Life at Wal-Mart - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/01/life-at-walmart.html <comment><USER2> Its so annoying to me that many people (esp in Bay Area) loath Wal-Mart, and then turn around and gush over how cheap they got this or that crappy chinese made product for at Target.

Both are massive big box retailers, both threaten smaller businesses by discounts and volume. Both pay their employees entry level low wages.

Target def has better marketing and gives money to school. But that hardly accounts for the difference in opinions people hold for the two companies. Its nice to see some other opinions about these companies.

<comment><USER3> for the purposes of a conversation about loathing, i think you're presenting a false equivalence here. in such subjective terms it's hard not to admit that despite whatever flaws it may have, target has at least not had books written and movies made [1] about their misdeeds.

[1] on amazon, "target" had one result on the first page related to the company that was positive, whereas with walmart the second result is " How Walmart Is Destroying America And The World: And What You Can Do About It" and it doesn't really improve from there

<comment><USER4> People attack the giant and the giant is Wal-Mart. They are bad because they are golliath.

The truth is, they provide one stop shopping for millions of customers who previously had to drive to many different stores to buy groceries, clothes and other household items -- and gas too!

In this way, not only does wal-mart save customers money, but they also save them time. This is true of Target, et al as well, but my point is that Wal- Mart does good things for a lot of people.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, everyone with their knives out end up going for the biggest target. Same story with McDonald's, which gets dissed at every turn [1] while Burger King doesn't have to deal with any of that baggage and can happily, you know, sell burgers.

1 - <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28967905/>

<comment><USER4> MCD is still doing really well for itself despite the critics. The food there now is much better than I remember it being in years past. I have a lot of respect for how they handled the whole Super Size Me thing.

It's kind of sad that people would break up that statue like that. Regardless of your opinion of MCD, the Ronald McDonald house does a lot of good things for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been defending Wal-Mart (not that they need my help) against idiots ever since I work there. People never consider the alternative. Wal-Mart may pay little, but the stores they replaced pay less. One Wal-Mart may use a lot of electricity, but the 20 stores they replace would have used more. And so on and so forth.

It's very easy to look at Wal-Mart in a vacuum and call it an atrocity, but when you compare it to the real world alternatives, it's one of the best things to ever happen to America.

<comment><USER7> This is partly based on stuff said in the BB thread:

Wal-mart might treat it's employees better, but it's cut-throat treatment of suppliers forces them to cut their (the suppliers') employee treatment to the bone. When walmart might jump ship on sourcing from you (their purchasers are known to have zero loyalty) because it costs you $0.25 more per decorative lamp than the guy using questionable labor practices, you don't really have a choice on what to do. That $0.25 might mean very little to a small main-street (to beat the dead-horse) store, but to a company that does billions of decorative lamp sales a year, that's a ton of money.

So, sure, Walmart employees might be treated fine, but the people actually producing the goods walmart sells (their non-service, indirectly employeed workers) are hurting.

<comment><USER8> In theory, if that becomes a big enough hole, the market should rectify it on its own.

You can already go to Starbucks and buy $10/lb 'Fair Trade' coffee, and many 'hip' brands (American Apparel comes to mind) trade on their humane wages and treatment of workers.

I'm not saying it's a complete solution (some of the costs are still likely being externalized, although that's more a problem in the case of pollution than labor), but in general when a savings is made because of a negative externality (it's 'costing' others, instead of the just the buyers), a 'non- negative' version will spring up, and sell for a handy markup.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes the invisible hand gives you the finger; I'm willing to wager that in a lot of these cases you end up with massive barriers to entry, and so once a company gets shuttered or pushed out competitively it will take years and years before a suitable replacement appears.

Not that I have any good ideas on how to make the subject better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only conclusion I would take from this article is that a dull and low paying Wal-Mart job is not too bad when you're there mainly to satisfy your curiosity about the place and you can go back to your regular job as the section editor of a magazine whenever you feel like.

</comment><comment><USER11> Adam Shepard is mentioned casually at the end. Adam voluntarily placed himself in a homeless shelter and 'made' it out.

Old and good thread about Adam Shepard: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116079>

<comment><USER12> Of course. If you're not a felon, you're not a drug addict, and you're in good health, escaping a homeless shelter is pretty easy. [1] There are people (some of whom are my friends) who have full-time jobs trying to help people get out! [2] And there are a lot of incentives to leave. Nobody enjoys the homeless- shelter experience.

