Ask HN: How to choose functional programming side projects? - <AUTHOR> I've been using functional programming languages in the workplace for about a year and a half now, first Scala and now Clojure.  I am comfortable with basic FP operations (reduce, fold, map, etc) and the principles behind it, but I have yet to come across a reason to learn the more academic side of things (monads, applicative functors, currying, etc).
I'm trying to figure out a fun side project that will give me an opportunity to get deeper into the weeds of FP.  I'm not sure whether to take a simple idea you could do in OO (i.e. a CRUD app) and do it in an FP language, or look for a problem that is more suited to the domain of FP.
What are the characteristics of a problem that is especially suited to FP?  Or is it a pointless distinction?  And how much of the theory is actually worth learning if I don't plan on using Haskell? <comment><USER2> I would recommend having a look at [http://haskellbook.com/](http://haskellbook.com/) which is written by someone who is seriously passionate about making Haskell understandable to regular programmers. Before writing the book he kept track of the best resources for learning Haskell but was always thinking the community needs something better for beginners. So I think it would be worth buying.

For parallel and concurrency programming this book is excellent [http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929) and is free online to read. I am working through the concurrency chapters and it is blowing my mind how excellent concurrency support is in Haskell AND how someone who is smart enough to work on the GHC for 15 years can explain concurrency in a way that is accessible to someone fairly new to Haskell and concurrency. You'd probably need the grounding of haskellbook first though before reading this.

For a Haskell project I have decided to make a stock exchange using the concurrency I am learning from the above book. Eventually it may be good enough for someone wanting to run a bitcoin exchange or similar. Happy to have you help me if you like.

> What are the characteristics of a problem that is especially suited to FP?

Really, any programming problem is suitable for FP. I think web applications and server applications are especially suited. Writing desktop applications is trickier mainly because of a lack of a really nice paradigm. The nicest thing I've seen so far in that respect is the Elm language - which is for the browser but the ideas could be applied to the native desktop too.

The classic applications for FP is compilers but Haskell is a general purpose language and ideal for producing the kind of business apps that Java/C# is often used for.

<comment> a-saleh I second the elm recommendation :-) Really nice language to learn the FP from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To produce the benefits you want, you're probably going to need a side project that you stick with for a while, one that pushes you to figure out how to do things that aren't necessarily easy to do in (simple) FP. To me, the kind of side project that is likely to do that is one where _you care about the project_. Forget whether the problem is "suited to FP" or not. Do something you _want_ to do.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want to be boring, try writing purely functional data structures (check out Containers in the Ponyo source via ponyo.org). Otherwise, do something interesting like writing a web server from scratch or a wrapper to FastCGI. These are the kinds of things I do in every new language I want to learn (OCaml, SML, Scheme, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you read Functional Programming in Scala?

[https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Scala-Paul- Chi...](https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Scala-Paul- Chiusano/dp/1617290653/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465849313&sr=8-1&keywords=functional+programming+in+scala)

</comment><comment><USER6> You could try implement monads in an OO language.</comment>


Paul Meier - Statistican who saved millions of lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/1315465/Paul-Meier---Statistican-who-saved-millions-of-lives.html <comment><USER2> This is one of those moments for me where you kinda assumed a technique was used in the past, but the truth is it had to be invented. Then when you look at the past with this knowledge, you think, "My god, how barbaric!". Sort of how McCoy (a la Star Trek) acts when he goes back in time.

<comment><USER3> Not all problems with trials have been ironed out. Only as of 2004, have some medical journals been requiring pre-registration of clinical trials. Previously, drug manufacturers could pretend null results didn't exist.

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

<comment><USER4> First, I think this is a closed view of the issue. Second, I think publication bias has more effect on basic research and translational research (read: early animal pharmacology studies) than drug development.

Conduct of a clinical trial for the purposes of establishing the safety and efficacy of a drug product intended for a specific clinical indication has the goal of registration (NDA, BLA, PMA, 510(k)) of the drug so that the drug can be marketed and sold. Publications are great, and are a component of that, but not the primary goal.

To conduct a clinical study, the company must present all preclinical (FDA calls it nonclinical) pharmacology and toxicology on the drug product to determine whether the product is safe for testing in human trials. This is done via an investigational new drug application (IND, big damn documents that take months to prepare). But I digress...

To conduct a clinical study, the protocol has to be submitted and FDA given time to comment (and they will, often and without much room to argue). That means the patient population, randomization scheme, endpoints, power analysis, etc. are vetted by FDA pretty thoroughly. Next, the same process occurs for the study at local or national (central) institutional review boards (IRBs). They get really nitpicky (especially local university IRBs for numerous reasons). Their primary goal is to ensure the safety of patients, but they won't hesitate to comment on the design of the study in most cases. And (not sure exactly when it became a requirement) sponsors have to register their clinical trial with a national registry (which you can search on clinicaltrials.gov). The results of those studies MUST be submitted to the FDA under the IND, to the IRB, and updated in the registry, or development stops and the IND cancelled.

So unless I misunderstand your comment, the publication practices of journals affects the validity and thoroughness of clinical trial data. This is not the case. Publication bias may alter the available literature, but drugs are NOT registered on publications and effected by "pre-registration." Drugs are developed and brought to market through a seriously controlled and monitored process, not at the whim of medical journals. Now, preclinical data, basic science, "academic studies" not moving a drug toward registration, etc. are affected by publication bias. It is a problem, and pre-registration is a complex issue but beneficial.

One final note: Writing this comment made me think that an alternative form of pre-registration would be really interesting. But not to medical journals, but an open registry for "coming soon research science." Think of a registry of "here's what we want to do" for researchers in basic science, all putting up ideas (ones they are willing to do so openly) for preclinical or clinical studies on the site, indexed by keyword. This would allow researchers to look online and not see what things HAVE been done, but see what things are GOING to be done. This could help researchers identify colleagues (communicate via social features), collaborate on the research, and pool their funding efforts to get multi-institutional grants (usually higher dollar and currently a little less competitive and thus easier to get). Put your research field and interest, and studies you would do "if you had the money" and then the registry would send you recommendations of people to connect with to try and move those research areas forward. If this does not currently exist (which it does not, to my knowledge), it would be amazing to have. It may also be an easier task to implement as a new feature of an existing research social network or community. "Enhancing serendipity in research..." Interesting. Thoughts?

<comment><USER5> There have been corporations who suppressed evidence that their drugs didn't work right. I'd describe that as publication bias, too, if not simply fraud...

<comment><USER4> I agree that there are long-term safety and efficacy studies that are fraudulently suppressed by some larger players in industry. It is an insidious problem that has horrible effects on patients. However, it is separate from my argument.

My point was that the registration of drugs is not effected by publication bias. The "suppressed evidence" typically comes in the form of post-marketing studies in significant patient populations, some of which aren't even randomized or placebo controlled (some are). NDA-directed studies are tightly controlled and reported. Then the drug is registered, and the FDA says, "we'd still like to see long-term safety data on this to see what things look like over time. We'll let you put this drug out there, but keep sending us more data."

I think the problem therein is related to the regs on post-marketing clinical studies. Companies have too much latitude to conduct post-marketing studies and then decide what to send FDA (or to publish), thus introducing the publication bias. FDA should have more control over Phase IV studies. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA, or pud-oof-a) was established to charge companies over $1million to register a drug, funneling money back into FDA so they could acquire more resources to review and grand NDAs. So the review times for NDAs went down, FDA got more efficient, and industry was happier. However, the act did not increase Phase IV controls as stringently as they should have, and companies have a lot of latitude on "additional clinical data" from studies conducted after the drug hits the market. That's why you see articles like the following:

GSK Suppresses Paxil Suicide Data: <http://goo.gl/LCM94>

AstraZeneca Suppresses Data on Seroquel: <http://goo.gl/408fJ>

Pfizer Suppresses Data on Edronax: <http://goo.gl/fxLbW>

So yes, there is publication bias and possibly fraud at work here, but it lies, in my view, early in the process (preclinical, basic science) and very late in the process (Phase IV studies). The registration process is pretty well controlled.

Note: My expertise is in preclinical pharmacology, toxicology, and NDA- directed studies (Phase I-III) not post-marketing studies (Phase IV), so if anyone has more experience here please speak up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully obvious, but some of this stuff also applies to A/B testing.

 _Yet in the 1950s the usual technique was to give a new treatment to the patients whom it was thought would most benefit from it. It frequently happened that those were the patients whose chances of recovery were the best in any case, under the existing treatments as well as the new one. The result was all too often that new treatments were thought to be better than old ones but in fact were not._

</comment><comment><USER7> > 'When I said "randomize" in breast cancer trials I was looked at with > amazement by my clinical colleagues' said Meier in an interview in 2004. ' > "Randomize? We know this treatment is better than that one" they said. I > said "Not really…" '</comment>


92 Facebook Apps Have Access To My Account - <AUTHOR> http://mypermissions.org/clean2014/ <comment><USER2> I recently had a spree of hack-attacks (or so I thought) via my Twitter account where it was making anonymous spammy tweets. I kept changing my password to no avail. I then realized that it was a service that I had given permissions to a long time ago that had been hacked and the attacker was spamming tweets through my account via that service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great service. It's a shame it's necessary. It's an (intentional) failing of UX design that makes it so difficult to know what apps have what permissions on the main social platforms.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady I check which apps have Facebook permissions and remove them all the time so 13 didn't surprise me (I wanted those 13 to have permissions). Twitter was more of a surprise with 45 - 41 of which can 'act on my behalf.

