Cutting 'Old Heads' at IBM - <AUTHOR> http://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/ <comment><USER3> The important bit:

 _How did IBM get around the legal requirement for the disclosures? With a move that even critics acknowledge is ingenious._

 _The company's pre-2014 layoff documents required employees receiving severance to waive all bias claims based on "race, national origin, ancestry, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital status, age... disability, medical condition, or veteran status." The new documents deleted "age" from the waiver list. In fact, they specifically said employees were not waiving their right when it came to age and could pursue age discrimination cases against the company._

 _But, the new documents added, employees had to waive the right to take their age cases to court. Instead, they had to pursue them through private arbitration. What's more, they had to keep them confidential and pursue them alone. They couldn't join with other workers to make a case._

Forced arbitration continues to be an awful thing that companies foist on employees to strip them of their rights.

<comment><USER4> What's especially clever here is that most people will sign to get the severance package (it's better than nothing), leaving the group who refuses to sign too small to mount an effective legal defense against age discrimination (the company can just outspend them in court). Meanwhile the company can just say "we offered people a choice, and they chose" and pretend like they did nothing wrong.

This is exactly the sort of thing unions are supposed to protect people from. If something like this happened in my country there would be a general strike and the country would be at a standstill.

<comment><USER5> That's why there should never, ever be any conditions on a severance package.

<comment><USER6> My spouse gave up an entire severance package because of the ludicrous terms outlined in the agreement. She could have been sued for any comments she made about her employer in perpetuity if she took her severance, which was neither generous nor fair. Our lawyer advised us to walk away and didn't charge us for his time to look at it either.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't she be sued even after declining severance ?

<comment><USER6> No, signing the draconian contract was a condition of receiving the severance, so (as explained by our attorney) by not signing she was not bound by that contract. It didn't amount to much money wise, not even a whole paycheck, and we were fortunate enough to be able to pass it up.

<comment><USER7> the natural state of things is anyone can sue anyone. So unless she got them to sign a contract to not sue, they can sue her.

<comment><USER8> Sure. They could sue but they cannot sue for a slam dunk "breach of contract" suit. They would actually have to prove damages which makes any case much more expensive for the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The dislocation caused by IBM's cuts has been especially great because until recently the company encouraged its employees to think of themselves as "IBMers" and many operated under the assumption that they had career-long employment._

I tell everyone -- don't drink the Kool-Aid. Never believe that a company has any loyalty and always keep an eye on the market. Even if you are paid well now and see that your job isn't gaining you marketable skills -- leave. At the end of the day, as a person in technology, your major resources are your technical skills.

I will leave a company in a heartbeat if I see that the company's technical direction isn't in line with what the market wants. I'm in my 40s and biggest fear is being unemployable -- not being unemployed.

I haven't had to do it yet, but hopefully, I would have the discipline to leave a job where I'm overpaid with respect to the market to take a job that pays a little less that keeps me competitive.

<comment><USER10> I was surprised when I visited the Computer History Museum recently and discovered that IBM actually had its own rally song: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU)

<comment><USER11> I was surprised to visit the Computer History Museum and see VAX computers I had to work with on my first job right out of college... in 2005, for a defence firm. 1MB of RAM was a square foot of circuit board. I had a lot of questions about my future.

<comment><USER12> Our plant still runs mission critical VAX VMS TDMS applications.

We junked our VAX 7000s about a decade ago and moved to the Charon emulator. Played with VAX VMS on Simh, but everyone was too scared to put any real data on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years"_

Combine this with the _" new tech leaders"_[1] affinity for hiring only young people and it's getting tough out there.

Fortunately, non-technical fortune 500 companies seem still open to us grey hairs in their IT orgs.

[1] Google, FB, Twitter, Uber, etc.

<comment><USER14> The company I'm at has been hiring these ex-big blue individuals in droves and it's been awesome. Tons of talent combined with some truly remarkable experience.

<comment> at-fates-hands The group I work with at my current gig just hired two older devs to work with us. One guy came from Lockheed Martin, the other spent most of his career in finance at various banks and investment companies. Both have ungodly amounts of experience with .Net, Java and Javascript.

Just being able to have them around has given our team an ocean of knowledge to draw from. I know I'm a better developer just from asking for help and bouncing stuff off of them. You can't put a price on stuff like this.

<comment><USER13> That's exactly the value I was alluding to. Is paying these folks, say, 20% more than someone in their 30's really a boat anchor, or is it an asset?

<comment><USER15> Realistically speaking, the answer to that question depends on the current makeup of your employees.

If most of your workforce is 50+, you probably don't need more highly experienced people and are probably overpaying for some of the more basic tasks some are doing. It's also not great for continuity if you're set to have large segments of your workforce retiring in a small window of time.

On the other hand, if your workforce skews young and inexperienced, bringing in some people with much more experience is probably going to be a valuable resource for them that'll help everyone perform better, and will help you avoid costly mistakes.

<comment><USER13> That's a good observation. Managers should be maintaining a reasonable balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> IBM is an embarrassing company. They are not culling based on age, they are culling based on severe lack of skills and dated values. IBM is saturated with tech people who threw in their technical chops 20 years ago to become a salesperson.

Everything they do, from their blockchain efforts to Watson, is so embarrassingly driven by oldschool sales/marketing people that they can't be taken seriously by technical decision makers at their customer companies. They no longer have the ability to lead their customers in technical decisions.

<comment><USER17> Well, they let go of a lot of people with actual skills and knowledge because they made too much money. People with the know-how (my Dad being one of them) saw the writing on the wall decades ago and hit the door even before being pushed out due to age.

They're absolutely embarrassing now. They've lost too many good people and everybody knows what IBM's about now. They can focus on hiring Millenials all they want, but which early-stage workers would really want to go to IBM? They know what it'll be like. Lots of outsourcing, bureaucracy and bad decisions. Not many would choose IBM over another offer.

Screwing over the workforce has consequences.

<comment><USER11> > everybody knows what IBM's about now

I don't work for, nor have I applied to work for, IBM so maybe I'm more dense than my question illustrates... but what is IBM about these days as you mention? Please help me get rid of the rock over my head on this topic.

<comment><USER18> _but what is IBM about these days as you mention?_

Since they sold off their consumer hardware businesses, it's all about their Global Services consulting and a little bit of big iron ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll offer a counter point to this, we hired a senior SVP from IBM about 2 years ago (he spent his entire career at IBM). IBM also tried to sue him when he left. My company is a "born in the cloud" company so we have values and an attitude that I would consider in alignment with modern, inclusive, customer positive values, etc. He passed interviews and all the numbers showed he was a high performer etc.

We brought him on hoping he would use his experience to grow our cloud business into "the enterprise". What we found was we had hired a guy that scoffed at ideas like UX, frequently bullied his team and the extended team in calls. Would often go off on monologues and was extremely rigid in his top down approach to management. It was a complete culture shock to the team and customers. We understood that some of these things were part of the deal but what we didnt expect was a near zero openness to ideas.

He had classic double speak of stating his door was always open to differing opinions or ideas but a week later he would be telling the company on conference calls that if people didn't like it there was the door. He brought in his entire exec team from IBM and things continued to go down hill from there. Some of his own team would make fun of our sales leaders until one of them called these guys out and discovered they had little to no understanding of how cloud pricing and subscription worked. It was a big moment.

My experience of him and his team makes me wonder if IBM is doing the right thing, if that experience is common across IBM they are going to struggle to compete with firms like my own and even worse attract talent that has no interest in being bullied for decades before a promotion.

<comment><USER20> The article describes the rank-and-file employees being fired, not the middle- to-upper management behind the layoffs, a piece of which your company unfortunately hired.

<comment><USER21> Not saying it's different for engineers, but most of the examples in the article seem to be sales and marketing.

<comment><USER20> You are correct. I have amended my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you're old enough to remember IBM being a real tech (evil) empire, the striking thing is how much the swapping out of old career employees with young people and contractors has correlated with IBM floundering and the cool parts of the company being gradually replaced with services and... more services.

<comment><USER23> """Services as a Service" as a Service" as a Service" (TM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could it be a case of correlation vs causation?

Age discrimination is bad. Firing employees because of their age, or maybe more cynically, because if their elevated salaries, is a shit thing to do.

But what about getting rid of the employees who hold the company back? The ones who drag their feet. The ones who are more concerned about protecting their political standing than accomplishing good work. The ones who try to avoid change, sometimes literally defended by "Well that's the way we've always done it."

That breed of employee tends to have been at the company for a long time. Often that means they're older in age, too. Making a clean sweep of folks like that could appear to be age discrimination while actually being due to performance.

<comment><USER25> These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a year or two.

That being said, if it is an older person doing this, then it can be difficult to let them go without it appearing to be due to age discrimination.

But I've seen enough layoffs to know that for a lot of companies, it's all about saving money by getting rid of these people, not about their performance, at least every time I've seen it happen.

I've even been told directly in a layoff it was because I was one of the higher paid people in the company (it was a game studio, so I still wasn't being paid all that much). I guess I was old for someone in the game industry, since most people start fresh out of school and burn out of the industry in less than five years.

My manager got laid off as well, who was in his 60s, did excellent at his job, and had tons of amazing experience (I wish I worked on even just one of the cool games he was lead on), but it was definitely because he was one of the highest paid people there (if not the highest), not because of anything else.

