Ask HN: Where to go to discuss product/service ideas - <AUTHOR> I love Show HN posts. It's really fun to see the products you all come up with.
I could build a product and show you it, but I feel like I need to take a step further back and really flesh out what this product/service might be before I build it and ask for feedback.
Is there a good forum or subreddit for discussing and iterating over product ideas with a willing audience?  Thanks! <comment><USER2> We get a lot of projects that just start with a page on STOMT to collect wishes for the project. It's basically a mix of feedback management and community building.

Example: [https://www.stomt.com/stomt](https://www.stomt.com/stomt) We used it to collect and manage our own ideas and at the same time we shared labeled stomts with friends and used this as priorization tool while building the platform itself.

Mostly used by game developers we get more and more SaaS and app projects on board. It has a freemium tier that is good enough to let your project becoming big.

Edit: And btw.. users don't have to sign up but can leave their e-mail address optionally to get notified.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out indiehackers - perfect platform and audience for this

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic, thank you.

<comment><USER4> Unless your potential product is for tech users, I don't think IndieHackers is a good place to discuss your idea. If you're building software for cafe owners or dentists, then you need to be talking to groups of cafe owners or dentists, not other tech guys like you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would suggest finding a forum that your target audience visits. If they respond well to your idea they might just turn into your first few customers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a good side project...lol...

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you did there. This is a trick question though :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Arima – Quora for Polls. How should we promote our website? - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched our site, http://arima.io. Basically, we are similar to traditional Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers in the sense that users can ask, answer and browse questions curated by other participants. What makes us unique is that we focus on multiple choices questions and we aggregate data from users all around the globe and display data visualizations in a personalized way.
We launched 3 weeks ago, and our traction so far has been mediocre. We get about 500 visitors person, with around 1000-2000 answers submitted. Our primary strategy has been posting polls on Reddit, and that has been inconsistent (some days we get close to 2000 visitors, some days 200). Does anyone have any good suggestions for us? What should we do to increase traffic?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER3> Get rid of the question ranking. I see that number first and it looks like hardly anyone answered, whereas the actual # of people who answered (which might be hundreds) is displayed in a less prominent position. Rank by popularity or growth in popularity (1st derivative of # of answers).

The graphic presentation is great. The stats side is poor; for example if I look at a question about the big boxing match tonight, opinion is divided but in my neighborhood it's 100% for one boxer. Unusual...but I looka t a few other countries where this fight is not a big deal and many answers are 100%, so my conclusion is only 1 or 2 people form those places answered the survey.

Mae it embeddable as well as shareable. Set up rolling questions about things like economic sentiment and update them cyclically, eg every month, then graph changes over time. OK your polls are unscientific so that won't mean much, but you might as well start somewhere, and you could expand into scientific polling later.

It's a neat site but I think the traction should come from making it handy for other providers like bloggers and so on. Just browsing people's opinions on random topics isn't that interesting to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments!

\- Question ranking - good point, will consider.

\- Stats - there are plans for additional visualization (like a heatmap), and that will come in a few days. Yes, you are right, stats are only meaningful when you have a lot of answers, and when you have a lot of answers, you can certainly do lots of creative things (like compare by gender, by interest, etc), but it will take time to get there.

\- Embeddable - yes this is important (but will take time). Shareable - <USER2> you be a bit more specific about this one? Right now, you can share on twitter, facebook and reddit easily, what else should we be adding?

\- About browsing random questions. If things were organized (e.g. tags, sub- categories, etc) where questions of similar topics were grouped together, would that be something that makes you want to browse more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I click on a question, I'd like to see a visualized graph of what others have chosen as an answer.

Not everyone wants to answer the question to see the opinion of everyone else (it's kind of like the person browsing for a new laptop based on other opinions, who first needs to give his/her opinion before he can see others).

You have a lot of space below the question, so get creative with graphs and visualizations, as that might keep eyes on the site longer).

Also, I agree with anigbrowl about the "upvote" thing. When you see few upvotes, you start to think not many people are using the site.

If you want to adjust that, make the "80 people answered" more prominent. Use things like colours for trending questions.

Eg. 50 people answered = green (question is building)

500 people answered = red (question is "hot"/trending)

TBCH, your app kind of seems like a feature for other products. As I understand, you can poll people on reddit as well, so you should look at the bigger picture from that POV about what your app is/does.

Oh and the bottom, I don't see why people would comment on a site like this, but who knows, the user may start commenting for discussion-like purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- Report without having to answer - we are doing this right now, and should have it ready in the next week or so.

\- More visualizations is coming as well.

\- You are right, right now, this probably isn't any different from other polls sites you may have encountered. But the bigger picture, hopefully, is to create something that combines data collection and data visualization together. With Reddit, for example, you could collect data easily (because of its traffic), but you won't be able to see detailed visualizations (unless if you create your own), and with visualization tools/websites, one often struggles to find good datasets. This is, at least ideally, the longer term plan.

\- Comments - understand. We have few comments atm. Do you think this is because of the nature of the site, or because there is no traffic, and hence nobody commenting?</comment></comment>


Microsoft looks to stop bike crashes before they happen, predictive intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/microsoft-looks-to-stop-bike-crashes-before-they-happen-testing-minority-report-style-predictive-intelligence/?utm_content=buffer4f4b6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> The actual point is hidden midway through: '"When you go to justify a major investment for pedestrians and bikes, it gets really hard because you don't have good data," Loewenherz said.'

...as opposed to a major investment for cars, which is just common sense, right? I have yet to see such an investment backed with "good data" \- just handwaving and "more motorways is good, because it's good, and _that 's_ because it's good."</comment>


Is scribd promising too much? - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/scribd/unwise-promises-259048.php <comment><USER2> Looks like Valleywag is browsing news.yc for story ideas too.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a valleywag mole in here :)</comment>


Getting Comfortable With People Who Make You Uncomfortable - <AUTHOR> http://laserlike.com/2009/07/26/getting-comfortable-with-people-who-make-you-uncomfortable/

<comment><USER2> How is this different from: [http://laserlike.com/2009/07/26/getting- comfortable-with-peo...](http://laserlike.com/2009/07/26/getting-comfortable- with-people-who-make-you-uncomfortable/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is completely identical. Should it not be? I mean... that's the URL I submitted...

<comment><USER2> Sory, I meant:

[http://gigaom.com/2009/07/26/getting-comfortable-with- people...](http://gigaom.com/2009/07/26/getting-comfortable-with-people-who- make-you-uncomfortable/)

Which was submitted in

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724314>

My mistake - I copy/pasted the wrong thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh lame, I've been duped! I hadn't noticed it on HN prior.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Simple GPU Hash Table - <AUTHOR> http://nosferalatu.com/SimpleGPUHashTable.html <comment><USER2> You might want to check out Bidirectional Linear Probing, which can handle load factor >90% with good performance. I implemented and benchmarked it here: [https://github.com/senderista/hashtable- benchmarks](https://github.com/senderista/hashtable-benchmarks). Storing integer keys as their hash values (using a reversible hash function) also helps performance. I implemented a dozen or so 32- and 64-bit reversible integer hash functions in the same repo.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great work. Thanks! Using a reversible hash function is a good idea.