Edit:

Please change the title of this post (at time of writing it is: "92 Facebook Apps Have Access To My Account"). The service checks permissions for around 10 different sites - not just Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would you suggest as the title of this post?

<comment> k-mcgrady Something along the lines of "Check which apps have permission to your social media accounts"

<comment><USER4> Not catchy enough ... i wouldnt have clicked on that title.

<comment> k-mcgrady I'd rather not have link-bait titles as I'm less likely to click those.

<comment><USER5> It was submitted by a "growth hacker" from the same venture firm that invested in MyPermissions. Better to submit with a link bait title now and have it changed by an admin than to submit with a proper title and never see the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't worked at that VC firm for a few months now... I submitted this because I thought it would be useful for the HN community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer to prevent - I almost never give access to my account to some application/websites, and prefer the plain old email to create an account somewhere.

I've just checked on Facebook, and I have two. A game (that only supported Facebook sign-in, I usually just delete the game if I find that) and a third- party client.

Same for Twitter, I just have a bunch of third-party clients.

<comment><USER7> Of course, but 5-6 years ago some of us were teens who had no idea about online privacy. It worries me to see how many application I used long time back had so much information about me.

<comment><USER8> So its fine if facebook is data mining everything but ahhhh freakout when some third party app has a smidge? Lol...

<comment><USER9> Facebook has a reputation to uphold, so they won't do anything _completely_ and _obviously_ evil without slowly ramping up to it over several years first; third party apps can abuse all the data they want, get shut down, and then come back a week later with a new name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Apps" in this context probably means mostly "websites I used 'login with facebook' on".

(I would have had a closer look if this wasn't a closed-source download ...)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Start cleaning : this plug in can access all of your data on all websites tabs and navigation activity." Kind of ironic. Pretty useful anyway.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, there's no way we can help you without getting that kind of access. That being said, we really expect people to do their due diligence when giving security apps permission to act on their behalf. We'd love to hear if you can think of a better way for us to do it.

<comment><USER11> Don't get me wrong, I find your site useful, and must I add, well designed. Maybe you could ask the user if he wishes to revoke the authorizations for your own app after scanning.

<comment><USER12> All you need to do to get that done is disable the extension. Once that's done, there is no access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The irony of this thing asking to post on fb/twitter then create yet another login is not lost on me.

<comment><USER12> Our service is free. As such, they only thing we ask, is that you pass on the word. The easiest way, is through social services, but we do that without asking you for any permissions whatsoever. Also think of it this way, where do people actually need protecting? On those exact social services :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The author of this addon has not been verified"

How ironic

<comment><USER12> You're using Firefox or explorer right? Their process of verification is downright absurd. Every time we update the service we need to reverify the addon and it takes months. The irony is that we only update the addon to give more protection to users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing that annoys me, re: permissions - when you signup for a service through Twitter, and the next time you try to login you forget that you used Twitter to sign-up so you click on LinkedIn. And the process continues until you've given permissions for every single social network account you own...

<comment><USER16> This is one of many reasons why, if a service only supports facebook/linkedin/twitter/gmail/whatever login, I do a Tab Closed; Didn't Read on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its really helpful. Apps like "What emotion are you" and "where you will be 10 years from now" have permission to read my messages !. Thanks for opening my eyes !

</comment><comment><USER18> 0 have access to my facebook, how disappointingly satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried the android app. Say, I check the permissions of my facebook account by logging in, I didn't find a way (at least a conspicuous one) to logout.

And, I didn't find the point of forcing me to create a mypermissions account if I am allowed to login and use the app without me confirming my account via the confirmation mail. I might as well create an account using a fake or someone else's email.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty shocking. I found out that 4 apps can access my inbox! I've removed all of them except for the gmail iOS app.

<comment><USER21> Wow! Can you share what those 4 were?

<comment><USER20> 9gag, Mailbox, Immersion and Tumblr.

<comment><USER21> Without using Mailbox, by name that's not surprising. The other 3 are a surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can see 8 for facebook (two of those are my apps and one is something called "Developer", I guess that's related). Thought it would be more.

Four for google if I count various stackoverflows as one. Five for twitter and that's it. Can't even imagine how would one rise to a hundred.

</comment><comment><USER23> Luckily I manage this on a monthly base. Only 23 on Facebook and none of those can acces information I do not want them to see. Good link though, we need more awareness for third party apps accesing our social media profiles.

</comment><comment><USER7> Some applications I used as a newcomer to facebook still had access to my profile. And I never knew they still had this much access. Thank you for this link.

</comment><comment><USER24> 93* __

</comment><comment><USER25> Cleanup your social media apps? How about delete your Facebook account to start 2014. Facebook is so 2010... I deleted my account years ago.

<comment><USER26> Does HN now stand for Hipster News?

<comment><USER25> What does this replay have to do with my comment?

Why has my comment been down voted? The point of the post is social media apps cause a privacy concern. What about Facebook itself? This is like go remove a couple of small cancerous tumors but let's not treat the lung cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is Facebook?

On another note I have 132 text files with passwords in. The whole security thing isn't going to get easier.

<comment><USER28> Not sure if you're ironic, but just incase not: ever heard of 1password and similar apps? Cleans that right up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Aren't most of these "Facebook Apps" just using Facebook for easier account creation / login?

<comment><USER30> Would you like to login with Facebook for easier account creation/login?

Nope, if that's the only option, I'll opt to not take part in your service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Only 34 but I decided I might spring clean and removed 8 of those that I don't need anymore :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Holy guacamole - 110 applications have access to my facebook account. ...removing...

</comment><comment><USER33> I would love to see some stats from mypermissions.org on people's permissions

<comment><USER34> Seeing as mypermissions.org is just a site with links, i think its just not possible. The most stat that they can get you is the number of people which click on a particular application link (say fb vs twitter)

EDIT: I wrote the above when I didn't know about their chrome extension. That could perhaps be used for more stats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Some of the Google ones are ambiguous or duplicated.

I revoked everything anyway.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is why Google+ login is more accepted than Facebook and others [http://blog.oauth.io/the-oauth-report-1-social- logins/](http://blog.oauth.io/the-oauth-report-1-social-logins/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone else deleted all of them?

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it reliable?

<comment><USER39> They're just links to the network sites' permission pages.

<comment><USER12> Try their other site. MyPermissions.com</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some Bay Area startups that don't use an open office plan? - <AUTHOR> Are there any that use cubicles or more private work spaces? <comment><USER2> I really feel that the open office environment really only makes sense for junior programmers. For them, it's great to have a pool of knowledge(experienced programmers) around all the time to push them along, bounce ideas off of, and in general, act as mentors.

I think when you really start getting to the point where you know what needs to get done, and approximately the right way to go about it, open office loses it's luster very quickly.

<comment><USER3> So where do these experienced programmers sit?

<comment><USER4> In red Victorian chairs with tall oversized backrests.

<comment><USER5> Stroking their neckbeard :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CircleCI is based in SF (2nd & Market), and we all have private offices. We really feel strongly about this, especially after spending time in open plan offices in the last few years.

Here's what we wrote when we were looking: [http://blog.circleci.com/silence- is-for-the-weak/](http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I work as an IT consultant at several small tech companies and startups in SF. Small sample of data, but here it is:

\- 2 use cubicles (with a small number of offices, used by execs or for meetings or a mix of the two)

\- 1 uses sort-of-cubicles which are mostly open and have low glass partitions (most would probably count this as an open plan)

\- 2 use an open plan

As an aside, Apple customizes workspaces on a team-by-team basis depending on the needs and requests of the team.

</comment><comment><USER8> A somewhat related question: I'm about to start a job at a company with "open office" structure, after having my own office for the last 4 years. Anything I should be prepared for?

EDIT: Any headphones suggestions?

<comment><USER9> Check out the various levels of headphones on The Wirecutter. [http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/headphones/](http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/headphones/)

I use the Sony MDR-7506 which are rated as the best $150 Over Ear Headphones (actually $90ish on Amazon) and they are very popular with audio pros. Not noise canceling but they are comfortable enough for wearing all day and if you're listening to something, you don't have sound leaking in or out.

<comment><USER10> I have them also, you might want to look to get some replacement ear pads

[http://www.amazon.com/Beyerdynamic-Velour-Earcushions- MDR750...](http://www.amazon.com/Beyerdynamic-Velour-Earcushions- MDR7506-Headphones/dp/B0016MF7W2?&tag=rnwap-20)

<comment><USER11> I have the twin headphone Sony-MDRV6. They are awesome, but suffer from the same earpad issue. I've had them for 10 years now (yikes).

The earpads will go and start flaking (for me after 5 years). They are easy to replace though.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the MDRV6 with Beyerdynamic Velour earcushions are my secret sauce for getting in the zone. The stock pleather earpads will give you "hot ears" that make long shifts uncomfortable.

