I Stop Celebrities from Blowing Their Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/how-do-celebrities-spend-their-money.html <comment><USER2> "One thing that's surprisingly inexpensive for a lot of our clients is health insurance. The insurance policy for members of SAG-AFTRA is amazing. For the money, it is the best health insurance out there. It's only about $400 per quarter for an individual, so you're looking at about $1,200 or $1,500 a year for the best PPO coverage in the country. It travels with you everywhere, and you have access to emergency care facilities and 24/7 mental-health care. It's great. I wish I could get it."

For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.

<comment><USER3> I can assure you that the majority of SAG actors are working service jobs, living hand to mouth. This isn't an example of the rich lording over the plebs, this is an example of a union doing right by its members.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. All tech workers could have similar benefits if they unionized en masse using a structure similar to that of actors.

<comment><USER5> Getting into and maintaining SAG membership is very time consuming and expensive.

You could work in the industry for years and never get in. Others get lucky and get in within a few months. A lot of people are SAG Eligible but can't afford the initial fees to get in.

It's not like a standard union where you show up to work every day for months and you are in. Non-union basically do the exact same thing as union folk, but get paid less per hour. In contrast, there is a budget limit to how many SAG workers can be on set, so while your hourly is higher, the quantity of work you have is much lower.

Most SAG members are background extras, who don't earn very much money, and can't work more if they wanted to.

Definitely not the union you'd want to emulate. Film and TV actors are all temporary workers.

<comment><USER4> Well, the good thing about unions, is they're democratically organized. So, tech workers should look at what works in SAG (performance based pay w/reasonable floors, great benefits), emulate that, and set aside the problems/barriers you describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't find the story, but several years ago, an NBA player bought a bunch of fast food franchises, and there was collective head-scratching about why he'd do that. Matthew Yglesias pointed out that it was brilliant: the value of the franchises was that they were illiquid, so that he had a backstop against overspending or family members asking for money.

About that last point: for those of us who come from middle class backgrounds, it's easy to think "just be reasonable about what you give people". It's a much harder proposition if your entire family has been struggling your entire life--especially if they made sacrifices for your dream (I think John Wall's mom once let the lights get cut off to pay for something basketball related for him).

<comment><USER7> On that last point... an analogy When the microfinance exuberance started dying back about 5 years ago, I heard the following interpretation of micro- credit:

 _Poor rural people need credit because they can 't save. They can't save because they owe their neighbours a moral debt._

Jennifer really needs $50 to pay her kid's dentist bill. She looked after your grandmother, when she was sick and you were away. You owe her (and love her, you're friends).

If you have $50 saved, you will get requests that cannot be refused. Everyone is broke and everyone owes eachother favours. Debt is the only way of getting a lump sum. The critic concluded that saving with a (big) negative interest rate is a bitter pill, but better than nothing.

Fast food franchises sound like a great idea, if they aren't too failure prone. You lock up illiquid assets. You can give family members jobs, if necessary/appropriate. The bad idea side effects of this is that businesses can potentially lose money as well as value.

The spanner in any such system will always be debt. You can lock up all your assets but if you have assets to your name, you can get credit and spend those assets regardless.

<comment><USER6> This is a great point, and it also fits with how a lot of "tribal" societies work/worked. You never accumulate wealth, but, for instance, if you have a large yam harvest, you throw a feast for the entire community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If any of this is at all interesting to you, I'd recommend checking out the very excellent ESPN documentary "Broke": [http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=broke](http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=broke)

ESPN's 30 for 30 docs are really great, even if you're not particularly huge into sports. Broke is one of my favorites (after a "The Two Escobars"). It goes into a lot of detail about how ill-prepared many professional athletes are for the lifestyle, how they overestimate their net worth and their projected career duration, and digs into all of the different pitfalls new signees might face as they enter sport. It's easy to blow it off and say "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway", but there's a lot of heartbreaking instances where people did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt.

Anyway, worth a viewing.

<comment><USER9> Can you give some examples of "did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt."?

<comment><USER10> So, doing the "right thing" might not be the way to phrase it, but there are many athletes who lived within their means themselves and were taken advantage of by people they trusted. A recent example of the is Jack Johnson [1], whose parent's spent all of his money and left him $10M in debt.

[1]: [https://deadspin.com/how-jack-johnsons-parents-screwed- him-a...](https://deadspin.com/how-jack-johnsons-parents-screwed-him-and-left- him-mill-1663583325)

<comment><USER11> Tim Duncan's another example: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nba-duncan- adviser/financ...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nba-duncan- adviser/financial-adviser-sentenced-to-four-years-for-bilking-nbas-tim-duncan- idUSKBN19J2PZ)

<comment><USER12> he got screwed over but he's far from bankrupt.

<comment><USER11> Fair, I somehow missed that word my first time reading the comment, but he's an example of someone who "did the right thing" and still got "punished".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought this bit was interesting: "... actors, recording artists, producers, writers, and athletes with personal net worths ranging from $1 million to $50 million..."

I kind of feel bad for the low end of her clients whose net worth is only $1 million. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money. But it also doesn't go that far nowadays, especially if you live in SF Bay area (though most of her clients are probably in the LA area; slightly better but not by much). You can't even afford a decent house with cash for that amount of money. I feel bad for the client who has $1m but thinks he/she has a lot of money, and needs to pay a financial adviser (5% even!) to manage it for him/her. In this day and age and in California, if you have $1m, you'd better be working hard still and save up for retirement.

<comment><USER14> I would guess that those clients are young and with high income, so their net worth may not be that meaningful yet. Otherwise, they would be well-advised to fire their financial manager, take their million dollars and live somewhere less expensive.

<comment><USER15> That does not work, because you are out of work then. Nobody will meet you or call you out of the blue.

<comment><USER14> That depends on your age and what you do for a living.

<comment><USER16> Since they're "actors, recording artists, producers, writers, and athletes" they're often in LA, NYC, and a handful of other places that are expensive to live. They usually have to be near their projects, sets, studio, or team for a significant part of the year.

We're not talking about remote software developers or launching a new startup here.

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree, but you are having a conversation about something completely different. This was my comment:

>I would guess that those clients are young and with high income, so their net worth may not be that meaningful yet. Otherwise, they would be well-advised to fire their financial manager, take their million dollars and live somewhere less expensive.

When I say "otherwise," that means that you are either old or on a low salary. Let's spell that out:

i) If you are young, on a low salary, but own a million dollars, you would be well-advised to change careers and move somewhere else, otherwise that million dollars won't last long, especially with an expensive financial manager.

ii) If you are old and own a million dollars, you may as well consider retirement.

Thanks for your comment anyway, but since I don't feel super invested in this argument, I'm going to end my participation here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The cookie wall won't let me continue without agreeing to cookies. I can reject them in the Cookie Policy, but that too is protected behind the cookie wall.

Obviously, this doesn't comply with the GDPR, and makes the site unreadable for some.

<comment><USER18> These wall designs are really surprising; I would expect bad designs to come from difficulty of implementing data collection management, not the wall UX. Just imagine you're a user seeing this, do you not feel antagonized?

<comment><USER19> Since the data collection management would traditionally be stored as a cookie... It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Without tracking, how do you track that consent was revoked?

The cookie law bugs me because it's feels like it's being applied in completely the wrong place. Isn't the browser perfectly capable of restricting third party cookies and presenting the necessary legal warnings?

<comment><USER20> The cookie law has exemptions for cookies that are there for technical reasons. For example, your locale, and which cookies you agreed to.

The browser cannot differentiate first party cookies that are technical or for tracking.

<comment><USER21> ^ this; people for some reason still assume all cookies are banned. If that was so, it'd be a feature removed from browsers already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The US does a terrible job of inculcating basic financial literacy in the populace.

The only way that paying someone 5% of assets / income just to avoid ruination can be a sound investment is if the person is utterly clueless about how money in general, and compound interest in particular, works.

<comment><USER23> Depends on how much work these people put in. If they are going over every contract including insurance etc it would be an extremely valuable service.

On to of that they are sorting all their mail, doing bill payments etc. 'I was at his house every single day, helping to oversee contractors, pick out windows, pick out drapes.'

<comment><USER24> I think she also meant but didn't say stopped contractors ripping her client off.

Charging for Italian Marble but actually using crap materials or billing for more days worked than they did would be a couple of good examples.

<comment><USER25> Which might also indicate that good politics are a part of her job as well.

You don't want to tell the contractors who _aren 't_ trying to rip you off "I need to stand here and stare at you so that you don't cheat me/steal anything", but if you're always around to help "pick out windows" or "choose drapes", you can keep an eye on things without being too obvious about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> FIVE PERCENT FEES? After inflation that basically brings your ROI from holding risky equities down to savings account rates.

She gets paid better than the world's most successful hedge funds to be a glorified baby sitter to grownups?

I picked the wrong career.

<comment><USER27> Seems reasonable considering the amount of babysitting they do.

Managing assets and making sure certain bills get paid on time seems reasonable. But having to talk them out of impulse buys they may not be able to afford sounds terrible.