<comment><USER2> FYI here's a concurrent version of BLP (I haven't implemented it but I stole their simplified insert algorithm): [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6d6c/ca94c57d408c0b1164d6ff...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6d6c/ca94c57d408c0b1164d6ff7faea25635fedb.pdf). Also see a compact version (concurrent Cleary hash table) by the same authors: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alfons_Laarman/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alfons_Laarman/publication/221274114_A_Parallel_Compact_Hash_Table/links/00b7d527256971ae55000000/A-Parallel- Compact-Hash-Table.pdf).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this technique can be used to implement order independent transparency on GPU in a performant manner.

Really great algorithm regardless!

Explanatory Edit:

Visually correct alpha blending requires all blended pixels to be known at the blend time but the way real time graphic pipelines work is too lossy to achieve that. Intermediate pixel are lost on each fragment step.

In current game engines, when a semi-transparent object is rendered, it can only know the previous blended state of the pixel it is writing into. So instead of being able to do something like `blend(p1, p2, p3, p4, ...)`, you work around it with a blend model that looks like `blend(..., blend(p4, blend(p3, blend(p2, p1))))`. A common working (partially) solution uses a linked list of pixel colors, encoded in a texture (src: NVidia RnD) to be able to preserve these colors until the final image is rendered. It is still costly in terms of computation and space. There are other solutions but each has its own, unavoidable drawbacks.

So I figured as a newbie, maybe this hash table can store pixel location as key and a linked list of colors as value to mitigate for the computation cost of NVidia's algorithm. The space cost is still there though. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong.

<comment><USER4> Intel has a great set of papers; the idea is to store a few of the semi- transparent pixels in a texture, then overflow to a storage buffer as needed.

[https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014547/Adaptive-Order- Indepen...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014547/Adaptive-Order-Independent- Transparency-A)

Especially at around 15:06 they make a great argument that above a certain limit, the net effect of additional pixels is minimal (because they will be blended behind a significant fraction of the whole picture, so just mushing together a few semi-transparent pixels at the _back_ of the stack is reasonable).

The problem is getting each pixel's data as small as possible so the texture doesn't overflow the limits of texture sizes in GPUs - typically mobile devices have a limit of 128 bits per pixel in texture sizes. Also, mobile devices don't really have enough GPU RAM to do this kind of order independent transparency on the 4x anti-aliased framebuffer.

After solving the above problems you're ready to spill some pixels into the storage buffer (again, because most pixels on the screen don't have 8 semi- transparent pixels in them, so spilling to overflow for the few ones that do may be faster than trying to keep it all in the texture). Now you're ready to do something like this technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome!

> The table uses power-of-two sizes instead of prime numbers because pow2/AND > masking is a fast single instruction and the modulo operator is much slower.

I was under the impression that the idea of prime number hash table sizes being faster was shredded a couple decades ago? Maybe by Bob Jenkins?

<comment><USER6> The idea behind prime number sizes is that you can use a hash function with periodicity issues, which would normally cause collisions. E.g. in C++, it's totally standard-compliant for std::hash<size_t>::operator() to be the identity function. The prime number of buckets will tend to mitigate this.

These days, the preferred solution to this is usually to just use a better hash function without periodicity issues, so the bucketing no longer matters.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Indeed - I found the link I was thinking of - Bob Jenkins wrote about that in his famous 1997 article on hashes in Dr Dobbs. Having learned in college that hash table sizes are ideally prime, reading this article was shocking at the time. Ironically, I learned that hash table sizes should be prime in college after 1997, and didn't find this article until later. I guess best practice knowledge takes time to percolate.

"The best hash table sizes are powers of 2. There is no need to do mod a prime (mod is sooo slow!). If you need less than 32 bits, use a bitmask. For example, if you need only 10 bits, do h = (h & hashmask(10));"

[https://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/doobs.html](https://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/doobs.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Concerning: "...as the table is linearly searched, the slot index must be wrapped at each slot. The cost of a modulo operation at each slot quickly adds up." As you linearly search, you don't need to re-modulo; you just have to set the index to zero if it has reached the end of the table, so it's a simple compare-and-conditionally-assign operation.

</comment><comment><USER8> A 32-bit key and 32-bit value are some serious constraints. The whole point of hash tables is usually that you have variable length keys or values.

If you have more than 32GB of RAM (which is not rare nowadays) you can directly map all 32-bit values into a 32GB chunk of memory and be probably faster than this GPU solution on regular CPUs.

<comment><USER9> Even so, GPU-based hash tables are useful in that they can be used to speed up various kinds of simulations for video games and animation:

[https://wickedengine.net/2018/05/21/scalabe-gpu-fluid- simula...](https://wickedengine.net/2018/05/21/scalabe-gpu-fluid-simulation/)

[https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-i- geometr...](https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-i- geometry/chapter-7-point-based-visualization-metaballs-gpu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does the performance compare to other implementation either for GPU or not?

</comment><comment><USER11> My understanding is that pcie devices incur a very high latency for getting data to and from them, due to the pcie device itself and setting up a dma descriptor. Sadly this article doesn't look into that.

Can someone comment on what sort of latency would be involved in something like this? For example, latency to send to pcie device, latency to react to and manipulate the data in a warp(Nvidia?), and latency to send the data back to the host system?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is just mind blowingly cool

</comment><comment> michael-ax That is a most awesome thing you did there. Thank you very much for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the global atomic op a bad idea?

<comment><USER14> It's not terrible but it might be possible to get better performance within a warp using some warp function.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin 'Ought to Be Outlawed,' Nobel Prize Winner Stiglitz Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/bitcoin-ought-to-be-outlawed-nobel-prize-winner-stiglitz-says-jal10hxd <comment><USER2> Bitcoin seems like it's custom designed to create bubbles, rather than be a useful currency. It is limited to 21 million units, which means that it cannot support a growing Bitcoin-based economy without rapidly appreciating in value versus other currencies, and depreciating the price of assets.

One of the core purposes of currency is to provide a relatively stable store of value as a medium of exchange. Rapid inflation or deflation is very undesirable. Currency is not supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme. It's the oil of commerce. But, bizarrely, it's fundamentally architected into Bitcoin that it will fail at that, preferring instead to promote a rush to scarcity that grabs headlines but provides little utility as currency.

Having said that, a cryptocurrency that does its job -- that is, has the features of an actual currency, such as being a stable store of value, by expanding the money supply in proportion to the amount of economic activity it supports -- seems like a very valuable concept. Do any of them do that? I looked at Ethereum, and its design doesn't seem better in this respect.

<comment><USER3> I count six times you used the word "currency". Yes, some people thought it would be that, but it isn't. It's Bitcoin. "Digital gold" isn't a perfect description, but it's close. Thus, you're flogging a straw horse.

It is not limited to 21M "units", and it never was. It's arbitrarily divisible into whatever units you like. Again, since it is not a national currency, it doesn't matter. It isn't "deflation" when the price of gold goes up.

I guess some people can't let go of the idea that Bitcoin is "supposed" to be like a dollar-denominated debit card.

<comment><USER4> Actually it is limited to units. You can still divide a Bitcoin into satoshis, and these satoshis are limited in their printing. He used 21 million units of Bitcoin, but since you want to get technical, it's actually 21,000,000,000,000,000 satoshi. I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong.

