Fred Wilson: Some Thoughts On The Louis CK "Experiment" - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/12/some-thoughts-on-the-louis-ck-experiment.html

<comment><USER2> Either everything I've ever learned about business is wrong or he is misusing the term business model.

I was always taught a business model is essentially a corporate version of a scientific hypothesis. Meaning it has to be defined and tested in a way that can be repeated by others

(successful business models can fail if the people using them don't execute them properly but that's the equivalent of a scientist not reproducing the environment of an experiment properly)

In the case of Louis C.K. his celebrity filled a very important aspect of the business model which is "the method by which customers are enticed to pay for the goods being delivered". Mr. Wilson tries to gloss over that by saying...

"over time, if their work is good, their audience will grow and the investments they can make and the profits they can make will increase."

But that's not proven by what Louis C.K. did and in fact there's tons of proof on the internet that shows it isn't the case (it isn't hard to find undiscovered talent on the internet). Moreover the situation will only get worse over time. As more people try what Louis C.K. did it will add more noise to the already noisy internet making the true talent that much harder to find.

Companies like record labels originally existed because society needed middle men. People who would pay A&R reps to go to clubs every night and find talent. Then the label would deliver that talent to the masses. If you really want to make the Louis C.K. model into a business model everyone can use the question that needs to be answered is....

"how do you use technology to find the talent and then connect it to people who want to consume it?"

And Louis C.K.'s experiment does nothing to answer that.

<comment><USER3> One step at a time. If we can all agree on the apparently controversial/notable fact that _selling your content to fans for money_ is a viable business _for a famous person_ , we are finally making steps towards a better world for artists and consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the fact that Louis CK disintermediated like a star.

However, there is a reason it worked: The Hollywood/NYC advertising machine spent a lot of dollars to cause his name recognition. (Most likely, they profited handsomely too.) But now he has taken that name recognition and cut them out of the deal.

So it is very predictable what happens next: Future studio contracts will return to the days where the studios own all of your output for a period of time in return for promoting you.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't make sense unless all the top talent rolls over like they did 70 years ago because they didn't know any better. Why do you think studios stopped owning talent decades ago? Because talent wised up. The studios can't be the studios with second-rate talent, but that's what they'll get if they don't negotiate fairly. In short, they don't have the leverage.

<comment><USER4> > _The studios can't be the studios with second-rate talent_

Combine:

1\. There is always a pipeline of new talent,

2\. Businesses do not invest without a return.

So either the studios are going to lock in a return, or the studios are going to go away and the entertainment industry is going to fragment into a million pieces.

As much as I'd like to see the second case, my guess is that there are enough starving actors that they will sign up for long-term owned-output contracts.

<comment><USER5> And they got their return. Are you trying to say they spent more than they made off Louis CK? This is a weak argument for how they're going to turn back the clock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this business model is similar to that of the self-publishing model.

The two main parties in any published work are 1) the author and 2) the reader. The publisher, agent, distributor (book store) etc. are all intermediaries that have increased the cost of books for the reader AND decreased the money earned for the author (therefore restricting many authors' artistic contributions). With websites like creativespace.com authors can now publish self-publish with many fewer middle-men - therefore making the price lower and the net gain to the author higher.

The same applies for Louis CK's experiment. I assume his industry is pirated more than the print publications so that is the real trick. Either way, great experiment.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the most interesting part of the post was in the comments when Fred highlighted an up and coming star using the web for distribution.

Freddie Wong is starting an episodic series. He raised the production money on KickStarter:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/video-game- high...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freddiew/video-game-high-school)

Can you imagine how more interesting the web will get when the next Lucille Ball can go direct to the fans? All that is needed is a way to easily consume media from the web on the big screen.

Forget 500 channels, how about 5 billion channels!

<comment><USER8> > an you imagine how more interesting the web will get when the next Lucille > Ball can go direct to the fans?

agreed. and already happening. I've discovered several hilarious talented women on YouTube, total amateurs, yet more entertaining than most generic Hollywood mass produced actresses. And these women can all now control their message and work and charge fans directly for premium content, get advertising revenue, etc. The next Lucy's and Oprah's may already exist now and they've started their little empires on YouTube.

<comment><USER9> >The next Lucy's and Oprah's may already exist now and they've started their little empires on YouTube.

Just imagine all of the talent that (prior to the web,youtube blogs, _fill in the blank web based distribution model of your choice here_ ) gave up because someone in media never thought they would "sell".

Truly is a great time to be alive, both for the artist and the folks that love good content.

Viva Le Web!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I demand that the existing media conglomerate distribution model be left in place so that I may be told what is worth "consuming" and who I should look up to as a star.</comment>


Trying Rails and Mac. Confessions of a .NET Developer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/11/trying-rails-mac-confessions-of-net.html

<comment><USER2> I think the lesson learned is that switching to a new development platform on a completely different OS then with which you're familiar is not something to be undertaken trivially.

I say this having gone through all his pain when I switched to a Mac but now I'd never go back to Windows by choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> While this doesn't help him get his time back, next time I'd encourage him to use rvm as the other posters have previously indicated — but instead of actually installing the massive XCode bundle (4GBs is a lot if you're using an SSD) I recommend he check out this 300MB bundle you can install which is just gcc and the other bare minimum tools you'd need to get ruby and the various gems working:

<https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer>

Also, one small gripe is that it sounds like the majority of his complaints were actually trying to get Python and Mercurial working. This isn't really the fault of OS X nor does it bog down most Rails devs working on OS X. Just some perspective!

</comment><comment><USER4> His frustrations with getting the correct version of Python and Ruby packages is completely correct. I don't understand why OSX and Ubuntu still bundle a specific (usually old) version of languages to their operating system, and then we (as developers) need to wait until a new package is available for our operating system.

Is there any other good way to decouple the package management of languages (Python, Ruby, Java, what have you) from the operating system? I've used homebrew (edit: and rvm/rbenv) and like it, but it's not an official product from Apple.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've done something similar and flip-flopped back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows. Other than the initial pain of installing Ubuntu and getting everything working just right (which actually wasn't any worse than Windows) I never had any trouble getting things to work beyond finding out what the right tool was. Gotta love apt-get.

</comment><comment><USER5> windows is definitely easier for newbie developers, but once you start to want more tools, the unix env is still the best place to be. It's like trying to use vim when you've eclipse all your life. Vim plugins have all these "requirements" that make it look painful in comparison to eclipse addons.

<comment><USER6> I'm entirely a Linux person and would never want to use anything else. However, I think Windows really isn't that bad as a development platform-- probably not the most fashionable idea in the HN crowd. I know developers-- experienced ones, at that--who are very efficient on Windows. There are now tools like Powershell that give Windows the functionality you'd need.

While Windows is still proprietary and annoying, I don't think that just having a unix env is enough to be so much better than Windows. Of course, Linux is the best option for _me_ because I'm used to it and can leverage it completely--and I'm sure it's the case for you too--but I've seen too many people efficiently using Windows to just ignore it out of hand. (Well, I can safely ignore it because it's proprietary, but that's completely unrelated to the topic at hand.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What? Just use whatever you're comfortable with. All the OS dogma is BS.</comment>


VaderSharp – Sentiment analysis using Vader with C# - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/codingupastorm/vadersharp <comment><USER2> Curated list of other solutions (not limited to C#) [https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment- analysis](https://github.com/xiamx/awesome-sentiment-analysis)

</comment><comment><USER3> Paper at [http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm14.vader.hutto.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm14.vader.hutto.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Any benchmarks ?

<comment><USER5> This is crucial. There are a LOT of companies selling social media sentiment analysis tooling, mostly wrapped up in web apps and large monthly subscription fees.

When I've seen teams do manual classification to test out the accuracy of their tools, it has turned out that the accuracy is generally all around horrible, most tools heavily bias towards "neutral" which really means "not sure". Not too surprising, tweets doesn't provide much context.

<comment><USER6> From the python, looks like it uses a series of local text file [https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment](https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any resources to get Vader running with German lexica?

