Yahoo's Marissa Mayer could get $55M in severance pay - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-0429-tn-marissa-mayer-severance-20160429-story.html <comment><USER2> It's easy to criticize Mayer but I think the expectations of what she could have achieved were pretty wildly out of whack. I'm reminded of Daniel Kahneman's dissection of CEO performance and the book "Built to Last", in his book, "Thinking Fast and Slow":

> The basic message of Built to Last and other similar books is that good > managerial practices can be identified and that good practices will be > rewarded by good results. Both messages are overstated. The comparison of > firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a > comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.

> Because luck plays a large role, the quality of leadership and management > practices cannot be inferred reliably from observations of success. And even > if you had perfect foreknowledge that a CEO has brilliant vision and > extraordinary competence, you still would be unable to predict how the > company will perform with much better accuracy than the flip of a coin. On > average, the gap in corporate profitability and stock returns between the > outstanding firms and the less successful firms studied in Built to Last > shrank to almost nothing in the period following the study. The average > profitability of the companies identified in the famous In Search of > Excellence dropped sharply as well within a short time. A study of Fortune's > "Most Admired Companies" finds that over a twenty-year period, the firms > with the worst ratings went on to earn much higher stock returns than the > most admired firms.

Mayer wasn't lucky. But I bet she's far more competent than most of us.

<comment><USER3> This is just as much an argument in support that she doesn't deserve to get 55 million. Just because you took the helm of the titanic as it was hitting the iceberg doesn't mean you deserve to make 250 times what a regular engineer makes.

<comment><USER4> You are not qualified to judge what others deserve. Steph Curry's net worth is $44M and I don't think anybody deserves $44networth for being good at throwing balls through hoops.

But it is market that often determines these numbers and we simply do not possess the information to look at all those variables.

<comment><USER5> His net worth isn't based on being able to throw balls through hoops; it's based on his ability to attract and retain a huge audience for advertisers.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't matter. I dont think advertisers should pay that much money to him.

Case in point is that worth of Mayers might depend on far too many factors which we cant comprehend and we must not judge her.

<comment><USER5> Advertisers are notoriously poor at proving ROI, so you could be right in your assessment of his worth to them. Anyway, if putting a ball through a hoop was a bankable skill, this guy would be a billionaire: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG_DQXEK764](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG_DQXEK764)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This story is being misreported, a little. Here is Yahoo justifying her compensation in their latest annual filing:

> It's important to understand that Ms. Mayer's performance-based equity award > values in the Summary Compensation Table reflect the significant > appreciation in our stock price between when the awards were originally > approved by the Compensation Committee and when the applicable annual > performance goals were subsequently set (the accounting measurement date). > For example, our stock price increased 178 percent between July 16, 2012 > (the date on which Ms. Mayer's recruitment awards were originally approved) > and March 6, 2015 (the date on which the recruitment option's 2015 tranche > was valued for reporting purposes). That option tranche had an original > approval value of $3 million in 2012, and a reported value of nearly $20 > million in 2015, due to our intervening stock price appreciation (which > benefits executives and shareholders alike).

The exercise price of the options is not lower than the stock price on the day the options/RSU's were awarded

You could argue that the scheme was poorly designed since she is being rewarded for the performance of BABA, rather than the performance of YHOO.

The second part is that the severance pay portion is only paid out if Mayer is fired after a change of control event _on the main entity_. This excludes the sale of Yahoo internet assets that are currently being negotiated, but takes effect if there is a takeover of the main entity.

It looks more like a poison pill, or insurance from being fired too early for Mayer, rather compensation that is intended to be paid.

In related news, Yahoo just finished up a long battle with Starboard (who got 4 new members onto the board - including 3 onto the compensation committee (which is now at 5)) who took issue with compensation - but I don't think there is much they can do right now.

</comment><comment><USER7> The defense of hundred million dollar CEO paychecks in this thread feels like some bizarre Stockholm syndrome.

<comment><USER8> I chalk it up to the fact that everyone here believes they are going to be the CEO of their own multi-billion dollar startup, and when that happens, they want their own $100M/yr pay package as well.

<comment><USER9> Or it could be people thinking "just because someone has more money than I doesn't mean they took it from me. Good for them."

<comment><USER10> But they absolutely took it from me when they are being paid by a publicly traded company.

I am more convinced every day that the marginal income tax above a certain limit (my proposal is 100 * 2000 * minimum wage per hour, I'm willing to go lower to build consensus) above which the income shall be taxed at 90% of the additional income. It is the right thing to do. I want companies to go to the executives and say "look, it costs us too much to give you any more money. Please try to cooperate."

It is the right thing to do.

<comment><USER9> It only your money if you own stock in that company.

If you do own stock, then get enough shareholders together to vote on executive compensation.

That's the proper mechanism. If you can't get enough shareholders to change things, then I guess it's not that big of a problem to most.

The other option is just don't own stock. That's your choice.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how a small investor or an individual with a retirement plan can do that. Corporations accepted the controls when they decided to play in the big kids pool.

I understand not every decision can be made in a centralized manner but I think a progressive personal income tax is the right thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the cold light of history, executive pay in this epoch is going to shock.

Executive 'severance' shall not be comprehended at all.

Something is very, very, very wrong in our culture.

<comment><USER12> The pool of people who are capable of leading a company the size of Yahoo isn't that big to begin with.

Add to that the fact that Yahoo had a recent serial history of hiring then firing CEOs before they brought in Mayer, and the pool of potential people to fill the spot shrinks again.

Yahoo had no pathway to success and was likely to fail spectacularly - especially given the way the board was behaving - which signified to any potential hire that it might be their last job. The pool of potential CEOs shrinks again.

Of course the incoming CEO would negotiate a well-beyond-market severance package. They shouldn't even want to hire someone who didn't have the foresight to do so.

<comment><USER13> The "elite" are not actually elite, they are just a wealthy mediocrity. Much more capable people than Meyer are likely sitting around in a cubicle right now, but due to their lack of 'correct' connections/pedigree/experience they will never have even 1/100th the opportunity as Meyer.

<comment><USER12> If you're on the board of directors for a billion dollar search engine, who do you hire as CEO? A guy in a cubicle, or a Stanford grad who was employee #20 at google that spent a career in charge of Search, User Experience, and Location?

You're acting like they just hired Paris Hilton off the street, when the reality is that she busted her ass her entire career in a field that few women have had major success in.

The last CEO to hold onto the job at Yahoo as long as Mayer has is Terry Semel, and he got booted in 2007.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Marissa was the 5th Yahoo CEO between 2011 and 2012. Yahoo had a habit of hiring CEOs and then firing before they had a chance to make progress.

She didn't want to be fired 6 months into the job. Yahoo is a big ship, and Marissa wanted time to turn it around and see results. I assume she negotiated a large severance pay not as a way of making lots of money, but rather to incentive the board to give her a chance.

<comment><USER15> -> I assume she negotiated a large severance pay not as a way of making lots of money, but rather to incentive the board to give her a chance.

The game theorist in me says this is probably correct. I suppose it would be helpful to think of severance pay as a hedge against the downside risk of failure. Still, it does _sound_ kind of awful that she'll get this much money with the company itself having, essentially, negative value.

<comment><USER16> If the other player accepts your poison pill, then you should reconsider its effectiveness. The only rational conclusion you could draw from such a move would be "Gee, they're willing to spend at least 55 million to fire and hire as they please."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that really baffles me is that she will be hired by another company after this for similar comp. Either that, or she'll make a credible run at political office. It's amazing how little America holds these people to account for poor performance. It literally does not matter how well they do in their job.

</comment><comment><USER17> When she was hired I asked (and what I imagined she probably would've asked), what is Yahoo!'s business model, how much fierce is the compeition, and how willing it is to seek other markets (that can serve as low hanging fruit).

I see tech companies business models (very broadly) as being one of a few kinds:

\- serving masses and revenue-through-ads (the social media model)

\- serving masses and selling a product

\- serving big businesses

it looks like Yahoo! was in the first category at that time and there was already market monopoly by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. So continuing what they were doing already but better meant taking those companies head on, and that was an uphill battle.

So I was of the opinion that the best way forward IMO would be to seek new markets and low hanging fruit, maybe explore creating a product, maybe get into hardware, maybe serve big businesses.

Over the years I never heard Yahoo! do something radical, or go into a new direction, or even seek some safe investment. I might not be fully-informed though, but if that's really the case then the CEO is clearly to be blamed for it. So TBH I'm not surprised Yahoo! is still not doing well and has to be sold.

Looking for corrections/more-info/thoughts in response to my comment. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER18> Stock compensation to executives should be in the form of options with a strike price around market value.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess I will never understand the business model employed by most large companies that involves paying executives such enormous sums, even in cases where the leadership failed (I say this in general, not because I think Mayer failed). It seems there is a big disconnect between performance and compensation when you get to a certain level of leadership.

<comment><USER20> At that level, in general, boards pay CEOs that much money to leave, because the cost of them staying on to the shareholders is often many times more. The severance usually sounds like a lot compared to what you or I make, which is why it gets such bad headlines, but compared to the often billions of dollars it could cost shareholders to retain a bad CEO instead of finding a new one; it's a no brainer.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't it be cheaper to fire her and not give her an insane severance package?

