LinkedIn has lost its vision - <AUTHOR> http://sworddance.com/blog/2016/03/26/linkedin-has-lost-its-vision/ <comment><USER2> The problem is that LinkedIn got sucked into serving one very specific demographic: recruiters.

It would be as if Facebook decided to focus obsessively on serving college students. It's a good initial strategy, but eventually you have to serve bigger markets.

If I were in charge at LinkedIn I'd focus it on becoming the number one place for professionals to exchange information, create and manage events, and connect with like minded colleagues.

There's a huge potential in this because most professions don't have particularly good online social networks. Oftentimes they're old fashioned discussion boards behind paywalls, comments sections of popular blogs and other half-ass solutions.

Interestingly, my vision really wouldn't do much for software engineers and developers. I think StackOverflow, meetups, and other resources already provide this.

It boggles my mind that they didn't take this route and instead they became the social network for the unemployed as another commenter aptly described them.

It's a business school case study waiting to be written.

<comment><USER3> How would that make money? I mean profits not revenue.

<comment><USER2> Ha. Good question, I didn't think anyone thought about profits any more.

Seriously, I'm assuming the same ad driven model that has made Facebook profitable would work for a professional network to.

I know I have personally clicked on ads that are related to my profession. I'm far, far more tolerant (even accepting) of B2B advertising than I am of B2C.

It's tricky though. They would have to be careful not to turn it into a pure marketing play. There would have to be safeguards against that.

The key is they would have to keep their eye on the main value proposition:

Becoming the number one way professionals connect with the idea, events, and people who can help them do their jobs better.

<comment><USER3> And how is that different from Facebook? I'm not being a troll. Just exploring your thoughts.

<comment><USER4> In the same way Ravelry is different from Facebook.

<comment><USER3> I hadn't even heard of Ravelry. Thanks to your comment, I'll check it out. :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for going to the effort and checking it out.

For other people who don't know (and don't want to make the effort): my argument was that special purpose social networking sites can do well. Even if with a bit of hacking (and `apps') you could replicate most of their functionality on Facebook.

Ravelry is for knitting and associated crafts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Vision or not, they have exceptional engineering talent able to draw conclusions about who my ex girlfriends are from 20 years ago and suggest I connect with them.

Or somehow to draw conclusions about who I communicated with on an anonymous dating site and suggest I connect with them.

I'm looking forward to the day that as I walk down the street wearing my Augmented Reality glasses, LinkedIn transparently identifies the faces of the passing people and suggests that I connect to each long lost deeply valued relationship, or suggests I connect to the person walking past who has been stalking me online after I went on one date with them and hated them. Viva LinkedIn!

If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!

<comment><USER6> Linkedin is just a sum of so many dark patters...

I mean really, take Facebook. Does it suck in some ways? Yes. Does it set the privacy defaults a bit more lenient than my own preferences? Sure.. but I use it and I've found it trivially easy to grasp some of its privacy basics, and set the settings according to my wishes, such that it's usable within my privacy wishes. Further, they've at various times prompted me to look into my privacy settings. All of this has been under enormous scrutiny and pressure, they're no saints... but for me it's a reasonable product in my own experience. If need be, I wouldn't feel bad about closing my FB account because it'd mean FB just wasn't for me, rather than FB is trying to screw me left and right and I need to get out.

Linkedin is very much unlike that, every interaction I have with it says 'close your account because you don't know what the hell Linkedin is doing', and I've not logged on in at least half a year because I fear what kind of alerts and notifications they'll send to my network on the basis of me visiting a few pages there. Like when I turned off 'see who visited my profile', so that I could turn off 'let people see I visited their profile'. A few days later I check my best friends' linkedin because I was updating mine and looking for inspiration, and he jokingly messages me I'm stalking him on linkedin. I couldn't care less he saw that, he's my best friend, but what the f, I just turned that feature off? It's just an accumulation of stuff like that where I've completely lost my trust.

> If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great > success!

Totally my experience. And I'm even one of those people who's pretty good at bs options, like a tiny remark that give permission for linkedin to email your entire gmail contact list (i.e. anyone you ever conversed with, like say a guy from craigslist you bought a fishbowl from 7 years ago). Even then I feel like Linkedin is just screwing me in broad daylight while I'm paying my utmost attention.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, they actually sell the ability to see who visited your page even if they have privacy turned on.

<comment><USER8> So create a second profile... (I get that you might naturally expect/want that you could use your main profile with some special bit set, but given that the workaround is so trivial, the pragmatist in me has trouble working up a lot of anger over it.)

<comment><USER4> It's more the violation of trust (also trust in reliability and predictability) that annoys people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually the 'monetization' of LinkedIn against non-recruiter members has really dampened my enthusiasm for the company. So many things that I used to be able to do as a member for free have been cut off. I got a chance to talk to someone about that and their off the record comment was that two things had happened, first recruiters were using their own profiles to do research rather than using the tools that LinkedIn tried to sell them, and two when they restricted access they found their "meat" members started paying for the service of knowing things like "who looked at my profile." Win win! sort of.

The interesting thing was this trick, a recruiter creates a fake profile that has the same characteristics of a candidate they are trying to place. They wait for the LinkedIn AI scripts to send their fake profile a list of companies that are looking for people like that fake profile (and thus their actual client) and then they are spamming those companies HR/Jobs/other emails to try to get their candidate in front of the company So much easier than trying to lie your way into figuring out who was hiring and for what.

<comment><USER10> It seems crazy, but pretty damning evidence of that gong on discussed here

[http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=17...](http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=179303)

<comment><USER9> That is pretty funny. Clearly you could search for every profile that had a picture from a stock photo on it and turn up a bunch of fakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing for me personally, is after some of their past behavior I just don't trust them enough to use the site regularly. I'm thinking specifically of their extremely aggressive and manipulative attempts to gain access to your email contacts and spam people you know. While I'm not specifically worried about that one specific thing, the fact that they were willing to do something like that makes me think they're willing to do other things I'd disagree with. When it's your professional reputation and contacts at stake it just feels a little bit too risky to use it regularly.

That said, it really is a useful tool for keeping track of where people have gone and what they're presently up to, I just can't imagine ever using it regularly when I don't entirely trust them.

</comment><comment><USER12> LinkedIn is great: everyone you want to connect with is not active on the platform and everyone you don't want to connect with is _very_ active.

</comment><comment><USER13> Linkedin has become a creepy social network, with those hundreds of headhunters trying to build their database and mostly spamming you with worse and worse offers, with those creepy notifications that "somebody has visited your profile", looking more like average dating site more than something professional.

Yes, it seems that LinkedIn is lacking a vision on how to make looking for a job a better experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> Linked in employees probably _can 't_ update their profile without attracting unwanted attention from managers who will hound them about "why are you leaving?!?!" and hence, you know everything you need to.

<comment><USER15> Does that happen at LinkedIn, or are you just assuming? It sounds a little weird, actually. Why would a manager get agitated about one of his/her people actually updating their skills on their very own site?

I'd be suspicious if someone was _not_ updating their profile at least once or twice a year.

Though, in practice, I would just avoid managerial stalking of my employees. So what if someone's keeping their profile up to date? So what if they're checking out the market regularly. We all do it. You'd be a fool not to.

<comment><USER14> I'm totally speculating. I don't know.

> Why would a manager get agitated about one of his/her people actually > updating their skills on their very own site?

Dysfunction is prevalent everywhere in the world. LinkedIn isn't somehow magically exempt because they own the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They should probably rebrand as SpammedIn. The only people I hear from there are recruiters, and not very good ones as they don't even seem to bother to read my profile. I occasionally find its useful for tracking down people I want to get in touch with, though I can usually find their email pretty easily via other means. It's sad, because it could have been a really useful tool for networking and exchanging information.

</comment><comment><USER17> As an employer, I posted a job ad a couple weeks ago, paid a few hundred dollars, and got 2 non-qualified applicants. Many of my 'connections' (friends) saw the posting and clicked the job posting...and LinkedIn reported these ads views (making me think my posting was more popular than it actually was). Needless to say, it was a learning experience and I'll be sticking to Indeed. I'd short LNKD...

</comment><comment> T-A > Earlier in 2016, LinkedIn lost its bloom. A year ago LNKD was at $269, today > it is at $110. What happened?

This: [https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1459032194553&chddm=23851&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:LNKD&cmptdms=0&q=NYSE:MWW&ntsp=0&ei=fRD3VrHLNYjEUaWUo8AO)

Not very informative to plot a price chart in isolation, without any kind of comparison to the sector or broader stock market...

<comment><USER18> Here you go:

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1459033180269&chddm=98141&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:FB;INDEXSP:.INX&cmptdms=0;0&q=NYSE:LNKD&ntsp=1&ei=UxT3VrHSCcX- igKvjo7YBg)

<comment> T-A If you think LinkedIn is in the same sector as Facebook, maybe. I find the comparison with Monster far more telling.

<comment><USER19> What did I miss about these well correlated drops? What happened to both companies to cause these losses? I am genuinely curious as I don't really follow these 2 companies.

<comment> T-A The year started with a surge in recession fears. In a recession, employers reduce hiring, so it makes sense that companies offering professional recruitment services would be particularly affected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Haven't updated my LinkedIn profile for a long time, and I get friended all the time by strangers and I don't even know if it makes any sense, but I just accept them... How do you use LinkedIn? Please share your ways...

