Ask HN: Cofounder vs Management Team? - <AUTHOR>

In filling out several apps for incubator type startup programs, I've noticed that single founders are at a significant disadvantage. This disadvantage is, in my eyes, 100% justified. I agree that for MOST startups, having only 1 founder is a disaster waiting to happen because 1. It's too much work 2. You can't bounce ideas etc.
That being said, if a single founder startup already has its product developed, it has users who are excited about the new platform, and the main issue now is scaling, would finding a cofounder be valuable?  Or would time be better spent finding and hiring a management team?
This is the crossroads I'm currently at. Find a cofounder (who would essentially do what a management person does) or find a strong management type person / team.
Note: We are talking about a non-technical founder. In my personal case the startup has minimal to no coding needed. <comment><USER2> The term "founder" has really no significance in an ongoing operation, other than the fact that it might make a few geeks happy and a few employees unhappy.

Scaling your business usually requires that you bring in more people and inevitably more experienced people in leadership roles. Those hires will need to be motivated through a combination of opportunity (equity, bonus, career advancement), compensation (base salary, benefits, perks) and environment (responsibility, prestige, office culture). You will end up giving some equity to them for that reasons (and only that reason - the fact that they were there on "founding day" is truly irrelevant). How much you give depends on the person, role and state of your company. If the role is important enough and your current status early enough then they might very well end up with half of the equity. Or more. Or less.

So go and hire the right person. The rest will shake itself out when you negotiate compensation...</comment>


The Problems with a Hackintosh Netbook, Six Months Out - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5240757/the-problems-with-a-hackintosh-netbook-six-months-out

<comment><USER2> so cheap laptops have quality issues, small laptops have small keyboards, small hard drives run out of space, and running a hacked-together, unsupported operating system has bugs. oh my!

</comment><comment><USER3> I tend to think that the netbook trend won't last very long. Even if you could get a nice OS like OSX to run smoothly, such small devices are ergonomically problematic. Aside from the noted difficulty simply typing, the small size encourages hunching over.

I have an Asus Eee running linux, and I like it, but about all I use it for is to stream radio, watch videos, or occasionally surf the web while in bed. My iPhone can do all this; the only advantage of the Eee is a slightly larger screen.

<comment><USER4> I have a EEE too - I plug it into a full keyboard and HD display, and it feels like a desktop. That is, docking it, as many people used to dock their laptops. The shrinking size of the box (not display/kb) is inevitable I think (Moore's Law).

BTW: Asus is switching to the 1000 series exclusively - 10 inch screen, and a larger keyboard than the 701.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess Apple weren't wrong when they said people want a full size screen and keyboard.

6 months later, I'm very happy with my MacBook Air, and I'm glad I chose it over a netbook. In fact, it's become my primary computer.

</comment><comment><USER6> What did any of those articles have to do with Hackintosh netbooks? It seems like all of the complaints (except the wifi issue) was caused by the netbook itself, not the OS it was running.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Title is misleading. As you say, most of the complaints are hardware based.

I've been running OS X on a Dell Laptop for about a year and find the experience quite good.

<comment><USER6> Have you had any OS related problems? I've been considering a hackintosh netbook (I already have an EeePC that I love) and was hoping that this article would provide relevant information.

<comment><USER7> Because of my model (Dell XPS M1330), integrated Ethernet port does not work. Wi-Fi does. Card reader only reads SD. But OS related? VMWare Fusion works great, TextMate, integrated Apache too (in 64 bit). MySQL 64 bit also works great, PHP. I use Xcode just fine, iWork. So far, everything I've tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For some people, Netbooks are a boon. I've loved sub-notebooks ever since my first Toshiba Libretto. If you think typing on an EEE is tough, you should try a 50CT. Netbooks provide a similar experience to what would've been traditionally a £2000 sub-notebook for less than a quarter of the price. You can't knock it... unless you compare it to an equivalently specced sub- notebook. If you look at the top-end sub-notebooks (non-Apple, mind) the resale price is very comparable and you get a heck of a lot for your buck.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been noticing this is par for the segment, regardless of OS.

I'm not surprised at it, I'm just (continually) surprised that the netbook boosters are so blind to it.

They go on and on about the 'desktop OS' and keyboard, frankly, as if they'd never actually _used one_ before.</comment>


FCC chair wants to replace net neutrality with "voluntary" commitments - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/fcc-chair-wants-to-replace-net-neutrality-with-voluntary-commitments/ <comment><USER2> The regulations were put in place because ISPs were not voluntarily cooperating with net neutrality. The FCC chair appears to be either unaware of history or practicing wishful thinking.

<comment><USER3> Normally, the quote goes "never attribute to malice what can be assigned to stupidity" or something along those lines. But Pai is a categorical, shit eating politician. And in the case of politicians, "never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to malice".

This is a willful dismantling of consumer protections for political or financial gain.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER4> > Normally, the quote goes "never attribute to malice what can be assigned to > stupidity" or something along those lines.

I always like to respond to that quote with another one. I think it fits our current governmental situation particularly.

"Which is more culpable: stupidity or malice?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > the FCC net neutrality order "imposes intrusive government regulations that > won't work to solve a problem that doesn't exist using legal authority the > FCC doesn't have."

That is an outright lie. Actually, _four_ of them in _one_ sentence! .. Ok, the "intrusive government regulations" part is arguable (at best), but they _do_ work, and they _do_ solve a problem _that exists_ , and, by definition, they _do_ have the authority (these rules clearly give it).

> The net neutrality order also required ISPs to make more specific public > disclosures about prices, fees, and data caps.

What is wrong with that, exactly? Do customers not need to know prices? Is it not literally fraudulent to not give this information?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related (from yesterday): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057164)

This Ars Technica article provides additional context vs. the Reuters article on the history of net neutrality in the FCC and the current chair's past statements when he was a commissioner; as well as additional context on the implications of FCC vs. FTC enforcement.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's because he's a corporate shill. Corps need to keep their dirty fingers out of politics. Gov't has already restricted consumer choice with ISPs and now they want to use that lack of choice to punish us. It's really messed up, and there's no actual way for consumers to go somewhere else. I hope all the major US ISPs get sued into oblivion for anti-trust violations.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can we pay taxes voluntarily? Equally likely to work.

</comment><comment><USER8> 'Voluntary commitments' is not only a paradox but has turned this unfortunate policy push into a ridiculous farce.

Especially since that's the default situation under this new anti-net- neutrality push by the GOP anyways.

</comment><comment><USER9> if net neutrality fails would google become an isp then?

<comment><USER10> No, it's really hard hard to become a new ISP, and actually Google is a perfect example. They have tons of money to pull it off, yet even they are giving up on it (they are no longer expanding to other places).

What is happening is that they pull to a city, and offer attractive deals, as soon as they do companies like Time Warner will adapt and match their price and speed, but only in the region that Google get, every other customer in another region is still being f*cked as usual.

The regional ISPs can actually provide service even at a loss, because they are available in different regions so they can use money from other regions to subsidize losses in the specific one they want to eliminate the competition.

I think at this point best deal for us is if a cities would start providing ISP services, and some are trying to do just that, but unfortunately existing ISPs fighting tooth and nail with this by suing every city that is trying to do that.

So, no, nothing can easily replace existing ISPs and they know it. Currently a lot of regulation is needed because there's no competition possible, otherwise ISPs are free to do whatever they want, because who you're going to switch to if you're fed up with them?

<comment><USER11> Yup, ask yourself, why aren't there multiple water and sewer providers to homes? It doesn't work economically to supply a competitive market for certain services - physically doubling sets of pipes to end customers just don't work, regardless if they carry water or data. Just saying "the market will provide a fix" in situations like this is a shallow analysis of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I promise I won't make more money. I promise, my word is my bond.

</comment><comment><USER13> Everyone here is so cynical, saying he's in the pocket of telecoms. Maybe he is.

But maybe he's just ideologically opposed to these rules being implemented by a regulatory bureaucracy on the federal level.

<comment><USER11> He can be ideologically opposed to rules, but he is also blatantly ignoring information regarding lack of competition for last mile broadband customers, and without that, consumers have no market method of counterbalancing corporate overreach.

Of he offered more of a structural remedy, or something, anything that actually addressed lack of last-mile competition I would be willing be less cynical about him.

<comment><USER14> His structural remedy is to remove government from the mix and let the market dictate the price of bandwidth. One thought is that the last-mile problem becomes irrelevant when mobile providers are offering high-speed internet.

Whether you agree with that sentiment is largely dependent on how you view the world.

<comment><USER11> The wireless provisioning of bandwidth to a residential market has basically failed and does not provide any real competition to wired last-mile access. Without that there is no competitive market for the last mile.

The current landscape is that mobile service providers basically do not provide any service that meet the needs of residential networks. It is difficult to even connect a network of devices to a mobile wireless hotspot without violating the terms of service from the mobile provider or very rapidly hitting bandwidth caps. As far as I can tell, multiple small companies focused on providing wireless residential network service have failed, or stayed very small regional companies because of an inherent technological inadequacy of wireless to compete with the same level of wired transit...