<comment><USER8> I seems it cannot support other languages out of the box as some language depend stuff are hardcoded : [https://github.com/codingupastorm/vadersharp/blob/master/Vad...](https://github.com/codingupastorm/vadersharp/blob/master/VaderSharp/VaderSharp/SentimentIntensityAnalyzer.cs#L114-L117)

Also all the capitalization logic has meaning only in languages that use a bicameral script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sad day.

<comment><USER10> Why? Out of curiosity.

<comment><USER9> The title seems to have changed from something like "now it is rewritten from Python to C#". I now suppose all the downvotes of my comment happened after the retitling.

<comment><USER11> Why is it a "sad day" exactly?

<comment><USER9> It's like investing energy to switch from "My app runs on Kubernetes" to "My app runs on Windows XP" and being proud about it for unexplainable reasons.

<comment><USER11> It's actually not like that at all since C# is a lively, rapidly evolving platform and also probably friendlier to a large codebase than Python (and almost certainly more performant).

<comment><USER9> And how good is it at _avoiding_ a large code base?

<comment><USER11> I don't think good C# code is actually much more verbose than Python unless you're stuck on a very old version.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google shutters Bulletin, its hyperlocal news experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/26/google-bulletin-shuts-down-news-app/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty interesting that I haven't seen aot of people talking about it.

<comment><USER3> I never even heard of it before now.</comment></comment>


DraftKings and FanDuel to Merge - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/draftkings-fanduel-merge-dan-primack?published=t <comment><USER2> To make one giant shitty company!!!

<comment><USER3> This is a useless comment unless you tell us what you don't like about them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Track social sharing and community sentiment on HN and reddit - <AUTHOR> http://stats.timgallant.us/

<comment><USER2> Nice implementation, simple and helpful UI (specially "Need help? try these links.")!

A glitch: I entered [http://www.megacz.com/berkeley/coq-in- ghc/](http://www.megacz.com/berkeley/coq-in-ghc/) and it says 'This link has not been posted to reddit.'

A suggestion: Can you add a URL route to automatically initialize the lookup. Eg. /?url={url} or #{url}. Its handy for sharing.

A question: Which sentiment analysis library are you using. It seems to be classifying the comments on the mentioned link as negative.

Edit: Alright, looks like [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tgallant/blog- checker/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tgallant/blog- checker/master/inputs/scores.txt) is being used to calculate the score.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll look into setting up a URL route for easier sharing. Also, here is the code that handles the sentiment analysis [https://github.com/tgallant/blog- checker/blob/master/src/blo...](https://github.com/tgallant/blog- checker/blob/master/src/blog_checker/sentiment.clj)

<comment><USER2> It looks like you are tokenizing scores file too. That way the prefix information will be lost. As an example,

        admir* 3
        amaz* 3
        interest* 2

should add up positive scores to words starting with admir|amaz|interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The link bar says "Enter in you[sic]URL here"

You should have the reddit posts sort so the ones with the most upvotes sit on top rather all the way at the bottom

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome work guys!</comment>


Bands Pivot Just Like Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.imanjalali.com/bands-pivot-startups/

<comment><AUTHOR> What bands/musicians do you feel pivoted?</comment>


Oil prices: Is there an oil bubble? What will the future price of oil be? - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/the-future-of-o.html

<comment><USER2> At least this guy is willing to admit that he was wrong once before.

But I'm afraid that he's wrong once again.

New crude is still constantly being discovered it's just that it's being discovered at higher and higher break even prices.

Alberta tar sands are coming in at $15 per barrel of crude equivalent break even.

Rocky Mountain Oil Shale is now being reported by Shell to come in at $30 per barrel of crude equivalent break even.

There are still massive reserves in northern Alaska and off the pacific and atlantic coasts. China is exploring in the Sudan and that african nation is now cranking out half million barrels a day.

Oil only becomes non-renewable when all the energy companies stop exploring. That is not happening.

<comment><USER3> Price prediction is a fool's errand, if only because the ability to do it would itself affect the dynamics of the market.

That said, it's also pretty difficult to predict prices of commodities that are caught up in a bubble. How does one model irrational behavior?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> it s 200$ in next year</comment>


Rethinking office space - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html <comment><USER4> Reminds me of the following passages from Masters of Doom[1]

"When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling.

But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air- condition.

Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there's nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers' finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn't just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers' paradise and all one saw were rows of caves."

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom)

</comment><comment><USER5> I work at Google in MTV and this is very exciting to me. I think the higher- ups at this company have the vision to pull this off, I hope I stay engaged here long enough to see it.

The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.

I currently commute to MTV from SF. I have a shitty apartment, i pay 2x as much as it's worth in any other city, and I commute 1.5hrs each way on a clogged highway. I hope it's doesn't get much worse.

<comment><USER6> For what it's worth, MTV doesn't mean Mountain View to anybody who doesn't live or work in Mountain View.

To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.

<comment><USER7> For what it's worth, I live on the east coast, am not particularly keyed in to the Silicon Valley world like most HN readers, and knew (assumed) immediately that MTV = Mountain View based on the context of the article and the comment. I think it's pretty obvious given the overall context here.

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth, I live in Sunnyvale just next to Mountain View and I have never seen or heard this abbreviation used. I thought "I work at Google in MTV" described some internal Google department, and it wasn't until I saw "commute to MTV from SF" that it clicked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I should point out that this is traditionally a sign of a peak of a company, sometimes called the Edifice Complex.

<comment><USER10> This is the first time Google is developing an office complex from scratch and it's somehow "Edifice Complex"?

Mind you this is a $400 billion company.

<comment><USER11> You can object to it if you want, but it's a well known phenomena - <USER2> to build buildings is often a bad sign for the company's long-term future prospects. And since we're talking about companies peaking, the size of the company isn't particularly relevant.

It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.

<comment><USER10> > it's a well known phenomena

Do you have any data to back it up or did you just made it up?

<comment><USER11> [http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed- headquarters-200...](http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed- headquarters-2009-11)

Or from a16z:

"Pouring huge money into overly glorious new headquarters — "The Edifice Complex" — then repeating two years later. There's also a danger in signaling to employees "we've made it, we're amazing" (and while everyone hates the cramped but collaborative space when they're in it, they miss it terribly after the move)."

<comment><USER10> That's anecdote, not data. Having 10 examples doesn't validate your point.

And for the a16z stuff you quoted, the first paragraph says "10 ways to damage your fast-growing tech startup".

Thanks for classifying Google as a fast-growing tech startup, but I think the startup phase was over a long time ago.

<comment><USER11> You had asked for data that it was a well-known phenomena. A major business publication and a well-known VC firm both referring to it by name is decent data for it being well-known, and the best you're going to get without paying me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting that Google's office plan is garnering a lot of negative feedback.

When Apple announced a plan to make one giant office building to house its entire corporate workforce, the general consensus was positive. Even Cupertino's politicians praised its ambition and assumed wealth it will bring to the city. Has anyone been in Cupertino recently? It feels like almost every single office building in that city is occupied by Apple now :-|.

Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.

Google's office plan does seem a bit overly optimistic but clearly pitched in a way to win support of Mountain View. Right now I don't see anything in the blog post that speaks to engineers and managers who actually WANT to work in the buildings, so I hold judgement until they share more about that part.

<comment><USER13> I imagine that the "mothership" building could probably be re-purposed into condos without too much hassle.

<comment><USER14> Sure, or office space for a bunch of different companies. Rent it out one wedge at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm reminded of the San Francisco Federal Building. It was designed with many of the same goals to "bridge the indoors and outdoors" and do away with traditional concepts in favor of being green and environmental.

It won many design awards, but later required massive retrofits to install traditional HVAC and ultimately was a complete failure.

<comment><USER16> The render on the blog post shows huge amounts of sunlight, curved geodesic, and the indoor path curving over the 'entrance', increasing the distance for someone on the inside to get out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google currently doesn't have space. MTV offices are packed, there's little space left to seat new employees, and no parking (pretty much have to rely on valet service)

Google has only 3 options:

1\. find existing buildings nearby, but this increases sprawl even more 2\. move to another city or only open space in other cities 3\. build new buildings on land holdings you already have

#1 and #2 have the downsides of making it harder to collaborate.