If you keep going down the audiophile rabbit hole like I did, next up is a DAC or a tube amp. A good starter cheap one (sub $100) is the Qinpu:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TGDB9Q/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TGDB9Q/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the biggest reasons I dont stay long at any startup I work for and go back to freelancing is because I hate open offices.

</comment><comment><USER14> What I find is that the people that work for me are much more distracted by FB and the plethora of other web distractions than other developers.

<comment><USER15> ^This. Note that we're all commenting on HN right now complaining about how open offices destroy our productivity.

<comment><USER16> _I_ get to choose when I go to HN. I just closed a bug I'd spent the better part of the week on, I'm fine with relaxing.

In an open office I lacked the ability to choose interruptions. I still remember Dipesh coming over, slamming his hands down on my shoulders, to ask "what's up buddy". You could hear the stack falling out of my brain. He just wanted to chat.

<comment><USER15> Maybe you should talk to Dipesh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 71 comments so far and only 2 people actually answered the question and they both said the same company: Circle CI.

Personally I'm more interested in the answer to the question posed than a debate on the merits of an open office plan vs closed so if anyone else knows of any other startups that don't use an open office plan I would love to know. I imagine others clicking into this conversation are probably interested too.

</comment><comment><USER18> TLDR: The benefit is to the team, not the individual. When executing open concept, ensure communication is relevant to the team by not including unrelated teams in the same space. We have had private and open offices; we're much happier with the results of open offices.

Overview:

First, we believe the benefit of the open office space is derived at the organization/team level by an increase in communication and ambient awareness. The mental load of this awareness and communication negatively affects the productivity of individuals but results a net benefit to the whole. This is why many individuals working in an open space will have their complaints, but project managers/product owners will often sing the open concept's praises. I'm in the latter group but I work in our open office as well.

In Practice:

Here in our office, we've done it both ways. We're located in Texas and space is plentiful, we've got enough private offices to go around and we did it that way for quite some time. After years of struggling through project overrun, bugs, and misallocated resources we decided to try an open concept.

Doing it Wrong:

The difference in team productivity couldn't be more apparent, at first it was much worse... we combined QA, Engineering, and Customer Service in one open concept office. Everyone was unhappy; Customer Service was constantly talking and distracting others with their one-sided phone calls, QA was very collaborative and yet had to talk over Customer Service, and the poor engineering team was just annoyed by both and resorted to headphones and instant messaging each other.

Doing it Right (the second time):

We realized that the biggest benefit in better communication is to the teams of people who are directly working on building our new products and features and anything else in the room just distracts from those goals.

After reorganizing our teams we moved QA and Customer Service out of the room, and instead filled it with more engineering teams and added our design and product teams as well. By including the right teams in the open space, the ambient noise level is much lower, when conversations do occur they're often directly relevant to all other teams in the room. Overall everyone is much happier in the open space even though some miss the privacy of their own offices.

To address the needs of those who occasionally need to work in a quiet place, we've turned a few of our private offices into "break out rooms" where anyone can go work as they wish. They're a great place to take phone calls and they're communal and provide limited amenities so nobody is occupying them constantly and removing themselves from their core team.

Months Later / Conclusions:

Today, we have one large open office which includes web engineers, iOS engineers, Android engineers, OSX/Windows engineers, UX designers, quality assurance, and product managers. We have breakout rooms for private work and all other staff is in private offices just outside the open space.

After our second try at an open office we can confidently say that we made the right decision. We've launched two major products in one quarter of the time it took to previously launch one. We've launched numerous bug fixes, updates, and features. And most importantly, our metrics not only show the real world results of that work, but everyone on the team is aware of them in their everyday workflow. The pace of development is not only faster, but we're making better engineering and design decisions. And, as an added benefit, our sense of team solidarity and moral is way up as well. People (who previously had private offices) still occasionally complain about being distracted, and sometimes they choose to work in a breakout room, but overall everyone has adjusted now and feels like we're kicking butt.

Of course, I'm simplifying months of thoughts and work down as much as I can here, and there's a lot more in the details of executing a good open office. I'm happy to expand on anything if this is at all helpful to anyone.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the insights! I've just got a couple of questions:

1\. What's the ratio of junior to senior level developers?

2\. When you were in private offices did the company set aside work time each day to socialise with your coworkers (e.g. Board games for an hour each day)?

3\. How many of the developers use headphones during the day?

<comment><USER18> No problem :) 1\. Our ratio is about 1 senior developer to 2 juniors, although as far as organization structure we're fairly flat and in some teams it's more 1 to 1. Average team size is about 3 engineers. 2\. Yes, every Wednesday was game day and we'd alternate through a number of card and board games. Now this happens more organically, people are setting up their own games and times. We (of course) have ping pong and pool tables as well. 3\. We have about 16 people in our open space and at any time one or two have headphones on (max). The way we have the room laid out seems to cut down on ambient chatter.

If you're interested: We have 4 pods of 4, plus conference and lounge separating the room into 2 sets of 2. Each desk in a pod has roughly about 49 square feet of space, all desks are L shaped (ikea galant with extensions), facing out towards the corners. We have half-height cubicle-style walls between pods, otherwise no walls between desks (other than dual 27-30in displays). It seems to be just the right amount of privacy/openness/sound dampening. We're currently building out another identical one of these open offices in our extra warehouse (did I mention space in Texas is cheap?) to house a few more engineers who are still in private offices and in anticipation of hiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Circle CI now have offices for everyone AFAIK.

</comment><comment><USER21> A bit off topic, but does anyone here prefer / not mind open office plans?

As someone who prefers open office plans to private offices / cubicles, I've always wondered if the large number of anti-open-plan articles are because that opinion is the majority, or because it is the loud minority.

<comment><USER22> I don't mind it. I think it helps me do my job.

This is the first job I've worked that the company had a sales team. One of my jobs is developing solutions for the sales team. Being able to overhear their interactions with customers is invaluable to understanding the types of technology solutions they need.

That being said, right now our two engineers sit in the middle of sales guy crossfire. 3 sales guys in front of me, 2 behind me, all talking in my direction. That's not ideal, and we're going to change that soon.

It's also helpful if you consider a programmer at a startup to be more than a programmer. Sure, I don't sit and code for 8 hours a day, but I'm also a product guy, marketing guy, growth guy, business dev idea guy, etc. That's what I love about startups. Sure, I get to work on cool coding work, but I also get to contribute and shape almost all the other things that I do, and I can do that better by being exposed to all sides of the business in the open plan.

Now, as we grow we plan on separating off engineering teams so they can focus, but at an early stage startup being in the heart of everything is invaluable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think if you keep different "functions" (engineering, sales, ...) separate, then each can have their own open office without losing productivity. Don't you think so?

<comment><USER24> I'm not convinced. I'm in an engineering area but if it's open plan then I'd still be able to see people, hear their (arguably more interesting than sales) conversations, and constantly have to split attention between monitoring the area around me and focusing on whatever problem I'm solving.

An engineer coming into my cube to chat a few minutes ago is what distracted me and now I'm frustrated and browsing HN. It's bad enough in high-walled cubicles; I don't know that I could maintain deep focus for meaningful amounts of time in an open plan.

I put a door on my cubicle recently and being able to mentally expand to fill my space while free from worrying about anybody else has done wonders for my productivity.

<comment><USER25> I seriously do not know how people still manage to work like that.

One of my _requirements_ is a private office. I will not do cubicles, I sure as hell will not do open plans. Office. Period.

I've turned down a few decent offers because of this, and I'm sure I'll turn down more in the future as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Open space + Bose Quiet Comfort 15 active noise cancelling earphones makes this concept a bit more tolerable :)</comment>


The New Data Browser - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2012/12/20/the-new-data-browser-2/ <comment><USER2> Looks a little bit like this (demo starts at 1:30 minutes into video) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSDU0JiI2c>

Essentially it was a way of displaying data from any HTTP based API, with just a handlful of lines of JavsScript.

Kind of a solution without a problem</comment>


Adobe tells users of old Premiere versions that they are not allowed to use them - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ashleylynch/status/1126899335419981824 <comment><USER2> So Adobe has a licensing issue with Dolby or an "other third party" as they put it - and end users who paid for the software as recently as 3 months ago are supposed to switch versions in the middle of a project, or be "subject to infringement claims"(!?) in some IP proxy war?

It seems like this is Adobe's problem. I don't know if throwing their customers under the bus was a sad attempt at fomenting pressure on Dolby to capitulate, but it's really scummy and a bad look for Adobe.

<comment><USER3> They should release a patch to remove that feature or add a replacement then, but I guess forcing people to upgrade sounded better to the finance folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I got this notice re photoshop that I pay for monthly and I was utterly confused. But it was a good reminder to finally cancel the subscription and switch to another software for a one time fee.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember when they took down the CS2 activation servers and they made everything available for download with a universal serial number. It was available for a long time, for years. Lot of people downloaded those versions even tho it was technically still illegal. But it was "free" and straight from Adobe. Abandonware if we can say that. Still have my copy too, made a backup just in case. And the page was up until last week and they nuked that too.

And yeah all the CS2 apps are still working fine in 2019 under Windows 10 even tho they are 14 years old.

<comment><USER6> Adobe apps were never difficult to pirate at all, the theory is that they wanted more users who would eventually buy the products in a commercial setting.