<comment><USER21> I endorse friends for skills they don't have to screw with them.

<comment><USER22> All of my coworkers have endorsed me for Wordpress for this same reason (to mess with me and potentially get Wordpress recruiter spam)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lost its vision? LinkedIn has felt useless for years. It's that "social network" that clogs up my inbox no matter how many times I changed the notification settings and nothing more to me.

The worst part is, those e-mails are useless. I keep getting ones informing me that there are five jobs changes in my network. I'm actually curious about who has gone where and click the link and it takes me to...well, I don't even know what I'm looking at.

Afters years of working as a freelance writer and not doing too well lately, I took a stab at getting one of those "real" jobs which required references. I decided to look at my LinkedIn profile for the first time in ages to see who might be able to help.

I click "My Network" and get this pop-over that takes up the whole screen asking me to "grow my network" and effectively hiding the information I came for in the first place. How is this supposed to be useful?

<comment><USER24> Completely agreed. Shady practises (eg: email spam), plus dark patterns (eg presenting people who _might_ be a connection as having actually sent a "Connection Request") have made it fundamentally a not-to-be-trusted website.

My LinkedIn profile now _literally_ tells recruiters to Fuck Off. And still they come.

The only value it has for me, is presenting (generally) valid contact details (eg: email address) for the people I already know and whom I may have fallen out of contact with. That's not huge value though, and several times I've been seriously tempted to just remove my profile forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The part about the past vs the future is so true; why not ask me for a few keywords describing what I'd like to do, or not like to do?

I'd be very happy to provide that and it would be a gold mine for their paying customer, the recruiter.

Now I get tons of recruitment spam for things I wouldn't dream of doing, and the things I'd like to do but haven't yet done aren't visible anywhere.

So many missed opportunities in this product it's amazing.

<comment><USER26> Why not write that in your summary yourself, rather than wait for LinkedIn to figure it out? It's not a finely searchable field, but at least it's there.

<comment><USER25> True, but as a feature that recruiters actually use, and that would change the entire mindset of recruiters to seach for people who want to do X, rather than people who already did X) I think it would be a valuable feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I haven't touched linked-in in quite a while but an idea that I would enjoy: bring all the value of the meat-world conference online.

Across each major industry vertical, it could organise say a quarterly event featuring webcasts and q&a from industry legends, moderated discussions, workshops plus all the networking and promotional activities. Bit like a MOOC but focussed on professionals not students.

It would make the networking aspect of linked-in meaningful. It shouldn't be passive rolodex, linked-in should get off their ass and actually work to help us create real new connections with people we interact with in the events and activities they host.

</comment><comment><USER28> >LinkedIn's own employees don't see the value of updating their own LinkedIn profile!

Huh? It's a company of 8,000+ people, and a random screenshot of 4 profiles leads you to this conclusion? In any company of thousands you're going find at least some people that don't find utility in the product that company is creating. Surely that's obvious? You'd need to actually perform a proper statistical study to know for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

Some points here:

1\. I don't have access to all that data do that sort of analysis. If you have that access, run the analysis and get back to me. I was writing an opinion piece, not an academic paper.

2\. The people in question are all managers and above. A good demographic of LinkedIn's sweet spot.

3\. These people in question, I met personally. And each one of them expressed some variant of not seeing a _personal_ need to update their own profile.

4\. Most of my personal friends understand that they are supposed to get "something" from their LinkedIn profile - they just don't know what that "something" is.

5\. LinkedIn has potential that it is wasting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, as an intellectual exercise, what would I want from a "perfect" LinkedIn:

\- well I gotta trust it, so all of the below I cannot see LinkedIn actually doing but \- become a contact manager. When did I last call / mail this person. \- become a graphical network tool - show me my personal business network \- and remind me who I have not called despite really wanting to

\- What about? Did I promise anything? Did they? Keep reminding me of my todos

<comment><USER30> Hey Paul, we're actually working on an app that does a lot of the things you mentioned.

I shot you a quick email with a private beta invite in case you want to give it a go.

Thanks for the validation. :)

Josh

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I would be interested in this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> LinkedIn is great for someone like my wife, who avoids Facebook as a time sink, and calls LinkedIn a "Facebook for grownups". It's been a useful way for her to connect with people without the cruft of looking at kitten pictures and what someone ate for breakfast.

I log in maybe twice a month, and that's sufficient for me. I hope it works for LinkedIn as well, because I'd like them to stay in business, but I'm happy with my level of involvement which I suspect is similar to that of many others who are also overcommitted on other networks like Facebook, Plus, Twitter, etc.

I do find myself spending more time there (i.e. staying logged on for a longer period) because of the blogging/article stream, much of which involves issues I'm interested in -- employment, technology, the markets, future trends. Truly, it is a Facebook for grownups, at least for me and my friends.

<comment><USER31> I'd rather just a big filter on Facebook and some added resume features for that. Let me create a professional profile and add professional friends to it. Add a searchable resume system and we're good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What do all those 9k employees do?

</comment><comment><USER33> Tbh, LinkedIn only has value if you are looking for a job. The majority of its features are nearly worthless to the general population of users.

This being the case I think there is an opportunity for a lean site with a narrow vertical [e.g. software devs which are heavily recruited by internal recruiters] to dislodge LinkedIn. Of course they'd have to solely sell your resume to recruiters. All the other revenue streams and related issues would have to be dropped.

<comment><USER34> There's a couple sites specifically catering to the software dev for hire vertical, like Hired.

Though I think software devs have a unique view of Linkedin, in that we have many other avenues for professional networking AND we are heavily recruited at all levels of experience. When the only real way to network is via mutual acquaintances (as opposed to open source projects, chat rooms, etc.) and you aren't getting spammed with every "game changing startup" Linkedin can give you real value.

<comment><USER33> > There's a couple sites specifically catering to the software dev for hire > vertical, like Hired.

Yeah but honestly they are all companies I'd personally avoid and haven't been happy with.

> Though I think software devs have a unique view of Linkedin, in that we have > many other avenues for professional networking AND we are heavily recruited > at all levels of experience. When the only real way to network is via mutual > acquaintances (as opposed to open source projects, chat rooms, etc.) and you > aren't getting spammed with every "game changing startup" Linkedin can give > you real value.

Yes but what value do you get out of it besides access to a network for a job search?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> March 28, 2016 at 2:13 am As the editor-in-chief of a management magazine (Strategy+Business, www.strategy-business.com), I have a different perspective on this.

The potential value of LinkedIn is as a vehicle for showing up professionally. Within a company, and often outside, people realize their aspirations by demonstrating what they can do distinctively.

That goes beyond having a personal brand: it involves having relationship equity, reputational equity, and competence – all of which accrue, over time, just as powerfully as interest-earning capital. LinkedIn is a vehicle for accelerating this, which is why it has value as a platform for publishing articles etc.

It's also why the spam issue is serious - to the extent it interferes with that platform.

The problem articulated here stems from a confusion between public and professional identities. They're not the same thing. They involve different kinds of equity. A public identity requires having a reputation and presence. We need to be able to publish, critique, and show up. LinkedIn is a platform.

A professional identity requires relationships and connection. For managing relationships, we need to be able to prune and prioritize people. Avoiding spam is critical. LinkedIn is a connection point. I too use it to find people and try to contact them.

For both purposes, we need aspirational guidance, damage control (dealing with rumors etc.), and the ability to have one place where people can always find us. To the extent LinkedIn offers these transparently, it can monetize them.

It hasn't, in my view, lost its vision. It's grappling with the fact that its vision is complicated. And the tools are not always clear. The user interface gets in the way. Is that a trust issue - or just a user experience issue?

Thanks for posting this . I appreciated this essay and the comments. Reply

</comment><comment><USER36> LinkedIn had... a vision? Since when?

</comment><comment><USER37> This resonates with me. I've already been planning to delete my LinkedIn account soon. Just having it and maintaining it has more cost than it provides me value. I'm just doing a few preparation steps before I do it (basically, a transition plan, like exporting all the valuable to me information from there into something I'm happier to maintain).

</comment><comment><USER38> LinkedIn never had a vision. They never thought big.

They should have aligned themselves with the worker bees, instead they are now synonymous with recruiters. They should have bought stackoverflow and github. I don't k is why the fuck they did not do that. Look at Facebook, it bought Instagram and whatsapp and kept itself relevant. LinkedIn failed in that aspect.

</comment><comment><USER39> Most of us, here, understand that the site has been only marginally useful for quite some time. Well, the company I'm contracted to just did a reorg a couple weeks ago, following an major headcount reduction last fall. In a STUNNING display of Dilertonian megacorp management, we were told, in a meeting, that we shouldn't be unhappy with where we were put in the new organization, because they used our LinkedIn profiles to sort it out. So, if you don't like where you wound up, they said, you should have been keeping your your LinkedIn profile up to date. I really should just delete the whole thing. It's done absolutely nothing for me, after all these years. And, while I wasn't affected by these moves, I see that it keeping it can, actually, work against me, professionally.

</comment><comment><USER40> A symptom of the lack of focus -- or giving up -- on the idea that people should have a reason to keep profiles up to date: acquiring Lynda.