<comment><USER26> > These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of > young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a > year or two.

I do remember a guy hired when we were in our twenties basically say something like "we're not paid to think/above pay grade," when trying to come up with solutions to problems. I was young enough to be surprised. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is nothing new for them. My father started at IBM in 1968, and was forced into "voluntary" early retirement in 1993. He at least got to keep his pension, but if he hadn't gone voluntarily and opted to stick it out like some of his colleagues, he would have been let go in the following months and lost everything.

<comment><USER28> How would he have lost everything? The pension would stay no matter what.

<comment><USER11> > The pension would stay no matter what.

I have a doubt, because "business in America".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Among professional jobs, software is the only one where you go out of demand as you age. Doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects routinely peak in their 50s, but in tech if you haven't transitioned into management by 40, you're not valued anymore.

How did this even come to be?

<comment><USER30> Software developers aren't considered in the same league as doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, or architects. Software developers are viewed as construction workers by most people and businesses.

<comment><USER31> This is going to upset a lot of developers who expect the boom to last forever. A ton of people think they're on the same side as senior management because they get paid better than average and have been able to get better working conditions; very few people in management share this view.

The brilliant thing was getting so many to buy into libertarian propaganda and actively fight against things like unionization or labor laws which would reduce the power imbalance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I just participated in a "Voluntary Reduction In Force" at (company I can't mention for legal reasons). It was applied across all of R&D but only people with 15 years or more of service were allowed to apply. We're being paid a week of salary and healthcare for each year worked so it's not too bad. But even so it was abundantly clear who they were targeting.

<comment><USER33> One week of salary per year served is actually pretty bad. That money is gone quickly. In my company it used to be 4 weeks per year. Now it's two.

<comment><USER25> Wow 4 weeks? I didn't know there was companies like that out there, especially now.

Our company reduced it to 1 week per year (claimed it was the 'standard', and it would save them money so they could spend it on being so innovative elsewhere), then reduced 401k matching from them paying once per quarter to you have to be employed on December 31 of that year or they don't have to match for the entire year (crazy, I know), and then after they got those two things in place started axing tens of thousands of people's jobs, and saved tons of money in the process, I'm sure. These policy changes also lead to people voluntarily resigning and thus giving them lower layoff numbers too.

I'm probably not sticking around much longer myself, but I had a few too many life changes (like buying a house) that kept me from leaving earlier.

<comment><USER33> I am sure the top guys in your company took a significant amount of the savings as bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pay off your mortgage. When you get pushed out of the workforce because of age (and you will), having no rent and no mortgage puts the situation in a different perspective. It becomes more of a beginning than an end.

<comment><USER35> Paying a mortgage is simply moving numbers from one column to another, and usually into a less tax-favorable column with a worse risk-return profile. _accumulating wealth_ is the way to thrive in unemployment.

<comment><USER36> Reducing debt is equivalent to accumulating wealth. Your wealth increases as the debt goes down.

<comment><USER35> Reducing debt by _spending your wealth_ cancels out the wealth increase from reducing debt.

<comment><USER36> The interest payments on debt are almost always going to be larger than a "safe" investment would provide in returns, because the lenders need to make money somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> And they probably saved millions in wages while they were at it.

Coming out of college as a mature student I saw so many of my younger classmates absolutely throwing themselves at the worst offers the local job pool presented.

I kept telling them just don't accept, wait for a better offer, look elsewhere. The problem is, at least in the market I'm in, there seems to be a practice of wage fixing. It's the same bad offer everywhere. I talked to a few recruiters at those companies, asked some pointed questions about compensation that more experienced employees tend to ask, and watched them just shut down. It was less about the "millennial advantage" and more about the benefits of naivety on their bottom line.

I get that having more work/life experience in general qualifies me for a slightly higher starting wage, but I held out and refused any offers from low ball employers and started $10k higher than most of my colleagues who graduated at the same time.

It's horrible that this older demographic is being discriminated against and forced out of their jobs, but this isn't only about age discrimination. The goal isn't to acquire "digitally native" employees (not entirely). The goal is to save money on wages and lower the wage expectations of an entire generation of people.

...unless I'm wrong and everyone who replaced someone who was forced out is doing great and all those boomers were just becoming stagnant dead weight and deserved what they got.

<comment><USER38> boomers? The baby boom generation was born between the mid-1940s and 1960s. They're all in their late 60s and 70s now and most have long retired. The age- out demography we are talking about now generally are their children currently in their early-40s to early 50s. The dial-up generation.

<comment><USER37> fair enough, don't know why I lump all the "olds" together like that. There has to be a better name for them than the dial-up generation. I grew up with dial-up and I'm not that old.

<comment><USER26> Gen X, while I'm not fond of it, is usually the term here. Grew up with Commodore 64, saw the birth of the web and built it up, now considered too expensive, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is exactly why I would never consider a full time job here. I was an intern and watched my entire team get laid off regardless of performance. Older workers were most definitely targeted.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if Amazon, Facebook and Google are using similar performance management tactics to drive the attrition of older workers?

"A slide from a similar presentation prepared last spring for the same leaders called for "re-profiling current talent" to "create room for new talent." Presentations for 2015 and 2016 for the 50,000-employee software group also included plans for "aggressive performance management" and emphasized the need to "maintain steady attrition to offset hiring.""

</comment><comment><USER41> If it's all about the money, companies should offer voluntary pay cuts. I know a few folks who'd take that over "voluntary" retirement any day.

<comment><USER42> It's harder to hide the age bias if you cut pay.

<comment><USER43> This only matters if it isn't about the money...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm not sure this is just IBM lacking the vision to see their older employees for the value that they truly hold, rather, they're just following the path of least resistance. I see this same sort of scenario playing out in other companies across the globe too; why should any company be innovative enough to value and empower older workers when they can just exploit young, naive talent?

How do we prevent this exact same vicious cycle from playing out all over again in 25-30 years when Millennials are the grey-haired ones with an inability to "innovate" or "connect" with the younger generation? If anything, with the rapid pace of technology only accelerating over time, future generations will become irrelevant "old heads" on an even shorter timeline.

<comment><USER45> Either that or the cycle stops due to being unsustainable. So instead of gray heads it will be most paid workers. Usually most paid for a reason that's correlated with achievement or experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This speaks to me.

[https://youtu.be/yL7X3DTyS2Q](https://youtu.be/yL7X3DTyS2Q)

</comment><comment><USER47> It's kind of ironic that it's the old heads at the top, like Ginni Rometty, that are the very ones responsible for the position IBM is in.

</comment><comment><USER48> IBM has one main problem: They are a sick culture. One consequence is that they are a sick company. Their sickness causes them to do self-destructive things which makes them an even sicker company.

Here are some parts of the sick IBM culture:

(1) Marketing.

"You might think that IBM is a technology company or a computer company, but you would be wrong. IBM is a marketing company: They look for opportunities to sell. They might get into grocery stores tomorrow if they thought that there was money to be made there." \-- IIRC from a manager of a large IBM branch office. Same guy, IIRC: "You might think that IBM research comes up with powerful new technology. IBM development turns this technology into good, new products. Then IBM marketing sells these products and makes money. That's exactly backwards: Instead, IBM marketing comes up with what new products can be sold at a profit. IBM development builds these products and gets them ready for the market. If development has trouble, they may go to IBM research for solutions. What IBM charges for the products has nothing to do with what IBM's costs are: Instead, IBM sells the products for what the customers are willing to pay."

Consequences: (A) IBM respects people who do well managing marketing efforts. (B) IBM does not much respect technical people or people not in management. (C) The decision makers in IBM are marketing people who are not very technical. So, these people are slow to see the market and marketing potential of new technology. (D) Long IBM's approach to what to sell was that their main customers, large banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, would grab their IBM marketing representatives and scream about problems they had. With enough screaming with clearly enough market potential, finally IBM would develop and sell a solution.

(2) IBM Management

In this way, part of the IBM culture was the primacy of the middle and upper managers. High stability was valued. Innovation was not. The higher managers had staffs to thoroughly study each decision. Then the manager had plenty of cover for the decisions they did make.

IIRC, an early remark of IBM CEO Lou Gerstner was that "IBM is the most arrogant, inwardly directed, process oriented company I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of companies.".

(3) Stuck with Mainframes

So, these attitudes caused IBM to miss out on essentially everything past 3270 terminals connected to CICS (customer information control system -- for building and running interactive applications, e.g., for order entry) on an IBM 370 family _mainframe_.

So, sure, can see this situation as a case of "The Innovator's Dilemma". I.e., IBM was slow to get into lines of business that would compete, under sell, undercut, beat IBM's mainframe, cash cow business.

(4) IBM Missed out

Long a standard attitude in IBM was that IBM needed only high margin businesses and should not try to compete in low margin businesses. So, with this thinking, IBM passed on the businesses of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Google, Qualcomm, Apple, etc.

So, IBM missed out on the growth of TCP/IP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, the Internet, Web browsers, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.