So it becomes not a market for raw bandwidth (which I would be reasonably happy with), but a market for access to bandwidth bundled with whatever junk the provider is trying to bundle. That bandwidth is further encumbered with business agreements restraining travel of data through last-mile access bottlenecks based on secondary agreements not between the customer and ISP (and not disclosed to the end consumer). This also does not make for a good market - choice and visibility are removed from the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The beautiful thing about a VPN is it means I don't have to care who voluntarily agrees to what.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if you're making a joke, but revoking Net Neutrality is exactly the thing a VPN won't protect you from.

If ISPs are allowed to charge different rates for different traffic types on their network, they can charge an exorbitant fee for VPN traffic and punish you.

<comment><USER15> They can, but they won't. Most major companies and the government require their employees to use VPNs now, and an ISP can't tell the difference between a personal VPN and an employer-mandated one. If they penalize VPN users, they're going to get flack from the Fortune 500 and from the governments whose goodwill they depend on to exist, not just from a bunch of individual hackers.

<comment><USER17> ISPs can easily tell the difference between corporate and residential customers, and penalize the latter. 'I can figure out a way to game this system therefore it's not a problem' is a very hackerish response, but it's also an immature one; not because it's bad to mediate social relations with technology, but to pretend that oneself is the only actor one needs to be concerned about, a position which is neither pragmatic nor principled. Of course I don't expect you to hew to the same principles as I do, but as a practical matter you won't be able to invent/hack your way out of your problems forever* so it behooves you to consider situations in which that strategy will not be available to you.

* unless you die young or go live in a cabin in the woods like Ted Kaczynski.

<comment><USER15> > ISPs can easily tell the difference between corporate and residential > customers

How?

BTW I agree with you that we can't just hack our way out of policy problems. But _one_ avenue of resistance to bad policy is technology.

<comment><USER17> Street maps? Kind of service their customers asked to buy? They don't know anything about why you're browsing but they know what kind of service you're buying from them because you told them. OK you could buy the basic corporate package because you like the download speeds and then just use it as a consumer to watch multiple cat videos at once, but most people aren't going to pay extra for the business package. It's like lying to political pollsters, a few people do it but not enough to invalidate the basic methodology of polling.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Navy slaps drinking ban on 18,600 sailors in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-navy-idUSKCN0YS0CL <comment><USER2> I imagine part of the point is the loss of revenue at local businesses as sailors, contractors and dependents stop spending. "Kick us out of Okinawa, or Japan as a whole? OK, but our money goes with us."</comment>


China Became Capitalist - <AUTHOR> https://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2013/how-china-became-capitalist <comment><USER2> This is dated seven years ago 2013, mod please add a date tag.</comment>


Are you seeing "Gift Card Rebel" spam everywhere on YouTube? - <AUTHOR> http://symmetrycode.com/gift-cards-rebel-everywhere-youtube/ <comment><USER2> Hey, I have a rewarding app and we deal with this all the time. I know exactly what he is doing and I'm going to make a video about it. Thanks for the information! @uentoapp</comment>


IGN Acquired by Ziff Davis - <AUTHOR> http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/04/ign-parent-company-changes <comment><USER2> Nearly all the talent at 1UP left to work in the games industry long ago, but Jeremy Parish is still there and has been there throughout all the selling and buying. Must be odd for him to be back at Ziff again.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great example of a cyclical industry. Ziff-Davis buys 1UP and other sites and then hits a wall with its debt load. After the bankruptcy, liquidates and sells 1UP to UGO. UGO is sold to IGN/News Corp. Ziff Davis brand is recapitalized without the debt, buys 1UP and the rest back. The long standing brands never really die, they are just recycled.

<comment><USER4> Actually, most media brands in the games industry are long dead and were left there to rot, without the assets even being sold. Look at EGM, GamePro, Computer Gaming World, Official Xbox Magazine.

Hopefully, none of these acquired sites will be shit canned, but sadly, Ziff is well known for destroying things.

<comment><USER5> EGM, CGW, XBoxNation (and maybe a few others) were rolled into 1up.com. I worked on the original 1UP.com site in NYC (classic ASP and Vignette!) prior to it being moved out to San Fran.

<comment><USER4> Yeah... "Rolled Up."

You mean Scooter and Sam? Cause that's the only thing I can think of that made the transition from magazine to 1up. I worked there too... They kept Scooter and Sam. Sam eventually left anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yay, a company that quite deliberately spams HN bought another website. Can't wait to see the same handful of accounts submitting ign.com alongside extremetech, pcmag and geek!

<comment><USER7> I can't recall the last time I saw an IGN story here, and I visit this site a few times a day.

<comment><USER6> Ziff Davis had/has a half a dozen employee shill accounts at different times for extremetech.com, geek.com and pcmag.com.

This is a great illustration another HN user (DanBC) put together:

<http://imgur.com/a/EfzHB>

They have almost no natural submissions to HN.

<comment><USER7> To be honest, those accounts in those pics don't convince me of anything. Most of the frequent posters from those domains post plenty of other links to other sites. They were created years apart. Two of them seem to post extremetech.com and/or geek.com exclusively, but posts are 5-10 days apart.

Isn't it a lot more likely that these are simply people who happen to read enough of those particular sites and post to HN to turn up on in a chart like this?

There's not enough data points to point to any kind of concerted effort by these sites over the span of years.

And even _if_ that were the case. Suppose someone affiliated with these sites is posting 1-2 links a week, that's hardly flooding the system. There's still the voting system, right? Good articles float towards the top. The new submissions page isn't jam packed with dozens of articles a day from these sites, is it?

<comment><USER6> ukdm and russellholly are this guy: <https://plus.google.com/106631699076927387965>

<http://www.geek.com/users/rholly/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly>

mrsebastian is this guy:

<http://www.extremetech.com/author/santhony>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian>

maxko87 is an unknown who ran an autosubmitter for two sites one of which happened to be extremetech, till he got hellbanned:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maxko87>

adeelarshad82 is their social media marketing guy:

<http://www.linkedin.com/in/adeelarshad82>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82>

Then there's these guys who _really_ love ziff davis properties:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=memoryfailure>

And this guy who just likes them a lot of the time, he may just be a regular karma whore if that is a real thing.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9>

That accounts for almost all Ziff Davis submissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't worry, 9/10 reviews are still available for the bargain price of one pre-release copy of the game.</comment>


What Every Developer Should Know About URLs - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should-know-about-urls/? <comment><USER2> The // part isn't required for every scheme as the article implies. For example, tel:5555555555 is perfectly acceptable.

The two slashes are even now considered a bad design decision originally: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8306631.stm>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the // isn't part of the scheme, it's part of the authority.

That BBC article doesn't say _why_ "net users" find them annoying. I like the double slashes (or at least some unique separator of the scheme from the hostname and designates where the hostname starts), since it allows building of useful relative URLs, as mentioned in the OA. As an example, not covered in the examples in the article, you don't need to serve different CSS files for secure and insecure content when you serve media assets from another domain which is also available via both http and https.

The CSS

       background-image: url(//media.example.com/image.png)

can be used on both HTTP and HTTPS served pages and the browser will resolve that relative URL by filling in the protocol from the base document. Without the double slashes, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between a relative path and a relative URL. If I remember correctly, a scheme change on the same hostname but with a different path like:

      base document:  http://example.com/some/path
      relative URL:   https:/some/other/path

is possible too (I wonder how the parsing should work with port numbers, if they can be relative too -- I have not read the RFC in a while, and it's such a rare thing to use port numbers anyway).

Double slashes (well, backslashes) is how Microsoft/CIFS originally designated server names in UNC paths, which I think may have been around before URLs were standardized (don't quote me on that, they're most likely roughly the same age and influenced each other). This is also why the file: scheme "requires" _three_ leading slashes, as the "host" is empty to designate the local machine -- but you could put in a hostname to access network shares (I put "requires" in quotes because file has always had some ambiguities in the parsing implementations).

I find it annoying when people read addresses and call them "backslashes". Talk about wasting time and energy, that's a whole additional syllable said for every path component in a URL!

<comment><USER4> These tricks by combining parts of URLs to do relative linking on scheme, host, etc. are little known but useful; I was expecting them to show up in the article.

Going back to the debate over Chrome's potential dropping of "<http://> in the address bar, if they were to use "//" instead they would have an argument for technical correctness because the default protocol of "http:" could be assumed. But having no leading "//" visually confuses it with a relative path omitting the host, because it breaks the signifier for the authority component of the URL. Just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any web developers here who didn't know these things? Are there any developers of any type who didn't? I'm not sure who the audience for this article is meant to be but I'm guessing you won't find too many of them here.

<comment><USER6> I never knew about params, I know a few people who didnt know things like fragments dont get sent to the server, everyone gets encoding wrong at some point, and I know a lot of people dont really know how the base tags work

Cheers for the article, handy quick reference.

<comment><USER7> I didn't either - in path params seems like an interesting way to address issues that can come up when devising RESTful URL schemes (rather than relying on query params only).