Also, please take your "digital gold" meme and use it on r/Bitcoin. Not only does Bitcoin's price contain the speculative valuation of a million people who call it a currency (regardless of your particular vision) but that vision also has a million flaws. It's rather funny, when someone points out its flaws as "digital gold" then the Bitcoin troglodites come out and call it a currency. When you point out its flaws as a currency, they correct you that it is, in fact, digital gold. When in fact, it's just a technology medium for transmitting value without the economic mechanisms to be a currency, nor the historical/economic/political/social mechanisms to be a 'digital gold'.

<comment><USER5> What are there flaws in the Bitcoin as digital gold analogy? I don't follow r/Bitcoin and would appreciate a summary.

From my limited level of understanding, it seems that the only differences are that you know that Bitcoin has no inherent value at all (gold has some since it can be used to make jewelery and gold-plated audio connectors, among other things) and you know exactly how much Bitcoin can ever be mined.

<comment><USER6> It's marketing.

Instead of explaining what Bitcoin actually is you compare it to something very simple that everybody knows and derive "digital gold" ...

<comment><USER7> Gold is also marketing. No one is going yaya over other, similarly rare elements [1]. Tantalum is significantly less common then gold, for example, and doesn't tarnish! And yet gold is 320x more expensive than tantalum [2] [3]!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elements_abundance- bars.svg)

[2] [https://www.metalary.com/tantalum- price/](https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/) [3] [https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold- price/today/kilograms/u...](https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold- price/today/kilograms/usd/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't really see how "it doesn't serve any socially useful function" yields the statement "it should be outlawed." The former applies to many, many things that are still legal. Disappointing to hear such weak reasoning from someone who is lauded as one of the greatest minds of our time. I can't watch the video, so perhaps that particular statement lacks some context.

<comment><USER9> But isn't that level of ideological punditry what Stiglitz's is today all about?

<comment><USER10> Is he like the Ann Coulter of Economics/Finance? Genuine question.

<comment><USER9> I don't even hold it against him. He probably just realized that he can have a much more entertaining life (more speeches, more books sold, etc) by being more provocative and telling the New Yorker readers how wholesome their views are. I would myself certainly prefer that over a life spend between teaching Undergrads another decade the same models and fumble with statistics long enough to write another paper that explains the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Stiglitz is in favour the government printing money as a solution to many economic problems. What he must be concerned about is that if bitcoin is the medium of exchange, that lever no longer exists. Monteary inflation controlled by public servants or politicians is no longer a thing in management of an economy.

I'm making no comment about whether he's right, or whether bitcoin is good, bad or indifferent. This is what needs to be considered about Stiglitz's position and it's worth discussing, with him as well as other economists.

<comment><USER12> A very good point. A decentralized "free" currency provides many advantages but it does offer to threaten the levers of monetary policy. Some of which (in theory anyway) keep things stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some of the smartest people I know work on Wall St. and when the topic comes up of cryptocurrencies the conversation turns to outright borderline anger and instant dismissal. They simply don't believe it can have any useful value as a store of value or be used for exchanging goods or services.

I have seen this reaction twice before. First, I see it when we talk about politics. People on the other side just can't believe it when facts are presented that refute their belief.

The second, is when the internet came about. Talking to people in different industries about how it could be used to revolutionize video, news, and just about everything often resulted in a reaction of dismissal.

Wall St. is a deeply ingrained industry and Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc are already sucking a big chunk of transactions from NYSE and everyone on Wall St looses. So it is a natural reaction to dismiss it.

<comment><USER2> Actually, big banks are interested in blockchain technology, because having a distributed ledger of stock ownership would help cut out exchanges and brokers, and facilitate international trade.

The broker divisions of big banks are probably afraid of it, or dismissive, but trade execution and asset management divisions are investing in the concept.

My (probably unpopular) bet: blockchain will revolutionize much of finance, but Bitcoin specifically will crash and eventually be ignored.

<comment><USER14> Separating bitcoin from blockchain is separating it from its incentive structure, which is the very thing that makes it a disruptive invention. It's almost like they're trying to unmake the invention.

<comment><USER15> Nothing wrong with using the blockchain without paying billions to the people who bought Bitcoin early.

<comment><USER14> None of that belief has anything to do with bitcoin and nakamoto consensus.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. Big banks using blockchain technology as a distributed ledger of stock ownership might have nothing to do with bitcoin.

<comment><USER14> Blockchain without the distributed consensus structure and independent incentivized miners is just an inefficient redundant database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Charles Stross recently said it should be outlawed based on the environmental impact of Proof Of Work. [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2017/11/unforsee...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2017/11/unforseen-consequences-and-tha.html)

<comment><USER17> We should ban video games and porn too then. The amount of electricity going into powering all the consoles and computers around then world toward a useless endeavour is immense.

<comment><USER18> Please explain how video games and porn don't serve a useful purpose. I'm thinking it's possible that porn contributes to a lower birth rate, which would more than offset the amount of power consumed to produce and transmit pornography.

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about- sex/200904/do...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about- sex/200904/does-pornography-cause-social-harm)

<comment><USER17> I don't actually think they should be banned. I'm making a facetious analogy to prove a point. Bitcoin is at least as useful as video games and porn.

<comment><USER18> Ugh, sorry. In the Age of the Great Orange One, it's almost impossible to tell joking from earnestness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've said this before on HN, but let me reiterate it here: Bitcoin is very easily compared to BitTorrent. Everyone's falling all over themselves, much like people did in the early 2000s. People thought that BitTorrent was going to "change the world" \-- and sure, it helped catalyze the inevitable media distribution revolution of the past decade (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, Spotify), but where is _BitTorrent_ now? That's right: it's mostly used to download stuff illegally.

Similarly, BTC and ETH provide no immediate value when compared to fiat currencies. Their main functional (that is, non-philosophical) upside, like TOR, for example, is to do illegal shit. Sure, there are various incidental benefits (like privacy), but this is a misdirection: businesses have been able to hide fiat currencies in off-shore accounts for decades.

<comment><USER20> One of the big pros of BitTorrent is that it allows you to download huge files over an extended period of time on a slow connection. Back in the day when torrents were starting to take over things like Limwire/Kazaa, this was a big deal. This was also in the days before video hosting (i.e. YouTube and, frankly, PornHub) and cloud storage were a mainstream thing.

Also, due to peering, torrents tended to allow you to max your connection compared to shady direct-download websites which required premium membership (e.g. Rapidshare).

BitTorrent is still a viable solution for big files and slow connections. Some scientific datasets are available via torrent for this reason.

Media distribution has certainly helped kill off torrents (I say kill off, they're still widely used, damped perhaps?), but another part of it is faster connection speeds, no bandwidth caps in many places and the availability of cheap file hosting (e.g. via Mega).

<comment><USER21> > I say kill off, they're still widely used, damped perhaps?

I would say "delegitemized".

Media companies have worked hard to convince the general public that data can be "owned", and that "piracy" is literal "theft", meaning that pirated content creates some loss they can claim as damages, thereby filling the fifth part of the legal definition for fraud.

The media oligopoly wants to provide encrypted data (DRM), which isn't static (changing keys), and therefore won't scale on bittorrent.

> but another part of it is faster connection speeds, no bandwidth caps in > many places and the availability of cheap file hosting (e.g. via Mega).

That is certainly a major part of it. That, and the association bittorrent has with piracy are why most people don't think to use bittorrent to distribute static content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Economics as a discipline is fraught with normalcy bias. Macroeconomics assumes a government. Taxes are assumed. Deficits are a given. Central banks, fiat legal tender, and fractional reserve banking -- none of these existed 150 years ago, yet they are as foundational to modern economics as mass is to physics.