With high irony, IBM long made the crucial, core chips used in the high end routers of Cisco and Juniper. Why? IBM had a microelectronics division, and they saw those chips as a business opportunity. But IBM did not pick up that ball and run with it to compete against Cisco or Juniper in high end routers. Due to J. Cocke and his 801 computer, IBM Research was early in RISC. There was some usage of RISC in some IBM mainframe I/O subsystems and in IBM's AIX workstation lines, but RISC became a big thing (e.g., the current Hennessy, Patterson Turing award that claims that now 99% of processors are RISC) but apparently not for IBM. IBM was ahead in magnetic recording with giant magneto resistance disk heads, but Western Digital, etc. were successful with disks but not IBM. IBM had high end research on architecture, algorithms, and software for high end disk clusters, but, IIRC, EMC made the big bucks there, not IBM. IBM Research was early into "wearable" computers, but Apple got rich with the iPhone, etc., not IBM. At one time, IBM actually ran all of the Internet, but they never saw the opportunity there until too late. IBM had an early Web browser but let others get big leverage in the browser wars. At one time, IBM had the TCP/IP stack in chip hardware, but they failed to make big bucks with that. At one time, maybe still, much of the backbone of the Internet needs an IBM-invented amplifier that amplifies the optical signals on the optical fibers without converting back to digital; that was great leverage over the backbone of the Internet, but IBM didn't take that opportunity. The chip manufacturers are only just now moving to extreme UV for their light sources, but parts of IBM saw the point back in the 1980s or so and built a cyclotron as an X-ray source for a microelectronics lithography light source. Today there are lots of chip companies -- Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. -- and several high end chip foundries but apparently IBM is not a major player there. IBM was early into social computing, with Prodigy, etc., but AOL and later Facebook did well. Prodigy was also with Sears and for on-line selling, but Amazon made the big bucks there. IBM was early into really good work in virtual machines, e.g., the 360/67 of 1967 and its CP/67 virtual machine software. But VMware made the big bucks with virtual machines. IBM was a leader in relational database, with System R and DB/2 and the software on the System/38, etc., but Oracle, SQL Server, etc. are the database success stories now. IBM had object oriented software in firmware in 1970 or so, but apparently IBM never became a leader in object oriented computing. PCs? IBM was essentially the leader, but Microsoft and Intel made the big bucks from PCs, not IBM. Cloud computing? I've heard of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google but much less about IBM. Laser printers? Same song, next verse.

(5) Defeat from Jaws of Victory

It goes on this way: In plain terms, from 1980 to 1990, IBM was essentially the technology leader in essentially everything in computing, but the IBM top managers never saw how to make money with that technology. So, 1990 computer and Internet technology, the open door for likely the biggest step up in technology, economic productivity, and more in all of human history, and IBM was determined to ignore it.

It appears that generally IBM is a massive case of organizational behavior goal subordination: The middle and upper managers want to crush anything new; they are not successful in this effort outside IBM but quite successful inside IBM.

For many years, the IBM division managers would meet at the Armonk HQ, give their financial results, nicely ahead of projections, and project even better results for the next year. But near 1990, somehow the results were commonly less good than the projections. The consensus was that "God had ceased to smile on IBM".

(6) For Individuals

For a worker in the US economy, for a good job, income, and financial security, it is their responsibility to get that done. A very common approach is to start and run a successful business. An electrician who has a truck and an assistant and who stays busy can do better financially than 80% of the US IBM employees. Same for a guy who has several crews mowing grass and plowing snow; same for a guy doing well running several McDonald's, Burger Kings, or Wendy's. Same for a dentist. A K-12 school teacher or a nurse has a more stable career than nearly anyone in IBM.

(7) Firing People

IBM fires lots of people because IBM management doesn't know how to organize work for those people in ways that make money. IBM likes to fire older people so that they can blame the failures on the older people being "behind" in technology. Also the managers don't like the older, technical people as subordinates because the older people know too much and can challenge the manager. In particular, the managers don't like technical people and don't want any technical people who know more about technology than the managers. Since the managers with respect are marketing people with poor technical qualifications, those marketing managers like to fire to older experts in technology. It's dysfunctional organizational behavior goal subordination, arrogant, inwardly directed, process oriented, etc.

(8) Future of IBM

The solution? Sure, Darwin is on the case: Slowly IBM will shrink and disappear. Maybe near the end, Bill Gates will buy all of it and put what is left of it in a museum.

<comment><USER49> item 4 is particularly interesting. it sounds like IBM's greatest missed opportunities -- really huge ones -- were caused by failures in business/marketing/management, not engineering and technology.

<comment><USER48> Right: With high irony, top management believed that their special abilities were in marketing and not technology, but, except for marketing cash cow mainframes to big customers locked in due to their unique applications software, the marketing was awful while the technology was terrific. As I started with, IBM was a sick culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I dislike anti-discrimination laws for anything other than manual labor anyway. I think they are probably fundamentally flawed.

</comment><comment><USER16> IBM is an embarrassing company. They are not culling based on age, they are culling based on severe lack of skills and dated values. IBM is saturated with tech people who threw in their technical chops 20 years ago to become a salesperson.

Everything they do, from their blockchain efforts to Watson, is so embarrassingly driven by oldschool sales/marketing people that they can't be taken seriously by technical decision makers at their customer companies.

</comment><comment><USER51> I dont know about this. Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I can see AWS & Google has much younger devs who are fluent in more modern systems.

I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.

<comment><USER52> > I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.

I'll make a killing as an old fashioned java developer at that age, probably.

<comment><USER53> COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40 something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.

<comment><USER54> I'll mention that COBOL devs are no longer doing just fine. I had an ex- coworker that had trouble finding well-paying COBOL jobs. A lot of it has been offshored or outsourced to low-paid consulting companies like Tata and the like.

<comment> le-mark I have anecdotal evidence of this as well. A local company that formerly employed thousands of cobol devs has had aggressive layoffs and offshoring over the past 10 years. Lots and lots of unemployed cobol devs here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> We all know how it works in our industry. I do find it bitterly ironic that all our diversity efforts (which I otherwise fully support) rarely or never even touch on this issue. The one form of discrimination everyone will face unless they die or leave tech.

But, you know, labor costs.

</comment><comment><USER56> Completely anecdotal, but I've interviewed a few IBM lifers and veterans for positions outside IBM. Their skills were lacking, to say the least. It's unclear why. Perhaps when you joined IBM "back in the day" a CS degree was less important? Or maybe the business itself stressed other skills over technical proficiency?

While ageism is a serious problem in the industry, I also don't think it's fair to equate seniority with competence. There are many wizard old heads, but not every old head is a wizard.

<comment><USER57> A CS degree, you say? What in the world use is that other than jumpstarting the first couple of years of employment? And getting filtered past people who believe it is important?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always seen some of these older companies as being big on hiring people from academia (and also military for some reason - <USER2> seems many of these folks have military backgrounds).

<comment><USER56> Joining the industry in the 90s wasn't anything like joining it now, at least for entry level positions. Just saying, the industry was different back then and knowing fundamentals seemed less important than slinging code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> On one hand, while harsh, laying off older workers (even the ones who _have_ kept up to date on technology) makes good economic sense. On the other hand, not all global companies are limited by the type of worker's rights legislation noted in the article.

While this survival of the fittest, hyper-capitalism approach will optimize return on investment and technological innovation, I suspect it is also ~destroying the careers of many high achievers who would likely have outperformed in other fields without having their careers derailed.

Does anyone see a way to reconcile this?

<comment><USER59> > On one hand, while harsh, laying off older workers (even the ones who have > kept up to date on technology) makes good economic sense

It's actually a completely irrational thing to do, you would not get rid of an experienced, productive, loyal employee, unless you are forced into a compensation plan that no longer makes sense and there is no way to diminish that paycheck. In light of the large increase for IT compensation in the last decades, this seems the exception.

In my 20s I worked with 60 year olds that were better than all of my young/senior peers, with deep, multidisciplinary understanding of our product, technology and market.

This is why I have serious reservations about the way the issue is presented in the article, as purely a prejudice against old age. That would make sense say in the airline industry, driven by the customer's prejudices, but in tech it is simply self-defeating, you are not gaining anything, there is no motive, quite the opposite. That is if, and only if, the employees keep up to date, productive and motivated.

A large part of the article is bemoaning how IBM failed their expectations for a job for life where they can retire from. That is a huge warning sign of an employee who no longer competes in the market and sees his paycheck as an earned right.

<comment><USER60> Unfortunately, I screwed up the question. As downvotes will have me in the penalty box until sometime later tonight, I made a new username in hopes of salvaging some value from my incomplete original asking of the question as I feel it is an important topic.

A hopefully improved asking of the same question:

Two employees, one 22 years old, one 50 years old. The younger employee makes $46k, the older employee makes $127k.

While the older employee has slightly better useful to the company experience, an _omniscient_ (this is an sincere attempt to stop people from avoiding the question being asked) being would judge the younger employee to have objectively superior cost/benefits to the company. In other words, _for the context of this particular question only_ , the older work does NOT offer experience-based value superior to the younger worker.

In some countries, such as the USA, the older employee would be protected by age discrimination legislation. However, not all global companies are limited by the type of worker's rights legislation noted in the article.

While this survival of the fittest, hyper-capitalism approach will optimize return on investment and technological innovation, I suspect it is also ~destroying the careers of many high achievers who would likely have outperformed in other fields without having their careers derailed.

As well, in a globalized free trade world, this would limit the competitiveness of countries who have passed such legislation. (Once again, our omniscient being above has confirmed this assertion.)

