SoftBank to write down WeWork by $6.6B, compounding portfolio misery - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22C011 <comment><USER2> _The highly leveraged conglomerate has been forced into selling major assets to raise funds, but could receive a big boost from the Bank of Japan's plan to expand corporate bond buying, which would support its predilection for borrowing._

The Japanese taxpayer (Yen-holder) having to support the losses of Adam Neumann's personal money tree seems pretty crazy to me.

<comment><USER3> This sounds a bit similar to - and just as ludicrous as - American taxpayers financially assisting or "bailing out" massive companies which were/are so bad at cash flow management that their runway was/is only 1-3 months, despite hundreds of millions - if not billions - in annual revenue and a varying chunk of that being profit.

<comment><USER4> American taxpayers invest their 401k money into american stock market, and they vote with their money for such companies. I'm against bailouts on libertarian principles, but if you're going to do bailouts at all, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't bailout these companies.

(And, every time bailouts are mentioned, I have to notice that it's not free money, it's loans, with interests, and 2008 bailout have actually made money for american taxpayers in the end. May be not as much money as other investments would, but it also had a nice side effect of saving american (and probably world) economy from even worse disaster).

Edit: OK, I was wroung about free money, by bad. But when the 2008 bailour is mentioned, I feel that most people discussing it still think of it as some sort of handout.

<comment><USER5> That's not exactly true this time. The airlines, for instance, are getting about $35 billion in outright grants, and $15 billion in loans and warrants equal to 10% of the total.

The large part of it is free money, and many major US airlines have been the worst offenders at financial engineering, spending the large part of their free cash flow on stock buybacks, and running the business on razor margins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> WeWork is effectively worth nothing at this point.

Their revenue surely has tanked given everything and won't just magically return to normal. They're sitting on massive liabilities with all the leases and capital they invested in locations. Yes leases could be renegotiated etc. but given WeWork's woes that long predate COVID-19 it's very unclear how they survive much longer beyond perhaps being sold for scrap in some sort of fire sale.

It's crazy to remember that less than a year ago there was serious movement towards a WeWork IPO.

</comment><comment><USER7> The shame is that they will probably blame all of this on the Pandemic, rather than fundamental issues with the business that were becoming clear long before the virus hit.

<comment><USER8> The blame for this falls solely on the laughable prospectus they issued ahead of the IPO. I was relieved that everyone in the finance world appeared to call it for what it is.

While I hope the BOJ and the Japanese taxpayer aren't on the hook for Softbank's hubris (not just with WeWork but also Oyo and Uber), I am glad that pension and mutual funds won't have any exposure to this flaming pile of garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"Every writedown takes Wework's carrying value closer to reality. Clearly the value is zero," said Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Redex Holdings._

I wonder if the value will be less than 0 soon with all of the liabilities WeWork has!

<comment><USER10> Limited liability companies cannot have a value less than zero in general. However, WeWork's lawsuit against SoftBank could very well be successful; effectively making it negative for SoftBank.

<comment><USER11> WeWork's lawsuit against softbank only succeeds if it lives long enough to get to a court decision, and Softbank are in quite a strong position to stop that happening.

<comment><USER6> When the final lifeline for your company is suing your primary investor over competing definitions of just how terrible the company is performing then I'm not sure it's worth much for either party!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Best quote from an analyst: "Every writedown takes Wework's carrying value closer to reality. Clearly the value is zero,"

</comment><comment><USER13> > The tech conglomerate has poured more than $13.5 billion into WeWork

So the potential downside is still even larger.

Seeing as WeWork needs to continue to pay their long-term leases, 2020 is not going to look good for them thanks to Covid-19.

<comment><USER14> If the main lose is on the leases, isn't that where corporate lawyers involve or foresee that kind of situations? Are they still paying all of the lease during pandemic?

<comment><USER15> Victoria's Secret managed to put a "you must continue paying even if there's a pandemic" clause in a contract signed _in February_ so... it wouldn't surprise me if We Work still had to pay rent given how well (read: not well) the company is run.

<comment><USER16> Can you give us a link to a story about this? I'm curious to see how (some) companies planned for the economic downturn.

<comment><USER17> It was mentioned in Matt Levine's columns of the 23rd and 24th. Unfortunately, I assume those are behind Bloomberg's paywall. Here is a quote from L Brands courtesy of Levine:

"Sycamore ignores a fundamental problem with its apparent case of buyer's remorse: At the time the parties negotiated the Agreement, the world was already well aware of the existence of COVID-19, and the parties agreed that Sycamore would bear the risk of any adverse impacts stemming from such a pandemic. … Sycamore and its representatives may wish that the world did not have to face the pandemic that now confronts us, and may regret that they did not negotiate the allocation of pandemic risk differently in the Transaction Agreement. But having made that commercial choice, Sycamore must now live by it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money." \-- Everett Dirksen

<comment><USER19> There is dispute as to whether Dirksen said that [1]. According to Wikiquote, when asked whether he had said it, Dirksen said: "Oh, I never said that. A newspaper fella misquoted me once, and I thought it sounded so good that I never bothered to deny it."

[1] [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen#Misattributed](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen#Misattributed)

<comment><USER18> Fascinating! thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if Japanese tax laws are similar to the US in that they incentivize write downs to create net operating losses to offset future profit. For SoftBank, which operates a very profitable core business, losses here could ensure no tax payments for years to come. This happened in 08 with many of the fire sales in the mortgage and banking business.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm starting to believe this is some plot to disenfranchise the Saudis, because the dimensions are too large for plain stupidity.

<comment><USER22> The Saudis are perfectly capable of organic home-grown stupidity.

MBS has an impressive record of investment failures. It's possible he's part of a secret plot to destabilise the entire region and bring the reign of the House of Saud to an end, but it's just as likely he's a privileged playboy fool who has no idea what he's doing.

<comment><USER23> "Don't explain with malice what can be explained with stupidity ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious as to how this might impact other Vision Fund companies like Fanatics or Mapbox.

</comment><comment><USER25> I do miss the free beer and wine at my local WeWorks from 1500 each work day :-(</comment>


Invisible Children co-founder detained by police; charity made 'KONY 2012' video - <AUTHOR> http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/16/10721745-report-invisible-children-co-founder-detained-by-police-charity-made-kony-2012-video <comment><USER2> It's disturbing to see blatant prejudice on HN against someone who may have a mental illness. (I'm not a doctor, and I'm not saying he does. Maybe he just went on a drinks / drugs bender, in which case judge away.)

His erratic behaviour shouldn't be causing you to scrutinise their information; that's something you should be trying to do anyway.

For a reputable source you could try IRIN (Yes, I post lot from them. I have no connection to them.)