<comment><USER8> For fucks sake, there is _no such thing_ as a RESTful URL scheme. 'Pretty' URLs are a major anti-pattern -- they not only don't make you any more RESTful, they actively undermine HATEOAS, which is the true signifier of RESTfulness.

Actual REST treats URL strings (including query parameters) as being completely opaque implementation details. The server is supposed to respond with URLs in the hypertext -- you're _never_ supposed to be formatting them yourself client-side using out of band knowledge. Query parameters are no exception to that: if you want the client to pass them, give the client a form in the response.

If you're expecting a client to munge together "path components" based on foreknowledge of your data model, _you're doing it wrong_.

<comment><USER9> Any chance you have articles to back this up? Not that I doubt you, but I've never really understood or looked into all this REST business and if I'm ever going to do so, I'd like to learn what being RESTful really means --- and not just jumping on what sounds like a bandwagon for 'Pretty URLs' as you mentioned. :)

<comment><USER10> <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No mention of non-ASCII characters at all? Punycode in the host name may still be uncommon, but passing non-ASCII in the query is important. There is also nothing about the encoding of space as + rather than %20 that happens a lot.

<comment><USER12> note, however, that encoding a space as a + is supposed to happen only in the query portion of the url, not the path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did this guy just paraphrase the RFC? It's a lot of work, but if it gets you on HN...

<comment><USER14> I suspect that there're a lot of RFCs and W3C specs that could be paraphrased and get you on HN.

How many web developers _actually_ know HTML, for example? In a few discussions here and on Reddit, it seemed like well over 80% did not realize that <!doctype html> is a valid doctype, or that you do not need to close many common tags.

<comment><USER8> I place all the blame for the cargo-cult validation-seeking know-nothing standardistas squarely on the shoulders of Jeffery Zeldman.

If it wasn't for his ignorant boosterism, we probably could have euthanized XHTML a long time ago.

<comment><USER15> If it wasn't for his boosterism, we'd probably still be writing HTML for specific browsers and versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For extra credit explain how to encode an IPv6 address in a URL without getting it mixed up with the port.

<comment><USER17> By putting it inside of square brackets.

[2001:db8::a00:20ff:fea7:ccea]:80

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In general, I am not a big fan of the father-knows-best narrative "What Every Developer _Should_ Know".

Thanks, pa. All I needed from you was an "atta-boy!". _sigh_</comment>


When it comes to Windows 10 privacy, don't trust amateur analysts - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-it-comes-to-windows-10-privacy-dont-trust-amateur-analysts/ <comment><USER2> Dear Mr Ed Bott

For your information, HTTP(S) can be used to send data, not only to receive it. See this weird stuff called POST, which is actually part of the HTTP protocol, is used mainly to send data to the server.

So we can't discard all these HTTP connections as non-tracking.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also don't trust Microsoft.</comment>


Master AngularJS and the JavaScript concepts behind it - <AUTHOR> http://indepthtech.tumblr.com/post/116915187619/learn-and-understand-angularjs-udemy

<comment><USER2> for $112 only!</comment>


Microsoft is killing the Nokia and Windows Phone brands - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/10/6131695/microsoft-is-killing-the-nokia-and-windows-phone-brands <comment><USER2> Nokia employee here.

Microsoft doesn't have a choice whether they want to "kill the Nokia brand" (that is, remove it from Lumia handsets). They have to. It's part of the terms of the sale of the Devices division.

It's our brand and we'd like it back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Correction: They're going to keep doing exactly what they were doing before except instead of saying "Windows Phone" they're going to just say "Windows" and they aren't going to say "Nokia" anymore.

Not news.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, you'd have to pretty damn high on marketing kool-aid to think that dropping the "Phone" from the brand name is somehow a Big Thing.

<comment><USER5> I think the Big Thing is not the naming itself, but what is being signaled by it.

If Microsoft can actually pull it off, I think a single OS that works well enough on all form factors could be awesome. I imagine writing native apps that are responsive like the web apps we have today.

(I'll never use or endorse it if I can't side-load apps though! There's no way I'm moving into any kind of walled-garden.)

<comment><USER6> Calling 2 different things the same thing does not change that they are different things.

<comment> at-fates-hands Unless you're not referring to the things at all - but a convergent platform.

Huge difference. The only issue is getting consumers to buy in on the idea.

<comment><USER6> "convergent platform" is just buzz-speak. What I said before is still true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Nokia smartphone brand reverts to Finland's Nokia in early 2016, [http://seekingalpha.com/article/1679612-a-glimmer-of-hope- fo...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/1679612-a-glimmer-of-hope-for-a-nokia- comeback-as-a-smartphone-producer-in-2016)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a very Microsoft move to drop the word which is what the product is and keep the word which is a UX element the product does not have.

I get it as a pure branding exercise if you just think about what Microsoft brands have equity and history, but it still strikes me as funny in terms of what the words actually mean.

<comment><USER9> As a pure branding exercise it seems like an insane, sycophantic, shortsighted move.

Having all your products share exactly the same brand accomplishes two things: Customers get confused, and any one of your products has the ability to do serious harm to the reputation of all of your products.

<comment><USER10> > Having all your products share exactly the same brand accomplishes two > things

Except they're not. "Windows" is the OS, "Lumia" is the phone.

I see it as unifying it under a common name. Windows from phone to PC to server, it's familiar. Hence why no more "Windows RT". It's all Windows. The only difference is in the server line, it's "Windows Server 2012", but that's a different market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Microsoft continues to fail miserably on one very important front: Marketing

If I were in charge I'd fire the ENTIRE marketing department and start fresh. They have lost the tangible sense you need in order to understand your customers and communicate with them. Much like when UPS decided to almost ruin a brand recognized world over by launching a campaign that re-branded them as "brown". What an absolutely clueless move!

Microsoft examples abound. From commercials with people dancing around a table snapping magnetic keyboards on and off a device to "Cortana" (WTF!), a name only a mother could love and want to say all day long.

I am disappointed because they have a lot to offer. They just don't seem to have a clue as to how to make the right decisions any more. Please fire everyone and hire me as your benevolent dictator. Almost anyone could do better.

<comment><USER12> To riff off that:

.net - A bad name and it was impossible to search for information in the early days.

SkyDrive - Great name...but oops already trademarked.

Live.com - Makes no sense.

Bing.com - See Live.com.

<comment><USER13> Does "ebay" or "amazon" or "google" make sense?

<comment><USER14> At least for ebay and google, these names held no previous definition. Live, bing and amazon are all words that meant something before they became brand names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "All this recent evidence led us to speculate whether Microsoft is simply planning to just use Windows for its brand in the future, and that appears to be the case"

Is speculation really necessary? Microsoft seems to have publicly announced "One Windows." And for those not really following Windows Phone and Threshold (Windows 9), the future seems to be an OS that adapts to the device you're on. If you're on a phone, a Phone app appears, large enough screen, the desktop becomes available, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Much more interesting is to speculate if and when the old Nokia releases a new phone, say an Android model. There is probably contractual "rusty handcuffs" period of 2-4 years that prevents it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have skunkworks projects already. Of course, a lot of factories and supply chains are gone, but know-how and contact networks would make it possible to bootstrap it again.

<comment><USER7> A Jolla speculator, [http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small- print-t...](http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small-print-three- ways-nokia-can.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This smells a bit of a slighty dangerous throwback to the "windows everywhere" days where Microsoft tied everything into Windows. It makes me wonder if they understand that the Windows brand itself is a liability moving forward. Nokia had the same problem - just like "Nokia" had become synonymous with "dumb phone" in the consumer's mind, so too has Windows become associated with "legacy business computer at work that I hate". I feel that if Microsoft wants to succeed they need to chart a future that succeeds without being chained to something with such strong associations in people's minds - even for those for whom it is a good association, _it is the wrong association_.

</comment><comment><USER18> Surface. Xbox. Windows.

Those three should be the _only_ brand ids, and long term I would start replacing the Windows brand with the Surface brand.

<comment><USER19> I don't understand the surface branding either. When I hear Microsoft Surface I still think of those table tops.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. The only reason the used that for the tablet's is because they couldn't really sell Surface and ended up reusing some of that tech/team in the tablet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some reason for the past week I have this itch to switch completely to Apple! Starting with the new iPhone I will be dropping my windows phone. Followed by an iPad to replace the Surface v1 (big fail!). Already own a macbook pro with Windows, so I will simply switch over to OS X. Dropping C# in favor of NodeJS/Yeoman/Sails.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really wonder what would have happened if Nokia had jumped onto Android early.

Sad day.

<comment><USER22> Or put more effort into Meego - which actually was a very good OS, and the N9 which was a great product. Adopting Windows phone was the nail in the coffin...

<comment><USER23> I think that adopting Windows phone came with a pile of money, so it's hard to weigh the pros and cons without more information.

<comment><USER22> At the time Nokia already had a pile of money.

The N9 was highly anticipated, and IMO, a resounding success. But the fact Stephen Elop said it would be the first, last, and only Meego device made it DOA. And of course, the Windows phones weren't well received...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now, just make the phones Surface phones and they'll be some coherent branding around their mobile efforts.