It's like these stars are not fully functioning human beings.

<comment><USER28> > _It's like these stars are not fully functioning human beings_

Or that the personalities that (a) go into low-probability high-payoff careers like entertainment and (b) do well in entertainment (through further selection or the perso al transformations necessary to succeed in Hollywood or the NFL) are also bad at saying no to competitive luxuries and short-term impulses.

<comment><USER29> And many of them work with people who make even more money than they do, which can distort their idea of what lifestyle they can afford.

<comment><USER30> I see this very much. Friends that are surrounded by dual income couples that are lawyers/doctors/etc get convinced that 300k+ household incomes are "not that much". This while being 97+% percentile for household incomes in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A long time ago, in a job (thankfully) far far away I had to have a fair bit of interaction with famous people.

Some of them are crazy - one of the artists (now dead) demanded "more goat heads" on his project. This was an actual client request.

I still do take pride in getting one of the most difficult clients in the roster to admit we did a "good job".

Famous people can be weird, and some do really exist in their own special bubble.

<comment><USER22> Wealth/power/fame don't change who people are, they just allow them to express it unconstrained.

For fame and fortune as an artist, though, the chances of "making it" are so remote that the proportion of sober and rational people who choose to take the first steps down that path has to be rather low, and that of the ones that just keep going down the path even lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Mildly interesting article but mostly reads like an advertisement. Great content marketing piece though!

<comment><USER33> Yes, the tone is well done. Sort of a "let me give this to you straight" message. Sort of subtweety in referencing real clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A lot of people who are making $300K a year in Silicon Valley are going to be in that situation around age 50.

<comment><USER35> That can be accurate, but keep in mind that the people ins Silicon Valley are there using the brain and therefore more aware of the financials of their lives. Artists and sportists on the other hand can be a bit more detached from how much they make. I am not saying that this happens in 100% of the cases but there is a correlation.

<comment><USER36> I kind of agree with your sentiment but you make it sound a bit like artists don't use their brain, or are outright stupid - which I don't think you meant and I don't think is true.

<comment><USER37> There's going to be a lot of difference in practice between accumulating a lot of money over the course of decades until you're in a pretty good place in your 50s, and having all of that dumped on you in one fell swoop when you're 19.

Among the things that a SV engineer who manages that has to think about is if they have children, what happens when they die. It's nice to pass some things on to your children, but at the same time, plopping a million dollars in assets down on your kid all at once may not be doing them favors. Best to look at your options. (I'm not going into it here just because it's really more than fits into an HN message, nor should you take the advice from me; I'm aware that there are options.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "I charge a 5 percent commission rate, which is pretty standard"

5 percent of what?

<comment><USER39> I presume it's their income, or assets under management. Pretty sweet deal if so compared to the 2-and-20 a lot of investment managers make.

<comment><USER26> 2 and 20 is what premier hedge funds make (many charge less nowadays). 1% is a standard financial advisor fee.

<comment><USER28> > _2 and 20 is what premier hedge funds make (many charge less nowadays). 1% > is a standard financial advisor fee._

Hedge fund managers and financial advisors meet with their LPs/clients from time to time. They don't "get all of [their] clients' mail — bills, fan mail, business-related mail, everything" nor "oversee payments for their mortgages, phone, rent, utilities, and all the little things that keep their lives going and the lights on."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The actor that "died suddenly" sounds like it might have been Anton Yelchin.

<comment><USER41> "I felt like I had failed him, or could have done more." \-- This sounds like the actor died as a result of a wrong choice, not from a freak car accident.

<comment><USER40> Maybe she feels like she could have researched a better car for him? The parents did sue the car manufacturer after all. Just speculating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish there was a service like this for people with an average income.

There are lots of artists out there who are in this category, and who could use such a service. Also, the typical "mad scientist" probably doesn't care much for personal finance, so they could benefit as well. And lots of other people.

<comment><USER28> > _I wish there was a service like this for people with an average income_

I pay my accountant roughly $1,000 a year to, once a quarter, look over my credit card and bank statements with me and talk about how much I should be contributing to which accounts and where I may be spending too much. (This is preferable, for me, to a financial advisor because I like to pick my own investments.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > It is easy to become enmeshed in clients' lives. I had one client who was > young and impressionable and became very successful very quickly, and he was > getting pulled in different directions by the people around him. He and I > clicked and became very close. He bought a house and was away a lot, so I > was at his house every single day, helping to oversee contractors, pick out > windows, pick out drapes. I was a big part of his life. He died suddenly, > and it crushed me. I felt like I had failed him, or could have done more.

Pure speculation, but Anton Yelchin?

<comment><USER44> Contextually I wouldn't think so, his death was an accident caused by what ended up being deemed really poor design of the shift interface of his vehicle; the guilt implication from the author sounds more like maybe drugs or falling in with the wrong crowd or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So she's a family office for single people. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office))

The Varian Rule, which is about how the future resembles how the rich live today, the middle and poorer classes will have tomorrow, may apply here. Multi-family offices for middle net worth individuals seem like a plausible future.

I can't seem to convince my lawyer and accountant friends that this is a viable service because (I think) they are basically not entrepreneurial, and big firms don't offer it because they are already fighting and maintaining position in the HNWI market.

A one-stop shop that handles everything from taxes, to parking tickets, legal advice, to investments, insurance, and even medical, could be worth it for a lot of people.

What makes it viable now is that families with the kind of money worth professional management are still actually working for it each day, that is, still making this kind of money on their labor instead of returns on capital, so they have the income (albeit less in assets), but not the time to manage it properly.

I would look forward to using such a service...one day. :)

<comment><USER46> Lots of these services are being created piecemeal. Professional management works for these people because the clients are overwhelmed and don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to budget X million dollars for 4 years.

Most average people think that they do know what they're doing. They have a few hundred in the bank, they're paycheck is the same and comes every 2 weeks, and they know the price and value of the things they need. They don't suffer from the illusion that they can buy jetskis on a whim without bankrupting themselves.

<comment><USER45> Arguably, that Lamborghini is even a thing suggests otherwise. There is tons of new and younger money out there that could be deployed to build real lasting foundations for families, at least enough for grandchildren to have private school and college taken care of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here's a detailed view of the outcome she's trying to prevent: [https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/johnny-depp- law...](https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/johnny-depp-lawsuit- marriage-w521671)

> It's estimated that Depp has made $650 million on films that netted $3.6 > billion. Almost all of it is gone.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is Mick Jagger primarily a musician or a businessman?

Rock and roll has always been a business - 'the music business' \- and usually those that succeed have an excellent business partner that looks after the books. You would be surprised at the property and stock portfolios of the truly successful 'musicians'. Even John Lennon was a 'businessman'. Although he did put peace and love first and foremost he made sure those Russians paid him in furs when he sang a few ditties there.

The same goes in the 'art business'. Is Damien Hirst an artist or a businessman, first and foremost? Again, an excellent business partner takes care of business for him whilst the army of interns/students/wannabees do the hard work of assembling the dead animals into 'art' (for the status-anxiety celebrities to buy).

So-called 'celebrities' have to be smart otherwise they end up with accountants skimming off '5%' of their earnings.

</comment><comment><USER49> Reminded me immediately of Ballers, and now I see the third season was released—thanks!

</comment><comment><USER50> "Some times my clients call me and ask 'What is my social security number'"

hollywood idiots

these must be models and actors</comment>


Is this scene from the a Team explainable by Physics? - <AUTHOR> http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/134943/is-this-scene-from-the-a-team-explainable-by-physics <comment><USER2> Yes, if the kinetic energy (i.e. the round's mass times the square of its velocity) of the discharged round equals the kinetic energy of the falling tank. Otherwise no.

If it were true, if the round's mass times the square of its velocity equaled the KE of the falling tank, the tank would stop in the air, then resume its fall as though from a stationary start.

And ... the sudden stop would probably kill the tank's occupants, just as though it had collided with the ground.</comment>


Apache Wave on Sandstorm.io - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-20-apache-wave.html <comment><USER2> Wave was a great idea that was completely misunderstood. Unfortunately, it also seemed to have been misunderstood by the people who designed it.

Wave was supposed to be a collaborative replacement for email built on the then-exciting XMPP protocol. It was marketed poorly, misunderstood, and eventually shitcanned because Google had no idea what to do with it.

<comment><USER3> What was exciting about the XMPP protocol itself? Were people back then just excited to be in the presence of vast amounts of XML?

I mean, that'd explain a lot.

I felt like Wave very closely approached something useful in this space, but almost anything in communications is interesting when you have another person to talk to, and very little is interesting without one. That makes it very hard to judge if the platform is helping or not.

<comment><USER4> There was no IM standard at the time. Every provider had their own standard and most of the IM software was not open sourced. Jabber changed the playing field.

<comment><USER5> Changed it how? Google has since tossed XMPP integration for their whole closed platform Hangouts thing, MSN's old halfway-API-able thing has been integrated into Skype, which is entirely closed, I believe. AIM and YIM are all but dead, at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think where Google messed up was requiring invites for Wave.

