Walmart Paid Its People More to Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/upshot/how-did-walmart-get-cleaner-stores-and-higher-sales-it-paid-its-people-more.html <comment><USER2> Another Wally post that gets many comments. Perhaps I am the only HN poster with actual working experience at wally - in the retail area too. So let me react to others' posts.

The Walmart worker image I seem to read by comments are the sales floor and cashier type associate. Yes, there are Some that you wonder if they can be employed elsewhere. But that is not even close to a majority at the store I know about.

Can a Walmart worker work at a Starbucks? Of course!! Can a Starbucks worker work at Wal-Mart? Sure. But retail sucks at times and I would bet more Starbucks -> Wally failures than the other way around.

Many wally workers have been there decades. They earn 50 -125% more than the $10/hr publicised. First level managers Get the 48k required to avoid overtime when the new law takes effect.

Since the new wage hike in my store there has not been any "ventilation" of out with the old and in with better employees. Its really really hard to hire anybody now. Heartbeat? You are hired.

Promotions come at such a rapid pace it is truly wonderful to see. 20 year old given 4 Promotions in 18 months to become assist the manager at 48k. It happens. On another site Many posts about how rapidly promotions occur. Many store managers who make 130-250+ and more started out selling dirt alongside those "can't be employeed elsewhere" associates. In many cases it only takes 10 years to get to that level.

Retail is its own form of servitude. It's hard. Takes work and a special person to succeed. Once off the clock you can not work.

The "$10" pay more to employees was a brilliant move. The press ate it.

I'll finish by my own transformation. I used to think Wally workers were in a class of their own. I worked at Costco too. There is no difference. There are substantially fewer Costcos than Wally. And Costco has much less need for employees. So you don't see the "can't work anywhere else" types.

<comment><USER3> I've worked at Walmart as recently as a month or so ago and, after being fired, I now work at Target - please reserve judgement for one of America's lost boys. I only worked there for a short time and the fire came from not showing up to work, so I'm not holding any grudge.

This store was in the Bay Area. I'd say there were quite a few of the types that were nearly unemployable, including new hires. This is probably due to the fact that the job is nearly unworkable. One time I mentioned the fact that I was tired to a woman who had been with the company for 15 years, she said 'Working at Walmart will do that to you'. I don't think it takes a 'special type of person' to succeed at working there, and I'm not sure I'd call it succeeding. I only worked on weekends so my perspective may be skewed but it felt like doing a wave of work, consisting mostly of putting things back to there proper place, only to come back tomorrow and do the same thing with no end in sight. This may be a phenomenon of employment at large, I don't know.

I'll say that my experience with Target astounds me how Target is apparently so much less popular than Walmart, and for the reasons that this article was trying to push. The training software with Walmart felt very cheap,and something to be rushed through (or in my case something to be milked for a week while I read a book on my phone). Target's training is done in small groups by team leads. I worked at Walmart for almost two months and, despite a few attempts at trying, I was never trained in finding items in the storage room (I was actually coached to say 'we're out of that item'). I was trained in this after working at Target for a few days. Not only that, but there's the fact that business management software is much more deeply embedded into the average Target employee's workday. It makes for a better store. More on 'the investments', some Walmart employee's get 10% off select items in the store. All Target employees get 10% off everything in the store (except produce, which is an extra 10% for a total of 20).

Anyway, I'm just chipping in.

<comment><USER4> Target (and Lowe's) were hacked for credit cards (but not Walmart) because they did not update POS software to newer OS as recommended by the manufacturer, Microsoft.

So, glad to see Target spends money training employees, for it didn't spend the money for upgrading their POS terminal software (and apparently Walmart has).

<comment><USER5> Target didn't get hacked for not having updated software. They were hacked because an HVAC contractor was hacked to get the HVAC system credentials and it wasn't properly segregated from the same network as the POS terminals. They even had FireEye installed and detected the exfiltration malware [0], but for some reason ignored the alarms.

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-13/target- mis...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed- warnings-in-epic-hack-of-credit-card-data)

<comment><USER4> I used to work as a consultant to a subsidiary of one of the largest software security firms. The security hole exploited by the hackers was essentially closed by Windows 7 embedded in 2010. Target was running Windows XPe (embedded).

I had read the Bloomberg article when it came out with some interest, because the reason Target was hacked was simply because they did not upgrade the POS OS as recommended and it was for this reason that Target was hacked.

"Both Home Depot and Target Corp. (TGT) -- whose registers were compromised last December -- appear to have fallen victim to a decade-old exploit of Windows XPe.

What's more, these losses -- which may total as many as 100 million customer credit and debit card numbers -- could have likely been prevented by simply paying to upgrade to a more modern Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) operating system, such as Windows 7 for Embedded Systems." [1]

Each version of Windows has security upgrades (sometimes using new features of Intel CPU hardware) that previous versions of Windows don't implement, even with security updates.

Many of these security hacks happen because firms that use computers refuse to pay for proper security software, perform recommended upgrades and to hire very competent people to work with their systems. Of course, the systems can still be hacked, but there are easier systems to exploit and the attacks can be caught earlier and with limited consequences.

[1] [http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Wind...](http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Windows+XPe+Holes+Led+to+Home+Depot+Hack/article36517.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Costco pays much better than Wal-Mart.[1] "(Costco) pays workers an average of $20.89 an hour, compared with Wal-Mart's average hourly wage of $11.83." There's an article in Forbes on why Wal-Mart shouldn't raise wages to Costco levels.

Costco has some advantages which don't involve hammering the employees. Their stores are plain warehouses. They only sell in bulk. They have a membership system, which not only encourages repeat visits, but cuts shoplifting way down. (Few shoplifters will come in, be photographed, and buy a Costco membership.)

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/why-walmart-cant-pay- costco-w...](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-walmart-cant-pay-costco- wages-2015-5)

<comment><USER7> Costco employees check all customers leaving the store to match goods with receipts.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK this is more about making sure people have what they paid for rather than checking for shoplifting.

<comment><USER9> This is the optimist's view; in fact, I've never considered this in the 10+ years I've shopped at Sam's Club/Costco.

They just briefly skim over the receipt -- until they hit a more expensive purchase, so your view would make sense (the opposite is not possible for shoplifting).

<comment><USER10> In my experience they do check to see if you have items that are likely to be forgotten because they have to be brought from the wire cage such as stamps and gift cards.

<comment><USER11> I doubt that. They've been checking receipts since long before gift cards were a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The issue isn't really the wages.

You get poor quality workers when you make the majority of them have to work a second job, since you don't give them full time hours or benefits. Retail often can have 100% turnover or more in the span of a year because of this. The average retail job works their employees part time, from 15 or less hours to near full time, on a schedule which changes from week to week. Sometimes even keyholding staff are worked like this.

You don't create employees loyal to your store when you do this, and especially if they also have to work an additional 5 or more hour shift before showing up at your job. Then you also get into tiny payroll budgets overall, preventing the store from hiring enough people to meet needs. So your 15 an hour worker can't clean the store, because he is on register all day, and he can't work extra hours because there is no budget. Or he does work them, but he has to take the next day off because he can't go over his schedule.

These things among others create a culture where all you can do is punch in, survive the shift, and go home. You can't do a good job because the district managers don't want you to do a good job. they want you to meet their metrics, and most of it is about money and budget. They don't care much about clean stores, since they visit your store maybe once every few months. They do care that you spend more than your payroll, no matter whether you needed to or not.

Honestly, retail sucks.

<comment><USER2> This.

But I used to brush all Walmart workers with the same crusty paint brush (bought at Wally).

Sure, i'd rather still be earning 6 figures. But when we did we all knew it could not last. What do you do? Leave early when the golden handcuffs are attached?

Retail is my second job. What you describe is very spot on true.

Yet probably the surprisingly largest difference is my lack of awareness prior to Wally that people did not have a supportive and wealthy home life. My retail peers suffer from lives I could not even imagine. Most of this group have no possible way of seeing parent(s) show them how to have a professional life. To excel. To build wealth. To dream big. That's the difference. Where my retail peers come from. Just as my sister in law would not be seen in a Walmart, my fellow co workers don't like to shop at the mall and enter macys or Lord and Taylor. Sears is ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's not revolutionary at all, despite what the New York Times claims. This was done, long, long ago already by Henry Ford (double the going wage for his workers):

[http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/history/post-p...](http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/history/post- perspective/ford-doubles-minimum-wage.html)

<comment><USER14> This is known as the "Efficiency wage" theory. Megan McArdle has written a number of posts about where it does and does not make sense. Her conclusion (and I agree) is that generally speaking, "WalMart worker"* isn't beholden to efficiency wages.