Have the "elite" somehow made it illegal to get rid of them without multi- million dollar packages? Or is this just an example of, we do it because it's always been done this way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Executive pay is something I haven't heard convincing arguments about. It's obviously gone up a lot in recent decades, why?

The incentives seem to be of the heads-I-tail-you-lose variety, for all the complex performance pay that it is nominally made up of. Most arguments you do hear seem to apply equally in 1950 or 1980, so why the trend?

The common sense argument that a CEO is so impactful on a company so big, that CEO pay is always worth it inasmuch as it has any kind of meaningful effect on performance. 3% improvement in Yahoo's value is $1bn and you'd imagine the 1st choice CEO is worth at least 3% more that the 2nd. I reckon that kind of thinking plays a big role here.

This kind of money, and the way so many of these packages seem to come with weird ways (eg severance pay) to add 7, 8, 9 figure sums in certain cases seems dangerous. Self interest is naked once these sums are in play and the room for cynical, self interested choices is very wide for a CEO.

<comment><USER22> Planet money did an episode on this. As often is the case it starts with a change in regulation. [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/05/465747726/-682-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/02/05/465747726/-682-when- ceo-pay-exploded)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I find amazing is that Mayer failed to articulate any real strategy for how Yahoo was going to succeed in the future. To me, that was her only job - get in, and find a way for Yahoo to move forward. Then execute on that strategy (hiring/firing/acquisition/etc).

<comment><USER24> She was too indecisive, shifted gears too often, and tried to take too many pages from her past employers.

She did everything a good executive should not do. She tried to acquire her way to growth when she couldn't stabilize the core business. She hired consultants to reaffirm things she already knew, and she spent lavishly on silly things. She was a great middle manager who was never going to be a good CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe someone here can explain but why would another large company such as Verizon want to buy dying brands such as AOL and Yahoo? The user base of such sites is drying up. They could be replaced by Google tomorrow if people just stopped using them and went elsewhere for the same information and services. The brands themselves are losing value everyday as a new generation grows up without ever knowing what they were.

<comment><USER26> Yahoo has basically 3 things that are still valuable and are actually pretty good: Sports, Finance, Mail. I occasionally use Yahoo Finance myself.

<comment><USER27> Yahoo's finance site is far, far ahead of any other that I've tried. I'll be sorry to see that go. When I try another site I feel like grabbing the collar of its developers and demanding to know what is wrong with them.

Example: [https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/BABA,BIIB,FB,QQQ,UPS,VHT/vi...](https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/BABA,BIIB,FB,QQQ,UPS,VHT/view/v1)

I.e. with one click I can get a custom snapshot of whatever basket I'm interested in, with everything there and links to drill down for more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can someone give an example of a similar situation where the CEO was male? Ie an outsider brought in to save a big tech company that looked doomed and indeed was.

Jack Dorsey is almost that, but he had previous involvement at the top of Twitter so maybe not quite the same thing.

The reason I ask is I think Marissa has received an awful lot of particularly aggressive criticism, and it'd be interesting to see if men in her situation receive the same treatment from HN, the tech press, etc.

It would be interesting to find a good comparison.

<comment><USER29> Considering most CEOs are male by far, I'm sure there are dozens of cases historically where it's happened. This isn't the first time a company has been failing and they fire the CEO and hire someone else, only to fail in the end anyways.

<comment><USER28> Sure. But a specific example from tech in say the last decade?

<comment><USER29> Well, I didn't down vote you because I didn't think it was a terrible question. I am not well versed in business CEO history though, so I can't point out specific examples. I just was saying that given the thousands and thousands of businesses that have existed in history, this situation isn't unique.

I also am not sure how you'd distinguish she was getting criticized due to her gender as opposed to it just being an extremely iconic company from internet history that has steadily gone down the tubes. It's a bad situation and tons of people have lost their jobs, I'm not sure how one could speculate accurately that the criticisms are because she's female vs. the other dozens of issues.

cheers

<comment><USER28> I don't disagree.

If you could find an example of a guy in a similar situation who has received a similar level of criticism, then I think you could at least conclude that gender wasn't the primary factor in motivating criticism.

If you couldn't find an example, then not much could be concluded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was hoping Yahoo would've went private like Dell. So that she'd have the time to turn the company around. She did a great job improving the tech behind their company but...Yahoo was like a 1960's abandoned nuclear silo. To reinvent their company it would be costly and with stock pressures, they weren't able to do the impossible.

I personally hope YellowPages buys out Yahoo, I think they'd be able to best handle the transition to making Yahoo change into what it needs to be.

<comment><USER31> YellowPages? The joke is they can transition Yahoo into irrelevance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious what she'd do next. She obviously wouldn't _have_ to work, but I can't imagine her just retiring.

<comment><USER33> Destroy another company.

<comment><USER34> You call it destroyed she will put on her resume she doubled the stock price and found a successful acquisition of the company with a complimentary partner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know it's been asked before, but is there a critical function Yahoo! serves right now that would have to be replicated immediately if they went away? I honestly cannot think of anything that couldn't be reproduced by other tech and media companies rather quickly.

Disclaimer: I use no Yahoo! products other than Yahoo! Fantasy Sports for fantasy hockey.

<comment><USER30> Most don't realize it but Yahoo Small Business and their storefront/hosting efforts generate a lot of revenue for them. But most of their revenue is from ads.

<comment><USER35> Yahoo already indicated that they don't care about that product. It was their pick to get spun off along with the Alibaba stock as Aabaco: [https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/](https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/)

Since the actual spinoff seems to have fizzled, Yahoo does still own them, but I can only presume they did serious damage to its user trust by leaving it in this limbo state. They also claimed revenue of $50 million a year when they announced the spinoff, which is not exactly big money for a place Yahoo's size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Every journalist who reports on what they believe to be excessive executive compensation (or even what they believe to be shareholder-friendly pay) should be clearly identifying (a) the members and Chair of the Board's Compensation Committee, and (b) the Board's Compensation Consultant. Although the whole Board is responsible for CEO pay, the Compensation Committee and the Board's compensation consultant are primarily decision-makers and influencers, respectively.

In Yahoo's case, Maynard Webb, Jr. is Chairman of the Board and member of the Compensation Committee. Jane Shaw (Intel) is Chair of the Compensation Committee. And Fred Cook is the Board's Compensation Consultant. Regardless of whether you think her package excessive or reasonable, these are the people who ought to receive credit or blame.

</comment><comment><USER29> So she lasted like 4 years before the company failed? Somehow I don't feel particularly sorry for her with $55M in the bank from that job. How obscene.

<comment><USER37> > So she lasted like 4 years before the company failed?

Took 4 years for the company to fail, you mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yahoo replaced its native internet pioneer culture with a corporate culture too early in its development.

</comment><comment><USER39> I hope Google buys Yahoo and makes something out of the pieces that are somewhat valuable. Like for example, Yahoo mail is somewhat good and widely used, but can be made a lot better by Google moving that into the Gmail platform.

</comment><comment><USER40> Don't forget, she gave Yahoo a new logo :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is just about signalling. You negotiate a package to signal your value, and the severance signals your value to the next company that will hire you. As a counterpoint, if she offered to run yahoo for free, there is no way they would have offered her the position.

<comment><USER24> Highly doubt that any corporation would hire her as CEO after Yahoo. I'm not blaming her for the mess it was in when she joined and she did OK, but lots and lots of talented people can be an OK CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> People seem to forget that companies compete for CEOs. If you want someone to be your CEO, you need to pay a very high salary regardless of how your company is doing.

<comment><USER42> What is the thing they are competing for? There's a whole lot more people than there are CEOs, so it seems you need more explanation than _If you want someone to be your CEO, you need to pay a very high salary regardless of how your company is doing._

I think they don't particularly know what they are competing for and that this works out nicely for CEOs. Obviously there are people that can add a great deal of value to certain situations. I don't think there is a good method of identifying them. If there was such a method, pay would be lower (or we'd have many more great companies).

<comment><USER9> _What is the thing they are competing for?_

They are competing for people to run their company? Relevant experience and skill set? Just like any other job?

My point is, if you have two companies, A and B. A is on a downward slope for the past few years and needs a turnaround. Company B is on the uphill slope and is going to be a unicorn.