<comment><USER14> That's why bitcoin is such a disruptive invention. It solves what was previously the unsolvable Byzantine Generals Problem. Before that invention, a cryptographically secure decentralized store of value was not possible. Now it is. That's why it is such a disruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found this [1] a more compelling argument, probably not from the future but pretty much nailed the 2017 valuation 4 years ago.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The ignorance displayed by very smart people with regards to cryptocurrencies is fascinating.

<comment><USER24> Can you outline those ignorances in some sort of testable way? Or is this just a long way of saying "I disagree"?

<comment><USER25> An obvious form of ignorance is saying "bitcoin has no value", (maybe with the "intrinsic" word thrown in there), despite the manifest fact of a market price, and of a huge run up. Value is like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, and dismissing bitcoin, or CounterStrike skins, or World of Warcraft assets as valueless is ignorant.

They can't see the simple "repetition becomes truth" driver of bitcoin price, as in the longer the price is not zero, and the longer people talk between themselfs about the bitcoin price, the more real the idea that bitcoin has value becomes. This is how money is born, by a shared belief.

<comment><USER24> He specifically says that Bitcoins value derives from perception.

He further says that it's value is largely derived from its "potential for circumvention".

The idea that random dude on the internet can call a Nobel Laureate & one of the most cited economists in history "ignorant" about these issues is hilarious.

<comment><USER26> I think Stiglitz is coming from the position that ALL 'circumvention' is a societal harm. He is working from a position which supports Federal govt first, and individuals second.

Confiscating money from child pornographers is a pretty clear moral good.

Civil asset forfeiture, the confiscating the cash a poor single-mom is taking to buy the car because "it could be drug money" is a pretty clear moral evil to me.

Which one of those happens more often? I'd guess the later is 100-1000x more frequent.

Bitcoin is not moral, it offers circumvention to all, for better or worse.

<comment><USER24> Sure but his position isn't "ignorant". Quite the contrary he's one of the worlds experts on it.

Disagree all you want. But ignorance isn't the issue.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, 'myopic' or 'out of touch' would probably have been more accurate adjectives.

<comment><USER17> What are "myopic" and "out of touch" but euphemisms for ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Governments should make it illegal because governments need to have control over the money supply.

We need taxation. We need monetary policy. The Bitcoin obsessives think these are bad things. No. They are very important and good things.

<comment><USER14> > We need taxation. We need monetary policy.

Yes to one, no to two. Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth. They then manipulate the inflation statistics (hedonic regression anyone?) to make it seem that inflation is lower than it is, so that your purchasing power is debased faster than the statistics. That's why house prices have exploded for 40 years, and just about anything you buy costs more by some orders of magnitude than what it should given CPI.

Bitcoin is the reckoning for that system. The government will be forced to accept that people will not hold their token except to pay taxes. When it is not possible to know the worth of someone, which is already painfully obvious for the very wealthy, the only taxable system will be on the use of goods and services in their respective governanace area.

<comment><USER28> moreover monetary inflation absolutely kills poor people and enables rich people to do things like leveraged investments, and drives the middle class into investing in corporations to stay afloat for retirement (essentially a subsidy for the wealthy).

<comment><USER14> I think bitcoin will finally separate the good debt from the bad debt. It is my personal belief ( as in i don't know of any formal theory ) that debt should only be incurred for the use of building a productive asset. In a deflationary currency, this encourages businesses to ensure that productivity increases will have greater returns than savings. Instead, our financial system has encouraged the acquisition of debt for fixed assets. The only thing this has done is bid up the price of those fixed debts with debt, and handed over the money for supporting that system to banks and their owners. In order to stimulate growth in such a system, the only way that you can function is to tax savings. That's what inflation is. What it forces people to do is to invest in increasingly risky assets, because of the loss of their purchasing power. Hence bubble after bubble after bubble. Crisis after crisis after crisis.

Bitcoin will eventually stabilize to an ever appreciating value asset. But what it will allow you to do is save for a house. If you have a business proposal that encourages people to pay you for a good or service, people will invest their savings in it and take on that risk. Banks will instead move back to providing capital to businesses, using savings from people that are willing to invest. Businesses will again focus on productivity increases, because that's how you get access to capital.

I also don't think it is going to be resisted quite as much as people think it will be. People still need to pay their taxes, and that is not going to stop. The main thing it is going to do is prick the bubble of consumer debt, and remove the banking middle-men from that space. That alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry, let alone the annuities that banks own and graft from, from those assets. Removing these people (i.e. banking debt suppliers) from positions of power, by strangling their access to capital, is a justification for bitcoin in its own right. Imagine a world in which banks didn't control governments.

That's the way it is supposed to work i think. It is pure genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Somewhat off-topic but I like how lowly Nassim Taleb tends to think about Nobel laureates.

"[Bitcoin] doesn't serve any socially useful function." If that's what Stiglitz said word by word than he clearly lacks the ability to consider non- American perspectives.

In bubble times like this everybody talks about it, that's what's annoying me most. Everybody is eager to predict the bubble bursting. But few people put their money where there mouth is or just be honorable enough to give more precise predictions and later speak up if they predicted badly. They'd just quietly ignore they said something.

(Which is why I'm personally interested in predictions markets where you could challenge anyone to take a bet on a quantifiable outcome. But it seems they're not ready yet and probably won't be next year either...)

</comment><comment><USER30> He's probably correct, in our current system it should be outlawed.

However our current system isn't going to be fit for purpose for much longer. I'm hoping decentralised currencies leads to more decentralisation elsewhere, right up to the idea that it facilitates direct democracy.

<comment><USER31> this might be what your thinking of.

[https://voteflux.org](https://voteflux.org)

<comment><USER30> Yeah, although I was thinking of this a lot before Flux came about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Should everything that "doesn't serve any socially useful function" be outlawed? That seems like incredibly shallow thinking that would include numerous activities. I know the Nobel doesn't mean much these days, but come on. If this guy is the smartest mind in economics today, we're fucked.

</comment><comment><USER33> 1\. Stiglitz is effectively calling for perpetuating the surveillance state - one with no privacy, no strong encryption. How else can you ultimately stop cryptocurrencies?

2\. Does Joseph Stiglitz have a right to exist, even though his social utility is low? After all, he is quite old, has already done the work recognized in his Nobel prize and is unlikely to be of further use to society. Utilitarians will undoubtedly disagree with me here, but I assert that each of us has the right to trade communicate freely with one another, and to write and maintain whatever programs we wish to.

</comment><comment><USER27> Have efforts been made to produce a cryptocurrency that is compatible with monetary policy? Such that supply can increase or decrease either on command or naturally?

<comment><USER34> The "naturally" part is interesting...we manipulate money supply partly to hit target inflation rate. Would there be a way to use the ongoing transactions on a blockchain itself to calculate an inflation metric, and then naturally increase or decrease the money supply to keep it around 2-3% or whatever?

<comment><USER27> That's exactly what I've been thinking. Of course the inflation target would be arbitrary, but once agreed upon and baked into the blockchain logic it could maintain itself based on some parameter or set of parameters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years.

</comment><comment><USER36> He's right it should be. (From his perspective as a govt stooge.) And it will be. Whether that can stop it is the question.

</comment><comment><USER37> Government can still extract money from your bitcoin wallet. It works like this:

1\. Ask if you have bitcoin and how much. If you lie you go to jail for perjury.