It's not "Edifice Complex" if you have no choice but to build more space. And so, if you're going to build new buildings, why not get what you want to satisfy your requirements rather than a cookie cutter design?

<comment><USER18> Option 4. Remote work. That would solve for packed offices, packed parking lots, overpriced real estate, long commutes, and more.

<comment><USER19> Option 5. Screw it, we're The Google -- we are going to build our own mini- Domed Cities.

<comment><USER20> Option 6. Create software that writes itself

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> well, that's certainly some tremendous architecture. however... conspicuously missing from the office space album is pictures of actual offices. maybe i just didn't see them.

but as far as revolutionary concepts go, how about just giving your employees an office with a window and a door that shuts?

<comment><USER22> It's crazy, theres 10 minutes of inspiring (read: empty) talk and all of the renderings show completely empty buildings with just a bunch of floors that you can walk down one side and fall to your certain death.

Also, America, no wonder your commute is long, theres a 10 lane highway surrounded by a bunch of single-family homes. If you want to put more people into the same space, what you usually do is go up in height.

<comment><USER23> Mountain View (all of Silicon Valley, really) has the bad habit of approving anything that brings in new jobs while simultaneously rejected housing commensurate to the number of jobs added. Many of the residents of the valley want their cities to remain de facto suburbs (designed for cars). Throw in prop 13, a substantial number of well paid transplants, and you have a recipe for the extreme cost of living in the Bay.

<comment><USER24> Honest question, how does prop 13 increase the cost of living?

<comment><USER25> Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.

So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.

If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".

<comment><USER26> dragonwriter covered most of the details, but they key one he missed in Prop 13 is that every other homestead law I am aware of has an owner occupancy requirement that Prop 13 lacks. In Florida, which has a very generous homestead law, the ad valorem tax limits apply to the owner-occupied primary residence. You move and rent the place, your valuation spikes up to market rate. Own two houses? Pick one, because the other is getting taxed at market rate. It also does not apply to commercial property whatsoever.

Because of California's lenient qualifications, someone who bought that $30k house can move to North Carolina and collect massive rent checks without seeing their property taxes jump to reflect reality. The owners of apartment complexes have a vested interest in keeping their properties as they are, since a major renovation or addition would trigger a revaluation. Same for owners of office and retail space who aren't big enough to cut tax deals with the various levels of municipal government.

<comment><USER23> Those older than 55 can also apply their previous tax to any home they buy of equal or lesser value when they move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Facebook's new building is a big open-plan office space, with some stuff to break up the visual sight lines. Since they're currently open-plan, that probably won't affect productivity much one way or the other.

There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's depressing just to visit. I'd hate to work there.

Apple's new mothership[2] definitely indicates an edifice complex. It could work out, though. Apple is currently spread over a large number of modest buildings separated by busy roads. The mothership is a big round building with a lot of underground parking. Just getting most of their people within walking distance will be a win. Of course, that assumes Apple allows them to talk to each other.

The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.

The classic edifice in Silicon Valley is IBM Almaden Research, from the 1960s. You enter through a modest gate and drive through rolling hills for a mile, until you reach the big glass and steel complex atop the mountain. The cafeteria looks out on miles of unblemished parkland. A lot of good stuff came out of there, including three Nobel prizes. Today, it's a shadow of what it once was. Part of it is rented out.

Overdoing this sort of thing is rare in the US today. Moscow, Dubai, and Beijing, though...

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmos0GSCWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmos0GSCWE) [2] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2784069](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2784069)

<comment><USER28> _The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help._

Citation? I'm seeing conflicting reports. One article says Google wants to build them; One has a councilman suggesting it. I don't think it's required -- that would be weird.

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/google- hq/#Vd7nAQ:64H](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/google-hq/#Vd7nAQ:64H)

""It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View," the video above says. That's a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locate or build housing in line with the company's growth has put pressure on cities to the north like San Francisco."

[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/26/google-taps- heat...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/26/google-taps-heatherwick- ingels-avant-garde-european-architects-to-design-new-hq-in-mountain-view/)

Google's plan to redesign the city's North Bayshore area will bring even more workers to this suburban city. Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel said he wants to add 5,000 new housing units to the plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Neat concept, but I can't help finding it ironic that this would make an actual reality of the stereotype that Googlers and tech companies in general are living in a bubble cut off from the rest of society.

Also hopefully they won't throw stones after they move in to their glass house!

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd work in a filthy basement in the middle of Kansas for a company/project that's worth it.

<comment><USER31> I work for Google in Mountain View, and I'd prefer to work in a filthy basement in Kansas. The commute would be better, and the cost of living lower...

<comment><USER32> Move to Mountain View? For the 5 years I was at Google, I never lived more than 2 miles away, my commute was 15 minutes by bicycle, and for half that, rent was only about $1400/month (it started rising rapidly in the last few years).

But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.

<comment><USER33> >only about $1400/month

Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.

<comment><USER32> Rents for a 1BR in SF are now around $3000/month [1]. Mountain View has gone up significantly in the last few years, a sibling comment indicates it's around $2300/month, but comparatively speaking, it's still "only".

Yes, this is insane. But people can pay them. Tech company employees are indeed far above the average national income.

[1] [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/06/mapping_the_median_...](http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/06/mapping_the_median_rent_of_a_onebedroom_in_san_francisco.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The usual theory I've heard isn't so much that fancy starchitect headquarters _cause_ the companies to fail. Rather, it's more of a signaling story. To wit: new headquarters say something about the kind of company you have, and _what_ it says is usually a bad sign.

When companies are doing _really well_ the corporate offices are too busy _doing stuff_ to hire a starchitect and the company is growing too fast for it to make sense to literally _set in stone_ how it should henceforth be arranged.

You tend to build a fancy new building when the company has _stopped growing_ (so you know how big to make the building and how to lay out the various departments) and when the management staff is to some extent twiddling their thumbs looking for something useful to do rather than starting bold new projects. That sort of building signals the company is coasting rather than being dynamic. They are investing time and money and effort in a building because (unlike when they were growing) they currently can't think of anything _better_ to invest that time and money in.

However, both Apple and Google are arguably exceptions to this rule.

In Apple's case, mitigating circumstances include that they've already survived building and moving into the "Infinite Loop" campus and a vast flood of architecturally-interesting Apple Stores. Their new campus - <USER3> impressive - is essentially iterative; it's doing something they've done before using skills they've successfully used before, merely on a larger scale.

In Google's case, their (goofy) design explicitly seems to anticipate LOTS of change and potential further growth and reorganization. They are not "setting in stone" the shape of the company.

And in both Google AND Apple's case, the companies have so much money and so many employees that it'd be stupid NOT to try to consolidate a bit at this point.

<comment><USER34> One key sign: basically no one in those pictures is actually working.

I see one guy with a laptop, and I suppose a few people could be trying to solve hard problems by walking around. But there is more yoga in those pictures than software development or customer service or anything that Google does for a living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> These really curved, artsy spaces remind me of Xanadu House and similar poorly received architectural experiments of the 70s. It often seems to me that designs of this type tip too far away from function and too much into form. (Plus what's the long-term maintenance requirements?)

But if anyone could pull it off, it's probably Google!

</comment><comment><USER16> Strongly reminded of How Buildings Learn's first episode[1], about buildings as statements which turn out to neglect the people who occupy them.

[1] [http://youtu.be/AvEqfg2sIH0](http://youtu.be/AvEqfg2sIH0)

</comment><comment><USER36> It's nothing if not bold. It seems to be drawing a fair amount of inspiration from the Metabolist movement of the 1960s, particularly in its emphasis on modularity and even mobility. I have to wonder how practical that's going to be – the only truly modular building to come out of Metabolism is Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower ([http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07...](http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/Nakagin.jpg)), but in four decades, none of the capsules have ever been moved or replaced.