Just because Company A is doing poorly, doesn't mean they can pay their CEO less. Why? Because the potential hires could always just go to Company B.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> That's a google lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER44> Nice, she can throw a few more of her famous parties

</comment><comment><USER45> Heads I Win; Tails You Lose;</comment>


Card Builder: A Tool for Modern News Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.lovelysystems.com/blog/cardbuilder/ <comment><AUTHOR> Card Builder is a tool for publishers to create interactive stacks of cards and embed them into their site. Go check it out - readers love it!</comment>


How Tesla's website and Twitter accounts were hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2014/07/09/10000-is-on-offer-for-anyone-who-can-hack-a-tesla-car/

<comment><USER2> Why did this get 4 upvotes in 15 minutes when the article is from 2014 and unrelated to the recent hack?</comment>


Ask HN: Constantly shuffling between toy projects. - <AUTHOR>

Ok, I know this isn't so much of a question as it is an observation, but wanted to see if anyone else has experienced the same thing and how they dealt with it.
I find myself constantly starting a project, getting good traction, spending a week or two in a furious coding rage getting it off the ground, then suddenly.... I either find a way to convince myself that the current project is dumb, or that there is some other, more useful toy project that I should be working on.So, I break out the pen and paper, get away from the laptop and start scribbling notes, features, mockups, which is essentially thinly veiled procrastination from other projects I've been working on. Then I'll get started on this new "project of the week", bang out a few features, and generally kick ass until I convince myself I "need" to start this "other" new project because I want to try out that new Rails gem, jQuery effect, try out SASS, etc.</p><p>While I think working on a bunch of toy projects has helped me broaden my skillset, I'm left with the nagging feeling that I'm not really closing anything out, and just using these new pet projects almost as a distraction.
I know, clearly the best solution to this problem is "Get off HN and do something", I just wanted to see if anyone else has had similar experiences in their career, and if they had any resources/methods for addressing this sort of "Project of the Week"  syndrome. <comment><USER2> One realization I've had is that, for all of the projects that I started and never finished, or even never started, I would _much_ rather have that project finished and done and part of my project portfolio, even if it really was a dumb idea, than to have given up on it.

If I can really truly believe that and act on it, then it makes since to follow through and finish projects, regardless of if after a week I think it's a dumb idea. Now, of course, some ideas may really be dumb. You have to have some mechanism for filtering out garbage. I propose filtering at the beginning: make at least an informal design of the project, and if, after that, it still seems reasonable, then commit to yourself to finish it. And finish it _before_ starting another personal project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a severe case of this too. I always get caught up in the thrill of a new idea.

I've been getting better at finishing things since I wrote all of my 'in progress' projects down and noted what stage they were at and what I need to do to move them on.

I found that my projects got shelved once they needed outside help to continue. So in effect I had taken them to the limit of my own skills, which was more finished than I originally thought.

Now I've got a list of where I'm at with them all and what extra resource they need to progress.

So for example one project will be finished when I've got a spare $300 to put towards it.

Another will be put into production if I find a manufacturer that meets a certain price and spec.

Others are just beyond my technical level currently so I might release them as open source projects that people might make use of.

Knowing what 'finished' looks like and what is needed next will remind you to keep contributing to the projects you've started.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a useful URL for procrastinators. Weirdly they've made it so long that people needing help probably won't get around to reading it.

([http://writingcenter.unc.edu/resources/handouts- demos/writin...](http://writingcenter.unc.edu/resources/handouts- demos/writing-the-paper/procrastination))

One suggestion is to build in a finish condition before you start. That at least allows you to not feel guilty frustrated / angry when you reach that point. Then post-mortem the project to see what you learnt and what can be applied.

Another suggestion is to find a small easy bit of OSS to fix and brush up.

<comment><USER4> I also meant to say that I have ideas for a dozen toy projects that I have little hope of coding (and none of paying to be coded) but which I would use. So let me know if you want a list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been known to do this as well, but I have also found that I am more creative when I have more than one thing going on. Generally I find that a solution in one application will lead me to rethink a problem in the other.

That being said I also go through times when I want to work on both or use one to procrastinate from working on another one.

So you are not alone. I have found the best system that works for me is setting small goals and deadlines. That gives me the flexibility to move from project to project while also feeling like I am accomplishing something.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am definitely in that boat at the moment. I think the main problem is none of those side projects has a "customer" so there is no cost in killing them off. If someone was going to use it, it would be harder to kill. Even if it was free \ open source.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's important to get what you've built into the hands of someone else. You cannot rely on your own experience with what you've built as a basis for decision making.

</comment><comment><USER8> The reason you posted here is that you have a problem and are looking for a solution. You know that this is aimless development, however working out at the gym is aimless too. Both help you exercise, but neither are doing good except for getting better at starting development projects and burning calories, respectively. Instead of going to the gym, you could work at Habitat for Humanity or similar and build houses or do other volunteer work that requires physical effort. The development equivalent is working on open source projects that need help.

<comment><USER2> That's an interesting observation about physical exercise. The most excess weight I've lost, and the best physical exercise I've gotten, has been when I was doing something that simply required physical exertion, rather than exercising for the sake of exercising.

Thank you; I suspect if I ponder this for a bit, it will have a positive impact on my future exercise plans and goals.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best developer conferences for 2015? - <AUTHOR> As a resolution for 2015, I'm hoping to attend more conferences - particularly for web development, server-side languages, Linux, and open source software. What are the best conferences lined up for 2015? <comment><USER2> PyCon ([https://us.pycon.org/2015/](https://us.pycon.org/2015/)) is always a blast. It's large, but has an amazing sense of community. You will find at least three or four amazing talks each day, on a variety of subjects. The posters area will expose you to all kinds of cool academic and other projects. The Expo Hall is always full of hip companies (giving away lots of great SWAG, of course).

I guarantee you will leave inspired.

<comment><USER3> Any Idea how much this will cost? I am a student in college and I was interested in going to PyCon since python was my first programming language -- and do Students have a different rate than regular tickets?

<comment><USER4> Student tickets are $125, Individual / Enthusiast tickets $350, and Corporate tickets $600 ([https://us.pycon.org/2015/registration/](https://us.pycon.org/2015/registration/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are in India, HasGeek's conferences are all for developers, and often pretty much the only conference on the topic in India (websites are still for 2014):

Feb 2015: Meta Refresh, on web UI ([https://metarefresh.in](https://metarefresh.in)) and Construkt Festival, on tech startups ([http://construkt.me](http://construkt.me))

May 2015: Rootconf, on devops and cloud infrastructure ([https://rootconf.in](https://rootconf.in))

Jul 2015: The Fifth Elephant, on big data and analytics ([https://fifthelephant.in](https://fifthelephant.in))

Sep 2015: JSFoo, on JavaScript ([https://jsfoo.in](https://jsfoo.in))

Dec 2015: Droidcon India, on Android ([https://droidcon.in](https://droidcon.in))

All conference videos are available at [https://hasgeek.tv](https://hasgeek.tv)

<comment><USER6> +1 this - mostly because they're all in the second or third iteration of the conference.

Take a look at the last few years' videos to get an idea of why this is worth attending, which is probably the harder detail for people who have to travel to attend conferences.

<comment><USER5> JSFoo 2015 will be the fifth year. That's the oldest. Rootconf 2015 in the third year is the youngest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> BSD conferences are Right Sized and the people are amazing. BSDCan is worth the trip if you want to see a different perspective from the larger confs which are highly commercialized.

<comment><USER8> BSDCan is awesome. 2015 will be my 11th trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> strangeloop [https://thestrangeloop.com/](https://thestrangeloop.com/) & gluecon [http://gluecon.com/](http://gluecon.com/)

<comment><USER10> I second StrangeLoop. I went last year for the first time (after hearing about it every year) and was duly impressed. Amazing content and impeccably run. Also, it's the most progressive conference I've been. They dedicate a ton of time and scholarship money to increase attendance by under-represented groups.

<comment><USER10> And not only do they offer scholarship money to individuals from underrepresented groups, they give travel stipends as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why has no one added JSConf. It is an amazing conference with a limited set of people and very good talks. And its a 3 day conference where one day is pure fun. I attended it once and wish to attend again.

[http://2015.jsconf.us/](http://2015.jsconf.us/)

<comment><USER12> I second this.

Went to JSConf US this year in the beautiful Amelia Islands (right off the coast of Jacksonville, FL) and had an absolute blast!

Extremely well organized, knowledgeable, and a ton of fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should provide what kind of location or travel budget that you are asking about: there's great conferences across Europe but that may not be of interest if you are based on the West coast of the states for example.

<comment><USER14> I live in Australia. So almost EVERYTHING is an international airfare (ugh).

But love it here anyhow!

<comment><USER6> LCA is pretty awesome.

I went to linux.conf.au for five years in a row (from India).

Heard people like like Andrew Tanenbaum and Bruce Schneier, more importantly go to ask them questions (yes, that's the point).

Rusty, Tridge, Linus, Bdale, Keith Packard, Lennart, Garret, Val Henson, Rasmus ... if you work on the lower layers of the linux ecosystem, this is a pretty awesome place to head to.

The only downside was that I returned from the conference every year with a sensation of having wasted the entire year before not doing anything significant (of course, I worked on a lot of small things, but nothing which took a year to write).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you can't attend every conference, many of them are recorded.

[http://www.confreaks.com/events](http://www.confreaks.com/events)

Rubyconf is here and various other ones not related to ruby.

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://rubyconf.org/](http://rubyconf.org/)

The International Ruby Conference -- more commonly known as RubyConf -- has been the main annual gathering of Rubyists from around the world since 2001.