Amusingly enough, archive.org has archived those downloads too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case someone is looking for a free alternative, check Davinci Resolve out from Black Magic.

<comment><USER8> Came here to say this, really good software, picked it up for a recent project and was pretty productive pretty fast

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related and recent: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19863481)

</comment><comment><USER10> How prescient was to buy CS6 in the last days of its availability...

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmm. Weren't things like "support", "guarantees", "reliability", etc the original premise to use proprietary stuff?

I wonder if comparable technologies exist that are open, or at least free to use.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't it about unlicensed content / licenses by third parties that ran out? The last sentence in that message is pretty telling, it's about claims by third parties and not Adobe.

Seems reasonable that they don't offer those versions as a download anymore (I guess you could question if they should offer those old versions without that unlicensed content/tools now. But I mean, you opted in to use their Software as a Service products. There are great alternatives for (nearly) all of their tools these days.)</comment>


Machine Learning for Humans: K Nearest-Neighbor - <AUTHOR> http://www.jiaaro.com/KNN-for-humans/ <comment><USER2> k nearest neighbours suffers from over clustering problems and central nodes which have too many edges. at least tell people what causes the algorithm to fail in real life scenarios.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you know almost nobody else does? - <AUTHOR> Do you have a niche interest in which you have knowledge almost nobody else does?<p>Some secret insider information concerning whatever? <comment><USER2> I believe I have played for at least a few minutes every single game ever commercially released for the BBC Micro, a British 8-bit home computer.

I got slightly obsessed with playing all of them, a few years ago.

About 10-20% of them are pretty good. A small percentage are genuinely shockingly good, for such an old system.

The vast majority are pretty awful, with many of them being horrible BBC BASIC "conversions" of at the time current popular arcade games, with names and icons changed to avoid copyright problems.

I don't feel particularly enlightened by my short-lived obsession.

<comment><USER3> Did you publish your findings somewhere?

<comment><USER2> I started making YouTube videos of them, but gave up pretty fast after realizing the enormity of the project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In any windows system this happens:

\- show your desktop

\- move your mouse over an icon

\- keep pressing 'home' on your keyboard (home key brings the focus to top left icon) and then left mouse button (changes the focus to the icon you're over)

\- do it faster and faster (home, lmb, home, lmb, ...), focus will jump between top icon and the icon under the mouse pointer

\- when you reach the double-click speed, the icon will be launched

but it will not be the icon under the mouse pointer, but the top left corner icon.

<comment><USER5> Ok, this is legit. Blew my mind.

<comment><USER4> I've discovered it in like 1998, but I waited for a good moment to reveal it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bicarbonate of soda works as a deodorant. I have a small pot by my bathroom sink. Dab in two damp fingers, under the arms, no smell. It's more effective than any deodorant I've tried, doesn't give me an allergic reaction, is better for the environment, and is very cheap.

<comment><USER7> Sodium bicarbonate is a magic substance which has so many uses, it almost looks like it's a cheat in the matrix: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate#Uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate#Uses)

From the list:

\- cooking (leavenant, baking powder, etc.)

\- fungicide and pest control

\- pH increase

\- pyrotechnics

\- disinfectant

\- fire extinguisher

\- medical (addon for laxatives, antidepressant, anesthetics, anti-tear gas)

\- hygiene (addon for toothpaste, mouthwash)

\- short-term doping

\- cleaning agent

... and now deodorant !

<comment><USER8> > short-term doping... Wait, what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this quora now? I'd prefer if we don't have this kind of question here. How can anyone even know that they are the only people that know a piece of information, it's not like they're going around asking people if they know it or not.

<comment><USER10> I still enjoy these types of questions.

I read HN more than other sites, and I have learned quite a few things over the years from these types of open ended discussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My private key :) On a more serious note, and not revealing anything that I really shouldn't be telling people: I'm sure many people know that there used to be a feature on macOS where you could hold down the shift key while minimizing windows (among other things) and it would slow down the animation comically. This feature seems like it was removed a couple of years ago, but it wasn't: I was poking around the Dock binary one day and discovered that it's still secretly there, hidden behind a preference key. You can reenable it with

      $ defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES && killall Dock

Enjoy.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I remember discovering this in my college graphics class and showing everyone. We thought Apple were so cool :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Economics and related industrial, business, and commercial activities are designed to systematically control and subjugate individuals by imposing a way and manner of thinking that effectively short-circuits individual thought and responsibility - one feels obligated to deliver arbitrary end-goals because of a misplaced sense of "responsibility" despite having limited (in some cases, zero) real/effective ownership in the created output, while still feeling the brunt of "production support" and sometimes even the product decisions in and of themselves.

In spite of this, the owners of capital still reap all the reward, in spite of their distance from the actual decision making that actually shapes and molds the end-result.

<comment><USER5> So there was a whole book about this, Power Elite by C.W. Mills. I suspect quite a few people know this.

<comment><USER13> I think capitalism can work but we don't have pure capitalism - corporatocratic bailouts have been normalized since the 1990s, and as a result, all systemically important losses are socialized, while the gains are always split across a handful of criminals that exploit a system they partially mold to their own liking in order to propagate the toxicity that enables them to further their own interests.

I predict that the Federal Reserve will gain new powers within the next quarter that will enable them to indefinitely prop up equity markets through large-scale asset purchases in the equity markets through some novel facility (I'm sure it'll have some super cool new vernacular as well) that changes all the rules and allows for unilateral action without any covenants - awesome!

For any speculators out there - just buy calls, nothing can go down anymore. Easiest outlook EVER.

<comment><USER14> again, this isn't new, Just look at the collapse of the east india company.

basically a few people treated it as a way to live like a king, and it collapsed. The state stepped in and took it over, because it was too big to fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> \- CSS3D, a fun and easy way to make 3D scenes / games in the browser without WebGL. To my knowledge, we are about 5 people to use it ([https://xem.github.io/articles/css3dgames.html](https://xem.github.io/articles/css3dgames.html))

\- JS code-golfing... I'm not alone but we're a small community, who enjoy making JS programs / art / games with the smallest possible amount of code (js1k.com, js13kgames.com, dwitter.net, ...)

\- Unicode, its quirks, its updates (not only emoji), its encodings and its predecessors charsets

\- Regexes (everyone hates them but I enjoy using them)

\- Browsers hacks and polyfills (remember IE6? Firefox 3? Chrome 1? With enough effort, you could make them do almost everything that modern browsers can do today. My job has been to do exactly that for many years, and it was actually pretty fun)

</comment><comment><USER16> \- Brushing your teeth during a long ultra-endurance event (100 miles or longer) can make you feel fresh and energetic.

</comment><comment><USER17> QM math is bunk! Randall Mills of brilliantlightpower.com has figured out a classical model of the atom that works far better than the Schroedinger electron is everywhere at once model. Theory has many astonishing consequences - oscillating universe, unlimited energy (working prototypes exist) from atomic hydrogen transition to smaller hydrinos, dark matter is hydrogen in form of hydrinos, etc. Wikipedia says it is nonsense, but Wikipedia is policed by uber skeptics that won't even allow pro-hydrino rebuttal to be added to the page so is not an unbiased source. Proof is in the experimental videos and accompanying verification paper by independent scientists.

</comment><comment><USER18> OK I'll risk it by saying things I _think_ I know about quantum mechanics that have proved useful in dispelling/illuminating/clarifying popular accounts, that lots of people probably don't get.

Bear in mind that someone quite famous and rather clever once said "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics", and I think he surely wasn't joking!

\- There's no such thing as an independent 'observation'. To observe quantum particles you must interact with them. 'You' might be just a particle.

\- All the things you've interacted with look different to the things you haven't.

\- Noone really understands quantum mechanics

<comment><USER19> "There's no such thing as an independent 'observation'." It's not as if you can see macro objects without bouncing photons off them, either. Does this point have to do with QM specifically? At large enough scales the amount of interaction needed to observe something is incidental to the thing itself. At small enough QM scales the interaction needed for observation is non-trivial. But is this a difference of kind, or just a difference of quantity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We're all immortal from our own perspective because we're living in a multiverse.

Although the knowledge to see this is all out there, I'm not aware of anyone else alive who says it's true.

</comment><comment><USER21> This questions seems a little too ask-redditty imo

</comment><comment><USER22> I've seen fractals that nobody has seen.

(Not hard to do with fractals :D)

</comment><comment><USER23> Reversibility is the key to further understanding in physics.

<comment><USER24> Care to explain?

<comment><USER23> The laws of physics are time-symmetrical. This is true for both classical dynamics and quantum mechanics.

Various attempts have been made over the decades to try to come up with a deeper understanding. Examples include String Theory, Loop quantum gravity, and computational models such as those espoused by Stephen Wolfram.

What they all seem to lack however is a recognition of the intrinsic reversibility of the universe we live in.

In my opinion, the most promising research in this realm is actually around Quantum computation. By necessity, it accepts the reversibility at the heart of things, otherwise you couldn't have the sorts of logic gates you need to do Quantum computation.

By way of an entrance into this rabbit hole, look up the Ffredkin gate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bone meal can be applied topically to your teeth to help soothe aches.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know where there is a U.S.-made 18" naval gun projectile.