<comment><USER20> Good idea, but it doesn't roll as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> And Windows Phone was never to be heard from again (in whichever way you want to take it).

</comment><comment><USER26> "In fact, Microsoft refers to Windows Phone simply as Windows."

What?

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey, why don't they call it the Kin? Or PocketPC? </sarcasm></comment>


Facebook News: Protecting the EU Elections From Misinformation - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/protecting-eu-elections-from-misinformation/ <comment><USER2> FB started with snopes, which is a very well known left-leaning liberal biased 'fact finder' who in Feb stopped doing this for FB. I dont know about these others, but if anyone trys to get 'facts' from FB, you're doing it wrong. </rant> Thank you, and have a great day!</comment>


Overview of vulnerabilities in web applications - <AUTHOR> https://lchsk.com/stay-paranoid-and-trust-no-one-overview-of-common-security-vulnerabilities-in-web-applications.html <comment><USER2> Interested in data on real world impact from these attack vectors? Hackerone has public data on how often they reward each type: [https://www.hackerone.com/blog/hackerone-top-10-most- impactf...](https://www.hackerone.com/blog/hackerone-top-10-most-impactful- and-rewarded-vulnerability-types) . You can also browse through findings in Hackerone's hacktivity: [https://hackerone.com/hacktivity](https://hackerone.com/hacktivity) . I run a project where we try and connect the dots between breaches and the how and why they happened: [https://ericalexander.org/SecurityBreach/](https://ericalexander.org/SecurityBreach/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this uses Django for examples and mentions Bandit as an automated option for finding vulnerabilities, are there any others that people would recommend?

</comment><comment><USER4> I always thought a lot of the biggest hacks were done by insiders, or with insider information. I know there's a lot you can hunt for out there. But being part of the team that built something of interest, knowing what is exploitable, could be a big temptation.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what you mean by "biggest", but in my experience the most common cause is lax security practices, mainly not performing security updates quickly enough. A business doesn't want to spend extra on website maintenance, so sites get neglected, sometimes for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another resource I'd recommend is OWASP's lists, their top 10 is a good starting place:

[https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/](https://owasp.org/www-project-top- ten/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great info, I'm especially stoked Django was used for the examples.</comment>


Google is gagging user advocates - <AUTHOR> http://infotrope.net/2011/07/29/google-is-gagging-employees/

<comment><USER2> The title should be clear that the advocate or advocates in question here are Google employees. That doesn't make any gag right, but it is _vital_ context.

<comment><USER3> And it should also be clear that it's not even clear any gag orders have occurred. The entire evidence to support this thesis is:

> @Skud: ok, unless someone tells me otherwise, it looks like google employees > who don't support the names policy have been gagged. #nymwars

> @Skud: @lizthegrey this is your chance to tell me i'm wrong, btw.

Somebody not responding to your tweet is hardly proof employees are being gagged. Here's one idea: maybe Liz doesn't want to be the center of attention on this anymore.

<comment><USER4> Maybe I misread this, but this seemed the basis for assuming it was a gag order:

> _On July 25th (four days ago) she stopped posting on the subject altogether. > Looking at her stream, though, I see that she did post, without any comment, > a link to a Wikipedia article talking about gag orders._

Further, the poster says liz is a friend, so it seems likely they'd get _some_ response to a direct question if she wasn't gagged.

<comment><USER5> Maybe she just got tired of discussing this subject, as opposed to the author who seems to be on a crusade.

<comment><USER6> She posted 46 articles on the subject in less than a month. If you don't call that a crusade, I don't know what is.

Of course, if you're suggesting that she simply got burnt out, that's a possibility. I could understand decreasing the number of essays written on the subject, but responding to a tweet seems like something that she'd do, given her previous crusade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this is related to Steve Yegge standing up in front of the entire Internet and saying that Google+ is a huge waste of time. That happened on the 25th as well, and could easily have annoyed a VP to the point of prohibiting negative comments by Google employees.

</comment><comment><USER8> What a ridiculous mess. It would not surprise me if it's come to this. When all else fails, whip out the lawyercats.

How much will it take to make people quit(quitquit)?

<comment><USER9> I'd be surprised if lawyers were involved, even if the 'gag' description is accurate. The most likely 'gag' would probably just the woman's boss pulling her aside and saying "you can say anything you want internally, but when you badmouth the company in public you are hurting the company".

I mean we really have no idea, but it seems far far more likely something like that occurred than Google sending a formal C&D to one of it's own employees.

<comment><USER8> One might say that being evil is hurting the company more, especially when knowledgeable employees quit rather than being associated with such actions. People who push back on such things actually care about the company they joined, not the company it has become.

<comment><USER10> so offering a web service, any web service -- that requires using real names is _evil_. Now and forever. Is that right?

Are you sure it's not just a service that some people won't want to use, because of this design decision? Or is it fundamentally evil to offer a web service some people might not want to use?

I have no argument whatsoever that services should not exist that not only allow pseudonyms but where pseudonyms are embraced and expected. I love many of these services, and would defend their right to exist to no end.

But I do not even remotely understand what seems to be a prevailing argument here that there must _not_ exist any service based on real names.

All of the argument in favor of pseudonym is really an argument in favor of those types of services existing -- which they do, in spades. Millions of them. No one is, or has, killed anonymous or pseudonymous interaction on the web. No one is, or has, hindered the ability of a person seeking such cover from the ability to publish anything on the web and to be found.

Its an additional service offering, its not a subtraction of what already exists (rampant, multitudinous options for anonymous and pseudonymous posting which can and are being used by folks seeking avenues for anonymous and pseudonymous posting and sharing and community building).

<comment><USER8> Offering a web service and ignoring the pleas of those who know a minefield when they see one is evil. Launching it anyway despite unprecedented pushback is evil. Pretending it's somehow new and unexpected, like wow, we didn't think anyone would care... is evil.

Also, right now, you're right, this doesn't matter. You can just ignore their dumb little toy and go on with life. Trouble is, future services are planned to be integrated. That means you either suck it up and create a profile (thus running into the Real Name fiasco) or opt out of anything which needs one.

Using one thing to force people to do another thing. Where have we seen this before?

If you're inside the company and you care about this stuff, you're probably freaking out because it reflects on you, too.

From a business perspective outside of the company, it's brilliant. It means there will be a lot of people looking for alternative ways to do things where they were previously relying on the big G since it was good enough. I guess I should just shut up and let them keep digging that hole. It'll mean more business for the rest of us.

<comment><USER10> "Offering a web service and ignoring the pleas of those who know a minefield when they see one is evil. Launching it anyway despite unprecedented pushback is evil. Pretending it's somehow new and unexpected, like wow, we didn't think anyone would care... is evil."

You and I have dramatically different definitions of evil. Basically you are saying that yes, launching a service that some people, in your eyes (or in someone's) will not like, is evil. Pretty narrow little circle of goodness you've left yourself with, one that likely encompasses nothing.

"Using one thing to force people to do another thing. Where have we seen this before?"

Except there exists no force.

"From a business perspective outside of the company, it's brilliant. It means there will be a lot of people looking for alternative ways to do things where they were previously relying on the big G since it was good enough. I guess I should just shut up and let them keep digging that hole. It'll mean more business for the rest of us."

That is why anonymous and pseudonymous activity will exist and thrive as it always has, because there is a market for it.

Funnily enough that also roughly describes the effect Facebook is having on the broader web, in many ways. Hundreds of millions of people prefer the safe confines of Facebook to the broader web. They have found it to be the better alternative way to do things. Apparently, there is a very strong consumer demand for that market, as well. Real names is not a hindrance to Facebooks success with _that specific market_ , it is central to it. Facebook is not a small community.

What your argument boils down to -- is that Google is both stupid and evil for wanting to serve both markets, to have two types of services. EVIL, mind you.

It just seems an odd criticism that is far over-the-top, relative to the actual situation of offering a web service to compete for a market that is obviously huge, in demand, and dramatically underserved (choice of 1 real name social network, basically, vs in essense hundreds of thousands of anonymous networks).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sounds like a classic conspiracy theory. How exactly could Google defend itself, even if it wanted to?

Citizen: The government is dissecting aliens!

Government: Uh, no we're not.

Citizen: Further proof that you are!

This sounds a lot like that.

</comment><comment><USER12> That they would do that to Liz is ... disappointing. (Otherwise biting tongue, for her sake.)

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't take this article seriously. That page and this post/article/whatever is a mess. It's like I'm reading forwarded emails from my mom.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google+ on its present trajectory is headed to the deadpool.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like Google and I really hope this isn't true.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would imagine a large part of this is that if someone launches a lawsuit, anything said will be twisted into an admission of guilt or at least knowledge of the offense.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is getting silly and borderline paranoid. I think this whole pseudonym thing is an overreaction, and an unfair criticism to an incomplete project.

As for the this 'gag' stuff she offers no proof and seems like she is just conveniently picking narrative to complement her disapproval.

Just let it go already.

<comment><USER17> Well, the pseudonym thing was a valid complaint, and it is a genuine issue for some people.

