Sylpheed – a simple, lightweight but featureful e-mail client - <AUTHOR> http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ <comment><USER2> The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it uses GTK it looks like the rest of your desktop (assuming your desktop is GNOME).

I always end up going back to Thunderbird, for a variety of reasons. But, I try a bunch of other stuff every now and then. Sylpheed is not bad, but it's not got anything I don't get from Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is more actively maintained and has more capabilities. (I keep trying Evolution, and _hating_ it, every single time. It's huge and thinks really hard about every single action and continues to be buggy. I don't know how something has been in really active development for decades and still has weird quirks and misbehavior without any actionable error messages.)

<comment><USER3> What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message.

Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier.

Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc.

Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices.

[1] [http://www.claws-mail.org/](http://www.claws-mail.org/)

<comment><USER4> To edit the From address in outgoing email with Thunderbird, try the Virtual Identity extension.

The really nice thing about Virtual Identity is that it remembers which From address you use for each To address. Additionally, if you reply to someone that you've not written to before, VI uses the incoming mail's To address as the outgoing mail's From address.

<comment><USER3> I've tried Virtual Identity several times, several versions, but it always ended up making it impossible to read or send mail. When the extension was active I could not open messages (got empty windows), disabling the extension made everything right again. When it works Virtual Identity works well, but unfortunately it rarely works - at least for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sylpheed is my all-time favorite e-mail app.

In late 2001 I brought a Vaio C1 [1] back from Japan. 192 MB ram, Transmeta Crusoe processor that could burst to 600 MHz. Running Windows ME _everything_ was slow out of the box, but with Linux (Slackware), a minimal window manager (forget if it was XFCE, Enlightenment, or something else), and Sylpheed it just flew. Even with huge numbers of messages everything was snappy. It was amazing.

I switched from Linux to Mac in 2009 and migrated to Mail.app at the time. It's not terrible, but even on recent hardware it feels more sluggish than Sylpheed did on that underpowered ultraportable in 2001.

Good to see that it's still getting occasional updates 16 years later.

1\. [http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/](http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/)

<comment><USER6> With MacOS, I particularly love MailMate.

It's been with me for years, and I love how it handles the flow of editing mail messages. You take care of the contents, it takes care of formatting. If you've ever tried LaTeX, it's a similar concept.

<comment><USER7> Used mailmate when Mail.app was slightly buggy some years ago but then got tired of mailmate being buggy as well (iirc, takes seconds selecting multiple mails, changes column width after showing mail folders on/off, message signature inserting unnecessary new line and crashes randomly and never had those fixed in a year or something), I switched back to Mail.app in Sierra, seems responsive and trouble free so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does it compare with Claws Mail [0]?

I've always assumed Claws is the more full-featured fork of Sylpheed, but seeing that they've diverged over a decade ago and are both still in development I'm curious how they compare.

[0] [http://www.claws-mail.org/](http://www.claws-mail.org/)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#...](http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#What_are_the_differences_between_Claws_Mail_and_Sylpheed.3F)

 _Back in 2001 Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws) started as the bleeding- edge version of Sylpheed, in order to act as a testbed for new features for Sylpheed. The idea was to regularly resync with Hiroyuki 's main branch, and vice-versa. Claws Mail then evolved into the stable, extended version of Sylpheed, and in 2006 became an entity in its own right, in part due to different goals and the fact that syncing both codebases stopped happening. Claws Mail has many extra features compared to Sylpheed and is more powerful, yet is just as fast, lightweight and stable._

<comment><USER8> Well, considering that was written a decade ago, it doesn't really answer my question...

[http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Inform...](http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Information&type=revision&diff=3029&oldid=1817)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For last few years (after geting bitten by yet another breakage when upgrading evolution) I'm using claws-mail which is fork of sylpheed and it does everything I need from email client (and in contrast to evolution it even has usable windows version).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have about the same experience, but with Thunderbird. Once I got my accounts set up in Sylpheed/Claws (I have used both) I found it did everything I needed, Its extremely stable has minimal dependency and uses negligible CPU and memory.

I can compile Sylpheed form sources it in a few minutes on any recent version of Linux or BSD with little or no dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not unlike many others, I use Thunderbird and sometimes think about switching to something else (main reasons are speed and usability). But I guess what many of us need much more than better email client is better email workflow. I have dozens of filters and always keep my inbox empty, and yet I think may be the real thing is I don't really manage my emails properly. Maybe I just need to set up this filter to delete stuff instead of moving it (I'm not really keen on deleting stuff in general, always feels unsafe and shortsighted), maybe I need some other system.

By the way, using Gmail web-interface (and Gmail is not the only mail provider I use) feels almost as unsatisfactory, as Thunderbird: ok, filters and search are a bit better, and it physically cannot hung-up my whole system under load, but otherwise it is as needy and clumsy as Thunderbird. I remember receiving several thousands of emails overnight because of some programmers mistake, and deleting it was quite painful: I'd gladly tell Gmail "just delete all this stuff" (by filter), but I didn't find any way to do so, I had to fall back to slowly manually deleting my mail by 200-item batches.

Would be interesting to hear how other people manage their mailboxes.

</comment><comment><USER11> HTML vs plaintext

The plaintext email only nature resonated with me for long time but many email and chat services have gone rich text and it's great. Why I say that...I used to use claws mail for many years for business email but being able to at least make text bold or add an inline image is valuable. For personal email mutt is great for me and Gmail too nowadays but for business to business, HTML is required.

It took me a while to get Thunderbird to mimick Claws. Thunderbird is much slower and crashing randomly frequently but is the best from the crowd.

 _Does Claws Mail allow me to write HTML styled messages?

No. A discussion has gone around over this topic, and the outcome was that HTML mail is not wanted. If you really need to send HTML, you can of course attach a webpage to an e-mail._

[http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#...](http://www.claws- mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#Does_Claws_Mail_allow_me_to_write_HTML_styled_messages.3F)

<comment><USER12> Thunderbird's slowness and other quirks got me to switch from it to the Windows mail app when I'm on Windows... suffice to say I don't recommend it.

It looks nice and all, but isn't necessarily all that much faster, doesn't always render HTML email all that well, and has pieces of basic functionality mysteriously missing (i.e., to this day it doesn't understand what the Reply- To header is for).

Chalk it up as another in a long line of Thunderbird alternatives that just don't measure up. I'd love to have something else I like (especially now in the twilight of XUL) but it's just a tough space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow its ugly.

While people might or not might trust google etc. The spam filter and the ui from gmail is just to good to switch to any offline client.

I'm only using thunderbird for pgp mails.

<comment><USER14> Gmail's UI is terrible. Where do people get the opinion that it's good? It's slow, nonintuitive, requires I click a button to see updates new emails on a thread, the filtering/labels are terribly limited... I could go on

<comment><USER15> Fast flexible searches and spam filters that work better than anything else I've tried. I put up with other issues for these two things.

I don't use an offline client because I use a home desktop, phone, and work desktop that aren't the same os.

<comment><USER16> That's because you have not tried the antispam solution that you have to pay for. To me gmail and its spam filter is a curse, I self host my own mail server and despite it being up to date to the latest recommended best practice, sometime for no apparent reason and for a limited period of time gmail will silently drop my legit emails into the spam folder of my recipient. I've grown to really dislike gmail for not caring about smaller servers who do their best to do it right.

<comment><USER15> I have heard people complain about false positives, but I check from time to time and don't see any.

I am using the paid Gmail product, no idea if that makes it any different.

I assume the volume they deal in would make a Bayesian filter more effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Must admit I am somewhat jaded with current mail applications and actually creating my own. Sylpheed is wonderful and the one I currently use, it's fast and works. My problem is with the GUI. Every single linked email client in this thread looks like it has come from 2005 and, unsurprisingly, most of them were created around then.

Hoping that maybe by using some more modern libraries, and aiming for a material design-esque client, I might be able to make something easy to use and reliable.