Almost all of the people who are _chronic_ residents of homeless shelters have health problems (often, specifically, mental health problems), are current or former drug addicts, or have spent time in prison.

These problems tend to feed on each other. Mentally ill people often manifest erratic behavior that gets them sent to prison. Drug addicts get arrested and sent to prison. Prisons are a great place to be introduced to life as a drug addict, and can exacerbate certain mental illnesses. And sick people often attempt to relieve their own symptoms with drugs (a popular choice: alcohol). The technical term for the latter behavior is "self-medication", and it's a classic route by which an otherwise well-off person can get sucked into the poverty spiral.

Meanwhile, it also doesn't surprise me that a white, male, healthy, educated person with independent means and an active online life can really enjoy working at Wal-Mart. Slumming can be fun. Every grad student knows that. I'm told by reliable witnesses, however, that actual chronic poverty is an entirely different ball of wax.

\---

[1] Note, of course, that "escaping a homeless shelter" is not at all the same thing as "escaping poverty". Being homeless is only one of the more desperate forms of poverty. There are many others.

[2] One of the key skills for escaping homelessness: The ability to fill out forms. Social workers spend a lot of their time just helping people stay patient while sitting on hold, send in applications, get to appointments on time... It's easy to forget, from our perspective as high-end employees of the knowledge economy, that not all of our fellow humans are born with the requisite knowledge and patience to do these things. And that you and I are exactly one stroke or car accident away from losing those skills.

<comment><USER13> Another point about homeless shelters is that it is only a small percentage of the homeless that stayed in them.

I know that when I was homeless, I stayed away from homeless shelters for the vast majority of my time in any city, except for when I was entirely new to the city. I opted for staying in abandoned places and couch-surfing, as staying in the shelters is really hit-and-miss. Your few (and important) possessions are not safe,they often try to shove religion down your throat, and a lot of the people staying at the shelter are the mentally-unstable type of homeless.

<comment><USER14> You were homeless? What's your story (if you don't mind sharing)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Nickel and Dimed_ by Barbara Ehrenreich was first published in 2001 so presumably she worked at Walmart sometime before that.

So life at Wal-Mart may have changed since then. Also, he should have worked at the same Wal-Mart to help control for location.

<comment><USER16> Also, Ehrenreich didn't just work at a Wal-Mart - her focus was on trying to make ends meet on a minumum wage. She tried finding an apartment and a lifestyle that she could afford on a Wal-Mart paycheck.

Since this blogger talks about going home from work and looking some things up on his computer, I'm guessing that he didn't try to replicate her experiment faithfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I worked in the electronics department of the Walmart in Moscow, ID one summer during college. I liked it much better than my previous (and first) job as a box boy at Albertsons. The pay was reasonable for someone of my age and ability, and helped to fund my college education.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was _really_ surprised to read that every employee had access to profit margin data.

Kudos to Wal-Mart for a level of decentralization and transparency many startups and high tech companies don't even achieve!

<comment><USER19> Please elaborate on what you mean by decentralization.

<comment><USER15> I guess he means that Walmart floor employees can place products to maximize their local profit margin since they know what sells well at their store.

<comment><USER6> Not exactly. Most of the store layout comes down from corporate, where it is determined via a series of tests. They're truly amazing at optimizing sales by merchandising. Employees don't really choose what goes where.

<comment><USER20> Keeping score here: _At the branch where I worked, all the lowest-level employees were allowed this information and were encouraged to make individual decisions about inventory._

I guess that means it's either a lie, a difference in local management, or true but misleading?

<comment><USER21> It's possible he meant they simply had the ability to control the _number_ of items ordered for inventory, rather than their placement or marketing.

If the floor employee knows what is selling, it makes sense to let them hit the 'reorder this' button.

But this is entirely conjecture on my part.

<comment><USER6> Well, it's not even so much that. In general, corporate actually knows better than the local guy how many of an item are selling, they see it in the reports. Local guys don't have any better information.

Local guys don't control pricing either, in general. That too is set by corporate.

What was common, and I think what he may have been talking about, was employees discounting things for certain people. That's the only time I can think of when you'd look at profit margins. Maybe something placed in clearance, or resold open box after a return. Or, for instance, we'd give our bigger clients a discount on bulk orders of printer paper if they asked. Paper was pretty close to a loss leader anyway, so we'd sell it at "cost" or maybe even very slightly below.