Though I don't think it's an issue that deserves the sort of day-after-day- after-day-after-day-after-day-after-day nonstop coverage it's getting. It's a minor-ish problem some people have with a new product or service, though, and for some reason the tech press loves to latch onto those and make them into OMG ONLY THE BIGGEST PROBLEM EVAR (see: "antennagate").

<comment><USER18> Though even there, the difference between this and "antennagate" was that Apple shipped a finished product. Google+ is decidedly in field test beta (and did not cost $200-$600).</comment></comment></comment>


Are new "minimalist" cell phones really an alternative to smartphones? - <AUTHOR> https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/are-minimalist-cellphones-the-antidote-to-an-always-connected-way-of-life/ <comment><USER2> Except talking on the phone is the last thing I want to do on a phone. Phone calls for me are reserved for only the most important or critical situations and people. I hate the immediate interruption of someone calling unexpectedly.</comment>


Why Intel will never let owners control the ME - <AUTHOR> https://www.devever.net/~hl/intelme <comment><USER2> It's incredible how much effort and money has gone down this drain, chasing the fundamentally flawed idea of DRM. All to satisfy some inflated management egos and sell snake oil to the content industry - the enginners implementing these schemes must surely realize it's in vain, that the attack surface includes all devices in the world and all it takes is a single successful hack against a single device to decrypt the content after which it's game over.

And the consumer is paying for all of this security theater.

<comment><AUTHOR> The really horrible truth is, DRM was probably never intended to prevent piracy. I used to think this - then you realise what DRM is actually intended to do. So long as we argue like this, we're not confronting the real motives.

There seem to be two arguments for DRM which could be considered logical from an executive's perspective (even if in my view unethical):

\- Firstly, it delays the initial piracy of new releases. This is very variable and since new DRM systems aren't created as often as new films, this only seems to be successfully pulled off every now and then... but there have demonstrably been cases of it delaying piracy by a few weeks (hell, there's at least one video game which wasn't cracked for over a year). This probably feels valuable to executives who expect the bulk of returns on a film or video game to come immediately after release (especially if they have unrealistic expectations about correlations between piracy and lost sales).

\- Secondly, and more significantly, it ensures that media companies can control how content is consumed, and control the devices available to consume content. If you want to make a Blu-ray player, you have to sign contracts, and those contracts can tell you what functionality to add and what not to add. "Unauthorized" players, circumvention technology will always exist for the fringes, but that's too minor to care about. What it does mean - in tandem with the anticircumvention technology ban legislation, 17 USC 1202 - is that you can't walk into a retail chain store and buy a Blu-ray player that'll happily make copies, or so on. Most likely this is what these companies really care about - ensuring they have a say on what Homer Simpson has to choose from in Best Buy.

To be clear, I unequivocally oppose DRM; but I suspect the above points are a closer approximation of the motives of the media industry in pushing it.

<comment><USER3> Moreover, DRM enables content industry to control _where_ content can be played, known as geoblocking. For example, I live in North Europe, and the titles that are available in 'official', DRM-controlled sources, such as Netflix, are noticeably different than in North America. Maybe Netflix only has distribution rights for some title in the US market, so when I try to look it up the search comes back empty.

What DRM allows Netflix is to still sell one and the same subscription globally. The content you can view is _not_ tied to your account's registered post address or such, but which physical region of the Internet you are actually accessing the service from currently. When we were visiting the US, my spouse was able to play titles with her Netflix subscription that are not available at home, because she was connecting to the US DRM servers from the WiFi of our Airbnb in California.

For our flight home, she put her phone in flight mode and was able to watch cached titles during the flight. But as soon as she turned on her data in Europe, the titles magically disappeared in thin air, as the EU DRM server realized the geoblocking violation and revoked her license to those titles.

<comment><USER4> Geoblocking is entirely different from DRM. The former is a simple transaction of "Show me your IP" -> "You can't have this". DRM is a far more complicated thing that needs cooperation from all levels of the stack to enable, "Your computer can see this, but you, the user, can't".

<comment><USER3> Yes, but combining DRM and geoblocking allows the content distributor to _retroactively_ revoke access to content when you change the geoblocking region, such as traveling to another continent. Even content that you have downloaded to an offline cache can be rendered unavailable. From the distributor's point of view combining the two offers an enhanced form of geoblocking that transcends time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If disabling ME would only prevent me from watching Ultra-HD Blu-rays, which I don't watch, I'll disable ME immediately if I only could.

That won't breach any obvious contractual obligations of Intel/AMD with Hollywood.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not the issue. You can already disable pretty much all of the ME's functions post-boot with HAP and me_cleaner. But for people who take an interest in fully-open source firmware (coreboot, libreboot), it would be nice to be able to replace the ME firmware with something open source. But this is impossible because the hardware will only run Intel-signed blobs. By "owner control", I mean the freedom to run whatever you like on the ME. It's likely that Intel is not only unwilling, but contractually precluded from letting people do so, for the reasons I gave. Hence the claim that Intel will never let people control what runs on the ME.

<comment><USER6> The reasoning presented by this article is very "conspiracy-style". The arguments revolve around GPUs which are a more natural fit for DRM mechanisms: they display the image, and are more apt at decoding/encoding that protected stream than the CPU.

But using ME for DRM in the near future is highly unlikely since it would just be a boon for ARM based systems. With CPUs that can be designed and sold at far lower cost (and performance) by manufacturers that are willing to forego such lunacies as DRM embedded in x86 CPUs and get a foothold in the market. And x86 already feels past its prime given that many usage scenarios already migrated to ARM devices.

At some point the CPU, GPU, and a hypothetical VPU might share the same die in a heterogeneous chip, and this might include such DRM protection for the reasons GPUs have them now. But the x86 CPU part having built-in DRM? I'm not buying it without someone making a better case than this article.

The ME is just Intel's pi*s-poor attempt at securing the system. But it's mostly security through obscurity so basically almost none at all. The more "conspiracy" version is that it serves specifically as a back door for certain agency type actors. Which is not unlikely.

But the more obvious reason is that at this point opening it up is no longer an option. It would mean opening the door widely to an avalanche of exploits capable of hitting systems 12 years back. Something that would make Meltdown/Spectre look tame since there is no OS fix for ME. Also, in Intel's vision letting you control the ME is like giving you the keys to the kingdom. They can't admit to themselves that the ME is not a locked gate, it's a moat. And if you're willing to get dirty you will get through it.

<comment><USER7> The ME has in fact been used for video DRM for a long time; Google for Intel PAVP (Protected Audio-Video Path).

<comment><USER6> The important fact being that it only applied to the Intel iGPU. You also had the option to disable that and the HW decoding with the iGPU was also disabled.

The successor is called Intel Insider and it's still aimed at the GPU. Basically it's there to make sure the stream goes to the GPU (which has DRM) to be decrypted not to the CPU. That's because nobody was "courageous" enough until now to put the DRM label on a CPU.

[https://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_- _w...](https://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_- _what_is_it_no/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There should be a market for business desktops which don't have the ME, and don't have the keys for decrypting paid video content. You don't need your employees watching movies on their work machine, and the security is better.

</comment><comment><USER9> The one you want [https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html](https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html)

Open source and toolchain and access and validation turtles all the way down [https://git.raptorcs.com/git/](https://git.raptorcs.com/git/)

<comment><USER10> For others that didn't notice this new and somewhat less expensive version come out, here's the HN thread from 2 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124593)

<comment><USER11> _> somewhat less expensive_

Only in the sense that the Atlantic Ocean has "somewhat less water" than the Pacific. :-) Over $4K for a "desktop development system". That's not personal computing. That's small scale enterprise computing, which is too small a market to make a dent in Intel and AMD. Their prices need to come down by an order of magnitude to make this technology a significant player.

<comment><USER9> Huh? It's under $2k for a daily drivable config. $1600 if you are willing to do a 2.1 rev chip without HW speculative execution mitigations and some other errata.

<comment><USER11> _> It's under $2k for a daily drivable config._

Which config are you talking about?

<comment><USER9> Check the link in my original post and the child comment. You can buy DDR4-R and NVMe cheaply from places like Superbiiz.

Here is the special DD2.1 box [https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS1/intro.html](https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS1/intro.html) for $1600.

<comment><USER11> With a "starter CPU" that doesn't support virtualization, so realistically you're paying another $375 for a CPU upgrade. Still quite a bit closer to a useful price point, though. Thanks for the link!

<comment><USER9> You state this as if I didn't so I'm confused by that :S. Regardless it is possible to do a full build for under $2k, especially if you have any resuable parts like case/psu/nvme.

<comment><USER11> _> You state this as if I didn't_

You mentioned the base CPU not having HW speculative execution mitigations (which I also would consider worth a CPU upgrade to get), but not having virtualization is a much bigger limitation, in my view, and you didn't mention that, so I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there is a huge architectural philosophy divide here. Some think ME has it's place if done right,but surely many would agree with me when saying _all_ of ME's functionality should be implemented by the OS. ring -1 should not exist. Period.

<comment><USER13> > many would agree with me when saying all of ME's functionality should be > implemented by the OS.

ME's use case is to be able to manage the machine when there is _no_ OS installed, is unbootable or unresponsive. So somebody doesn't have to physically visit a datacenter and find the machine in a rack.