2\. Ask you for N bitcoin. If you resist you go to jail.

The entire technical advantage relies on you effectively lying to your government. Not a good plan.

<comment><USER38> In the US, it's not usually the government that is the problem. It is the banks (or PayPal).

Ever had your PayPal account frozen for an unknown or arbitrary reason? It happens and it is scary and frustrating.

<comment><USER39> When you give a bank your money you become an unsecured creditor to the bank.

It really isnt your money at that point. Talk to the folks in Cyprus who had 10% taken off the top

<comment><AUTHOR> > When you give a bank your money you become an unsecured creditor to the > bank.

In quite a few places there are central bank guarantees against bank failures. Usually with some kind of cap, 100K or thereabouts.

<comment><USER39> As a follow up here check the solvency of the FDIC... .250k per account and the highest number of accounts it insured that it can cover was 1.5% according to what I can find

The other 98.5% are out of luck... great guarantee

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Cryptocurrencies are P2P so they can't be truly stopped, just like P2P piracy couldn't be stopped.

Centralized exchanges are about as big of a weakness as centralized public torrent sites are, but even that could be changed if the need for decentralized exchanges truly arises. Right now, decentralized exchanges have a big chicken and egg problem (you need sellers to buy, and viceversa). But if the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges were shut down, the chicken and egg problem would disappear.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just stop calling it cryptocurrency already. Call it cryptocommodity and everything about it starts making sense.

</comment><comment><USER42> The guy is scared of a currency not controlled by governments. He should get used to it instead of freaking out.

</comment><comment><USER43> This guy seems to think you can possibly outlaw Bitcoin. That is funny.

</comment><comment><USER44> But cryptocurrencies do serve a socially useful function: the ability to send money without a transaction fee from a third party.

<comment><USER45> Without a transaction fee? It currently costs ~$5/transaction.

[https://bitcoinfees.info/](https://bitcoinfees.info/)

<comment><USER46> It's incredible how often I see people who are "sure Bitcoin is going to be worth millions", or otherwise singing it's praises, also claiming there are "no fees".

It seems very few Bitcoin holders have ever even attempted to utilize Bitcoin. Despite holding a decent amount myself, I think things are going to get very messy when reality sets in and the market runs out of greater fools.

<comment><USER44> > from a third party.

<comment><USER46> Miners aren't a third party?

Where exactly did you think those fees went?

<comment><USER44> It seems like you've already made up your mind that I'm wrong, so we'll leave it there.

<comment><USER46> If you're not wrong, please explain to me what miners are - if not a third party that receives fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Nobel Prize Winner

Why is it necessary to appeal to authority when making such claims? Because he has nothing else to back up what he is talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because IRL such appeal to authority holds weight with the public. Whether it should or not is another thing but when a Nobel Prize Winner says something about his field people tend to pay more attention than when the corner hot dog salesman says the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ponzi schemes are illegal and so long as bitcoin remains a vehicle entirely for speculation, it's sorta-kinda-almost a ponzi scheme.

Quite a few ICOs and altcoins certainly were created with the intent of such a scheme and should definitely be considered illegal.

In reality, intent matters, and since bitcoin was not created with the intent of creating a pyramid, it seems likely it should be legal, at least by that particular possible illegality.

<comment><USER49> Your assertion that bitcoin is "a vehicle entirely for speculation" is false. It provides convenient methods for transferring and storing value. Even if it were merely a vehicle for speculation, that is not the criterion for being a Ponzi scheme. Is gold a Ponzi scheme? ICOs are a different matter, but they shouldn't be lumped in with bitcoin any more than a little league baseball team should be lumped in with the New England Patriots.

<comment><USER24> I've been asking this a lot lately. What is the canonical indicator, other than price, that a Bitcoin bull would point to, that shows it has increased utility this year?

<comment><USER25> Financial markets always price the future utility, not the present one.

A bitcoin bull could point out to bitcoin futures on professional financial exchanges as an increased utility, as in now professional money managers can trade bitcoin in a professional way.

<comment><USER24> That is an excellent example of an indicator. Do any of those exist currently?

<comment><USER25> There are firm promises of them becoming available really soon now (TM).

[http://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press- releases/2017/10/31...](http://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press- releases/2017/10/31/cme_group_announceslaunchofbitcoinfutures.html)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/nasdaq- is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/nasdaq-is-said-to- plan-bitcoin-futures-joining-biggest-rivals)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The guy is obviously clueless. Obviously. He claims that bitcoin's value is derived from expectation of "future growth" implying that it's not the case with literally any other investment in any other instrument be it a currency, a common stock, a commodity or a bond.

An "economist" that didn't grasp the trivial notion that "inherent value" is a myth? Nobel prize my ass.

<comment><USER51> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment><USER50> Well isn't that convenient

<comment><USER51> That link was directed at you...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ISmackdown: The Google guys vs. Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/two-books-on-apple-and-google-dogfight-by-fred-vogelstein-jony-ive-by-leander-kahney/2013/12/19/48e6b3d8-6699-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Note to the title patrol: This is the title of the link on the WaPo's front page; the actual title of the piece is the more-prosaic "Two books on Apple and Google: 'Dogfight' by Fred Vogelstein; 'Jony Ive' by Leander Kahney"</comment>


How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/adobe-employee-retention/ <comment><USER2> Been at Microsoft at the time they made the exact same transition (from "bell curve" to "goal/commitments"). Anyway most of these big companies just follow one another on subjects like compensation and review system.

Frankly, both systems are just a stupid loss of time... It always end up the same: you don't want/are not interested to fill in those lengthy and boring papers, so you just write pretty much bullshit in there. Your manager (usually) being a good guy will help you rewrite part of it so that it's "corporate". And that's it. Nobody really cares.

For those who did not had to write that kind of papers, it's just always more or less the same. You have to answer 5/10 lines on questions like: "What did you do this last quarter?" "What are your commitments for the upcoming quarter?".

90% of all the "commitments" of the department at MS looked like that kind of BS: 1\. Describe your project and mention you're happy with it. 2\. Say that you plan to work hard to reducing the technical debt (every single MS project has 20 years of debt) 3\. Say that you will try to improve the overall quality of the project and work with QAs 4\. Find some trait in your personality or skills that you will improve for next quarter. e.g. "I will try to spend more time studying component X so that I can help on that matter".

After some time you don't even pay attention to these reviews. Just copy/paste what was written for the last quarter, change the commitments as accomplishments, and create some new commitments depending on the trending problems in the team.

<comment><USER3> It's not just bullshit, it's actively harmful. It encourages people to game the system, often by playing political games. Secondary to that it encourages work on short-term, easily measurable projects, which tends to be the least valuable work. If you spend a year cleaning up garbage code you won't get nearly as many gold stars as if you just built some useless shiny bolt-on feature that nobody will actually use in the future. Now you understand a lot of what's been wrong with software development at places like MS over the last decade and more.

Perhaps even worse than that, this sort of bureaucratic BS tends to be extremely off putting to talented engineers who are intrinsically motivated to do good work. So they leave. Because they have the most talent and experience and are thus the most able to find work elsewhere easily. Bad corporate culture has a tendency to cause talent to evaporate out of a company. It's been happening at MS for decades and has seriously damaged them, it's happening at a lot of other places too. The problem is that when the people in charge look at what's wrong they don't see these things because it's practically invisible on a macro scale. Individual people on specific teams could run you a laundry list of former heavy hitters in their part of the company who left for greener pastures because they got fed up. But at the highest levels the only evidence that tends to show up is that for some reason it's become more and more difficult to execute on challenging projects, which is easy to attribute to any one or multiple of the countless other changing variables.