The shift to content was already underway with Pulse et al., but purchasing Lynda indicated that LinkedIn needed to deduce interests and skills from viewing content, rather than get first-hand information from profiles.

In terms of resumes being more complete than LinkedIn, resumes let you do one thing you can't do with a public profile: scope your experience -- which is necessarily simplified to be on one page -- according to the role you're applying for.

</comment><comment><USER41> I found a solution to recruiter spam in LinkedIn. Instead of killing my account I just deleted all the details (positions and education) from my profile. Now I connect to ex-colleges without getting a lot of spam.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think that's the path of many companies. They have something good going but they are so overvalued that they have to grow at a much faster rate than their current market allows and so have find other ways to make money. Which in turn then often destroys their once good first product. I bet that will happen to Facebook and Google too. They better come up with something new to keep their growth going but it's really hard to find a market of the necessary size.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been on LinkedIn for about 10 years now. I still have no idea what it's for, or what I'm supposed to do on it. I don't even know if there's a way for me to pay to get different stuff than they show me. It clearly has an audience (every project manager I've had seems to love it), but that audience is equally clearly not me.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't keep my profile up to date because I don't see the value anymore. I did, once upon a time, keep it very up-to-date, but the only people who ever contacted me were headhunters for positions I had zero relevant experience for and would never be interested in.

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, I wish Facebook or Plus would create a "Professional" portal with a distinct friend list and profile page and searchable resumes so we could be done with this digital albatross.

</comment><comment><USER45> a big issue for them (as the article says) is incomplete profiles or profiles that aren't as filled out as the person's resume. i believe that is because a lot of, if not most, people embellish their resume to make what they did sound better than it actually was. you can't do that on a public profile since people will know you are bullshitting.

</comment><comment><USER46> I haven't paid much attention to LinkedIn in years, but it used to be all "consultants".

LinkedIn has a market cap of $14 billion. Which is just wrong for a company that's been around for years and is still losing money.</comment>


Show HN: Python Mongo Fluent Query Builder - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ziffusion/python-mongo-query

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool. I'm using mongo and python in one of my projects, might take a look at this.</comment>


Demonstration of Reversibility of Laminar Flow [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dbnH-BBSNo <comment><USER2> G. I. Taylor did it better!

See around the 13 minute mark: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-6QCJTAjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-6QCJTAjU)

</comment><comment><USER3> How well does this really work? It occurs to me that this could be used as a form of steganography.

<comment><USER4> Good luck transporting it without shaking it up. Even if you leave it in place for your counterparty to find, I'd bet that diffusion would render your "message" unreadable after just a few minutes.

<comment><USER5> Maybe one could freeze it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Better title: "Demonstration of Reversibility of Laminar Flow"

<comment> semi-extrinsic Nitpicking: it's not because the flow is laminar (which it is), but because it's approximately a Stokes flow.

If you sit down and non-dimensionalize the Navier-Stokes equations, you end up combining viscosity, density, a representative velocity and some representative distance into what we call the Reynolds number (Re). There's two smart places you can put it, and for very slow flows that's in front of the nonlinear term. When Re << 1 you can neglect that term, and you get the Stokes equation, which is time-reversible. If you can grok what the convective derivative really means, this starts to make intuitive sense.

I said there's another place you can put the Reynolds number, and that's 1/Re in front of the viscous term. So if you have an extremely fast flow, you can neglect viscosity, which also makes intuitive sense. Such inviscid flows are the gateway into understanding turbulence.</comment></comment>


Marco Arment: The new MacBook Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/1361316116

<comment><USER2> After several generations of netbooks, people are still pining for optical drives for the one or two times a year you wish you had one? I'd much rather the smaller form factor and a USB key for data transfer.

<comment><USER3> The best thing about an optical drive in a laptop is that in many laptops it is a bay so you can easily rip it out and shove a hard drive in there. This is so much more convenient and fast for doing backups or migrating OSes, or just hedging your bets on disk size (small SSD + huge platter is a great combo). Of course, this wouldn't apply to a Mac ...

<comment><USER4> Relevant: <http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/>

<comment><USER5> Yeah I used that optibay to put a second ssd in and raid it with my other ssd in my 17inch mbp. definitely worth it

<comment><USER6> Someone needs to create a filesystem optimized for something like two heterogeneous drives, like a 64GB SSD and a 500GB HDD. It would try to put larger files on the HDD (where storage space and sequential read/write speed are useful and random-access less critical) and smaller files on the SSD (which has better random access). This would rock! You'd have a really zippy laptop with scads of space.

<comment><USER7> Working on a driver for this. Watch this space. :) (been trying to go fulltime on this, financial constraints have been holding me back; I have a partial prototype working on Linux, Mac OS X is the next target)

That said, there are existing solutions for this, they just suck, e.g.:

<http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/laptop-hdd> (only 4GB Flash, WTF?)

[http://www.bit- tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/03/silverstone...](http://www.bit- tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/03/silverstone-announces-hybrid-ssd-hard- disk/1) (this is just a dumb partial RAID)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost> (designed to work with USB sticks of all things, and isn't terribly smart about what to cache)

<comment><USER6> What about a daemon that migrates files over and symlinks them?

<comment><USER7> Brittle. Many apps will delete and replace a file when writing. Now you have 2 copies, 1 out of date. You'd be mildly better off with a union file system, but there aren't any good ones I can find.

Plus, that sort of file-based system doesn't cache file system structure/metadata, which is a major source of disk head movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> """

It has a few huge improvements:

* Much higher resolution: 1440x900, up from 1280x800. This brings it from the 13" class to the 15" class. I've always wanted a light 13" notebook with a 15"-class screen resolution, and Apple just released one.

* SSDs only. The old Air base-model's 1.8" hard drives were unbearably slow. SSDs have always been the only sensible option for the Air, and it's nice that they're now the only option.

* Two USB ports instead of one. This matters more than you'd think.

* An SD-card reader (13" only). Useful if you often needed that USB port for a card reader, although this isn't a great photo-management computer.

* Ports that are perpendicular to the desk and aren't behind a flip-down door. So you can probably use any square-ended MagSafe adapter you already own to charge it without hanging the corner off the desk like with the old MacBook Air.

"""

My Lenovo x200s from like two years ago has a 12.1" 1440x900 screen, an SSD (option when I bought it, I did not, but the option was there), three USB ports (though I tried to plug in a bus-powered external drive today and the two plugs it had did not reach the spread of the ports on the laptop, thankfully it worked fine without the second plugged in), and an SD card reader. Just sayin'.

<comment><USER9> How thick is it?

<comment><USER10> About an inch, fairly flat front to back.

They 13-inch air and x20[01]s are very similar. Thinkpad advantages might be gig-e, vga port, thinkpad keyboard (if you like it), and possible i5 in the 201, and its built out of normal parts. To match the air's battery though, you have to get the big one, which bumps weight up to about 3.5 pounds, and the thinkpad costs more. The air does have nvidia graphics too.

I'd be tempted by the air if I hadn't bought the thinkpad a year ago, which to me, is the ultimate advantage it has.

<comment><USER8> Battery life depends what you run on it. I get almost 4 hours on the 4-cell, about 10 on the 9-cell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I disagree with his opinion of the MacBook Pro glass screen. I think it looks great, it's very easy to clean, and it simply doesn't scratch. It's one of the main reasons I went with a MacBook Pro.

Between the all-aluminum enclosure and the glass screen, you'll have a laptop that will always look almost as good as the day you bought it, and that means great things for resale value.

On the other hand, my original plastic MacBook looked very aged after two years of heavy use.

<comment><USER12> Man you must treat your MBP pretty delicately. My MPB looks like it got in a fight with a baseball bat and an angle grinder, and I carried it around in a padded laptop backpack for only a year.

Thank goodness I almost never put disks in the drive the case around the opening is so bent I don't think I can anything in or out of there.

(The screen still looks pretty good even if I can't ever seem to get the brightness to where I want it).

<comment><USER13> How did you manage to do that?!?! ;)

I put mine in my messenger bag and have ridden to work every for a year with it and the only thing with any signs of wear are the feet.

<comment><USER12> I wish I knew. I do know when the drive got wrecked, it was after sitting in my carry on after a 16 hour plane ride overseas. I don't even take it out anymore I'm so scared about the fragility of it. I have to say this, overall it looks better after a year of hard use than most of my Dells.

My other notebooks look terrible too, but I attribute that to cheap plastic. Little pieces broken off on the corners, battery that won't stay in place, etc.

I use computers _hard_ if you can't tell.

<comment><USER13> Before my MBP I had a black MacBook. It was nice but much closer in durability to a PC. The matte surface got shined up in the corners a lot worse than the Thinkpad T before it.

At this point, I doubt I'd buy another laptop without the all metal unibody construction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The new Airs are nice but I still don't fully get the appeal. I still have to rave about my Sony Vaio VGN-TZ390 for the ultimate portable workhorse.

Core 2 Duo U7700 @ 1.33Ghz, 1366x768 11.1" WXGA LCD, 128 Gig SSD, 2 Gig RAM, 2 USB, a/b/g/n WiFi, Sprint Mobile Broadband, BlueTooth, DVD±RW DL, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Firewire, V.90 Modem, VGA out, ExpressCard, Memory Stick, and SD slots, 1.3Mp Camera, Fingerprint reader, 10+ hours actual use on medium size battery, carbon fiber body, less than 1 inch thick and 2.7 pounds. Also has 'instant on' to watch DVDs, music, or photos without booting the OS.