([http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95083/SECURITY-Fighting- Kony-...](http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95083/SECURITY-Fighting-Kony-with- beer-spy-planes-and-YouTube))

> _Invisible Children only publish information on LRA, or suspected LRA, > activity on their LRAcrisistracker.com website, while other acts of violence > in the region - where aid workers say the "DRC government is absent" and > there are alleged human rights abuses by FARDC and Ugandan troops operating > with the assistance of US forces in CAR - never get a mention._

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure where you're getting the prejudice angle from, the link is merely information about a topic that was widely discussed here.

<comment><USER2> One person says "Maybe it shouldn't...but that makes me think a little less of this guy. I have always tried... but now I think I will redouble my efforts to fact-check and look with a critical eye, at issues that come to my attention via 'Clicktivist' campaigns."

If (and it might not be) it is a mental illness, well, you shouldn't think less of him. That's like saying you'd think less of someone if you found out they were Jewish, or that they used a wheelchair.

Another person says "I have a hard time believing that after putting in all the effort of creating the video and getting it out there that this guy would do something like this [...]"

If (and it might not be) it is a mental illness he either has less control or no control over his actions and thoughts. That's not an excuse to just let him do it, but it shouldn't affect the campaign.

Frustratingly I thought there was lots wrong with the KONY video, but my stigma-reduction for people with MH problems is bigger than that.

Obviously, maybe he was just on drugs, or is a weirdo. In which case he should get what he deserves.

<comment><USER3> The ivory-tower relativist view may give him a pass, but in the real world this turkey is cooked.

And that is total BS that you would compare people with mental problems to Jewish people or those born physically disabled. Yes, I twisted your words, but not that much. You could have chosen much better examples.

<comment><USER2> Why is it BS to compare someone with a mental illness (specifically a psychotic illness) to someone who is Jewish or someone who is a wheelchair user?

<comment><USER3> I think you have chosen your words poorly because the above reads like you are calling an entire ethnicity disabled.

<comment><USER2> I think you need to read what I wrote again.

There are several types of discrimination - race, sex, sexual preference, age, ability, and religion.

My point was to compare one type of discrimination -discrimination against those with a disability, a mental illness - with other types of discrimination, either discrimination against those with a different disability - those who use wheelchairs, or discrimination against people of a different ethnicity.

Why is it acceptable to say "This person has a mental illness and thus all of their work is suspect and all of the work of their organisation is suspect"?

Why is that acceptable if it's not acceptable to say "This person is a wheelchair user and thus all of their work is suspect and all of the work of their organisation is suspect" or "This person is gay and thus all of their work is suspect and all of the work of their organisation is suspect"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> the description sounds like textbook manic symptoms.

if i were this guy and suddenly had a huge internet audience watching my movies and then accusing me of distortion and lying, i can see it triggering a manic episode really easily.

</comment><comment><USER5> Uhhh...

Wow...

Maybe it shouldn't...but that makes me think a little less of this guy.

I have always tried...

but now I think I will redouble my efforts to fact-check and look with a critical eye, at issues that come to my attention via 'Clicktivist' campaigns.

EDIT:

...He is described on the organization's [Invisible Children] website as a co- founder and "our grand storyteller and dreamer."...

Not at all a slow news day for clicktivism. Better to just rip the band-aid off though... less painful that way.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a hard time believing that after putting in all the effort of creating the video and getting it out there that this guy would do something like this but truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER3> How bizzarre, but christ those are some serious allegations. That definitely strikes a blow to the legitimacy of this campaign...

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess Kony wasn't the only one shooting thousands of kids

</comment><comment><USER8> Drugged perhaps?</comment>


"Playing God" is a meaningless, dangerous cliche - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/05/playing-god-is-a-meaningless-dangerous-cliche/

<comment><USER2> _Fair enough: that kind of accusation has indeed a long history, harking back to the myths of Prometheus, Daedalus and Faust. But to regard hubris as "playing God" is, first, a modern perspective, and second, a secular one. After all, Prometheus did not in any sense "play God" (he was already divine, and Zeus himself gave him the role that he was deemed to have abused)._

Yes, Prometheus was divine, but the point of the myth was not that he stole godly powers but that he gave them to men. But the myth is interesting because it all worked out pretty well for men (but badly for Prometheus), so Prometheus is rebellious to the gods but still a great benefactor.

The closest analogy in the Abrahamic religion is Adam and Eve, who again got godlike powers (the power to understand good and evil) from disobeying a god. Unlike the case of Prometheus this act of rebellion is seen as an extremely bad thing for which we are still being punished.

In the same tradition there's also the Tower of Babel, another story about how man attempts to become Godlike and gets smacked down by god for it. And the Greek tragedies are basically all about folks who hubristically claim to be better than the Gods and wind up suffering horrible fates because of it.

Anyway, human mythology is full of all sorts of stories about humans who try to claim powers of gods. Sometimes it ends well, usually it ends badly. Some stories are teaching us to be happy with what we've got while others are trying to explain why what we currently have sucks. Picking on Prometheus, Daedelus and Faust are lousy examples, I don't know why the author picked 'em.

<comment><USER3> Prometheus is a truly complex character, with a well thought out story - unlike any in the Abrahamic religions.

To understand Prometheus, you have to understand his gift - foresight. He could see the future. In the battle between the Titans (which he was) and the Olympians, he saw that his kind would lose to their own children, so he 'joined' them.

His acts of defiance to Zeus weren't acts of rebellion, they were acts of guerilla warfare. Prometheus took fire, the one thing that truly kept man apart from the gods (IE the ability to change our environment at will), and he didn't just give it to mankind like the myth states, he gave it to his own children - many of which were also Zeus' offspring, and mankind as a whole was allegedly Zeus' greatest love.

Prometheus as it were saw the cycle of the universe. Cronus had usurped Uranus. Zeus had usurped Cronus, and Prometheus did everything in his power to ensure humans usurped Zeus.

As you pointed out, there is his act of stealing fire. However, one of his greater feats (which caused him the need to steal fire) was when an agreement was to be struck between the mortals and the immortals. Prometheus had man wrap beef within the cows stomach as one sacrifice and bones wrapped within glistening fat as another. Zeus chose the latter, setting a precedent for all sacrifices. When man started burning (IE sending to the gods) the junk parts of the animals, Zeus was pissed and took fire from mankind. Then Prometheus stole it back, and got chained to the rock.

However, again if you look at the bigger picture, Prometheus was never disadvantaged. He lifted mankind from the burden of sacrifice, he again gave fire to mankind, which landed him in eternal torture. However, Prometheus has illustrated several times that his foresight far out performs Zeus' omniscience. For him, eternal torture wasn't eternal, he knew Heracles (AKA Hercules) would be along shortly to free him. Prometheus eventually reconciles with Zeus by warning him that he's going to be usurped, and forms a sort of power-sharing agreement if he helps protect Zeus from being overthrown. It also, allegedly, led to the release of the other Titans from imprisonment.