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

<comment><USER12> Right,what is needed is a management OS(think efi-like). Also,kvm+ipmi[1] is used for that mostly,not ME.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Managem...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Management_Interface)

<comment><USER14> So ME isn't a cheap on-chip version of ipmi then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, the definition of a feature only required for a _single_ application (playback), and unwanted by consumers at that. This _clearly_ did not belong in any general-purpose processor (if it should have been built at all).

You know, if movie and recording studios want this so badly, let them put up the _billions_ it should require for them to produce their own coprocessor.

</comment><comment><USER16> The question I always have about this is, why has nobody tried to make the case that this is illegal? ESR has suggested that the selling of routers with closed-source firmware ought to be regarded as the tort of conversion; this is a similar but stronger case.

<comment><USER17> Maybe because not enough engineers have lawyer friends that understand technology well enough to listen to us complain about all this dumb shit we have to deal with. We all need to make more lawyer friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a supporting link from Intel's blog in 2011 that they are DRMing for Hollywood:

[https://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_- _w...](https://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_- _what_is_it_no/)

</comment><comment><USER19> At least one company is developing "a solid approach on how to run a freed Intel ME": [https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/](https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/)

<comment><USER20> That's not anything different from the described HAP bit and removal of unneeded modules. You still have 10% of the ME left and required to boot, on top of the BSP, which is also 'secret'.

<comment><USER17> Yep, we need new silicon designs, new fabs, and a new corporate structure that isn't as susceptible to this type of corruption.

<comment><USER21> Well, according to the linked post to Phoronix, the POWER9 architecture is not produced for OEM PC market requirements so it doesn't have do oblige Hollywood non-negotiable DRM requirements.

Did I understood right? Until now I thought the only option was using pre 2008 Intel (and same era AMD?) CPUs or some Atom models...

<comment><USER20> And then there is some ARM and RISC-V, those could become viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So the author is claiming that the main reason why ME exists is DRM.

I can see it being one of the reasons but it is also a pretty good anti-theft system if you look at it naively.

And I haven't seen a laptop with a CD tray for at least 7 years. Who is playing these bluray discs in their laptop?

<comment><USER23> Intel also benefits from ME in many many ways, I'm sure. Like obviously it is a massive value add to their Enterprise customers.

However, I think the argument in the article still holds water, not because Blu-ray matters, but because nobody had any idea it wouldn't. CPU and GPU manufacturers probably have extremely long contracts to implement and obscure DRM features, fueled in part by Hollywood's sore feelings from the DVD Jon days.

Of course Netflix and Hulu and so forth happened and whoops, laptops got thin and stopped having optical drives and oops, Samsung added streaming services to their TVs... And now Bluray and it's assinine security schemes hardly matter. Hollywood didn't adapt well to this new streaming world so I'll bet they didn't see it coming either.

Of course the threats not over. Next generation we'll probably see even more insane copyright protection coming out of Hollywood for the sake of protecting services like Netflix as a contractual obligation if they want to carry the hot new garbage. I'm particularly excited to see what happens with stuff like Intel SGX.

This will probably continue for the next couple decades until a set of realizations finally become too apparent to ignore. After all, the pirates torrenting the latest Game of Thrones don't need Intel SGX or HDCP. They just click play.

But the more delusional and out of touch the industry is, the longer it takes. Video game DRM may not be a solved problem but even the absolute worst protection available today is so much less hostile than what we were dealing with a decade ago that it hardly matters. Hell, nowadays with PC games, anticheat is the more invasive technology. Modern invasive DRM mostly just phones home to get some crypto keys and to try to limit a single license from being spread to the entire internet. It may seem anticonsumer, but it's the worst there is, and it's very telling that gamers seem more concerned about tracking technology than middleware like Denuvo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't assume that hardware-level DRM will go away with the death of optical media. As I understand it, the media industry seems to have adopted a standard position that UHD/4K content should require hardware-level DRM. UHD Blu-rays require this sort of thing, but also UHD streams on Netflix; for this reason at least at one point UHD Netflix was restricted to Chromebooks only. Not sure if this is still the case; I'd expect Google's Widevine to get Intel DRM support if it hasn't got it already.

You might want to look at Widevine's website; there's a small amount of information on the security levels. Essentially, there seem to be two levels of Widevine; what I'd describe as the placebo level (just obfuscated data processing within the browser, etc.) that might be used for e.g. HD Netflix, and the toxic-waste level which expects hardware-level DRM, which industry appears to be demanding as a minimum standard for UHD content. Consumer demand for UHD Netflix will continue to drive adoption of hardware-level DRM for the time being, it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a large part of why I find myself continually eyeing those TALOS OpenPower9 systems.

</comment><comment><USER25> One technology breakthrough for ARM over x86(which has little room left for improvement at this point), could be a watershed moment for the chip manufacturers

<comment><USER26> This stuff doesn't exist because of a particular vendor or ISA; it's a mainstream feature for modern application platforms. Many ARM systems achieve similar ends through a kind of hypervisor / shadow OS that can't readily be disabled by the device owner [1].

[1] [https://www.arm.com/products/security-on- arm/trustzone](https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone)

<comment><USER27> DRM schemes are explicitly listed and talked about as one of the 3 applications of TrustZone in the official docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So the article is portraying 4k blu-ray as the _raison d 'être_ for Intel ME on consumer devices, but isn't for example Netflix HD which uses HDCP 2.2 somehow also tied to a trusted execution environment within Intel CPUs, or is this method of protection only via the display and the graphics chip (sometimes also by Intel; on the motherboard)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The ME-based DRM provided by Intel isn't inherently limited to securing UHD Blu-rays, and you can expect Google's Widevine, as used by Netflix, to consume this functionality as well.

My understanding is that the industry has decided that UHD/4K content should require hardware-level DRM, no matter whether on disc or streamed, and that Netflix UHD requires a system with this functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The thing we need now is a version of the GDPR for hardware and software. A law that says that non-essential features mustn't be inseparably bundled with essential system features so the user can disable them without killing the system. Just like the GDPR did for essential data and marketing data. Is this so far-fetched?

<comment><USER30> It'd be damn tricky to implement, probably impossibly so. I can think of a few reasons:

\- Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled.

\- From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For _n_ features, you'd need (2^ _n_ )-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on.

\- And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard?

I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.

<comment><USER31> You can disable most of that stuff from the bios/efi, so you already can effectively opt out of those features. This would be enough for a harware-gdpr thingy I think...

<comment><USER30> That's true -- I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from that perspective. There'd still be the problem of asking consumers to "opt out/in" of these features, of course. It's hard enough asking consumers to make informed decisions when it comes to "can we use your photos/track you online" \-- now you'd be asking "do you want to run virtual machines/access encrypted content/etc.".

But I guess I'd appreciate the ability to turn more stuff on/off in the BIOS -- makes me think of the whole "dark silicon" notion (if I don't use my laptop for Netflix, can I disable the streaming encryption stuff to save battery life?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be nice if this kind of thing could be used to stop cheating in games providing a secure channel of communication between server --> cpu --> gpu, but that likely won't work considering it's not working very well to stop media from being pirated in it's current application.

<comment> J-Kuhn Yes, this is one application.

Google "Software Guard Extensions" and "Intel Enclave"

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

<comment><USER32> Any idea if commercial games are using this yet?

<comment><USER33> There are a few DRMs that offer using it but none of them are in use mostly because of market share issues.

SGX isn't available on the majority of consumer CPUs because it's a fairly new extension and it's Intel exclusive.

I know of a few enterprise products that use it for their "soft-dongle" licensing if you don't want to plug in a license dongle in your server, yes it's 2018 and we still have license dongles like it's 1988, ESRI I'm looking at you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does Apple deal with this?

<comment><USER35> Probably wanting to use their own solution (read: CPUs/SoCs, secure enclave) for their computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> there has to be a perception among the consumers that they are purchasing valuable content. the DRM makes this perception real. No DRM means no profit

</comment><comment><USER37> Not sure I buy the part about DRM and market suicide. Who uses optical discs any longer? I don't know anyone, though several have old collections from a decade ago gathering dust.

Also first I've heard that a new blu ray even exists.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, it doesn't make sense, especially for enterprise CPUs. Which server manufacturer/large datacenter operator cares about DRM? And conversely, wouldn't they rather not have another attack vector? So there must be legitimate enterprise use-cases for ME/PSP, or something else is going on.

<comment><USER37> They talk about remote management, but there's no requirement for that to be a secret that I know of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "They won't let you disable ME because of Hollywood".

I don't know, Rick... I'll call this argument bullshit.

I'm pretty sure there is a very good (evil) reason Intel won't let us disable ME, but it's not "Hollywood".</comment>


US President Blocking Twitter Users Is Unconstitutional, Holds US Court - <AUTHOR> http://www.livelaw.in/us-president-blocking-twitter-users-for-their-political-views-is-unconstitutional-holds-us-court-read-judgment/ <comment><USER2> From what I think, the President should not block anyone from access to information regardless of their political stance. But on the other hand, he would be wrong if he blocked anyone from the White House's handle. But he only blocked them from his personal account, which is his First Ammendment right.