Does anyone see a way to reconcile this? Or in other words, how might one explain how this is "no problem, _at all_ "?

<comment><USER59> Having been through it myself (buried for voicing a perfectly legitimate and reasoned, but politically unpopular position), I would say HN has a downvotes problem and would benefit from some metamoderation facility or at least significant reduction of available downvotes. They should be reserved for disruption and trolling and not much else.

> Two employees, one 22 years old, one 50 years old. The younger employee > makes $46k, the older employee makes $127k.

Good god, why is the older employee take home such a massive paycheck for doing "slightly better" work than an entry level grunt? This is clearly a payscale that favors seniority above everything else, that's your real problem, not the aging workforce.

I would say the exact opposite is usually true in most corporations, an order of magnitude productivity disparity is compressed in a 2:1, $50.000 to $100.000 compensation band. So while the old timer with the $100.000 paycheck might be somewhat less productive than a hotshot hire with the same advanced salary expectations, they are still _many times_ more productive than the fresh out of college girl expecting half their salary.

When you factor in the low friction, low risk, experience, loyalty and living institutional memory the older employees represent, you quickly realize how disruptive and stupid it is to simply throw them to the curve.

<comment><USER58> Agreed, HN has a moderation problem. I think the culture here has changed _significantly_ over the last decade (how time flies), but particularly in the last year or two. The former open-mindedness has been replaced by a somewhat militant leftist culture, at least in some respects. Strong opinions, with no reasoning to back them up.

Anyways, the point I was trying to make is: older people are often drastically overpaid (seniority, unions, bad contracts, legislative protection, whatever......historic baggage). Countries (and in turn companies that outsource to them) that do not have these issues have a distinct competitive advantage in this respect.

So while it's fine to criticize short thinking, there is also a legitimate and serious issue involved as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goldie Blox - <AUTHOR> http://www.goldieblox.com/ <comment><USER2> In what way is it "for girls" and not boys other than as a marketing angle.

I'd be fascinated to see the dynamics of engagement with this compared to other traditionally single sex toys to see if there was a sex differential in it's use.

Looks fun to me, a 30-something male; but then I've always enjoyed playing with kids toys.

cf [https://vimeo.com/59876490](https://vimeo.com/59876490)</comment>


Legal pot in the US is crippling Mexican cartels - <AUTHOR> http://news.vice.com/article/legal-pot-in-the-us-is-crippling-mexican-cartels

<comment><AUTHOR> "Pot farmers in the Sinaloa region have stopped planting due to a massive drop in wholesale prices, from $100 per kilo down to only $25. One farmer is quoted as saying: 'It's not worth it anymore. I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.'"</comment>


Another Big Ouch for Microsoft IE - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromevoice.com/another-win-for-chrome-browser-france-and-germany-warn-against-microsoft-ie/

<comment><USER2> As per HN guidelines, direct link to the news article:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8465038.stm>

</comment><comment><USER3> "It's true all browsers have security flaws, but to have 2 national governments speak out against your browser? That says something."

Yes that says something, but what? Governments don't care about computer security, they usually care about politics.

<comment><USER4> I can't speak of Germany, but France certainly isn't a technology-forward country. Of the people I've got to know in the country, they'd likely think this is the French government trying to look like it's tech-forward by 'supporting open-source'.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any prospect in this site made in 4 hours? - <AUTHOR>

Frequent reader, first submission. :)
I had an idea which turns out to be similar to yousendit.com and built out a prototype at http://www.volatilefile.com
The idea is to give out free file sharing up to a certain file size for 5 downloads or 3 days, which ever comes first.  A small fee of maybe a couple bucks would be charged for large files (to be implemented).  I read about how bit.ly analyzes data and sells it, so I was curious if anyone sees any monetization of this site other than advertisements?  I store the file name, remote IP and time stamp, then move the info to an archive table when it is removed.  I do not store the files themselves for more than 3 days.
Any feedback is appreciated, even feedback about my horrible design and no logo. :) <comment><USER2> If you make money on this, it will be because people didn't do their homework. This is not a new market, and there are a ton of free options that allow really large downloads (FileFactory, etc.).

I think the only way you'd make headway is to focus on customer service and presentation:

\- Provide a way to directly download the file via link vs. having to visit a page first.

\- Be very specific about the amount of time the file will be hosted, and tell the customer that you will contact them at the email address provided to remind them prior to expiry that it will expire. There will also be a defined period of time following expiry when the file would stay there until payment was made to extend the contract before the file was removed.

\- Be clear about how you store the files (using some well-known enterprise provider, or describe the fault tolerance enough where people feel safe).

\- Site must look very legit so that customers will really believe that you will take care of them.

\- Limited downloads or time limit is not something people are looking for. I think the companies that did rate limiting slow downloads that require customers to buy faster download had a better model, even though I never bought one. However, you can't do this and handle the first requirement of direct URL to download, so maybe you could offer both; if the customer wanting you to host the download wants a direct URL, they can pay you for that on subscription basis, in which case their customers would not have to wait on the download; otherwise, the customer downloading the file has to pay subscription for a faster download.

Realistically though you can't compete with larger companies doing massive storage. They will win on pricepoint. The best chance you have would be better service and usability, but imo it is a waste of your time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like it so far. The site does seem a bit empty (expected for 4 hours), but there is nothing inherently bad about the design. A few comments about using it:

1) I think it would really benefit from displaying the expiration date / number of downloads left. Right now, there don't seem to be any pages for the files, but being able to see what I'm downloading before doing so would also be great.

2) You might benefit from giving some shorter links. This seems like something that would be used on twitter or the like, and links that take up over half the allowed characters could be detrimental to adoption. One could use a URL shortener, but I'd personally like to avoid more indirection than necessary.

As for monetization, my first thought would be to sell extra downloads / longer time. You could also try selling larger file sizes.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem with these sites is that transferring large files is not really a problem businesses have that much - certainly not to the extent where they want to buy accounts on sites like this.

The people who do need this kind of services are independent musicians, folks wanting to spread underground music (dubstep, grime, etc) and warez. I've been known to dable in those scenes. There is no money in it, but people with skill who will try to subvert your service

I know from speaking to folks who ran the service you mentioned in your post that they were always fighting battles to keep the hackers out, the porn out and just dismayed to see their site being used to share music and other non- monetizable content.

</comment><comment><USER5> haha I was wondering the same thing:

<http://esploded.com>

edit: I have the code for expiring files in my local mercurial branch, and I've been wondering whether to push it

edit2: I don't think your design is so bad :)

I was thinking of the file expiry as more of a way to push people onto paid plans.

I was planning to expire the file after a week, but allow the uploader to re- enable hosting for that file for the next year (so I'd have the file on the server for a year, and if the person comes back, they can pay a couple dollars and the file would be hosted for some more time.

This is a very half baked plan, but I think it could work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds pretty similar to Drop.io (without the notes and chat features), but with a shorter download timeframe. Not to say it can't work, just saying that there are similar services.</comment>


Ask HN: Best gift for a 9 year old kid interested in electronics - <AUTHOR> A friend's son wants to get into electronics, he is 9, brilliant and loves to learn new stuff by himself. What would you recommend as a Christmas gift for him? An Arduino board and a good book on what to do with it? Maybe something else? <comment><USER2> I too used to use those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals, & loved it! I wound up teaching myself so much that I was able to start in 'Year 2' of a local vocational school for electronics repair- just from what I learned from those kits.

Later on, I felt limited by how they were designed, and found that 'Free Radio Berkeley' sold kits to build pirate radio stations, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever found, so I ordered some kits from them to work on. It turned out that the kits were missing quite a few parts (which weren't available through Radio Shack), so I had to search & find mail-order electronics suppliers to order the missing parts from. Another thing that was 'wrong' with these kits, which I had to find a solution for, was that they only included pictorial schematics- no use of standard electronic schematics like you'd find everywhere else. So I had to draw my own schematics based on what was present on the circuit boards. This eventually helped me in the long run, as I was able to bring the transmitter + the schematics I drew up to job interviews, & I landed my first electronics repair job based on my work on the transmitter.

EDIT: Another thing you might look into that I found educational/fun is mods for CB radios. A good CB shop can sell you a CB Radio & parts which allow you to make some changes & add extra functions by making simple alterations to the circuit boards. I added more wattage, a frequency slider, extra channels above & below the standard 40, & sideband to a Cobra 148GTL back in the day. There was a small community of people on the radio where I grew up, & I would stay up late at night talking with them on my fancy radio. Later I got a linear amplifier, but was always afraid to use it since they're illegal- so I got rid of that to play it safe.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I was a kid (way back in the 70s) my parents always used to get those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals you could wire together between the parts to make all kinds of circuits. Similar to this kit...

[http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1604010/elenco-200-in-1-ele...](http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1604010/elenco-200-in-1-electronic- project-lab.jsp?pfm=rrrecs-pdp-gtab1)

They still sell the old RS stuff on Ebay. I guess those Arduino boards are nice and all, but kids like to create things sometimes, not just play with pre-made stuff. I loved to tinker with things when I was a kid (and not just take alarm clock guts out and stick them in a different case) so those kinds of kits really kept up my interest.