[http://www.railsconf.com/](http://www.railsconf.com/)

April 21-23, 2015 • Atlanta, Georgia

Something similar to JsConf:

[http://fluentconf.com/javascript-html-2015?cmp=kn-web- confre...](http://fluentconf.com/javascript-html-2015?cmp=kn-web-confreg-home- fl15_adwords_geo)

[http://www.buildwindows.com/](http://www.buildwindows.com/) 2015

"/dev/winter 2015" [http://devcycles.net/2015/winter/?utm_source=lanyrd](http://devcycles.net/2015/winter/?utm_source=lanyrd)

Free 1 day software conference. Development, DevOps, Mobile, Web, NoSQL, Cloud, Functional Programming, Startups and more.

QCon London 2015

[http://qconlondon.com/](http://qconlondon.com/)

9th International Software Development Conference

Or

QCon New York 2015

The 4th Annual International Software Development Conference

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

Maybe: [http://sxsw.com/interactive](http://sxsw.com/interactive) ?

Less Web Dev though ( [http://www.gdconf.com/](http://www.gdconf.com/) )

Game Developers Conference

I think there will be:

[http://html5devconf.com/](http://html5devconf.com/) for 2014 as well.

Here are some other conferences about "Computer Image Analysis, Computer Vision Conferences One Year Calendar"

[http://conferences.visionbib.com/Browse- data.php?order=DateN...](http://conferences.visionbib.com/Browse- data.php?order=DateNum&ascdsc=ASC&year=2015)

<comment><USER10> I've been to RubyConf and, as a Rubyist, I was looking at going last year, but my impression was that it was pretty poorly run (at least compared to a conference like StrangeLoop). They seemed very late in getting sponsors and offered nothing in terms of travel assistance for underrepresented groups. When I asked them why they didn't, they gave me some malarkey about being a non-profit then refused to engage with me further.

<comment><USER10> For example, I was horrified when I found out that RubyConf didn't pay or even offer cover the travel for their speakers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are interested in security there are at least two or three good conferences happening every month somewhere. Some are listed below. BlackHat (big and expensive), Defcon and various Security BSides are always worth attending. There are some great ones in South America (H2HC, YSTS, ekoparty) and of course there are a lot in Europe (Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, HITB in Netherlands, NoSuchCon in France).

</comment><comment><USER18> For anyone freelancing, any WordCamps in your area may be well worth your time even if you're doing nothing with WordPress. The level of technical information varies depending on size/# of tracks, but there are a variety of other presentations of use (if Chris Lema is speaking, go to _that_ track).

If you're tight on time or money, they're also a decent choice because they're inexpensive by design (almost always under $50 for a 2-day conference; I believe WordCamp Chicago 2014 was $60 if you included the Friday training tracks) and they're generally on weekends.

You can get a fair idea of some of the things you'll find at them and where to find them by going to [http://wordcamp.org](http://wordcamp.org), and you can find a variety of videos at [http://wordpress.tv](http://wordpress.tv)

</comment><comment><USER19> Linux Plumbers Conference is always incredible, both as an attendee and as a presenter. This year, it's in Seattle.

linux.conf.au 2015 is coming up very soon, but you might want to start planning for linux.conf.au 2016.

In general, I highly recommend the LWN events and CFP calendars: [https://lwn.net/Calendar/](https://lwn.net/Calendar/) and [https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/](https://lwn.net/Calendar/Monthly/cfp/) . Use the former if you plan to attend, or the latter to know when to submit proposals.

<comment><USER20> Is there any info on Linux Plumbers Conference 2015? I can only find stuff about their 2014 conference online.

<comment><USER19> August 17-21, paired with LinuxCon North America; see [http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north- amer...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america) for the first half. Info about Plumbers will likely show up in the next couple of months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> AEA, [http://aneventapart.com/](http://aneventapart.com/), "The design conference for people who make websites" occurs in multiple cities.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd be interested in hearing from anybody who's attended That Conference ([https://www.thatconference.com](https://www.thatconference.com)) -- which bills itself as a summer camp for geeks. That it occurs at a giant indoor waterpark makes me wonder whether the actual conference is beneficial, or if it's just an excuse to get your company to bankroll part of your vacation. If you've attended and your company did foot the bill, was it a hard sell?

<comment><USER23> Gone every year so far. Company has sent the entire dev team (7 this past year). We're less than a two hour drive away. It was an easy sell for us because of cost. Tickets, hotel, travel, and food (the catered breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and pig roast are awesome) costs less to send 7 (8 or nine will go next year) than to send 2 developers anywhere else. Some talks are great, others are ok. Its great for netwotking and getting exposed to things outside your dev stack and for us its a team building function. You get out of it what you make it. They are trying to incorporate more family and kid stuff. Our team includes single devs, married devs, and devs with kids (though no families came with this year and would be a non company paid expense). It's also something simple our company does to stand out from others in the area (helps retain and show respect and care for developers from the company) feel free to ask me if you have any questions.

Add: There are some well known people from various dev communities that attend and/or present. Its kindof cool to be feet from them or even better getting hang out with them since its not massive in head count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fosdem in Brussels. Best place for open source since 14 years.

</comment><comment><USER21> An Event Apart - The design conference for people who make websites. [http://aneventapart.com/](http://aneventapart.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Strange Loop is the one I'm excited for

<comment><USER26> Me too! I'm going to do everything in my power to get a ticket this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google I/O is always a favorite, although I was disappointed by the change from 3 days to 2 days for 2014, and the conference is always very packed. That said, the enthusiasm and energy level is very high and you'll meet a lot of fantastic people.

</comment><comment><USER14> In addition to these great suggestions, I started a quick round-up myself at [http://blog.edge80.com/2014/12/developer-conferences- for-201...](http://blog.edge80.com/2014/12/developer-conferences- for-2015.html)

Soup to nuts.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm a little bias, but one of my favorite conference is the Erlang Factory SF! The conference is still small enough that there's no bullshit and you get to meet most of the active community! A must if you work with Erlang :)

<comment><USER26> I desperately want to go to Erlang Factory but as a freelance programmer $800-$1200 USD for a ticket is just way out of my range. The lineup of speakers and talks from every year are amazing and it would be so cool to spend time in person with other Erlang users. Bummer about the cost :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.yapcna.org/yn2015/](http://www.yapcna.org/yn2015/)

YAPC is a lot of fun. While Perl specific there are always talks about other stacks/languages.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://aneventapart.com/](http://aneventapart.com/) "The design conference for people who make websites."

</comment><comment><USER30> DebConf is always pretty fun. [http://debconf15.debconf.org/](http://debconf15.debconf.org/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm pretty excited for Facebook's React Conf at the end of the month, but I'm biased because I'm speaking. =D

</comment><comment><USER32> There is also couchdb day in February

[http://day.couchdb.org/](http://day.couchdb.org/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I too am interested in attending conferences this year.

My list so far:

Nodeconf Adventure

Laracon

WordPress Seattle and Vancouver

CascadiaJS

Ruby on Rails conf

</comment><comment><USER34> Any Java-focused conferences worth going to?

<comment><USER35> I attended UberConf a few years ago and found it to be pretty interesting. A lot of the talks seem to repeat from year to year, so it was likely a one-time thing, for me.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You can find most relevant talks on youtube.

<comment><USER37> The value in conferences is only mildly related to the actual talks. Meeting people and the discussions and connections are the real value. Like, ClueCon, for VoIP devs. It's rather haphazardly managed, many of the talks are useless, some are even just pure ads. But if you spend time to meet people it can be totally worth going.

<comment><USER38> >> The value in conferences is only mildly related to the actual talks.

Agreed.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Merry Christmas - <AUTHOR> As it is already Christmas Day in my part of the world, I wanted to wish everyone on HN a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!
Thank you everyone for sharing your tips and stories and like every year I've learned so much from many of you.
Here's to a great 2020 for us all! <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877571), which was posted later.

Normally we go the other way around of course, but sharing the karma forward seems appropriate in this case.</comment>


Show HN: Opyn.io, a content and opinion aggregation community - <AUTHOR> http://opyn.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

I wanted to share a project I've been working on: a site that keeps the best features of content aggregation while innovating in ways that fundamentally improve the user experience.

Ever wanted to see what other people thought about a post? At Opyn.io a core feature is voting transparency: we allow users to see who exactly agreed/disagreed with you by demographic (i.e. age, gender, etc, set on an opt-in basis).

We also believe that a variety of opinions matter. We would rather be open than be an echo chamber (i.e. tyranny of the majority), and to that end, we've valued likes and dislikes in a way so that the top posts are not always simply the most-liked ones. At the same time, we are not necessarily a bastion of free speech – we hold everyone to a reasonable community standard.

Feel free to ask questions/let me know what you think.</comment>


8 Hours of programming a day is too much - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/278628/8-hours-of-programming-a-day-is-too-much

<comment><USER2> Once I quit my day job and started consulting, I became deeply aware that most of my usual 8 hour work day is spent doing anything but coding/doing billable work.

Now, after a couple years of self-employment, I feel accomplished if I manage to work (i.e. bill) 4/5 hours a day. Paired to an appropriate pay increase (I'm still billing by the hour -- I know), that's the perfect amount of work to avoid any kind of mental burnout.

More than 5 hours and I'm mentally dead until the next day.