It may be 2 years old but is still only 0.4 pounds heavier than the Mini-Air and 0.13 inches thicker. And it offers a LOT more features wise.

<comment><USER15> The appeal is that it is small and light Mac. The described computer is heavier and has a slower CPU and is not Mac.

<comment><USER16> For what it's worth, the _current_ Sony Z model uses an i7 (and dual SSDs in RAID 0). It's significantly more powerful than anything Apple has in the 13" form factor, coming in at about the same weight as the new 13" Air (3.04 lbs). Actually, its i7 is the same speed as the 17" MBP's top option.

<comment><USER15> That sounds cool. Still not a Mac though. Maybe very very few people will hack it and run Mac OS X on it, but many people who buy Macs just want something that works out of the box.

<comment><USER16> > Still not a Mac though.

In the more general market of consumers that want a ~3 pound 13" device, the ones that see Win7 vs. OS X as an important differentiating factor are a small minority. For the market served by the underpowered Air, a Win 7 laptop will "just work" every bit as well as a Macbook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I bought the first generation macbook air (with SSD) when it first hit the stores and it was almost worth it just for the "wow" factor at conferences. I put it on the table at a meeting and an EA exec yelled "hey, why don't you just slam your huge elephant dick on the table?". That was worth $10 right there.

Anyhow I always found it to be unbearably slow - particularly when browsing to a new web server in a session. As if the dns lookup was.... thrashing somehow. I figured I was too dimwitted to figure out the problem after doing a bit of research, so it's rotting on the shelf.

Also, Marco is right - it's way too big to use in coach when the person in front leans back. Thankfully.... Ipad for air travel. Be curious to see what the 11" is like.

<comment><USER12> The 11" is about the same size as a netbook, which I can tell you from experience works fantastic in a coach seat. Even with room for a mouse!

<comment><USER18> I don't see the point in carrying a mouse if you go for the Air (or any MacBook for that matter); the touchpad is incredible.

<comment><USER12> Oh, I totally agree, I wouldn't bring a mouse along with an 11" MBA. Just making the point how well this type of form factor works in small spaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The battery life, while not terrible, isn't as good as a 13" or 15" MacBook Pro."

Actually, the battery life is measured using a more real world benchmark now. Jobs mentioned it has improved quite a bit compared to the macbook pro.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Jobs mistakenly said that the new 13" Air had more pixels than the 15". That's wrong: the 15" is the same by default, at 1440x900, and has a $100 option to raise it to 1680x1050. For reference, 1680x1050 is similar to many standalone 20" LCDs. ↩"

I think here that Jobs was referring to pixel density.

</comment><comment><USER21> You know how Apple has been gobbling up share in the the university market over the last few years? I have a feeling the Air is going accelerate that growth and become the notebook of choice on college campuses.

<comment><USER22> Maybe with faculty, especially those who travel much. I think students will lean toward the macbook as being better value for the money.

<comment><USER23> How many students spend their own money for college expenses? How often are laptops for students gifts from parents, friends, relatives?

<comment><USER22> It's not just about the money, it's about capability. The $999 MacBook has a 2.4GHz CPU and a 250GB hard drive, and the same GPU.

I work in a medical school neuroscience lab with a bunch of grad students and postdocs. Everyone has a Mac laptop, paid for by the lab. Two postdocs have MacBooks. Everyone else has a MacBook Pro. Except the PI who runs the lab, who has an MBA. The only one in the lab. He values small size and weight more than anyone else. He also travels more than anyone else.

I don't see many MBAs around campus.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. Students are also likely to have it as their _only_ machine - and IMHO the MBA is a very enticing _supplementary_ computer, but I'd be loathe to have it as my only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The new MBA does look fantastic, but I'm still pretty happy with my MBPro and iPad combination. I reserve the Pro for development work and intentionally keep all distracting applications and sites off of it (I block sites so I'm not tempted). I then use the iPad for travel and for most of my computing needs in the evenings or weekends such as browsing, reading, videos, games, etc. The MBA could fill the role well, but since I already have an iPad, I don't see myself switching or having both.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why did they remove the keyboard light? That is an essential feature for me. I guess I'm gonna cling to my current MBA until it dies instead of upgrading for better hardware :(

<comment><USER27> Generally people prefer to look at the screen. Extraneous lights are distracting.

<comment><USER28> For one of the primary usecases (frequent traveler) the backlit keyboard is pretty important--try typing on a dark plane with the backlight off. Fine most of the time, but when you have to hunt for which symbol is which, or you're not a great touch typer, then you're going to have a much harder time.

That said, my guess is that it's a major battery-suck, and that's why they took it out. White LEDs require non-trivial amounts of power.

<comment><USER6> I'd gladly "settle" for red LED backlights!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the logical next step is to replace the physical keyboard part of the Macbook with an iPad, which is okay to type on, and the keyboard can go away and become one big touch surface on demand, with graphics.

This also introduces a new class of touch-input aware Mac apps, which Apple can channel through its new App store.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Ideally I'd weigh a glass 15" on my scale to compare more fairly, but I don't have one, and I don't yet have the balls to walk into an Apple store with my kitchen scale._

I've walked into the Houston Galleria Apple Store with a hand truck. Sure, some smarmy guy made some comment like, "What is, this, Walmart?" but who cares? I have a bad back, FFS. Anyone who'd make a comment like that is most assuredly lamer than an empiricist who does whatever it takes.

</comment><comment><USER30> The iPad and the Macbook Air need to basically become the same product.

Kind of like the tablet laptops Toshiba was shipping about 7 years ago. You open the laptop and it's a Macbook with touchscreen display and keyboard. You swivel the screen flat onto the keyboard and it's an iPad. Maybe some apps work in only one mode or the other, but your files will be available to both kinds of apps, X and iOS.

<comment><USER31> You know that this has been tried many times before, and was the original tablet form factor, and it failed.

Now, you can get the Air and an ipad for a lot cheaper than any of those tablets.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps, but nobody wants to carry around (and charge, and sync) two devices when they could carry around just one.

If I had a device that worked like a MacBook _and_ an iPad, so I could use it like a laptop at a cafe and like a pad on the train, that would be a pretty damn neat device to have. And eventually, I probably will.

<comment><USER33> Something like this: [http://aidacase.com/keycase-folio-deluxe-with-built-in- keybo...](http://aidacase.com/keycase-folio-deluxe-with-built-in-keyboard-for- ipad.html) might work for you eventually, though it may seem silly. I think the difference in this is that you can just open the front flap for quick, instant-on tablet access, and unfold it further for keyboard usage vs. having to set up / maintain two different systems or use a tilt/swivel joint to access the touchscreen.

<comment><USER32> Something like that would be good, yes. Though obviously MacOS-based and not iPad-based, cuz I need my Terminal.app et cetera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't seem to understand Apple's move with the huge price drop in the Air. I feel like the Air is a much better alternative to the iPad, and this causes Apple to compete with its own product.

People make a big deal about tablets. Personally, I don't see them as the next big thing. Do you think Apple is straying away from them, given their somewhat underwhelming sales?

<comment><USER35> Do you think that maybe your desire for tablets to not be "the next big thing" is shading your assessment of iPad sales? The iPad outsold ALL Macs this quarter, so no, Apple is not likely cooling its heels on the tablet thing.

<comment><USER35> Clarification: Even if other companies can figure out how to make a decent tablet, still a pretty big if, who knows if tablets will be a "big thing" for the computer industry as a whole. The iPad is clearly already the next big thing for Apple. The ruling concern among Mac users -- a large enough concern that Apple made a point of addressing today -- is that Apple is focusing too much on iOS devices and "straying" from the Mac.

<comment><USER6> _who knows if tablets will be a "big thing" for the computer industry as a whole_

The hardware configuration inside of an iPad is destined to become commodity. Eventually, those things will be like displays and mice. The value for Apple will be in the software and software-ecosystem running on the iDevices of the future. (Also in the cloud.)

More comfortable and natural input and display naturally sell. Such tablets are both!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If these had ethernet, I think it would be the most perfect laptop for me, ever. I'm still tempted though, but can't help think that the next Macbook Pro revision will be even more exciting.

Steve specifically said he saw these as the future Macbook. They have higher resolution screens than the 13 inch Macbook Pro and have flash drives standard. Also, mentioning the no optical drive as the future if I remember correctly. It makes me super excited about the next Macbook Pro, especially the 13 inch (the 15 inch and 17 inch are way to big in my opinion).

</comment><comment><USER37> Hopefully they will further expand the new Air lineup with a 15" model boasting 1680x1050 screen (as available for the current 15" MBP). That would be the ultimate all-around Mac workstation for me.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd recently discovered 5Ghz wireless, which gives OK speeds to my Time Capsule, no need for ethernet - which I've been using for transferring big files, 720/1080p video.

</comment><comment><USER39> The camera is now called a "FaceTime camera" unlike all the other Apple laptops which have "iSight camera." I wonder if there is a significance to the name change.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does it run Linux?

<comment><USER41> Probably

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations Apple! You've finally put a netbook on the market and figured out how to charge 3x for it by removing all of the USB ports and putting a better screen in it!