<comment><USER18> I've upvoted you, because I think we need more e-mail clients. Actually, I was thinking about creating one myself as well.

<comment><USER17> Would you perhaps consider working together instead of on two separate projects? Half the workload for both of us to get the same final product!

<comment><USER18> I'm currently involved in writing a hex editor for big files (i.e. disk images), because I felt world needed one as well :), I already have a significant amount of code, it would be a waste if I'd switch projects now. Thanks for asking though. Working solo is hard, both for motivation and the amount of work that needs to be done. If I wouldn't have my current project I would definitely pair up with someone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used Sylpheed a lot in the past. Very fast, clean, simple and reliable. But switched to Notmuch (with Emacs UI) years ago for its great flexibility and programmability, and due to my general preference for using Emacs modes over separate applications.

<comment><USER16> I'm considering switching to notmuch in emacs, is there any advice or specific thing I should know beforehand ?

<comment><USER20> Know that all other mail clients will feel inadequate ever after. If you are forced to use something else at work, you might quit and end up homeless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sylpheed is lack of good HTML render engine. That's why I still not change to Claws or Sylpheed because its. This time is 2017, and I don't want to read and imagining about the figure that was appeared as text description in email.

<comment><USER3> I don't use this myself but in theory it should work:

      $ apt show claws-mail-fancy-plugin
      Package: claws-mail-fancy-plugin
      Version: 3.14.1-3+b1
      ...

      Description: HTML mail viewer using GTK+2 WebKit
       This plugin for Claws Mail allows rendering of HTML email messages
       in the message window.
       .
       It uses the GTK+2 port of the webkit library to render HTML.
       .
       Supports printing HTML mails when html2ps package is installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Trojita is my client of choice so far, I might have to reevaluate that again?

<comment><USER16> IIANM Trojita is limited to a single imap account which makes it almost useless to me, as I would have to have an additional email client for the other accounts.

Last time I checked trojita was still a work in progress with missing features and was not ready for production and daily use. Is it ready now ?

<comment><USER23> I like trojita and used it for several months recently. It does a lot right, but the biggest reason I stopped using it is a lack of an address book, or some other form of email address autocomplete. Having to lookup old emails to figure out someones email address is just a deal breaker -- especially because the search isn't all that great either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a point of comparison: why should I switch from Thunderbird to Sylpheed?

<comment><USER25> Why switch? I'll tell you why I switched from Thunderbird to Claws.

I got sick of Thunderbird's pathological memory leaking. I start by email client when I log in and leave it running indefinitely (days-weeks). Thunderbird continually started out at 1 GB but grew over time _without limit_ , even if only sitting idle, collecting mail. After a couple of days it would be creeping north of 6 GB. Several times it drove my PC into pathological swapping, making the PC impossible to use and extremely difficult even to get control of to shut down.

Claws is currently using 0.1 GB, even after running for a week.

<comment><USER26> Thunderbird user for over a decade here, on both Linux and Windows, and have not seen this happen, ever. Firefox, I'd agree and it still does on Linux. Never had a problem with Thunderbird other than the disappearing Outlook calendars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm yet to see a mail client that allows me to _rename_ all contacts that have a specified email, then search by using those changed names. I mean, I don't want to get e-mails from "F4taL ErRoR <firstname.lastname@example.com>", I want to get e-mails from "John Smith <firstname.lastname@example.com>". Some clients kind of allow me to do that kind of aliasing, but then indexing and searching for those aliases don't work. Claws mail is one of them, Thunderbird as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've used Sylpheed for years and I miss it. I stopped using it because I switched to OSX at some point. But it's a beautiful piece of software.

<comment><USER28> brew install sylpheed

It is compiled and linked using the native X libraries on OS X, so it looks quite decent. There are versions using XQuartz, but I have had problems with the font rendering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> slighty off topic, but there are mail client that support at-rest encryption?

For varius reason i need to run a mail client from a usb key, and i could't find a client that support the ability to encrypt the mailbox (also with addressbook and for windows). Veracrypt and similar solution are not applicable in my case.

<comment> mike-cardwell If your client supports PGP, you can always implement something like:

[https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incomi...](https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email)

<comment><USER29> i will look into that, it seem a step-up from my current setup. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I cannot understand the relevance of an email client, now that browsers can do email. It may be my workflow, so I will ask:

Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a browser based solution will not work?

<comment><USER31> > Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a > browser based solution will not work?

Here's one: multiple email accounts that you need to check on a regular basis. I would lose my mind if I had to track my emails across three different web interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, this brings back memories! I used Syplheed Claws when I was still running Mandrake - before it was merged and became Mandriva.

</comment><comment><USER33> last version for macOS 18 Apr 2014

</comment><comment><USER34> Does it still misses RFC 2177?

<comment><USER17> Pretty sure most applications don't need to support RFC 2177 to still be efficient. Long-polling for most IMAP servers requires one packet every nine minutes (to the best of my knowledge), which is literally nothing. It would take months of being run constantly to even get up to a megabyte of data being transferred. Some rough back of the envelope calculations:

\- 10 minutes per poll, 1440 minutes in a day, 144 packets per day.

\- 50 bytes per packet, 1,000,000 bytes to a megabyte, 20,000 packets required.

\- Roughly 140 days of time, or 5 months to reach a single megabyte.

Aren't there some optimisations that are so minuscule it isn't worth implementing them?

<comment><USER35> Of course but it so satisfying to reduce the overhead further. The struggle to reduce a megabyte of overhead by half a megabyte is great while knocking half a megabyte off a gigabyte is often trivial.

I'm not arguing that anyone should try shaving the megabyte of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not to be confused with:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed)</comment>


Aren't There Any Real Problems Left To Solve? - <AUTHOR> http://howtosplitanatom.com/questions/arent-there-real-problems-to-solve/

<comment><USER2> The title of the blog-post is "Aren't There Real Problems To Solve?", which is something completely differnet than "Aren't There Any Real Problems Left To Solve?". The latter sounds like a rhethorical question that suggests that progress has come to an end. The first one is a really good one (and I therefore recommend the blog-posting): are we often trying to solve problems that was caused by technology that not even solved a real problem. Are we getting into a problem-solving spiral that feeds itself?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Aren't There Real Problems To Solve?"

I have always spent a lot of my time in small or midsize companies (10 to 200 employees), and I can assure you the answer is ABSOLUTELY.

These are hard working people who are in a different world than most of the readers here. They don't facebook, twitter, or IM at work. But they are unbelieveably busy trying to get things done while depending upon software and systems that most of us here would laugh at.

Many of them don't have time to get to all their emails and voice mails. They have to make snap decisions all day long without enough information because their software just doesn't give them what they need easily enough. They have constant problems with interpersonal communication, instruction, and understanding.

Just a sample of what I've witnessed in the past 3 weeks:

\- We need multiple "ship to" addresses for this institutional customer. The software doesn't support it.

\- The exchange server is down.

\- We need multiple prices for the same item, depending on the scenario. The shopping cart won't allow it.

\- 300 "smart part numbers" were configured incorrectly because no one gave Jane the correct Vendor Codes last week. But now, we have orders, inventory, and history for those items, so the software won't let us change or delete them.

\- The exchange server is down.

\- No one remembered to reset the warehouse server last night, so everything came in today with the wrong date.

\- The new stockroom printer doesn't support HP PCL, so the bar code labels are all wrong.

\- We think that $90,000 order acknowledgement from XYZ Company was deleted by the spam filter, but we're not sure.

\- There was a bad pointer in the UPS data base last Tuesday, so 72 packages all went to the same customer in Duluth.

\- The wrong 800 number is being printed on our invoices. Our customers are calling a sex hotline.

\- The exchange server is down.

These are not jokes. I see them all the time. And while we regale all the cool stuff WE are doing, I can honestly say that the situation in many small businesses hasn't improved all that much. And there are 7 million of them. They need help.

The good news? This is a fantastic opportunity for those with our skills and technology.