Pretty hard to get people on board when they first have to scrounge to get an invite to something they do not quite understand. Network effect--;

It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues would have been ironed out.

<comment><USER7> Second issue they had was scalability of the service and I suspect the invite system was probably implemented to give them time to scale it.

On some large subjects with many people contributing the service was practically unusable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I liked Wave as a Google product, and I like Apache Wave self hosted. I have tried getting friends and family interested in using a self hosted instance, but not much interest. They like Facebook, go figure :-)

That said, a self hosted Apache Wave to small teams seems like a good tool for collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER9> I did not understand it then and am still confused.

What is this supposed to be - a new workflow? a new UI? a new paradigm to do something? Every discussion or webpage I see about this talks about mail. Is it applicable to any other application?

<comment><USER10> From what I recall, a few of my friends actively used it back in the day at work, and they claimed it was fantastic for remote collaborations.

<comment><USER11> I used it for 2 projects at uni and enjoyed it a lot. Then it slowed down so much it was unbearable and we couldn't really discover how far the improvements go. Maybe it would get a better response from general public if the modern browsers / js engines were available then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on motivations: [https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web- ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require- federated-hosting.html)

That made me a backer.

<comment><USER13> Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small modification of Wordpress?

<comment><USER14> Yep. You could fork our WordPress port[1], repackage it as your own app, and run it on any Sandstorm server.

[1] [https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress- sandstorm](https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People keep mentioning how Wave would start lagging as you use it more. Is this still a known issue or has it been fixed?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wave still seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> neat animated logo

</comment><comment><USER18> I think you guys are going too fast :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto platform for team communication.

[1]: [https://slack.com](https://slack.com)

<comment><USER20> Never head of Slack. Their site doesn't even describe what it is.

<comment><USER21> It's a HipChat clone.

<comment><USER22> Except it's 10x better than hipchat in almost every way. Price, funcationality, interop, apis, permissions, etc...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Africa's Mobile Explosion - <AUTHOR> http://opensignal.com/blog/2013/02/22/africas-mobile-explosion/

<comment><USER2> From my traveling experience in Ghana I can say that mobile usage there is crazy big. Everybody has a phone, but almost always a really basic (partly broken) phone. So except for the richer audience, smartphone are almost non- existent.

This, however, does not mean that mobile internet is also non-existent. Although data reception is pretty much bound to larger cities/communities, it goes through the entire country. And sometimes I even had reception in the most desolate places.

But the most interesting thing was that phones are actually used for calling people. When you exchange numbers they just randomly start calling you to ask you how you are and whatnot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great thread! I run a nonprofit called New Incentives (newincentives.org) that provides behavior-based cash incentives, known as conditional cash transfers, directly to individuals living on less than $0.30/day in five developing countries. My team is building a geolocation-based monitoring system to determine whether or not the conditions behind our cash incentives are met. We plan to license this technology to large-scale government-run cash incentive programs that cover anywhere from 5-15 millions individuals. Does anyone know if can get a person's feature phone (not a smartphone) to auto check-in and/or receive push notifications? In case it's helpful, you might think of an application of what we are hoping to build as a child laborer in rural India checking in to school and receiving compensation for every check in to support his/her family. Our goal is for this monitoring system to operate in low infrastructure settings and not have to deal directly with the telecommunication networks in the countries we work in; and if possible, not be dependent upon SMS. Any advice would be very much appreciated!

<comment><USER4> Wow, cool idea! From what I understand, you guys use cash incentives after a particular job/work/behavior is done or result achieved.

Building a technolog like yours (sort of a foursquare for developing countries) could have awesome implications for these countries. Keep us updated on HN please. This is great!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the encouragement, your understanding is spot on. I'll definitely keep the HN community posted!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I've found interesting that I'd love to see explored in depth, is the lack of interplay between the tech used in US/Western Europe (traditional tech hubs) and Africa. It seems the apps that are important to one market are not the same that matter in another - even in similar sectors (e.g. Square vs MPesa) perhaps this is because one set of apps targets smartphones and fast internet connections (not to mention processors) while another is targeted at feature phones. As smartphones reach higher levels of adoption I'd love to see African built apps taking on Western markets.

<comment><USER6> In large part it has to do with the level of tech available. Bandwidth in many parts of Africa is very slow, so SMS is preferred as a workable solution for data. M-pesa uses SMS on any low cost feature phone, while Square requires a more expensive smartphone with apps and data plans. People use what is practical in their context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Friend(s) of mine in Mumbai are easily accessible using WhatsApp on their android phone than they were on their home desktop machines and Instant messengers.

Just like other developing countries, I think Next generation of India will be skipping whole desktop and Laptop and move straight to mobile and tablet based computing devices.

<comment><USER8> Sadly, that means the barrier to actually creating things will be that much higher. That concerns me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I dont see any barriers they just need to cater to our needs. I think they can innovate in their area of expertise like the mining sector or any resource driven field. Lets not ignore the fact that many big corporations work in Africa so they are exposed to technological advancements.</comment>


Bogdanov affair - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair <comment><USER2> _> "The Bogdanoffs' work is significantly more incoherent than just about anything else being published. But the increasingly low standard of coherence in the whole field is what allowed them to think they were doing something sensible and publish it."_

There's a certain beauty in an entire field losing coherency.

I feel like this quote could be about javascript libraries too. For instance [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/) has all the right jargon and could be mistaken for a serious project.

<comment><USER3> > For instance [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/) has all the > right jargon and could be mistaken for a serious project.

That's hilarious. I like the counter showing the size as you add features: " _0 bytes uncompressed, 25 bytes gzipped_ "

<comment><USER4> I remember my friend mentioning this when I told him I had just started web development and wanted to learn a new framework. I even selected the features I thought I should have, hit the download button, and was surprised to see an empty folder in my downloads *facepalm"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For many years (in the 1980s), the Bogdanoffs claimed (for instance, in the back covers of their popular science books) to be "authentic geniuses", with combined IQs > 400 and two (2) PhD's each.

This was, obviously now, not true, at least for the "PhD" part of the claim, so at one point they had to try to pass PhDs for real. It took them quite a bit of time and effort, and this effort, as I had been told at the time the "affair" was unraveling by mathematicians who had been involved in this process, was to call famous scientists of their time over the phone asking them questions about the subject of their thesis (after all they were some sort of journalists so at least they knew how to ask questions), and transcribe the answers. Unfortunately they only understood the words of these conversations but not their meanings, which explains why their thesis can look like some genuine science if you look at the sentence level, but doesn't make any sense when you try to find any meaning in it.

Some recent discussion about the affair (in French): [http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/2015/07/02/les- bogdanov-...](http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/2015/07/02/les-bogdanov- condamnes-au-profit-du-cnrs/)

What's doubling truly sad in this story, IMHO, is that:

1) While the are obviously not the scientific geniuses they claim to be, they are even not good science popularisers, they are actually really bad.

2) There are still people, and not only people attracted by pseudoscience or the bizarre aspects of their personality, that take them seriously. I remember, for instance, that that have been interviewed in recent years on France Info (national public french information radio) about the Higgs boson discovery or their recent books.

<comment><USER6> They're weird beasts, not taken seriously anymore by academics, and not taken seriously by tv audience, that just want a bit of smart stuff on stage to feel educated for 5 minutes. Before they divert the interviews in jokes and music.

One more thing, being a science populariser requires a special ability to bridge different mindsets, it's not easy, for instance Cedric Villani is not good at that, his tv appearances goes quickly into silent misunderstandings. A guy like MIT's ex W. Lewin is better at this IMO.

<comment><USER7> > not taken seriously by tv audience

last time I checked, most people still think they are legit in France.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This got me real good:

> One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis, MIT's Roman > Jackiw... was intrigued by the thesis, although it contained many points he > did not understand. Jackiw defended the thesis:

> "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some > originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."

<comment><USER9> > "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some > originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."

Wow. Talk about low standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Grichka thesis : [https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00001502/document](https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00001502/document)

Igor thesis : [https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00001503v1/document](https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00001503v1/document)

<comment><USER11> Unacceptable. Proper formatting is a prerequisite. It's not about being elitist - it's about readability and efficient communication. The equations in these "theses" are so badly formatted I would have taken off marks if an undergrad gave me something similar.

It's fine if you have a handful of equations in your text. But for a PhD in maths? Unacceptable.

<comment><USER7> Even their sentences don't make sense, they just pile up complex words together. There is not one sane line written.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I come away from reading this Wikipedia article still unclear if their thesis and papers are nonsense.

I figure it's bad news for the field of big bang physics when you can't falsify nonsense. I thought that was the point of the whole science thing.

<comment><USER6> This quote is clear though

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair#cite_ref-le- mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair#cite_ref-le-monde_14-1)

I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics.[14]

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had no idea they were "famous" on English Wikipedia.

<comment><USER6> I'm still processing the presence of this on HN's FP.