It's also worth mentioning that a side effect of efficiency wages is more unemployment. Paying more results in a better class of applicant, meaning that people who would normally use WalMart as the bottom rung of their career ladder are shut out.

*Yes, Costco can do it, but Costco also has a very different business model.

<comment><USER15> > It's also worth mentioning that a side effect of efficiency wages is more > unemployment. Paying more results in a better class of applicant, meaning > that people who would normally use WalMart as the bottom rung of their > career ladder are shut out.

This assumes that workers are of a fixed quality. I know I worked harder for $10/hour than I did for $7.25. Higher pay means stronger incentives to do well and less stress from poverty.

<comment><USER16> Certainly, people will work harder if you pay them more, you won't just get better people.

However:

Employers will have to hire fewer workers because their workers are more productive

More people will be interested in the jobs, increasing employee competition

Since people vary, some people's increase in productivity will be insufficient to cover the increase of wages

The end result it seems is that getting a job is made harder. This is not to say that increased wages are bad, they are great.

<comment><USER17> "getting a job is made harder" isn't a problem, when the the people are getting better at getting a job.

"increase in productivity will be insufficient to cover the increase of wages" is only true if the company isn't turning a profit or paying high salary to managers. This is relevant for some small businesses and bankruptcy-threatened large business, but not for the largest players in the economy, like Walmart.

<comment><USER16> 1) Given that there are fewer jobs available, and more people seeking those jobs, its simply absurd to think that people are just going to get better at getting those jobs to make up for it.

2) Whether the company is turning or a profit or paying a high salary is completely irreleavent. The question is whether or not you are productive enough that hiring you makes the company more money then they pay you.

<comment><USER18> There aren't fewer jobs available. US full-time job openings are at/near all- time highs and have been for a while now.

<comment><USER16> Sure. But I was specifically speaking about these higher-paying jobs at Wal- Mart. The fewer jobs at Wal-Mart are more then offset by increased jobs elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, Walmart where a substantial (2-digit) percentage of their workforce requires food-stamps or other government subsidies to get by.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/we- are-spending-153-billion-a-year-to-subsidize-mcdonalds-and-walmarts-low-wage- workers/?utm_term=.014e5668b588)

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report- walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#6525d99e7cd8)

<comment><USER20> In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employer. The current regulations around that sort of thing make it so the people who want to avoid needing government assistance have to get two jobs and deal with potential scheduling conflicts between them. When I worked minimum wage jobs there were a lot of people who couldn't work out a situation where they could easily get a second job like this partly because they were dependent on slow public transportation. You'd likely have significantly less people on government assistance if they were free to work more

<comment><USER21> You Americans are so brutal to each other. Instead of trying to address the problem of why someone can't live on a 40-hour week, you just want to remove one of the staple worker-protection laws.

60-hour weeks basically means you live to work. Have you considered that perhaps someone's economic usefulness shouldn't be the only determinate of whether they have to spend essentially their entire lives on Earth just trying to survive?

<comment><USER18> > You Americans are so brutal to each other.

Brutal is an exaggeration. Americans don't come close to leading in the 50+ hour work week category. The US now ranks below: Iceland, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea on that metric and has been falling down those rankings for decades.

[https://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/2016/08/15/employees- wo...](https://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/2016/08/15/employees-working-more- than-50-hours-per-week-2014-opec-area/)

<comment><USER21> When I say brutal, I'm not specifically talking about people working 50+ hours a week, I'm talking about the mindset that says that the singular number of how many bucks you can pull in should determine whether or not you're going to have a seriously downtrodden life, as if that were the only measure of your value to the world, or as a human being.

<comment><USER22> How should you measure your value to the world if not by what you produce? By being very very good looking and your mother thinks you're smart? By being a nice person? Being nice should be table stakes, but ultimately, on average, people need to produce more than they consume or the world as we know it fails. It wasn't too long ago, that 50+ hours/week was a luxury - and it wasn't earned by typing at a desk.

<comment><USER23> >By being very very good looking

Models are paid to be very, very good-looking. "What you produce" is a value decision _in the first place_ , one that society makes together by how we allocate resources.

<comment><USER24> Yes. We basically pay people based on 1 metric.

Not what they produce, but how good they are at convincing other people to give them money. Whether it's by building a product, being very good-looking, or asking for a handout. (Sure you can say that we pay people based on what they produce if you argue that a homeless man is producing good feelings when you donate to him, but I think that's a bit silly).

Obviously this is always going to be the case to some extent in a free society, but we should definitely do more to help those who don't happen to be good at convincing other people to part with their cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't fully understand how paying worker's more money makes the stores cleaner, have brighter lighting, or ensures that the shelves are stocked. Much of that has to do with spending money to remodel stores, paying more money to ensure that enough staff are employed to clean the stores (McDonald's is famous for cleanliness thanks to the leadership of its founder), and improving logistics and ensuring there is enough staff to put items on shelves. I'm glad people are getting more money, but I see a correlation with higher wages not a causation, and I don't see they changes in budgets for the stores which may account for the higher sales per store.

According to Megan McArdle's article on Walmart and Costco [1], Walmart has one employee for every $211,000 in revenue while Costco has one employee for every $620,000 in revenue. For each dollar of revenue, Walmart hires 3 people compared to 1 for Costco, which has 107,000 employees.

 _Thus, if Costco were using Walmart 's metrics, they would hire about 215,000 additional employees, most of whom would need only a high school education, at that. Jobs that can be done with little education are the jobs that are being exported to Mexico and China._

Interestingly, articles on paying higher wages never seem to focus on the number of people employed.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-08-27/why- walma...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will- never-pay-like-costco)

<comment><USER25> Costco is selling wholesale / larger quantities to a different customer segment who is also spending more money though. I'm not sure comparing the two here makes sense to me.

<comment><USER4> But many people _do_ compare Walmart to Costco by comparing the relatively lower wages that Walmart pays compared to Costco (or Trader Joe's) [1]

I'm simply demonstrating that Costco _could_ hire more employees among the segment of people with little education and help to lower unemployment. Many people batter Walmart for not increasing wages for employees, but just as important is that Costco could hire many more employees and help to reduce unemployment.

In my view, I think the writers should point out Walmart as an example of hiring 3 times more people per dollar of revenue than Costco (I don't know the figure for Trader Joe's) and thus, compared to Costco, doing much more to reduce unemployment. But you never read an article asking Costco to hire more people, only criticizing Walmart for not paying enough.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the- trad...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-trader-joes- lesson-how-to-pay-a-living-wage-and-still-make-money-in-retail/274322/)

<comment><USER25> It would definitely be interesting to see comparable data around Trader Joe's or even Whole Foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious if anyone has done any analysis on the "other Walmart" phenomenon -- when there are two walmarts (or malls) in a given area, one of them (the older one, usually) rapidly gets far worse. Overall, it seems like it gets worse than it would have on its own, and worse than simply removing customers. What amazes me is that this happens even in suburban/rural locations where everyone drives to the stores, so going from the bad store to the good store is at most the direct-drive distance between them (sometimes just a couple of minutes). Why would anyone at all continue to go to the bad one?

</comment><comment><USER27> Meanwhile, Walmart _can_ increase profits by simply hiring fewer workers (or laying off more). Allegedly, in 2012, Walmart was spending $12MM _per second_ of transaction time in cashier wages alone[1].

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/walmart- idUSL2E8E72FF20120307](http://www.reuters.com/article/walmart- idUSL2E8E72FF20120307)

<comment><USER28> That's per second of _average_ transaction time, meaning one second times the total number of transactions (per year I guess?). Kind of a meaningless metric in my opinion.

<comment><USER27> Good point, I glossed over that. I'm not sure I understand your interpretation properly, though. My interpretation was they took all of the transaction times, divided them by the total number of transactions, and then divided that number by their total expenditure in cashier personnel costs. I wouldn't go so far as to characterize this as "meaningless," but I will admit it's a little weird to measure your personnel costs in terms of dollars per second of the average time a given transaction takes. I think the idea is to shock people with a big number -- 12MM per second is shocking. However, the article doesn't explain that Walmart employs more people than any other company, world-wide[1] -- that's also a big number, and so when you divide the two, a much smaller number appears. The more interesting number, I think, is the total personnel costs versus the number of personnel -- some average or quantile that demonstrates, on a smaller scale, the ratio of personnel cost. Now, multiply that number to scale back up to number of transactions and you'll get a better representation of the personnel cost per transaction, without the oddball time axis.

In fact, as I'm thinking about this, perhaps you're saying it's a meaningless metric because it makes no sense to compare dollars per average transaction- second to dollars for all cashiers, as the units aren't correlated and just give random values.