<comment><USER26> Whoa. Did the US ever have a naval gun capable of firing that? If so, on what? Or was it just experimental?

<comment><USER27> just in testing. E.g. _Iowa_ class originally was planned to maybe have 18" guns.

<comment><USER25> Nevertheless, it persists there on the firing line in Dahlgren, VA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> <troll>myself</troll>

</comment><comment><USER29> how loud my roommates can be when i'm trying to fall asleep

</comment><comment><USER30> Lol, nice try.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you are ugly, then your life will be harder. The converse is also true.

<comment><USER31> If your life is hard, you will be uglier?

Or did you mean the inverse "If you are not ugly, your life will not be harder"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We should clone attractive people to enhance the population genetics present on the planet right now.</comment>


Intel Quark Runs on Roof, Raises Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319447 <comment><USER2> "We looked at Freescale and ARM too but decided on using Quark"

Interesting that he doesn't say why here. There's no "it simply had better performance", "it did more with the power budget" or other reason.

I suspect Intel were quite eager to have a customer and case study to launch with.

<comment><USER3> Two sentences later: "Security software gave Intel the edge over ARM."

<comment><USER2> It's a pretty lame reason. A "HVAC giant" should easily be able to lean on a software vendor to get their software running on anything (sane) they ask them to.

(McAfee security software? really?)

<comment><USER4> >(McAfee security software? really?)

It's a name people who wear hard hats recognize. Commercial HVAC people aren't hip like us.

<comment><USER5> It's also an Intel subsidiary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So if you were still wondering if ARM isn't directly lined up in Intel's sights, this should dispel that notion.

For a couple of years now I've noted that one advantage ARM had that seemed quite durable was you could put it into the SOC of your own design, but you could not do that with an x86 chip. If Intel is willing to allow that it is a potent weapon.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone knowledgeable comment on whether Intel's foray into the realm of ARM and embedded systems is significant? Will anything substantial change as a result of their entry into this already populated market?

(I guess one thing the article mentions is that Quark is potentially more secure than the alternatives. Presumably embedded systems security will be a bigger issue as we approach the future Internet of Things.)

<comment><USER7> Every non-x86 processor from Intel has failed, so there's that.

<comment><USER8> The i960 did ok, and still finds use in some military applications. But, on the other hand, Itanic.

<comment><USER9> Yep. Fond memories of writing an execution trace disassembler for the i960CA back in the early 90s. The chip had an 8-bit incremental trace bus, which made it possible to produce an execution-time instruction trace, as long as the code didn't modify the instructions in memory.

<comment><USER10> I wrote and instruction scheduler for the i960CA, which was fun. (For those who don't know, the i960CA was the first superscalar microprocessor.) It took assembly code as input and contained (as close as I could get from public docs to) a cycle accurate timing simulator.

Less fun was the associated project of getting the GNU assembler and linker to run under 16-bit DOS. I recall that at the the time the linker consisted of _one_ giant source file, and one of the tools (I think the assembler) contained the wonderful declaration:

        int malloc();

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the volume on a reasonable sized small batch of chips? How small of an order does it make sense to go down do doing your own chips? If one buys the IP, is it Intel fabbing the chips, or do you have to take the resultant work elsewhere, or is it your option?

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know how fast this thing runs? Is it comparable to 386, 486, Pentium speeds, etc?</comment>


M-Pesa – a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinancing service - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa <comment><USER2> Tanzanian here.

I think calling the service "M-Pesa" is misleading since a lot of other people are offering the same service.

Here in Tanzania,

"M-Pesa" is the name for the service offered by vodafone,a mobile communications company.

"Tigo Pesa" is the name for the same service offered by tigo,a mobile communication company.

"Airtel money" is the name for the same service offered by airtel,a mobile communication company.

"EzyPesa" is the name for the same service offered by zantel,a mobile communication company.

For the above reasons,i generally call the service offered by these companies as "a banking service managed by mobile phone companies".

"Sim banking" is the name of the service offered by a "traditional" bank called crdb[1] so a more generalized name that accommodates both traditional banks and cellular network operator banks is in need.

Most traditional banks are also offering the same service.

The only thing they all have in common from the user's perspective is that the services are offered through ussd codes[1] meaning they are not tied to mobile phones and they work with any device that supports ussd codes.

I have an application called ussd-gui[4][3] that i use to manage by money at vodafone "bank" using a mobile broadband modem on my linux system.

[1] [http://crdbbank.com/tz/alternative- banking/simbanking.html](http://crdbbank.com/tz/alternative- banking/simbanking.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data)

[3] [https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd- gui/blob/master/icons/u...](https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd- gui/blob/master/icons/ussd-gui.jpeg)

[4] [https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd- gui](https://github.com/mhogomchungu/ussd-gui)

<comment><USER3> So these companies act as a kind of payment bank in this capacity.

<comment><USER2> They act like traditional banks in a sense that you can have them hold your money for you and some give out interest rates!!!.

Their biggest difference with a traditional bank is that their "bank" accounts are tied to phone numbers.

Once they have your money,you can do money transactions more or less the same way you do with a debit/credit card.

You can also have your "bank" accounts on these companies tied to a "bank" account from a traditional bank and you can move your money back and forth between them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> M-Pesa was on 60 minutes last night:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m- pesa-60-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m- pesa-60-minutes/)

HN thread here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614816)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Yet another advertisement for a specific company on 60 minutes, that show has turned into a mix of corporate PR and a government mouthpiece. What happened to their journalistic integrity?

M-Pesa in particular in one of many competitors in Kenya. But yet they repeated M-Pesa two or three dozen times in the report and asked people about that specific service by name over and over.

I rarely watch 60 Minutes now. It just annoys me too much. It is like watching CBS Evening News, just blatant propaganda and scaremongering, I miss the BBC, and Al Jazeera (both of which are "strangely" not available in much of the US, so we have to put up with the US version of Russia Today).

<comment><USER6> M-Pesa got there first and is by far the dominant mobile money system in Kenya, regardless of competitors like Airtel Money. Even people who use Airtel for their phone service will still keep a Safaricom SIM card on hand so they can use M-Pesa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A small plug for our company, Angaza Design; integration with various mobile money providers, such as M-Pesa, Airtel, and a bunch of others is one of our core strengths.

If you're interested in learning more about how they work, and you want to help the one billion poorest people on the planet move off kerosene onto clean solar, check us out -- we're hiring!

[http://www.angazadesign.com/contact- page/#careers](http://www.angazadesign.com/contact-page/#careers)

</comment><comment><USER8> As a Kenyan I use it for many transactions, its really nice. The next frontier though is banks adopting the M-Pesa model. Equity bank, one of the largest and most popular bank in Kenya is issuing sim-cards (it's an MVNO) which can be connected to it's bank accounts, as opposed to M-Pesa where a mobile service provider(Safaricom) is holding the money. This allows more flexibility for both the bank and the customer. The mobile money landscape is changing rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of debate's going round over what is M-Pesa and what it isn't. Yes, M-Pesa is the specific variant of mobile money transfer introduced by Vodacom. However, M-Pesa in Kenya is what pushed mobile money transfers to light in Africa. For the longest while it wasn't just successful, but also the only large scale deployment of such a service (At least Half of GDP flows through the service!). Unlike other countries that had continual relaunches, rebrands, and failures, M-Pesa just bloomed. All that led to this brand genericide where it's much easier to talk of M-Pesa rather than account for Tigo, Airtel money, and all other fledgling counterparts. M-Pesa is the 'kleenex' / 'xerox' of mobile money transfers. (African Telecos are always being acquired, renamed, or merged leading to rebooting/relaunching of their mobile money brands. Contrastingly, Safaricom, the telecommunications company that deploys M-Pesa, is remarkably stable and is the biggest earning corporate entity in Eastern & Central Africa)

<comment><USER10> > At least Half of GDP flows through the service!

Completely wrong.

<comment><USER9> I hate Hacker News for comments such as yours that do little to further the discussion. You do little to explicate on what makes the statement wrong. It's about constructive dialogue, not notching points. I should have been more explicit. The total volume of transactions through M-PESA is comparable equivalent in worth to half the GDP.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you should start by actually making a statement that has value and that is supported by data and is actually true, before you put the burden on me to do your job explaining your points, when you're the one making a wrong statement in the first place. But I'll oblige.

First, even in your correction, you're still making a pretty useless point that is misleading to people who don't understand the nuance of the definition of GDP, don't have an understanding of MPESA (i.e. the target audience of your comment), and implies mpesa is far more significant than it actually is. i.e. it misleads, whether you like it or not. It's so misleading you probably took it as a fact when you read it the first time, and only saw the mistake when I told you it was wrong and you looked it up. Why not correct your statement with a useful quantifiable answer?

So why is it a pretty useless point? Well look, if I hand $1 to my brother, and he hands it back to me right away, and we do this 100000 trillion times on a digital money system we designed (say, a simple database with a simple algorithm to execute all these trillions of payments), we'd be able to say, 100% truthfully, that our silly payment system has a total volume of transactions that far exceeds GDP, or the entire world economy in this century so far, for that matter. It's a meaningless statistic, and it's an apples/oranges comparison because there was 0 added value in any of the transactions between me and my brother. GDP measures added value, mpesa transactions measured in volume don't. Why say 'mpesa's non added value figure is x percentage of the country's added value figure' at all?