<comment><USER14> It is interesting to contrast the discussions of 'impostor syndrome' with actual impostors. When I hear various snake-oil spiels ( _blockchain_ springs to mind) or just a self-hype I often wonder if the person has self-awareness of their being a phony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow I just googled these guys. Not that it should matter but this is how they look:

[http://imgur.com/0X0myNJ](http://imgur.com/0X0myNJ)

I could be wrong but it looks like they have had a lot of plastic surgery...

<comment><USER16> Two things I notice...

First: before the surgeries, they have facial features that would be common in Russia but would stand out in a crowd of western europeans. It is a bit sad if this part contributes to the comment that they look weird. I think it does.

Second: at some point they start to seem obsessed with some twisted idea of looking youthful and in deep denial of their age. For example, the same faces with shorter, grayer hair would look better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Since 1979, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have been widely known in France as > television-show hosts.

They recently had their own parodical song:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbXj2OGXFjI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbXj2OGXFjI)

This is about their supposedly abnormally long chin (people regularly joke about Bogdanov being aliens).

<comment><USER18> But why?

How could we, as a society, let that happen?

<comment><USER19> TL DR; France is the country where Cargo Cult science is born, and that what was Feynman has been warning against, because it it was beginning to contaminate US at his time (has finished by now)

It is called academism: when you respect the look&feel of science more than science itself.

Some very well known moralists that have been making some real scientific breakthrough such as Pasteur, Cuvier have used this to publish pseudo science based on their scientific credit France has hence created some very disturbing _pseudo-science_ backed by academy

Pasteur was a convinced puritan. When the league of virtue came to him to shut down the sinners who where drinking alcohol, he backed a totally un-scientific study to claim absinth was a poison. The prohobition in USA is based on a similar lobbying.

Cuvier who was friend of Linné, after going to a pub by seeing one poor girl from south african born with a dysmorphia made a very nice theory from one sample stating that the «black» where closers to the gorillas than the «whites». Giving racism a «scientific credit».

Than in the early XXth helped by politics, scientific academy claimed that all about crimes could be solved with science, hence the birth of scientific police and «scientific methods to investigate» (CSI) including: using graphology, numerology, the face of the people (based on Cuvier) and extended to say stuff like the facial trait of jews that were more akin to be criminals, polygraphs and shits.

One of our greatest and first she PhD, Marie Curie (who was born polish) was at the opposite of Bogdanov constantly under the fire of criticism of «our scientific institutions» for being too free. (She divorced, had an affair, and above all CLAIMED to be able to do science by herself). Thus French scientific academy have asked the Royal Academy of Stockholm to not give her the Nobel prize in 1906. Stupidity that they happily ignored.

French science had always a tendency to prefer the appearance of science over its content (reading Molière is very informative on the topic), and until recently USA developed itself greatly by abhorring this model (read quicksilver from Stephenson as a good picture) greatly inspired by the «erudition» held by the church.

But after the WWII amazingly USA have been all the more looking like France in its worst part they have been bashing France.

I think the biography of Feynman and the part on the introduction of Fundamental Math is instructive. It is the fundation of the cargo cult story. Or the book of Pr Gleick on dynamic systems where it is described why Mandelbrot prefered to give up on polytechnique (french Ivy league) or even the Sokal scandal can depict a pretty accurate picture of the slow convergence of US academism towards french one.

America's greatness in knowledge is being held down by this: conformism, and giving more credit to institution than they ought to have.

<comment><USER20> > the introduction of Fundamental Math is instructive. It is the fundation of > the cargo cult story.

What do you mean by that?

<comment><USER19> according to Feynman autobiography the talk he gave was inspired by the feelings that he had reading the textbook while in the californian commission for it. At the time of the introduction of «Mahtématiques fondamentales» a french revolutionary (lol) methodology for learning maths.

He expressed a concern that this kind of math did look savant, but was wrong in helping having intuition. Arithmetics vs geometry.

Stuff for which he may be right since Bourbaki actually designed their math teaching on formalism over intuition/geometry after a feud with Poincaré who dismissed the influence of «french school» in his work...a very horrible crime of lèse majesté.

The Ignorance of Bourbaki: [https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~ardm/bourbaki.pdf](https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~ardm/bourbaki.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As an aside, they did a marketing video for the commodore Amiga [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRNAndfFEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRNAndfFEY) :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny, coincidentally read about Schon's scandal, read this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal) which list this thread's link too.

</comment><comment><USER22> In some ill-defined dual space of a Bogdanov manifold there is the Sokal affair: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

</comment><comment><USER23> Almost sounds a bit like Elizabeth Holmes...

</comment><comment><USER24> Popular culture sidenote : in France, the Bogdanov's brothers are now _the_ standard butt of jokes related to:

\- aesthetic surgery (in a close race with actresses Emanuelle Beart and Angelina Jolie)

\- aliens (or people looking like, claiming to have met, or communicate with aliens)

\- chins (a rather popular comedian has based about 12% of all his jokes about silly puns with Bogdanov's brothers and the word 'menton')

\- lots of other stufff

\- mad scientists

\- and, I suppose, cosmologists (although it is probably a challenge to make a cosmologist joke in front of a regular audience.)

For whatever it's worth, next time you have to make a standup routine in France.

<comment><USER25> > aesthetic surgery

[http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.446201.131459328...](http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.446201.1314593283!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_750/alg- split-bogdanoff-brothers-jpg.jpg)

<comment><USER26> Does anyone here understand why people do this to themselves? Is it some sort of disorder, like anorexia?

<comment><USER27> Body dysmorphia is relatively common, has a high rate of attempted suicide and deaths by suicide.

[http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/740015](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/740015)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Computer Science PhD trends - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/42007984829/computer-science-phd-trends <comment><USER2> It's always good to keep things in perspective. Many of my friends in the liberal arts are doing PhDs with the same (or less) 7% tenure track position rate. The difference is that they don't have the choice to go into industry afterward. Our "worst case scenario" of going to work for Google for $150k-$200k is a dream for most PhD candidates.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure working for google for 200K is NOT the worst case scenario for a computer science PhD.

<comment><USER4> <http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/mcdonalds-joke>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hear, hear on point 3. The fact that our immigration policy is so screwed that we actively disuade PhD candidates from staying here in the USA is an absolute disgrace. Taking into account that in most cases those PhD candidates are fully funded by taxpayer dollars, one might think policymakers are actively taking money from foreign nations to maintain the status quo.

<comment><USER6> I am not convinced it is incredibly hard for a tech PhD student who has done quality research from a good school to stay in the U.S. There are two options currently:

1\. EB-1: A visa given to an alien of extraordinary ability. The requirements for this are complex but a person with a decent lawyer should be able to navigate them provided the person has access to enough people in academia and industry who vouch that this person is of extraordinary ability.

2\. EB-2: Employment sponsorship. Both academic institutions and industry have a standard practice of sponsoring people who have done any form of grad. school to a path that involves a green card.

Now, sure, 1) has overly bizarre documentation requirements (like for example requiring that one print out every paper that one has written and send it to USCIS) and 2) takes way too long for people born in India and China. This of course requires reform in a fair manner that takes into account other constraints like making sure that immigration doesn't become top heavy from two nations.

The sequoia capital article talks about foreign born students getting ejected. Do we have any quantitative data on how many of them are really being ejected? ( Acquiring a H1B visa to work in the United States is not hard. When, I (a foreign born student) graduated and applied for an H1B visa, it took ten days for it to get approved. ) Have there been surveys done on people who have voluntarily left for personal reasons vs. people who left because of this issue?

<comment><USER7> I have never known an international grad student, even if they do not finish the program, to be forced back after. Actually, I don't know anyone that actually did went back without getting a green card first.

<comment><USER6> I know people from two groups:

1) People who have non C.S. degrees even from good schools. Once you have finished your degree, you have three months to find a job. Some people don't find a job within those three months and are forced to leave. Honestly, I am not sure what the solution to that is? Stapling a green card on their applications post graduation seems good to help an indefinite stay but what if you can't find a job in 6 months? 9 months?

2) People who don't want to stay here. Their objective is to go back home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a Junior at University right now, this article speaks quite positively about the benefits of doing a PhD.

1) Even if you get a PhD and aren't shining at your field (read gulped into tenure track positions at a top 10 CS program) you're not confined to becoming a professor at a state school. This is a legitimate fear, and one of the things that has always made me frightened of pursuing a PhD.

2) Even if I end up outside of Academia, I'll likely bear little to no fiscal loss. The work will most probably be more interesting than the work I'd be doing had I not done a PhD. The job-ceiling will also be significantly higher, or non-existant.

As a semi-related question - does anyone with a background in the area know if it's easier to get accepted into a top-10 CS program having been born and raised in the States? GPA, research experience and my school's 'ranking' is a non-issue - I'm just curious if residency in the United States ever affects PhD committees in regards to admission.

<comment><USER9> >this article speaks quite positively about the benefits of doing a PhD.

That's not at all what I got out of it. I read that phds provide no material advantage and that they're really tough (in every way, including from a psychological standpoint).