<comment><USER42> Huh? The MBAs have 2 USB ports, one on each side.

That's one more than they had in the past. ;-)

<comment><USER12> Well...33% fewer then.

I mean really, didn't Jobs explicitly say that they would not release a device in this form factor? If this isn't Apple's take on a netbook I don't know what is.

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358514,00.asp>

At least do something cool with it like let me flip the screen around and use it as a tablet or put a micro projector on it or something for that money.

<comment><USER22> It's not the form factor it's the cheap quality of $400 netbooks.

Jobs said they couldn't make something in that price class without it being crap.

<comment><USER12> Looking at how I just burned 8 points of karma (and probably now more with this post), I guess I should have just done like everybody else and parroted the new marketing talking points and pretended to debate the merit of 11 inches or 13 inches.

 _(burn baby burn!)_

<comment><USER35> Yours is clearly a case of being downvoted unfairly.

<comment><USER43> Indeed. I actually think that paying 3 times as much for something not so different (a nice netbook vs a mba) is hard to justify purely by the differences in quality (in software and hardware).

In other words, it's because of the apple fanboys that are willing to write blank checks just to get their newest white gizmo =) And those fanboys are the same that downvoted both you and elblanco.

PS: Maybe it's just me, but this fanboyism seems more proper over reddit than here.

<comment><USER12> BTW, even though it shows only -4 on my posts, I've lost far more than 12 points of karma. PG appears to actually be counting the downvotes these days even if he's only showing -4. I think I just bled away about 25 points last night because people can't accept that an 11" notebook with an SSD and no optical drive is a netbook.

<comment><USER44> I'll hazard a guess that quite a lot of that bleeding isn't because people can't accept that, but because you whined about losing karma.

<comment><USER12> Oh no, I lost that karma way before I whined about it. I knew as soon as I posted that it's just a karma burning exercise. Any contrary (or slightly contrary) post in a discussion about Apple is pretty much treated like leprosy. I know that going in. I was just observing that the algorithm appears to have changed and now downvotes are all counted regardless of what the displayed score is.

<comment><USER44> You didn't lose all of it before you whined. I know that because I downvoted your whine about being downvoted, and didn't downvote your bah-it's-just-a- netbook comments.

(I have a policy of always downvoting whines about being downvoted and "I know I'll be downvoted for this ..." comments and so forth, because (1) they're boring and (2) I have a nasty suspicion that they produce net-positive results for their authors and want to make them not do so.)

<comment><USER12> So I lost 80% of it pre-whine...any other hairs you'd like to look at cutting?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lecture 20: Later-Stage Advice - <AUTHOR> http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec20/

<comment><USER2> I just wanted to say thank you to Sam and YC for creating this class and putting it all online. I enjoyed each of them and its most probable that these set of lectures are going to return more value to me over my life than any of the other classes I am taking right now in college.

<comment><USER3> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really nice advice.

The company I founded just hit 25 employees and I just got finished spending a couple quarters trying to ignore management because it seemed cooler to have no structure, and working on a project in hero mode because I got over-excited about it... wish it had come out 6 months ago :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sam, I'm just just wondering if you could expand on your productivity advice? You said that you:

\- Have 1 piece of paper with 3-12 month goals that you look at every day

\- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each day of these goals? Can you expand on this?

\- Have a tool/paperstack/book? for each employee? Can you expand on this?

I'm working on my own method similar to this and I'm just curious about your preference of paper vs. book vs. tools.

Thanks in advance! Micah

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't seen this lecture yet, but I also want to thank you Sam and all other people who had lectures.

These 2.5 months have been very interesting and being from the other part of the world I don't have access to these kind of people and information. The people I know and hang out who have created companies have revenues of a couple of millions when they have something "big", surely not billions.

I hope one day to be also part of the YC family

</comment><comment><USER7> Great lecture series. Favourite part of this lecture was hearing about all of the distractions that founders will face throughout the life of their startup (especially if they're successful). Getting a heads up on what to expect is the first step towards planning on how to deal with it.

Here are 42 quotes I picked up from the lecture that I've published here: [https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/42-quotes-from-sam- altman-o...](https://medium.com/@RajenSanghvi/42-quotes-from-sam-altman-on- later-stage-startup-advice-6c3d1cc4431d)

P.S. I've somewhat religiously been watching/taking notes from these lectures since they started. I really agree with a lot of the comments here, that it's been a very practical lecture series with lots of tactical advice that you can directly apply to your startup (as opposed to high level strategy discussions). Thanks to YC and Sam for putting this together.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have found these series very entertaining and there have been some great suggestions along the way. I know that Sam is not going to organise such a course, but it would be great to have a series on the non-vc path on how to start a start up (the unfairly defamed lifestyle businesses).

</comment><comment><USER9> We are a company with 20 People and this is really a great lecture for me personally (Single Founder with Organic growth and never raised outside investment). Thanks for doing this.

The whole lecture series is great addition to startup community and will be useful for founders everywhere for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks Sam. For me the note on how you stay personally organised and the last answer I.e 'wait till it's working' were little insights that may make a big difference. Ta!

</comment><comment><USER11> These were amazing lectures. Only suggestion is to have longer q&a's at the end with the speakers. Well done and thank you!

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, thanks to Sam and all the speakers who made this possible, The advice was really good!

</comment><comment><USER13> Good end, to a great set of lectures. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER14> Surprisingly good, thoughtful, experienced, well informed, mature. Definitely get the transcript and slides.

For some of the work, e.g., trademarks, I would suggest getting those filed earlier than "later-stage". Similarly for the bookkeeping, tax planning and taxes, accounting, employee benefits, stock planning, where to put the intellectual property to lease back to the operating business, etc.

Altman suggested each year, for the first 10 years, assign another 3-5% of the stock to employees. That sounds generous and like it would create one heck of an internal fight for stock.

Once an apparently wise adviser told me, "Never give stock to an employee who doesn't contribute directly to earnings.".

For some more on leadership and culture, also draw from the AVC.com blog user JLM's contributions and links, often back to JLM's Web site, at Fred Wilson's blog AVC.com. JLM has long been the most popular contributor to that blog.

Altman seemed to want a fairly strict organizational hierarchy. He recognized that too little hierarchical organization can be bad but was not clear on just how much a good hierarchy should do.

A strict hierarchy can lead to a lot of _goal subordination_ (where a middle manager works for their own interests largely against the interests of the company), process and formality over reality and progress, fighting with people down the hall instead of against problems inside the company or competitors outside, arrogance, fear that any effort at innovation could have a lot of downside with nearly no chance of upside, fear that good success could lead to jealousy and attacks from above, narrowly just _managing_ the existing business with no interest in progress for new business directions or even for the existing business, etc.

For how to get work done and evaluate employees outside of just a strict hierarchy, I'm entertaining borrowing from other work. E.g., when someone sees a problem, find a likely person, or for a really big problem a person and some assistants for a team, and (a) have them investigate and write a paper and give a presentation describing the problem, its importance, etc. If continue, then (b) have them do some research and write a paper, etc., on proposed solutions and give a presentation. (c) If continue, then have them write a paper, etc., planning the implementation of the solution. (d) If continue, then have them write a paper on the implementation with budgets, other resources, milestones, quality control, due dates, progress reporting, etc. (e) If continue, then have them proceed as in (d).

At employee evaluation time, look at the papers and, especially, the completed projects.

I definitely intend to get the transcript and slides. Apparently Altman has learned a lot, somewhere, in his own start-ups, watching YC start-ups, somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER15> 20 videos already. Great work. 17/20.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks!</comment>


There's No Bigger Grift in Business Than the Consultant - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/enhttps://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/theres-no-bigger-grift-in-business-than-the-consultant-us/story/theres-no-bigger-grift-in-business-than-the-consultant <comment><USER2> Bad link. [https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/theres-no-bigger- grift-i...](https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/theres-no-bigger-grift-in- business-than-the-consultant)</comment>


Why Is No One Talking About LENR Cold Fusion? - <AUTHOR> https://edgylabs.com/2017/03/29/lenr-cold-fusion/ <comment><USER2> I've been following LENR since late 2011, have had a google alert since then. I have follwed it for so long without any big break through that I have about given up. There are some big companies that have got involved, makes me think there is something to it but, I have ben thinking that for 6 years!

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as the petro dollar slavery system controls the world no new energy technologies will be allowed. Anyone attempting to bring new technology to market is given a choice. Silver or lead.</comment>


A Python 2 to 3 Migration Guide - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pyspoken.com/2018/02/13/python-2-to-3-migration-guide/ <comment><USER2> That's a nice summary, with good advice on the things to watch out for, and the things to not worry about so much.</comment>


Ask HN: Service to rent a movie and watch with person in another country? - <AUTHOR> Is there such a service? One person should be able to pay for both, and it doesn't have to sync. <comment><USER2> If you don't care about them syncing, most movie rental services that I'm aware of offer gift cards that you can give to the other party, or you can gift them the specific movie.</comment>


Volkswagen plans 30K job cuts worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38023933 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if these are actually layoffs. In the German news it sounded more like nobody is getting fired - so perhaps they are simply not replacing workers who retire?

<comment><USER3> Yes, they are going to give older workers good conditions for early retirement and will not replace those exact positions. The work council has agreed to the conditions.

Also, they are creating 9k new jobs in e-mobility.