So the real question here is, was Zeus ever going to be usurped in the first place? It essentially went from the Titans being overthrown, Prometheus waging a guerilla war and eventually forming a coalition government between the Titans and Olympians.

I've said this before to people when discussing this, but where in the hell was the imagination in the Abrahamic religions? Prometheus, a singular character in the Ancient Greek religion has a story in such a scope that it would kick LotR's ass, and still be 3-times longer . . . from what we, thousands of years later, have pieced together.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for that. You obviously know more about it than I do.

 _I've said this before to people when discussing this, but where in the hell was the imagination in the Abrahamic religions?_

Interesting question. I'm not sure whether to attribute it to ancient Hebrew culture being generally less sophisticated than ancient Greek culture, or whether the Israelites just boxed themselves into a narrative corner by declaring that there was only one god and that he was _perfect_. It's not easy writing interesting stories when your only character is always right, knows everything and is omnipotent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _But to regard hubris as "playing God" is, first, a modern perspective, and second, a secular one._

This seems true; the "God" invoked in this phrase is not the religious God but more the God represented by nature and that sense of the natural order. I think that the reason this notion has become popular in recent history is that it is only in the last hundred years or so that our technology has advanced to the point where we can really fundamentally disrupt the balance created here by four and a half billion years of evolution. I'm not sure it is fair to single out creating life as especially dangerous as, to me, there are many abilities we have that wield similar amounts of power. I think of cane toads in Australia and the oil spill in the gulf and climate change. All of these are evidence of hubris, of mistakes with long term consequences and few good solutions.

Creating and modifying life (something we have been in the business of doing for quite some time) does fit into this category. We are messing with with incredibly complex systems we don't near fully understand. It's science and it's exciting and we are advancing our knowledge but the possible consequences are indeed dire. I'm not trying to preach anti-technology or anything and I don't think that the fact that we are indeed "playing God" should stop us from pursuing this research and these ideas. But I do think that it is something to be mindful of. We only have the one earth.

EDIT: hugh3 said it better than I did: '"Playing God" to me is just a turn of phrase, shorthand (and somewhat cliched) for "messing with powers beyond your understanding or ability to control".'

<comment><USER5> _...it is only in the last hundred years or so that our technology has advanced to the point where we can really fundamentally disrupt the balance created here by four and a half billion years of evolution..._

This statement is so wrong I don't even know where to start.

For hundreds (if not thousands) of years humans have dramatically altered their natural environment by cultivating land, hunting various animals to extinction and selective breeding. However, evolution never achieved a "balance" for humans to disrupt. Evolution and "balance" are almost diametrically opposite. Are you under the impression that after 4 billion years of evolution, we finally reached a stable terminal point, only to be disrupted by naughty humans?

<comment><USER3> Agreed, before we built cities we were cutting down forests for farmland. Before we built farms, we burnt down forests to create savannah to expand the grazing land so we could herd more cattle (yes, there was a disturbing trend 100,000's of years ago - up to about 1 million years ago - that wherever mankind lived, fire occurrence went through the roof)

People conveniently overlook our past whilst condemning our present.

I'm sorry to all those people who blindly don't see, but _we are god_. We aren't playing as this secular god, we have been it since long before we even acquired fire.

At our present point we can change the world in a heartbeat. If an ice age begins, we have the ability to produce vast quantities of green house gasses far more potent than CO2 or methane. Similarly, if the planet starts heating dramatically, we have the ability to release vast quantities of SO2 into the upper atmosphere and force the planet into a global dimming cycle like it was in between the 1960's-90's.

Similarly, with our construction of vast arrays of wind turbines there has been a noticeable decline in wind speeds in those areas. Incidentally, something many people have failed to remember from basic high school physics is that generators can act as motors and vice versa. If it ever came to it, we have the ability to change the direction of winds in localised areas.

There's even debate over whether we have the ability to cause the formation of rain (we invariably can heat+water, it just takes a lot more effort than the cloud seeding hocus pocus method), and scientists around the world regularly cause lightening.

Really, what do humans do that is _not_ attributed to a god?

<comment><USER4> The whole point of this phrase is to give us pause as we consider how to use these massive powers. We clearly have the ability to effect these changes, but your seeming confidence in our ability to easily solve massive problems only reinforces how important our humility is.

Case in point, we accidentally dumped millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, causing a huge mess. One solution, has been using chemicals to disperse the oil, but now after trying that strategy for a bit, we are scaling back its use for fear of causing more problems. These systems we are trying to change a monstrously large and complicated and we don't understand them completely enough to be able to know the concequences of our actions. That is why we must be cautious when "playing God"

I mean, it is hard enough to change pieces of an OS without having unintended consequences, and that is a system entirely of our own creation.

<comment><USER6> I feel like you're stretching your story too thin when you claim oil drilling and cleanup is a scenario under "playing God".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science- fiction/?...](http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science- fiction/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsspect%2FfJur+%28Dresden+Codak%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)

<comment><USER8> Why didn't I know about this?

Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The people I've met who accuse scientists of "playing god" are usually doing so themselves. That is, passing judgment and condemnation. Of course, they think God is compelling them to do so, rather than that they are compelling their idea of God to do so.

<comment><USER10> Interesting interpretation of people who are judging others. The Bible states that people are doing this in order to distract God from their own sins that they need to confess and repent of.

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, the Bible also says we should stone homosexuals, people who work on the sabbath and girls who aren't virgins when they get married.

The Bible says a lot of things. Come to think of it, all the death-by-stoning punishments make a lot more sense than the "never judge anyone for anything" idea.

<comment><USER10> Well the idea isn't to avoid correcting people who go astray but rather to avoid pointing to others faults as evidence of your righteousness. That's what most people do (even those who aren't religious as I'd normally define it).

The Bible states in the same book (Romans chapter 2 for the first citation and 6 for this one) that the wages of sin is death--meaning this life or the next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it is interesting that most religions condemn man for using the name of god to pass judgement and the religious conservatives who fear science should be just as wary of anyone who claims to know the will of god and specifically to pass judgement on others as if they were god. Those who condemn the actions of others are truly "playing god" yet there is no conservative theological out cry because as usual the heart of the matter has nothing to do with theology but rather just simple fear mongering.

<comment><USER12> Why use the euphemism "I think it is interesting" instead of just saying that you think it's hypocritical?

<comment><USER11> Just trying to keep things polite here

<comment><USER12> Not that it's a big deal, but in my opinion it's more polite to criticize someone directly than obliquely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree that the term doesn't carry much meaning, but what is "dangerous" about it?

<comment><USER14> E.g, the way it's employed against stem-cell research that should otherwise go on to save, you know, millions and millions of lives.