>you're not confined to becoming a professor at a state school. This is a legitimate fear, and one of the things that has always made me frightened of pursuing a PhD.

Confined? Most people don't have this choice. Fear? This a dream of a large % of phd graduates. I'd add one thing that the article doesn't mention: graduate school is far less of a meritocracy than people outside realize. There are so many levels of luck involved, including finding a good advisor, department politics, finding a good project, not having your research 'scooped', funding, etc. These things are correlated with intelligence/ability, but a large number of smart people fail grad school for reasons beyond their control, and a significant % of the people who succeed were blessed with amazing luck. It's the smart and accomplished undergrads (which I take it you are) who have the most to lose.

>I'll likely bear little to no fiscal loss.

Consider the opportunity cost. Here are some reasonable numbers: a masters costs 25K, a phd pays out 150K over six years, and in the five years of working the masters makes 500K. By the time the phd is out of school the masters student is 325K ahead of the phd student, and his work experience/career is probably further (meaning his salary will probably be at least as high). Also, the masters student lived more comfortably in those five years.

> The work will most probably be more interesting than the work I'd be doing > had I not done a PhD.

I have seen very few industry jobs that require a phd, and I work in a field dominated by phds. The exception is industry research, which is great but isn't open to most phds. Most phds don't be doing anything resembling their research two years out of grad school.

I don't mean to make a phd sound totally crappy. There's a lot you can get out of it, it teaches you how to think and organize projects in a way that's hard to find outside grad school. You'll meet smart, motivated people. You'll be able to interact with professors as almost-peers. But consider a research- oriented masters, it's what I did and I consider it a happy medium.

<comment><USER10> To give a counterpoint, as a current CS PhD student...

If you measure how much money someone will make in the next 10 years from the point they decide whether to pursue a PhD or not, yes, you are correct, the ones who do not pursue one will have lots more money.

However, you can live a middle class lifestyle while gettings a PhD (OK, maybe "lower middle class" here, but still very comfortably, if you don't have dependents to support) and also after getting a PhD, which is the same result as if you didn't pursue the PhD.

To me, that is more relevant than a raw amount of money.

I care what class I'm in, i.e., (a) starving; (b) poor; (c) middle class; (d) rich. I don't really care _within_ those categories.

As a sidenote, I think getting a PhD increases your likelihood of getting an otherwise unlikely outcome in the sense of career success/advancement, getting rich, etc. (unless you choose academia). I mean, over the course of your career, you could really leverage your PhD, or you could not. In theory (and probably in practice most of the time), it won't hurt to have one, career- wise.

<comment><USER6> > As a sidenote, I think getting a PhD increases your likelihood of getting an > otherwise unlikely outcome in the sense of career success/advancement, > getting rich, etc. (unless you choose academia). I mean, over the course of > your career, you could really leverage your PhD, or you could not. In theory > (and probably in practice most of the time), it won't hurt to have one, > career-wise.

To give you another counterpoint, as a person who dropped out of a C.S. PhD and went to industry. Sure, it won't hurt to get a PhD. Getting rich unfortunately is only weakly correlated with technical ability beyond a certain point. 1) You are not going to get rich purely as a salary (wo)man unless you are lucky enough to be an early stage employee (which I don't see how the PhD or otherwise helps you that much. ). 2) To found your own company and leverage your PhD skills seems tempting but rarely if ever do PhD's have research that can be converted into successful industry products. Boston Dynamics is one of those rare examples. However, these opportunities are not closed to off to people who while they may not have done research in the field and know every other implication of certain strategies but have great contacts and know how to get things done.

<comment><USER11> I'm currently an undergrad senior getting degrees in CS and Physics. I just finished applying to CS PhD grad programs, but I've really been leaning towards dropping out after completing my masters and going to work in industry.

I'm just interested in your experience of doing just that. I've found very little reference material on it, except some comments by professors and people currently working in industry that people are courted by companies once they finish their qualifying exams.

This may be off topic, but what's your experience with this? Were you courted before you decided to leave? How far did you get? What affected your decision? What was the salary difference? What do you do now? Was it worth it to even go for a little?

<comment><USER10> I'm not the person you're asking this question of, but rather, the person who faced the same decision and decided to stay in grad school.

I couldn't let my advisor down. After sticking with me for two years, I would have felt horrible if I had left him after my masters. I did not _expect_ this going in, and I planned to have "leaving after my masters" as a real option.

To be clear, I still would have left if I had had a good reason. Ultimately, I wanted to stay. But if it had been borderline, I would have still stayed. And "borderline" for grad school may very well be "I'm tired of killing myself with overwork, I don't really feel like doing this shit for a few more years. But I could just suck it up and keep going, since I'm already like half way there." Grad school can be pretty crappy.

I definitely could have turned summer internships during grad school into full-time work, though, and gotten a well-paying engineering job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Points 2 and 3 make no reference to previous years' data, so aren't really talking about trends. Point 1 ignores the (trend that they state) that there are more post-doc positions.

Post-docs are safer jobs, because you know what will happen at the end of them (you get kicked out and find another job). Fewer people going straight into tenure-track means fewer people spending years at an institution, not getting a job (because they lost the race) and starting elsewhere. Sounds very healthy to me!

</comment><comment><USER13> What do the other 46% do?

<comment><USER14> The source material is pretty accessible - mostly just tables of data: [http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CRA_Taulb...](http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CRA_Taulbee_2011-2012_Results.pdf)

So 23.9% are in other parts of academic computer science, mostly Postdocs. another 3.6% go to positions (unspecified) in other academic departments.

His 47% is "North American, Non-Academic, Industry". It doesn't break down research vs. development jobs, which is probably smart.

Another interesting thing is that it's broken down (Table D4) by specialty - so for instance, two PhDs in HCI left the US from the 2010-2011 class, and the specialties with the highest percentage leaving the country after graduating were "Information Systems" and "Networks".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Darn, those aliens have so many PhDs, no wonder they fly them saucers so well. UFO = Untyped+Functional+Objective

<comment><USER16> Hahahaha! That has to be one of the wittiest comments i've read on HN. Thanks for making me laugh aloud!???

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know about similar content on Business PhD trends?

<comment><USER18> For econ PhDs, there is [http://cber.uark.edu/2011-12_New_PhD_Labor_Market_Survey_Rep...](http://cber.uark.edu/2011-12_New_PhD_Labor_Market_Survey_Report.pdf)</comment></comment>


Who are the UKFast girls and what is their purpose? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lawrencejones.eu/search-marketing/2010/04/26/life-in-the-ukfast-lane/

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to a modern tech company :(</comment>


Show HN: Nightmare – Simple browser automation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nightmarejs.org/ <comment><USER2> Even after substituting the fancy ampersands on your homepage, and requiring nightmare your example still does not run:

      var Nightmare = require('nightmare');
      new Nightmare()
        .goto('http://yahoo.com')
        .type('input[title="Search"]', 'github nightmare')
        .click('.searchsubmit')
        .run();

yields:

      node yahoo.js
      phantom stdout: TypeError: 'null' is not an object (evaluating 'element.value = text')

      phantom stdout:   phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():3
        phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4
        phantomjs://webpage.evaluate():4

      stream.js:94
            throw er; // Unhandled stream error in pipe.
                  ^
      TypeError: undefined is not a function
          at next (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/lib/index.js:56:23)
          at f (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/once/once.js:16:25)
          at Proto.apply (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:123:13)
          at Proto.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/node_modules/dnode-protocol/index.js:99:19)
          at D.dnode.handle (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:140:21)
          at D.dnode.write (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/dnode/lib/dnode.js:128:22)
          at SockJSConnection.ondata (stream.js:51:26)
          at SockJSConnection.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:107:17)
          at Session.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/transport.js:220:25)
          at WebSocketReceiver.didMessage (/private/tmp/night/node_modules/nightmare/node_modules/phantom/node_modules/shoe/node_modules/sockjs/lib/trans-websocket.js:102:40)

The examples in the githubs pages readme don't run either. I am too lazy to debug this.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey sorry about that, just realized i forgot to npm publish v1.1.0 -- published now hope that helps

<comment><USER3> Hey, I'm working on this atm:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/library/night...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit/blob/master/library/nightmare/nightmare.py)

which should help matters. Will reply when done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quick example of how we use this at Segment... for each integration ([https://segment.io/integrations](https://segment.io/integrations)) we need to create a vector logo. This got a bit tedious after the first 50 :) so we built nightmare + nightmare-swiftly so that our chat bot could "auto-generate" vector logos: [https://cloudup.com/cEA-dTd3glM](https://cloudup.com/cEA- dTd3glM)

Hope it's helpful!

<comment><USER4> Is it doing this by checking colored pixel areas and making SVG shapes for them? If so, whatever you use should replace Illustrator's Image Trace functionality, cause that is so bad at creating crisp vector copies of things.

<comment><USER5> Looks like they are submitting it to Swiftly, and then a human does it.