For example, take sinopec. Chinese company with nearly $0.5 trillion in revenues. Imagine its profit margin is say about 5%, then that means that it has nearly 0.5 trillion in expenses, too. So this company processes about $1 trillion in value, every year. The chinese GDP is about $7 trillion. It'd be completely to say this single company which employs 0.02% of the Chinese population, processes money totalling about 1/7th of China's gdp, even though it's a factually true statement that's completely meaningless, when the real contribution to the 7 trillion Chinese gdp is actually just about 7 billion.

Either you express a statement of how much of added value is transacted on mpesa and take that as a percentage of total added value (GDP), or you measure the percentage of total volume that is transacted on mpesa, as a percentage of the total volume of all payment systems in the country, without getting into added value/gdp at all.

If you do so, you'll find mpesa is pretty small, the Kenyan central bank has pretty decent data. For example, in August mpesa handled about 250b kes in value, a tiny bit less than ACH, and an order of magnitude less than RTGS in Kenya which handled about 2.8 trillion. And those are just the electronic payment systems where mpesa looks to be less than 7%. Let's not forget the most recent reports are that 94% of transactions in Kenya are made with cash (which, expressed in a silly 'volume of cash transactions as a % of gdp' metric, would constitute a figure that's likely more than a tenfold of GDP, but again it's meaningless).

And I'm not even getting into the fact that a large portion of economic activity in Kenya isn't part of GDP, as the grey economy often is substantial in developing countries, or the large amount of double counting in the figure you're referring to.

Mpesa is awesome, I'm glad it's here, it'll keep on growing and become more important with time. But let's not sprinkle these bs apples/oranges metrics around on HN, the economist and the like take care of that just fine on their own. The mpesa story doesn't need this hyperbole, and its growth statistics are impressive and promising on their own.

<comment><USER9> > if I hand $1 to my brother, and he hands it back to me right away, and we do > this 100000 trillion times on a digital money system we designed

Incredibly facetious. Blatantly false.

<comment><USER10> You didn't even cite the entire sentence... Feel free to elaborate as to what is false as I don't see it, unlike your earlier statements.

And no, it's not facetious at all. It's a theoretical example of how one can make completely honest and truthful statements, that are misleading and insignificant, an example you can obviously agree with because it is indeed a silly and insignificant statement, yet completely truthful that our bookkeeping system could indeed register the change of ownership of a $1 bill by processing trillions of money transfer orders in a given day, generating a volume of transactions that exceeds GDP. There's nothing false about this.

The statements by you that express mpesa transaction volume as a percentage of gdp are as meaningless without further data. And if you do add the further data, as I have in my post (conveniently ignored by you), you'll find mpesa is much less significant than your statement would lead people to assume. That's why I called your statement misleading and called you out on making the statement, despite the fact your corrected statement is 100% truthful.

I won't require you to agree with any of my points, that's up to you. But you can hardly call me facetious when I called you out on an error in your statement which you corrected, in my first post, and did the homework you should've done by adding context to your empty statements, in my second post. If anything, I'm taking this much more seriously than you, facetiousness then is quite an ironic accusation coming from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> M-Pesa is part of what lets GiveDirectly transfer money to poor Kenyans so efficiently: [http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/give- dir...](http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/give-directly)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm in Nairobi, Kenya right now on a business trip to Safaricom and I can tell you that M-Pesa is huge. In fact, the application we're building has an M-Pesa payment component which will be leveraged to pay hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in M-Pesa instead of regular cash.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just read "The Next Africa"[1] which had a good bit on M-Pesa and one of the cool offshoots, M-Kopa[2], which is offering a pay as you go solar lights/radio/sim card all paid for with M-Pesa. It sounds like it could be as big of a deal as the Rural Electrification projects of the last century.

1\. [http://us.macmillan.com/thenextafrica/jakebright](http://us.macmillan.com/thenextafrica/jakebright) 2\. [http://solar.m-kopa.com/about/company- overview/](http://solar.m-kopa.com/about/company-overview/)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is completely ubiquitous in Kenya. Highly recommend chatting with friends/acquaintances from there to understand how the country really runs on "Pesa", as they call it.

A cool Kenyan Uber driver gave me an amazing unintentional lecture on mobile payments the other day. It's just amazing to see innovation force its way through when the establishment sucks (ie, most Kenyans being essentially locked out of the financial system prior to this).

<comment><USER15> "Pesa" just means money in Kiswahili. No one uses the word to refer to "M-Pesa". Maybe you caught a snatch of conversation out of context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The big takeaway is how ubiquitous mobile phones are. Everyone might not have water or a toilet, but they will have a cell phone since a cell phone is cheaper than anything else.

<comment><USER17> This is super powerful, @magic_man, in terms of orienting the field around designing solutions that meet users where they are (vs. approaching design from a "remediation" vantage point). I previously worked for a non-profit working to build the financial capability of low-income youth here in America. We discovered that 85% of youth have mobile phones, though a much smaller percentage belong to families that are connected to the financial mainstream (many use fringe banking services). This was a critical insight for us; it led us to design a smartphone application that issued teens digital challenges designed to build financial health. Platform decision-making is paramount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I sometimes work with these systems. If anyone has pointers to other similar mobile payment systems for 3rd world countries I'm interested.

Edit

There are some interesting pointers in this previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10453809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10453809)

<comment><USER19> I have gone through the documentation in Jamaica and the interest rates can net a pretty penny! Interested?

<comment><USER18> No projects there ATM but still interested if you have pointers esp. to technical information.

<comment><USER19> Do you need implementation methods for the SW? There is an app driven and the GSM(text message) driven version.

<comment><USER18> Mostly I just want to know which systems exist and roughly how they work in case I'll have to integrate with more of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's the segment from last night's '60 Minutes' show on M-Pesa:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m- pesa-60-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m- pesa-60-minutes/)

</comment><comment><USER21> the whole time I was watching the 60 minutes feature I was thinking, sure this is great for the people but what about the cell/mobile providers behind it all? How do they pay for their cell network access? Who is (must be) raking it in on that front/the gateway/infrastructure to have all of this work on top of?

<comment><USER15> The financial services are offered by the telcos themselves, who run their own infrastructure. There's no intermediary. M-Pesa by Safaricom, Airtel Money by Airtel, and so forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this even so popular today? Vodafone started it years ago.

<comment><USER23> East Africa and some parts of Asia have had mobile money solutions like this for over a decade. They are so ubiquitous in those parts of the world that many people don't even bother to open bank accounts any more.

The rest of the world is still working on "fintech"... They don't like to talk or hear about M-Pesa. So each time they do, it's a bit of a shocker.

<comment><USER24> According to 60 Minutes, competing big banks have blocked m-pesa type services in many countries.</comment></comment></comment>


Chika Ofili: 12-year-old Nigerian awarded for making mathematics easy to learn - <AUTHOR> https://www.pulse.com.gh/bi/lifestyle/chika-ofili-12-year-old-nigerian-awarded-for-making-mathematics-easy-to-learn/w246s09 <comment><USER2> this is a nice story</comment>


Button Basics - <AUTHOR> http://jacojoubert.ca/post/7210637533/button-basics

<comment><USER2> No body is mentioning but the tutorial is really descriptive in content where much of the design tutorials on the web lacks. It explains each design step, not 'how to do it' but 'why to do it', which i think developer minds looking for in design.

I will have an eye on this, keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in (tested in Chrome). When I zoom in, the right side of the buttons does no longer fit perfectly with the rest of the button: it get moved by some 2 pixels up, while the rest of the button remains in place.

I've experienced this problem on many websites, that's why I try to avoid composite image buttons whenever possible. Either I create a button of only one image(which often can't be reused) or I create if with CSS3 (some compatibility issues).

<comment><USER4> _The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in_

Breaking features that paying users overwhelmingly do not use is not a showstopper for most businesses. I don't actively hate power-users, but if you're savvy enough to do anything other than open up the browser in the default settings and make with the clicky-clicky, you're savvy enough to undo it when you run into problems.

See also: "I disabled Javascript and your website broke", "I disable first- party cookies by default and your website broke", "I couldn't get your website to work on my wife's computer which I set up to run Lynx on Ubuntu Dapper" (no, really), etc.

I feel a lot worse over the related answer for disabled users, since they typically don't have an option to turn off being disabled, but the economics are the same: 100% higher development costs to improve the experience of under 1% of users is not feasible.

<comment><USER5> I'm one of the people perennially angry over 'I disabled JavaScript and your website broke,' but that's limited to sites that _should_ work fine with JS off. Like this guy's - it's a blog post. A blog post should not completely break with JS off.

What I think isn't that 'the site breaks with JS off' is inherently terrible. Some sites actually do require JS - but that's far fewer than the number that _think_ that they require JS, and _completely breaking_ with JS off is a very distinct code smell. It says 'this person does not sweat the details.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So to get this straight, the author created a button image in photoshop, then created the same style using css3, took a picture of both, zoomed in, and compared the pixelated blockyness? ... While completely disregarding the fact that actually zooming in on the css3 version in the browser would avoid any pixelation and blockyness in the first place?