<comment><USER4> > but kids like to create things sometimes

As time goes on and as technology progresses, the minimum parts or components used while "making something oneself" become more complex. For example, there would have been a time when making your own capacitor using glass jars and chemicals, or making your own light bulb using a vacuum pump, would have been the equivalent of making your own remote-controlled car today. Every generation builds on the advancements of the previous generations. Failing to do so may doom one to focus only on the advancements of generations past. At the same time, I definitely understand the nostalgia of imagining your modern child experiencing those same things you did when you were younger. The problem is that the world changes too fast for this approach to really be advisable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When my daughter was younger, we bought her a "Snap Circuits Jr electronic Set". It's easy to connect and has a few projects. She liked it a lot.

Later we bought her a "Arduinos Sparkfun Professional Inventor's Kit", but she didn't play with it too much. (This is more expensive (x2 or x3) that buying each part separately but it's a nice starting kit and has many initial projects. (Buy more LEDs in the local store, they are cheap and nice.))

For more ideas, I remember a very interesting page: The Sylvia's Super-Awesome Maker Show! : [http://sylviashow.com/](http://sylviashow.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You should have a look at Circuit Scribe [http://www.circuitscribe.com/](http://www.circuitscribe.com/)

It's basically pens filled with some kind of metallic ink that conducts electricity. It comes with "blocks" you place on a paper sheet. You use the pens to connect the blocks.

</comment><comment><USER7> The good book is key. And a tutor, and/or regular visit to a makerspace, to get him started.

<comment><USER8> +1 for tutor I think that there should be someone who could sometimes answer for his questions and help if things don't work as he want.</comment></comment>


First-time homebuyers getting squeezed out by investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/06/21/734357279/1st-time-homebuyers-are-getting-squeezed-out-by-investors <comment><USER2> The easy way is to make people who rent their houses out pay a business tax as if they were a retail store that the tenant is legislatively forbidden from being forced to pay as a line item. Being embedded in the rent it will acts to discourage the 'home as a rentable investment' to buyers because it will act like friction on a rotating wheel, removing momentum and things coast to a stop. People who buy a house and live in it will not pay the tax. Those that rent part of their home as a BNB are hit by the full tax for each month of the year they rent out space, even if only 1 day = they pay a month's tax. Sure, some will evade, but city/state access to BNB bookings and their books and payment methods will create a thicket of coercion that will make most comply. The BNB'ing of residences as well as the idea of a residence as an investment is indeed a cancer in our society, and it can easily be extended to multiple dwellings as that tax will reduce the investment potential of them. You either do this or see the bulk of our society turned into tenants, as new home prices in Toronto are a million dollars or so and this is caused entirely by the investment and BNB potential run amock.</comment>


The Disengagement Myth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cruise/the-disengagement-myth-1b5cbdf8e239 <comment><USER2> Always, always introduce your acronyms. And while you're at it, jargon words are also worth a few words too.

First I had to figure out we're talking autopilot, and then that disengagement doesn't mean the driver stops paying attention to the road.</comment>


A/B testing in Mailchimp: 7 years of successful experiments - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailchimp.com/ab-testing-in-mailchimp-7-years-of-successful-experiments/

<comment><USER2> My MailChimp account actually got banned due to limitations in their AB testing framework.

At the time at least, they had no proper way to segment cohorts, meaning that in order to control for things like length or circumstances of subscription, we had to do multiple smaller sends to lists that were subsets of our subscribers and aggregate the testing data afterwards, rather than being able to do just one send. On top of this creating a lot of extra work setting up the sends, it skews the statistics on things like SPAM complaints.

What caused the account to be banned was that some of the smaller lists would occasionally see spikes in SPAM complaints. These spikes were well within statistical norms. However, because MailChimp will ban an account that breaks a threshold of complaints for a single list in a single sending, we triggered the ban, despite the list and send as a whole, being well within their limits. Had the AB testing framework been built properly, to account for cohorts, we would have had no issues.

I tried to speak with their CS to explain the issue, but it seems either they could not understand or weren't interested. All of this, after multiple communications with their tech team about the limitations of their frameworks and how they could improve their AB testing.

If you are looking to do anything beyond incredibly basic AB Testing, I would look elsewhere. We ended up at SendGrid, though my recent issues with their billing prevent me from recommending them either.

<comment><USER3> I don't know whether this is still the case, but last time I looked into MailChimp they appeared extremely conservative/paranoid regarding spam. There seemed to be dire warnings all over the place about how anyone doing anything they didn't like would get banned. I wonder whether they once got stuck on a lot of blacklists after a bad customer abused their system, maybe some time in their early days when they were trying to establish credibility, and this (perhaps understandably) led to a policy of shooting first and not asking a lot of questions even later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm... in general this method of testing (sending to a fraction of the list) is underpowered and it seems like they also encourage early stopping. It's standard practice for sure, but also bad practice in terms of getting accurate results.

Would say more but I don't have time.

<comment><USER5> Ravi Parikh from Heap goes into detail about why early stopping can screw up your test results: [http://data.heapanalytics.com/dont-stop-your-ab-tests- part-w...](http://data.heapanalytics.com/dont-stop-your-ab-tests-part-way- through/)

<comment><USER6> Well, testing to a fixed sample to run your test and then sending to the other 80% is not an example of early stopping. If you want to send 8,000 emails and conduct a test on the first 1,000, then that is not early stopping. It would be early stopping if you looked at the preliminary results and decided to stop at 500 instead. Otherwise, the statistical interpretation is sound. There are statistical methods to deal with early stopping if you don't want to complete tests on huge samples (e.g. Sequential Probability Ratio Tests), which may be suitable in some cases.

<comment><USER4> With email you don't know if the user isn't going to open your email, or they just haven't opened it yet. So there is a survivor analysis aspects to A/B testing of email -- at any point in time you might get more information from a fixed sample just by waiting.

This definitely effects the power of tests. However there is an early stopping aspect in the decision to wait longer to collect more information, or to stop the test. This is analogous to deciding to collect more samples or stop a test, which is classic early stopping. In both cases you're making a decision to stop/continue without considering its impact on your error rate.

On closer reading I note that MailChimp by default avoids this issue, by making a decision after a fixed period of time. However they aren't controlling for loss of power and so forth.

\-----

Other points:

\- With a finite population, such as a mailing list, minimising regret is a better objective than statistical significance. (Want to know more? Sign up at bandits.mynaweb.com and it will be covered in due course.)

\- There is a multiple testing aspect to what MailChimp does, and I bet they don't control for false discovery rate.

\- Also some post-hoc reasoning.

\- Statistics is hard, and it's easy to criticise others and hard to do well oneself. I hope this post will be taken as constructive criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was hoping for some conclusions of what made for good emails...but instead the article just told me that MailChimp offers A/B testing.

</comment><comment><USER8> "We recommend testing only one difference between the A and B groups. When there are several differences between test groups, it's difficult to figure out which change impacted your engagement."

A/B testing may be better to figure out one specific aspect (time to send, sender name) but wouldn't multivariate testing make sense if you were looking for the best combination of those variables? i.e. if I wanted to find out that sending an email at 9pm, from a corporate account, with larger images is the best combination?

I'm interested to hear others' opinions on the pros/cons.

<comment><USER9> I read this as marketing bluff:

Testing one difference guarantees that one side will beat the other (whether or not there is a true difference).

Multiple testing has a danger of the results appearing inconsistent/random (again, whether or not there is a true difference).

Encouraging people to test one difference benefits MailChimp, for exactly the reason that they say - the results will always appear to be relevant.

<comment><USER10> That's why you must do at least a back of the envelope test to see if the results are significant. If you send two set of n mails, the expected variations is something like sqrt(n) (I don't remember now, probably sqrt(n)/4 or sqrt(n)/2, or something like that.) Ask a statistician for the exact number.

One easy experiment is to do the null A/B test. Send two sets of identical mails and analyze the difference of the result of the two sets. Usually you will get more variation that most people naively expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does a difference between 99.9% and 100% for successful deliveries show as statistically significant? There's surely a bug there?

<comment><USER11> As n goes to infinity, all things become significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For some company (a two person cpy), I'm using Mailchimp to send emails to their 3500 clients. The thing is, I don't really want a mailing list stuff.

Today, what are my options if I just want to send HTML emails through outlook to my 3500 subscribers, without being flagged as SPAM ?

<comment><USER13> Mailchimp offers Mandrill, which is a basic SMTP service.

<comment><USER14> Mandrill is transactional, so would be a no go for sending a message to 3500 clients. Mailchimp and mandrill don't overlap.

<comment><USER15> False.

[http://help.mandrill.com/entries/22242948-What-is- Mandrill-](http://help.mandrill.com/entries/22242948-What-is-Mandrill-)

> Technically, though, you can send any legal, non-spam emails through > Mandrill.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can we help more people to start coding in 2015? - <AUTHOR> As a community I think we agree that we need to get more people interested to join our little neck of the woods. So how about sharing what we've found to be great groups and causes over the last year so we can all find and work together on those in 2015. Some that we worked with and enjoyed:
http://www.resilientcoders.org/ - Talked to a group of students there, really interesting cause. If you're in Boston definitely reach out to David (happy to introduce as well)
http://railsgirls.com/ - We helped out with a few of those events in Austria. Has always been fun and a great way to help more women get started in software development
https://codestarter.org/ - Collects donations to give laptops to kids to get into programming and CS. Great initiative started by Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner where we happily donated a laptop (and so should every other funded Startup)
What are organisations, events or causes that you've found great and that the community should support? Which cities do you need help in?
If you're looking for help in either Boston, MA or Vienna, Austria reach out to me: firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> Coding is easy. Anyone can learn to code.