Yes, there are plenty of real problems to solve. Stay tuned.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for describing the mundaneness (is that a word?) that is currently my everyday life, and is the everyday life for a huge portion of the working world. It's not sexy or glamorous, but there are small opportunities everywhere in the nitty-gritty of daily business that often don't involve social networks or the cool technology du-jour.

Maybe that's the problem with getting youthful entrepreneurs straight out of college. PG discourages young entrepreneurs from settling down, and getting trapped by employment by someone else. In so doing, these people never see the opportunities for solving problems that small businesses or mega-corporations need.

Perhaps it's just the makeup of this little YC-centric microcosm that is tilting my perspective on entrepreneurship.

Oh, and I don't know why anybody hasn't fixed the Exchange server problem yet. If Linux and Apple can mount a real challenge to something as complex as Redmond's operating system, why not something silly like their groupware server?

<comment><USER3> Nice to see I'm not the only one here in my situation, mosburger. I think our everyday "mundaneness" and yc/hn are perfect compliments for each other. I've always had more problems to solve than I could get to and I've always found the technology to do a better job of it. With this group here, now I have that additional "oomph" I sometimes need to _do something_. It's silly to whine about bad database schemas when our compatriots are using the same skills and technology to change the world.

(And don't even get me started about Microsoft. Fodder for another rant, er a I mean post.)

<comment><USER5> Dude do you have a blog?

<comment><USER3> Nope, this is my "blog".

kirkubakaran, I am hoping to finally meet you sometime this weekend. Let's touch base offline sometime today.

<comment><USER5> I hope no one who knows Tamil (my mother tongue) reads your comment. You just called me a lunatic :-D "kirku"

Yea I am looking forward to meeting you too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think what Spalding wants to get at is the fact that as entrepreneurs, we're overlooking the real change that we can induce at the whims of the VC community. There are other ways to finance. There are other ways to innovate. Isn't it time that we decided to take action on this "problem"?

I think that there are plenty of problems to tackle, especially in the way we handle information. Let's get out there and change the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lately I have noticed there aren't ANY new sites out that are really revolutionary. Only minor tweaks on whats currently available. A bit disappointing;/

</comment><comment><USER8> Of course there are, but I have to say that problems will be solved when they are painful enough for people to pay for a solution, or to work one themselves, (opensource).

</comment><comment><USER9> There are lots of people who need food and water. They might like a solution to their starving to death and have no water problem.</comment>


Steve Jobs: Not a very nice person to know - <AUTHOR> http://www.livemint.com/2011/10/21004530/Not-a-very-nice-man-to-know.html

<comment><USER2> (i made this comment on that web page, but hasn't been approved in the last 3 hours, so copying here as well)

I think some of your stories are not very accurate, they are twisted to be more negative than they were.

In any case, one thing you should definitely do is remove Richard Stallman's statement -- since perhaps you don't know him -- he thinks the whole IT product industry is satanish -- nobody should ever sell any product as per him. He does not use any software which is sold and lives like a hermit in the world of tech, with so fanatic ideals that he is completely incompatible with today's world.

Secondly, labor conditions at FoxConn factories are often pointed out as Apple's crimes -- but it is foolish to do so. Foxconn is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world, and a LOT of top tech brands in the world outsource their manufacturing to them. Apple makes them most money though -- I am not sure how Foxconn conditions are caused by Apple.

Thirdly, about charity, he donated privately. And he had a RED product campaign for iPods which donated a large amount of money to Africa for AIDS. And he has left his wealth of 7 billion here, his wife spent a lot of time doing charity, I am sure she will use almost all of it in charity...

Fourthly, backdating options was a common practice followed at a lot of companies -- this has nothing to do with Steve Jobs -- in fact he was found to be innocent in this (he knew about it, but he likely thought of it as an accounting issue: he was no accounting expert -- its not like he requested for this to be done).

Regarding Amelio -- really? Can you point to any authentic source for reference? I am not sure he made Apple a 3 billion stock pile when Apple had a multi-billion dollar loss the year before Steve Jobs joined. And you are trying to make it sound like Steve Jobs was a hitler who kicked off Amelio who should have been the CEO of Apple. Are you nuts?

One more -- you mention Apple "stole" the developers from C&G, a MP3 software firm. Please can you describe more what you meant -- I never knew one could "steal" developers.... Apple had hired 4 of their key employees --- by making them an offer which they could have declined obviously but they didn't, because they wanted to join Apple -- i am not sure how this means anything. Lot of things like this happen in the industry, for example, Juniper frequently hires a bunch of developers from Cisco's team for a product, when they want to start a new similar product.

Overall - I obviously agree Steve was not a "polite" person -- he used to talk harshly and make aggressive moves business wise. But he did all of it for passion of making something that will change the market upside down. And he did that, multiple times. With innovative ideas. Who could have started a retail store chain in 2001 for an electronics company? And made it successful today when all retail is failing...

All his achievements are known to everybody. He was a person that had failings like everybody else, but he pursued his passion with such a vigor, that he made a massive impact on everything he did. He moved industries forward, with a sudden, immense push, multiple times.

<comment><USER3> "Apple makes them most money though -- I am not sure how Foxconn conditions are caused by Apple."

Nike was very heavily criticized for the working/living conditions of workers at the factories that made Nike shoes.

For quite sometime, Nike hid behind the claim that they were not shoe manufacturers, but a sports product design and marketing company, and that the actual conditions of the workers were not Nike's business.

What you are telling me "Apple makes them most money though " is that Apple has a great deal of leverage with FoxConn, and that Apple can use that leverage as Nike did to dramatically improve and police the conditions of the FoxConn employees.

And if Steve Jobs had, or Tim Cook would, tell their users that in the future prices would take a $10 jump per player to ensure they were manufactured in better conditions, my guess is that it would affect sales in much the same way that Nike's sales were affected (which is to say, increase.)

<comment><USER2> Apple actually did a lot to better the labor conditions at the plants. They routinely publish a report about it as well.

What I wanted to say is that Foxconn makes products for a large number of companies : Acer, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Vizio, and others, apart from Apple. I am sure their products are also manufactured in the same labor conditions. Why is Apple being blamed and not any of the other companies? In fact, since Apple's name has been publicized, they have done much more to improve the conditions there, I am not sure whether these other clients did even a little bit.

<comment><USER3> If Apple makes FoxConn the most money, then Apple can take the lead that no other company can.

That you are not aware of criticism of other companies does not mean it does not exist. Just as Nike took point with criticism of its sweatshops but many companies also suffered that criticism.

But Apple from it's 1984 commercial, it's commercial celebrating Gandhi, all of its associations with musicians, the entire Apple brand stands for a humanism that is belied in its production methods.

They can do more.

Not only do they then deserve the criticism, they are precisely the most effective company to pressure due to their leverage with FoxConn giving them power, and their overall brand message giving critics power over Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The book The No Asshole Rule talks extensively about Steve, IIRC labeling him a certified asshole and discussing his management style. The conclusion I drew was Steve succeeded in part because he was more often charismatic but people were afraid of disappointing Steve and facing the asshole persona.

Heck, in a way I'm sure it was great working with him - I bet you always knew where you stood.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's one thing to be brutally honest with people and quite another to disown your own child, deride subordinates for silly things, destroy people's public reputation and park in multiple spots meant for handicapped people!

People who are honest and disregard the consequences of absolute honesty are an asset in a world filled with people who would lie to keep social ties intact. Assholes on the other hand, not so much.

<comment><USER2> If you think nobody liked Steve, do you think he would have remained the CEO of Apple? Was he a dictator who couldn't be ousted? He was the best leader for Apple, period. Secondly, if your boss scolds you, sometimes unnecessarily so, but he makes you millions of dollars by leading the company to a 130X increase in stock price, would you mind?? Thirdly, employees in the company love him. I happen to work at Apple right now, and the love I have seen in the employees for Steve, cannot be paralleled for any other leader at any other company. People didn't like his aggressiveness and his abrasiveness, but still loved him and his dedication and leadership, and that he single-handedly led Apple to great success. Genius is idiosyncratic.