<comment><USER4> What is in your experience a better way to subtract the effect of personal feelings from performance reviews? How can you scale, and make it fair? Is it even desirable, as an unpleasant but productive person may have an impact on the morale of a team?

<comment><USER5> I've never had to manage "at scale", but I've spent the last several years of my career with one foot in management and the other doing actual development. I've been the person reporting to the people who lack introspection.

Ultimately, in my opinion, I think that trying to create the perfect algorithm for evaluating performance is futile. You can't really remove the effect of personal feelings because they play a huge part in group dynamics and in the end you are not trying to optimize for a single person, you want to optimize your team (or organization).

My experience has been that if you just listen to your team and watch them it'll be very obvious who is adding value, who is neutral, and who is a net negative. So long as your team size isn't larger than a dozen or so people, the team will seem to naturally coalesce around people who get stuff done, and they will tell you (sometimes with honest words and a tone that implies sarcasm or joking to remove the feeling of guilt) when someone isn't doing their part. The entire thing can be very opaque- I know of cases where one person seemed to get far less done than everyone else on the team (completed fewer projects, committed less code), and yet was very highly regarded. One might think that she was simply well liked if unproductive, but after she left for a different position the productivity of the team declined significantly. She turned out to have been so well respected because while she didn't create a lot of code she had a knack for spotting problems early on (things that were never seen outside the team because they were fixed early) and coordinating decision making between different people and projects. After she left there was a brief surge in productivity, followed by a disastrous slog as development was mired in bugs and component rework because of poor communication of specifications. In the same team, much later, there was an analogous incident where a developer appeared to be one of the most productive developers on the team. He was well liked as well and often participated in team activities, etc. but there was a constant undertone of joking about how much difficulty and complexity the person introduced into the code base. When I stepped in and did a thorough code review and looked at his parts of the project I realized all the joking had been really telling of a very real problem. The code was nightmarish. After that person was moved away from development and back into devops the productivity of the team had a short slump as everyone worked to refactor or replace his parts of the project, and then eventually ended up being much higher even with one less person.

None of the anecdotes are really new to anyone whose done development before, we know about net-negative producing programmers and people who catalyze work more than actually doing it themselves. I really just bring it up as a reminder of why it's so hard to have any objective measure, but also looking at how the other team members react to a person is very telling.

<comment><USER4> Well, that works when you manage a small team, but if you were in charge of say, Google Search or Microsoft Excel how would you go about managing hundreds or thousands of developers? Knowing you can't even be around the several hundred team leaders, let alone every developer, so managing by feel becomes impossible. You have thousands of new, and leaving engineers, you need some kind of order to the chaos...

Personally, I only tackle problems where I know I can keep the team small and in constant contact. We work remotely, and prefer Haskell, both of which self- select for people who are capable of managing themselves and working in such a setup. But it wouldn't scale to Google or Facebook scale, I don't think. Maybe Whatsapp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To set a salary:

Look at what they have done previously. If you hire a coder: Look at the quality of their code and the problems they have solved. Then figure out exactly what they will do in your company. And make an agreement what that might be worth, considering the quality of their previously work.

For me it takes less then five minutes of reading someone's code for me to decide if I want to hire them or not. I also already know what I need and what that will be worth.

You can repeat this every year or six month because of the constantly changing requirements of what needs to be done. And then it will be even easier, as you have access of everything the employee has done.

To keep them: Constantly give them attention when they do something good, like solving a problem, suitable for their skill level and competence. Remember that you can praise different ppl for different things. You will get away praising junior developers for doing things at their level while at the same time praising senior developers for solving serious hard problems.

Remember that praising, celebrating and thanking people do not cost any money!!

Some people just want to come to work and do exactly what they have done the last ten years, while others get bored if they do not face any challenges. The later category will need management, but they will also be valuable as they will be able to adapt to changes and advance your company.

For those that want to, let them go to conferences and learn new stuff. The stuff they learn will add value to your company.

Identify every individual's skill and good traits, then take advantage of them!

Never, ever fire anyone unless there is a very serious problem, like stealing or fist fighting.

Do not allow ass kissing, bullying or politics in general. Encourage a professional attitude, but keep in mind that "everything is personal", so try to be fair.

It's only when people feel safe and at ease they can go outside their comfort zones and achieve great things!

<comment><USER7> you seems like a great manager! everything you said makes sense, except for "Never, ever fire anyone...". Really? what about those who are highly paid but very disruptive to the team, ie. destructive to both budget and team outputs? And can't be move to different areas. Surely that would be the exception to your rule?

<comment><USER6> It's probably your own fault. Small things might have built up over the years, because you did not confront right away the first time you experienced the bad behavior.

Maybe you can use the disruptive energy to your advantage!? If there are bad influences, maybe you can turn it into good influences.

There's an exception though, if you are dealing with a true sociopath or psychopath, you need to get rid of them asap. You will know you are dealing with such a person if they constantly "destroy" people despite you've told them that it's not acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot imagine any situation in which I would think "Man, I hate my job. I'd quit right now if it weren't for the enlightened way they do performance review and goal-setting."

Of course that's a little unfair. Maybe doing this stuff well means that employees are less likely to find themselves with nothing important to do, or something. Still, it seems like it's focusing on the wrong things.

If you want to keep good employees, surely you actually want to do things like these: Give them interesting work to do. Give them work that has actual value for the world. Pay them well. Make sure they have good tools. Give them a sense of responsibility for the company's success (which means (1) shares or options and (2) as much clarity as possible about how their work relates to the company's higher-level goals). Make sure there are opportunities for progress.

If tinkering with performance-management makes a big difference, I think that can only be because either before or after the tinkering it was catastrophically broken.

<comment><USER9> Google's system was intolerable. You put yourself up for competitive promotion. Draining, rewards those who pay the optics game. Worst of all it left the great people who don't know how to play politics behind and left a lot of terrible people promoted who did

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > It's also about boosting Adobe's (ADBE -0.18%) stock price.

I know it's about the larger trend, but I couldn't help grinning.

<comment><USER11> These inline quotes in some newspapers feel so out of place and irrelevant. They are only good when they are funny, as in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Adobe's stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In > began.

I don't want to be overly negative but COME ON. Changing their goals program didn't nearly triple their stock price. I'm surprised Fortune included that at the end. If it truly had that much of an impact that should be the title of the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> On the underperformer side this is an interesting strategy. By having frequent conversations about underperformance that alone causes people to leave.

If what they're doing is true I think this is one of the more innovative talent management strategies out there. I hope this leads to more honest conversations and less politics due to doing whatever it takes to make sure you come out on the top end of a distribution.

As a consultant I've had many projects where we came in to fix a process where we were really fighting their performance management and incentives system.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm a bit skeptical. I've been through different companies with both strategies, and the 'goal setting' is a lesser evil than once-per-year but its hardly a reason for _staying_. All formal review processes are just time sinks.

The only review system I kinda liked was Symbian's. I have no idea if it was a mainstream idea, but they assigned you a level based on how you and your boss perceived a third party would describe your influence.