[1] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/08/24/24-7...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/08/24/24-7-wall- st-biggest-employers/14443001/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The headline is false. Far down in the article, find this nuggest:

"The profit landscape is less sunny. Operating income for Walmart's United States stores was down 6 percent in the most recent quarter, reflecting higher labor costs and other new investments."

And while employee headcount from 2008 is mentioned, there is no mention of the number of employees who have been let go to allow for paying high wages to the remaining workers.

This article is yet another example of how the NY Times is a well-disguised propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

<comment><USER30> Sales and operating income are two different metrics. The headline is not false, it just doesn't say what you want it to say.

Paragraph 10:

"The results are promising. By early 2016, the proportion of stores hitting their targeted customer-service ratings had rebounded to 75 percent. Sales are rising again."

<comment><USER31> Maybe the person you reply to was confused by the original title in HN, which was "Walmart generated higher sales, profits by paying workers more, better training" (that's not the NYT's fault, tough).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another way is how WinCo does it, each employee can become an owner as it is majority employee owned, and it is a very well run place. Yes you can buy stock in Wal-mart or Costco and Costco has profit sharing, but there is something about owning a part of the company you work at that helps productivity, responsibility and caring what happens to the company. Personally I like shopping there because I know people there value it and more money is going to the workers.

One example of how this may be better is a lower performing store that is still making a profit may stay open, other larger chains may remove stores and cut lower performing stores even though profit is made. Not a flawless system but owning shares, ownership and being a part of the company in this way makes the best work come out of skilled people.

[http://wincofoods.com/about/an-employee-owned- company/](http://wincofoods.com/about/an-employee-owned-company/)

<comment><USER33> How does the lower performing store work in that sense? Is it separate from the rest in some way?

The reason low profit locations are often shut down is because there are often higher profit places to park that capital.

So if I'm a shareholder employee of another location or HQ, I might wonder why we're not doing something that will grow the company even more.

Of course this is where things like company values and mission statements come into play to ensure everyone is aligned.

Not advocating that this is necessarily what I'd do in that situation, just curious how it is handled when it inevitably comes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would be interesting if anybody will follow them. Walmart is taking a hit for the american economy by giving it's workers more spending power, not something I would have ever expected from the retail giant.

<comment><USER35> They aren't doing it for the economy they are doing it because their sales were sliding as a result of poor customer experience. They realized that their focus on lowest possible labor cost left them in a position where they were getting the least ambitious bottom of the barrel labor. So they hypothesized that by training people in basic retail concepts, like how to stock a shelve to be visually attractive, offering people an above minimum wage and a path to better opportunities within the company that they could have a better trained workforce and better retain those people.

<comment><USER36> It's more a way to try to quell incipient union action. They've closed several stores in order to head off strike action already (which is expensive) and it failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Barely a blip about companies like Costco in this. Costco and Publix are my favorite in terms of using culture and compensation to get great results. Here's two links on them:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/reasons-love- costco...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/reasons-love- costco_n_4275774.html)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the- wal-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/07/24/the-wal-mart- slayer-how-publixs-people-first-culture-is-winning-the-grocer- war/#5b321b976767)

I think it's important in discussions like these to point out that Costco got to $100 billion a year _without advertising_ by just paying people well and keeping management out of their way. The result was they did a great job with high customer service that spread business by word of mouth. Remember that this $100+ billion business started _in 1983_. Publix, founded in 1930, similarly minimized number and cost of management and executives while keeping large numbers of production workers whose personal stock rewards them based on company performance. Founder, like Costco's, still rich despite taking care of employees. The result is Publix is _most profitable_ of all grocers with _highest service_ level. Almost twice the margin of Walmart despite selling less stuff with very, conservative expansion.

This shit isn't rocket science like biased NY Times and other corporate media would have you believe. Virtually every company that does these things outperforms those that don't. Toyota Production System probably being one with most media coverage. They rarely talk about most, though, since the owners of corporate media are themselves pulling outrageous amounts of money out of their semi-micro-managed companies. Any widespread change of the compensation situation in America to favor workers would pull money of out media managers' own pockets. So they seem to censor companies like Publix and Costco a lot while making a big fuss of how McDonalds might handle a raise. Sickening but makes rational sense given incentives of media executives (highest compensation) and business model (ad revenue from companies screwing workers). Don't bite the hand that feeds.

It's that simple for vast majority of cases. As I always say, most of these medium to high margin firms could take care of and enable workers if a 1.6%, 2.2%, or 5.6% (IIRC...) margin company can do it. That those companies outperform micro-managed firms treating people like cogs despite less management & executive compensation means companies forgoing this strategy are doing it for reasons that have nothing to do with company performance. More like executive's paychecks and managers' egos. ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> The HN user submitted the article with the editorialized title: _" Walmart generated higher sales, profits by paying workers more, better training"_

Please don't mislead readers with false information. The original NYT title does not have the word " _profits_ " in it:

 _" How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More"_

This is a critical distinction because the details of the story actually explain that _profits are down_ \-- not up -- after paying their workers more:

 _> The profit landscape is less sunny. Operating income for Walmart's United States stores was down 6 percent in the most recent quarter, reflecting higher labor costs and other new investments._

 _> In the short term, the Walmart experiment shows pretty clearly that paying people better improves both the work force and the shoppers' experience, but not profitability, at least not yet._

<comment><USER39> I'm curious how much of it has to do with perception too. I avoid Walmart. I don't feel they treat their employees well, pay them well, or do anything well, fwiw. I much rather shop where i have the perception that the employees are happier.

So, just because Walmart is paying them better, does not inherently mean they are happier OR that i _know_ they are being treated better. I had no clue, and thusly have not changed my shopping habits at all.

<comment><USER40> If it helps, Walmart don't pay their employees poorly because they are less moral than other companies, but because they hire a different type of employee from, for example, Starbucks. If you happen to live in a place with Starbucks and Walmart, try visiting both and then ask yourself if the Walmart employee would stand a chance of getting a job at Starbucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Doesn't HN have a policy on linking to articles behind a pay wall?

<comment><USER42> I think the policy is to hit the "web" link next to the article.

<comment><USER41> "web"

Wow. That's descriptive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Higher wages means less jobs. So less people will be getting paid more. It will also mean less people will have more responsibility and longer hours.

Employees that have higher skills will get the higher-paying job and the ones with lower skills will have even less of a chance to get a job.

<comment><USER39> It's sad that we even have jobs so below to poverty line, reliant on social aid programs to live. Someone working 40 hours a week should not be on government aid. Unfortunately for Walmart's terrible pay (and the terrible minimum wage in general), it's quite common.

My fiancee has been steadily employed by a different retail chain and was on Medicaid/etc because of the useless minimum wage pay.

Now we're double income _(along with a moderate engineer pay)_ , so she no longer needs that, thankfully.

<comment><USER43> Walmart pays above minimum wage for nearly every position:

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Walmart-Hourly- Pay-E715...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Walmart-Hourly-Pay-E715.htm)

"Someone working 40 hours a week should not be on government aid."

This has nothing to do with Walmart, because they pay above minimum wage.

If you have 3 kids (a personal choice) and have no choice but to work at Walmart (because of a lack of skills), and you are forced to get government assistance, you need to start re-evaluating your personal choices.

The problem is that everybody has different needs and should make decision accordingly. Many people make bad personal choices and can't support themselves on the standard, minimum wage. The healthcare system does need to be fixed, but also needs to be more stress on personal responsibility.

"My fiancee has been steadily employed by a different retail chain and was on Medicaid/etc because of the useless minimum wage pay."

I have a hard time believing she was getting minimum wage. My Wife has worked at almost every single retail chain stocking and doing other various jobs and has always gotten paid more than minimum wage.

All of the fast food chains and most retail stores in my area pay at least $2/hour above minimum wage. The reason is because market competition has pushed the wages up and they wouldn't be able to find many workers at anything less.

<comment> vertex-four > you need to start re-evaluating your personal choices

Note that at that point, you have essentially no option. You can't retrain because the Government is entirely unwilling to look after your family while you do, and you can't save money on retail wages to be able to quit your job to retrain. You're stuck until your children are able to support themselves.

<comment><USER43> "You can't retrain because the Government is entirely unwilling to look after your family while you do,"

So the answer is to just shrug our shoulders and make it easier and easier for more people to get themselves into the situation because the government or the taxpayers will bail them out?

Why is this the job of the government? If this is the case, I, the taxpayer, should have a lot more control over the people that decide they need me to pay for their kids while they retrain. The government should have complete control over the family and money decisions (IE: no drugs, alcohol, or expensive gadgets) while on the dole.

The people that do the right thing and make better personal choices always seem to get punished these days. I don't have a problem using some of my tax dollars to help the needy (I donate money every year to the poor), but when there are egregious abuses of the system, we should have some say in how our money is spent.