Maybe there's something wrong with my work ethic, or I'm working on exceptionally hard projects (they are not, but I spend most of my time creating and deconstructing abstractions in my head than actual code writing, and that burns an incredible amount of energy), but that's also what scares me when I entertain the idea of getting back to a full-time job: I really don't think I can handle 8/9 hours working, I would feel like a fraud being that I'm mentally able to be productive only 50% of that time.

God forbid working 12+ hours in one of the usual big companies.

<comment><USER3> Nothing wrong with your work ethic. It seems to be a consistent finding across domains that four or five hours of intellectually demanding work per day is about the limit of what the human brain can handle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to get 8 hours of _uninterrupted_ coding time.</comment>


Jospeh O'Connor denies Twitter hack - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/i-didnt-hack-elon-musks-twitter-account-but-i-know-how-it-was-done-3r2tsq59n <comment><USER2> Innocent until proven guilty an all that, but being one of the first to post the screenshots doesn't look great for him. Also given his history in gaming (as booter and ddos) it does seem like he likes the attention..I'm guessing his social media showing off hasn't caused him much trouble before, however this time it might be the final nail.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best browser-based IDE? - <AUTHOR>

I know I've seen several of these in the past but it's been awhile and I'm wondering what's the current "cream of the crop".  I'm looking for IDE's/development environments that run completely in the browser and are capable of building stand-alone apps and publishing them directly to the internet.  Something that can be used to develop an application with no reliance on local resources other than a web browser. <comment><USER2> <http://280atlas.com/> from the makers of the Cappuccino framework (currently available as a $20 beta) is definitely among the cream of the crop at the moment.

<http://pipes.yahoo.com/> is not a general-purpose programming environment, but its in-browser IDE is certainly top-notch.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought atlas was MacOS only?

<comment><USER2> Looks like you're right. I'd only watched the demo video; I haven't used the beta myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: listening audio + recording device - <AUTHOR>

I am taking a online course at a internet cafe where i am not allowed to install any software. I plugin my headphones and listen to the course in the browser.
Please suggest me a portable device/solution that I can plugin which records the audio and also lets me listen to the course at the same time.
thanks <comment><USER2> Buy one of these:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=audio+splitter&safe=off&espv...](https://www.google.com/search?q=audio+splitter&safe=off&espv=2&tbm=isch&imgil=dLAtvtLpY7bpUM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted- tbn1.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcTKCjU11zhPHQbRuSjkqztU5AIUyHKKXncvFGoNzOSBGnNVmYrJ%253B300%253B239%253B5GVWVFu0RN6sWM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fshop.acquirepc.com%25252Fproduct%25252Fpath%25252F66%25252Fproduct_id%25252F87&source=iu&usg=__iAMz4Z9phqx0YcF7-ljARI4Hg7M%3D&sa=X&ei=UDWcU6CzOcS1sATun4HwBQ&ved=0CE0Q9QEwAg&biw=1536&bih=1203)

Then just run one of the lines to your recording device. Handhand digital recorder, or whatever you intend to use.</comment>


What to Expect as an International Founder at Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/yc-international-founder/ <comment><USER2> This is a really great summary of the yc program for everyone, international or not! The main things I want everyone going through yc to achieve are clarity (lesson 1), focus (lesson 2), and boundless potential (lesson 4).

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't just great for international founders, it's great for anyone in YC!

As an international founder, the two things I took away in my batch were: 1) How to deal with visa issues - which can be gruelling + take time and money. That being said, just being associated with YC helps you out a lot. They can recommend great lawyers and alumni who've gone through similar experiences. 2) If you have a non-english sounding accent, pg is likely gonna scream at you when you try to pitch. It's kinda weird, but try not to let it get you down.

<comment><USER4> Scream? Could you expand on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you Sondre for sharing these insights with us. My question for is: why you think that a derivative idea isn't "cool" ?

<comment><USER6> I'm not Sondre obviously, but basically a derivative idea is only cool if you can show that your variation will somehow be bigger and/or more important than the original idea. Otherwise you're thinking too small.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does YC still require international corporations to reincorporate in Delaware?

<comment><USER8> As of the W16 batch (of which I was a part), yes. Not sure it's a "requirement" as much as it's an advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only I found Sam's advice (first question) to be very näive (and buzzword)?

</comment><comment><USER10> Read the first 3 points, saw they had nothing to do with the headline, and bounced.

<comment><USER11> The article is just general YC advices. I was hoping to read more about visa issues, funding issues as international founder, building teams in US and Norway etc.

<comment><USER12> Great points, I might write a follow-up with that, as that is something we certainly experienced, certainly after YC.

I'll take the gist here.

On visa. YC introduces you to a great lawyer, who has an incredibly success rate. It costs 10kusd for one, and you get 50 % discount for 2nd person. The two most relevant visas is the investor visa and the O1 (extraordinary ability), as they are the ones without quote on them. We got the O1. It lasts 3 years, but is moderately simple to prolong. The process takes some time, but isn't that much work, beyond gathering newspapers articles about yourself (you can translate with google translate). Would recommend starting perhaps halfway into YC if you intend to do this. For a while just travelling on estra works well though.

Building teams in US and Norway Our company was already setup to work remotely, since it's basically our product. That said our employees were/are in Norway, and are only travelling here on Esta. The benefit of any non-SF location is of course lower cost, especially of the most talented developers. And the con is that they are outside the Bay area culture, which is much more at the forefront of any topic. This tacit knowledge is hard to share, and is a legitimate benefit to having your team here.

That being said, using tools like Slack, zoom and uberconference, as well as having getaways, makes multi-location teams totally doable, at least for a period.</comment></comment></comment>


Trolling recruiters who harass our engineers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/recruiter-black-hole/

<comment><USER2> I'm somewhat curious as to why you blurred out the recruiters name. Seems like a good ol' fashioned public shaming would be useful.

Also, unless you Photoshopped that image, it looks like all of those emails came to you as well. Do you automatically get CC'd in employee emails?

Finally, what are your opinions on recruiters in general? You mentioned Oli as being a good one, but in my experience, there aren't very many good ones at all. I tend to get bombarded by recruiters every day that have zero idea of what it is that I do, which just turns me off to the idea of recruiters in general.

For instance, this one "Head of Talent" for a company contacted me about a position that I'm completely unqualified for. I emailed back and basically said "I'm not really qualified for this, but thanks for thinking of me." Instead of saying "Ok, great, thanks," he pivoted and pushed another position that I'm uninterested in. I wrote back and said, "Thanks, but I'm not interested in that position." Instead of taking the hint, he writes back and says "No problem, but I have this other great position that I think you'd be a perfect fit for" \-- and it's the original position he sent me in the first email!

Sadly, this is very, very typical of interactions with recruiters. Are they all morons, do they think _we 're_ morons and don't talk to each other, or do they just not care?

<comment><USER3> They don't have to care. If the current spam methods weren't working for them, they'd stop. But someone's replying to those e-mails, and someone's paying their referral fees.

Why should they bother filtering when we do it for them? They prefer to be ignored unless you're going to sign up for an interview or five. This is one reason why I always reply with a short form letter: "Thanks for reaching out, I'm happy where I am, etc" so they have to take the time to filter me out as someone who isn't interested.

<comment><USER4> "This is one reason why I always reply with a short form letter: "Thanks for reaching out, I'm happy where I am, etc" so they have to take the time to filter me out as someone who isn't interested."

But see, in my experience, they DON'T filter you out in any way. They just keep spamming you.

<comment><USER3> I'm not expecting them to filter me out. I'm just causing them to have to spend a little time on something that won't bear fruit.

<comment><USER4> That's my point. They're not spending any more time on anything. They'll just continue spamming down the list and eventually they'll hit you again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh. I know people say there are good recruiters out there (somewhere), but stories like this are all I ever seem to hear, and are a large part of the inspiration behind creating matchist ([http://matchist.com](http://matchist.com)).

I understand technical/creative recruiting is generally a "spray and see what sticks" industry, but it seems things very rarely sticks. Is there really a good enough ROI on these seemingly ineffective techniques that justifies recruiters' continued use of them?

That said, this is a genius idea for dealing with it. I truly hope the recruiters get it, but sadly, I honestly don't think they're capable of understanding how pointless their actions are.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any idea how i can listen to this without paying international phone fees?

<comment><USER6> Call on Gmail/Hangouts</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to choose a startup opportunity - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
In a few months I expect to have secured some free time and some seed capital to try out some small scale startup ideas.
In my own process, I first compose a list of probable ideas without judgement and usually that can be anywhere from 5 to 20 pages.
The 2nd part of the process I start a judgement process where I measure up resources of seed capital and development time for each idea and weed out the ones that do not match.
The problem in my set of processes is that I have not figured out whether at this point measuring of whether there is fast development of market or not should have a role in the decision making process of what opportunities I want to try.
Thus, I was wondering what HN readers and community members are using as far as their process?
Let me give you an example, in the mobile area there are still a lot of small scale SAAS plays to both mobile developers and their clients. With the low cost of cloud services from amazon and or Google(appEngine has a 1 million hits per month  before they charge)one could certainly build out a SAAS startup play and see if one can get enough traction to get a full funding round. FB/Twitter/GoogleBuzz context, etc.
Yeah, someone already did my social enabled by NCF idea..but I have another list of ideas :)
Thanks for taking the time to respond. <comment><USER2> I think it's best if you do go after ideas related to things you are passionate about, as amac suggested. IMO startups and businesses in general are largely about vision, especially in the early stages. It's hard to have vision for something you aren't passionate about or don't know well. Vision isn't something that can be harnessed with an x step business process either.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in a similar position though I think I've improved my focus vastly compared to previous projects. Please feel free to email me if you want to discuss in private.