<comment><USER4> Trouble is the "good ones" take the redundancy in a lot of cases

<comment><USER5> yes, probably b/c the good ones know they can find employment elsewhere without too much difficulty.

<comment><USER6> Not that simple. Depends on the deal but taking retirement and redundancy are very different things.

This looks like a retirement package which means they can't take a new job, if I understand it correctly.

Having faced layoff in both Europe and US. The laws are a world apart.

<comment><USER7> Cant take a new job! I cant believe that it violates so many eu rules and the employees human rights.

Of course it might not make sense if you are near state retirement age.

Of course this is outwith things like medical retirement ie you have a terminal illness

<comment><USER8> Why would it violate anything?

When you retire, you are basically stating that you are unfit or unwilling to continue working, and as such the company you have worked for all this time should continue to pay your living expenses.

Getting a new job basically says that you can and want to continue working.

<comment><USER7> Well id need to see the schemes rules but certainly in the UK you can take a pension now and work - or you can defer it and take it later.

Typically you would defer and work at the new job 90% of the people who built out the uk's mobile network did this.

They took redundancy from the GPO /BT got a huge pay off (3 years salary tax free) and 6 extra years on the pension and then worked for the competition.

And a pension is deferred pay not some grace and favour hand out from a feudal lord. And for some DB schemas when you hit the max years it makes sense to take redundancy as you cant build up any more pension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most interesting thing in that article for me is that the profit margin that VW has at the moment is just 2%. A relatively small drop in car sales (from, say, autonomous Ubers?) could eat their entire profit and then some. Is the entire car industry run like that?

<comment><USER10> VW has long suffered from very low levels of productivity. According to Bloomberg, they employ as many people as Toyota and GM combined while making half as many cars as the combined entity.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-11-18/vw- job-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-11-18/vw-job-cuts- sound-big-but-do-little-to-boost-efficiency)

Part of the problem are the unions and a large ownership stake by the state, which is naturally not very interested in having their constituent lose their jobs.

<comment><USER11> > _Part of the problem are the unions and a large ownership stake by the > state_

That's interesting. I thought VW had been fully privatized, but TIL the German state of Lower Saxony still owns 20% of the company - [http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/content/en/invest...](http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/content/en/investor_relations/share/Shareholder_Structure.html)

<comment><USER12> Usually a shareholder needs to own more than 25% of the shares to veto major decisions. For Volkswagen there is a special law lowering this requirement to 20%, which conveniently is the number of shares the state of Lower Saxony owns.

This law also requires a two-third majority in the board of directors (which is distinct from the executive board) to set-up or close down factories. Half of the members in the board of directors are (as in all large German companies) employee representatives, granting them a veto power for those decisions.

<comment><USER13> This description sounds quite communistic i guess.. But it works really well for everybody.. Some restructuring is necessary though- the whole affair is prone to dig into a technology-tree-branch and stay stuck there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reading the title this sounds like PR for "regulate us, lose jobs."

But the actual content of the article suggest restructuring for a more sustainable future.

</comment><comment><USER15> The central issue here is also that Volkswagen is going to change massively over the next 10 years. They are about to invest billions in e-mobility, connectivity, and autonomous driving. So the competition among car manufacturers, esp. Tesla and the rest, is going to increase over the next years. Tesla we be on new grounds in 10 years from now.

<comment><USER16> Or they are going to find themselves so far behind that they have to buy into a Google ecosystem to run their cars and like Android manufacturers they find themselves in the declining hardware margin business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Volkswegnehmen

</comment><comment><USER18> I fail to see how this is HN related. Any hints are welcome.

<comment><USER19> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I guess I deserved the down votes for not reading this before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow ... so Executives who were actually responsible for taking this decisions will get away with it and staff will get fired. Always blame low level engineer seems to be the mantra.

<comment><USER21> If that matters the former CEO immediately accepted responsibility and resigned in 2015.

I believe, these are further consequences of the budget cut, they are NOT blaming low level engineers for the emission scandal...

<comment><USER20> Yes they are. [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen- pulls-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen- pulls-2016-diesel-lineup-from-us-market/)

<comment><USER22> What if it's true?

<comment><USER23> VAG said they had come clean, and now there's another software defeat going through in some Audi models now. _Another_ rogue engineer? That hardly seems credible. Corporate bad faith and malfeasance? They're already in the thick of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Citymapper moves to disrupt London transport - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/citymapper-smart-ride-ceo-smart-bus-make-money <comment><USER2> Citymapper is a fantastic app, but I still wonder how "operate a bus/taxi/... service" can be a successful monetisation strategy. Happy to be proved wrong though.

Looks like Uber is doing something similar: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16435877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16435877)</comment>


10 tips for making money selling domains on Flippa - <AUTHOR> http://hack.ly/articles/10-tips-for-making-money-selling-domains-on-flippa/ <comment><USER2> Anyone interested in 'haber-ery.com' or 'productbacklog.com' ? email me.</comment>


Multi 10 Gbit RX/TX with PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ntop.org/pf_ring/introducing-pf_ring-zc-zero-copy/

<comment><USER2> FYI compiling a libpcap with PF_RING and having to recompile everything that depends on it can be a real bear if you're trying to do it via the operating system's package manager (tcpdump, wireshark, etc), but it is totally worth it.

PF_RING will let you do wire rate pcaps with 0 dropped packets.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different than Netmap [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2103536](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2103536)</comment>


Quora: Guaranteed $1B Company - <AUTHOR> http://startuphoodlum.com/2010/07/31/quora-revolutionary-content-creation/

<comment><USER2> Quora is nice and I hope they do quite well, but I don't understand how it's revolutionary.

It's been done before. They're free to do it better. Personally, I think SO came up with some really great ways to do this sort of thing. Yahoo and Google both had properties that did questions and answers along with countless smaller ones.</comment>


San Francisco's most walkable neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/San_Francisco

<comment><USER2> It appears to me that the list only takes into account how easily you can get around and get things done by walking, and not needing to drive. I wonder what the numbers would look like if they also took the relative safety of the neighborhoods into account.</comment>


Show HN: Read articles with context, wikipedia snippets of people or interests - <AUTHOR> http://contextually.in/ <comment><USER2> The idea is good, but I think this is trying to do too much.

Perhaps you could not teleport the user to a foreign page, but let him do these things right on the page he is? Perhaps not try to do fancy word extraction, but just let the user highlight words or expressions he wants to search on the page itself? My humble suggestions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Having snippets in the same page is a good idea! We wanted to strip out all the clutter (and ads) for better reading experience.

Will add it in the next update.</comment></comment>


Buffett on crypto: 'I can say with certainty that it will end badly' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/buffett-says-cyrptocurrencies-will-almost-certainly-end-badly.html <comment><USER2> Can anyone give a really simple English paraphrase of what Buffett is saying?</comment>


Sergey Brin's Resume (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html

<comment><USER2> What fascinates me most here is when and how he and Page transformed over into doing public business with their research, not just keep working on it academically. Lots of my friends are working through their often very interesting thesis projects, tangled up in this academia lifestyle, but they all seem to be drifting away further and further from the ability to ever put this into a business context. Not that this is necessary or what many want to do with their research, but I really was just curious how Sergey and Larry made that shift.</comment>


BlueJeans also runs a webserver when installed on macOS - <AUTHOR> https://support.bluejeans.com/s/article/BlueJeans-Detector-Service <comment><USER2> Typical "My functionality is the only thing that matters" pretentious mindset.

It's a general purpose personal computer. Not some device you sold me which exists for the purpose of solely connecting to your app.

Let's treat automobiles the same way you'd like us to treat computers. I go to a Shell station to fill up with gas. They have custom nozzles, and I have to drill a hole and weld on a special fitting to get gas. Two days later I go to BP and fill up again. They have proprietary nozzles that don't work with Shell fittings. So I drill another hole and weld on another fitting. 6 months and 40 gas stations later my car barely moves because it's a tragic mess of holes and ugly shit welded all over it. Why? Well I might want to stop at a Shell station in the future.

F __* that and any company who operates this way.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit of an arms race between bluejeans, zoom, webex, gotmeeting, teams for who can get people into a meeting with the least friction. The people requesting meetings are probably also the ones requesting "make it easier for people to get into my meetings."

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To remove the BlueJeans daemon, run:

launchctl remove com.bluejeansnet.BlueJeansHelper rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.bluejeansnet.BlueJeansHelper.plist

Then delete the app from /Applications

</comment><comment><USER4> Have these video conferencing services never heard about External Protocol Requests in browsers? It's a much less hacky, and much more secure method to pull off this same feature-set.

<comment><USER5> Zoom responded to this point [1]:

> This is a workaround to a change introduced in Safari 12 that requires a > user to confirm that they want to start the Zoom client prior to joining > every meeting. The local web server enables users to avoid this extra click > before joining every meeting. We feel that this is a legitimate solution to > a poor user experience problem, enabling our users to have faster, one- > click-to-join meetings. We are not alone among video conferencing providers > in implementing this solution.

Presumably they're both doing the janky web server solution for the same reason. Either way, I'm not sold, that browser behavior exists for for a reason.

[1]: [https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/07/08/response-to- video-...](https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/07/08/response-to-video-on- concern/)

<comment><USER6> Wow that is really damning, trashing user security in trade to remove a single click that makes it clear as to what is happening.