The other thing that's ambiguous about what he said (and Wal-Mart's numbers in general) is exactly how they compute margins. Wal-Mart runs their own distribution chain, so unlike a mom and pop, who simply buys a product for a set price including delivery, Wal-Mart buys the product for a lower price and deals with getting it to the stores themselves.

So they pad their "cost" as seen by the employees by some amount to account for the supply chain, which can include a profit, or so I was told. Meaning that a store could still sell an item at what they consider cost, but corporate Wal-Mart might still make money on it.

Also, the lowest level employees are not empowered to change prices, though the supervisors (next to lowest level) generally can. However it's very common for the average floor person to ask the supervisor "hey can I sell this to this guy for $x because it's open box and I need that space for the new seasonal products tomorrow anyway" and the supervisor to simply approve it.

Wal-Mart pays generous bonuses to stores for achieving certain profit amounts, so employees, knowing the margin, are encouraged to not dip below it where possible. Otherwise for all an employee cared, he'd sell everything for $1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is so cool, and great to hear.

I've never quite understood the anti-Walmart sentiment. What do people have against low prices? Poorer people can afford to buy (or save) more if they are fortunate enough to have a Walmart nearby.

One reason to despise the retailer: Walmart has recently been lobbying congress to raise minimum wage.

If successful, this could force more small businesses to go under because they cannot afford to pay their employees more, but Walmart can. And they know it.

<comment><USER23> I hear this logic about low prices being good for poor people all the time, and I can never understand it. If prices are low because labor is cheap, then it seems that the employer/merchant will always make out. It's simple math. Try applying your logic to every wage earner in the world. If a price is reduced by 10% because wages are reduces by 20%, then the employee loses 10%. Sure they can buy everything they need 10% cheaper, but they lost 20% of their pay check. This only helps two types of consumers, investors and people on welfare.

<comment><USER24> You're assuming that prices are lower because somebody lowered the wages of his employees. Generally speaking, prices go lower because someone finds a way to optimize his supply chain, or a more efficient way to build a product, or by investing in automation. Lowering your prices by giving your employees a pay cut just makes the employees look for new jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Manufacturing is not much better. I worked in a lot of mfg companies during college. Starting pay with either at or a little above minimum wage.

There is no easy fix. Companies don't stay in business by paying people more than they are "worth" in economic terms.

Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for every other one.

<comment><USER25> It surprised me at how many college grads were working in a mfg plant (on the floor, not in management, engineering, etc). However, a lot had history, poli sci, or econ degrees. It was a short term job that turned into a long term one because of kids, marriage, etc.

<comment><USER26> "However, a lot had history, poli sci, or econ degrees."

It may turn out that history, political science, and economics degrees felt like investments but actually were consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Unfortunately, It's hard to defend Wal-Mart for all the good they do when they insist on lobbying local councils for direct subsidies or tax breaks, often taking money from their small competitors.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's another vigorous refutation of Ehrenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed' mindset:

<http://libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_07/lamon-poor.html>

<comment><USER16> Yeah, 'vigorous' is about the nicest word I can think of to describe it... :)

People who can barely make ends meet should move to the sun belt to save on clothing? If you can't afford the deposit on an apartment, it's your own fault, because people have bailed on a lease before? Huh?

But if you get past the overall obnoxiousness, though, he does actually have some good points.

<comment><USER28> Migration has, over thousands of years, been the most effective antipoverty program.

So yes, if you "can barely make ends meet" in a cold expensive place with no jobs, you should move to a warmer cheaper place with jobs. Steal bus fare, if you must.

<comment><USER16> Yes, that would be a good argument, but that wasn't the one made in the article. Ehrenreich had a job in Minnesota, which is slightly cheaper to live in than Phoenix, by most standards. Should she still have moved?

<comment><USER28> It was not that Ehrenreich "had a job in Minnesota". She chose the twin cities for her experiment. Here's the passage where she describes the deep thinking of her selection process:

 _I had thought for months of going to Sacramento or somewhere else in California's Central Valley not far from Berkeley, where I'd spent the spring. But warnings about the heat and the allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do. Don't ask me why Minnesota came to mind, maybe I just had a yearning for deciduous trees. It's a relatively liberal state, I knew that, and more merciful than many to its welfare poor. A half and hour or so of Web research revealed an agreeably tight labor market, with entry-level jobs advertised at $8 an hour or more and studio apartments for $400 or less. If some enterprising journalist wants to test the low-wage way of lif if darkest Idaho or Louisiana, more power to her. Call me gutless, but what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable correspondence between income and rent, a few mild adventures, a soft landing._

At least she did 30 minutes of web research!