<comment><USER7> He's zooming in so you can see the pixels. He obviously isn't talking about putting giant, stretched-out buttons on an actual site.

<comment><USER6> Which is not what I'm talking about either. I'm just saying it's a bit ironic to need to zoom in on a button to even distinguish any quality differences and then giving the quality award to the method that isn't suitable for scaling.

<comment><USER8> The zoomed image was meant to illustrate why the photoshop button was rendered better at default size - it has nothing to do with browser zooming.

<comment><USER6> I understand that, in fact I mentioned that the aspect of zooming was completely ignored in my first post, and I found it ironic that it was.

But anyway, lets forget about that fact for now. If you need to zoom in 400-800x on some pixels to even be able to spot the differences, then in practical terms there are no differences. You can't expect your typical visitor to sit in front of the monitor with a magnifying glass sweating at your pixel perfect buttons. Honestly, no one is going to give it much more than a glance, so attention to detail you can hardly spot with the naked eye is almost completely pointless.

Now to come back to my main point: what isn't pointless is maintaining quality when zooming in with the browser. This is something I often do myself when I'm too lazy to put my contacts in to just casually browse the web. Just about every website looks like a mess of blurry/pixelated crap when you do that. Had he just went with the css3 approach, the quality at non standard zoom levels would far outweigh the minuscule pixel details at normal zoom levels between the css3 and photoshop versions.

Anyway, that's all I really wanted to say. Had the point been that CSS3 styling was still iffy with older browsers being around and the photoshop button was superior for that reason, I wouldn't have said anything. But to dismiss it based on some differences in pixelation you wouldn't even spot normally, while ignoring that if you had actually zoomed in the browser there would be no pixelation at all with the "inferior" css3 version, was just too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fyi, using Dropbox as a replacement for real image hosting (either on your own server or through a service such as S3) means that anyone at work who can't get to a Dropbox URL can't see basically anything worthwhile on your site.

<comment><USER10> Author here: I will move the images over to a real host as soon as I can. The blog post was incomplete and only published so some friends could read it over. Wasn't meant to go live at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great tutorial if you want to create buttons form scratch in photoshop with and use css sprites.

What I would like to see, is a simple javascript api on top to generate all the nitty gritty css in the browser. That's excatly what sproutcore and sencha touch does.

</comment><comment><USER12> One downside with image buttons: they are really, really, annoying to localize. A compromise would be to have the button itself as an image and overlay the label in HTML.

<comment><USER10> That is how this is done. The label is html, only the background is an image.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to connect two computers to one USB-C display? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone found / know of a KVM switch that will take USB-C in from two computers and output USB-C  to connect to a USB-C only monitor?<p>I have my laptop for work and a gaming computer under the desk currently with a DualLink HDMI to an old 30" Apple Cinema display but need to upgrade as the monitor is starting to get old. Would like to go with some of the 4k/5k options, but they seem to be trending towards USB-C and I can't find any way to replace the KVM easily. <comment><USER2> Couple of links:

[https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-usbc- model](https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-usbc-model)

[https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-Port-Type-C-Delivery-USB- KC...](https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-2-Port-Type-C-Delivery-USB- KCPD/dp/B07Y2HKN37/)

[https://www.blackbox.com/en- us/store/product/detail/usb-c-4k...](https://www.blackbox.com/en- us/store/product/detail/usb-c-4k-kvm-switch-2-port/kvmc4k-2p)

(From: [https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/))

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm... USB-C is complicated because there are a couple different ways it's used to display video. If your computers are able to output Displayport over USB-C I would think you should be able to utilize a Displayport KVM and USB-C->Displayport cables on the input of the KVM and the same cable in reverse on the other end. I think the hard part is figuring out if your computers all push Displayport over their USB-C ports or not.</comment>


The fundamentals you need to master in sales: cause & effect - <AUTHOR> http://b2brainmaker.com/b2b-lead-generation/when-youre-conversant-in-these-things-good-things-happen-to-you/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know what that circuit diagram is at the top? I'm intrigued.</comment>


Rotor sail helps Finnish ferry Viking Grace reduce fuel consumption - <AUTHOR> https://metropolitan.fi/entry/rotor-sail-helps-finnish-ferry-viking-grace-reduce-fuel-consumption <comment><USER2> Cargo ships are currently burning the dirtiest fuels available -- so-called bunker fuel. Regulation is finally forcing a degree of cleanup by 2020, limiting sulfer emmissions.

Cargo shipping is ruthlessly cost-competitive, and fuel is currently 50-60% of costs. [1] With the new regulations that percent will increase.

Still it is telling the rotor sail in the example is on a passenger ship (where it has more PR value) not a cargo ship. That says to me the cost savings are really not there yet. Probably even stronger clean shipping rules are required before this kind of thing will be cost effective.

[1] [https://www.morethanshipping.com/fuel-costs-ocean- shipping/](https://www.morethanshipping.com/fuel-costs-ocean-shipping/)

<comment><USER3> Would it stop absurd transportation of goods like exotic fruits all year long ?

If people stopped buying things from far away that aren't really really necessary, maybe that will also reduce fuel use.

<comment><USER4> Buying things from far away is _the point of living in a modern, global economy_. You don't get people on your side by telling them they want the wrong things. The way forward is to give people what they want in a sustainable way.

If someone's feet hurt, you don't tell them to lie down for the rest of their lives. You tell them to get better shoes.

Global trade reduces global warfare, too.

<comment><USER3> I'm happy about warfare channeling through economic relations but the rest is bullshit IMO. I believe more in locality rather than having constant supply of things from all over the world. And that it's "THE" point of a modern economy couldn't be more pointless to me.

<comment><USER5> I'm genuinely curious about what is the right size of "local"

<comment><USER3> same timezone, same latitude band ?

<comment><USER6> That means a car economy, the question of what is local is a good one, there is a reason the world population is spread out the way it is.

<comment><USER3> \- grow more vegetables and fruits nearby (lots of unused space)

eat them

\- gather local material as much as possible

use them with creativity (see the wood based buildings for instance)

I don't accept the "world status" anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship#Size_categories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship#Size_categories)

The air draft of a ship is a limited resource, as if a ship is too high above the water, it won't be able to pass under bridges and other port infrastructure. It strikes me that adding 24 meters to this might not be something cargo ships are willing to do.

See, for example, [https://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-new-york-and- new...](https://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-new-york-and-new- jersey/bayonne-height-restriction-removal-aids-ny-nj-port- navigation_20170425.html) , where $1.3B is being spent to raise a bridge 64 feet to accompdate larger ships. That's 19 meters, which is in the ballpark of 24.

<comment><USER8> Some of the rotors are retractable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please note this ship was quite unique to begin with: it's a 5-year-old 12-deck cruiseferry that burns gas instead of oil. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Viking_Grace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Viking_Grace)

Here's an image of the ship with the new rotor sail on top: [http://www.maritimeherald.com/2017/cruise-ferry-viking- grace...](http://www.maritimeherald.com/2017/cruise-ferry-viking-grace- install-turbosail-for-hybrid-usage-of-wind-power/)

<comment><USER10> the physics involved must be really interesting. Visually, the "sail" looks incredibly tiny compared to the size of the ship and the size of sails on sailing ships of earlier ages

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are also large kite systems for ships, taking advantage of stronger winds at higher altitudes. Savings of up to 20% fuel.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5186905/Cargo- ships-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5186905/Cargo-ships-KITES- help-slash-fuel-bills.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Simple video that shows how the Magnus force works: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O6JdMSpiIqU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O6JdMSpiIqU)

<comment><USER13> Thanks! Seeing this reminded me of this basketball being dropped off the edge of a dam:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PM9vnEWmA1c](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PM9vnEWmA1c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wikipedia link: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship) "Flettner constructed an experimental rotor vessel; October 1924"... Not practical. Renewed interest this century, improved design. New ships: Viking Line to reduce fuel consumption up to 15%. Maersk to start testing 2018. Norsepower to cut 7-10% of fuel cost in big tankers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why one? Why not 5 or 10? (since the savings quoted are between 10% to 20%)

I realize this must be a test, but I'm surprised they don't discuss plans for multiple. Are the projected savings actual or "theoretical"?

<comment><USER15> I think some ships have two, but the reason you can't stuff a bunch in there is the same reason planes usually have only one wing.

<comment><USER16> most planes have 5 wings under any reasonable accounting.

<comment><USER17> Most planes have only two wings. Wings producing lift and keep the plane up.

Two little horizontal 'wings' at the back are horizontal stabilizers. They are like wings but installed upside down (they produce negative lift and push the tail down).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doubt it is purely based on pressure, as the diagram insinuates. Like the lift effect of an aerofoil, much of it comes from entrainment: the phenomenon that the device is basically causing the moving air to stick to it and then "throwing" that air at an altered angle which generates thrust.

</comment><comment><USER19> Stupid question- but there is are huge currents under water- could they be harvested for additional forward motion?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if we would be better off sending stuff by rail, at least for Europe we are connected by land to China.