</comment><comment><USER37> Cubicles get marketed with the same modularity idea, but in practice hardly anyone actually moves them around after the initial installation. Do they really expect to move buildings?

</comment><comment><USER38> Not so sure doing yoga next to people eating lunch next to a bike path is ideal, but the concepts look awesome.

Also who is going to clean all those windows? New automated self cleaning window robots?

</comment><comment><USER39> The pictures are so ridiculous - awesome, but ridiculous. Two thoughts: few people are working, and everyone is young (presumably because older people who don't want to live the dorm life can't afford single family homes in the area).

</comment><comment><USER40> The concept looks super cool, but that Radcliffe guy needs to fix his bad habit of ending most every sentence with a question?

It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video?

I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?

<comment><USER41> The indirectness in silicon valley speak is grating.

Starting sentences with "So..." and ending with questions is annoying indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I work near a wall of windows, which is quite nice. But every morning I'm pulling and adjusting the blinds to avoid being blinded by the morning sun. I also wonder about what it will sound like when it rains. I guess with that will the curved roof transmit sound very long distances, such that you can hear quiet conversations across the building.

I'm don't mean this as negatively as this probably sounds. Google has done a lot of innovation in things like data centers, and I am hoping they have similar innovations for the problems I have raised.

</comment><comment><USER43> For those without 10 minutes to spend watching the video, the architects are BIG and Thomas Heatherwick. <strike>I really wish they'd give them written credit -- they're the ones who did all the work!</strike> (It's actually there, I just missed it. :-/)

<comment><USER44> > It's the first time we'll design and build offices from scratch and we hope > these plans by Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick > Studio will lead to a better way of working.

They did.

<comment><USER43> Such fail. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How often do buildings get to look like what the architects envision? I feel there is an often a disconnect similar to how many cars are initially designed to look futuristic and sleek, but later end up looking quite ordinary.

<comment><USER46> Quite often I think buildings turn out to be what they look like in renderings if you look at form/layout/materials in isolation.

The problem is the full vision: architects love tossing in an unrealistic amount of people having loads of fun that's almost impossible to have in such a spontaneous way. They stage social utopic scenarios in their renderings which almost never describe how the public ends up utilizing and interacting with the public spaces provided by the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> i worked in offices, cubes, and now in the south facing open space with bad AC and lightning (result of a very expensive with all the latest fads remodel). I am at the state of office nirvana - i know it just can't get worse than that, so whatever "rethinking" is going to happen in the office space - let them, i don't care.

</comment><comment><USER48> Reminds me of the model city that's at the beginning of Logan's Run.

(I looked for the footage, but couldn't find the clip.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Holy crap.

Ok, sign me up for the new Google Domed City with integrated weather, parks, transportation (self-driving cars), housing, office space, entertainment, and local governance. Would like one here here in Ft. Worth, it is snowing a lot today.

[https://beta.googledomedcity.com](https://beta.googledomedcity.com) not resolving, darn.

When is the Beta launching near me.

Couple of feature requests: don't forget to include greywater recycling guys. And voting.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's hot in Mountain View for several months a year. How are they going to cool these greenhouses?

</comment><comment> shrill-and-loud The language used right at the beginning is uncalled for and off-putting. Please consider your audience.

There is no need to write "Not the sexiest title for a blog post, I know." when there are equally valid constructions that eschew the sexual.

<comment><USER50> Anecdotally, referring to things that are not typically viewed in a sexual light, as "sexy" (or not), is fairly common parlance. Like so many things, the meaning of the word has evolved with its common usage to become more context dependent ; using it in this setting is perfectly normal.

Also - I have to ask (genuinely intrigued) - who is this language supposed to be offending, and why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> wouldn't it be better to use existing structures, like all the abandoned malls in the usa? why not distribute the workforce so people can live in an affordable, commutable area? and it bugs me further they couldn't find a way to locate walking distance to bart or caltrain.

<comment><USER24> There aren't any abandoned malls near the existing offices.

<comment><USER51> but there are all over the country. why not give people to option to live somewhere else?

<comment><USER24> Google management must feel there is a benefit to having their employees clustered into a small number of campuses. Maybe mountain view isn't the optimal place for that, but uprooting the campus and distributing it among failed shopping malls throughout the world or building a giant googleplex in Montana is probably not a good strategy to keep the bulk of their employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> arcology

</comment><comment><USER53> Looks like want to cover big parts of mountain view with a see-thru tent, and turn north-of-101 into a new downtown. Life under the dome. I absolutely hate it.

<comment><USER54> Castro is nice enough but there are enough people to support another urban center. I'm with you on being skeptical of dome life.

<comment><USER32> The area around San Antonio & El Camino looks like it may end up gentrifying into an urban center in the near future. There are mid-rise residential towers going up, and a number of shops in a walkable shopping center.

North Bayshore would obviously be better for Googlers, but there seems to be a lot more resistance to building housing there, for whatever reason.</comment></comment></comment>


Is College Working? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbreditors/2009/01/what_is_the_future_of_the_work.html <comment><USER2> Well I guess if anything it's time to stop viewing college as an inevitably great investment. If you feel that an English major college degree would be an enriching experience, then treat it as such, not as an investment.

From this vantage point it's comparable to taking a year off to travel (except 4X longer) or taking a couple of years off to volunteer. The question then becomes, can I afford it?

An interesting excercise is thinking about creative alternatives with similar costs. Say a parent was willing to give their 17-18 yr old child 100k in capital (maybe also help getting financed) + a 4 year stipend to start a business. Every cent must be reinvested. I'm not saying go start Microsoft. Maybe buy an ice cream franchise, mobile dog wash or double up & spring for an existing small business. Would they emerge 'more likely to succeed' at 22 then they would have otherwise?

<comment><USER3> All of these things seem to focus on skills. For better or worse, college is one of the rites of passage to being part of the economic elite – doubly so at institutions like Harvard – membership in which tends to be a better predictor of weath than practical skills. That's why it's really seen as an investment; for most degrees awarded it's been poor vocational training for a long time.

<comment><USER4> Mostly because of:

\- The rolodex factor.

\- The fact that people that go to Harvard are already smart, and they would be successful anyway.

<comment><USER5> mostly the second. A study showed that people who get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton and instead go to state school make almost as much money as they would have otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a link? I would love to read the study.

<comment><USER5> Ask and ye shall receive.

<http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322.pdf>

I'm not sure if this is a generally available link; I am using it from a Stanford IP which may have purchased access. The paper is Dale and Krueger, "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who's currently taking a break from school and doubting the value of it, I keep seeing these articles and thinking "Sweet! Maybe I'm right, if $publication is saying it!"

But then I read the article, and it's always some sob story about average folks who went to college in a liberal arts field while making absolutely no attempts at establishing an independent career in the field or working outside of class on their trade. Then they get out, and they're a convenience store clerk or something.

They end up having the opposite effect on me, rather than confirming my biases.

<comment><USER8> Why don't you focus on education, instead of schooling?

Pick the things you need to learn to reach the goals you want. Go learn those things. Repeat and rinse. That may or may not mean formal schooling. It could mean mentoring, hands-on work, lots of book-reading, long seminars. There are lots of ways to learn.

Schooling is where they pick those things for you. What I keep getting from these articles is that most major institutions aren't very good at picking those things for you. That the selection of things to pick from are driven more by politics and happytalk than practical results for most of the students participating. There's no feedback between what defines a degree and what the actual perceived value is from those receiving one.

If I were you, I might go back, and I might not. That's kinda the point -- you're supposed to take ownership and actually do something. Failure to take ownership of your education is what leads to working at the chicken-plucking factory, not a lack of a degree.

<comment><USER9> I agree, the primary focus of school should be learning. However, just because somebody is smart and motivated does not mean they'll learn on their own. For somebody like the GP, a college education can provide access to a huge number of resources that you simply can't find anywhere else. There are some people for whom the combination of great professors, literary resources, and a focus on learning for 3.5 months at a time will provide a better and more concentrated education than anywhere else. Outside of college, you have to spend at least some of your energy on acquiring those opportunites, necessarily making it less effective.