<comment><USER2> Just because you think something will save millions of lives doesn't make every counterargument, and every turn of phrase used by every counterargument, "dangerous" though. That's just one step away from saying that your opponents are not only mistaken but unconscionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but "playing God" isn't always used as meaning "we should be aware of the benefits", and often used as a cheap scare tactic. I feel that actually analyzing the risks and benefits is a better tactic than trotting out this old cliche. Furthermore, it has connotations of fearing new technology (I can't quite phrase this right, sorry). There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about discoveries such as artificially replicating DNA, but I don't think that "Man vs God" is one of them.

I don't feel that I've phrased this quite as well as I'd like to. If you'd like elaboration or clarification, please ask.

<comment><USER2> "Playing God" to me is just a turn of phrase, shorthand (and somewhat cliched) for "messing with powers beyond your understanding or ability to control". It has nothing to do with whether one or more gods actually exists and can quite sensibly be used by atheists since it means "assuming powers which should only belong to (hypothetical) gods" rather than "assuming powers which should only belong to that Yahweh dude".

<comment><USER15> _can quite sensibly be used by atheists since it means "assuming powers which should only belong to (hypothetical) gods"_

Sorry, but I refuse to call atheist to anyone who believes that an arbitrary, human-made list of values can be "godlike" in any meaningful sense. If anything, should that person use that list of values to base their political or scientific arguments, I would call them theocrats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "God" is a meaningless, dangerous cliche.</comment>


Ask HN: how do you handle preorders (not charging CC until later)? Any gotchas? - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking about getting the CC# weeks or months in advance and then actually processing payment when it's time to deliver. Also, does Stripe handle this sort of situation pretty well, or is there another payment processor that does it better? <comment><USER2> Stripe handles this really well. We've been using them to power the payments piece for trycelery.com. No big gotchas so far based on my experience. If you wait too long to charge, you may run into an expired credit card.

I'd say the most important thing is to clearly communicate shipping/fulfillment timing to your customers, so they know what to expect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, exactly what I was hoping to find out. Thanks for the insight!

<comment><USER2> Glad I could help. Feel free to shoot me an email (in my HN profile) if you have any specific questions.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company? - <AUTHOR> E.g. Onboarding of new employees, expenses, security, etc.. <comment><USER2> I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.

<comment><USER3> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following:

Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.

If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.

Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.

<comment><USER4> My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical)

Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead.

 _> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken _

Please tell, what's broken in my org?

<comment><USER3> > > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your > organisation is broken

> Please tell, what's broken in my org?

What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.

The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."

<comment><USER5> Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lawyers.

The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer.

The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building.

After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading.

The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so it's not wise for them to automate anything.

For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the shit hits the fan.

In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't get sued for trying to do simple business.

<comment><USER7> You can't really automate lawyers, unfortunately, anymore than you can automate accountants. Someone has to assume the liability for giving you legal advice / accounting advice. Computers can't yet assume such liability.

<comment><USER6> That's true. The computer cannot be liable for the advice.

I see two ways around this:

1\. The company behind the computer takes full responsibility and charges for the risk. Stripe has made online payments a breeze, because they are the one taking responsibility for the legal things (securing payments, proofing physical access to servers holding the credit card data etc).

2\. The tool is so understandable that I'm willing to take the legal risk. There are a few tools that make accounting so easy for a small business owner that I'm willing to take the legal risk myself about the accounting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the hardest time getting traction.

I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This $badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how it works today.

Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket.

Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it.

If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.

<comment><USER9> Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!

It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.

<comment><USER10> This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman- could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from an HTML document, cutting out portions that weren't supposed to be there with scissors, and then photocopying the cut up page to get a final report to mail out to the client. I'll let that sink in...

It didn't take me long to start editing the HTML document directly to skip the physical work (someone before me had figured this much out, but hadn't been able to teach anyone else well enough to pass it along when he left, just a vague rumor that it had happened). Then I went ahead and made a crude script to edit the documents automatically, ultimately turning an hour long job into a 2 minute one with cleaner looking results. Ended up spending a lot of time at that job just watching TV.

My next job after that was all about automating manual processes, but with less down time since I was automating other people's jobs, rather than my own. I think I preferred the former.

<comment><USER11> I used to work for a company basically copying and pasting data from one excel spreadsheet to the other. I didn't know how to program yet, but I knew there had to be a better way, so I learned macros. I spent ~20 minutes a day working. I worked part-time and when I left, my boss commented on how I got done more than all of the full-timers there.

I personally think the biggest benefit to every company would be to drill into people's heads how software should automate your day to day work. Software people think that way, but most employees don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf, taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow

<comment><USER13> I left a place a year ago where I ran the lab. I remember the satisfaction of my replacement converting all the VMs into "real computers", and then triplicating the VLAN network I had with layer 1 replacements.

I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would have gotten rid of the VPN server.

<comment><USER14> So what's the benefit of VMs? I mean, I understand the underlying benefits of isolation and such, but for things that easily fit on small servers (i.e. single/double core small procs with <4GB RAM), why is it better to virtualize instead of having a physical server for that task? Assuming said task isn't vital enough to have several redundant systems?

I've gone both ways before, but I seem to be on the other end of the spectrum and prefer small cheap hardware over VMs when possible.

Not trying to argue or anything, just curious for someone else's point of view.

<comment><USER15> Those small things are actually the ideal use case for VMs.

Imagine wanting to spin up a new server so you go and buy that small tower, bring it back, and hook it up.

Now imagine using a VM where you literally go onto a webpage and click a button to provision the same amount of resources.

Additionally, most hardware sits idle most of the time. When you're using tons of towers, it's likely that most of them will sit under 50% load 90+% of the time. With a VM setup, the hypervisor can balance that better so you can get better utilization of your hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.)

Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.

<comment><USER17> hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: email@example.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)

<comment><USER18> You guys realise that mailinator is public? Dale, I can see your email address.

I highly recommend 33mail.com instead - it has a pretty generous free tier: [http://33mail.com/rj37w3](http://33mail.com/rj37w3).

(Not associated, just a long-time user and happy paying customer.)

<comment><USER17> haha, oh crap mbrookes. Looks like I fell on my face with this. Thanks for the 33mail tip. Hey, hentrap - email me here:

email@example.com

<comment><USER18> Incidentally, since I don't see it mentioned anywhere obvious on the site, you can also use @yourdom.33m.co as short address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Security.

90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.

<comment><USER20> Rotation is a really interesting subject which has true security benefits. Unfortunately manual rotation is a PITA. What works better is to have an automated system rotating the credentials, and then you fetch the credentials as-needed by authenticating with an identity and access management system.

For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators ([https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation](https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation)) for rotating things like SSH keys, database passwords, and cloud credentials. In each case, the rotator changes the credential in the backend (e.g. changes the public key in the authorized_keys file), and then stores the new credential behind an access-controlled and audited API where only you (and other authorized roles) can fetch it.

Disclosure: I am CTO of Conjur.