Edit to add: this is an excellent old article I was reminded of and recommend: [http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate- hr](http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr)

</comment><comment><USER15> The reason I was told about the elimination of a yearly written report card, and replacing by regular conversation, is that employees have no trail of documents saying their performance is good.

This gives greater freedom to lay people off, in the sense that there is no documentary basis for a lawsuit of wrongful termination.

<comment><USER16> I would actually think otherwise -- with no formal documentation of poor performance, they'll have a much harder time justifying a layoff/firing if they are sued for discrimination or something.

<comment><USER15> I see where you're going, but the constraints don't work out that way.

In an at-will state like California, you can be laid off for any business reason, such as "the work in this area is closing up." So, justifying a layoff (to the satisfaction of a court) is not a major constraint.

But if there is documentation stating that the employee's work is great, that future opportunities abound, etc., then that justification begins to look suspect.

On the other hand, in the absence of documentation, the at-will rules give great freedom to the employer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Large companies have three somewhat conflicting goals:

1) Find and retain key people

2) Make improvements in the culture and the people that work there over time

3) Have some kind of system that allows you to let people go when sales go downhill. (And sales will go downhill at some point. Bringing a group of managers into your office and telling them to get rid of 20% of the workforce within the next 4 weeks -- without the affected employes having any indication at all that they are at the bottom of the list -- makes a bad situation even worse)

I think perhaps it's best to separate these goals instead of trying to do it all at once. You don't necessarily want to find people that look like the ones you have. Improvements in people, culture, and environment is something that should always be done with a focus on how the employees personal goals (which should be part of this conversation) fit into the larger enterprise goals, not the other way around. And as long as employees are getting to work in various teams over the course of the year, having each team force-rank folks according to whether they would keep them on their team if the budget was cut in half seems reasonable, because that's just what might happen. Notice that managers do not appear on the vote-them-off-the-island system.

It's a very tough situation and there are no easy answers. I think identifying the various parts and how they might conflict with each other is the first step in moving to the next local optimization.

<comment><USER18> I agree with you. One of the very simplest ways companies could help themselves is through transparent communication of corporate strategy & performance, particularly if line managers map that to individual & team objectives. I have never been at any company that did a good job of this. It seems much more common that strategic obfuscation, keeping employees in the shadows (if not entirely in the dark) is something taught in management school.

<comment><USER17> (My day job is helping organizations change.)

Many years ago, I worked with a client once that was very small, like <50 people, but was staffed with people who used to hold very senior positions in large companies.

We had some really kick-ass guys, don't get me wrong, but overall the entire thing was a cluster fuck. Why? Because succeeding in a selfless way in a small team and succeeding in an ambitious way in a large organization are diametrically-opposed things.

These guys could _talk_ a good game about how things were supposed to be -- they had taken all the leadership courses and been coached and mentored like hell. They were self-starters and highly-motivated overachievers. There's no doubt in my mind that giving them a clear objectives and sufficient resources would result in the objectives being met. But getting a clear idea of organizational strategy communicated from point A to point B in this place was impossible.

People hold on to knowledge in a large organization. Knowledge is power. It was not unusual -- and remember this was an extremely small org -- to be part of a meeting with 4 or 5 folks where everybody in the room had a different idea of what the endgame was. The CEO told different people different things. Mid-level managers were encouraged to compete with one another. I told my wife that it was the first place I had worked where each person I met had a secret strategy for "once the board gets rid of all those other yahoos, I'll be the one left standing"

Sharing a vision/strategy and living your values is something that cannot be overstated. In fact, executives have to over-communicate and demonstrate it almost as melodrama in order for the rank-and-file to really grok it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, essentially they changed the names of various meetings and then gave a budget to managers because stack ranking with mandatory firing causes political infighting.

Now let's see how they deal with deadwood in a few years... I imagine there will be a pendulum.

<comment><USER20> "Dead wood" is a myth. Few employees are useless and it's always obvious if it is the case.

<comment><USER21> In what way is it a myth? I've definitely worked with people who where without a doubt dead wood, but I agree that it's absolutely obvious to everyone who they are.

<comment><USER22> I don't agree that it's obvious. Smart people who aren't motivated can be pretty good at pretending to be productive. I've worked with a guy who hand waves everything even slightly technical, doesn't know what version control is, and generally has no real insights.

But it seems I'm in minority. He has a phd and is presented as the brains of the company. Due to historical chance he's also held important sounding titles. He acts friendly, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Ditching annual performance reviews has paid unexpected dividends.

> At an annual "rewards check-in,"...

It looks to me like this is old wine in a new bottle. Instead of calling it a bell curve you give it a new name. For a corporation to change a system like this where performance reviews are tied to fixed budgets is next to impossible.

Most feedback that I give my employees are during a lunch conversation or a code review. Trickle feedback works quite well. I'm against annual performance reviews too. Adjustments in compensation are not mapped to fixed goals for a year or 8 week reviews. Whoever gets more shit done in the interest of the company gets a pay hike when we can accommodate it. Simple.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like it can be summarized as "shorter feedback cycles".

Doesn't sound too dumb, but IMO you the real issue is that you can't get people to talk candidly unless you have some good man management. Sure, allowing people to talk more often is good, but what happens if they don't feel they can say what they want? It doesn't always seem like a good idea to blurt out your real feelings about work.

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems like the kind of system you'd have if you just didn't mandate anything, but had a culture of giving a damn, and one time a year to suggest raises. I.e., I'm pretty sure this is the default, and grading according to a bell curve and letting people go who fall below a certain percentage, regardless of actual performance, is the weird exception (in the sense of taking effort to implement, not exception in the sense that few people do it).

If I am a manager, and I care about those under me doing a good job (both to reflect well on me, and to continue to perform well), I will, of course, check in periodically. Ask how things are going, suggest areas that could use improving, and commending them for areas they're doing well in. The response to that would color how I recommend people for raises, and if someone didn't seem to respond ~at all~ to that, and was underperforming, would lead me to recommend their transfer to another team or being let go.

</comment><comment><USER25> so they invented 1on1s?

<comment><USER26> ... and renamed the annual review as a "rewards check-in".

<comment><USER27> I think the actually-interesting thing that changed is that there's no longer a fan-in of review data, followed by some sort of central number-crunching. Instead, it's effectively a feudal system: every "lord" is empowered to give their "vassals" whatever raises/promotions/bonuses they like.

This is a system that actually works well, if you've got good and generous "lords" that want to keep their "vassals" happy and productive and generally use "do it yourself" as an opportunity to do away with bureaucracy, rather than make more. Whatever benefit Adobe is seeing from the change is probably because they managed to hire some really good managers (somehow), and are finally letting them loose to do their jobs.

Of course, a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.

<comment><USER14> Very nicely put between-the-lines interpretation :)

One small nitpick:

> a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At > least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.

If you have a bad lord (eh, manager) and your company uses a rank-and-yank system, then it'll be your boss gaming it not you.

-Reviews- eh 'working' in general - only works well if you have a good well-meaning boss?

<comment><USER28> Except when behind closed doors they fiddle the figures

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Don't see this mentioned: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback)

Instead of 1 on 1s, employees review a handful of their peers + their superiors. What do people think about this?

<comment><USER30> In the times that I've worked places that did this, it always completely exacerbated any underlying petty feuds that were going on between co-workers and lambasted managers for doing things like actually managing instead of being totally cool with someone playing WOW all day.