That said, I don't think that college is this way for everybody. If you're disengaged in classes and primarily linked in to the social scene, then the value you get out of college is less clear. A degree is socially necessary for some jobs, so it's not entirely wasted time, but the price is steep.

Point being, college is like everything else: you get out what you put in. I wouldn't trade my college experience for anything (especially that $160k). Nothing is a panacea.

<comment><USER8> _just because somebody is smart and motivated does not mean they'll learn on their own_

How would you demonstrate being smart and motivated _without_ learning on your own? I mean, when I say "hey look at that smart and motivated person!" I'm saying that they're demonstrating learning new things to reach goals -- that they are motivated. Motivation doesn't exist without some kind of action to show for it.

I work with people who have varying degrees, from no college at all to PhDs.

What I find is that once you've spent that $160K, there is a tendency to feel like it was worth it. This is the same thing that happens during hiking: the goal seems completely pointless until you've spent all day (or multiple days) reaching it. At that point, you wouldn't trade anything in the world for it. I see the same thing from people with military experience, and I imagine the same thing happens for people who work in the Peace Corps.

There's nothing wrong with not knowing what you want and having somebody else pick it for you, aka schooling. But in that case, there should still be foundational goals: ability to survive in the modern economy comes at the top of the list. Any formal schooling that doesn't meet those needs fails, in my opinion (tying this back to the topic of the article)

<comment><USER9> First point: consider that if the only people that are smart and motivated have something to show for it, then there are vastly fewer smart, motivated poor people than there are in the middle and upper classes. Intelligence and motivation may be necessary to learning, but they are certainly not sufficent.

It's hard to say objectively whether anything is worth it. However, I don't think that hiking and paying for school are that similar - with hiking, you put the work in up front, and with school, you receive the diploma (and ostensibly the benefits of 4 years of learning) before you even have to start paying back your student loans. That said, doesn't it say something if all those who have done it say it's valuable?

In any case, I guess the fundamental issue that I see is the relationship between learning and applicable skills. Picking up skills is certainly learning, but learing is not always economically valuable. Schools do not exist to create wealth in their students - they exist to pass on knowledge. If schools are not passing on real-world skills, they are not intrinsically failing, nor is the real world somehow broken. I value learing for its own sake and am actually willing to forgo some matarial comfort for it. I suppose it all depends on your definitions of success.

I will admit that if people are going to school with no clear path and no motivation, and expecting to come out on the other side more employable, that's a problem. But again, it's a problem of expectations, not institutional reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the biggest thing college and university do is force people to do work who likely never did any work in their life.

I understand the premise of college, however except for certain highly specialized or certified jobs I don't really see the value for money in it. I see the value of going to law school to get a law degree and help in passing the bar, but I don't see the value in taking English if you plan to get a career out of it... unless perhaps you desire to teach English.

I mean I'm working to become a novelist, and the best advice I ever saw was to find something that interests you and then write about it. I mean all my favorite writers come from such bizarre fields like a ESA scientists, Cops, Soldiers, Forensic Investigators, Physicists, Economists, Mathematicians, etc. Not a single one (that I'm aware of) even touched English, yet all are full time writers.

I mean a perfect example of this is Cory Doctorow. He dropped out of four universities, became an electronics right activist and worked for the EFF before quitting and becoming a full-time writer. No degree in english, no creative writing in university.

IMO I see this happening in IT. The classic path to money was joining the economic elite, however 2/3 of the biggest names in IT never graduated university. Dell dropped out of University of Texas; Jobs I believe dropped out of Reed College and only Gates actually graduated, however from what I remember his path through Higher Education wasn't typical of the economic elite as he got fascinated by computers and did his own thing instead of what his parents planned for him.

<comment><USER11> Gates did not graduate, he got an honorary law degree.

Wozniak went back to finish his degree, and Ballmer did not join Microsoft until after he finished his.

<comment><USER10> Oh I didn't know that, I just read he had a law degree... I guess I assumed wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the higher education market is in for a reality check just like what the credit market is going through right now.

1) Because of the deluge of college students. Many college educated people get jobs at Best Buy and retail outlets. Some of my high school friends are in situations like that. They assumed they would get a good job out of college, but that's what they get by getting a liberal arts degree and partying for 4 years. A 30,000-40,000 per year tuition, all down the drain.

2) Because a lot of job performance is measured by the market (i.e. startups). Getting a prestigious college degree doesn't necessarily get you the job needed and a lot of times you'll get beaten out by someone at a "less prestigious" school.

3) Many people getting a college, medical, or law degree should realize that if they're not at the top of their class, it's not necessarily guaranteed for them to get a great job. For a less prestigious university, it's even more so the case.

4) All of this will lead college counselors and the next generation of parents to advice people to get the most value for their money: i.e. a good education for a good price (i.e. not going to Harvard for Engineering, etc).

<comment><USER13> _a good education for a good price (i.e. not going to Harvard for Engineering_

Do you seriously think going to Harvard for engineering is a bad idea? Why do you think so? Would it still be a bad idea if the student enjoys Harvard's financial aid and is paying just a few thousand dollars a year (earned through part-time work) to attend Harvard?

(I'd really like to know, so I'm inviting any onlooker with knowledge of this issue to reply.)

<comment><USER14> The SEAS (School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard) is a actually surprisingly decent. The one thing that gets some people is that CS is taught from a very mathematical bend - about a third of the CS classes don't require any significant work on a computer (besides typesetting the problem sets in TeX). I actually prefer it that way - I'd rather focus on theory in class, I can pick up the idiosyncrasies of the tools and languages on my own time.

I understand that Harvard's Math department is pretty impressive too (near the same level as MIT/Princeton/etc).

<comment><USER13> _I understand that Harvard's Math department is pretty impressive too_

Many people think that Harvard's math department is the best in the world.

<comment><USER15> If you defined 'many people' I'd be much obliged.

(Not challenging the assertion, just curious who.)

<comment><USER13> The sample I hear from about Harvard's undergraduate math program consists largely of participants on the Art of Problem Solving forum

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php?f=143>

and those participants include many young people from various countries who have participated in the International Mathematics Olympiad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Woodrow Wilson was basically arguing the same point in 1909:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education. We want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

</comment><comment><USER17> Surprising and encouraging to see this kind of critical questioning coming from Harvard, even if it just a blog.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know, but I think this is really just another iteration of the debate over how much college should be vocational training and how much it should be devoted towards building minds. My greatest regret towards the way I approached some of my college course selections was to worry too much about how useful it would be to my career/how it would affect my GPA, since I needed to make sure my resume was competitive enough to get a job. I should have taken more classes that were just challenging and interesting for their own sake.

Then again, I got, and at least for now, am still holding a job, so, hindsight 20/20, neh?

<comment><USER19> Does the US even have a system for vocational training? Over here in germany we have this system where you go to a university if you want an academic education, but if you want vocational training you go to a company and then get an accredited vocational degree after two or three years where you work at your company like 80% of the time and visit a specialized public school for the rest of the time. So if I want to be a computer scientist, I go to the university, but if I want to be a carpenter or network admin, I just get a vocational degree in carpentry or network administration. The system has some problims with things like adapting to change, but still seems better than a college or nothing approach.

<comment><USER20> The US has different levels of degrees. Most of the colleges and universities that you hear about offer bachelors degrees as the first degree (generally a four year degree). Other colleges, especially so-called community and junior colleges will offer 2 year associates degrees in more vocational subjects such as nursing. And then there are other purely vocational schools that offer training that lasts less than a year (usually for-profit schools).

One of the biggest differences between the US and German system is that almost all American students attend the same type of high school, which theoretically should prepare you to go to a university and the curricula are usually general. Also it's important to know that the US system is mostly controlled on the local level, rather than the federal level for public schools, so a school in one city can be very different than a school in another city or state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A BA in creative writing. That could be of tremendous help to lot of businesses worldwide.