<comment><USER4> :( - I was hoping for a cool algorithm to determine that. Haha maybe I'll write one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could I accomplish multi-page form automation doing something like:

      .goto(page1)
        // page 1
        .type('selector', 'value')
        .click('selector')
        .wait()

        // page 2
        .type('selector', 'value')
        .click('selector')
        .wait()

etc. ?

If so, that seems super easy and more straightforward than vanilla Shadow or even Casper.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's exactly right

<comment><USER6> Thanks, this should be absolutely perfect for a project I've been procrastinating on :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been wanting to programmatically get my transaction details from my bank for a while. I knew about phantomJS but never got around to trying it out. When I saw this I decided to give it a shot, and within half an hour I was able to log into my bank's website (a complicated multi-step process that I had failed to achieve with just POST requests).

Nice tool, thanks. The debugging could use a bit of work - whenever something went wrong it just spit out a bunch of "null is not an object" messages from phantom. Overall it was very easy to use though.

<comment><USER8> Whats a good way to automate this to run? I see the getting started in the documentation says "Save it as hello.js and then run it from the command line" but Iwasnt sure if there are tools like CRON in Linux to automate the script.

<comment><USER7> That is the documentation for phantomjs, which is a stand-alone process. Nightmare is a package for nodejs (that interacts with a phantomjs process), so your code runs in a node context, where there are plenty of scheduling options, e.g. the node-cron package, or just plain setInterval().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like DalekJS ([http://dalekjs.com/](http://dalekjs.com/))

<comment><USER10> Or Twill for Python. ([http://twill.idyll.org/python- api.html](http://twill.idyll.org/python-api.html))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm using casper now but this seems like it may be even easier.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, there's a ton of "easier to use" libraries atop Phantom. CasperJS is by far the most recognized and community-backed. Not sure what value all of these others provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am one of the founders of a startup that sells a similar, proprietary library for Python and Java: [http://heliumhq.com](http://heliumhq.com). Maybe some of the people reading this will find it interesting.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's a polished website... and I know what javascript is, but they didn't do a good job of explaining what it is.

Browser automation? Is this a test suite of some sort, something like selenium? Or is it more like Mechanize?

</comment><comment><USER15> I do like the work they've done with Phantom but the API is horrendous and I found myself wrapping the parts I used. Nightmare looks more complete and probably better tested than my wrapper. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks like an interesting library. I have no use for it right now but maybe one day. Definitely can see why this would be useful for some people though.

Their website has some serious style. It looks cool and original. Which raises a meta-issue that has been bugging me for a while. This is the bar you have to meet for even an open source project nowadays. It's not enough for you to pour your blood sweat and tears into something and then give it away for free. You then have to create slick looking site to market it and get people's attention.

<comment><USER17> Not really... Counterexample: [http://www.haproxy.org/](http://www.haproxy.org/) :)

I think most of the people don't care about the fab wrap, as long as the product works properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> obligatory self-promotion, for those interested in an easy to use PhantomJs: [https://PhantomJsCloud.com](https://PhantomJsCloud.com)

<comment><USER18> oh, and I'd love to let my users use nightmare in their scrips, but I don't know an easy way to sandbox the requested phantomjs instance :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use Ubuntu Linux, and I've got PhantomJS installed. Whether I use Nightmare, Nightmarejs, or Phantomjs on the command line this is what I get: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Nightmare

      nightmare.js:1

Should there be more instructions for installing? I believe the brew command is something for Mac users only...

</comment><comment><USER20> Shameless plug: I maintain Node-huxley ([https://github.com/chenglou/node- huxley](https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley)), which accomplishes what this project does, but without the need for writing automation code. Also compares previous/next screenshots for you automatically.

</comment><comment><USER21> How is it different from [http://nightwatchjs.org/](http://nightwatchjs.org/) ?

<comment><USER22> Nightwatch runs against Selenium, Nightmare uses Phantom.js

With Selenium you have full cross browser support, while Phantom is Webkit based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I currently only have experience using CasperJS which also wraps-around PhantomJS. This has different goals (simpler) and therefore a simpler API, though. The use case at Segment (automatically generating vector logos from a given graphic) is even cooler though, I think! Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice work!

Can you please provide an example for using `evaluate()` to get the page's content?

I tried this, but didn't get anything:

      new Nightmare()
        .goto('http://yahoo.com')
        .evaluate(function (page) { return this.content; }, function (res) {console.log(res);})
        .run();

<comment><AUTHOR> extracting stuff seems to be a common use case so added an example to the readme for ya: [https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples](https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare#examples)

</comment></comment><comment> andrey-p And, if you want a very very thin wrapper around Phantom (essentially a phantom script manager), feel free to have a look at this instead:

[https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm- js](https://github.com/andrey-p/ectoplasm-js)

Pardon the shameless plug.

</comment><comment><USER25> What is the project's background image ([http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg](http://www.nightmarejs.org/nightmarejs.org/images/ground.jpg))?

<comment><USER26> That's a photo that Frank Hurley took on his (nearly doomed) antarctic adventure with Ernest Shackleton. You can find scads more photos here: [http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/](http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/)

<comment><USER25> Wow, thanks for the info! What an amazing story, and photos.

<comment><USER26> It really is. Hurley is one of my favorite photographers of all time; his stuff just captured the essence of the time so well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As someone entirely unfamiliar with both Nightmare and PhantomJS, what is the typical use case? It isn't obvious to me from the examples or FAQs. Why prefer these over something like Selenium?

<comment><USER28> I assume because it's more light-weight and hence suited better for certain needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Very nice. FYI best practices are to have a CTA or indicator on your site to scroll down, so no one leaves thinking the whole site is just an image and title.

</comment><comment><USER30> Segment usually puts out great tools and crisp sites!

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone know how this compares to zombie js? I'm new to headless browser testing so apologies if question isn't relevant

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm building a bot using this, any idea of proxies i can use to change the source ip's and how i can use it with a proxy?

</comment><comment><USER33> Fantastic easy tool! There is a way to pass phantomjs command line options (eg. --ssl-protocol=X ) through nightmarejs?

<comment><USER33> Found it, line 108 in lib/index.js

      - phantom.create({ port: port }, function(instance) {
      + phantom.create({ port: port}, "--ssl-protocol=X", function(instance) {

<comment><USER34> Have you tried this? It's not working for me :|

I'm getting about:blank everytime I hit a web address using ssl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Extra points for page design!

</comment><comment><USER36> so... how does one query the DOM? It looks it has been left out of the api. Does this mean that Nightmare is only able to do brainless automation without checking browser results?

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting background... creepy is good.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER39> Ordinarily I would file a website bug, but this happens so often I'm mentioning it here to hopefully stop others from doing it, too.

 _Please_ don't use fancy quotes or the fancy apostrophe for code examples on your webpage. It looks out-of-place with the rest of the fixed width font and, most importantly, it stops folks from being able to copy-and-paste your examples into their terminal or editor.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like a browser level or OS level plugin could be useful to check paste buffers and swap to|from fancy quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> the problem with Phantom.js is that compared to an actual browser it still falls short. I've given up on Phantom.js all together because it is actually not a true replacement for Selenium running on an actual browser. I found it far more reliable to have Firefox running on Xvfb for when I'm testing without worrying about Phantom.js behaving wildly.

<comment><USER42> It's definitely for a different use case. Phantom/Nightmare is for automating web page interaction, whereas Selenium is for cross-browser testing.

<comment><USER41> You can use Selenium for automation and web page interaction. There is just an overhead of running Xvfb but it's trivial to setup.

What I mean is that PhantomJS engine still falls short of a real browser. Advantage of running a real browser with Xvfb is that you won't ever have to worry about if the page is going to render properly or have it behave the way you expect it to. The overhead is not of a big deal, in fact it's a tradeoff for rendering accuracy.

Don't get me wrong headless browser like PhantomJS is headed in the right direction but if compatibility with website is crucial for your success, it is not enough and I just don't have a lot of confidence that it will replace a real browser with Xvfb.

Basically the Javascript libraries are reinventing a lot of the wheels that have already been done in other languages before the explosion of Node.js.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Self-Learn Programming? - <AUTHOR> I am self-learning programming for building web apps. Self-learning is not working. I am constantly switching from one language to another, Python to JS, or HTML, or CSS.
I don't have enough money and time to join any course or bootcamp.
Please give me some advice to self-learn programming. <comment><USER2> "I don't have enough money and time to join any course or bootcamp." If you don't have time / money how do you expect to learn? There's freecodecamp, udemy, MDN. Start a side project or join an open source project and complete tasks in those projects. You are focused more on the act of learning, and less on the doing of the things you want to learn. Learn by doing. Go make a crappy web project on github and link it to a netlify domain. Takes 10 minutes. Then do it again and again, getting better each time. Go on fiverr and take on some simple HTML projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> learn the way the internet learned, first look at html. learn how the language works, then start "reading html and practice understanding it. then go for JS , then CSS. Here is a catchall of sorts where all 3 and more! are discussed:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web)

i suggest find someplaces like this to retrieve some skeletons so you can see simplicity then learn to flesh it up, start small just make a page that says hello world, and displays a kitten pic , or some such thing:

[https://linuxwebdevelopment.com/html5-boilerplate/](https://linuxwebdevelopment.com/html5-boilerplate/)

how you learn is important top down or bottum up. do you look at the big picture grand scheme and dissect it to find what parts make it up? or do you look at fundamental pieces, and examine how they relate to each other and function as a group?

here is a place to experiment with JS script so you can edit a snippet and see how things change:

[https://jsfiddle.net/boilerplate/react- jsx/](https://jsfiddle.net/boilerplate/react-jsx/)

keep in mind there are many flavours of java, but basically its a programme sitting inside the html.