What makes programming hard is the frustration. Almost everything you write will fail in some obscure way. The levels of frustration in programming knows no bound.

Even worse, very few people will be "software blacksmiths" who write code from scratch. Programming at most jobs seems to be writing glue code from one framework to another. Failures in frameworks are a whole new level of frustration. At best you hope that Home Depot has a new better framework in their software section.

And in the long term we will have managers who took a three-day "learn to program" course and wrote a working fizz-buzz program. We will hear "I wrote programs. It is easy. What is taking so long?"... a whole meta-level of frustration.

Programming is as easy as writing a recipe. I can read a recipe. But I can't cook.

So keep your expectations of these "learn to program" initiatives within bounds. Autodidacts who find frustrations a "challenge" will succeed just as they have in the past. The rest will find programming as interesting as algebra.

</comment><comment><USER3> We develop a project to teach kids how to code, bitbloq.bq.com by the use of small Arduino robots. It is really easy to use and the kids love it. We are starting now in a few schools and we are having a big success.</comment>


Until Yesterday, My Father Was the Longest-Held Hostage in U.S. History - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/11/my-father-was-longest-held-hostage-in-us-history.html <comment><USER2> Haven't many detainees in Guantanamo bay been held hostage BY the US, for longer than this?

<comment><USER3> Are they American by citizenship ? If not, your statement is useless as it is outside the scope of the article which is clearly about an American hostage.

<comment><USER4> It's just not an accurate title, as "US history" also includes non-citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does the sign mean? "4th year... You can't or you don't want...?"

* What is the "4th year"? it's not how long Levinson has been hostage (unless the date in the photo caption is wrong)

* Is the message an anti-US taunt by his captors?

* I thought Levinson was missing, not actively held hostage by a captor who advertised his presence or demanded ransom.

Can someone clarify?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not seeing the HN angle here.

<comment><USER7> From the HN guidelines on comments:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

"

<comment><USER6> I'm not complaining, but I was hoping that someone would articulate it for my benefit. Having been here a while I am familiar with the guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While i feel for her, having had a father myself who had trouble expressing emotions, though for other reasons; i balk at the title "Longest-Held Hostage in U.S. History".

What about other countries? Are there people from other countries who've been held hostage for longer? Do they matter less? Or are these two men the longest-held hostages in world history? If so, why not say so? Does the world matter less than the USA?

<comment><USER9> Is this satire?

<comment><USER10> No, it's probably bitterness. Most americans wouldn't understand.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Single-Instruction (Subleq) Programming Game - <AUTHOR> https://jaredkrinke.itch.io/sic-1 <comment><AUTHOR> To everyone who gave this a try, I just wanted to say: thanks! And I hope you enjoyed it.

The intersection of people who like esoteric computer architectures and like playing programming games is pretty small, but (based on the number of new players) highly concentrated on Hacker News :)</comment>


Ask HN: Which Wiki to use? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to setup a Wiki for my startup´s API similar to: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/. However PBWiki is far out of our price range (4$-8$ per user) which free opensource (preferably PHP) or other lowcost solution would you recommend? <comment><USER3> We just recently looked at a few options and pbwiki beats them all. WYSIWYG and elegant.

It seems ultra expensive but you can negotiate a pretty dope rate. We got $100/year for unlimited users and stuff. Call that 1-888 number and work that magic!

<http://bumptop.pbwiki.com/> is ours

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I am going to do that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> docuwiki is also

<http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki>

</comment><comment><USER5> I use MediaWiki because I'm familiar with it and it's feature-rich. Really, you should use one that you know, understand, and like.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to host source code also, you might consider something like Trac (<http://trac.edgewall.org>) or Redmine (<http://redmine.org>).

</comment><comment><USER7> Twiki looks really nice. I could however not get it to work with the beta of lighttpd (script hang at setup screen).

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that for publicly editable wikis (like BarCamp, for instance), PBwiki does not charge for folks outside your organization. (Otherwise BarCamp would owe us tens of thousands of dollars a month they don't have!) You'll only have to pay for as many people are using the wiki at your startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are lots of options.

If you want to get going quickly, get a Virtual Machine (Virtual Appliance) that is already configured for the Wiki. There are good TWiki and MediaWiki images available that will get you going in no time flat. <http://www.vmware.com/appliances/> \- <http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/53> \- <http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/839> \- etc - <USER2>

Long term - only advice I can give is to stick with the technology set you know. I've seen MediaWiki go into lots of corporates and fail as it's impossible (for them) to integrate and maintain. Confluence (Java+Oracle) is usually a better option in that case... For you it would seem MediaWiki is the best shot.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're a startup (2 people or less) Fogbugz is free and comes with wiki software. If there's more than two of you, then if PBwiki is expensive..fogbugz is much more so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - we want to let the users be allowed to edit the Wiki - hence we're looking for no limit on users. MediaWiki is starting to look more and more attractive but it's just so visually cluttered for my liking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jotspot, now Google Wiki [http://sites.google.com/?hl=en&tab=w3&pli=1](http://sites.google.com/?hl=en&tab=w3&pli=1)

<comment><USER12> I second Google Sites, because it is very easy to use and has a good WYSIWYG. However, it has its limitations and google tech support is not very good through their forums. The premium version is costly and does not appear to provide any significant benefits on top of the free version.

Anyone know of any google sites worth looking at for their design?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you'd like to compare all wiki engines and services available try

<http://www.wikimatrix.org/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I find TiddlyWiki to be rather elegant.

<http://www.tiddlywiki.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> I find PmWiki to be simple and straight to the point.

<http://pmwiki.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> we use dokuwiki for #barcampsaigon website [http://www.barcampsaigon.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=2008_org_h...](http://www.barcampsaigon.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=2008_org_home)

</comment><comment><USER17> MoinMoin <http://moinmo.in/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Simple, easy, fun, open-source, php, double-click to edit Try Wikka Wiki

</comment><comment><USER19> OS X Server's wiki is fairly impressive with no recurring costs

</comment><comment><USER20> php? MediaWiki.

<comment><USER21> MediaWiki is a ghetto, FYI.

Once you go MediaWiki, you will never be able to leave. Why? As far as I know, no one has ever been able to duplicate the parser in any other language.</comment></comment>


Coffee Joulies: Kickstarter project keeps your coffee at the right temperature - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/705847536/coffee-joulies-your-coffee-just-right

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested to see a graph of the temperature over time of a cup of coffee with Joulies vs. without.

<comment><USER3> I was able to find one through their website (<http://www.joulies.com/videos>)

Direct link to video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRpfYAaMRIE>

<comment><USER4> Too bad it only shows how fast it cools, but not how much longer it'll retain that temperature! Or is there a different video for that?

<comment><USER3> I was disappointed by that as well. They mention in their other video that it retains the optimal temperature for twice the amount of time. It would have been great to see them show that in the video. Hopefully they'll do so in a follow-up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Team Notifo ordered some for the company.. office necessity. When we were working out of the garage, we had a ritual of making coffee (no temp control on the machine) then digging into the ice chest for a cube or two. We would hear Chad's aunt call us wimps for using ice when she heard us open the freezer haha.

<comment><USER6> I tried to retort by pointing out the fact that she puts cream in her coffee (thus cooling it), while we drink ours black. Apparently, this was not a valid excuse for her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting hack, but if your coffee is scalding when it's being prepared, something is wrong and it's going to taste bad anyways.

I also hope there's a disclaimer attached to the packaging that warns of the dangers of gulping down your coffee joulies.

<comment><USER8> Disagree. A quick google shows most sources claim the optimal temperature for brewing coffee is somewhere between 195-205F (92-96C) which is certainly hot enough to cause first degree burns in your mouth.

Now certain herbal teas on the other hand are brewed at lower temperatures to keep from scalding the leaves. That may be what you're thinking?

I'm curious, what's your optimal temperature and how do you brew your joe?

<comment><USER9> I've spent a good long time studying coffee prep. I'm not a pro, but I am a mildly obsessive foodie geek, so that may inform how many pinches of salt you take this with.

In non-pressurised or Turkish coffee (French Press, pour-over, other filter) the optimal extraction temperature varies between 93C and 89C - above that you'll start to "scorch" the brew, which means you'll be over-extracting caffine amongst other things, causing that bitter taste.

(I'm fairly sure those are the figures that Harold McGee quotes in "On Food And Cooking", although my copy is buried below a stack of books at the moment whilst we redo our kitchen.)

However, yes, 93C is definitely hot enough that it'll be no fun to drink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One request: Make a version for those of us that like hot coffee (160F).

<comment><USER11> I like my coffee the McDonald's way: 190F

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh hell, I'd buy this. It seemed gimmicky at first, but I love the marketing, product design and packaging. Good luck guys!! These will make awesome xmass gifts.

</comment><comment><USER13> They're going to make a fortune in SkyMall.