<comment><USER21> A bit off topic, but the conjur.net domain seems to be a bit broken. [https://conjur.net](https://conjur.net) doesn't work properly and it threw an SSL/TLS certificate error the first time I visited. Also, it appears as if your main site doesn't redirect to HTTPS. As a security company my first thought is that if you can't handle these simple things I'm not sure I'm ready to talk to you about more complex matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Domestic freight, specifically rate quoting and booking.

I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation.

3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our shipping manager's time.

<comment><USER14> So what you're saying is you need a Third Party 3PL Logistics company :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A better version of this: [http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi- bin/live](http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live) . The corporate bullshit generator. If it could also make powerpoints with nice graphs of merging product timelines, we could replace most of management.

</comment><comment><USER24> Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants.

Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.

<comment><USER25> Hahahah! You just made me think of creating a chatbot to answer people's questions about me for phone screen interviews, since answering the same questions over and over and over again has gotten me to the point where I sometimes procrastinate getting back to recruiters because I don't want to go through the process for the fiftieth time.

"How much experience do you have with Unity?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "I worked with Unity on projects blah and blah and....". "Tell me more about your leadership in project blah?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "With project blah, I was in charge of X number of people. The project was completed over a period of X months and ...etc."

That's what you're suggesting, isn't it?

<comment><USER24> Pretty much! I'd also include narrative answers about challenges overcome, accomplishments, etc. and boilerplate about how great the company is, respectively.

It's critical to have the interviewer side fully automated as well, so the bots can all talk to one another and just ping us when things match up. Imagine the hyper conversations from the movie Her, but for jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The difficult part is that the areas that could be automated are usually the ones that would buy the automation software.

The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization.

I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the benefit.

Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER27> As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

<comment><USER28> JIRA is terrible in my opinion but has evolved and many (most?) small, medium and big software houses use it.

There are more alternatives than I can count did you look elsewhere? For some reason people continue using JIRA and investing time and money on it. JIRA has an awful interface, is unnecessarily complicated, has a learning curve (when it shouldn't) and you actually need to know SQL in order to create _helpful views_ for trivial things (e.g. have a proper view of hours/projects worked per week).

<comment><USER29> The earlier versions (3.x) were simpler, yet still customizable, and great for a lot of tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would like a tool that looks at what people are doing and fills out timesheets automatically. Stop asking your developers what they are working on directly and start looking at their artifacts. For example, if Dev A. just checked in a bunch of code for Project Alpha, there is a good chance they have been working on Project Alpha for the past X hours. If QA person Q just ran a bunch of tests for Project B and updated a spreadsheet, there is a good chance that they have been working on Project B for the past Y hours. Person W just updated a bunch of Wiki pages for Project C? And so on.

Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets" I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of that for me.

<comment><USER30> Isn't it what time trackers do?

Mac: [https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/](https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/) (our app, the site lacks info but it has export now)

Linux: [https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy](https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy)

Windows: [http://www.manictime.com/](http://www.manictime.com/)

</comment></comment><comment> ju-st Ordering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!

<comment><USER31> _I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project._

Pardon my language: holy shit.

How large is your organization??? All I _do_ at work is build dev environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking _dev environment_???

FOUR? How does this happen?

<comment><USER32> At Wells Fargo, I'd kill for a dev environment in general. We only do production-classified-as-dev. And 4 months? Slow down! We're six months...if you're lucky.

<comment><USER33> How's that joke go? Everybody has a testing environment, some people are lucky enough to have a separate environment to run production in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Our password policy is pretty terrible. We don't even have our own user profiles. Whenever I'm on a different desk than my own, I get to experience a completely different desktop. With completely different applications installed, settings, etc. I work part-time hence my desk isn't the same permanent spot, so this does occur regularly. So apart from a security hazard, this is also a productivity loss.

I'd also swap everything to Linux (my preference is macOS, but I can see how that'd increase cost). For the kind of development we do, Linux is just as good as the other two.

I honestly don't know how to solve the issue for me easily. Perhaps just install all applications and settings on a thumb drive?

</comment><comment><USER35> A related question, for my own interests... how _able_ do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools?

As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm _very_ curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools that can save a lot of pain and money.

<comment><USER36> It's generic advice, but: Make sure you're solving the manager's pain point, not the low-level employee's (i.e. "this gets the information/service to you with a higher guarantee of quality and always at your fingertips" rather than "this saves your employee a lot of stress"), and make sure you're marketing to the manager, not just the low-level employee. And if you get lower-level employees as leads, make sure they have the ammunition (white papers, etc.) so they can escalate to their managers in terms of solving their managers' pain points.

<comment><USER37> Actually, if you really want to score some office politics brownie points, you should try to solve the manager's manager's pain points!

<comment><USER35> I'm thinking of focusing on downtime and shortening recovery time from failures as a marketing angle. It's not the only problem I'm trying to solve, but it seems like a solid sell for management's pain points. Whether or not they care if their engineers are miserable, they care if they're losing a thousand bucks a minute on a down system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I automated entire process of applying jobs on Glassdoor by using Python and Selenium. Already sold to a few students.

<comment><USER39> This sounds interesting and potentially very useful. Would you mind sharing a link to your project or giving a more in-depth description?

<comment><USER38> you may contact me via email given in my profile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Bringing our main app into various states (and also regular Selenium tests based on the same code, ideally in Clojure). It currently takes dozens of clicks and dozens of pages, all super repetitive to get to most places in the app (super long question / answer based interface). I should have done this years ago when I joined but the pain has finally become great enough that it can't be ignored anymore.

</comment><comment><USER41> I would automate coffee making. Too many lazy or disrespectful coworkers skipping the making of coffee after taking the last cup.

<comment><USER42> The IETF tried that, but everyone ended up just building "compliant" teapots and calling it a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Dealing with US banks from abroad. It took an _absurd_ amount of effort to get an account opened and after over a month, I _still_ don't have debit cards.

<comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure this is a "feature" not a "bug" due to regulation. I'm not saying it's bad or good (I understand why).

<comment><USER43> Someone asks what I manual processes I want automated, I tell them.

Actually, automating "dealing with regulation in general" would be the most amazing thing ever.

<comment><USER45> Keep your fingers crossed for artificial intelligence. It's going to be a wild ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A developer would like to do welcome such kind of _automation_

[http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates- job-6...](http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6-years- boss-fires-finds/)

<comment><USER46> Reminds of me this post/story:

[https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts](https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker- scripts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interviewing and hiring interaction for seasonal workers.

We hire tons and tons of IC's two times per year. We run into bottlenecks due to time on the phone during interviews. If there way a consistent way to screen talent it would save us a ton of time.

<comment><USER48> I've never used it myself (I'm just a programmer) but perhaps Workable ([https://www.workable.com/](https://www.workable.com/)) might be what you're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> onboarding new developers so they understand the essentials of our archeitecture and code base.

that includes writing up all the documentation. (what, you thought youd just create a sleek ui with the documentation provided by users? no! thats the hard part!)