<comment><USER5> You can be an asshole and still have people love you. How do you think dictators typically operate?

No clue about Steve as I never met the dude. But you're implying that just because he is able to turn a hefty profit and that people liked him means is proof he wasn't an asshole.

<comment><USER6> It's more complicated than whether someone "is an asshole" or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ugh! This page has auto-playing audio, and the audio controls are way down at the bottom of the page.

@asto, I think you should have remarked on this in the title to this link. And I wish people would not post links with auto-playing audio or video.

<comment><USER7> It's possible that the original poster didn't realize it was there. I, for one, had no idea there was any kind of audio on that page, because any such thing is automatically blocked.

<comment><USER3> You might be right. What a horrible website -- I have no idea who the audience they are targeting is that appreciates autoplay audio.</comment></comment></comment>


Wages rise on California farms, Americans still don't want the job - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration <comment><USER2> I work at the LA Times and conducted the data analysis of wages included in this story. We published all the code behind it on GitHub. AMA. [https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production- wages...](https://github.com/datadesk/california-crop-production-wages- analysis/blob/master/03-analysis.ipynb)

<comment><USER3> Great work guys at LA Times! That is very transparent.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. The Jupyter Notebook technology is great for us. It's nice that it helps us be transparent, and it's even better that it helps us keep our analysis readable, sharable and organized when it's in development.

<comment><USER4> palrewire, it would be great to have the notebook hosted on [http://notebooks.azure.com](http://notebooks.azure.com) so people can run it. thx.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for passing this along. It's very interesting. I just gave it a go with a hefty SQL import to test its power. My database connection string to Amazon RDS, which works locally on my computer, failed. Any idea why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was younger, I worked at a McDonalds in SoCal. Almost all the employees were white teenagers. The managers were white as well. We didn't make much, just a bit above minimum wage, but we were all mostly high-school students or college students working in the summer to pay tuition.

This went on until around 1984 or so, when it became much harder to hire this demographic. It wasn't as cool to work at fast food, and the area was becoming more affluent.

Fast forward five years, and 99% of the staff was now Hispanic, including several illegal immigrants. The restaurant had to do what it could to make money and stay in biz.

I don't know how high wages would have to be to attract the previous demographic to that type of work. The area is far more affluent than when I was growing up, and house prices start at over $700K and go higher easily.

I do think something is missing though when kids don't learn what it's like to hold a retail type job dealing with the public. You learn hard work, humility, and often an appreciation for higher education.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of white teenagers who work at every In-N-Out I've ever been to--because they pay better. Otherwise those kids, in nicer areas like you point to, have better alternatives for minimum wage like retail. The reason the jobs you describe are being replaced by immigrants is because the wages have been stagnant or not kept up with inflation. Unskilled immigrants take labor jobs that Americans aren't really willing to do, like being a janitor or emptying septic tanks or pouring concrete in Bakersfield.

<comment><USER7> To the parent's point, it's probably generally considered slightly 'cooler' to work at In-N-Out than at McDonald's. In-N-Out certainly seems to be trendier amongst young people than most other fast food restaurants.

Anecdotally, it seems that as general affluence within a community rises, so does the value placed on social standing. So your compensation package has to cover increased lifestyle expenses, adjusted for the position's impact on your status in the community.

If wages stagnated, but somehow McDonald's just kept getting trendier, I expect they would retain more of their original demographic than if McDonald's was increasingly seen as a place that only employs losers and morons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This persistent myth that first world western countries need mass migration because there are jobs "$NATIONALY won't do" really needs to die. Japan is a high income first world nation, very low immigration, and yet somehow they are able to find people to drive taxis, serve food and sweep streets.

It's nothing more than an emotion based persuasion technique to get the first world working class to accept lower wages. Don't fall for it.

<comment><USER9> Food can be shipped though, so there's a cap on how high wages can rise unless you start adding import taxes.

<comment><USER10> The U.S. uses import caps instead of import taxes to protect the local farmers and ranchers. My country and Argentina and Australia would sell them all the meat they could otherwise.

Europe does the same. So yes, farmers and ranchers are protected by import restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Trump's border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it's creating a desperate shortage of help." (Disclamer: I am an immigrant whose paper work is still ongoing)

From the article, it seemed like at least for some their business model was questionable. If the only way to be profitable is to rely on illegal immigrant or non-competitive wages (one of the farmers mentioned could only stay profitable at $8/hr but it seems anything above $10/hr seems unprofitable. "Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.") than you're better off growing something else anyways. (almond and olive trees in this guys case). Even if there was a way to get visas to get labor, the cost of application and transportation might still prevent some of these low margin farms.

Googling shows that other manual labor type jobs in Napa valley [1] seems to be $17+ and often offers training + transport. Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable again?

If I could go work at a farm during summer to save some money for my college, I would consider it. But looking at cost of living/risk involved/ lack of benefits for season workers/ pay, it doesn't appear to be worth it.

So, yes, preventing people willing to work and make it work from doing so it not a good solution. But the narrative that Americans would never work on a farm given the choice is also not true, imho. I've met plenty of white Americans who would like to do it, but lot of the work seems to be seasonal.

<comment><USER12> > Seeing as how grapes seems to be used in wine industry, wouldn't the wine > industry pay more for the grapes as supply dwindles and make it profitable > again?

Grapes, IIRC, have a multi-year cycle time. You don't just drop in a set of vines and have a useful harvest for wine in 6 months. As such, that dents the supply/demand cycle and turns it into a game of "chicken".

If I know that we're all hurting growing grapes, the only question is whether I can hold out longer than the other folks who go bankrupt and finally shrink the supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Status, status, status.

Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day?

We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self- interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in comparison to its size.

It's like how _Stranger Things_ HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.

<comment><USER14> If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status. Status follows money, not the other way around.

<comment><USER15> > If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status.

Farm _workers_ would have status. (Of course, _farmers_ would also have to make a lot more than they do now, or require far less hired labor, for farm work to typically pay $200k/yr.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Walking around handing out business cards in a bad neighborhood is not effective recruiting. Nor is the wine industry that important. It's good to see wages rising, though.

Machine picking is taking over. Every crop which can be machine harvested already is. All the staple crops were mechanized decades ago. Fruits and vegetables are mostly mechanized. Orange picking has been mechanized.[1] (The mechanism is brutal, but over 10 years, production isn't affected.) There's a newer, more gentle mechanism.[2] The orange picking machine is a big version of a grape harvester.[3]

Very few kinds of produce require full robotic picking. Apples to be sold whole do, and robotic apple picking exists, but is still experimental.[4] Robotic strawberry picking machines are available.[5]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyI6-jKIfoo) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av17eM1Ruyo) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXTnd90XFWE) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU) [5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI)

<comment><USER17> Is this why all the potatoes that I buy now have round, half-moon shaped cuts in them?

<comment><USER16> That's probably from the washing and root removal.[1] Those machines have drums, rollers, or vibrating screens which remove unwanted bits of root.

Potato harvesters are simple. They drive a horizontal blade through the ground at root level, and bring up everything above the blade onto a conveyor with slots. The dirt falls through the slots back onto the ground, and the potatoes are carried upward. Here's an operation that's digging 450 acres a day. Look how fast the trucks fill up with potatoes. No amount of hand labor could compete with that.[2]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gydrEpzAs) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KL7OrHkDaY)

<comment><USER16> This is probably where the cuts come from.[1] That's a machine that separates potatoes from rocks and dirt clods by dry mechanical means. Notice the toothed wheels over which the potatoes pass. There are other machines which do the same job more gently by floating the potatoes in water, while the rocks sink, but this one doesn't need so much water.

If most of your product is headed for the peeler and french fry cutter, there's no advantage to keeping the potato skin intact.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo3rpXoAH7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo3rpXoAH7w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well then obviously wages haven't risen enough.

For an extreme example, pay me 200$ an hour and I'll quit my web dev job and do it myself.