<comment><USER44> How about making it easier for people to get themselves _out_ of the situation?

It is the job of the government if people decide it is the job of the government to provide a safety net.

And it ought to be in part on the assumption that a proportion of those who finds themselves in such as situation either is there without fault and/or want to improve and stop being a drain on the taxpayer. Investing in their future is also investing in increased tax revenue and reduced future benefits payments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


E Ink at CES 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.eink.com/ces2015/ <comment><USER3> I'd love to put project plans and day-to-day requirements and lists, as well as status reports on the wall of my office without requiring a projector or TV. This sounds like it might be a viable option for the aesthetically inclined office!

Can't wait to see pricing and release dates..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'd love to get a whiteboard made out of it that has some sort of touch detection or Wacom-esque pen action.

I was considering on buying a $300 40+" TV[1] on black friday and using one of those visual detection systems, but I decided not to.

[1]Visual quality is very bad, but if it just displays text all the time, how bad can it really be?

<comment><USER4> I personally have been literally dreaming of the cheap, huge, high resolution whiteboard, where I can take vast amounts of data (in my case financial) and spread them all over the thing, then annotate as desired. Already I use 2x4k screens to max the amount of graphical grid data I can display simultaneously in chart form. The challenge is to use algorithms to find the interesting bits of the data and highlight them (in my experience, large data sets are usually 99% boring - you're looking for the 1% gems). Still even if the vast amount of data are boring, being able to jump to any piece of it without interruption from any interaction, scrolling, or queries, just a flick of the eye - <USER2> large display surfaces enable - is actually hugely valuable for understanding a global big data system. No pause to control an interface - just look, possibly even walk, around a huge wall size version of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hoped that they come up with high resolution, flexible, multi color, large size, touch sensitive, affordable panel(1), but they are into wallpaper business instead.

Ok. Fine. But I am still a bit disappointed.

(1) They actually have high resolution 9.7" panel [http://www.eink.com/display_products_pearl.html](http://www.eink.com/display_products_pearl.html) but no color and no touch (this is probably a major show stopper);

They have color panels [http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html](http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html) but no high resolution and large size and no touch;

They have flexible panel [http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html/display_pro...](http://www.eink.com/display_products_mobius.html/display_products_mobius.html) but no color, no high resolution and they are either ultra small or too large and no high resolution or touch;

So we are almost there but still not there.

<comment><USER6> There's a 13.3" grayscale touch panel on the Sony device, [https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product- DPTS1/?PID=I:digitalpa...](https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product- DPTS1/?PID=I:digitalpaper:digitalpaperproductpage)

<comment><USER7> Sony is very nice yet costly and at the same time very limited(PDF only, hard to use dictionary, no add on programs, not rooted yet ).

At CES there was another 13 inch reader presented which should be cheaper and support more standards: [http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/08/hands- netronix-6-8-...](http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/08/hands- netronix-6-8-13-3-e-ink-android-ereaders/)

There was also a 13 inch USB (plenty of bandwidth for low refresh of e-ink) monitor at CES.

There is a ton of pent up demand for larger screen e-ink readers as Sony found out when people outside their target market wanted to buy the 13 inch DPTS1.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the pointer to the USB e-ink monitor, [http://the-digital- reader.com/2015/01/06/e-ink-demos-13-3-se...](http://the-digital- reader.com/2015/01/06/e-ink-demos-13-3-second-screen-e-ink-monitor- ces-2015-video/)

The low weight of these flexible e-ink + plastic screens is amazing, looking forward to more devices being released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone else think this is going to end up primarily being used for advertising? A bit like minority report? [http://fluffrick.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/vlcsnap-2011-11...](http://fluffrick.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/vlcsnap-2011-11-27-12h31m48s171.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> Long a staple of science fiction movies, the wall that is also a retina-like display is finally here, even if it's just an initial, minimally viable version.

As adoption grows and the technology improves over time, we can expect ease and cost of application to improve and possibly even match traditional wallpaper.

Architects and interior designers will _love_ this, and I can't wait to see how people transform interior spaces in offices, homes, schools, hospitals...

<comment><USER10> I don't think this will work for homes, school, hospitals or any place where people and kids can touch it. Eink screens can be scratched and marked. This kind of thing is going to be very hard to maintain.

I mean: it will look amazing for a week or so... and then some kid will draw all over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and if parents taught their kids to respect things, we wouldn't have this issue.

And I also love how people think parents aren't responsible for their kids' actions: if they destroy an expensive item, your insurance company will sue the parents if they have any assets.

<comment><USER11> I take it you don't have kids yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like everybody's talking about something different from what I'm looking at. The wall panels seem to have large (palm-sized-ish) cells that can change color on or off. It's cool looking, but it's more of an adjustable pattern than a display. It certainly doesn't look like something that would display text.</comment>


Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I'm one of the researchers that produced this result: we figured out how to make 3D adversarial objects (currently fabricated using full-color 3D printing technology) that consistently fool neural networks in the physical world. Basically, we have an algorithm that can take any 3D object and perturb it so it tricks a classifier into thinking it's something else (for any given target class).

Recently, there's been some debate about whether or not adversarial examples are a problem in the real world, and our research shows that this is a real concern, at least with current neural network architectures (nobody has managed to solve the problem of white-box adversarial examples yet).

I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has!

<comment><USER2> This was a wondrous read. I had not expected that these things would be significant in real world context with free viewpoint.

Have you looked at whether the perturbation tend to do something to other networks than it's optimized for? If I ran for example VGG-19 and Resnet-50 alongside Inception V3, could I still be reasonably sure to get a correct best-of-three vote if I point the camera on your models?

Do you think your algorithm would support optimizing to fool several known networks in the same way simultaneously?

<comment><USER3> What we propose in our paper is a white-box attack, so given access to the classifier gradient, we can make adversarial examples. We don't investigate the "transferability" of our adversarial examples to other networks, though other work in this area has explored that problem (though, of course, not in the EOT / 3D adversarial example case).

I expect it wouldn't be difficult to defeat an ensemble, though (e.g. if you're averaging predictions, you can just differentiate through the averaging).

<comment><USER2> Apologies if I bring up things that can be found in the paper at a more careful read, but I probably won't have time to go through it properly before this HN post goes cold. I think I have fairly good notion of what you're doing though.

I share your expectations for an averaging ensemble, which is after all still for most purposes a single model, but let's say I'm concerned precisely about people trying to fool my networks like this and one of the things I do is check the consistency of answers between different models and if they mismatch over a certain threshold I might flag that for an extra check by releasing the hounds or something.

In that context I think it's of interest how the perturbation features you develop affect networks created with similar technology but different choices of architecture and hyperparameters. Are the foreign pertubations neutral there or do they have an effect? If there is an effect, to what extent is it consistent? To what extant can they be superposed in a way that is manageable for getting predictable results for different networks simultaneously? What fraction of the available texture area do you need to affect to get a reliable misclassification, and what is the 'perturbation capacity' of the available area? That last one I think is particularly interesting in your case where presumably you put much more constraint on the texture by requiring that it works for multiple viewpoints.

I totally respect if you, or indeed anyone, can't answer those questions yet, because of focus and stage of research. Personally I have only followed adversarial attacks very superficially so far, because IMO before what you just released it was a point of concern for the mechanics of the ANNs (and inspiration for some good ideas) but for practical purposes more of a curiosity than a demonstrated real concern in applications. (If you're allowed to show people deceptively crafted scenes from _exactly_ the right perspective point they fail too. Just look at Ames rooms. But good luck making that into a significant real-world exploit on humans.)

Any publications you'd care to recommend in the transferability subfield?

<comment><USER4> I agree - it's a surprising and cool paper. There has been some work done on fooling network ensembles by constructing constructing a Bayesian posterior over weights using dropout [0]. This is an ensemble of weights for the same network, not over different architectures, however.

The basic idea here is that most of the time, each member of the ensemble will misclassify the adversarial example in a different way. This means that the posterior predictive distribution for adversarial examples ends up much broader, and you can detect them this way.

Surprisingly, even this can be beaten in the white-box case [1], although it's by far the hardest to beat of the current adversarial defences, and needs much more distortion. It's beaten exactly as the GP says, by differentiating through the averaging. AFAIK no-one's tried architecture ensembling, but I expect it would be vulnerable to the same technique.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00410](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00410) [1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07263](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07263)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So someday, Hypothetical Nation#1 captures one of Hypothetical Nation#2's optically-guided missiles that uses a neural network to distinguish friend from foe. N#1 technicians download the network weights and use this to generate perturbatory paintjobs for their fighter jets, making N#2's missiles recognize N#1's planes as various models of N#2's civilian aircraft. Before N#2 can refit their missiles with a retrained neural network, N#1 launches a massive offensive and decisively takes control of the Hypothetical South China Sea, or something.