<comment><USER50> We do this at Talla. A lot of our companies use us to onboard new employees in Slack, or MS Teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Time tracking. Like, the physical act of figuring out how much time was spent on X task for Y client and then logging that in. And no, cheesy little desktop apps that provide a UI and timers for this are not the answer I'm looking for.

<comment><USER52> The challenge we faced and still face is more making it clear on how to classify time to the rank and file team (I work in a digital agency).

We are pretty much ~90% now.. ..some lessons learned:

1\. Just have people track rough time per day (a couple hours here, a couple hours there), but make sure it is done daily. The resolution will hold up when you analyze it. What seems rough each day, ends up being quite accurate over weeks/months.

2\. Don't be strict about budgets AND ask for perfect accuracy in time tracking. You are offloading the responsibility of good estimates to the team, and boxing them in.. screwing your long term job costing.

3\. Build a dashboard that summarizes project / account status and is as useful and obvious for Project Managers & Leadership, and they will become advocates in promoting good time tracking hygiene. (I guess this is a basic truism in general.. build systems where the best way to use it is the easiest way.. )

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Onboarding of new _customers_. I feel like we must do this different than most places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be " _good enough_ " so far (support has been perfect though). I feel like a bunch of this should be able to be automated with something that already exists.

<comment><USER54> I'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?

<comment><USER55> > What am I missing?

The human element.

We make an application that makes use of folder on a network share. One of the developers here types up instructions each time we install a new site. If the customer has trouble or opts to have our help, they will connect remotely to create a folder and some sub folders. This takes anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour if they have trouble connecting remotely.

I mentioned in a developer meeting that we should create an install script for the network folders. It would save the company hundreds of hours or work.

One developed asked how I would do it. A generally competent developer, who has worked with files and folders for many years, asked how we could deliver a program to create folders.

I nearly walked out (and we still dont have a 4 line script to create the folders we need)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Someone looking for start up ideas?

<comment><USER57> Looks like it - have you got any?

<comment><USER56> Not yet - will hopefully pick up a few from this thread!

<comment><USER58> You should automate the discovery of startup ideas by posting a thread here every few days.

<comment><USER59> That would be a quick way to get banned.

<comment><USER60> Are you really going to let that stop you? [https://luminati.io/](https://luminati.io/) [http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/](http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Database changes. We can't use database projects just yet but I'd like to find a way to automate it much the same way that you can apt-get install things.

<comment><USER61> if anyone has any suggestions about dependency management and automated deployables in the MSSQL world I'd be open

<comment><USER3> It's called Flyway: [https://flywaydb.org/](https://flywaydb.org/)

<comment><USER61> Looks promising I'll check it out. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Firing the CEO

<comment><USER63> You think you can do a better job as the CEO than the CEO you have now? Or you know someone that you think can do a better job?

<comment><USER64> No, he thinks he could write a script to fire his CEO, so they don't have to do it every day.

<comment><USER65> At my work we just have a Jenkins job that fires the current CEO first thing in the morning

<comment><USER66> Dude, simple cron job is enough.. 30 8 * * * /fire/ceo/now

<comment><USER67> I'd make it event-driven. /usr/sbin/hire --ceo starts a setTimeout(function() {`/usr/sbin/fire --ceo`}, 'INTERVAL 60 DAY') (And that is a weird bit of pseudocode, indeed.)

<comment><USER68> Ridiculous. This is obviously a job for systemd.

<comment><USER42> That's what the last CEO said before we fired him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Estimating when we'll have something done by modelling the department like some people model the weather.

</comment><comment><USER69> Using my left hand on the keyboard.

Edit: What? This is a great idea. Does anyone know a good encoding scheme for the 10 key?

<comment><USER70> AutoCAD used to be amazing at this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this:

* Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form".

* Tag form / template as "version 1" in our document management system.

* Fill in all the blanks, remove brackets, etc.

* Tag this as "version 2" in our document management system.

* Create a diff / redline with all my changes.

* Send diff to partner for review.

* Incorporate changes from partner into document.

* Replace (rather than append) "version 2" in our document management system with the new doc.

* Email document to opposing counsel for review.

* If we're sharing docs with opposing counsel via Dropbox, Box, etc., upload there too. But also email them, because they might not remember to check Dropbox.

* Bug opposing counsel every 24-48 hours until they respond with an edited copy of our document.

* Let partners and clients know that you are bugging opposing counsel so they know it's totally not your fault if this deal doesn't get done by Friday.

* Save opposing counsel's edited document as "version 3" in our document management system.

* Create a diff of the document they send and ask partner to review.

* Bug partner every 24 hours until they respond with more changes.

* Save this as "version 4" in our document management system.

* Send this, along with a diff, back to opposing counsel.

* Somewhere in this process we also pass along to our actual client for review.

* Repeat until no one has any more changes. Do this for many more documents that are part of the same deal.

* Send out the first set of documents for signature. Some people don't want to actually review the things they're signing (crazy!), so we create "signature packets" where it's just like four signature pages in a row. Also, everyone has a different set of documents to sign so different people get different sets of pages + documents -- and sometimes we need to make sure that person X doesn't see some document that only person Y can see because secrets.

* Or we use an e-signature service, in which case I spend some time creating little boxes over all the document so the service knows that this is a place where a signature-like image has to go.

* Discover some error in document. Fix. Redo all of my little boxes.

* Respond to people confused about how e-signatures work. Sometimes if there are four documents, the signatory gets four e-mails and then they're confused as to whether they should just sign the last one or all four or whatever (you should sign all four). Also, sometimes people refuse to use e-signatures, so we have to explain to people that because Docusign says the deal is done doesn't mean it's actually done.

* Sometimes this is where we file stuff with the state government.

* Send out a second set of documents of signature. We don't send these out with the first set (even if the same person is signing stuff in both the first and second set) because it's very important that the second set not be signed until _after_ the first set is signed by all the parties (or after we get some sort of confirmation back from the government if there's a filing involved). Sometimes we have very important people that hate being interrupted to sign documents, so we let them sign everything in one go but hold some of those signatures "in escrow" so we can "release the signatures" in the right order.

* Track all of the outstanding signatures and filings via a spreadsheet and try to update this in as "real time" as possible.

* Respond to partner or client asking you about deal status by pointing to spreadsheet.

* Respond to partner or client unable to open spreadsheet for whatever reason by summarizing signature status in text form.

* Bug people periodically until everything is signed.

* If any of the parties to a deal refuses to e-sign stuff, this is where I have to create a "final" signed PDF copy of the documents, wherein I replace blank signature pages in a document with some faxed or scanned signature page.

* If signatures were being held "in escrow", bug the people who are holding the signatures in escrow for confirmation that the signatures are released.

* Sometimes these people need to bug other people for confirmation. These people then ask lots of questions like "has other person X signed yet?". Point to spreadsheet.