<comment><USER19> Although it's obviously not going to happen, even if it did you couldn't afford buying that same product as a direct result of the increase in cost.

<comment><USER20> Is that really relevant, though? If the cost of having cheap food is that we create an underclass that are willing to put up with low wages out of economic desperation, is that really an acceptable moral compromise?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you raised wages and nobody wants the job, you haven't raised wages enough.

<comment><USER22> Or the economy is overheating and you're just causing inflation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The staggering low wages on Californian farms is preventing proper incentivisation to automate these processes. It reminds me of how slaves in the antibellum south prevented the area from becoming industrialized.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Kind of half-right, half-wrong, on both counts. The cotton gin, for example, was a product of industry that expanded production in the slaveholding South.

The problem with your analogy is that cash crops tend to command higher margins than foodstuffs like those grown in California. Margins are very low in agriculture, and it's a lot of hard, backbreaking, thankless work. That's before factoring in losses from climate conditions, insects, malformed food that nobody will buy and has to be thrown away...

So it's no surprise that wages are pitiful and labor supply remains low or relegated to immigrants who find toiling in the California sunshine preferable to the dangers and destitution found south of the border.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of > men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless > encampment.

Has he tried Craigslist? Or has his entire hiring strategy involved approaching random people on the street?

<comment><USER25> I would expect his target audience doesn't spend much time on the internet.

<comment><USER24> And what target audience is that? The one he's used to that the past few administrations are trying to eliminate?

The impression I get from the article is that he's willing to pay more, but not willing to change how he approaches hiring. Assuming that is the case, it's hard to fault anyone but him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So if you raise wages there isn't instantly a group of people available who will do the work at those wages? So it takes time for things to adjust because that's how humans and cultures react to incentives? That's an excellent argument for never changing much of anything if you don;t feel like it.

When I was a kid the democrats were on the side of labor, like American citizens who work with their hands. It's a shame that now the leaders of both parties agree that cheap manual labor is a right that rich people and corporations have

</comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 There is always a desperation factor: how badly the worker needs the income from a particular job's wages to get by, or in come cases, support their entire family.

Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away.

One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue- collar work.

In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non- immigrant legal US residents.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Trump's border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California > farmers, it's creating a desperate shortage of help.

I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?

Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.

<comment><USER15> > What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at > all right now?

The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.

<comment><USER27> Immigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.

<comment><USER15> > Immigration raids?

Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect.

> Deportation is not new under Trump.

No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump.

> He's barely been in office 50 days.

He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity and hostile intent toward Mexicans specifically since literally the speech in which he announced he was seeking the Republican nomination.

Voting isn't the only way people react to signals like that.

<comment><USER27> The article itself, despite its headline, seems to acknowledge that blaming everything on Trump is not quite correct:

> Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as > security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the > same time, Mexico's own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for > people who stayed behind.

Many of the specific anecdotes occur before Trump even ran. For instance:

> Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina > peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job > openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than > the state's minimum wage at the time.

> He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he > needed; 109 didn't show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, "the > vast majority in the first two days," Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the > entire peach season.

Another one:

> In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted > more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state's job agency. Even > when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers > lost interest, fast.

Five year period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yeah no shit no one wants the job. The industry needs to adapt. You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway.

Ultimately the jobs need to be replaced by machines or the cost of labor needs to get passed on to the consumer. It might be the end of two buck chuck.

<comment><USER29> "You can't keep paying people more to solve the problem, it doesn't work. No one aspires to earn 30k a year anyway"

No!

The _average income_ for the USA in 2008 was $28K!

That's the _average_ \- meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.

90% of people don't work as an 'aspiration'. The don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs'. And 90% of jobs in this world are not very exciting. Stocking shelves, pushing paper etc..

It's crazy to suggest that 'almost all of our jobs are crap and boring and nobody wants to do them but desperate illegal migrants who'll work for crap pay'.

If you pay reasonable wages, people will do regular jobs - that's how almost the entire world works.

If there as no negative social stigma doing things like 'stocking shelves' \- and BTW it's a very new phenom - then things would work just fine.

<comment><USER30> > The _average income_ for the USA in 2008 was $28K!

> That's the _average_ \- meaning that for every person earning $75K (not that > much) there are a dozen people earning $20K.

For all your emphasis, this is a pretty dramatic misunderstanding of how averages work. You'd need a histogram to make the claim you're making.

The population earning $75K can equal the population earning $20K, or have basically any other relation to it, without affecting the average income.

<comment><USER31> That's why they use _Median Income_ When talking about average income in the US [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER30> The claim I objected to is much more nonsensical based off of a median figure than it is when based off of a mean. You use median income if you want a sense of how much money a "typical person" earns as opposed to how much the entire population earns collectively. But neither median nor mean will tell you anything at all about the shape of the distribution.

And yes, as dragonwriter points out, _your own link_ clearly shows that the mean US income for 2008 was just over $28K. (It also shows that the mean US income for 2008 was just under $27K; within-article consistency is not a big priority on Wikipedia...)

<comment><USER31> You're probably right that Ed was referring to the mean. However, Real Median Income was only $29k in 2008 [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N)

While Real Mean Income was $42k [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA672N)

<comment><USER30> Do you happen to know why, according to that wikipedia page, "According to the U.S Census Bureau 'The per capita income for the overall population in 2008 was $26,964'", whereas according to the source of your charts (which suggest that citations should credit the Census Bureau!), it was $38,376? ( [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N) ). One of those is being seriously adjusted. I tend to suspect it's the Fed chart, which notes that its population base is those aged 15 years and over.

I'm still struggling to understand why you responded to my original comment in the first place. What point are you trying to make? The median income value tells you _absolutely nothing_ about the relative numbers of people making incomes other than the median value.

<comment><USER31> Can't speak for wikipedia or those who make the edits, frankly the only reason I responded to you is I know you're confused and so is dragonwriter.

Feel free to take a gander at the Census Bureaus reporting of Personal Income. Table 1 Page 7. [https://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf)

Do they use Median or Mean? $27,834

Edit Dragonwriter, You don't understand the difference between Mean and Median Income, hint its not what you think it is

<comment><USER15> The first part of Table 1, on page six, reports medians. The per capita section, which is at the top of page 7, reports means (though it retains the median heading, which is admittedly poor data presentation.)

You have to read the footnotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _For California farmers, it's creating a desperate shortage of help._

I am now offering $15k for a new BMW, up from $10k, but there are still no takers. Clearly, there is a "desperate shortage" of BMWs...

Does the LA Times seriously expect us to believe that immigrant labor is immune to the Law of Supply and Demand--that no wage or no combination of wage and benefits is enticing enough to persuade American citizens to work in agriculture, or that if the price is so high as to be unsustainable for most farms, that automation wouldn't come to be viewed as an increasingly viable, cost-effective alternative if cheap, illegal labor were denied to them?

The LA Times should be ashamed of itself for publishing this propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER33> Farming is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. There are reasons aside from money that people choose to pursue other careers.

<comment><USER34> I would think it being seasonal would put a big damper on people wanting to do it: if you can only work 6-8 months a year, what are you going to do the rest of the time?

<comment><USER15> If you're paid enough in that 6-8 months, whatever you want. Plenty of dangerous, limited season jobs exist—but to attract workers they have to pay _really_ well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This argument is a bit double-edged. Okay, so it's implicitly immoral to keep immigrants out. But it's moral to hire them for jobs that Americans won't do because they're so unpleasant?

<comment><USER29> There is absolutely nothing unpleasant about working in food services.

What makes it 'unpleasant' is the destruction of the social contract that valued 'regular work', and the fulfillment of specific jobs by illegal migrants which creates a negative 'social class signalling' dynamic to the work.

It's socially destructive, and irreversible - and I believe it adds considerably to inequality.

<comment><USER35> However you construe the problem (unpleasant, low social capital, etc.) I've gotta believe that in a functional labor economy, illegal immigration would not be incentivized to this degree.