Do I have that right?

<comment><USER6> You just need a second neural net that classifies adversarial and non- adversarial objects.

<comment><USER7> And of course a third network to classify the adversarial objects that slip through the second.

Reminds me of the record player chapter from GEB [1]

[1] [https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-contracrostipunctus- an...](https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-contracrostipunctus-annotated)

<comment><USER8> After a couple of iterations, an adversarial object will become the adversarial object for humans too. That is a military plane disguised as a civil plane. It is probably forbidden by some convention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am beginning to realize that neural networks have their own class of "vulnerabilities" that are not the same as other software bugs (implementation errors, etc) but are at the same time serious functional flaws. Like "oh I found the bug in your program! Here you import an older CNN, which last year was found to silently fail under this specific set of lighting and lens conditions. You need to update to the latest version and the problem will go away."

<comment><USER10> One of the major structural problems with using neural networks in production is that all failures are silent failures. You could create an ensemble of models that base their conclusions on reliably different features and report on disagreements with the ensemble decision, but that doesn't actually tell you which models were in error, just that some models were in error. Also, reliably determining that models are using different features is difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Get rich slow scheme: take out a patent for clothing embedded with adversarial objects. Fashion which confuses our robot overlords is almost certain to become chic one day in the not too distant future.

</comment><comment><USER12> On the flip side, someone can use this as a feature. You can create hidden messages in 3d objects that can only be revealed in a neural net's wrong classification

</comment><comment><USER13> Please correct me if I am interpreting this incorrectly. I read the paper and it sounds like you retrained the softmax layer on Inception to classify the 3-D printed turtle as a rifle. In that case, you would have overwritten Inception's original representation of what a rifle looks like. Did you test out what would happen if you put a picture of a rifle in front of the camera? How would the network now classify the rifle?

<comment><USER14> They're not changing the original network. That would not be very interesting. They're generating objects that fool the correctly trained network.

<comment><USER15> >given access to the classifier gradient, we can make adversarial examples

It seems like they are finding little "inflection points" in the trained network where a small, well-placed change of input can flip the result to something different. With the rise of "AI for AI", I imagine this is something that could be optimized against.

In the turtle example, it seems that google's classifier has found that looking for a couple specific things (mostly a trigger in this case) identifies a gun better than looking for the entirety of a gun. Perhaps optimizing against these inflection points will force the classifier to have a better understanding of the objects it is classifying and lead to better results in non-adversarial situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading this article along with the following one, is striking: [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/11/01/gtc-dc-project- mave...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/11/01/gtc-dc-project-maven-jack- shanahan/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Crazy to think we've built optical software smart enough to suffer from its own kind of optical illusions, which is effectively what these models are.

<comment><USER18> > smart enough

I'd suggest that if it was "smart enough", it wouldn't be mistaking a turtle for a rifle.

<comment><USER17> Well, we are the greatest intelligence yet discovered in the universe and can't tell what color a dress is [1].

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't you have obtained the same result by painting a rifle on the back of the turtle?

</comment><comment><USER20> If I stick a picture of a dog on a car and my neural net detects a dog instead of a car, can I claim that I've invented an adversarial generator?

</comment><comment><USER21> A bunch of armchair devil's advocating here, but is it really the NN that's fooled or the humans? The adversarial turtle isn't a real turtle, so the human is wrong in judging it as that. The NN is presumably seeing features of a rifle camouflaged in the surface of the object - which are really there but our human brain decides the turtle-ness is more important and is very confident that it's only a turtle despite having a rifle stock on it. Since a real turtle would never have those markings, it's not obvious to me that this object should be called a turtle. The NN could be doing a super-human job of detecting that it's not a turtle, but fails in identifying what it really is. Maybe this weakness of the NN would actually make it perform better than a human at picking out camouflaged objects where humans are distracted by the shape of the outline but the NN looks more at the texture.

<comment><USER22> Would you say the same after being shot by a pistol painted to classify as a lunchbox?

<comment><USER21> Please don't talk about murdering the person you're talking to. It's intented to provoke painful emotion.

I'll clarify my comment though. The object is really a model that's shaped like a turtle but with pictures of rifle parts on it. It's neither a rifle nor a turtle. Both human and computer are too confident in their classification and both are just as wrong.

Using your analogy. You could actually hide gun inside a lunchbox and fool humans.

<comment><USER22> I did not intend to provoke painful emotion.

>It's neither a rifle nor a turtle.

I disagree. Would also say the pistol is no longer a pistol?

<comment><USER23> That doesn't follow because the pistol painted to classify as a lunch box is still a pistol.

The "Turtle" is a plastic replica of a turtle not a real turtle. It's the treachery of images idea - "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

Humans see its form and recognize the plastic replica to be a representation of a turtle because we prioritize its shape over its textured image which seems more correct to us, but I'm not sure that it really _is_ more correct in some objective way. In this case I suppose you could say it is because a turtle is what we mean for it to represent, but the test seems rigged in favor of human visual classification.

I think an interesting question is what adversarial attacks exist on human vision that may not affect a machine (certain optical illusions?). If we're also vulnerable to this kind of manipulation then it may not be something unique to computer vision we may just be picking test cases that we're better at. Then it's just a matter of tradeoffs and deciding when we want human style classification.

<comment><USER22> It's a plastic replica of a turtle with an artificial rifle texture.

The human's error is in missing the texture. The computer's error is worse, it misses the turtle and thinks the texture is an actual rifle.

<comment><USER23> I agree, but it's an unfair test - it was designed to confuse the computer and not the human.

For a counter example - imagine that you make a toaster that looks exactly like a pistol, but it actually just toasts bread.

A human would think it's a pistol when looking at it (so would the machine in this case). There may be adversarial examples where the human classification is worse than the machine if you specifically try and make examples that are bad for the human visual system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you explain why it thinks the turtle is a rifle?

<comment><USER25> If you freeze the frame and look at the shell closely theres a trigger and stock that is warped. On the underside the fins have gun features as well.</comment></comment>


The Ten-Year Century - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574300382022042424.html

<comment><USER2> > In computer jargon, when your hard drive becomes overwhelmed with too much > information it is said to be fragmented—or "fragged."

No it isn't

<comment><USER3> easy tiger, happy "Mark of the Beast Day".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This just in: someone writing for a newspaper thinks the world is moving too fast. Why am I not surprised?

</comment><comment><USER5> They author could have just posted a link to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change> and be done with it. This isn't exactly news.</comment>


Make a Samsung Smartphone Great by Switching Out Its Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/technology/personaltech/make-a-samsung-smartphone-great-by-switching-out-its-apps.html?ref=technology&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Mossberg said in a recent review "Premium devices shouldn't be vehicles for carrier come-ons".

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/8/11176606/walt-mossberg- sams...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/8/11176606/walt-mossberg-samsung- galaxy-s7-smartphone-review)

I can't imagine spending $700-$800 USD for a device and then having to uninstall junk.

<comment><USER3> I have no love for carrier or manufacturer bloatware, and Android devices are worse than iOS for both. But I have to say that iOS isn't immune - I have a folder full of Apple apps that I don't use and can't even disable on my iPad (Health, Watch, Maps, Find Friends, Tips, etc etc etc)

<comment><USER4> I thought I was the only one with an unused builtin app folder hidden on my last screen! For the life of me, I don't understand why Apple won't let you remove the Tips app, of all things...

<comment><USER5> They don't want to field the support calls from people who delete Safari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At this point it is quite clear that OEMs only put these apps on consumer's devices to make a profit, and that there is no eye towards the affect on the product.

The bigger question is, why do the carriers want so badly for me to use their NFL app?

<comment><USER7> They don't, but they got a fraction of a penny to put the app in front of you. Nobody (to a first approximation, and especially on the Android side) buys a phone because of the software - they just look at the hardware (if that) and make their decision. By the time you're being annoyed by NFL apps it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not just about the apps with Samsung Phones, the long delay on new Android versions and the "TouchWiz" skin make it inferior to a Nexus or even a "close-to-native" experience like the Moto X pure.

<comment><USER9> Touchwiz with a custom launcher is completely fine. I actually ended up getting a note 5 because Samsung phones have a killer feature that I can't get anywhere else (yet), which is multi window. Being able to browse internet/reddit/hn and watch TV shows or netflix is an absolute necessity to me and at the time, I couldn't find any other phones that had it.

So in my case, TouchWiz + a launcher actually provided me value that I couldn't get through other Android phones.