* Sometimes money gets wired here. Wait until we confirm the money came in.

* Signatures are released! The money came in! Tell everyone the deal is done!

* Curl into fetal position.

<comment><USER14> That sounds.... painful...

Totally does seem like something that can be nicely automated to some level. Even document tracking and associated metadata (like a list of participants and status of signatures per page, approval of document, etc) would help.

<comment><USER72> Of course it can be automated. The problem is that everyone involved in the process is extremely resistant to automation because clients are billed by the hour and automation would result in fewer hours spent on the case, which means decreased revenue.

<comment><USER73> I'm a total outsider to this field, so forgive me if the answer to this is trivial/obvious, but why not sell a service like this directly to the client?

<comment><USER71> If you give outside counsel any significant role in a transaction, they'll find some way to create work and bump the bill up to whatever cap you set. So you don't really save cost-wise unless you're able to almost entirely remove the human element.

Now as to why we don't remove human lawyers from the process ... I think it's trust, mostly.

It's a bit like selling automated medical services. Your clients don't always have benchmarks for what's "good" legal work, much in the same they don't know if they're getting "good" medical advice, so it's hard to evaluate the quality of an automated service. And since there's always some chance the automation misses some edge case that a trained professional would have caught, if the stakes are high (medical -> life or death of a person, legal -> multi-million dollar lawsuit), clients opt to keep the lawyer (or doctor) in the loop.

For simpler or low-stake workflows though, there is direct selling to the client (see Clerky).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> The most productive teams I work with are using Slack bots to automate several tasks/notify the team.

Many bots are admittedly experimental, but individuals are empowered to optimize or unsubscribe from a channel.

</comment><comment><USER75> To answer your question about Software companies, the main process that will be automated is software development. AI is coming and engineers will be leaving.

</comment><comment><USER76> Showing up to work.

<comment><USER77> I'm assuming this is a joke. Otherwise, let me know (and perhaps elaborate on what you mean) and sorry for the downvote.

<comment><USER78> I interpreted it as "commuting is a repeated manual process, and thus should be possible to automate"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Our company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files, and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online.

I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience this in their organization and want to work together on something?

<comment><USER48> Check out pandoc. With it you could convert your documents into Markdown. Then use common *nix text-utils to merge the parts you want into a single file and then load it to InDesign. Check out this article ([http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/](http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/)) that inspired me to automate protocol specs extraction from Word documents (bluurgh).

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I actually recently mostly automated refund calculations. it's not fully complete, but it's in the verification stage

</comment><comment><USER81> Cleaning up and organizing data for processing.

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate?

There are plenty of data cleansing and processing tools. Things like formatting errors can easily be fixed automatically. Things like "Human erroneously put a string in a date field in Excel and exported it to CSV."? Not so much. Errors like that often require bespoke solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Expense tracking

<comment><USER83> I've been using ledger-cli [1] for this. It takes time to reconcile accounts, but I've been going strong for the last couple months.

[1]: [http://www.ledger-cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I'm working on some marketing automation stuff. Automatically sharing blog post links to Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER85> If your blog provides an RSS feed then there are many options to choose from to achieve autoposting to Twitter, first two that come to my mind:

[https://dlvrit.com/](https://dlvrit.com/)

[https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter](https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter)

<comment><USER84> Yep. I'm more inclined to roll my own right now though, since I have some very specific ideas I want to implement and some other use cases to incorporate. The biggest problem lately has been time. I started down this path sometime last year, but have been letting it sit on the back-burner for a while, in favor of focusing on higher priority tasks. _sigh_

<comment><USER86> What kind of uses cases you have ? I think buffer,hootsuits like paid apps should be enough to do whatever you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I wish a customer could go to our online order form and press "Price Quote" instead of "Order" and get a price quote (PDF) that they could give to their purchasing department. It would only take a few hours to pound out, but there is always higher priority work.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Delegating some rights to some managers in Active Directory. For example allow them to add or remove access to specific groups in a way that is intuitive to them.

It would allow us to focus on other stuff, and they would be able to quickly grant access without waiting after us at all.

</comment><comment><USER88> Creating Jira accounts and giving them access to the right projects. It's one of my jobs.

<comment><USER38> Python/Selenium is your friend. I did something similar in past ;)

<comment><USER89> Never checked, but I would expect it to have an API for that.

<comment><USER38> It's a library which you can use in many languages. I use it in Python to automate many sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Logging jira tempo hours.

</comment><comment><USER91> Coffee Maker

<comment><USER38> This guy already did this:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his- job-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his-job-2015-11)

<comment><USER91> Yup, but I'll need to automate my mug too..

<comment><USER92> Caffeine pills dispenser at your desk. Everyday at 9h it gives you a pill.

<comment><USER93> Just hook me up with an IV drip and call it a day.

<comment><USER92> Overkill. Caffeine can be absorbed by the skin. Make the keyboard and mouse output a small dose of caffeine during the day. You wouldn't even notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Eating

<comment><USER95> Soylent comes close

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Creating multiple versions of share images for social media

<comment><USER97> This seems to me like a simple tool to do the job. Could you please elaborate on the requirements?

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Browsing reddit.

</comment><comment><USER99> Offboarding

</comment><comment><USER100> Daily standup meetings.

I'd build a robot, tape a picture of my face onto it, and program it to tromp over to the conference room, zone out for fifteen minutes as everyone goes around the circle like it's kindergarten show-and-tell, then read my commit messages for the day before, the titles of the tickets I've picked out to work on today, and finish with "No roadblocks".

It'd save me an hour a day in interruptions and wasted time. Now I just need to build the robot...

<comment><USER101> We recently switched to holding the daily standup in Slack, using a simple

      /remind Time for the daily standup! Say what matters and where you need help. everyday at 10 AM

(Before, the meeting was in voice chat, not a physical standup since we're at multiple locations.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Robotics & PLC Programing:

Automate DEA state creation from CAD-Cell Descriptions, state-transfers and all-state-covered-automated-proofing- im so sick of all those forgotten states and the blame that usually gets shifted towards the moving actors aka robots.

<comment><USER103> Is the program based on finite state automata/machines?

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Most of marketing at traditional compnaies can be automated by ML. This is already happening, but there are huge F500 companies where the employees have an incentive not to automate.

<comment><USER45> There are always incentives not to automate. I think people forget this sometimes. Look at the cotton gin, there was massive opposition to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> transcribing real time notes</comment>


Plerts - Tap Your Social Safety Net for Medical and Personal Safety - <AUTHOR> http://plerts.com <comment><USER2> Kind of interesting. Although I didn't understand exactly what it was until looking at the pricing page.</comment>


Scann: Scalable Nearest Neighbors - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/scann <comment><USER2> If someone is looking for the referenced paper ( _Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization_ ), it can be found here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10396](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10396)

(It's also linked in the repository's docs/algorithms.md, to which there's a link at the bottom of the main page.)