</comment><comment><USER14> could one make a cup that has field's metal (or whatever they use) in its walls? i hate the idea of having something in my coffee and an extra thing to wash.

<comment><USER15> It'd be fairly easy, though you'd want to put it in the bottom, or something, or else you would end up with an oddly thick cup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've thought about what would be the opposite of ice cubes, I guess this is it. Only it's kind of better since it solves two problems, some initial cooling so you can start drinking and then maintaining the temperature. A hacker's product, if there was ever one.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the kind of device that _requires_ a patent, so that you can tell me _precisely_ what's in your "proprietary phase change material." Perhaps you could also describe its containment. That's what "patent" means, after all: open, obvious, visible.

I'm not going to put a can full of mystery alloy into my scalding coffee and _trust_ that it's not going to leak, burst, or leach metals into my food. Just not gonna happen. Given the market for this product, I know I'm not the only one who will balk.

<comment><USER18> My guess is that the material is really trivial, and they're just trying to protect the composition so they can get a lead to market. Once it's on the market, I bet it'll be cracked open within days, and cloned fast.

My guess? The phase change material could be as simple as beeswax. (Melting point of 62-64 C, very close to the melting point they specify.) They'd want to optimize for heat capacity, but there are plenty of natural and safe materials in the ballpark.

<comment><USER17> That's what a patent is for: get you twenty year lead to market.

Even if it is just beeswax, this is a novel application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow this is awesome - a perfect complement to my collection of coffee toys. I just bought an Aeropress last week, and now this. I'm really excited for this product!

</comment><comment><USER20> After almost 20 years, I recently stopped drinking coffee because of the bad water footprint coffee has. Of course, my co-workers smile at me pitifully, but I believe it's the right thing to do. Now I wonder if that step will make me a worse hacker in the long run? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks fantastic, but after reading the whole page I couldn't quite shake the feeling that maybe these things are unsafe.

I don't _actually_ think they're unsafe, but perhaps something to keep in mind as you grow your business.

<comment><USER22> Agreed - this bit especially could use some work:

"Yes! Joulies are perfectly safe _when used properly_ , and _in fact make drinking coffee safer than usual_ by reducing the risk of burning your mouth." (Emphasis mine)

The whole "it's actually safer because burning your mouth is unsafe" isn't very comforting, and the "safe when used properly" clause makes me think "what happens if I dont' use it properly?" The fact that the inner material is proprietary and is somewhat of a mystery doesn't help either.

Still a very interesting idea, but I think the early-adopters and overall target market for theses things overlaps largely with more conscientiousness food shoppers who want to know exactly what's in the food and drink they buy.

<comment><USER23> "Do not taunt Joulie fun bean."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should think about building this into the bottom of an insulated coffee cup. Another good product would be to put the thermal material in a silicon jacket instead of stainless steel so that it could be microwave safe.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really like it, I wonder if there's any point in funding them more now? I can't find anything about what they are planning with all the extra money.

<comment><USER26> You get 20% off the retail price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A little out of my budget at the moment, but I can definitely see the potential market. My coffee was getting cold just as I was reading this.

</comment><comment><USER28> This idea, while an awesome use of physics, has a problem -even in the cleanest of brewing processes, the brewed beverage continues to go through chemical changes as it sits. Preserving their idea of a "perfect" temperature in order to preserve the coffee longer is inherently flawed, as it will begin to taste bad after a certain point no matter what. All coffee is temporary; do yourself a favor and brew more. Top-notch shops aren't dumping their airpots after 45 minutes because the coffee has cooled down too much.

</comment><comment><USER29> From what I can tell these people as selling a huge lump of metal. It's a F*CKING thermal mass. This isn't an invention of any kind. They simply took thermodynamics. It's kills me they made 22grand.

<comment><USER30> I don't think that is all there is to it. The page says they are filled with "Phase Change Material" (which I would guess is some sort of wax) that melts at !40F. I don't know why that would be better or worse than a lump of metal though.

<comment><USER31> Apologies for going meta, but it's refreshing to see that I'm not the only one who uses capital 1's from time to time.</comment></comment></comment>


Insights on Hitler and More from the First 500,000 Searches - <AUTHOR> https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-analysis# <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everybody, my "Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia" [1] from two weeks ago was really popular with this crowd and I enjoyed all the comments and discussion that resulted. Now that the site has handled half a million search results, there is a lot of interesting data which I know you will also enjoy seeing. So I put together this blog post and I plan to make a series of them on different aspects of this side project.

All the code for my project is open source [2] and I'm happy to answer any questions or hear any suggestions you've got. If you want to get notified of future blog posts in this series, I have a low-volume personal newsletter [3] you can sign up for.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196)

[2] [https://github.com/jwngr/sdow](https://github.com/jwngr/sdow)

[3] [https://jwn.us15.list- manage.com/subscribe/post?u=d19fa80c86...](https://jwn.us15.list- manage.com/subscribe/post?u=d19fa80c86cc4e9017baf4f4b&id=46d31d866a)</comment>


Analytics platform leveraging Ethereum Smart Contracts events and logs - <AUTHOR> is there a blockchain analytics platform leveraging Ethereum events and logs to create application analytics dashboards ? <comment><USER2> dune analytics gets close if i get what you are asking. they use rebase as the BI tool. If by events you mean logs from eth ancillary services, that would be interesting to watch and hard to get.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm referring to anything that is generated using the emit keyword in a smart contract. Here is what I'm referring to: [https://medium.com/mycrypto/understanding-event-logs-on- the-...](https://medium.com/mycrypto/understanding-event-logs-on-the-ethereum- blockchain-f4ae7ba50378)</comment></comment>


Zombie (2004) - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/12/09/1260445.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I suggest the title, How to Make a Zombie</comment>


How to Hack the App Store: Hibermate's Chris Thomas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/66805403441/how-to-hack-the-app-store-and-cure-snoring Chris Thomas, an Australian SEO guru, talks about how to game the app store as well as his new invention: earmuffs for sleeping. <comment><USER2> For those looking for a TL;DR:

1) Keyword Stuff Your App's Title 2) Keyword Stuff Your App's Description 3) Spam Everyone You Know With the App Store URL

BONUS: Write a blog post about earmuffs and cram a paragraph or two about App Store SEO near the end.

<comment><USER3> The amount of advertising that goes on here at HN is getting a bit excessive lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has to take the cake of most clickbaity headline on HN.</comment>


Pro-surveillance voting data for the US Congress - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1jmjv8/i_compiled_data_on_representatives_who_have/

<comment><USER2> Direct link to the list: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8_USrDOQxfdX18xbHpGbzJtNzA/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8_USrDOQxfdX18xbHpGbzJtNzA/view)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a perfect example of something which should be included in this idea: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935)

This data is 1 of the _many parts_ of the problem.

And it should be made _conveniently actionable_ with the right tech tools.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for starting semi-technical business - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to launch a business in the health insurance industry. I would describe the business as semi-technical in that although coding will need to be done, there are other things that need to be done that I view as more difficult and more important. Particularly, establishing relationships with insurers and major healthcare providers.
My background is in finance. My brother works as an IT consultant to the health insurance industry and is very excited about the project. He also has mentioned the idea to some of his coworkers and they also are very excited.
Right now the business is just an idea. My next step is to finish writing a brief business plan describing the idea, market, and team.
But after this I don't know what to do. I need concrete advice on what next steps should be. Books and other resources would be helpful too.
Some of my many questions:
When and how should I seek funding? I would expect that the idea would take a fair amount of start up capital to produce revenue, but I have no idea about how to begin putting a budget together.
When should entity formation documents be drafted? When to discuss questions of ownership? I don't necessarily want to give equity to my brother's coworkers.
Ideally the company would hire a business development person from a major health insurer. I would expect this to make getting meetings much easier. How do I find the right person?
There are a million other questions that aren't coming to mind right now, but you get the idea. I'm sure that most entrepreneurs have dealt with similar questions. Any help is appreciated.
Chris <comment><USER2> It sounds like some kind of marketplaces since its both insurance and healthcare providers. your going to need to talk with the people charge of making the decisions a those companies. Break the system down in the the smallest possible parts that could work. setup a pitch deck and pitch it some potential customers. be prepared for a long slow process. It took the insurance company I worked at about 6 years after basically everyone knew they wanted new claims software for us to buy it. The included 2 rounds of full RFPs with onsite demos etc. also, bringing on a top tier consulting company just to help us buy the stuff. we used another one as a systems integrator.</comment>


Lisp Prolog and Evolution - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samibadawi.com/2013/05/lisp-prolog-and-evolution.html <comment><USER4> I absolutely love programming in Prolog. I've never needed to write anything large in it at all (which is where most prolog interpreters fail), but when it comes together so beautifully at the end, its quite amazing.

I thoroughly recommend "The Art of Prolog" which is an engaging and fun read.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I first learned about Prolog in AI class, the first thing that struct me was how beautiful Prolog/logic programming solutions are.

In non-declarative languages like Java, you have to build up the different pieces of computations, while you keep maintaining a mental picture of how the various pieces fit together.

In Prolog, you declare the entities and the relationships/constraints between them, and the system will build the solution for you through inference.

David Nolen has done some awesome work writing the core.logic[1] library, which makes those Prolog gooodies accessible to Clojure programmers.