In terms of advice, probably the best thing to do is to pursue what you care about, and not to let others define who you are or what you do.</comment>


Rust 1.37.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/08/15/Rust-1.37.0.html <comment><USER2> Rust has evolved from something safe and _simple_ (once you grasp the different type of pointers) to something way less accessible.

Rust source code is now full of annotations, and very hard to read and maintain.

Traits have evolved from a nice feature to something overused everywhere.

Basic crates use so many generics, impl Trait and abstractions over abstractions over abstractions that it's really difficult to follow what concrete types you need to satisfy these.

When one of the oldest and still unanswered issue in the Hyper HTTP library is "how do I read the body?", there is a conceptual problem.

And things got even more complicated with Futures. async/await don't solve much, as besides textbook examples, these are unusable without deep knowledge of how everything works internally. Pin/Unpin makes things even more complicated.

I'm an early Rust adopter and advocate. However, I wouldn't consider it any longer for new projects.

My productivity in Rust has become very low compared to other languages such as Go or even C, that let me easily express what I want to do.

With Rust, 90% of my time is spent trying to understand how to express what I want to do. Such as what types I have, what 3rd party crates expect and how to convert them.

<comment><USER3> I'm working on a language with similar goals, but with the focus on simplicity:

[https://vlang.io](https://vlang.io)

A relatively stable 0.2 release will be out this month.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about the example code at [https://vlang.io/compare](https://vlang.io/compare) (apologies if you answered this before):

\- Does the compiler use escape analysis to determine that the `cursor` variable needs to be heap allocated? If not, how does it know that the worker threads won't outlive the stack frame that owns `cursor`? If so, when does the allocation get freed? And does implicit heap allocation conflict with the goal of being as fast as C?

\- How does the compiler know that the `lock` block is the only code that touches `cursor`? Does it still work if the `lock` block is in a subroutine? Does that require whole-program analysis? If two different `lock` blocks touch the same variable, are they implicitly a single `lock`?

<comment><USER5> The two languages I'd be most interested in seeing added to that comparison are Nim and Zig. Those definitely have most of my mindshare on "new low- level/efficient languages simpler than Rust".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In case anyone else is curious, async/await isn't part of this release but should be in the next (1.38):

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/62149](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/62149)

<comment><USER7> Genuine question: given a language which has a real notion of parallelism/concurrency and can run real threads on multiple cores, what is the appeal for async/await?

<comment><USER8> And now you have 32 cores just waiting for slow HTTP clients. Apache with the prefork MPM does exactly that.

See [http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html](http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) for an in-depth, if old, discussion.

<comment><USER9> Why would cores be waiting? A thread blocked on synchronous I/O will in general not be scheduled on a core. This is true on all OSs that I'm aware of.

Not sure if Apache had some spin-wait loops or something, but if so then that was a bug in Apache, not a fundamental characteristic of doing synchronous I/O in threads.

<comment><USER8> You're still paying some costs: there might be scalability issues in the scheduler data structures (how long does it take to schedule one thread out of a million blocked ones?), you need memory to store their stacks (hope you're on 64-bit), when they become runnable, you have a lot of context switches (which cost even more now after the Spectre fixes). Probably others that don't come to mind right now.

As for Apache, it spins a number of processes up to a point. When there aren't any free ones, the clients don't get any data.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I pointed all of this out in another reply:

> For one thing, threads take up memory and address space, and create work for > the scheduler.

It is the right answer. "Cores are waiting" is not the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting how much two of the big cloud providers are assisting the Rust project. Is GCP absent due to Chrome/Firefox?

> AWS has provided hosting for release artifacts (compilers, libraries, tools, > and source code), serving those artifacts to users through CloudFront, > preventing regressions with Crater on EC2, and managing other Rust-related > infrastructure hosted on AWS.

> Microsoft Azure has sponsored builders for Rust's CI infrastructure, notably > the extremely resource intensive rust-lang/rust repository.

<comment><USER11> I did a chunk of the work on the AWS side, and it's not not due to Chrome/Firefox—Google is using Rust for Fuschia, after all.

At least on AWS' side, it was some individuals—me included—who sent emails to the right people internally & pushed on tickets to be prioritized. There was surprisingly little pushback.

<comment><USER10> Are you in Seattle? Do you go to the Rust meetups?

<comment><USER11> Nope, I'm in Boston, but I did the attend the July Rust meetup at Microsoft. You?

<comment><USER10> I will at some point. Meetings in Redmond are difficult but this should also allow the NWC++ users group to more easily cross paths with Rust.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad we're finally able to talk about the Amazon and Microsoft support; both companies have been good to the project.

I don't personally use cargo vendor but seeing it up streamed is also a big plus, IMHO.

<comment><USER13> Why was it a secret at all? Seems like nothing but good PR all around.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't a really a secret. They ran into all sorts of issues with Travis, and people from Azure offered to run the Rust CI instead. The initial discussions were public.

Unfortunately, the build times still seem to be close to four hours, which limits the amount of changes that can be merged.

<comment><USER14> We aggressively use rollups to merge PRs into rust-lang/rust to mitigate the effect of the 4 hour build times. But it would sure be nice to bring it down to less. It would certainly make my life as the maintainer of the bors queue easier. ;)

<comment><USER15> It's probably a testament to the scope of the build + test that makes it four hours. If it were faster, would the scope tend to increase in order to hit more tiers/more tests?

I'd rather my commit sit in a test queue for several hours than push and cross my fingers like LLVM does it.

<comment><USER14> With faster builds, would probably reduce the queue latency and land more PRs. We'd probably also allow more toolchains to be tested and whatnot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As one of the larger production users of Rust, it has been great to quickly the language and the ecosystem are growing.

Small things like Option::xor() or default cargo run are signs more and more people are using it "for real".

<comment><USER17> What are you building with Rust? Curious about its prod usage!

<comment><USER18> Not the person you were replying to, but we're using Rust to build Materialize: [https://materialize.io](https://materialize.io)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really appreciate the clarity and communication style of these Rust release notes.

As an enthusiastic Rust user who is perhaps not as academic/intellectual as most of the Rust community, I often find Rust-related reading material quite daunting. But never these. They're simple and they're great.

<comment><USER14> Thank you! I tried hard to make this blog post easy to read so it's nice that it feels that way. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Profile-guided optimization seems huge. Does anyone have any numbers relating to the performance increase we can expect?

<comment><USER21> The effect is very dependent on program structure and actual code running, but for a suitable application it's reasonable to expect anything from 5-15%, and sometimes much more (see e.g. Firefox reporting 18% here: [https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3888](https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3888) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Rust platform size has recently increased by 50%:

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/61978](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/61978)

which puts it at over double the size of Go. Worse is seems to be no impetus to fix this. Also notable is Rust still doesnt have a Map literal:

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/542](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/issues/542)

<comment><USER23> I'm confused, why would you care about the rust compiler size? I can't imagine a situation where this metric is useful.

<comment><USER22> Why would you not? Surely you would agree there's a point where it starts to matter. What if the platform was 1 GB, 10 GB? Eventually everyone would care. So the point is it's crossed the threshold where I care about it. Maybe it hasn't for you, or maybe you just haven't thought about how big is too big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I almost got to make my first contribution to Rust, by correcting a small semantic error in the (pre)release notes, but alas, I wasn't at a real computer at the time and someone else was faster :)

<comment><USER25> Well there is still time and lots to do. Let's help the project in any capacity we can.

I am a coder but I'm not well versed in Rust enough to be able to contribute code, but i'm gonna try to investigate and find other venues I might be helpful (writing documentation, translation to the languages i speak, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've tried spending time learning rust, but keep getting stuck since I don't have a good project to work on.

What are some good open source projects built in rust which wouldn't be too difficult to contribute to?

<comment><USER27> Depending on your profiency : \- you can actually contribute to the compiler itself : [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3AE-easy+sort%3Acomments-asc) \- you can contribute to the low-level abstracting graphics library : [https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx/labels/contributor- friendly](https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx/labels/contributor-friendly) \- and more generally you can also take a look at the weeksletter (and previous iterations of it to see where help was requested) :Week's letter : [https://this-week-in-rust.org/](https://this-week-in-rust.org/)

<comment><USER26> The call for participation in week in rust gives a lot of different projects.

I also like that the compiler issues are tagged by difficulty and whether a mentor is available, fantastic.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Newb Question:

Why didn't Rust go with an easier to read syntax? Why did they stick to old C syntax?

Edit/ Sorry, didn't mean to offend anyone.