English is the international business language but unfortunately at least two- thirds of the world struggles to communicate correctly. Just as US outsourced mundane work in operations and computing, US & UK can support businesses elsewhere with their spoken language at home. There is a huge opportunity here.

<comment><USER19> But there is a downside, too. I have read statements from the field of high energy physics that everybody understands everybody else _except_ the native english speakers because they tend to use the whole english language and not just the globally comprehensible subset. So hiring a creative writing major to do your international correspondence might be the wrong choice, you want someone who predictably writes simple english .

<comment><USER21> Interesting point on the "globally comprehensible subset". I agree with you completely for international correspondence.

What I had in mind was more of messages and docs required for a product itself.

I had a personal experience building this quite successful app iRead on facebook and I would most always mess up the grammar or the tone in the news feed, which would then go through repeated corrections from people in the US.

People who have formally studied creative writing with English being their mother tongue would be able to message better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article's point: The job market is flooded, disadvantaging recent graduates without experience. Hence, we need to give newcomers more experience so they can compete.

This doesn't seem to help the situation. (1) Now, experienced people with families to support will (theoretically) be out of work longer, and (2) Raising the bar on "practical" experience raises it for _everyone_ , still making jobs hard to get.

<comment><USER23> One thing British schools do is have a year interning inbetween the rest of the years for the degree. This both gives the student real world experience and helps them get their name out. Plus, it encourages businesses to invest in the students, since they have the opportunity to hire a good candidate in a couple years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hi, I'm the HBR editor who wrote the original blog. This is a fascinating conversation! I invite you all to contribute your comments directly at [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbreditors/2009/01/what_is_...](http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbreditors/2009/01/what_is_the_future_of_the_work.html) The more the merrier!

</comment><comment><USER25> Like many things in life ... you get what you put into it.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Is it time for the U.S. to rethink it's educational model?_

No. We do not have a model for all education. That's centralized planning, which doesn't work. What we need to re-think is what activities we encourage by financing. We heavily finance 4 years of student activity that, by this author's account, does not prepare students for providing for their own needs after school. In short, we're creating 22 and 24-year-olds without the chutzpah that a common street hustler has at age 15. And we're paying lots of money to do it.

Education has always been about goals. I love the fuzzy goals like appreciation of arts, understanding of various philosophical schools, sensitivity to world cultural differences -- things that you absolutely need but are hard to measure. Problem is, you can subsidize things that are hard to measure. There's no quality control. There's no standard to say whether institution X is doing any better or worse than institution Y.

People, young or old, need to be able to adapt to find a spot in a complex society where they can provide value to the rest of us in such a fashion that we formally thank them -- that is, we give them money. That's job #1. That's something we have a public interest in advocating.

More worrisome is that groupthink that colleges instill. It's always there under the surface, as in this quote from the article:

 _One newly-minted MBA said that if worse comes to worst, he'll stay at home and look after the baby he and his wife are expecting...."provided," the reporter remarked, "his wife still has her job."_

If worse comes to worse he'll actually raise his own kid, instead of having somebody else do it for him. The sacrifices we must make.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is Working College?

</comment><comment><USER27> There's something we must ask before that. Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?

</comment><comment><USER28> I have to say I have no idea how people decide to major in English. At my school they have it made and they just fuck it up so badly! They're this close to moving up in wealth and they decide to study literature...ouch.

<comment><USER29> Because literature's fascinating? I gave up an English major for something more tech-related, because I read and analyze on my own - I don't need college for that - but still, if I had a choice between a billion dollars and acute understanding of every line of _Finnegans Wake_ , I'd take the latter.

<comment><USER30> Another great thing about life: a billion dollars couldn't buy you an acute understanding of every line of Finnegans Wake.

<comment><USER31> For the same reason that a billion dollars couldn't buy you a number that was prime and factorable.

<comment><USER29> Finnegans Wake absolutely has meaning. It's just an abrupt pain that refuses to go easy on you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eyes and Ears of India (Or any country for that matter) - <AUTHOR>

Quick Note for the Impatient: I propose a web-application to coordinate and schedule "a vigil for suspicious activities" by ordinary citizens across the country / world.
Detailed Explanation: It was heart-breaking to see what happened in Mumbai. Although it is easy to blame the "system" for lack of "intelligence", it is simply not possible to believe that none of the citizens who were around the area where terrorists docked did not see them coming. Most probably someone who saw, did not think it was important enough to escalate to the police. ("Chalta Hai" attitude).
Such incidents can be reduced, if ordinary citizens keep their eyes and ears open when they are out in public places doing their regular things and escalate them when something suspicious is seen.
What I propose is a web-application to organize and schedule a vigil whereby volunteers can opt-in to keep their "eyes and ears open" at a particular public place for a particular time-slot.
Other volunteers can see what places and time-slots are already covered and opt to vigil some other area / time-slot.
BTW not sure if this post is relevant in this forum. Sincere apologies if that is the case.
What do fellow hackers think about this idea? <comment><USER2> Indian here. Mumbaikar here. Bad idea.... Very bad idea... You simply can't manage signal to noise in such an effort and the cost of false-positives is zero to you and very very high to the poor false-positive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had thought about the very high noise level. My argument is at a given place / time, if atleast one guy is "good" (obviously the immediate question arises is "which one"), it would be sufficient to escalate a "real situation" and supress a false positive.

Maybe this still is a bad idea. My point is we need to figure out how do we harness "intelligence" of ordinary "good" citizens who are on the streets at the time when things are happening or about to happen.

<comment><USER2> Are ordinary "good" citizens capable of really providing such "intelligence" without doing much damage for things about to happen? I doubt it.

However, I really appreciate the sheer lack of original journalism that came from ordinary citizens during this time... I think only one or two people were reporting from ground zero... Pretty much everyone else was just echoing the main media. That is a problem that needs a solution...

A serious collective of amateur journalists doing some serious journalism and not just echoing the established media would be a great thing to have. No idea, how that could be achieved but if it existed during this mayhem, it would have been the resource I would be glued to, not the maddening sensationalist sickening reporting of the news channels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who watches the watchmen?</comment>


Ask HN: Interesting code to read - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>Do you know some really interesting code to read (the kind of code that shows best practices in action), in C, python, yacc and lisp ? <comment><USER2> For C, the Lua source is great, and there's a hyperlinked version here - <http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/> . It's written in strictly compliant ANSI C.

For Lisp and Scheme, try Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ and Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ (PAIP and LiSP). The former has more Common Lisp, the latter Scheme. Both will give you quite a bit to think about. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Peter Norvig has written some very nice Python and Lisp. I think most of the code he has on his website (<http://norvig.com/>) is in Python, but PAIP is all Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a bit biassed here, but several people have told me that they think the tarsnap source code (all in C) is "beautiful", "well designed", "very UNIXy", "incredibly clean", etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> For C, I think the Linux kernel is a good representative: <http://miller.cs.wm.edu/lxr3.linux/http/source/?v=126.96.36.199>

<comment><USER6> Personally, I find the Minix3 kernel to be a better read: <http://www.minix3.org/doc/>

The book serves as nice documentation and explanation of the principles (as well as containing the full source, printed.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I find a good factory? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on some designs of a physical product to be made with plastic and aluminum.  I want to put it into production and have been looking for a factory that can do injection molding, investment casting, and CNC machining, but the price quotes have been so varied, I'm not sure who to believe.<p>Anybody have tips on how to find a trustworthy factory for mass production of products? <comment><USER2> This blog series on getting your stuff made in China by Adam Hocherman might be a good starting point?

[http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/01/go-it-alone-how-to- make-...](http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/01/go-it-alone-how-to-make-your- stuff-in-china-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who knows nothing about manufacturing the only starting point that springs to mind is Alibaba.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, have been digging through <http://www.mfg.com/> <http://www.alibaba.com/> <http://www.globalsources.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work as a buyer in that sector (in Italy). For aluminum castings and plastic injection the bulk of the cost is about the making of the stamps and toolings. There is also a big difference wheter you are facing a production of thousands or a productions of millions of pieces.