<comment><USER10> Android 6 has native MW support, and there have been MW launchers since Android 4 if not earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article describes the exact process I went through with my Galaxy S3.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that the author makes the point that choice is important for an OS like Android, and then recommends only Google-made alternatives to make it "as Google intended". Google software != best software, necessarily.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but many people like myself use Google services on android, so it's a good alternative.

<comment><USER14> Even if it is choosing the default, then that is still something I actually wanted. What really enrages me is to see how all that stupid Samsung software lives its secret life for itself on my phone, without me being able to make the choice to get rid of it. That stuff sits there, updates all the time and annoys me. Like a bunch of squatters living in my house.

Thanks for that "HP printer driver" btw, I really needed that one, Samsung.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did the same steps with my S7. Much better after replacing the launcher and keyboard

</comment><comment><USER16> Make apple devices great by using Google services.</comment>


What Do Investors Look for in a Game Developer? - <AUTHOR> http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/182962/what_do_investors_look_for_in_a_.php

<comment><USER2> if you're a decent game developer, in this age of digital distribution (Steam), you should forgo the whole venture thing & look at Kickstarter.

Not only do you get to keep all your equity, you can crowdsource ideas & feature requests, fine-tune your marketing strategy & build a community of loyal gamers who will sustain you through the ups & down of the dev lifecycle al for a measly 5 % commission.

As long as you have good communication skills, the right attitude & talent. You'll find unrivaled rewards.

<comment><USER3> Well, Kickstarter might be a bit rough if you don't have loyal fans already. However, there are multiple marketplace where you could start (iOS, Android, Steam...).

However, still keep in mind that if you don't absolutely love creating games, there are a lot of other hard problems to be solved as a programmer. Game market tends to be over saturated and I know ppl who earn half of what they could in non-gaming company.</comment></comment>


How Google News Sort News By Relevance - <AUTHOR>

I am interested to know How Google News Sort News By Relevance. and is there any open algorithm for the same purpose ? <comment><USER2> Excuse a flippant answer, but I have to say 'poorly.' It's a hobbyhorse of mine, but GN has gotten progressively worse over the last 2 years, thanks to a mixture of SEO and slow development. Considering the legal costs of news delivery (settlements and ongoing litigation with publishers) I think more is being spent on keeping it functional than on development.

</comment><comment><USER3> Krishna Bharat Creator of Google News Used His own fork of The Hilltop algorithm is an algorithm. I don't know it work but if you are going to create a relevance for some news site remember this quote by Mark

"A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."</comment>


Gaming: Half Life 3 wait explained - <AUTHOR> http://birdbrainblue.tumblr.com/post/52350691777/half-life-3

<comment><USER2> Not a real explaination, but a nice summary of the developments at valve.

the most interesting part is the breen grub, written by Marc Laidlaw.

[https://twitter.com/BreenGrub](https://twitter.com/BreenGrub)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with failure of not getting into a good school? - <AUTHOR> How do you deal with the failure of not getting into the top highschool in CS?
Should I listen to my "friends" (more like old classmates) offer (everyone wants me to go to their option)? Which is to go to their school? I can go to another second option (but it requires a complicated commute and money) <comment><USER2> Use daddy's money to go into Singer's side door by buying extra time for the SATs and then bribing everyone along the way.

In reality - I never applied to those because it didn't seem like it mattered and I knew I couldn't afford it. Ask yourself why you care about school X, Y, or Z, and find a way to realize that any one individual school is not the critical path to your dreams.

Also, know that exploiting the opportunities you have is way more important than lamenting the opportunities you don't have.</comment>


How Did X Get Traction? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-Did-X-Get-Traction <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be about X11 ...

<comment><USER3> So did I!

And the answer for that is simple: it was free, James Gosling's NeWS cost money (and not a small amount).

And I'm sure this has more than a little to do with the success of Java, specifically the team delivering an ultimatum before launch that it would be free or they would leave (easy enough to make, since if it wasn't it would have died).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see any content, just a seo spam like website with many similar questions.

<comment><USER5> How so? Just to pick one out of that list the linkedin one there is an answer from a previous employee of linkedin. Seems like content to me.

<comment><USER4> Oh dear, I too assumed it was about <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System></comment></comment></comment>


Is Plagiarism Wrong? - mighty-fine https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/is-plagiarism-wrong-agnes-callard/ <comment><AUTHOR> Intentionally copying the work of someone else, letter by letter, with the goal of getting some kind of reward, can be seen as morally wrong.

But from there down you have a lot of shades of gray, can seven musical notes be taken as plagiarism if you do a different song with a sucession of notes that you didn't know from where they came (for you may be indistingishable from your own creation), or that you never heard before? Or a full phrase, in a different context, or a "common sense" algorythm to solve a common problem with not so many ways to solve it?

When you are not doing a full copy, at some point you reach the level of meme transmission, something that makes us humans, enabled the emergence of civilization and let us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or worse, with just independent, but similar enough, work, putting laws penalizing that turns creation into a potential trap for whoever that doesn't have an army of lawyers already.

</comment><comment><USER2> Plagiarism has more of a claim to being morally wrong than copyright violation, I would say. The notion of copyright only arose a few centuries ago, and even today a significant part of the world doesn't really get the concept deep down. But when it comes to plagiarism, we have attestations even from antiquity (Martial, for instance) of creators complaining about their work being passed off as that of someone else.

<comment><USER3> Copyright only became an issue with the printing press since no author could make a living from publishing before that.

Before commercial publishing basically all authors where either independently wealthy or clergy, or they were hired by the rich or powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a thought: What if there is a one or two categories missing from attributing or not attributing?

For a piece of work you could have:

1) Attributes the sources of works that comprise it. Honest, cannot think of a situation that it is inappropriate for people not bound by national security considerations and the like.

2) Does not attribute but explicitly states that they did not write it. Honest, but better to attribute. Not appropriate for anywhere the author needs to demonstrate their skill, such as academia. Not appropriate for things that explicitly or implicitly require attribution.

3) Does not attribute but it is implicit they didn't create it themselves. Limited applicability to things that the original author doesn't mind people spreading. Sharing jokes, memes and political slogans are obvious uses of this.

4) Doesn't attribute author and implicitly or explicitly gives the impression they were the original author. Traditional plagiarism. Utterly dishonest.

The usefulness of having these two extra categories (2 and 3) are that they differentiate between honest and dishonest people and that authors may want to release their works under a license that says they cannot claim they wrote the work themselves, thereby reducing the burden of future distributors of altered works having to include an ever-growing list of attributions as derived works move from person to person.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can understand a 6 year old being confused. They (maybe) aren't old enough to grasp that actually composing something like a poem is the hard part. At that age, memorizing and writing it down can seem like an impressive feat all by itself, possibly even more impressive than the composing part. All the more true for a kid under the circumstances described (challenges with English due to immigrating, etc).

With an adult, though...I'd think they'd understand the concept of taking credit for someone else's work being not ok.

I'm not fan of the way intellectual property law works (in particular the way it is shoehorned into a free market system which only works efficiently on scarce goods with non-zero marginal cost, which IP is not), but still. This isn't really about intellectual property per se. It's still wrong to claim you came up with things for which the copyright is long expired or never existed. It is dishonest, and it is cheating.

This article presents an interesting childhood misunderstanding, and a misunderstanding by adults of how a child might think (I tend to think the teacher was rather cruel), and then spins it as if the child's point of view is sophisticated enough to be a valid adult view. But it obviously isn't.

<comment><USER3> As I understand the story, it wasn't really about "taking credit". The kid did not deny the poem was from a book, they just didn't understand it wasn't supposed to be.

It was probably more a case of misunderstanding expectations. Some tradition of education have a large emphasis on knowledge and memorization, while others have more emphasis on personal creativity.

<comment><USER5> Sure, the kid was confused, but as an adult he shouldn't be.

The kid didn't value the creative side. Is he now as an adult denying the creative part has value?

That's the only way I can take the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net

Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching _just_ in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seriously absurd examples where an entire portfolio consists of my code, and the person got a job from it at a large company.

Compare a student who writes their own code to the student who plagiarizes.

If you're the non-copy-pasta student, you're competing with the fakes for jobs.

If you're an employer, you're tasked with figuring out who is who, and I strongly doubt you would personally want the copy-paster at your business for both legal and productivity reasons.

I think some people confuse plagiarism and innovation, especially when we start to wrap in "intellectual property" into it.

Plagiarism is a shortcut used to fake skills/credentials.

Innovation is a real skill, though could be debated I am sure.

Intellectual property value is up for debate.

People who are cheating/faking their way, lying about their value/skills harms both employers and students.

Just don't let people debating about plagiarism try to sneak in innovation/building-upon as a means of a straw man.