\-- [1] <https://github.com/clojure/core.logic>

<comment><USER5> I seem to recall that one of the issue with Prolog is that, above a certain level of complexity, you can't really write purely declarative Prolog "progams" - you have to start considering the procedural aspect as well which (in certain cases) can be non-trivial.

<comment><USER6> (See my other comment below too on this topic)

You indeed have to understand how the Prolog engine works in order to structure the declarative statements of your code in a way that will lead to an efficient execution.

A way to see a Prolog programs is as a sequence of facts and statements, and at least one query. The Prolog engine will then search for a solution that fits the given facts and requirements and answer the query. In a way the Prolog engine will search a space of possible answers to the query to find the one(s) that match the given facts and requirements. The key to speed is to structure the facts and statements that the search will fail as early as possible when a wrong path is taken. This amount to pruning the useless parts of the search space as aggressively as possible, so that the Prolog engine does not waste time evaluating options that are doomed in the end.

Before getting this I was often frustrated with apparently nice and correct Prolog programs that took forever and in effect just looked stuck (at some point you just stop waiting and abort the execution). I guess it's a pretty common frustration when beginning in Prolog. But once you get it, it's possible to come up with efficient code. It's still scary to see that some small changes in statements ordering can lead to dramatic difference in runtime. You can have big differences in performance for imperative programming too, but it's rare that it's so bad that a first implementation is completely useless. In Prolog it's quite common. And the way to optimize Prolog performance is very specific, you need to learn to anticipate how the engine walks the search space. I guess it's one of the big roadblock in the practical use of Prolog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find Prolog a marvel in "look what I can do!" Writing stupidly fun code in it is almost a no-brainer, compared to other languages (I have a half-assed English grammar parser in 60-odd lines, with a few comments!) But getting into prolog needs a complete rewire of how you think about programming: if you are used to imperative (or functional, or list-based, or almost whatever else) prolog feels very foreign.

I'm also a Lisp aficionado, having written more than a few small pieces (not counting emacs lisp, where I write more than a few!) to scrape the web or draw Lavaurs chords.

And my day-to-day I write PHP, Python, awk, R and whatever it takes to improve revenues in my company. So I have both perspectives, Lisp & Prolog and its awesomeness and "the other side." And mixing them up (splurge into data with awk, write it as Prolog terms, analyse its structure in Prolog and represent it in R) is one of the biggest joys of programming. Don't get entrenched in your "language," learn as many as you can and cherry-pick each one as you see fit for the problem.

<comment><USER8> Indeed! During a security assessment of a large code base, I wrote a simple ruby source code parser that spat out Prolog terms. After that, it was a breeze to find certain kinds of logic errors, such as code paths that used user input before sanitation...

It's beautiful when it all works together, checking everything manually would certainly have been a PITA and would have resulted in a lower quality result.

Definitely an aha moment!

<comment><USER9> Could you open source it? I'm very interested in seeing how one would do that, I've been thinking about writing one myself, for PHP (I've a somewhat large codebase to inherit, that only works in a old version of PHP, and I might need to migrate it).

<comment><USER8> I don't have the IP for the code so I can't copy it here, but what I did was very simple and the gist of it is described below:

The parser used regular expressions to recognise function definitions and calls in those definitions. I used file names as the function scope, this was good enough because there were no two functions with identical names in the same file. Function calls became the following terms: "calls(x,y,z).", meaning that function x in file y calls z.

These "calls" terms actually define a directed graph. If you google "prolog path through directed graph", there are lots of hits that will help you out. The following (untested) code should get you started:

        %there is a path if there is a call
        path(Caller, File, Called, [calls(Caller, File, Called)]) :- calls(Caller, File, Called).
        %there is a path if there is a call to some function and there is a path from that function
        path(Caller, File, Called, [calls(Caller, File, A) | P]) :- calls(Caller, File, A), path(A, _, Called).

After that, you can find all possible paths with "findall/3" and check for existence of a certain known good/bad function with "member/2" (again, google is your friend)

Due to some properties of the code, this simple approach worked well enough for me. Hopefully this helps you out.

<comment><USER7> Probably needs a green cut in the first term... Or maybe not. I'm quite backtracking-puzzled about green cuts in generic terms I write, so thinking about them in others' code is even more puzzling :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few people have asked if the video and slides for this talk are available. Unfortunately it did not get recorded and the slides don't make much sense without the words and there was a considerable amount of live coding in a REPL.

However I'll be attending <http://webrebels.org> where I'll be giving a more refined version of the talk - it will be recorded.

</comment><comment><USER11> AI Algorithms, Data Structures, and Idioms in Prolog, Lisp, and Java: [http://wps.aw.com/wps/media/objects/5771/5909832/PDF/Luger_0...](http://wps.aw.com/wps/media/objects/5771/5909832/PDF/Luger_0136070477_1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> On the subject of why amazingly-powerful, ahead-of-their-time languages don't catch on.. I'd be interested to know if a study has ever been done on the "accessibility" of a language and its popularity.

By which I mean: A total novice, even a non-programmer, can be given a simple bit of PHP/Javascript, and work out what it does and how to make minor changes to it. But something like Lisp & Haskell, you just can't do that - you need to spend some time learning the syntax before you can do anything with them.

I'd be surprised if the ramp-up time to be able to do useful things with a language didn't have more of an effect than how powerful and useful it is.

<comment><USER5> "you need to spend some time learning the syntax"

But Lisp has rather _less_ syntax than most other programming languages - <USER3> that's possibly a weakness rather than a strength when it comes to anyone new to the language.

I suspect there is a sweet spot when it comes to the syntactic complexity of programming languages - too little and people get lost in the generality and abstractions, too much and its difficult to remember it all and you end up with coding standards desperately trying to close down on the features that should be used (e.g. banning the ternary conditional operator).

<comment><USER12> > Lisp has rather less syntax than most other programming languages - <USER3> > that's possibly a weakness

Yup: it's like saying that binary is easier than decimal because it has less digits - the average Joe would still find it easier to do his maths in base ten :)

<comment><USER13> Personally, I find both Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 easier to read (when it is pretty printed) than any other language syntax.

That the syntax or lack there of also expresses itself as an AST in addition to that is quite elegant.

Due to the reduction in syntax verbosity it is evident in the code what the important elements are as that is the only information displayed.

Lisp's syntax enables powerful utilities like Paredit to exploit that for unrivaled transpositions of the code as refactoring occurs.

I do think other syntax designs look more aesthetically pleasing on its face than what either Lisp-1 or Lisp-2 appear to the novice (the ML family of languages for instance) but it is something I have come to appreciate as my proficiency in Lisp has improved.

Code simultaneously being data and the converse as well is another elegant consequence of Lisp's design, so everything is optimized for the tail, which is what is important for tools and the environment to provide.

I wish the environment provided in other languages was as mature as that of Common Lisp (<http://www.cliki.net/development>), because it is immensely pleasurable to code in once the learning curve is overcome.

The quality of documentation and literature available for Lisp is also excellent, many of which are classics in Computer Science as a result and are worth reading regardless of actually using Lisp to develop with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The following shows a common misconception:

"There is no reason why you cannot combine strong types or optional types with LISP, in fact, there are already LISP dialects out there that did this."

Common Lisp already has strong, dynamic, optional types.

"Strong" means: there is no implicit type conversion.

"Dynamic" means: runtime things (objects) have a type, not necessarily the (static) variables that hold them. This is also called "late binding".

"Optional" means: you need not specify a type for everything; types can be inferred from context.

<comment><USER15> > "There is no reason why you cannot combine strong types or optional types > with LISP, in fact, there are already LISP dialects out there that did > this."

> Common Lisp already has strong, dynamic, optional types.

Isn't that what he said? Common Lisp is a dialect of Lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > David Nolen give a talk at a LispNYC Meetup called: LISP is Too Powerful

...is this up online? does anyone have a link to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Slides and videos aren't available at this point. But he is presenting this again at Web Rebels.

<https://twitter.com/swannodette/status/336816354868989953>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Haskell and LISP both have minimal syntax compared to C++, C# and Java". I agree that LISP does but I can't really say the same thing for Haskell, especially when you get into the whole monad stuff...

</comment><comment><USER18> Dunno if the author's around, but Haskell does not descend from Lisps in the way that he thinks; it is much more closely related to the ML family.

<comment><USER19> It isn't descended from Prolog either -- I presumed the author was making a point about conceptually similar flavours of type systems, semantics etc. and Haskell's position as a typed Lambda calculus.</comment></comment>


Advice for entrepreneurs seeking investment: Pull your company's pants down - <AUTHOR> http://asack.typepad.com/a_sack_of_seattle/2009/02/advice-for-entrepreneurs-seeking-investment-pull-your-companys-pants-down.html <comment><USER2> _They have a company with 6 employees, that generates about 20K per month in revenue and are trying to raise 500K at $3,000,000 pre-money. I thought they were dreaming and told them so._

Is the valuation just too high? I've heard 3-5x revenue quoted as a good starting point for figuring out a valuation during an acquisition, but I'm assuming this is an early stage start up which expects to grow this revenue number quite a bit.</comment>


Transparency Begins at Home - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/smallagency/post?article_id=138988

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm an advocate of keeping the team in the loop. However my business partner has some trepidations because his father's employees went mutiny by taking all his clients and starting their own recruiting firm.</comment>