(If you read the chapter, you also see Ehrenreich chooses Wal-Mart at $7/hour over another retail job she was offered that paid at least $8.50 and perhaps $10/hour. It's page after page of her shooting herself in the foot so she has something to complain about.)

Also, the critique by Lamon does not suggest Phoenix but rather "the Sun Belt", which includes many of the cheapest places to live in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While this is just one data point, it is refreshing to see a business journalist actually reporting based on first-hand experience.

I can speak from personal experience in a newsroom that surprisingly few business journalists have ever actually worked in business in any form.

</comment><comment><USER30> Some of the things described in this article shows that wal-mart is implementing lean mfg ideas (or lean retail, rather).

<comment><USER31> You point out something that is incredibly interesting. Walmart is a juggernaut of capitalism, but all we generally hear about is how evil they are.

I bet they have some business practices that are worth learning about, other than the oft-heard about exploitation of their workers.

As an aside, I've known a few people who have worked at Walmart and they preferred it to a lot of jobs they'd held previously.

<comment><USER32> I wonder how much Walmart adjusts working conditions to the local job market. Things like high turnover have significant real costs and adjusting the the local job market could save them massive amounts of money. There also seems to be significant differences in the quality of the store depending on the local economy.

EX: I walked though a Wallmart in Arlington VA that seemed to be struggling where the Wallmart in Charles Town WV was thriving. I expect they lose out on the "high end" items like HDTV's and high quality items when people have more options and cash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >> _Most of all, my coworkers wanted to avoid those "mom-and-pop" stores beloved by social commentators_

I am suspicious of this writer & _his_ agenda & the possibility of confusing the fun of slumming it with the fun of feeling trapped in minimum paying jobs(mentioned here previously). But the above quote plays to my other suspicions. It goes also for McDonalds, Nestle, Nike & any other pet hate companies. They are under so much scrutiny, that they can't get away with what a lot of the small companies can get away with.</comment>


Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/10-books-every-entrepreneur-should-read/ <comment><USER2> Call me old-fashioned, but why would I read boring self-help books when there are thousands of books available, from all ages, that document the human experience? For instance:

\- Scriptures of the major religions

\- The Conquest of Happiness (Bertrand Russell)

\- On Aggression (Konrad Lorenz)

\- Crowds and Power (Elias Canetti)

\- LSD, My Problem Child (Albert Hofmann)

\- Huis Clos (J.P. Sartre)

\- Essays by Michel de Montaigne

\- The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Ibn Rushd)

<comment><USER3> I'd add the following:

\- Makers (Cory Doctorow) -- I recommend this to every entrepreneur and technologist I know, if only because it will inspire you to create something great.

\- Masters of Doom (David Kushner) -- History of id software

\- Game Over (David Sheff) -- History of Nintendo; seriously wild

<comment><USER4> You don't need to call me old-fashioned - I am.

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

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

Just my 2 cents on the list that actually matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a terrible list. Is it really likely that the 10 best books for entrepreneurs were all written after 2010? These are just the latest fad books.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. To take this one step further, these books fall into the Bermuda Triangle of bullshit: taking successful experiences and expecting that they'll work for others; make you feel good -- you can do it! Don't let your boss stand in your way!; selection bias, survivor bias, ....

I don't know if I've read it somewhere and I'm regurgitating it or if it's my own original thought, but I'm going to call this the Malcolm Gladwell effect. Take your limited scope, strip away the "irrelevant" pieces (regardless of how much they could've actually mattered), package up a bunch of anecdotes that convey the point you want them to, and make people feel good about that part of themselves.

Complete bunkum.

<comment><USER6> I find this particularly true for the "163 Ways to Pursue Excellence" book. I haven't read it, but the idea is laughable. Am I supposed to be "pursuing excellence" while I sit on the toilet with this "very compelling and browsable book"? It's worthless - just a way of providing people with their small fix of self-fulfillment one paragraph at a time by giving a "helpful hint" on how to improve their lives.

Sorry for the excessive use of quotations, I just wanted to emphasize the bullshit.