We're talking copy and paste here. Maybe some synonym swaps.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow's answers wrong? What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which feels more like math then English.

<comment><USER6> When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

To me, it just doesn't seem like it's even remotely challenging to figure out how to do this, or when to do this. If it's not yours, say where you got it.

When in doubt, cite it. What exactly would the harm be if you cited something when you weren't sure if it was necessary, anyway?

<comment><USER7> > When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack > overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no > different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

You do this? That is very impressive. I have never meant anyone who did that. Myself included.

<comment><USER8> I tend to put a link to the SO answer in a comment. That way whoever is looking at it later (mostly me in a few months) can understand what prompted that solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Give with an open hand, and stop thinking about the tokens with which you will be repaid. Be happy to be worth stealing from. The future owes you nothing."

I see ideas like this regularly on HN, yet when it comes to the GNU/GPL, violators are regularly excoriated. If you don't care about plagiarism, you shouldn't care about a company making money on code you decided to give out for free.

My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind when the plagiarism enriches someone they don't like, disagree with politically, or just don't feel deserves to profit off of it.

<comment><USER10> > My point is that people that write these articles quickly change their mind

Do you know it's the same people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like a bad apology from someone who got caught passing of others work as their own. Yes plagiarism is wrong, and no it's not the entirety of academia that is wrong because you can't get by without talent through just copying other people's work.

<comment><USER12> Lots of knowledge (I'd say most) was handed out to modern us as a result of what today would be called plagiarists. It's true, there was no grant system in the European Middle Ages and I guess the smart folk in Baghdad were also not that interested in being original or being seen as inventors/creators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.

<comment><USER14> I'm too lazy to read the article (hey at least I'm honest), but I think you can have a working science/news with plagiarism.

In our western culture everything is egocentric. You work hard to be remembered for milenia for wonderful things that you've done. We try to mention who first observed or invented something (even though it often happens in multiple places at once and only the most popular and best marketed person gets the mention), but those people rarely care. Mostly because they are dead, but also PG's latest essay[1].

You can have equally valid, working and moral system where it's rewarding enough when your pattern is getting spread rather than anybody caring that it was made by you. It seems to even be going in that direction with the youngest generation, memes and stuff.

And reputation still works. You assign weight to given entity based on previous information that it provided. Whether it was "invented" or merely repeated doesn't matter.

1\. [http://paulgraham.com/genius.html](http://paulgraham.com/genius.html)

<comment><USER15> I think you bring up good points. I think the only difference between Open Source and Proprietary software is that one you're allowed to plagiarize, and the other you're not. In the end, Open Source wins as it automatically gets way more exposure and users, as anyone can access, copy, modify and freely share it forever.

<comment><USER16> I am sorry, what?

Open source software license does not generally allow such thing.

<comment><USER17> The GPL variants, for example, require you to allow others to plagiarize your work.

<comment><USER18> The GPLv3 specifically requires copyright notices to be kept in tact on verbatim copies. Other popular Open Source licenses have more stringent attribution requirements. Plagiarism is definitely not inherent to Open Source, though it may be inherent in some licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, plagiarism is wrong.

The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird.

The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that laws are the source of morals, rather than existing to incentive moral behavior.

The author fails to consider the effect of reputation. Reputation is a heuristic that is used to determine how likely something is, given how trustworthy the speaker is on the subject. If a researcher in an esoteric field, having contributed several results to the field, suggests a new way to interpret the field, that suggests that the idea has already been reasonably vetted. A crank email, on the other hand, may present similarly novel ideas, but they have not been vetted. Plagiarism inappropriately assigns reputation, subverting this heuristic.

The author's metaphor of the apple tree has some rather unfortunate implications. By the logic given, a person should plant apple trees farther from the property line, so that all apples fall well away from public roads. In scientific discovery, this would mean hiding one's findings, refusing to publish other than to state that a discovery has been made. This was the method that was in use through the 16th century, and resulted in much slower rate of progress. Read, for instance, the multiple discoveries of the Cardano Formula.

In short, the author's case that plagiarism should be abandoned as a concept is severely flawed.

</comment><comment><USER20> > " American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were jealous > that you could do it."

Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?

Plagiarism is a fancy word but cheating is something that kids by that age should understand.

Also that's a pretty darn nasty and entitled attitude from an immigrant family, who should have been grateful for the country which received them.

> I have a simple recommendation for you: do a half-decent job teaching > undergraduates.

Part of teaching well is sending the message that cheating is not tolerated. It is demoralizing and stressful for honest, hard working students to see others cheat and blow the curve.

> There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed.

Pardon the snarkiness, but there doesn't seem to have been a moral foundation put down in the case of this author. Yes, if parents and educators don't build and reinforce that foundation, then there won't be any.

<comment><USER21> > > " American children are too stupid to memorize poetry, so they were > jealous that you could do it."

> Anyone else surprised that the child had no concept of cheating, and grew up > writing articles asking if plagiarism is wrong?

Yeah, yikes.

Aside from growing up with a mother who will readily defend cheating, it must also be easier to cheat and plagiarize if you're taught to view others with such contempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Similarly, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a system in which we stop crediting the original source of the idea—one would just need to find a way to make it practicable. There is no moral bedrock in which prohibition of plagiarism is inscribed."

I think that's the main point of the article, and I agree that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The problem is just that this can lead to other problems. One of them is lying; if you say that you made something you didn't, you are lying. Another one is that you can get rewarded for something you didn't make; it could be e.g. money or a job.

So in order to make it practicable we would have to find a way to either avoid all those other problems, or to make the change so small that we don't get those problems but in that case I don't know if there would practically be any difference.

</comment><comment><USER23> > It is true that I did not know about "intellectual property," but even if I > had, that would not have helped. . . But what if I want to go around quoting > Hamlet and claiming the words as my own? In that case, there's no issue of > depriving Shakespeare or his immediate descendants of the money that is > rightfully theirs. It is at that point that plagiarism norms kick in.

The author seems to think that copyright is just about _economic rights_ , but in reality it also confers _moral rights_.

For example, the Berne convention states: "independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work".

You cannot justify violating the right to attribution/recognition of authorship on the grounds that it does not cause any financial loss to the author - they are independent rights.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes, obviously IMO. Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned here yet but the chief reason plagiarism is wrong in my view is that it's typically employed in situations in which the finished work is used to "certify" the ability to prepare the finished work. By "stealing" that finished work, the plagiarizer is granted credentials that they don't deserve, thereby rotting their given institution from within by being granted prestige without the expected concomitant skill to match. It's institutional poison IMO

<comment><USER25> I think part of the problem here is that universities have repurposed the word "plagiarism" to include forms of cheating which it doesn't naturally cover.

For example, if a student pays someone else to write an essay, nowadays that gets classified as plagiarism. But it's hard to see it as a theft of ideas, any more than it's theft if I buy something from a shop.

<comment><USER3> Plagiarism is to misrepresent something as authored by yourself. Whether you paid someone else for writing it or copied it without permission does not matter for the plagiarism charge - the wrongdoing is the misrepresentation.

It is not the same as copyright infringement - although it might be both at the same time if you copy something without permission and publish it under your own name.

Plagiarism is not always illegal. Publishing a book which is ghostwritten by someone else is not illegal AFAIK (as long as they get paid). But in education and research it is illegal - and they don't care if you bought the material fairly, the point is that decisions (grades, hiring, funding etc.) are based on the assumption that the material reflects your abilities.

So it is not really "theft of ideas", it is "faking credentials".

<comment><USER26> One of the issues that makes this murkier is that it is often only social norms and expectations that determine whether someone is misrepresenting themselves. In the meme world, the whole purpose is to share and modify slightly. There isn't an expectation that your post is original. In the academic world, every single word is assumed to be original unless cited otherwise. There are areas in between these cases, and often what someone calls a violation is merely the case of someone misreading the social norms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This feels like another data point indicating that Internet youths are flirting with a total rewrite of what's right and wrong. It's absurd.

</comment><comment><USER28> One place where I think most people don't mind a little plagiarism is in joke telling. I can't tell you how many Dad Jokes I've found on the Internet and passed off as my own, and I think there's sort of an understanding that if you read a joke off a Laffy Taffy wrapper, you now get to tell that joke to others without attribution.

That said, in the professional comedy world, there's the idea of joke theft [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft) and I think most people recognize that as more clearly an example of cheating.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Is Plagiarism Wrong? by Agnes Callard"

Why did the author write his name in the article if the argument is that attributing any kind of ownership or provenance is without value? It's almost as if the author cares about his original work.

</comment><comment><USER30> > outrage against plagiarists is about protecting idea-creators, not readers.