This totally breaks Apple's Developer Terms right?

<comment><USER7> > Wow that is really damning, trashing user security in trade to remove a > single click

As someone who has had to develop and maintain a similar web-to-desktop bridge I can tell you that this one issue was responsible for around 90% of my company's total support requests, despite only being a small feature in a optional addon in one of our main products.

For businesses just trying to keep their customers happy, this particular one click is a very real problem.

I can absolutely symphetize with people trying to come up with workarounds.

<comment><USER8> Did your company try to write an FAQ page on how to accept the double-confirm dialogs in all major browsers (with screenshots) to maybe reduce your "90% of support tickets"? Does your ticketing software redirect you to (or display) an FAQ page that matches the ticket title?

I've come to understand how features like these get built, but I've also come to understand that people that use software are a lot more resilient and savvy than we think.

If 90% of your support tickets are about getting through a standard double- confirm, patio11 would probably recommend increasing your pricing to limit your paying customers to a pool that probably won't have much more trouble with that.

<comment><USER9> Ahhh, sweet naivety.

The people who end up calling support often aren't the ones paying the bill, for starters. That's _definitely_ the case for Bluejeans and Zoom.

It also doesn't matter if you make a great FAQ page. Majority of dissatisfied people will never see it. Majorly because they won't call support but instead complain and grumble locally, the second biggest portion because once sent towards FAQ by support.... They won't follow it.

Only the tiny sliver of most dedicated will follow up long enough to reach the FAQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the advertised "features":

> Launch the BlueJeans desktop application into a meeting without prompting > the user with confusing browser dialogs. This allows meetings to launch > quickly on one click without requiring any additional user interaction. It > also prevents the user from making a wrong decision on a browser dialog > which might permanently lock them out of launching meetings.

<comment><USER10> join.me seems to have solved this problem effortlessly, and taking a gander at procs, I only see a client running. The BlueJeans rationale here isn't passing my anecdotal sniff-test...

<comment><USER11> Only problem I've found with join.me is performance. My experience may not be common, but there is so much stuttering with join.me that it's unusable... And I've tried it multiple times on different days with different people.

<comment><USER12> Aren't you talking about their actual video stream though? The focus here seems to be on _initiating_ the conference, which join.me does without installing a hidden web server on a users machine the way Zoom and BlueJeans do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this site completely unusable with cookies disabled? All I see is this:

Technical Stuff

To view this site, enable cookies in your browser.

<comment><USER14> Least you get something. I get a blank page when JS is disabled...

<comment><USER10> _BlueJeans extends the war on its users to the browser_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand the rationale here:

> Determine if the BlueJeans desktop application is already installed. This > allows us to offer a new installation or launch the existing app based on > the user's machine.

If the "Detector" is installed, but the desktop app is not the user removed the BlueJeans app at some point because they didn't want it. How is silently installing it again against the user's prior wishes a reasonable behaviour?

<comment><USER16> I don't think that's the rationale behind this. If a user is clicking a link to start a BlueJeans session, then it's not against the user's prior wishes anymore. It's the user's current wish to start a BlueJeans meeting and that wish requires the BlueJeans app to continue. Without the "detector", the link click just fails and nothing happens. With the detector, it's determined that the app isn't installed and the user is _prompted_ to install BlueJeans. Otherwise, the app is opened and the correct meeting is started/joined. Nothing is silently done here.

That being said, this is still a crappy way to do this. Installing a server is not the solution to this. Browsers need to do a better job of dealing with this and that would get rid of the root issue but, in the interim, these developers need to figure out a better way than installing web servers on everyone's machine. Otherwise, everyone's computer ends up with 10000 of these stupid little single-purpose applications that are always running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unrelated note:

>"Your browser isn't supported

This browser won't play nicely with some features on this site. For the best experience, update your browser to the latest version, or switch to another browser."

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Update to what browser? (Using Firefox on Android, latest version)

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually that means "use the IE6 of our times, aka Chrome".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > However, this dialog is an annoyance to the user at best, and at worst may > scare the user into denying a legitimate request.

It is a great security feature at best. It tells me that a website I visited is about to launch something on my computer. A website launching an app on my machine scares me more than any pop up.

</comment><comment><USER19> Logitech also runs a local webserver. It's listening on port 4800. I've never even used a Logitech video conference. I do have a Logitech camera though, so perhaps this is from the driver.

/Library/Application Support/Logitech/com.logitech.vc.LogiVCCoreService/LogiVCCoreService.app/Contents/MacOS/LogiVCCoreService

</comment><comment><USER20> Found the BlueJeans server listening on :18171

To test if the BlueJeans server is running:

      lsof -i  :18171

</comment><comment><USER21> > It also prevents the user from making a wrong decision on a browser dialog > which might permanently lock them out of launching meetings.

> This allows us to offer a new installation or launch the existing app based > on the user's machine.

These all sound like problems that can be solved by fixing the interface itself and by polling for a desktop client connection.

<comment><USER22> However, the developers of this software have no way to force browser developers to "fix their interface." So they make a workaround instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Has anyone found a similar vulnerability with the BlueJeans local server? I tried sending a few test URLs and they don't seem to do anything so I'm not sure what the protocol is. If BlueJeans can't cause a webpage to launch it's app like Zoom does then I'm less concerned.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why is this news?

A lot of desktop applications do this. The Spotify client used to do it to enable play/pause controls from any webpage. Dropbox also definitely used the same method for single sign on, maybe still does, I don't use it anymore.

<comment><USER25> You've used past tense in all your examples. Is it still true? As Apple has moved more towards a system with GateKeeper where apps must operate in a sandbox, this behavior seems less acceptable in 2019. I don't want apps having complete access to my home directory because they absolutely do not need it to function.

I like that when I remove an app installed via App Store on Mac, I know it's actually gone. It seems like this was part of the thing that people couldn't stand about Windows — spyware coming along for the ride that is not removed when you delete the main app.

<comment><USER22> Use the App Store and the preference setting to only allow App Store apps if you want that behavior.

Macs are general purpose computers and it would be absolutely inappropriate for Apple to try to prevent users from running software on them.

<comment><USER26> Look, all that makes sense if users are giving _informed consent_ to have an app install a web server. Users should be able to run whatever they want, but they should also know what an app is installing.

At least the Bluejeans people have this page. The Zoom people did the same thing (possibly worse), but it was undocumented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It looks like if you delete Blue Jeans.app and then restart (or log out), the webserver won't relaunch. It will attempt to run on load, but the actual script to start it invokes the app binary with a special argument, so deleting the app is sufficient.

The "log out" part is because the webserver will presumably continue running in memory after deleting the app until you force it to quit. It's possible that it watches for the app to be thrown away, but I don't have any way of testing that right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm the case of BlueJeans, the server sits inside the app bundle.

<comment><USER27> What's rather curious is it uses what appeared to be a nodejs server stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Blue Jeans/, but it passes the path to that to the app bundle (I can't inspect it further since I already deleted that whole folder). My best guess is Blue Jeans wanted the ability to update the server independently of the app, though I don't know why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am learning about a lot of video conferencing solutions for all the wrong reasons this week, between this and Zoom.

</comment><comment><USER29> Deleted, what garbage</comment>


Google Engineers Explain Why They Stopped R&D in Renewable Energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8630724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8630724)</comment>


The South's Economy Is Falling Behind: 'All of a Sudden the Money Stops Flowing' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-souths-economy-is-falling-behind-all-of-a-sudden-the-money-stops-flowing-11560101610 <comment><USER2> [https://youtu.be/RN1GZpTLoWw](https://youtu.be/RN1GZpTLoWw)

the only sound i hear / is the cry of the wind / as it blows through the town / weave and spin, weave and spin</comment>


Learning a new language improves tolerance - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/how-learning-a-new-language-improves-tolerance-68472 <comment><USER2> I tend to be skeptical of claims that bilingualism improves any mental skill. The studies often fail to control for confounding variables correctly. See this article: [http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the- battl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-battle-over- bilingualism/462114/)

<comment><USER3> It's likely the real reason is the very act of interacting with another culture improves your understanding of that culture and makes you more tolerant. Probably not specific to just learning the language, etc.

<comment><USER4> The flips-side is that any significant interaction with another culture requires learning a language, so are they just two sides of the same coin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Breaking news: expanding your knowledge about new things makes you less closed minded!

</comment><comment><USER6> Sidenote: there should be some kind of global organization to develop non touristic travelling. Kids seeing other cultures, non neighboring, but not too foreign at first. Makes you appreciate others and your own much better.

<comment><USER7> Actually there is one. It's a no profit organization called Afs (afs.org). Its main purpose is to make adolescents (students between 14-17yo) explore a new country being hosted in a local family and studying in a local school. The participant makes a list of 10 (or less) preferred countries to which he'd like to go but can't choose the city. The latter is chosen depending on the compatibility with the families disponible in that country. The whole network of countries and hosting families is composed by volunteers (no economic benefits) all over the world who share the same goals: discovering and understanding new cultures. Disclaimer: I went one year abroad with afs and am currently a volunteer in my country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does not match my experiences. Many of my fellow Belgians are trilingual. If anything, I noticed a lot less intolerance living abroad in a monolingual country than I did in Belgium. Your mileage may vary.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find myself tempted to argue the converse -- that tolerance for different people drives one to learn a foreign language. Or maybe an underlying motivation -- for instance, at one time Russian was a useful skill for people interested in national security work -- might play a more important role.