Your peers are _not_ the best judges of your overall positive contributions to the company. Peer feedback can be important, as evidenced by some of the posts upstream, and I think it's good for a manager to get an overall feel for the team dynamic and if there's unanimous rumblings about one member that might need to be addressed. But ultimately your manager is the only person who's going to understand what positive contributions to the company that you're making, because your manager sees a bigger picture than your peers.

Reviewing a manager can be a good thing or it can be a double edged sword- truly anonymous reviews are pretty much impossible so it's inevitable that you're going to be tied to your review somehow. In a perfect world managers would be adults and you'd be able to have conversations about management styles and communication styles and both parties would come to have mutual respect and understanding, but in my 15 years in the working world this has only happened to me _once_ so I don't hold my breath for it happening again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Actually they have been loosing a lot of their top talent. This is just a PR Fluff piece.

<comment><USER32> I was wondering that. There is more to retaining talent than just fixing the review system. If the company changes their product strategy dramatically and engineers aren't happy with that, money won't help. Surely the whole idea how Adobe implements CC is flawed. It'll discourage product innovation (customers already locked in anyway), dripfeeding features does suffice. Buying other products and companies to increase potential market and customers is the only way left to increase revenue. Which engineer wants that?

Just looking at Lightroom (because I'm a customer), there appears to have been a lot of change over the years. Highly visible engineers and managers lost to do their own thing, Spotify and other companies.

The about screen lists engineers involved, that has changed dramatically as well. I don't know how engineering is set up at Adobe, but it certainly looks like they have outsourced quite a bit of that product.

It will probably take several years for Adobe to realise that their license rental scheme was a shot in the foot...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> they didn't keep me and a few of my boys from quitting

</comment><comment><USER33> "involuntary, non-regrettable attrition"

What does that even mean?

<comment><USER34> Firing people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like a key piece of this is to give HR less power.

</comment><comment><USER36> I usually say that one shouldn't feel loyalty to a corporation because the corporation has no loyalty to you, but Adobe is different. It did feel like they looked out for you - the corporate culture is good and the workers are happy (at least the people I worked with).

I don't think they've closed a single office of the companies that they've bought over the years even if the product has since disappeared.

<comment><USER27> How does that work? Is e.g. the Fireworks team just an isolated-to-their-own- office subteam of the Photoshop team now?

<comment><USER36> I only know what happened in my case. I worked for a Swiss company that was bought by Adobe. They pretty quickly expanded our office and we became an rnd center - the other in Europe being Hamburg.

Other examples, macromedia became their san francisco offices, navisware or some other purchase became an office in north carolina....

They must eventually close some down though - they've bought a ton of companies in the last 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> They allow them 3-month vacation in India once a year?</comment>


Taiwan is planning its own SOPA legislation; Taiwanese people are protesting - <AUTHOR> http://www.techinasia.com/taiwan-protests-copyright-blacklist-facebook-rally/

<comment><USER2> This is ironic given that until the 1980's Taiwan had not signed international copyright treaties and was a center for illegal book printing.</comment>


How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_use_blekko_to_rock_at_your_jobp2.php <comment><USER2> This is by far the most interesting thing I've seen on Hacker News in weeks.

<comment><USER3> It is/was interesting which surprised me - I thought the title was just awful.

<comment><USER2> Agreed - I only clicked on it because I was in one of those time wasting moods and had clicked through everything that looked interesting.

It's considerations like those discussed in the article which make me think that, while companies like facebook aren't going away... and while the web will indeed continue to be more social - the actual value proposition of being able to connect in more and more ways to people that I have met continues to reduce in my eye.

They talk about how it's social recommendations that you really trust the most, so they see this great marketing opportunity. But it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that most of my friends provide pretty woeful information compared to what I can get through some skilled use of google and what the author describes in this article. That's increasingly going to be the way of things because by necessity - one's social group can only store and compare a tiny amount of information. As more people realise this, so too will the value of a social recommendation decline.

Tools that allow you to find better quality of information will win on the web. I think social is a red-herring in that respect.</comment></comment></comment>


The Mercury Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/index.html

<comment><USER3> Even if you don't find a way to use anything out of the functional-logical space, reading about languages like this can change the way you program when you are in a functional-only or logical-only language.

Here's a little oversimplification that I've found useful for understanding this stuff.

        * Mercury is the Haskell of Prolog
        * Curry is the Prolog of Haskell

It's interesting to see a lot of the ideas in Mercury addressed from the opposite direction Curry. See for yourself: <http://www-ps.informatik.uni- kiel.de/currywiki/>

<comment><USER4> This is how I feel about it. Mercury is an elegant language but I think the applicable domain is restricted to a very narrow subset of the industry. As a [primarily] web programmer I will generally only become more "cultured" by studying esoteric languages (Scheme, Haskell, Mercury, Curry) - <USER2> acculturation does diffuse into my day-to-day practice, though. I find myself structuring code in a novel manner (often times it's more clean, cogent, and effective too) that I would not normally have done with my narrower knowledge space, pre-saturation. I also see myself creating logic and using data structures that weren't historically typical of me.

I think _every_ programmer should study esoteric languages. It's akin to the contrast of arithmetic and mathematical logic - you have the opportunity to appreciate and experience the ideal rather than the mundane. Not that beauty can't be found in building a web application (or any other application for that matter) using a framework and one's own set of libraries; I do everyday because I pour the expression of who I am into my practice - the thing is, it's [esoteric languages] the same sort of joy one derives from contemplating deep philosophical questions or from deliberately cultivating character through introspection.

I felt like whipping out the PhilosoRaptor tonight I guess...

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that people write tediously comprehensive imperative unit tests to verify their programs should be a warning sign that the use cases for logic programming may be more much general than you think. A hunch, nothing more. I'm just starting to dig into this stuff.

<comment><USER5> This!

People are itching for declarative testing systems. Writing testing code by hand is tedious and error-prone. Static typing works for a lot of things, but isn't completely satisfactory. Randomized testing is also useful (give a function that tests a property, give random_int -> value generators for its arguments, let it find edge cases), but those are only two facets of a much bigger picture.

I'm _really_ interested in more modern takes on Prolog, but from what I've read about Mercury, it seems to throw out my favorite aspect: computing with partial information. Constraint logic programming seems like a more valuable direction, though I see the appeal in a Prolog-esque language informed by modern type theory, and I'm particularly interested in what it does with linear types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always found this language interesting, especially because of its early commercial usage, but I haven't seen many first hand accounts of its use. Anyone care to chime in?

</comment><comment><USER7> Prince XML is written in Mercury

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_XML>

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone running that site reads this, request: put a Hello World code sample right smack on the home page. Seeing the size and structure of the syntax to accomplish that basic task will tell me loads, immediately, in very little space, about your language. I can then dig in deeper, or move on, depending on interest.

<comment><USER8> To save others the effort, I did some spelunking and found a Hello World in a tutorial. Here it is:

      :- module hello.
      :- interface.
      :- import_module io.
      :- pred main(io::di, io::uo) is det.
      :- implementation.

      main(IOState_in, IOState_out) :-
        io.write_string("Hello, World!\n", IOState_in, IOState_out).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        Logic programming languages [...] have not had
        significant impact on the computer industry.

        Mercury is a new logic/functional programming language

Mercury is "new" and admittedly interesting since 15 years now. Please somebody update the blurb.</comment>