<comment><USER21> From what I have come to understand sea based goods transportation isn't nearly as subject to the political whims of a nation as land based travel. That's one of its main advantage sis that even if say nation A has an issue with nation C nation A can still sell goods to nation B without issues of C blocking their travel

With land based transport, it is wholly dependent on a nation state to be cooperative. Thst isn't to say it wouldn't be a solvable problem and I think generally most nations would see the benefits quickly but it only takes say the Russians having a fallout with the US (I'm the case of ever building that mythical Alaska to Russia bridge in the Bering sea to interconnect the continents) for them to cut someone off. Or let's say a middle eastern terrorist group decides to blow up trade tracks that lead from China and great Asia into Europe.

Most of that political strife is safely ignored via sea trade. Honestly I believe that's what holds back globally connected rail which I think has a cheaper long run cost and could more reliably deliver goods in a perfect world

I don't have sufficient research to back this up at the one time though I simply just remember reading about this a few years back

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm confused. Can they only operate this when the wind I perpendicular to the direction the ship wants to go?

<comment><USER23> I suppose it works like ordinary sails, but without decent trim - the shape of the hull and rudder counterbalance the perpendicular force and you steer slightly crosswind to compensate for drift.

You won't be able to go directly into the wind, as the forward component can't be too small.

I guess you need to spin it in the right direction unless you want to go backwards...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why would this be better than sails?

<comment><USER24> You mean compared to traditional sailboat sails? There don't seem to be products that would add them to traditional cargo ships or ferries. Probably blocked by the crew skills and effort needed to operate and maintain them, as well as more invasive structural demands placed on the ship.

The only other recent sail boost attempt is kite based approach: [https://www.treehugger.com/cars/cargo-ship-with-kites- first-...](https://www.treehugger.com/cars/cargo-ship-with-kites-first-trans- atlantic-trip-a-success.html)

A cynic might of course also propose that you can't get public research money or patents for a product based on traditional sail...

<comment><USER25> _"as well as more invasive structural demands placed on the ship."_

Why would that be the case for a sail that gives the same fuel reduction? Are these rotors less impacted by sudden gusts of high wind speed than traditional sails?

<comment><USER26> A rotor sail is just a tube that rotates. Regular sails need complicated rigging.

<comment><USER25> Why? Without additional arguments on the table, I would think the force exerted on the wind-catching structure would be equal between sails and these rotors, for equal efficiency gains.

That load has to go somewhere. Rigging is a way to do so with traditional materials, but nowadays, a sturdier mast without rigging is possible.

(Rationale: if the 'mast' hidden in these rotors can be made strong enough, we can also create a mast holding a traditional sail taking the same load)

<comment><USER27> Have you _ever_ been sailing?

<comment><USER25> Does that matter? It's all physics. If you think my logic is incorrect, point out where.

<comment><USER27> Rotor sails are relatively insensitive to foul weather and wind direction.

If you had any experience with sailing, especialy on the high seas in a variety of conditions, you'd have a much better understanding of the problems.

If you have the means to go out on the sea in a sailboat, I highly recommend it. Especially for someone with a STEM background, it's actually a quite interesting activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the big argument against more efficient cargo ships is that they have long lifetimes and new ones aren't built that fast.

I think we should built giant cargo tugs with wind and solar power. They can just hook up to a cargo ship in the high seas and tow it. That way we can keep the existing ships.

<comment><USER28> _high seas and tow it_

I think this phrase would frighten any professional sailor. Tugboats don't really operate very far from shore, for good reason. You don't want to be in a storm and see the giant load to which you are strapped passing you and starting to roll.

<comment><USER29> If the thing that is towed is a conventional ship, it can use its own power in such conditions?

<comment><USER30> You wouldn't want to be in a conventional tug at all in open ocean conditions, regardless of the tow or no tow at all.

You would need a new kind of tug, more resilient to waves and storms, with crew quarters, room for provisions and all of the life saving gear a normal open ocean ship has. You may as well build a new cargo ship.

<comment><USER31> Not to say that the argument to have tugs pull barges offshore is sound, but high sea tugs exist: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeille_Bourbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeille_Bourbon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems like there's not enough surface area to capture much wind energy.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wouldn't just not having something as superfluous as luxury cruise ship lines reduce fuel consumption even more?

</comment><comment><USER33> How I know this article wasn't written by an AI " In addition to reduced strain on the enviornment, the rotary sail has a strong financial incentive for. "</comment>


Ask HN: How do I tell marketing that their work product is horrible - <AUTHOR>

Quick background, our company is successful and about 40 employees. We have just one issue, a really bad marketing group. The marketing is done by the owner's brother and he is clearly not the best, spelling mistakes in newsletters etc..
This is compounded by the fact we mainly hire recent grads and we have a semi-decent programmer who can also do some graphics. Our advertisements look like kid graphics.
For some reason this makes me a bit angry because at then end of the day when I tell people where I work they only see these images, logos, marketing material and not the fact that our product is successful.
Any thoughts on how to go about providing positive criticism? <comment><USER2> This isn't easy. My suggestions is not to say your marketing team sucks, but show how the marketing compares to others. When you are coming from the point of hey, look at how good these look and we could really learn something here. It is a different approach then saying, damn you guys really suck at your job. Sometimes a defensive person will still react badly even with this approach, but usually when they think you are helping it is not nearly as bad. And it may take more than 1 time to get the point across.

If your competitors aren't that good, then compare yourself to other companies that are really successful and show why it might be good to follow trend setters. Also, do this to make sure you aren't the one off base, sometimes we all get there.

The end game is to get the team to see the light (e.g. potential), not prove you are right or they are wrong. Use that as your logic and at least in my experience it goes a lot smoother.

</comment><comment><USER3> Data. You bring data to the table and let them make the rational decision. No reason to convince them of anything, let the stats speak for themselves.

It's marketing; its point is to drive sales and increase brand exposure right? These days (especially with digital campaigns) these things are measurable.

But you also need to be open to the fact that your opinion really doesn't matter. Maybe the ugly banners have higher click-through-rates or lead to a lower cost-per-acquisition than a prettier alternative. If that's the case, pretty doesn't matter. But if your hunch is correct then you should be experiencing substandard click-throughs, higher than normal CPA, etc; and you can point that out to them without being confrontational.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's the main issue: he's the owner's brother.

Sounds like you have some complex familial issues to overcome, unless he's open to feedback, before you can really influence change.

Does the owner know it's bad? Probably so. But the guy is still his brother :/

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of:

 _It needs to be more branded_.

[http://www.27bslash6.com/brochure.html](http://www.27bslash6.com/brochure.html)

<comment><USER6> I'm sure that didn't happen, but really the only thing I kept thinking while reading that is that the new designer was being unnecessarily antagonistic and unprofessional to the original one.

I didn't cheer for the new designer, all I thought is "I'd never want to work with this person." At least the old designer kept his cool through a lot of bullying before they finally retorted, I'd prefer to work with that person since they at least seem basically professional.

<comment><USER5> A professional acknowledges the limitations of their expertise and recognizes when their part in a project is done. Good manners are to be admired. Interfering with a person hired to do a job out of ego is not necessarily good manners. Passive aggression is still aggression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'll be tricky: how would you react if the marketing department gave you a code review?

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you work at STS Travel? This sounds far too familiar.</comment>


Uber tracked iPhone users after they deleted the app - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/23/new-york-times-digital-uberas-ceo-plays-with-fire.html <comment><USER2> It does not explain how they tracked users after their code was removed from the device. How do you think this was accomplished?

<comment><USER3> I had assumed it was shoddy reporting, but apparently this gives some details on the process.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/23/uber-responds-to-report- th...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/23/uber-responds-to-report-that-it- tracked-users-who-deleted-its-app/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Assumed it was something like fingerprint in. Techcrunch says it was more tracking of uninstall then reinstall than tracking while the app was not installed. They apparently geofenced Cupertino and used deprecated apis to get the device serial number but other Apple offices outside Cupertino detetected the unauthorized tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178397)</comment>


Shortcutfoo.com Adds Mortal Kombat Blood Code to Home Page - <AUTHOR> http://shortcutfoo.com

<comment><USER2> For those who can't remmeber what the Blood Code is: A B A C A B B (my personal mnemonic is a bad cabbage, but my mnemonics are weird and require you to know that D doesn't exist ;))

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, but would be better with Scorpion saying, "Get Over Here!" on activation, or maybe Dan Forden saying "Toasty!"

</comment><comment><USER4> neat site, but not usable for me: <http://i.imgur.com/d1K5g.png> (chrome, windows 7)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's good one!</comment>


Ask HN:Very very first experience and web design - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody, I am building my very very first idea, I am very young but since I have the possibility I decided to make some stuff done and put a simple app on the web.
However I have never been inside the "web design" world; my app is about done and now I need to it to looks nice but I can't do it by myself.
Since I have very few money I would need to stay cheap. But I don't know what to do, would be better just hire a very young somebody, get the work done, pay him cheaply, and move on
or
hire a more expert one and start a long breath work relationship (I mean: for now I need this 3 page done, in 2 weeks I will hopefully need also this other 2 and going on) but pay him with way bigger money ?
All considering that 1) Again I have few money 2) Everything is probably gonna fail <comment><USER2> You can look to see if there is a theme/template on <http://themeforest.net> that you like and can afford.

In the past, I spent a lot of time trying to design things myself and they never came out well. Now I just buy a theme and make any tweaks that are needed and I have a much better looking website.</comment>