<comment><USER29> For most programmers, a C-ish syntax is going to be most familiar. In general, I'd define the "universal C-ish syntax" as:

* Ending statements with ;

* {} for braces, lowercase keywords for control flow

* [] and 0-based indexing for arrays

* Infix operator notation, with mathematical operator precedence

* &, |, ^, ~ for bitwise operators

* . is used for member access

But they didn't copy all of C's syntax:

* There's no ->, since dereference is usually automatic.

* No ?:, if/else can be used as expressions instead

* No ~, since ! on an integer variable does bitwise negation instead.

* Pointer, array, and function types don't have the weird syntax they do in C... you say [ * mut fn()->i32; 4] instead of int ( * ())[4]

* Types follow variables instead of precede them (x: i32 instead of int x)

* No C-style casts (x as i32 instead of (int)x)

<comment><USER30> I was going to make a snarky comment to the effect that the Rust syntax for an array of pointers to functions isn't obviously less weird than the C syntax -- I assume the basic thing there is [<type>; <size>] -- but then I noticed that the C syntax above was very wrong, and the correct syntax is weirder :-).

So what it should actually be is int ( * [4])(). The principle is that "declaration mimics use" and that a type is written like a declaration with the variable name omitted. So, for an array of pointers to functions mapping no-args to int:

If f is such a function, you would call it as f() and get an int, so the declaration would look like int f() and the type would be int () except that functions, as opposed to function pointers, aren't first-class objects in C and don't have a type.

If pf is a pointer to such a function, you would need ( * pf) instead of f, so the declaration would be int ( * pf)() and the type would be int ( * )().

If apf is an array of those, then you would need to replace pf with apf[something], so the declaration would be int ( * apf[4])() and the type would be int ( * [4])().

Which is, indeed, a bit weird.

(Note: Spaces around all the asterisks because that seems to be the least-bad way of making HN not interpret them as markup. It's quite impressive how damaging HN's markup feature manages to be given how little it's capable of.)

<comment><USER29> Good lord, you're right. I constructed the C syntax off the top of my head, and I knew about the declaration-mimics-use, so I started constructing it as if I would use it... I just somehow mixed up the [4] and the ().

C's function pointer and array syntax does make sense when you understand it, but even for experts, it can be difficult to get it right on the first go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> not really into rust(yet), just wondering why each cargo install takes forever(it rebuilds everything related from source?).

By all means I feel rust still compile too slowly, if it has faster build time I might spend some time playing with it.

<comment><USER23> It only has to do that once though. Once it's built once it's cached. When you're working on code you don't even need to fully compile your own code every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats! Like many I was looking forward to async/await in this release but I'm happy they've taken some extra time to work through any existing issues before releasing it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone knows when will [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0066-bett...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0066-better-temporary-lifetimes.md) be fixed?

</comment><comment><USER34> With Rust can you cross compile for another platform?

<comment><USER35> Yes:

\- [https://github.com/japaric/rust-cross](https://github.com/japaric/rust- cross) (more involved)

\- [https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross](https://github.com/rust- embedded/cross) (straightforward)

(Edited for formatting)

<comment><USER36> Or just `cargo build --target` if your distro has cross-compiler + library packages already, instead of needing to use cross's two-year-old Docker images.</comment></comment></comment>


"Illegal" Lego Builds (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pdf <comment><USER2> Ah this explains why my kid brought me that cylinder-through-cone for me to take apart.

BTW the last slide says "Play Well". That's what you get when you tranlate "Leg Godt" from Danish. Which is where you get Lego from.

</comment><comment><USER3> A useful reminder that LEGO is actually a set of injection moulded parts with extremely fine tolerance, such that even the printing must be taken into account. It looks like they've run some of those models through finite element analysis software to calculate the force too.

<comment><USER4> Some of my mechanical engineering friends think of working at LEGO the way others think of working at Space X or NASA. I'm pretty sure all of those models have run through finite element analysis.

<comment><USER5> Stupidly tight tolerances, tons of computer analysis, modular parts and making things out of plastic are a fresh out of school ME's wet dream.

It takes age and experience to develop a taste for making things that are loose and cheap but through creativity of design still somehow manage to do the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also note: don't use pieces outside of LEGO or Technic. That includes powerful motors attached to technic axles, steel axles or bricks, bearings, etc. The bricks were designed with certain assumptions in mind and you will ruin your pieces over time doing that. Source: experience.

<comment><USER7> I think if you want to avoid ruining pieces, you need to be more careful than just not using third party components, e.g.: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umN2iHsw3UY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umN2iHsw3UY)

<comment><USER8> This channel is amazing! At some point, yt recommended it and that was the only time it recommended something truly unique. The channel not only does hoisting tests but also rev-tests, which are interesting as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the origin of this document? Is it meant for designers at LEGO? Very cool!

Most interesting was the description of the Audi kit that changed their testing process.

<comment><USER10> It's a document describing "illegal" ways of putting bricks together, which means that they are not for the designers of LEGO but amateur (as in non- official builds) builders as they are usually not as strong and using the bricks in a way not intended by the design.

Edit: if you read through the posted documents of the "Legal vs Illegal" ways of putting bricks together, some of them have description of why it's considered illegal.

For example:

"Both ends of a Technic hole are larger than the diameter in the middle. Until it 'snaps' into place, the half-peg is in compression and could be permanently damaged over time. Also, by not being locked into place, the element can easily pop out during play."

Edit2: actually, now when I read it again, it does seem to be a document for official LEGO designers (from LEGO designer Jamie Berard) about how to NOT design the sets. Sorry for the confusion.

<comment><USER7> > some of them have description of why it's considered illegal.

They all do. The slides are "animations" displayed on sequences of slides. As far as I noticed, every illegal technique had an explanation of why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most of these seem very natural (if you've messed with LEGO before), but I hadn't realized that specific materials choices were the reason that the cone- around-bar construction is a problem (I remember having a terrible time trying to undo that exact configuration). Super interesting deck!

One thing that the presentation only slightly addresses is the standards for overall structural integrity. Official sets seemed to favor a very "light" building style (to make constructions simpler? to save on materials?) that had a reasonably sturdy base (so the set can be picked up without collapsing) but which were vulnerable to lateral attacks or dropping (which would shatter stacked stud-based connections). My experience was that you could typically make models much stronger by adding vertical/diagonal braces via technic pieces.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty awesome. A lot these are pretty intuitive and the satisfying "click" is definitely something a child can understand.

</comment><comment><USER13> LEGO has more rules than this in my opinion. One thing that I did not understand as a kid was why other kids built things where there were no 'rules' when it came to colour. If I built a house then the bricks would have to be consistent regarding colour, the scope and design would be limited to what was available. If there weren't enough bricks of a given colour for the roof (for instance) then there would have to be a design consideration there, so maybe a line of substitute colour bricks could be used, or another house in the town scene rebuilt to get the required coloured bricks with that one having the substitute colour.

Using all the bricks in the suitcase would also be a requirement, so larger projects, e.g. that Saturn 5 rocket would be a skilled use of available resources, the limits on the design being the black and white bricks for the actual rocket with the obligatory lunar rover able to be made in another colour, e.g. yellow. A randomly coloured Saturn 5 would not fly.

I also think that there should be an occasional worrying project from a child's creativity. For instance, if the news has some story of military exuberance then a child really should be modelling whatever it is, in this day and age something like a Predator drone would fit the bill. Political statements from ten year old kids in LEGO art remind the parents of what their world has become.

Feng Shui is also another rule. This has to be innately learned and understood. This is how to learn what design is, by experimenting and refining one's LEGO craft. Taste is a vague thing and if you can build tasteful LEGO models then that sets you up in life for being able to think for yourself in other domains and do better than the instructions on the back of the box.

The lessons learned apply to the web, if you can create fantastic LEGO models and have the taste to get the rules of what goes mechanically as well as regarding unofficial colour and Feng Shui rules then there is no reason why you can't create beauty online in a world where everyone else is serving up div soup, copying from the instructions.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love how the audi tt lego car is as poorly engineered as the real deal.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a kid I figured out the perpendicular connection trick, the height of a "1" tall (flat plate kind of) piece is the same as the width between two pegs, so you can wedge em in there for neat reasonably sturdy perpendicular connections.

(A standard brick is 3 tall, in this calculus)

<comment><USER16> Yes, more precisely the elementary unit is the difference between the width and height of a 1x1x1 brick, which is also:

* half the height of a plate.

* the distance between the edge of the brick and the edge of the stud (half the distance between studs)

* one third the diameter of studs

* the height of the studs, except for the LEGO logo (which means that in some cases hollow or recessed studs are very helpful, because an illegal connection can become legal with hollow studs; [https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=8586...](https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=85861) is a very useful element in some intricate builds).

* the difference between the base and the top of the headlight brick [https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4070](https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4070)

* the thickness of angle brackets such as [https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=109...](https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=109610)

The LEGO system is great and everything makes a lot more sense once you figure out that the height of 1 brick and 2 plates is the same as the width of 2 bricks. For example I made a car where the sides are built "front to back" and attached sideways to the chassis ([https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-7455/bonzinip/awd- champions...](https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-7455/bonzinip/awd-champions- land-rover-defender-110/)).