As a private citizen, if the POTUS cannot block people from his personal twitter, it will be illegal for me to block my stalker, a kid cannot block a bully. This is not good.

<comment><USER3> If the POTUS had not conducted the country's business on his personal account I might be able to agree with your point. But your point is not in agreement with the ruling. The court investigates what he's doing with the account, not whose name is on it.

<comment><USER2> But, all the official policies and government information are released by proper White House channel and media releases. Trump is not blocking that. Also, tweets are not considered binding legal business until they are officially released by White House. So, why should it violate any law? Or any journalist trying to obtain information. They, like any other citizen, are entitled to the information released by White House.

Consider, it like this. If Trump had a group of friends who he likes to discuss country's policy with. Is it legally binding that, he has to inculde everyone in that group and cannot ban enyone from his friend club? Consider this friend club to be his twitter followers.

P.S. I am not a republican or even an American. I am just trying to create a constructive dialogue about the ruling and what laws come to play to enforce it.

<comment><USER4> If he's discussing with his group of friends behind closed doors either at the White House, a dinner, or the like, there is no expectation that he must share it publicly (but there's the possibility of leaks).

If he does so on a public forum, then he is not allowed to blacklist people from hearing/seeing it. He has the @POTUS account. If he's concerned about his public vs private privileges, he may wish to consider moving his government related tweets to the @POTUS account. At that point, he can tweet support for Tomi Laren (sp?) to his heart's content from his personal account. When he's discussing world stage stuff, though, that should stick to the POTUS account. That's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Such a shame. Like Citizens United vs FEC, this too would make it harder to herd and cull the sheeps.</comment>


Email Meta: Stupidly simple way to improve email - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ajkochanowicz/Email-Meta

<comment><USER2> Item #2 on [http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I too have wanted to overhaul email. But in the mean time, with the existing infrastructure, we can improve email greatly and with little effort this way.</comment></comment>


The 8 Essential Tools for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkingserious.com/2008/04/05/the-8-essential-tools-for-programmers/ What tools to you consider essential and fundamental for programmers? <comment><USER2> He left this one out: plain paper and pencil. lets you do plain text and it out saves your file!

<comment><AUTHOR> But how do I grep my stack of plain papers?

Seriously, yes I agree, plain old paper and pen is absolutely essential. They say geniuses think on paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Big whiteboard also does wonders for holding mental state.

In the office we've got some great big windows running down one wall that we use as scratchspace with special markers. Works a treat.

</comment><comment><USER4> Was this a class presentation written for a CS 101 undergraduate audience at a community college?

</comment><comment><USER5> in the same vein as gdb is strace, another lifesaver if you're on almost any nix box

</comment><comment><USER6> "1. Plain Text"

I'm confused, is there another option?

<comment><USER7> Even more strange, he says plain text then says he uses markup languages in them...

<comment><USER8> No, not strange at all. Plain text is the storage format for that markup language. The number of tools that can work with plain text may be "uncountable", but for something like rich text there's not as many. The idea is that even if the editor you originally used goes away, the format of the file itself will always be readable. If someone needs to open an MS Powerpoint presentation in 30 years, it may not be so easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He forgot to mention coffee and a computer. FAIL.</comment>


Leninthink - <AUTHOR> https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink <comment><USER2> Attention conservation notice: Lengthy somewhat tendentious history of Soviet Leninism, followed by an assertion that the confusing twists of cancel culture is down to the woke masses being in thrall to a Hiddden Lenin, and a rapid exit.

<comment><USER3> Correct. The author would be screaming "cultural marxism"[1] if that anti- semitic conspiracy theory wasn't already discredited.

The facts of this piece are pretty specious here as well. Boris Chicherin, for example, died in 1904, well before Lenin came to power.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory)

<comment><USER4> Whilst I'm sympathetic to the overarching point the author is trying to make (Lenin bad, more so than is generally appreciated), confusing Georgy Chicherin with Boris Chicherin does not build confidence he is the best person to make it (or in the editorial practices at New Criterion).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed more rights than any other state > in the world. I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the USSR > had absolute freedom of speech—so long as they did not lie

Actually I heard it as "The people of the USSR had complete and absolute freedom of speech... but only once". Lie or not, if the state didn't like it, you ended up in a concentration camp.

<comment><USER6> > The people of the USSR had complete and absolute freedom of speech... but > only once

The version I like is "Soviet citizens have the freedom of speech, but American citizens also have freedom after speech"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What ever else you think of this piece, it's worthwhile to know what The New Criterion is and what it represents. Though I suppose "Avidly Pro-Trump Literary Journal" is a concept that easily clears HN's bar for "intellectually interesting".

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the insight. I found this article discussing New Criterion which I found interesting.

[https://thebaffler.com/latest/decline-of-the-new- criterion-g...](https://thebaffler.com/latest/decline-of-the-new-criterion- ganz)

Regarding the article, from what I know about Lenin, it's spot on, and if you ever talk to anyone who survived his dekulakization [1] you'll understand the violent nature of Leninism.

But I'm not a fan of a propaganda outfit that likes to hide behind the occasional high intellect piece, so thanks again for the comment.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization)

<comment><USER8> We're right in the West to reject Leninist ideas, but it's important to understand the historical context in which Leninism gained traction.

Russia was a backwards pre-capitalist third world monarchy with vast economic inequality under one of the richest men in all of history, Nicholas Romanov II. He rejected attempt after attempt to reform his monarchy into a democratic constitutional monarchy, preferring to cling onto absolute power and repeatedly losing wars. The story of the Russian revolution is one of a transition from authoritarian rule to authoritarian rule.

Initially the revolution was widely praised by genuine revolutionaries, such as Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, & Rosa Luxemburg. The country was ruled democratically by a system of workers' councils (soviets), and workers were encouraged to form committees to self manage the work place democratically.

Within the year, however, the Soviets were dissolved and commissars were sent to the factories to take the place of the boss', effectively ending workers' self management. This was widely condemned by mainstream Marxists, most notably Rosa Luxembourg, who sent a historic admonitory letter to Lenin. This is when the idea of "Marxism-Leninism" as opposed to simple "Marxism" began to distinguish itself.

What Leninism has become now is a sort of paranoid ideology about "holding onto the revolution" against "the forces of reaction." They point to examples of successful workers' self management e.g. The Paris Commune, Anarchist Catalonia (read "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell), and claim that these revolutions were crushed because of a lack of "party discipline" and organization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd hate to be either of the two students the author throws under the bus with nary a sentence of context (the bus here being thousands of words describing Lenin's atrocities). Just think, one moment you're unable to sufficiently articulate your feelings on hate speech in front of a class to satisfy your professor, the next moment you've been lumped in with a mass murderer!

<comment><USER10> To be fair modern activist groups like anyone who disagrees with them to Hitler.. so the student is likely in good company.

<comment><USER9> Seems to be a common game with ignorant right and ignorant left (I can think of a million instances of ignorant right-wing people rambling on incessantly about the "socialist" part of national socialist german workers' party). The difference I suppose is that fascism is a far-right ideal and not a far-left one. Also the fact that the far-right in the United States are in some cases literal neonazis.

<comment><USER11> > fascism is a far-right ideal and not a far-left one.

That myth underlies much of the misunderstanding in contemporary political discourse.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure how you justify this? If one is going to define politics along a spectrum like left to right, fascism is going to be grouped with other political systems that tend toward nationalism and nativist policies.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far- right_politics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics)

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

<comment><USER12> I think left and right have no meaning in a one-party totalitarian state

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Leninthink erodes power differentials and power relations, which it portrays as good to destroy, but also erodes the dual relations of responsibility. When nobody has any responsibilities towards any other, then society is gone with the wind like so much poor soil.

</comment><comment><USER14> Off-topic: Why does Lenin always seem to look like a villain from a James Bond film? Yeah, it's definitely the beard.

Or perhaps those Bond villains were modeled after Lenin? Some western anti- communist propaganda thing?

</comment><comment><USER15> The fuck is this doing on the front page of HN?

<comment><USER16> No clue, except that it is.

Attempting to tar social justice movements as Leninist is sheer speculation. And maybe Leninist, so to speak.

But damn, just ignore that part. It's always good to be reminded of just how _insanely ruthless_ Lenin was. Also, recall that the Germans paid Lenin to destabilize Russia, and keep it out of WWI. So maybe the whole thing was basically a put-on.

<comment><USER17> >Attempting to tar social justice movements as Leninist is sheer speculation.

When a lot of them readily use Soviet symbols like hammer and sickle to represent themselves, it's not that far-fetched.

<comment><USER18> I have not heard of them doing so (though I admit that I have not followed them very closely). For those of us who haven't seen this, can you supply some reference(s)?