And yeah, some of the jobs are very unpleasant (I've worked a few of them). The article's sly portrayal of toothless guys and drug addicts refusing cushy gigs picking grapes at vineyards is meant to give an impression without coming out and saying something that probably cannot be supported by the data: the jobs are good and the citizens are lazy.

Every argument that "we simply can't get American citizens to do it" seems to be an appeal to a broken system staying broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The story is not too different for dairy (and other) farms in Upstate New York.

Most agricultural jobs pay a few more dollars an hour than the minimum wage, but they are much harder jobs than minimum wage jobs. It is one thing to wake up early morning to milk the cows if you own the farm, it is another thing to do it for other people's cows.

I don't know about Alaska and Hawaii, but illegal aliens are a big part of the agricultural workforce throughout the lower 48.

<comment><USER37> Has anyone here even worked a minimum wage job??

A few dollars an hour above the baseline isn't enough to compensate for the long term health and career advancement penalties you'll be taking. These are terminal career positions; they don't get better. Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design firm.

Pay people enough to make a decent, comfortable life and you'll have workers. The CoL/wage arbitrage between foreign and american workers is what makes these jobs work.

<comment><USER38> > Hauling apples and hay isn't going to get you a spot at a tractor design > firm.

Of course not. This is a change in required qualifications and education, not just a move up the ladder.

I don't know about agriculture jobs, but in food service your career prospects were to go from flipping burgers to managing/supervising/leading others who are flipping burgers (at increasing scale - store, regional, national, etc). While it's not as nice as any kind of engineering there _is_ a way forward there. Of course moving up like this gets competitive because of the sheer volume of people "at the bottom" hoping to move up.

<comment><USER37> Sure it is. You move from the person moving the hay to the person designing the hay moving systems. This would be a perfectly cogent career story for any engineer working in agriculture, and I know plenty of people who have worked in higher-margin areas of agriculture who have made the jump. (Beekeepers learning biochemistry and getting jobs working as Honey Q/A scientists, chefs jumping into food research and development positions, farm owners pivoting to seed banking/specific organism sales, etc.)

The fact that you can't generate enough economic surplus to fund studies to acquire the additional mechanical engineering study in a manner competitive with other mechanical engineering students is why you view the path as untenable. Hence why these positions are desperation tier end-of-the-line jobs and why the CoL/Wage arbitrage is required to keep them staffed.

Similarly, people engaged in agricultural studies generally don't come out of the 'harvest labour' workforce.

Working on a farm is a transaction with a specific expected ROI. If the ROI sucks in comparison to other mutually exclusive exchanges, why would you do it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> They aren't high enough. Perhaps prices need to be raised. If they can't raise them then I have basically no problem with these farmers investing in machinery and employing fewer people than they do now but making those workers legalized americans and paying them a good wage.

I also don't have a problem with this guys vineyard failing. That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

<comment><USER40> >That's capitalism, sometimes (a lot of times) businesses fail.

Agreed, and add: it's actually the overwhelming majority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Have a friend whose family owns a tree nursery in Texas. They tried very hard to hire Americans. Most of the people they talk to just aren't up to the job. Most people they did hire quit the first day because the work was too hard.

After the fourth American cut the tip of their pinky off in the first couple of hours on the job and sued, they stopped trying.

<comment><USER42> I've long suspected that it may eventually become problematic, that an entire generation's median capability set is "able to suck slurpee through a straw".

I think I'm in the minority, though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> There has to be more to the story here because the unemployment rate in Stockton is 9.5%. So what's the disconnect between people not working, and employers who are apparently trying to pay more and aren't getting workers?

<comment> crooked-v > Or perhaps farms are just not a place where native-born Americans want to > work. The job is seasonal, so laborers have to alternate between long > stretches without any income and then months of 60-hour weeks. They work in > extreme heat and cold, and spend all day bending over to reach vegetables or > climbing up and down ladders to pluck fruit in trees.

Agricultural jobs like these are strictly seasonal, require transportation to the job site, are physically exhausting, have very long days, and have no prospects for advancement.

Now compare that to refusing the offer and instead looking for a low-ranking job in construction, which requires transportation to the job site, is physically exhausting, and has very long days, but has work available year- round and has very real prospects for on-the-job training and career advancement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This seems like a victory for labor. Improving working conditions for unskilled labor is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER45> If it weren't for the human suffering involved in all this, I'd be laughing at the farmers, who are simply getting what they asked for[1]. Well, do I still find it funny, but in a much darker way.

I still think the answer to all of this is to call the Republican bluff, and just continually push E-verify any time anti-immigration nonsense comes up. Demand universal E-verify use, hit recalcitrant employers really hard (jail time, or at least business-crippling fines), and send the ICE thugs currently tormenting immigrants who try to speak out after the employers.

If nothing else, it would be amusing to listen to Ryan explain why he's suddenly soft on "illegals"[2].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers- bac...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-backed-trump- but-now-fear-losing-field-workers.html)

[2] There is no such thing as an illegal human.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's a difficult, dangerous, unpleasant job and the wage rise they are talking about still puts it at half the average wage for workers in the state. Why would they want it?

</comment><comment><USER47> Wonder if any high schools in nearby affluent areas need a new mandatory paid 1 week internship program for their students...

</comment><comment><USER48> I see a potential solution to Los Angeles's homeless population.

<comment><USER49> If I was homeless in LA, I still wouldn't work for 16 bucks an hour in the hot sun around dangerous chemicals with no benefits in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER29> " I still wouldn't work for 16 bucks an hour in the hot sun around dangerous chemicals with no benefits in the middle of nowhere."

You wouldn't work for what is about 20% above the national wage, to feed yourself, put a roof over your head?

If most people share your sentiment - then America is finished. You're done. It's over. I hope that's not the case.

<comment><USER49> America is already finished.

In my country, you can work in a warehouse. You get job security, full health coverage, and 18 per hour. There are worker safety regulations that actually get followed, regular breaks, shade, and ppe provided if you're working with dangerous chemicals. You're not out in the sun all day. The US agricultural industry can't provide any of this. Why would anyone work for them if they weren't a poor immigrant planning to take their wages back to Mexico, where 16 is at least a living wage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Don't want the job? Or too obese to do the job? It's funny how can't do can be spun as don't want.

</comment><comment><USER51> Good!

How does that saying go? "If you can't pay your employees a living wage, your business shouldn't exist"?

And maybe it's about time consumers learned the true cost of the goods they buy, without the artificial price suppression of abundant, cheap labor.

</comment><comment><USER52> Immigration laws seem likely to be enforced, illegal alien labor scabs self- deport in advance, and wages rise. Not hard to understand.

<comment><USER53> > illegal alien labor scabs self-deport in advance, and wages rise

You know when there was a bug in the codebase so hard to fix and for so many years that developers started building on top of that and considered the bug to be 'not really a bug' but more of a design decision.

And then some new hire comes along and fixes it without a deep understanding of the dependencies and breaks existing functionality. And then the dev budget for 'fixing' everything goes sky high?

Guess what will happen to the price of produce?

<comment><USER15> > Guess what will happen to the price of produce?

Very little, because it's a highly competitive global market and much of what is in supermarkets is already imported. There's a few crops where CA is dominant and where prices would be affected significantly, but the main question would be "what happens to the jobs, and the companies, when labor costs make it impossible to sell their product at a profit".

Jobs aren't a fixed quantity for which wages will rise without limit given a labor supply constraint.

<comment><USER54> If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water woes will be diminished? But on the other hand, that just leads to the growing economic collapse of the Central Valley.

Maybe some tech startups should start looking to relocate to Stockton and Sac, cheaper rents and CoL, and within drivable distance to the Palo Alto VC firms...

<comment><USER15> > If this leads to the decline of agriculture in CA, does that mean the water > woes will be diminished?

Depends which crops are most affected and what the land use shifts to (could be rising ag labor prices favor crops where the work is more automated, which may be a decline in total profits but not in land or water use.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don't want the job

No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.