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. I wonder why they stopped at 163? I suspect they just completely lost the will to continue any further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this an academic discussion?

The more books an entrepreneur reads, the more he/she may realize, that the success of the enterprise is more or less random (if you don't believe that, read Daniel Kahnemann: thinking fast and slow - but that advice would be against the advice I give in this post ;O). Its much better not to know all the problems in advance and get scared away. Instead, just start and solve problems as they appear. Stay motivated, hold alive a positive attitude and remain in good mood contributes most to success IMHO.

And while youre still reading, someone else may start your business...

But who am I to give advice to entrepreneurs? I'm not an entrepreneur myself (read too much).

<comment><USER9> As long as your aims are small('make a living', 'realize a dream', and not 'be the next Google/Facebook/Apple'), the best advice anyone can give someone who is thinking about being an Entrepreneur is "Just do it."

Yeah, you're probably in over your head. But you won't know till you try, and being in over your head and knowing it's all up to you is a pretty fantastic motivating power to overcome that difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> :|

I always cringe when I see lists like these. These books aren't even interesting! Pretty much everything you need to know about becoming an entrepreneur can be found on PG's site, and the rest can easily be found by searching the web. There is no hidden secret to working hard and solving problems.

I'd much rather spend all the time I'd be reading these books by reading something interesting and useful, say, a book on macroeconomics (you can of course pick a different subject if you don't like thise one) or even fiction (at least that's fun).

</comment><comment><USER11> Like most other non-scientific fields it's my experience that you should read books around the topic not on the topic.

If you want to be good with UX you don't read books about UX you read books about psychology, typography, color-theory, comics.

If you want to be a good entrepreneur you read about well everything kitsune_ wrote and even non-fiction.

You can't read your way to experience.

<comment><USER12> "You can't read your way to experience."

This reminds of a decision making book which are based on empirical observation and theory. Good if you want to know how to make decisions in ambiguity, uncertainty and other complex situations.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making - Gary Klein

[http://www.amazon.com/Streetlights-Shadows-Searching- Adaptiv...](http://www.amazon.com/Streetlights-Shadows-Searching-Adaptive- Decision/dp/0262013398)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That _The Innovator's Dilemma_ is not on that list shows that it is complete and utter fluff. _Delivering Happiness_ is probably a great book, but the rest looks like self-help-new-age gibberish. Better use the classics, as kitsune_ suggested, then.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, great book. I've heard it mentioned that it was one of Steve Job's favorite books too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always recommend _Founders at Work_ to all my friends who are contemplating a start-up. Incredibly motivating stories!

<comment><USER12> I never liked founders at work, there's nothing in there which you could learn. Here's the rating which I would to the book just like what Derek sivers did 2/10 - <http://sivers.org/book/FoundersAtWork> . It just turns out Jessica and PG has tons of influence in hacker community that's why you here her book being recommended all the time.

Alternative : Try Venture capitalist at work by Tarang Shah

[http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Capitalists-Work-Billion- Dolla...](http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Capitalists-Work-Billion-Dollar- Successes/dp/1430238372)

<comment><USER15> Ok, follow-up post 13 days' after technology's recommendation. I got the book and I read it and I did not find the advice actionable. He interviews a bunch of vcs (and a few founders) but mostly vcs and you hear the same thing that you expect:

\- Startups fail because they run out of money

\- VC's like to invest in smart passionate entrepreneurs who are solving a personal problem who are not in it for the money.

\- VC's like either big markets or great teams or both

\- etc etc

Some of the interviews were great (Howard Morgan) but the problem with interviewing active vcs is that they can't talk about the stuff behind the scenes. Often founder's who have had successful exits have no such qualms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A friend I trust highly recommends "The startup owners manual" by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By- Step...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By- Step/dp/0984999302)

<comment><USER16> Yes, this book plus Lean Startup by Eric Ries plus Rework - that's all any tech startup needs to read to become successful.

<comment><USER17> How about the successful startups that existed before those books? What books did they read?

<comment><USER12> Probably just by networking - no books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have read tons of books like this, verdict: complete bullshit, no substance. Best inspiring reading experience I've ever read: The old man an the sea, Hemingway. Try to read it with an entrepreneur point of view and you will see.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. I'd never thought of The Old Man and the Sea in that way, but I can see your point. Tough-minded perseverance.