The author states this, but then says nothing to elaborate on their claim or justify it. As a "user" of academic writings, it is extremely annoying to come across stuff that's not referenced properly, has been gratuitously-reinvented in a way that fractures the lit on some topic, etc. It's bad enough when these things happen casually or by mistake, imagine if people actually started doing it on purpose, merely to claim credit on others' achievements. Treating this as a "moral" crusade of sorts seems to be totally justified.

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting that a philosophy column on an ethical issue talks a lot about legality in the first half. I guess it speaks to an optimistic attitude about the role of law.

I love this bit in the references:

"1\. Any resemblances between this essay and Brian L. Frye's forthcoming article "Plagiarize This Paper" (IDEA: The IP Law Review [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3462144)) are probably due to the fact that I plagiarized it in several places."

</comment><comment><USER32> Incidentally, these auto-plagiarism-detection systems that academic journals use seem to go overboard. You 're not allowed to quote yourself, and sometimes they detect completely silly things. It's just not possible not to plagiarize "serial section electron tomography".

<comment><USER33> I would hope these automated systems are being used with human oversight, anyways.

I've heard some anecdotes of students dealing with TurnItIn's flimsiness, with the professor/teacher being too stubborn to actually re-evaluate what the tool thinks is plagarism. But most professors out there are going to see that the tool isn't perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yes. You need to give credits where it's due.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another annoying thing is that university plagiarism policies seem to have been largely written by humanities departments without thinking very hard about the needs of others.

Taken literally, my local university's plagiarism policy says it would be "academic misconduct" for a mathematics undergraduate to reproduce a known proof of a theorem in an examination without identifying a source. Unless things have changed greatly, this is not in fact expected of them.

</comment><comment><USER35> Lets copy this article under my domain name, attribute it to me and link to it on hackernews. Plagiarism withdraws many incentives to create (not only financial) and is therefore morally wrong. Copying memes is good since it allows confrontation and emergence of best memes. But you also need incentives to create, being money (sensible copyright) or fame (attibution)

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the author is making a good point here, though overstating the case. Remember, plagiarism in academia isn't just stealing an entire paper and claiming it's yours. In my narrow sub field, probably the first three sentences of every paper's introduction could be identical, but if I copied those from another paper that's plagiarism. Likewise, if my paper built on a useful equation from another's work, and I copied the explanation directly from that paper, it's plagiarism. Yet as the author said, this does little disservice to the reader. These rules are more about properly maintaining an academic measure of merit.

But while this is a great point, we shouldn't abandon the problem of plagiarism all together. Instead, just start with your moral system, say utilitarian or a Kantian ethic, and then put it to the test. For certain, some systems will find it intrinsically immortal regardless of the social context.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if the story about memorizing Shel Silverstein's poem is true or if the author stole that too

</comment><comment><USER38> Good artists copy, great artists steal ~ Picasso (remarked by Jobs).

</comment><comment><USER39> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER40> I teach college and often public speaking. Practically all college students know that wholesale plagiarism is wrong but many of them still don't know how to cite their sources.

I tell them any time you use information from another source you need to say the source even if you use the same source 2-3 sentences in a row. Every time I hear you give a statistic I ask myself, "Did you give a source for that?" We do exercises where I give them paragraphs without citations and ask them to identify all the ones that need citations. I have them do impromptu speeches on summarizing an article and citing it multiple times. I explain the difference between a source and a citation. I tell them I don't care about a works cited slide. If I don't hear them say the source it doesn't count.

Many of them still give statistics without citing them.</comment>


Visualized: The tangled web of smartphone patents - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/mobile/visualized-the-tangled-web-of-smartphone-patents/ <comment><USER2> I produced a graphic like this last time something like this was submitted:

<http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/MobileSuits.png>

Here are a few similar submissions ...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166958> <\- From over 2 years ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465057> <\- From 1 year ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856774>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2896671>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898639>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911684>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2915443>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921238>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928385> <\- This has comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941852></comment>


Review of using Trac for project management - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pretheory.com/arch/2007/10/review_of_using_trac_for_proje.php

<comment><USER2> What do people here use? I'm about to choose between Trac, Bugzilla, or anything else that comes up.

<comment><USER3> I like the subversion integration of Trac. It's a great tool to write documentation in as you can tie it to changesets, files, etc. It's also a decent bug tracking tool, what it lacks in this department it makes up with its integration of bug tracking, subversion and a wiki (which coincidentally is all you need when you start on a project).

<comment><USER2> I've heard this a number of times now. Since we're using SVN, I'll definitely try Trac.

Is there any reason to not use the built in server?

<comment><USER3> Because it's really easy to integrate it with Apache and this will solve some performance issues. If you use it a lot you might get annoyed by some pages loading too slow otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let's talk about Json Server - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eleven-labs.com/en/json-server/ <comment><USER2> Great article on a useful module, with a variety of examples to demonstrate its features. Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Oh! thank you! :-)</comment></comment>


Wanted: technical co-founders for YC application and/or potential VC funding - <AUTHOR>

Here's my situation:
I'm determined to start a company and I have a "big idea" (IMHO).  When I've shared my concept and business model with my friends, I've received very positive feedback (from both technical and business points of view).  Unfortunately I'm not your typical YC founder (I'm 36), and most of my friends are far more interested in a "job" than starting a company.  Most have said they would love to join me (as an employee) if I had the funding.
I intend to submit an application for the YC winter program, but as a sole founder I understand my odds aren't the best they could be (and in general I suspect it's probably good to have a partner or two).  Right now I'm concurrently working on the business plan, UI design and a functional prototype (I get bored working one aspect for too long (and as the concepts get more fleshed out, it seems like a more balanced way to work)).
Anyhow, I'm looking for one or two free electrons (highly skilled and productive people) to join me on my YC application and/or other VC funding.  Without giving out too much information, I will say that it's a web based application (shocker eh?) with a heavy JavaScript component and a distributed server (linux) environment involving a message bus.  Ideally one of the free electrons will know the ins and outs of the client side (JavaScript/HTML/CSS, page layout, page flow, graphics design).  The other free electron would have a good grasp on distributed server architectures/IPC/networking, database interactions and optimizations, and programming skill in C/C++ and one of the following (in approximate order of preference): Perl, Ruby, Lisp, Python.  I'm a bit nervous about giving out a large amount of ownership to an unknown person, but would be willing to consider some sort of vesting arrangement (any advice on how to approach this would appreciated as well).  I'm willing to make this work with the right people.
Please contact me at:  bruce.saunders at occamsoftware . com if interested. <comment><USER2> Whats the idea?</comment>


Class Creation and Organization using the MooTools JavaScript Framework - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptjunkie/gg576885.aspx

<comment><USER2> Is it possible to use it with node.js for example ?

that would make it a killer server side scripting language.</comment>


How well do sites that use JavaScript frameworks perform in the wild? - <AUTHOR> https://perf-track.web.app <comment><USER2> Would be nice if you could see comparisons between the frameworks all in one page.</comment>


Ask HN: New Job Poor Fit, Can't Make Immediate Jump - <AUTHOR> I took a new job about six months ago and am into my second project with them. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be a colossally bad fit. My job responsibilities have turned out to be closer to business analyst and assistant project manager than software engineer (but paid a senior software engineer salary). Their agile work style has turned out to be heavily bureaucratic, full of long meetings, documentation I am constantly being asked to generate, and just overall unpleasantness; I scarcely ever write a single line of code on the job. This did not match expectations based on the interview nor based on the experience listed on my résumé.
This is a remote position, and for various personal reasons, I am looking to relocate, a process that would take a few months and coordination with my S.O., and so am not interested in taking a local job in this mid-sized city. Good remote positions have been difficult to find. Financially, quitting in the interim is also not an option.
I am at odds trying to figure out a good way to handle this situation. <comment><USER2> Hi, fellow remote worker here. I am in somewhat the same boat, as I'm not really working on large scale software projects, more just plumbing for our frontend devs (I am a backend developer for a design company). As a result I often find myself creating my own priorities and requirements, which can relieve some of the boredom.

If you have the opportunity and the clout you could suggest new tech or new processes that might help alleviate some of the pain points you're feeling. It's at least worth a shot. You might end up getting to do some new dev work as a result.

</comment><comment><USER3> Starting a side project might help unless this is a more than 8 hours a day job, which I've had and side projects are impossible working 120 hours a week. But if its a normal 40 hour workweek remote that gives you some extra time to do a neat side project which could lead you to being on the indie hackers' site listing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm honestly kind of burnt out by the end of the work day and want to get out and socialize to recharge my batteries. I've been investing much of the rest of my free time into getting back to recruiters, checking out companies in cities we're considering relocating to, etc.</comment></comment>