<comment><USER15> > No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA

Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them.

> I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole > world outside of Sillycon Valley.

Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.

<comment><USER56> What's the equivalent of a $16 Napa salary in Nebraska? I really don't think it's worth moving for.

<comment><USER57> $16 in Napa is probably $2 in Nebraska. The cost of living there is so much lower than California you can barely compare the two. Homes are 1/10th the price or less.

You can find a nice house in Omaha for $175k that would cost about $2.5 million in Palo Alto for example.

When (if?) Bay Area workers ever figure this out they should telecommute from the midwest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google FlatBuffers - <AUTHOR> http://google.github.io/flatbuffers/

<comment><USER2> They've explained why you'd choose this over ProtoBuf, but why not its successor Cap'n Proto?</comment>


Apple Lost its Focus on Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_lost_its_focus_on_science/ <comment><USER2> Excellent perspective on Apple's move out of the science world.</comment>


Weev appeal succeeds: Court document - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/document/appellate-court-opinion

<comment><AUTHOR> In short, the appeal was granted on the narrow issue of improper venue.</comment>


Ask YC: now my site is done, what next? - <AUTHOR>

I have pretty much completed development/testing and launch my site. What is next? Should I submit a press release, how to get everyone on it? The target audience of my site isn't anyone around me. My site isn't doing strange new things (or around facebook) that could possibly get coverage on web 2.0 blogs like techcrunch. What other options do I have? <comment><USER2> Yes, a Press Release would be a good place to start.

Also look for any news/media outlets that might be related to whatever industry or vertical this mysterious site falls under and submit either a PR or "introduction" email to those places.

Comment (intelligently!) on blogs related to users that have an interest in whatever it is your site is offering. Provide a link back to your site (obviously).

DON'T try "link exchange" or "link farm" type sites as a mechanism for promoting your site. These have very little positive impact and a huge potential negative impact in terms of SEO.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could start by giving us the link.

<comment><USER4> Yes, please. Far too many people on news.yc are too self-conscious about self- promotion. If we aren't interested in the link we won't follow it. Just post it already.

At the very least, put it in your profile.

<comment><USER5> I agree... plus if you dont tell us more than your target market isn't anywhere near you, we dont even know where you are??? How can we help you? TC may not even be able to help you if they do not reach your target market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmmm... you need a plan, man... Before you pen that press release, step back a nd put a plan together. Without knowing what your site is/does, we cannot even begin to suggest anything. Not that you would/should take marketing advice from us.

Don't shoot from the hip on this. Put a business plan that makes business sense. I stress "business" because it sounds like you are a techie. It's not so much "build it and they will come." It always pays for it to have a strategy in place.

Anyway, you don't even state that your site is intended to be a business, so yeah, maybe sitting down and writing a press release is the best thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER7> "completed development"??

How did you decide it was 'complete'?

<comment><USER8> I think he means "made something usable."

<comment><USER7> Sure, but then you release, show users, and they have a completely different definition of 'usable' than you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the following talk from Startup School '08 interesting since I'm in the very same position.

"Mike Arrington speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get, and how to respond to press for your startup."

<http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/mike-arrington>

</comment><comment><USER10> press release, target your niche and advertise to it. find blogs and get them to review the service. basically, get the word of mouth out there as best as you can. SEO SEO SEO.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be interested in this too, I'll have to face this stage soon and would like to start reading up on it.</comment>


Happy New Year - <AUTHOR> Let's make 2018 better than 2017 and worse than 2019 ;-) <comment><USER2> HNY HN! Wishing all a prosperous and productive 2018. I get a lot from this community. And hope to give as much as I receive.

As far as new year's resolutions. Mine never changes: I vow to spend even more time out of doors this year ;)</comment>


Saturday Afternoon Serials - <AUTHOR> http://economychapter.wordpress.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a bit of a weird submission, so I thought I should explain it.

I was looking for images for a presentation I'm giving next week and happened across this blog.

As some of you may or may not know, there used to be movie serials -- episodic adventures they added to the regular movie. So before you watched the main movie, you'd see something like episode 8 of Brain Snatchers From Another World (Although I think they were mostly westerns?)

Here are some pictures and notes from them. If I remember correctly, George Lucas had these in mind when he first created Star Wars.

All of this is before my time, but it looks like great fun -- really campy scripts, cheap sets, and lots of improv.</comment>


Memcpy (and friends) with NULL pointers - <AUTHOR> https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/06/26/nonnull.html <comment><USER2> Here's another example of this fine feature:

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <string.h>
      #include <stdlib.h>
      #define LENGTH 128

      int main(int argc, char **argv) {
          char *string = NULL;
          int length = 0;
          if (argc > 1) {
              string = argv[1];
              length = strlen(string);
              if (length >= LENGTH) exit(1);
          }

          char buffer[LENGTH];
          memcpy(buffer, string, length);
          buffer[length] = 0;

          if (string == NULL) {
              printf("String is null, so cancel the launch.\n");
          } else {
              printf("String is not null, so launch the missiles!\n");
          }

          printf("string: %s\n", string);  // undefined for null but works in practice

          #if SEGFAULT_ON_NULL
          printf("%s\n", string);          // segfaults on null when bare "%s\n"
          #endif

          return 0;
      }

      nate@skylake:~/src$ clang-3.8 -Wall -O3 null_check.c -o null_check
      nate@skylake:~/src$ null_check
      String is null, so cancel the launch.
      string: (null)

      nate@skylake:~/src$ icc-17 -Wall -O3 null_check.c -o null_check
      nate@skylake:~/src$ null_check
      String is null, so cancel the launch.
      string: (null)

      nate@skylake:~/src$ gcc-5 -Wall -O3 null_check.c -o null_check
      nate@skylake:~/src$ null_check
      String is not null, so launch the missiles!
      string: (null)

It appear that Intel's ICC and Clang still haven't caught up with GCC's optimizations. Ouch if you were depending on that optimization to get the performance you need!

But before picking on GCC too much, consider that all three of those compilers segfault on _printf( "string: "); printf("%s\n", string)_ when string is NULL, despite having no problem with _printf( "string: %s\n", string)_ as a single statement. Can you see why using two separate statements would cause a segfault? If not, see here for a hint: [https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25609](https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25609)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. In the same vein, I once stumbled upon the following optimizer behaviour: ''' int array[8];

// later array[i]

''' The optimizer deduces from the access "array[i]" that "i >= 0 && i < 8". (leading it to optimizing away conditions like "i > 10").

Of course, if optimization leads to semantic differences, this means the program being compiled was wrong/ambiguous in the first place. However, now, to debug your programs, you must know how optimizers work.

<comment><USER4> A couple of years back, I worked at a company where I helped maintaining a Win32 application written in C, using (Open)Watcom as the compiler.

A few years before I started working there, the other programmers had been bitten by a bug in Watcom's optimizer that _sometimes_ would wrongly optimize away comparisons involving floating point numbers.

Consequently, all code was compiled with optimizations disabled completely. (I tried to debate, but then I compiled the project with most optimizations enabled and did a benchmark - the difference in performance was minimal, so I stopped bothering).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't the compiler warn about this?

<comment><USER2> It's usually argued that it would be too hard for the compiler to avoid false positives from templates and macro expansion. I don't like this argument, since distinguishing between "generated" code and "explicit" code isn't that hard. Also, the warning mechanism doesn't need to be perfect to be beneficial: it's generally better to catch some of the security flaws than to catch none. The one tool I've found that does catch many of these errors is "stack": [https://github.com/xiw/stack](https://github.com/xiw/stack)

It operates by identifying "unstable" code. Essentially, it uses Clang to optimize the code twice, once with optimizations on and once with optimizations off. Then it checks to see if any "basic blocks" have been removed. Its main problem is that it's difficult to set up. You have to locally compile a specific older version of LLVM with a particular set of compile flags.