But if they're going to call the alt-right Nazis (with justification, at least for some of them), and they're going to fly the hammer and sickle... well, I guess they earn being called communist, Stalinist, and Leninist.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did the dot com bust affect develop salaries post 2000? - <AUTHOR> I was not yet a developer in 2000 when we went through the cycle of boom to bust.<p>Curious to know how developer salaries changed at the time. Looking for a reference point for if something similar was to happen again now. <comment><USER2> I had just started my career and hid out in college during most of the bust, so I'm not a great source. I had double the salary when I got out of college in 2005, but there's this huge conflating factor of having a CS degree from a top school and a big volunteer project with 100K users under my belt.

From what I remember happening to coworkers & classmates, though: it was more a crash of employment than of salaries. Basically, the dot-com boom allowed a lot of people who lacked all the fundamentals to become highly-paid tech workers in this VC-fueled machine. When the VC funding dried up, their employers disappeared, they all got laid off, and many people exited tech altogether. I know a number of people who graduated 99/00, and their resume shows 1-2 years at a dot-com, followed by a 3-4 years stretch of temp jobs, usually followed by grad school or a switch into some totally unrelated profession. Their salary never really recovered, because they entered a field that paid much less than the one they exited.

Most people I know who had 5-10 years of experience, a solid track record, and really _enjoyed_ programming for its own sake did fine - in many cases, better than they did before the bubble. Think about it: if you were laid off from a dot-com in 2002 but lucky enough to get hoovered up by Google when they were the only ones hiring, you are almost certainly retired now and probably have a good-size family foundation to give away money. Similarly, I knew one other engineer that got laid off from the dot-com where I worked, ended up doing high-throughput transaction processing for an enterprise storage startup, and made a few million on stock options when they were acquired. The really top- end programmers who had the courage to persist when the industry was cratering - think of Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish, or Joshua Schacter of del.icio.us, or Evan Williams of Blogger, or the YouTube guys - ended up doing _really_ well, and in several cases are now billionaires.

Basically, busts exacerbate inequality. Love what you do, keep doing it, and find out how you can apply it so that other people genuinely benefit from it, and you end up cleaning up on all the wealth that everybody else is too scared to create. Flit between the hot new thing with just a superficial understanding and you'll probably end up unemployed when it's no longer hot.</comment>


Britain Looks to Address Inequality with Executive Pay Measures - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/business/britain-ceo-executive-pay.html <comment><USER3> JFC.... In the late 1970s, the US FTC was worried about rising executive pay. So they pioneered similar 'transparency' requirements, forcing publicly traded companies to reveal the compensation of their executives.

Do you know what the result was? MASSIVE increases in executive pay. Rather than shaming companies by making them admit to paying their executives hundreds or thousands of times more than they pay their average employees who are actually creating all of the companies value, they turned executive compensation into a signal to investors of corporate health. 'Would that company be able to pay their CEO $650 million a year if it was failing? Of course not!'

This move in Britain appears to be nothing more than an attempt to radically amplify economic inequality, not reduce it. And it will succeed at that as well as it succeeded in the US.

<comment><USER4> > Do you know what the result was? MASSIVE increases in executive pay.

That's not what massively increased executive pay. The stock market boom - starting from the early 1980s and accelerating in the mid 1990s to now - <USER2> what generated the hyper spike in executive compensation. You can directly trace all big increases and drops in executive compensation, going back 50 years, with the S&P 500's movements.

Jul 1964 to Apr 1982, the S&P 500 went from 84 to 109. Call it 30% over 17 years. Read that again and again until it sinks in.

From Apr 1982 to Oct 1993 it went from 109 to 466. Call it near 300% in 11 years.

From Oct 1993 to today, 24 years, it has gone from 466 to 2457.

The only reason executive compensation has soared so dramatically, is because so much of it is tied to stock compensation.

If we're talking base salary, the NBA's total league roster (~450 players) earns as much as all Fortune 500 CEOs combined.

<comment><USER5> This is a much better factually supported hypothesis than it's parent post.

I find it silly that transparency alone would cause pay raises or gas price increases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One test I have always applied when looking at joining a company is "do the majority of managers, including C level execs have an employee who makes more than them."

In the well run tech companies I've worked at, the programmers tended to make more money than their managers, which I find to be a good sign.

Ditto for almost all hedge funds I've seen, though to a much larger extreme, those who produce the value get the largest paycheck regardless of their pecking order. though to be fair the huge hedge funds buck this trend by making soooo much money and having a single person own the management company that the fund pays the management and performance fees into.

It doesn't help with measuring the ratio of the lowest paycheck to the highest, but it does help ensure that people get paid based on what they produce rather than their title.

But I find its a good question to ask when interviewing. Find the manager and ask how many of his/her reports make more than them. If you get squirming or push back about a top down approach with salaries that follow the same logic, then you've got a decent data point that you won't be all that valued at the company.

<comment><USER6> What's the incentive to go into management if you get paid less?

By management I don't mean product/project management, I mean general & strategic leadership of a large organisation.

<comment><USER7> _What 's the incentive to go into management if you get paid less?_

One organisation I worked for had a very elaborate grade system, I was a Grade 20, the highest non-management grade. At that level you had a choice: try to get promoted to Grade 21 at which you would officially be management, but you would lose your overtime pay, and it wasn't until Grade 25 at least that it would be financially worthwhile. Or you could divert your efforts into avoiding getting promoted... Guess what the majority of engineers did?

The guy I reported to there however embraced the promotion. He loved "being a manager". He loved the attache case, he loved going over the minutes of meetings, he loved pre-meetings to plan the next meeting, he loved travelling to attend more meetings... It takes all sorts I guess. He was an unremarkable engineer before, and he wasn't any good at actually managing either tho'!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I do believe that inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue in modern developed nations, isn't the rise of the inequality largely due to accumulation of wealth, and not income amongst the richest?

I see a lot of ire being targeted towards people making close to a million, and while the 1% makes for a good slogan, I believe the real problem is actually the 0.1 - 0.01% whose wealth has skyrocketed. And you don't reach the 0.1% with executive pay, but rather due to making money on existing capital.

Wasn't Picketty's research evidence that the problem isn't income, but rather accumulated wealth?

<comment><USER5> This is really prescient. It's not the "pay" but the capital gains. And something like a very minimal transaction tax would probably do far more to address inequality.

By focusing on people rather than the financial instruments, the politicians can be seen to do something (which is guaranteed to not fix the problem fundamentally).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The chances of this acutally becoming law are fairly small.

Firstly, most of the ruling party (Tories) are rabidly "pro buisness" which translates to sounding tough on anything that could be twisted into "red tape".

Secondly, this is an attempt to steal thunder from the current opposition party, who are currently in disarray.

Thirdly, and most importantly, there is simply not enough time for this to be implemented fully.

</comment><comment><USER10> * Britain Looks to Address _jealousy_ with Executive Pay Measures

A few executives making large salaries is not an actual issue.

<comment><USER3> Economic inequality is the sole reliable predictor of a high level of violent crime in a society. Thousands of different indicators have been examined, and economic inequality is literally the only one that correlates significantly with violent crime rates. And that's before you even get into the principles of the matter. If capitalism is supposed to be based upon people being paid relative to the value they actually create, outsized executive pay clearly betrays that standard utterly. While a small number of people could replace a business analyst who knows the operations of the business inside and out, almost anyone could do the job of a CEO who shows up and is gone within 3 years, off to a new company, serving as nothing more than temporary figurehead and whose primary actual job duty is to cash large checks so investors think the company is healthy.

<comment><USER11> Over the past 25 years in the US inequality has gone up while violent crime has dropped.

<comment><USER12> > Economic inequality is the sole reliable predictor of a high level of > violent crime in a society.

It might have dropped but it's still "a high level" \- 10,000 gun deaths thus far in 2017 would indicate that.

[http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/](http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They should figure a way for a shareholder vote to determine pay levels. I've got shares and wouldn't vote for the managers to get stupid high pay. At the moment the managers effectively choose their own salaries hence the excesses. It is, theoretically at any rate, us shareholder's money.

<comment><USER14> Remuneration of executive is up for approval at AGM in many countries. So you probably can vote. You can also check the vote results, the majority of shareholders vote to approve the remuneration packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this capitalism working exactly as intended?

<comment><USER10> That depends. Do you mean free market capitalism or crony capitalism?

To decide whether this is what free market capitalism intends, we'd have to determine if their wages are large due to free market forces (e.g supply and demand, etc) or if there is some government collusion going on inflating their wages.

<comment><USER15> What sort of collusion would increase their wages?

<comment><USER10> lobbying/bribing for laws intended to limit competition is the most common weapon of choice.

<comment><USER15> But that wouldn't affect the ratio of employee wage to executive wage. Lobbying/bribing would increase the company's total profit.

<comment><USER10> Executives are often paid (or given raises) in-part or in-whole relative to the companies total profit.

Typical employees are not.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, capitalism working as intended.

<comment><USER16> You say that as if it's a bad thing. A company is not a communist-commune where everyone owns the "commune" collectively. The executives' compensation is based on the company performance because they probably own shares and because their specific "function" is to make the company perform better.

An employee's function, on the other hand, is to do their "task". They get paid to do it. Now, you could argue that if they do their task well, then the company does well as well, but that's not the way the relationship is presented. It's more transactional in nature, because it's easy to quantify the value being exchanged.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>