I occasionally look through the business books section of a bookshop while waiting for my train home from work, and I'm always struck by the intellectual emptiness and embarrassing obsession with the latest fad of most of these books. I wonder how this sector of the book market got like this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All of this reading is great, and I mean it. I've read a lot of it. But one thing bothers me: the time spent reading is precious if you're an entrepreneur. It should not take over your work, so basically you read on your free time. I personally think it is important to pull the plug sometimes. That's why I try to read less startup stuff, and let my mind wander with novels. Read literature, that's where the inspiration comes from.

</comment><comment><USER20> This whole entrepreneur preparation thing feels so pre-meditated it's kinda cheesy. "Be great, read this", no man just do your job you already know what to do.

</comment><comment><USER21> My own list would include a few different choices:

 _The Art of the Start_

 _The Innovator's Dilemma_

 _The Four Steps to the Epiphany_

 _Positioning_

 _The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing_

 _The Lean Startup_

 _Blue Ocean Strategy_

 _Business Model Generation_

 _The Fountainhead_

 _Atlas Shrugged_

among others...

</comment><comment><USER22> Not the most definitive and diverse list. The vast majority of these books are 'marketing' focused. Establishing and running a business is more than just promotion. If you have time to read 10 books, I would mix it up a bit.

I would personally throw in an autobiography a functional business book. The rest can be made up with personal drive and passion.

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny, usually such lists are littered with affiliate links but this one only links to thumbnails of book covers.

</comment><comment><USER24> The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship is the best reference book for starting a business. Everything you would learn from an MBA condensed for entrepreneurs. I know most people here would say that all the old rules don't apply but taking the unconventional route isn't the best choice in every situation.

<comment><USER25> The author is trying to distinguish himself. This should really be titled "10 _more_ books every entrepreneur should read" since it's missing the basics like The Innovators Dilemma and The Four Steps To Epiphany, among others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good list. I also recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman--a great read on decision making.

</comment><comment><USER27> \- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin \- Growing a Business \- Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier. (The original death-march) \- The Entrepreneur and Small Business Problem Solver \- Web and Software Development by Nolo Press

</comment><comment><USER28> I also recommend this one: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Fastlane- Wealth-Lifeti...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Fastlane-Wealth- Lifetime/dp/0984358102)

<comment><USER29> I second this one ... one of the better books I've read in the last year. Validated some of the ways I thought about myself and my business, as well as gave me some new ideas and approaches to thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's the books i'd recommend

[http://www.catchcamera.com/2010/07/13/the-16-best- business-b...](http://www.catchcamera.com/2010/07/13/the-16-best-business- books-of-all-time/)

</comment><comment><USER31> This list I feel has material with significantly higher quality: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496038>

<comment><USER19> Great list thanks, but more code-oriented in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't agree with everything on this list, so I made my own: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4018867>

</comment><comment><USER33> What books document paths and approaches that failed?

Stuff that counters the "worked once for me" quality of so many how-to business books.

Only reading success stories is horribly misleading.

</comment><comment><USER34> There is a decent amount of literature of academic research on VC and start- ups. Much better than this fluff.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd also recommend Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte for when you're doing presentations (for fundraising or BD)

<comment><USER36> & Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What a coincidence! I was Googling this last night and boom, here it is! Would also love one for movies!

<comment><USER38> yes! and "the social network" shouldn't be allowed on the list just bc it's an obvious choice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You won't learn anything good from reading books. Nothing, in written form, can prepare your for hardship of entrepreneurial life - it is tough, unpredictable and every case is unique.

The only thing I read are (auto)biographies of successful entrepreneurs or books written by successful CEO's.

I don't need to know insights of some theoretics - they usually don't know shit.

<comment><USER39> Downvotes for writting the truth?

Would you read a book about JAVA written by someone who never wrote a 1 line of code? Only looked what others did?</comment></comment>


Internet start up - Craiglists Ad Translated. - <AUTHOR> http://jetztneu.blogspot.com/2011/01/internet-start-up-craiglists-ad.html <comment><USER2> I really don't feel like we need these articles on HN. It perpetuates the HN meme that "hackers" are always coders and "fakers" are the business people. The truth is that a hacker can have many different skill sets, and this craigslist ad is clearly from some faker, regardless of whether he needs a coder to implement his idea, or had instead posted as "needing some guy to sell this web app I totally made this weekend!"</comment>


Google T5 scores 88.9 on SuperGLUE Benchmark, approaching human baseline - <AUTHOR> https://super.gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard <comment><USER2> I didn't know anything about SuperGLUE before (turns out it's a benchmark for language understanding tasks), so I clicked around their site where they show different examples of the tasks.