<comment><AUTHOR> tooling costs have ranged from 5,000 USD to 12,000 USD. i plan on visiting the factories, but the large range in prices has me unsure of how i should price my own product.

first run of production will be 5k units. we will ramp up production once we get more distribution and the product begins to sell well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you looking for domestic or overseas production? Either way, and in particular for overseas production, you may need to find an intermediary, someone who deals with a number of factories and can find the right one for your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> either domestic or overseas - whatever can give us high quality and low price. i have currently been talking to factories in china, but our prototypes have all been made locally.

any times on finding a good intermediary? i've talked to xpicorp.com, who have seemed helpful, and i've tried pch international, but got transferred around their phone system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that always worked great for me was to buy my competitors product, take it apart, and see who made it or look for names / SKU's / notations I could google. You may be able to find this out just by browsing OEM web sites who advertise their clients.

From there I always had a great starting point for where to start looking. I did this largely because I never wanted to be the test pilot for a new OEM after some bad experiences.

Always visit the factory... It's the best money you'll spend with this sort of project even if you don't give them a PO.

</comment><comment><USER7> We've had good luck with a handful of molded parts from both www.quickparts.com and www.protomold.com. Our volumes were quite a bit smaller --initial runs of 200-2k, I think, It was nice not having to design the mold, just the part.

Haven't used any of the quick turn CNC firms yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> i was in this business for many years with sources of supply in taiwan hong kong and china. how to find good factory in my experience really comes down to your relationship with your counterpart on the other side. how can we know which factory is good for specific product? we cant. we would have to guess. so in other words in my opinion to find good factory you need to know someone over there ... and *they can find it...

</comment><comment><USER9> Ask the Pez MP3 player guy.</comment>


Puerto Rico: The Greece of the Caribbean? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33358307

<comment><USER2> No, Jamaica is the Greece of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is not even close to the same level of problems.</comment>


AT&T Blocking FaceTime over 3G - <AUTHOR> http://www.publicknowledge.org/att-facetime

<comment><AUTHOR> They're not going to let users use FaceTime unless they have a "mobile share" plan.</comment>


Introducing the Hipster PDA (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda <comment><USER2> This was 12 years ago already.. geezeus.. I'm getting so old.</comment>


The Self-Assembly Line : When the Pieces Put Themselves Together - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/when-the-pieces-put-themselves-together/?ref=technology&gwh=BAE73DD8827E3028E55A1B8C8ECE93F6

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a Video demo <http://vimeo.com/38067834>

I couldn't find much information on how that happens!

<comment><USER2> Magnets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously not! That would be kind of mechanical then, and it had nothing to Molecular Biology

<comment><USER2> From the article: _Those toys are based on biological forms — an enzyme, a protein, a virus — and are made up of four, eight, or 12 plastic parts with tiny magnets inside._ The shape in the video clearly uses magnets to assemble.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Behave.js – Coding Behaviors for textarea elements - <AUTHOR> http://jakiestfu.github.com/Behave.js/ <comment><USER2> Ok I'll be the pendant that says it...you _probably_ can't appropriate the image of Austin Powers for your open source library. Not that Mike Myers seems the type to flip out about it, but his movie studio probably is.

Otherwise, great work...and it behaves reasonably well even on iOS

<comment><USER3> I'll be the pedant to mention that a pendant is worn around the neck.

You like this? On-demand editing services: email@example.com

Clickable: <http://www.edithero.com/>

<comment><USER4> Good hustling! (Serious, not sarcastic.)

Your comment was funny and provided value (now I know about your service). Well played.

<comment><USER5> It's funny, in another thread he got voted down as close to #f6f6ef as I've ever seen and scolded to boot

<comment><USER2> For the record, I approve and upvoted. I had half-written a comeback but decided I was not actually clever and that I deserve to be mocked. "Pendant" indeed.

<comment><USER3> Thanks everybody! I'll do a Show HN post after we finish fiddling with some conversion tracking bits.

Getting scolded by a 3 karma account was fun :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this a lot. I really wish they'd add the tab functionality to Stack Overflow. I can't count the times I've tabbed out of the text box there.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should have the option to make backspace delete a full level of indentation, if soft tabs are on.

<comment><USER8> Keeping the indentation level on new lines would be nice too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indentation levels should be converting line to line, is it not for you?

<comment><USER8> Nope (Chrome 24.0.1312.56 on OS X 10.6.8).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. I'm using <http://ace.ajax.org/> right now in production and it's a huge heavyweight pain (but still the best thing out there). If only this had syntax highlighting i'd switch in an instant.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you'll like <http://kueblc.github.com/LDT/examples/generic.html>? but if you fix undo, add bracket matching, etc it will become huge too.

Also wanted to ask why do you think that ace is a pain? I agree that it's big, but seems to work ok?

<comment><USER11> Thanks so much for the LDT link, it's exactly what I was looking for (and thought impossible).

I can't speak for the GP, but my problem with ACE et al. is that they replace the textarea with their own HTML structure (e.g. a div for every line). I understand the reason why, but it means they have to reimplement all the textbox behaviour and they never get it completely right.

For example: when I double-click on a word in the textbox I'm writing this in, and then middle-click somewhere else, the word gets pasted there.

In ACE, it pastes a different text in a different location.

ACE is brilliant if you want to a full-fledged text editor. But it's an overkill if all you need is a normal textarea with some colours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really good work . Was reading your code to catch up on some javascript , but didn't understand what you're doing here . Surely this is a bug ?

[https://github.com/jakiestfu/Behave.js/blob/master/behave.js...](https://github.com/jakiestfu/Behave.js/blob/master/behave.js#L211)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey, this looks handy! I just wrote something kinda similar as part of an ad- hoc UI layer that just had to be done in HTML/JS. At first I was horrified, but by a couple hundred lines in I realized how nice it would feel to finally tame those meager input boxes into full on forces of good. ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> Just curious who is the person in the background page?

<comment><USER15> <https://www.google.com/search?q=austin+powers>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good work, like it a lot. I almost feel allowing tabs should be a browser based setting, I'd have it enabled, but I can imagine other people wouldn't never need to use a tab.

I built something similar for keeping indentation/bullets/lists on new lines to assist with Markdown in an ordinary textarea -> <http://jamiebicknell.github.com/Markdown-Helper/>

ps: long time lurker, first time poster.

<comment><AUTHOR> The option to disable tabs behavior is there. When to do that is up to you;]

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great tool and I'm enamored with the layout- scrolling background, AP stays with you.

Not sure how to repeat it every time but weird artifact quirk if one scrolls to the bottom on iPad safari & scrolls back up: <http://i.imgur.com/Hby2ZsL.jpg>

<comment><USER15> The layout might be familiar,

<http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html>

The Internet Archive pegs that page to October 2001. That's like 4 or 5 Internets ago.

<comment><USER9> That's just background-position: fixed; The background in this page scrolls but austin powers is position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0;

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Question: What does this do for accessibility if navigating with a keyboard? How would one genuinely tab out of the field?

Suggestion: Big notice somewhere saying "NO JQUERY DEPENDENCY". Things are so bad these days I assume jQuery dependency until I see something stating otherwise!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since posting and receiving positive feedback, I have added support for unindentation, and multi-line indent/unindent. Will see about adding more features tomorrow! Want to keep this light, it's almost there though. Next is IE support.

</comment><comment><USER19> Auto expanding for ', [, { (, " is great, but this should be configurable on a language basis. In other languages it's not uncommon to have things like `<http://uri.com`> or |Special syntax|

</comment><comment><USER20> This is extremely cool. Thank you!

Sidenote: The name conflicts a bit with <http://kennknowles.github.com/behave.js/> \- Not sure if that matters to you.

</comment><comment> bink-lynch This is great! I removed Ace because it was too heavy for my purpose.