But once you have it up, it catches a lot of non-obvious errors and doesn't have many false positives. Unfortunately, in the sample code I gave above, "stack" doesn't detect any errors, because Clang doesn't doesn't optimize out the "if (string)" statement like GCC does. And it doesn't catch the switch from printf() to puts() because it's a change of which function is called rather than a change in control flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the compiler is optimising code away, it's optimising away its _copy_ of code that the diligent programmer has already written. ie. the implied assertion that the check is not performed at all is not true. The check is not performed _twice_.

Of course programmers are not always diligent but perhaps in that case a language which unconditionally demands diligence is not the right choice.

> It also adds a very subtle, exceptional case to several very common > functions, burdening programmers.

Dealing with the burden of subtle and/or exceptional cases is the price of using a low-level language. If the price is unacceptable, don't buy the product.</comment>


Ruby 2.0: What We Want to Accomplish in the Near Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9LMOydfc4k

<comment><USER2> Highlights:

* Focus on YARV (Yet Another Ruby VM)

* Improved character encoding support

* Adding parameter distinguishers a la Objective-C/SmallTalk.

        e.g. def step(by: step, to: limit) vs def step(step, limit)

* Adding scope encapsulation to monkey patching to avoid conflicting changes throughout projects

* Adding conflict resolution to Mix-ins by allowing method renaming for conflicting methods

* Add method combinations similar to what exists in Common Lisp

* New implementation of Ruby interpreter for embedded systems (RITE)

       Hoping to dethrone LUA for game programming

       Want to enter appliances and distributed computing

<comment><USER3> > Adding parameter distinguishers a la Objective-C/SmallTalk.

Smalltalk or Python? Would `step(by:to:)` and `step(to:by:)` call the same method or different methods?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, but this talk was uploaded to youtube 8 months ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> Matz starts talking about 2.0 at about 14m30

</comment><comment><USER6> RITE is exactly what I want to need.

The problem is that distributed systems (like message queues or notification services) are required to be fast/scalable but very hard to program/debug/test. One solution is embedding plugin mechanism in a carefully programmed framework. There are examples such as Tokyo Tyrant's Lua plugin or Apache Solr's plugin mechanism. But rather than Lua or Java, I want to use Ruby because it's syntax and semantics are very suitable to write plugins.

RITE will make it possible. Ruby may be new standard of embedded languages.

<comment><USER7> Section of Matz's RubyConf X presentation that covers RITE:

[http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/rubyconf-2010-keynot...](http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/rubyconf-2010-keynote- by-matz/64)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No idea if this is kept up to date but <http://redmine.ruby- lang.org/projects/ruby-19/versions/5>

</comment><comment><USER9> The keyword arguments look a lot like the ones used in MacRuby.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting. I'll be curious to see how Ruby comes to be used in the near future and how it develops as a language.</comment>


German zoo draws up coronavirus slaughter list - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/german-zoo-draws-up-coronavirus-slaughter-list/a-53135354 <comment><AUTHOR> > The animals on the list would be fed to the zoo's lynx, eagles and > "Germany's biggest polar bear" Vitus, who is 3.6 meters (over 11 ft) tall.</comment>


Digital books: Free is a very good price | Technology | Los Angeles Times - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/07/digital-books-free-is-a-very-good-price.html <comment><USER2> Scribd link give me " Sorry, this content is geographically restricted

Due to our agreements with our publishing partners, the document you requested is only available to users located in the United States.". I'm in Japan. So yeah - real free. On scribd for 1 month only, only in the US and no download. Yawn. People like Lessig and Doctorow have done this better - and I suspect Lessig's Free Culture is more insightful than this paen to segmented pricing models.

Note - I'm not advocating free downloads so I can freeload - I'm a prolific buyer of both paper and ebooks (not kindle - since it also is US only - sigh )</comment>


Experiments and leaking company secrets through your testing infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/experiments-and-growth-hacking?ref=hackernews <comment><USER3> Since these comments imply that research firms already mine this, I think there's a hilarious opportunity for rank-and-file engineers at these tech companies to vend fake features/experiments (in which nobody receives the treatment), and watch hedge funds overstep then get the rug pulled out on them. At the least, the practice would cheapen the practice of data mining of the experiment names without having to implement any substantial fix.

Starting points could be, DRIVERLESS_DRONE_KILL_BOTS, or IR_CALL_DISPLAY_BANNER_RECORD_40_PCT_PROFIT_MARGIN.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool! I find it fascinating to see what experiments other companies run, and especially what the winners were.

I've had a similar idea on my mind for a while now: Find sites using optimizely (eg with nerdydata), automatically screenshot the variations, and revisit to see what the chosen winner was.

</comment><comment><USER5> These kinds of side channels often contain alternative data which is of very high interest to the financial industry. I don't think most companies leaking this information are aware of it, but it's very actively mined.

<comment><USER6> who mines it?

<comment><USER7> Private equity firms, hedge funds, any firm that does investment at a large scale will use every kind of advantage they can to understand if a company or competitor is testing new things

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> JFYI: iOS does not use openssl (however an app might choose to use it). I believe it uses a FIPS compliant custom TLS implementation in Security.framework. I believe ssl pinning is circumvented on iOS by leveraging the objective-c runtime to hook the callbacks that an app would use to inspect the remote peer certificate. More info: [https://www.guardsquare.com/en/blog/iOS-SSL-certificate- pinn...](https://www.guardsquare.com/en/blog/iOS-SSL-certificate-pinning- bypassing)

<comment><AUTHOR> My memory must have failed me, you're correct. I used to use [iOS kill switch]([https://github.com/iSECPartners/ios-ssl-kill- switch](https://github.com/iSECPartners/ios-ssl-kill-switch)), and for some reason assumed it overrode openssl! Thanks, I'll correct the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Discord keeps it on the down low:

[https://discordapp.com/api/experiments](https://discordapp.com/api/experiments) produces

        {"assignments": [[1927765909, 0, 0], [2969373038, 0, 1], [518926094, 1, 1], [3089664276, 0, 1], [3747495958, 1, 1], [600804427, 2, 1], [2078807847, 2, 1], [372914062, 0, 0], [4002407165, 0, 1], [2827351180, 2, 1], [183948708, 2, 1]], "fingerprint": "..."}

If you prettify their main JS bundle, you can figure out what these map to.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great!

Part 2 is going to be more analysis focused, checking the delta in how many experiments these companies are running, and how quickly they are moving.

I'll also mention how to properly disguise it - I'll use Discord as an example. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> You should make another post which explores private APIs and (undisplayed) data sent to mobile clients. For example, many (perhaps most?) delivery apps have an API endpoint which will send information about every single restaurant location within a bounding box to the client. You can often make the bounding box arbitrarily large to pull down a JSON list of every location and its metadata (like store hours, age, number of orders per day, menu, unique promotions, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a pretty common thread with a lot of my blog posts - with the rise of SPA's and the ubiquity of REST APIs, all the difficulties of "scraping" are gone - these services will often open up a route that lets you pull everything in an easy to digest JSON format.

[https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ryan-air](https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/ryan-air) and [https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/uber-stats](https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/uber- stats) are two blog posts of mine that follow a very similar path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always like these things. People have realized that absolute secrecy is very expensive, but doesn't buy you much. So they give up and just let the information out.

</comment><comment><USER11> There was once a bookmarklet to explore and preview Optimizely experiments: [https://growthhackers.com/questions/show-gh-spy-on- optimizel...](https://growthhackers.com/questions/show-gh-spy-on-optimizely- customers-experiments)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious if this violates any laws. Perhaps the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

<comment><AUTHOR> The real life equivalent would be if a company wrote their secrets on the back of a letter they sent you in the mail, and just relied on you not looking at the back.

There's no security breach, or even unauthorized network request - <USER2> service is requesting this data to your machine, from within their client. I think they just aren't thinking about potential repercussions in their testing names.

<comment><USER13> Aaron Swartz didn't breach JSTOR's security or make any (technically) unauthorized network requests, either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz)</comment></comment></comment>