</comment><comment><USER10> Makes sense, language is a key aspect of a community if you speak the language you feel identified and usually the community welcomes you.

<comment><USER11> Is that really tolerance? All you've done is expanded your in group. You could still be just as intolerant of your now slightly smaller outgroup.

<comment><USER12> That's how it's always been. We've extened our in-groups from family to tribe to city state to nation / religious group to (for some) all of humanity. But we still put billions of intelligent, feeling animals through a lifetime of pain so we can eat them. Perhaps in a few centuries the umbrella of inclusion will be broad enough to protect all mammals.

The arrow of history flies toward larger and larger in-groups but humans have always been horrible to those they label as "other".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Learning a new language, spending some time living in another country where I was not a speaker of the language, and just traveling around other countries has made me really appreciate at a deep level how tough immigrants and foreigners have it, and how shitty their treatment is even in the most "progressive" and "enlightened" countries.

I've never felt more embarrassingly like a child and an idiot than when trying to communicate to someone else using my primitive language skills. I must have sounded so stupid, with my monosyllabic, one or two word sentences. Yet inside I knew I wasn't, and had a lot to say, and really wanted to participate in the conversation on a much more sophisticated level, yet I couldn't.

Experiences like the above made me be a lot more understanding towards people making the effort to speak my own language when their native tongues are something else. Of course, I'd always known on an intellectual, abstract level that people who struggle to speak my language aren't necessarily stupid, but it's quite another thing to repeatedly go through such experiences yourself. It's much like the empathy one gets for really sick people when one has spent a good deal of time as a patient in a hospital yourself, or suffered from some serious, chronic illness.

I also hated being discriminated against and feeling like a suspect just because I was different or spoke another language, and hated being forced to comply with all sorts of discriminatory and protectionist laws. Work permits are one small example, where I really didn't see why I should be forbidden from working in another country if I could do the job as well as any native -- except obviously the natives want to unfairly advantage themselves in the job market. Really annoying.

There are harsher examples, like being treated like dirt at immigration/customs while the natives get cheerily waved through. Or being treated like a cash machine by hustlers, thieves, and law enforcement just because I'm a foreigner.

So, yeah, these and other instances of discrimination were just little tastes of what being a foreigner in my own country must feel like -- except worse in many cases, because people are often forced to work menial jobs where they're treated much worse than I was, getting attacked by xenophobic natives, having their children bullied because they look different or speak with an accent, even having a President who got elected based on his hatred of and intention to deport millions of immigrants, etc.

Being exposed to other cultures, which is an inevitable part of language learning (except for the learning of artificial languages like Loglan or programming language, which have no culture) also helps one to be more tolerant and appreciative of differences.

Food is a great example of this. Many people spend all their lives in their own country, sometimes not even ever leaving their home town, and only ever eat the same food they were brought up eating. When you get exposed to other cultures, you often try their food, and your world is enlarged, expanding your idea of what's possible and what's good. You might find that once you try it, you actually like some weird, alien food that you used to turn your nose up at, or maybe didn't even know existed.

I'm convinced that much of the hatred towards immigrants and foreigners stems from lack of travel to other countries and exposure to other cultures. Way too many people are far too insular and provincial, and even in the rare cases when they do travel to other countries they tend to stick to their own kind and what they're used to at home, defeating much of the point of leaving home in the first place.</comment>


How Emoji Can Improve Your Code–Seriously - <AUTHOR> https://www.tjvantoll.com/2016/06/10/emoji-and-coding/ <comment><USER2> OK ... I'm kinda sold on the added value of Emoji in comments. Wasn't aware that VSCODE had the ability to insert them.</comment>


Is Kate Tempest a Poet? - <AUTHOR> https://poeticnopoetry.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/is-kate-tempest-a-poet/ <comment><USER2> It's funny that an article questioning literary vocation contains such poor grammar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, language is dynamic and shaped by use everywhere, especially the global English these days.</comment></comment>


CodeTips – Learn to programme, with little or no prior experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.codetips.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Semi-related, pedantic remark on the title: in British English we commonly use the word "programme" in place of "program" for e.g. TV programmes and concert programmes. However, even in British English the correct form for a computer program is "program".

<comment><USER3> I have a copy of A Guide to Programming the National - Elliott 803 Electronic Digital Computer, and it spells it "programme" throughout, but that was written back in 1962. However, I haven't seen it spelt that way in the last 40 years or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> there's something very messed up with the organisation here. I tried two articles as entry points to see if this would be good for some of my nephews an nieces; the first was the first article in the 'Beginner' tag, which turns out to be:

[https://www.codetips.co.uk/what-is-a-switch- statement/](https://www.codetips.co.uk/what-is-a-switch-statement/)

 _In previous articles we 've discussed the if statement..._ what previous articles? So, back to the front page to find a starting point. "FizzBuzz", "An Introduction to Coding Challenges", "An interview with Kevin Ball", "Arrays and loops with Javascript"...then finally one that seems like it might be the entry point:

[https://www.codetips.co.uk/writing-your-first-javascript- pro...](https://www.codetips.co.uk/writing-your-first-javascript-programme/)

 _If you 've made it to this article you should have read the JavaScript Introduction, and be familiar with variables and data-types._ wait, what?

There seems to be no guided course here, or even a way in each article to get to the previous article, when clearly a lot of these assume prior knowledge (there is, but it's right at the end of the article, some of which are pages long).

This could really do with a 'New readers start here', and put the navigation - even the fact that there _are_ previous articles - up top in each article.

<comment><USER5> Hey,

I'm the CodeTips founder/owner, and I'm grateful for your feedback.

I'd like to get this to a position that your niece and nephew are able to use it, so if you're willing to continue the discussion that would be great.

Just to address your concerns....

\- Where I have referenced previous articles, they are linked. For example the `if` reference is a link, that will take you to the article explaining that concept. I just checked the articles you mentioned, and the links are there and working.

\- you're absolutely right that the articles are from latest - oldest. It wasn't necessarily built to be a "course", but I can see why the structure could be confusing. The balance is not having to make returning users scroll to the bottom to find new content, perhaps I could add a button that allows the user to sort the articles as they want to see them?

<comment><USER6> It sounds like they would like a "start here" link, not having to click random articles and follow the rabbit-hole back to the beginning - that's all.

<comment><USER5> That's fair. The issue with a "start here" page is the site is not designed to be a journey necessarily.

Obviously all the beginner articles are first, but then you have different language articles, serverless articles, intermediate articles etc. You could take any of those paths.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER7> I think a very simple solution is to use categories. Tag articles under things like "beginner", "intermediate" etc. Don't be afraid to use multiple categories and group article sets together.

Simple change but it would make huge payoffs UX-wise.

Edit: I wasn't very clear. I realize you have those top level tags already, but I was referring to further group articles that "flow" into each other. That way you can have a "journey" without actually having one :)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback! Are you able to share any examples of where a different tag would work better?

<comment><USER7> Just a quick thought example would be something like:

Article Title Tagged: Beginner, JavaScript, Variables

So in this example the user knowns that it's a beginner set > focused on JavaScript > specific to variables

Maybe oversimplistic, but it's just a concept.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google begins developing its own quantum chips, to prepare for the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/189155-google-begins-developing-its-own-quantum-computer-chips-to-prepare-for-the-future <comment><USER2> > Google will absorb UC Santa Barbara's quantum computing group

What's the market price for a quantum computing group acquihire? D-Wave investors spent more than $100M on R&D. How much did UCSB spend?</comment>


A note on mask registers (AVX-512) - <AUTHOR> https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/12/05/kreg-facts.html <comment><USER2> I have no particular reason at the moment to care about any of this, but your posts are always very interesting reading.

I was actually surprised to see the zeroing idioms not being recognized. I sort of assumed those were cheap to implement. I suppose they may not actually have much value since you would never actually want to use a zero mask register as an actual mask?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I would think most mask registers values just "pop into existence" as already nonzero based on a full write to the register, e.g., from a comparison, a load from memory, move from GP reg, etc.

I can't see all that many scenarios where you want a zeroed register to begin with. Many of the cases that happens in the GP world (e.g., zeroing out some accumulator or pointer or whatever) just don't come up in mask registers.

I am not sure about the cost to implement it. I don't think it's all that complicated to describe how it would work, but it does occur in the renamer, which is a critical path on modern chips, so probably the less complication there, the better. We already know that not all zeroing idioms are recognized (like sub same, same) on some chips, so that is some indication that it's not super cheap (or else you'd think they'd have just implemented all the idioms the first time around).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here, happy to answer any questions or for any feedback!

<comment><USER4> Great article as usual! Nice analysis. btw, just wondering, were you a processor architect in your previous roles?

<comment><USER3> No, my training and background is on the software side and so the hardware stuff is only a hobby.</comment></comment></comment>


The Coddling of the American Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040076)</comment>


Americans Will Pay a Price for State Privacy Laws - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/opinion/state-privacy-laws.html <comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately this is one of those issues that our current federal political system can't possibly address. The large companies know that federalizing this issue is functionally equivalent to killing meaningful privacy regulation in the US.</comment>