Indent Issue:

Type in at least 3 lines, highlight the middle lines using shift+down-arrow, tab(indent), notice the line below the highlighted lines indents too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you're talking about. Coda and Aptana both do the same thing, and the reason is you're selecting the \n new line character when you do shit+down-arrow. Try shift + down-arrow + left-arrow

<comment> bink-lynch True; I am getting my habits from Sublime Text 2 and Eclipse. These don't indent the unhighlighted line below. Guess there are two ways to go :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great landing page. Just add syntax highlighting and it'll be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER22> It absolutely crashed Firefox 18.0.1 under Mac. I typed

hgjj]{return}{return}{return}{return}

and it just beachballed. I had to force quit the browser. Happened the second time I tried it too.

<comment><USER23> Chromium 24.0.1302.0 (162733) on OS X 10.8.2: Same issue as above, although I just had to close out the tab instead of forcing the browser to close.

The issue is with the ']', and ONLY after I hit the return key. The entire page becomes unresponsive afterwards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ohh... shiny!

Can we also get Elastic tabstops? <http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/>

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you want the definition to be? How would you "activate" elastic tab stops?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > var editor = new Behave({

> var editor = Behave({

Is it a constructor or not?

<comment><USER25> I wish it could be var editor = now Behave({

<comment><USER26> var editor = oh Behave({

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1lJFlB-89Q>

</comment><comment><USER15> Auto indent should indent when a newline is nested in parentheses, like this:

      foo(1,
          2,
          3)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, it is easy to add support for indentation breaks, but it would function like braces or brackets. I'll look into this for parenthesis tomorrow, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like it very much. Simple and elegant solution. Will try to find a use for this lib.

</comment><comment><USER29> Now please add mouse-hover hint box, dropdown list for auto completion and I am sold

<comment><USER30> If only TextWrangler had auto-completion and auto-pairing of brackets and quotes.

<comment> bink-lynch Have you looked at Sublime Text 2?

<http://www.sublimetext.com/2>

I switched about a year ago and I am very pleased.

EDIT: This shows it off better: <http://www.sublimetext.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is cool but it will more cool if you add highlighting.

<comment><USER32> Ideally, highlighting should be pluggable into the textarea from another source.

<comment><USER31> Certainly,but it'll more awesome if it included by default. It will give a more IDE type look .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can't seem to get it to work on Chrome(24) on a Mac :(

<comment> bink-lynch Works for me on Mac/Chrome 24.0.1312.56.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Works great! Seems to have issues with IE 9 though.

</comment><comment><USER35> When you undo, it's undoing it very weirdly.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is my FUD regarding adopting AngularJS: most exciting things in Javascript world happen either in the jQuery world, or on top of bare-bones Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER37> Try to type in: {}]]] and press Enter...

<comment><USER38> Ok, looks like you found a bug which sends things into an infinite loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Awesome - Well done!</comment>


QRCodesDoneRight.com - let's teach people how to use QR codes right - <AUTHOR> http://QRCodesDoneRight.com After reading a number of QR-code-fail blogs we decided to put together a super simple and super condensed guide on how to use QR codes right. <comment><USER2> _> Some places are better than others for placing QR codes. Bearing in mind it takes a while to scan, rather than putting a code in that busy passage way why not put in on the subway train where everybody is rather bored and is playing with their phones anyways._

Because there is no reception underground. (Yes, this is changing, depending on the city. e.g. in London there is now free wifi at some stations, but not between stations.)

Also, some people, when a stranger takes a photo of the ad above their head, will mistakenly believe the stranger is taking a photo of _them_ , and treat it as threatening behaviour.

There is a typo in your <title>: "aobut" should be "about".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for spotting the typo - fixed!

I still see a lot of scenarios/places where QR codes would work if used correctly.

<comment> n-gauge Another one..

alrady (do you mean already?), also check out this artistic QR Code (view full size):

<http://www.blogger.com/profile/14761943015995502265>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey I like it! I thought a while ago about mashing up 8bit gfx and qr codes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I prefer this as my QR code reference: <http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> And yet the QR code on the front page has an embedded logo, which isn't at all part of the spec, I think. Kind of ironic. I know brands _love_ those designer QR codes (or at least loathe them less) but they have a significant impact on scan-ability, even if many decoders are good enough to scan them, they might take longer, especially on non-top-of-the-line phones. The point of a QR code is to make that information easier to get at, and the designer codes are at odds with this. (disclaimer, I worked at a barcode startup for a bit, and I left partly because I don't buy QR codes)

<comment><AUTHOR> Embedding logo is not a part of the spec, but demonstration that QR codes can be customized. In my experience (and i also have been involved in QR code related startup) these don't take longer to process as long as you don't go over the certain point with customizing the code. It's all about finding the right balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Licencing - you've misspelled 'patented' Readability - "its", _not_ "it's"

There's a bunch of other grammar/style issues - get someone to proofread it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Would you do it? Always try to stand in a shoes of a regular person and ask yourself would I scan it? Does this convince me to take out my phone and spend 10 seconds of my time to scan that QR code? Is it attractive enough?

When the answer to this question is a 'No I would not', I fail to see the utility of these things.

<comment><USER7>
      > I fail to see the utility of these things.

Then I suggest that you are lacking in imagination. I scan QR codes quite often and find them quite useful. Not every day, and not outstandingly useful, but useful enough that I know of no suitable alternative, and I would miss the utility they provide.

I've commented on this at length elsewhere, and will not do so again here. I doubt that you will change your mind, but I can provide references to my comments for those who are interested.

<comment><USER8> The question isn't "is there utility" but "is there sufficiently more utility than alternatives to justify their use". I don't think I've come across a situation where the answer to that is yes. The barriers are high.

Most people a) don't have a reader b) don't really know what they are. Compare this to something like a URL/domain which people do recognise the format of, or a discount code ("use SUBWAY10 for 10% off!") to achieve the same goals.

Seriously, I would love to hear of any use cases where a QR Code was the absolute best approach.

<comment><USER7> I've gone over all this several times before. It's great to have a facility to visit a website (or other text) that doesn't involve having to type in either a long piece of text, or a shortened piece of text that's some random mix of unusual characters. It takes me less than 20 seconds, including time taken to get the phone from my pocket, to scan a code. I've gone to stage shows, theatre productions and visited companies for special offers, none of which I would have done had they not had the QR code.

There is no other current alternative that I know. Please, name some alternatives that I could use, straight away, without downloading anything (and no, I didn't have to download my QR reader, it came with the phone), without configuring anything, and that is as error resistant as QR codes.

Even if I _do_ have to download something, tell me what reasonable alternatives exist when I'm standing on a train using one hand to hold on.

I'm not particularly a QR advocate, but for me, they are useful, and I'm getting tired of people telling me they aren't, and that they should go away. I'm especially tired of people removing from me things that work, and replacing them either with things that don't, or with nothing.

<comment><USER9> What would be wrong with OCR plus a marker or two to indicate a scannable area (and maybe content type) - human readable, phone scannable.

My biggest issue with QR codes is there is no indication of what they are before scanning. That, and I dislike most forms of advertising.

<comment><USER7>
      > What would be wrong with OCR plus a marker or two
      > to indicate a scannable area

Simple:

* There is no OCR that is currently sufficiently reliable

* It has no error correction ability, so is not robust against damage

* There are currently no apps I know that can perform this function

So go to it, create an app that works on all known phones and is robust against up to 30% damage, and you may have something with which to penetrate the market.

      > My biggest issue with QR codes is there is no indication
      > of what they are before scanning.

My phone tells me what it is and asks permission to open it, and the context usually tells me what it should be. I don't bother with context-less QR codes. Beside, this is not a problem with the code, it's a problem with the brain- dead manner in which some people use them.

      > That, and I dislike most forms of advertising.

I scan codes for shows, films, and shops. I know what I'm getting, and it's simple, clear, and my choice. I don't like advertising either, but sometimes I see notices of things I want to use, see, or get involved with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And I still see companies placing QR codes on billboards on the highway!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah me too! That's why we did QRCodesDoneRight.com and hope that at least ONE person will learn from this :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How many people that aren't in the tech scene actually know a simple way to scan a QR code?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a number of apps, for virtually any platform out there. I'm pretty sure that apart from tech scene QR codes are fairly recognizable.</comment></comment>