<comment><USER3> The paper is a bit odd. It feels like a lot of things are missing:

\- How are the quantized vectors used to do NNS? Do we have to brute force compare against each codeword?

\- In thst case, how many codewords are there? How big is k compared to n? How does changing k affect performance?

\- What architecture is used to train the embeddings? We are only given the loss function.

\- How fast is the preprocessing step? If we need to do Lloyd's algorithm type iterations combined with training neural nets, this is potentially a lot slower than Faiss which just picks random landmark points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Right now ANN is a huge (and fascinating) area for active data structures/Algos research.

I do sort of wonder if we will reach a point where instead of pure recall per speed, we'll have a family of algorithms with more trade offs for the use case. Where we begin to look at metrics for that domain for a given ANN approach instead of just its ability to recreate a nearest neighbors set retrieval.

Like one thing I see assumed is that while recall at N is good, does this also mean the "ranking" of that top N is ideal? I don't want to have to manually compute NN on this top N if I can avoid it, for example.

And are there specific vector spaces where one ANN is preferred? Or will there be some universal approach that just works for everything?

I realize it's too early to tell, but these questions always percolate in my mind when we hit a new benchmark in recall for speed. Especially since I still see people doing more naive things that seem to work perfectly fine for their use case (like KD trees, random projections, or LSH)

<comment><USER3> > And are there specific vector spaces where one ANN is preferred? Or will > there be some universal approach that just works for everything?

This is a great question for research right now. Basically euclidean (and inner product) search is quite well understood, but for distance measures such as edit distance we still have no idea what the best approach is.

The most general result is [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8555102](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8555102) , which works for all normed spaces.

However it is possible that people will try to just map everything to inner products using neural networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, so I am just trying to understand the basic concepts in the paper and put it in my own words:

It seems that the primary idea is that quantization precision is more important where there is a high density of neighbors.

I.e. at the edges the quantized sections (buckets) could be large since there are few items there, but at high density areas, the buckets should be much smaller in order to have an even distribution of objects per bucket as possible.

Therefore, the overall effectiveness of a Quantization loss function should not be evaluated on a sum of squared error (that assumes the vector space has consistent linear value), but should rather consider the densities of the vector space and use that as a weight of the errors at different regions.

To me it seems analogous to a hash set, where the goal would be to have even distribution (same number of items in every bucket).

We want to quantize space so that every position has about the same number of items.

<comment> ur-whale >should rather consider the densities of the vector space and use that as a weight of the errors at different regions.

Sounds like the n-dimensional version of an octree

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this looks impressively fast at very reasonable recall rates in the ANN- benchmarks. It seems to leave faiss and nmslib in the dust. Pulling up the arXiv paper as we speak to figure out what these guys are doing to achieve such impressive results.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised that I don't see DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, Spectral, etc. I don't even _recognize_ these methods. Am I missing something or have the methods I'm familiar with become obsolete that fast?

<comment><USER6> DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, Spectral, and many other classical algorithms are not scalable. You cannot use them to search for approximate nearest neighbors, say, among several billion embeddings in a 1024-dimensional vector space, which is the sort of thing you _can_ do with this library.

<comment><USER8> I don't know anything about this field. Are these distributed systems? A billion 1024 dimensional vectors sounds like a whole lot of memory (8 TB if each dimension is a double?).

<comment><USER9> The link is from google research. I'd imagine google has at least a few datasets of this scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://github.com/google-research/google- research/commit/40...](https://github.com/google-research/google- research/commit/406566cfafc83bcc4d54f82efa43fd3819039905#diff-9f09552fb2b5917f8532e55facc3734b)

<comment><USER11> Are you point out the removal of the Apace License header or what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would this algorithm suit the case of wanting to find neighbors within a set radius of a point? Does anyone know of an approximate method for doing this?

<comment><USER11> sklearn's BallTree has a query_radius method [1], but it's exhaustive, rather than approximate.

[1] [https://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ne...](https://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.neighbors.BallTree.html#sklearn.neighbors.BallTree.query_radius)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> how does this compare to milvus?

<comment><USER6> Not comparable.

milvus integrates and wraps libraries like faiss and nmslib, which are alternatives to Scann. (If anything, I expect the milvus developers will soon be looking into integrating and wrapping Scann.)</comment></comment>


The Evolution of Data at Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://redditblog.com/2018/02/28/the-evolution-of-data-at-reddit/ <comment><USER2> "Third party vendor". Is this Qubole? If so, would be nice to give him an Internet high-five by naming them :)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.flydata.com/blog/hive-and-redshift-a-brief- compa...](https://www.flydata.com/blog/hive-and-redshift-a-brief-comparison/)

Used Redshift for our large data needs. No reason to look to anything else, given our time-shifted data could easily be fit into Redshift. For larger data, we would have to have some other solution.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is extremely interesting and I'm eager to see the follow-up.

I'm currently planning something very similar at my company and any reference to how other smaller-scale companies handle this when scaling is invaluable. Are there any other blogs from other companies which have talked about similar things?

<comment><USER5> Not a direct answer to your question, but I maintain an HN-like aggregator of engineering blogs here: [https://engineered.at](https://engineered.at)

These types of posts pop up there pretty frequently

<comment><USER6> These need to be sorted by publishing time, not by your database entry time. You can tell because you've recently added Percona, and it's filling up the top with backdated stuff. I'd also have preferred just a minimalist interface. We don't need anymore voting/commenting stuff at this point.

<comment><USER5> Interesting feedback. Not sure how I could make the interface more minimal, it's pretty stark as it is.

The backdated stuff is weird I'll admit, but they also posted a bunch of things in the last couple days so could be screwing with the ranking algo. I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The tool we used did not support using Hive as a backend, and given the > speed of even relatively basic Hive queries, it wouldn't make much sense to > use that for reporting metrics.

Did Reddit try setting up Presto? Analytics, not just visualization, with Hive is really hard.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've had a great experience with Hive!

One thing that has made me sad is that there is that Rails / Ruby has little to no support. Many of the repos are over four to five years old.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think nowadays they use Microsoft PowerBI for dashboards/reporting</comment>


On a Quick Way to Extract Concise Image Descriptors from CNN Models - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phash.org/posts/concise-image-descriptor <comment><USER2> Watch out with your eigenvalue analysis - your covariance matrix is limited to rank 500 because you're only using 500 images. Furthermore, the smaller eigenvalues will have eigenvectors with high variance due to the random image sample (ie. "noisy"). If the singular values start to fall off within ~1-3x of your sample size then that's indication you need larger sample - eg. random matrix spectra will still exhibit rolloff in spectra.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The sample size was limited for memory restrictions. I obtained similar results in eigenvalues for different random selections of 500 images, but no doubt a covariance matrix based on more images might tell us more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would love to know some results</comment>