CSS can be confusing to read if you have no context for it.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduct...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduction_to_CSS)

basically CSS is a way of enforcing a certain look or layout but there are some cool tricks that can do things like animations, or changing fonts formats and images according to some event in the browser.

frameworks come up, this is a not basic aspect

</comment><comment><USER4> Have a deadline, say, 3 months. Choose _one_ language (no framework). Have _one_ project (a bookstore system, for example).

Read official documentation/tutorials as you develop.

You may not like the language. You may not like the project. But finish the job with the tools you chose.

<comment><USER5> >> You may not like the language. You may not like the project. But finish the job with the tools you chose. <<

Real-life life lesson right there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> start building something simple e.g. website ripper choose any stack. it doesnt matter.

important thing to understand is - webapp are becoming more complex these days. so getting whole picture will take some time.

you can try below simple project too.

1\. build library project using python. take name of books as input and add/delete/update/list in database like mysql.

2\. now build new database to add/delete/update/list name of students

3\. then add relationships to manage books borrowed by students

4\. do same thing using web. take input from webforms and store in mysql. retrieve them again. for backend you can try flask framework.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reading articles, stack overflow, language spec. Doing my own lab. Reading others code. Talking with other programmers. Discussion boards. IRC. But most importantly: working on real projects.

</comment><comment><USER8> Find a problem you want to solve.

Solve the problem.

<comment><USER9> Very concise and to the point. My effort is quite a bit more verbose:

Get yourself a project. Any project, but preferably not too minor. Write that project in your new language. Many times while doing that, you will need to do a few days or more of solid studying of the new language to get yourself past a hurdle that's blocking your progress.

Eventually, you will complete the project. Now, throw that one away. It was just to 'show you the ropes'. (That's commonly said as "Build one to throw away.") Now do that project again with your new, greater, basis of knowledge.

Repeat that with several projects. You now have a fair level of self-taught programming in that one language.

Repeat that process again but using a different language. There will be hurdles again, but different hurdles.

Now you know programming to a reasonable level.

Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Business Collaboration for Small Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.b2bsphere.com

<comment><USER2> There's a typo on the about us page. I'm assuming it should say B2bsphere.com

"Founded in February 2015 and based in Houston, Texas. B2pshere.com..."

<comment><USER3> Thank you and do appreciate your response. We have fixed it.</comment></comment>


How Do I Crack Satellite and Cable Pay TV? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://recon.cx/2016/resources/slides/RECON-0xA-How_Do_I_Crack_Satellite_and_Cable_Pay_TV.pdf <comment><USER2> What? No comments? This stuff is amazing.</comment>


What makes a country good at football? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/international/2018/06/09/what-makes-a-country-good-at-football <comment><USER2> Watching Germany play Brazil is so beautiful - so fundamentally and obviously different, it's like you can determine the entire national character form just a few minutes of football.

</comment><comment><USER3> This whole article imagines that football is only played by men.

Part of the reason the US does "worse than predicted" is that they're only looking at the Men's game. US interest in the women's side (current World Cup champions) is arguably higher than in the men's.

<comment><USER4> Why is it that the US women are consistently the best in the world, and US men are consistently middling? Do women in other countries just not play as much soccer as US women?

<comment><USER5> Womens' soccer gets the US' best athletes. There are plenty of stadiums open on Friday nights with 10-30K fans watching boys play American football. You would be lucky get get 100 to watch soccer.

<comment><USER6> >Womens' soccer gets the US' best athletes.

I'm not sure I agree with that. US women do well at the international level in a fair number of sports. But it's probably true that women in the US are more likely to seriously play soccer growing up, including at the collegiate level, than women in other countries are.

And, of course, the US Women's national basketball team is utterly dominant. Though given the relative popularity of basketball in the US compared to other major countries, that's not exactly a fair comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The same question can be asked of other small nations which dominate or excel in a particular sport.

Why are the New Zealand All Blacks so dominant in rugby union?

Why is Austria so good at winter sports?

Why does Ireland produce so many top class race horses?

In each case I think it has something to do with a unique cultural and natural environment, which then leads to the best in class supporting structures being built.

<comment><USER8> When a velodrome was built in my hometown, people were outraged. The cost was around $600k of 80's money. And there was absolutely no tradition in the area for this sport.

Less than ten years later, olympic gold:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Moreno_(cycli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Moreno_\(cyclist\))

<comment><USER9> The same could be said for the Manchester Velodrome, high quality facilities built in an area without much history of cycling and now we churn out Olympic medalists

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Englander here. Tell me when you find out.

<comment><USER11> England's poor performance is a mystery to me.

<comment><USER8> Maybe the fact that there is no UK national team?

Edit: Frankly I don't care so much about karma, but this downvote is strange. I would have thought that this reason wasn't controversial at all. I've even heard british players say that. Anybody care to explain?

<comment><USER11> Not downvoting, but I think England on its own has what it takes to do well.

<comment><USER8> Of course, but a joint team would minimize luck's role. England won World Cup once anyway, didn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the main reasons football (soccer) isn't that popular in the US (as opposed to the rest of the world) is that it's not as easy to marketize as other sports, i.e it doesn't have many adverticements opportunities.

Take for example basketball: It has 4 periods with pauses in between, and a number of time-outs; on all these occasions adverticements can be played.

Football on the other hand (usually) has only one 15 minute pause at the half- time. There won't be any other pauses to play adverticements, actually the 45 minute timer for each half never stops. Also, because of how the field is laid out usually the camera will be far away so adverticements in the field or in the players' clothes won't be easily visible.

For women's football, it's more or less non-existant in the rest of the world so it can't be a proper measurement of success.

</comment><comment><USER13> Look to Iceland. The place is no bigger than a large city, yet they have now qualified twice for major finals. And they even beat England last time.

How is this possible? Well basically it's because football talent isn't just some randomly distributed gold-dust. People there decided they would make a bunch of indoor halls to train in, and they got themselves coaching badges. They supply a lot of youth players to different leagues in Europe.

Size and wealth are just poor correlates for the number of centres of excellence: places that by luck, tradition, or directed investment have the kind of people who pour their lives into training kids in football.

One other thing to note is that size can also work against a country. You can only have one national team at each age level, so only so many players can gather experience at that level.

<comment><USER14> Minor correction, Iceland is pretty big. It takes a long time to drive around it, and I have.

The population is less than a big city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What this article describes through statistics is what we would call Love for the game. If you want parents to take their kids to training sessions and sunday morning games supervised by quasi-benevolent coaches and referees, your best hope is to rely on the help of a fervent people.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, genetics like height/physique can no longer be an excuse in the Men's game since there are players like Messi (even as an outlier). This contrasts sports like basketball and American football.

At least for the US, would it be possible to learn from their success(dominance over other countries) in baseball/basketball and apply the same structure to Men's football(soccer)? Is it possible that the genetic variance that the US has could be an advantage in the future? Or is it impossible due to culture? (Higher chance of making money in football/basketball, etc)

<comment><USER16> Actually genetics should be one of the main reasons why football is more popular globally than American football or basketball: Except from the goalkeeper, most roles in a football team don't benefit from an extreme physique (e.g. being too tall has adverse effects in many situations).

Edit: But to answer your question, I think culture stands in the way:

\- You can earn much more than your average NBA player but its much harder as an American to get to that level, because you need to get out of the US early on to become a contender (Infrastructure helps)

\- somehow football has been marketed as 'unmanly' in the US

\- American soon-to-become-athletes have many more options (NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB) whereas in most nations there's at least a clear no. 1 sport.

\- Not being American (but wearing my stuck-up hat), but could it be that there's also a race-connection (i.e. caucasians more likely to choose ice- hockey, african-americans more likely to choose American football/basketball, latin-americans more likely to play baseball or football)?

<comment><USER17> I really doubt genetics has anything to do with the lack of popularity of football and basketball in the vast majority of the world. The actual probable reason is equipment. If you're playing a tackle sport why would you choose a complicated one such as football over rugby? And basketball requires the installation of a net, a good flat surface and a high quality ball that bounces well off the ground. Soccer on the other hand can be played with basically anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My not-to-be-taken-seriously theory is that Italian influence helps. If you look at the national teams of Uruguay, Argentina (should really be called South Italy), Brazil, and (obviously) Italy itself, you'll find a large number of Italian surnames. That's 13 titles between these 4 countries.