In addition, the inside diameter of hollow studs is the same as the diameter of clips and minifigure hands, and the same as the inside diameter of Technic pegs. There are a lot of newer parts that use this "secondary" system, but the basic measurements were established in the 70s. See [http://www.newelementary.com/2016/12/bravo-three-one- eight.h...](http://www.newelementary.com/2016/12/bravo-three-one-eight.html) for more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use Lego blocks as a metaphor for mathematics (a discrete number of building blocks, with rules how one can connect them to each other). In this context, an explicit list of illegal constructions makes this metaphor even stronger.

</comment><comment><USER18> A plate slotted into another at right angles, and plugging a brick into a fence, were standard techniques when I was a lad. Returning to Lego in later years with my own kids, the various bricks introduced in the interim with studs on top and the sides, obviating these hacks, were the most glaring (and welcome) innovations.

<comment><USER19> I believe the Lego fan jargon for the side-quest pieces is SNOT blocks (studs not on top).

<comment><USER20> I always thought SNOT just meant that you couldn't see any studs on the presentation surface, for example, such that if you took a picture of your model then you wouldn't see any studs.

Is it broader, like to mean using a brick in such a way that normally the studs would be on top but now they're in a different position? Or something like that, e.g., not just in the overall aesthetic?

I admittedly don't really know all of the terminology. My kid has recently gotten old enough for LEGO, so I'm starting to learn more (or relearn what I knew as a kid myself maybe).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want to see actually illegal Lego, Google "lepin star wars"

</comment><comment><USER22> Come at me, LEGO police

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome! When I was a kid busy tinkering with this stuff, I often wondered whether models made by set designers had to adhere to a minimum standard of structural integrity. Now it seems a standard does exist, and here are all the illegal moves. I wonder how exhaustive is the list, and whether there is a document with a set of legal builds considered best practice?

</comment><comment><USER24> Slide 12. "... the resistance becomes too great and there is the potential for elements (and children) being stressed."

</comment><comment><USER25> Note that this still pertains to the old (studded) Technic bricks, not the new (studless) ones.

<comment><USER16> Studded Technic bricks are used a lot in non-Technic builds these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> From a builder's perspective, all rules are advisory. You may want the specific effect these rules state is a problem - what if you want something to detach with less force than the "click"?

But these rules are really for Lego's internal use - I can understand the company wanting to make sure that kits it sells work properly in isolation, but obviously they can't control the other kits it will be mixed with. Maybe this means that they should have considered more possible combinations when designing those particular parts?

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know the software they used for those models? Some artifacts remind me of the early build of Sketch-Up.

<comment> gjsman-1000 Lego Digital Designer, or LDD. No longer supported, but you can still download it and use it in Offline Mode.

[https://www.lego.com/en-us/ldd](https://www.lego.com/en-us/ldd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Slide #34 is the best.

<comment><USER29> (Questions? No (+ jokes))

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was surprised by page 24: "Definitely Illegal!"

The ⊥ shape is apparently illegal because "because the receiving brick has smaller dimensions than the one being connected to it."

I always thought that was intentionally possible.

<comment><USER31> I am fairly certain that several older models that I had as a kid had this designed in. So Lego themselves changed their stance on this over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So happy to see this here, I was looking for the slide deck for months but wasn't able to google for it and everyone I asked didn't know it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Also, don't let your family gift your children with counterfeit blocks. I know it isn't socually acceptable to complain when you receive gifts but I had to lecture my family I will not accept even single counterfeit block because they ruin the fun.

<comment><USER34> Lego is expensive. Not everybody has the kind of money to buy brand name Lego. As a Lego 'puritan' I would never give anything but the real thing to kids but if someone were to give my kid a present that is not 'the original' the only words I would use would be 'thank you', after all, who am I to judge someone else's purchasing power.

The plastic they use _used_ to be very good but more recent mixes are actually not all that good, they turn brittle after just a few months outside of the packaging. Especially 1x1's will spontaneously cracked when they have been connected to a stud at the bottom.

Counterfeit blocks aren't really counterfeit either, Lego itself is a counterfeit product, it was an idea taken from a UK company.

<comment><USER33> Lego is a company with name and patents. Other products purporting to be "Lego" while not produced by the company named Lego are counterfeit according to EU law.

I understand Lego seems expensive and that might have something to do with the sticker price dictated by the appeal the blocks have to the buyers and also quality control the company has in place to make sure everything is durable and fits perfectly. I have 30 year old blocks and new ones and everything snaps together predictably and tightly. I also haven't noticed any of the bricks get brittle over time. I fully expect my grandchildren to keep playing with the blocks I played with as a child.

The fact that blocks are getting _constant use over many, many years_ makes them actually _very cheap_ compared to other toys that frequently get broken in hours or days and get quickly forgotten. My kids 3 and 5 spend large part of their time playing Lego which makes me not regret the hefty price of the blocks.

The sticker price is bad way of deciding whether the toy is cheap or expensive. Is $1000 toy that will be constant source of enjoyment and creative education over many years (and possibly your grandchildren) an expensive one compared to $30 toy that will offer no educational value, will only make loud repetitive noises and get broken in couple of hours and quickly forgotten? I don't think so.

There are other formats of blocks that are much cheaper and do not purport to be Lego-interchangeable. Just use those if you are concerned with costs.

<comment><USER35> Most of the legal related points you raise above are demonstrably false.

Nearly all of Lego's patents have expired across the world, and as of today it is perfectly legal for companies to release competing products that are compatible with Lego's interlocking brick system.

There are many manufacturers releasing compatible bricks, most famous of which (at least in the west) is Mega Brands, a Canadian company, known for MegaBloks and Mega Construx. More recently quite a few Chinese companies have popped up such as Lepin and Oxford.

Today, most of Lego's legal battles involve companies stealing the designs of Lego sets (as in, the full set design, brick for brick) and re-releasing them, the primary culprit being Lepin. Oxford primarilly release their own designs and therefore are left alone.

Your quality arguments do hold some merit though, as the design process of both the set and element design that Lego goes through is unmatched. However at least in the quality department, Chinese brands are coming close. They however have the benefit of Lego doing all the design for them in the first place.

EDIT:

Sources: [https://boingboing.net/2005/11/17/judge-to-lego- your-p.html](https://boingboing.net/2005/11/17/judge-to-lego-your-p.html) [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/lego- loses-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/lego-loses- trademark-battle-2079389.html) [http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-48/...](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-48/09) [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/business/worldbusiness/bu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/business/worldbusiness/building- a-legal-case-block-by-block.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does their software check these design rules automatically?

</comment><comment><USER37> #13 made me physically ill

</comment><comment><USER38> Lego has made their decision, now let them enforce it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there a reason that they're using such low polygon count models? They look like poorly exported STLs from some CAD package.

<comment><USER40> They're screenshots from a 13 year old desktop application. In 2006 The Elder Scrolls Oblivion was considered high-end graphics.

<comment><USER39> In 2002 I was using well established CAD software that handled curves just fine. One of my first undergrad projects was modelling LEGO.

CAD is a different beast to game engines.

[https://support.ptc.com/carezone/tutorials/files/2001update....](https://support.ptc.com/carezone/tutorials/files/2001update.pdf)

There was even a shareware version called Pro/Desktop.

<comment><USER40> These screenshots are from a consumer-oriented LEGO design tool designed to run on a typical PC.

<comment><USER39> And these CAD packages also ran on typical PCs. Most of my classmates used their own laptops; I couldn't afford one. Sure you'll need a powerful workstation for a full assembly of a complex machine like a car where every part is fully modelled and contrained (oddly enough today's packages continue to sap vastly superior resources to do much the same work) but drawing a high quality LEGO block with just primary features with Phong shading is trivial for consumer hardware from 2002. There's more polygons in the 3D spinning screensavers in Windows 2000.

The shareware tool Pro/Desktop was incredibly light. There's some misconception here that PCs couldn't draw a few hundred polygons as recently as the early noughties.

Looking at LEGO specific software and tools like LeoCAD, which originated in the late nineties, they appear to have been able to render bricks just fine. I'm left with the impression that the images used were done so with an artistic intent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New mandoc feature: -T html -O toc (Table of contents) - <AUTHOR> https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20181002175838 <comment><USER2> It's really cool how they solved it without breaking backward compatibility or the interface: unless specifically requested, mandoc(1) will work as before, but the overall capability of the software has been enhanced. That's what I call system engineering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neovim's ":Man" command also shows a ToC when you type "gO" (mnemonic: "outline").

See also:

        :help gO

Currently Nvim builds this ToC with its own hacks, so it would be nice to get that info from mandoc instead. But IIUC, "-O toc" only works with HTML output of mandoc? How can non-HTML tools get the ToC from mandoc?

<comment><USER4> Similarly, man and woman in Emacs generate a ToC that imenu (M-x imenu) can use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> mandoc is great! It could replace legacy man almost everywhere</comment>


Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-15/lifesaving-coast-guard-scientist-reflects-on-government-service <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/vgFAp2](https://outline.com/vgFAp2)</comment>