<comment><USER19> Soccer is universally beloved in south america, it isn't just the italians. There was sizeable italian immigration to south america in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but I don't think they are particulary over-represented in football.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The primary goal of soccer parents in the US is to get their sons/daughters a collegiate scholarship. I suspect the primary goal of most other countries is to play professionally.

</comment><comment><USER21> I may not know what makes a country good at football but for sure, I can tell a thing or two about what makes Pakistan amazing at making footballs! :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> The model seems not to be a good one

</comment><comment><USER23> Practice?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a good opportunity to clarify HN's policy w.r.t. paywall articles; are they allowed? encouraged? discouraged? Only for "reached your limit" paywalls in case some readers didn't reach said limit?

<comment><USER25> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Haha, what is this...

So, I have no interest in football, but a quick search for top clubs -> Everton FC players reveals around half of them are foreign.

So what does this have to do with the country? A rich club can afford the best players from all over the world, plus the best training... and that's it...

<comment><USER27> The article is about predicting the success of national teams, not club teams. National team players can't be bought or sold and in most cases people are only eligible to play for one or maybe two national teams.

<comment><USER26> I see, I thought they're all the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well, I'll read this, but my first thought was of American football. And my first response thereupon was, "blind allegiance".

Sounds snarky. But it is applicable, on so many levels.

(And yeah, it is a bit snarky. I'm not very keen on the U.S., right now -- even though I'm part of it.)

<comment><USER28> An initial downvote -- fair enough. For there are political and other tones to my comment. But, since the OP introduces the topic of sport, in the first place, some of the things I see in American football that lead to my comment -- and that cause my concern for the U.S.:

\- Players destroying their bodies (and, we increasingly know, minds) for the sake of the sport.

\- A willful blindness to the above, served at top levels by rampant commercialism and profit, for decades. Even the cognitive effects, probably for a couple of decades if not longer.

\- A fan base that spends an inordinate amount of time in such allegiance and paying fealty. Granted, there's a lot of socialization around this. But there's also a lot of... well, several words come to mind, but I'll sum it up with "aggression", often I find of a rather mindless and inconsiderate sort, at least from a minority but a minority having an outsized impact.

\- Most recently, when the "show" is co-opted to express another viewpoint: The protests. So much allegiance to the show and disinterest in paying attention to what the players, the participants who actually make the show possible, are rightly trying to point out -- something that belongs to many of their own backgrounds and experiences.

Blind allegiance. Stop and think about the context.

P.S. I know European football has a lot of violence -- those stories about fan violence and absurdity. But I don't feel qualified to speak to it, really. I also don't perceive the players as being quite so chewed up by the game, although I vaguely recall some stories of arthritis and significantly limited mobility. And headers are becoming increasingly suspect in brain trauma.

<comment><USER29> I think the downvotes most of all reflect the fact you didn't bother to read the article.

The discussion is about _soccer_ , not _american football_.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Reinstall macOS on a Fusion Drive - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karti/how-to-reinstall-macos-on-a-fusion-drive-73713b97183f <comment><USER2> Related: [http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/06/08/clean-install-mojave- fu...](http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/06/08/clean-install-mojave-fusion- drive.html)</comment>


Lockheed's stealth C-130 successor revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2011/09/images-lockheeds-stealth-c-130/

<comment><USER2> Should be 'Large wind tunnel model of proposed design revealed', no new aircraft is being introduced. Looks a bit like Thunderbird 2, if you go back that far.</comment>


What's Holding Back Google Apps? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090513_247160.htm <comment><USER2> > Google Apps, on the other hand, store data on Google's servers. "That's > probably our biggest stumbling block to going bigger with Google," Simpson > says.

This is a huge problem for many companies. Some documents you really don't care if Google stores or not.

However our compliance officer told us that we can't by law store rough drafts of our annual report or any spreadsheets dealing with unreported numbers on any servers but our own.

Google really needs to address this issue if it wants companies to move fully to it's solution.

<comment><USER3> I'll second this. We've been experimenting with Zoho Office which has an API (at least for it's most important apps). I'm shocked that Google (a company with way more resources) hasn't at least matched what Zoho is doing in the space.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I follow.

First, Google Apps has an API: <http://code.google.com/apis/apps/> though I can't speak to it's completeness next to the Zoho API.

Second, an API has nothing to do with where the data is stored, unless I'm missing something...?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> '"Building a sales staff to proffer its applications is a labor-intensive endeavor that hasn't been part of the company's DNA, says Zachary Nelson, CEO of online accounting software maker NetSuite (N). "If you want to sell enterprise software, you have to have salespeople," he says.'

This seems the most concise summary of the problem. Enterprise sales is very different than their consumer facing, ad supported businesses. And adding an enterprise style sales force is probably a mistake, as it runs counter to Google's business culture. Then you have two kinds of companies joined at the hip, one that makes decisions by algorithm to keep cost of sales to a minimum, and another that uses steak and strippers to sell product. It is not clear why you should have one firm at that point, rather than spin off the enterprise products into their own entity.

'Creating new ways to analyze business data inside Apps has been "harder to get up on the priority list" given Google's long list of projects, according to Sam Schillace, a Google engineering director who created the software that's the basis for Google's word processor.'

On the other hand, this seems the place where Google could add value. Surely, there must be Google engineers with clever ideas about how to employ Google's infrastructure and machine learning algorithms to slurp in all the data in a business's spreadsheets and spit out interesting, actionable information that would be difficult for that business to recreate on its own?

</comment><comment><USER6> I had a discussion 3 weeks with coworkers. I thought the reason why Google Apps and others are not making that progress fast enough is not purely technology limitation on the web platform. Google are in fact may be very careful not to put themselves in the same pair of shoes as Microsoft did to get sued on basis of anti-trust.

Of course now we all heard from Techcrunch that DOJ has interested in building possible case against Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd use Google Apps more if they were actually Google App Engine applications which I could choose to run locally, on Google's server or on a third-party's system.

</comment><comment><USER8> Inertia.

The same thing keeping anyone stuck on outmoded middle of the road platforms like Office. But Google are good enough to be picking folk up in various niches, and there's other smaller players getting play too. Standard disruptive innovation stuff.

Some of this article sounds a bit anti-Google, pro-Microsoft but really if, as far as GE is concerned, Microsoft is simply one of three options for an office suite, and its main plus is local data (rather than say total omnipresence) then compared with a few years ago that's a terrible place for Microsoft to be.

</comment><comment><USER9> The answer is really simple - a solid marketing campaign is missing. They have relied on public attention for every other product they've produced (AdSense and AdWords included).

</comment><comment><USER10> "What's Holding Back Google Apps?"

Speed and simplicity.

Microsoft Office is slow and complicated. Google Apps are slower and, in some ways, more complicated.

Need examples of outrageous successes using speed and simplicity: email, instant messaging, texting, .txt files. Google Apps must be more like these, faster and simpler, for widespread adoption.

<comment><USER11> I disagree that MS Office is slow or complicated. It's very fast on every one of my machines, especially compared to Java-based alternatives. And it's extremely simple to use. Granted, there are complicated features but I generally don't use them and they're hidden away on ribbon strips that I never see.

<comment><USER10> "they're hidden away on ribbon strips that I never see"

Because you've already hidden them. Along with that fricken dancing paper clip.

Many people, when initially overwhelmed by unnecessary features, just refuse to adopt and stick with something simpler. _That's_ Google's biggest problem with Apps.

<comment><USER12> Have you used Office 2007 at all? They're hidden away by default. The whole purpose of the ribbon was to manage the complexity better. Plus, there's no paper clip. It's not the '90s anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Googlefail? :) <http://www.roomatic.com/%23googlefail></comment>


Bitcoin Startup 21 Unveils Product Plan: Embeddable Chips for Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/18/bitcoin-startup-21-unveils-product-plan-embeddable-mining-chips/?mod=rss_Technology

<comment><USER2> It's probably way too far out for anyone to make any real judgements on this. Additionally I will qualify the rest of the text with the information that I find BitCoin more silly and revolutionary.

That being said...What the actual fuck? From an embedded mining chip in smartphones, to not focusing specifically on mining(?), to a distinctly finite currency (at least as I understand it) being referred to as an "infinite stream of digital currency".

This does not inspire confidence, no...

It actually seems to get to the level of the Fry "not-sure-if" meme in the next paragraph when quoting Mr. Srinivasan.

>The product launch reflects 21's view that "bitcoin will ultimately be seen as a fundamental system resource on par with CPU, bandwidth, hard drive space and RAM,"

I feel one must question at the very least the motives of a person who wants MONEY to be a fundamental system resource. Woe unto us when we open a system monitor to see an account balance next to our consumed physical/virtual memory.</comment>


Hurricane Idai (the Southern Hemispheres worst disaster?) happened a week ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/cyclone-idai-worst-weather-disaster-to-hit-southern-hemisphere-mozambique-malawi <comment><AUTHOR> ...and started 2 weeks ago. News from this part of the world often travels slow... Are there any _good_ reasons why this story took so long to break?</comment>