One "word in context" task is to look at 2 different sentences that have a common word and decide if that word means the _same_ thing in both sentences or _different_ things (more details here: [https://pilehvar.github.io/wic/](https://pilehvar.github.io/wic/))

One of their examples, though, didn't make any sense to me:

1\. The pilot managed to _land_ the airplane safely

2\. The enemy _landed_ several of our aircrafts

It says that the word "land" does NOT mean the same thing in those sentences. I am a native English speaker, and I honestly don't understand what they are thinking the second sentence means. Shot them down? If so, I have never heard "landed" used in that context, and it appears neither has Merriam-Webster. Also, the plural of aircraft is just "aircraft", without the s.

<comment><USER3> My mother got a perfect 800 score on the GRE English test many years ago when she wanted to go back to graduate school after her children were grown up enough (highschool/college age).

She told me that the way she got her perfect score was by realizing when the questions were wrong and thinking of what answer the test creators believed to be correct.

She had to outguess the test creators and answer the questions wrong -- in the "right" way.

This seems like a similar situation.

<comment><USER4> I've had the 'pleasure' of taking some 'Microsoft certifications' at various companies I worked at in the past and this sounds extremely familiar.

 _" I probably won't ever do it like that and/or there's a syntax error in all four of the answers... but this is the answer you want to hear. It's wrong, mind you, but it's what you want to hear."_

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of the 1 question I got "wrong" on a DOS test (years ago) at TAFE.

The question was "How do you delete all files in the current directory?". Using DOS 6.22 (I think, it's from memory).

My answer "del." was marked incorrect. Because the teacher didn't know enough about DOS to understand that's the standard shortcut for "del _._ ". And the teacher refused to even try out the command, lets alone fix the incorrect mark. _sigh_

<comment><USER6> TAFE anecdote time!

In my TAFE class, I was asked to list two examples of operating systems.

I listed Linux and eComStation. The teacher had never heard of eComStation and marked me wrong.

Refused to correct my mark even when I proved him right. I'm still bitter about it a decade later.

<comment><USER5> Swinburne TAFE as well? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing to always point out in these cases is that the human baseline isn't "how well people do at this task," like it's often hyped to be. It's "how well does a person quickly and repetitively doing this do, on average." The 'quickly and repetitively' part is important because we all make more boneheaded errors in this scenario. The 'on average' part is important because the errors the algo makes aren't just fewer than people, they're different. The algos often still get certain things wrong that humans almost never would.

This is really really super great, let's be clear. It's just not up to the hype "omg super human" usually gets.

<comment><USER8> Regarding the _type_ of errors, it seems like the benchmark should be able to take that into account. That is, get a load of humans to do the task on the same specific examples, then for each example you know how hard it is, and what acceptable answers are (I bet a lot of the ground truth is wrong or ambiguous).

Then you can benchmark your AI but penalise it more heavily for getting things wrong that are obvious to a human.

<comment><USER7> That would be ideal, if money weren't a factor. Since money is a factor, I wonder what the tradeoff is between labelling each instance N more times versus just getting N times more instances labeled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was an article[1] posted to HN recently about these benchmarks, and it was pretty skeptical.

Regarding SuperGLUE specifically, it asked:

 _" Indeed, Bowman and his collaborators recently introduced a test called SuperGLUE that's specifically designed to be hard for BERT-based systems. So far, no neural network can beat human performance on it. But even if (or when) it happens, does it mean that machines can really understand language any better than before? Or does just it mean that science has gotten better at teaching machines to the test?"_

[1] - [https://www.quantamagazine.org/machines-beat-humans-on-a- rea...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/machines-beat-humans-on-a-reading-test- but-do-they-understand-20191017)

<comment><USER10> This feels hollow. Can't this be said about any benchmark? It seems natural and proper that as one benchmark becomes saturated, we introduce harder benchmarks.

I don't think anyone in the field thinks that once we match human performance on benchmark X, we're officially done. It just means it's time for more interesting benchmarks.

Over time, if it starts to become difficult to design benchmarks that humans can outperform machines on, then that will prompt interesting conceptual work about what exactly the difference between human and machine language competency is. And then that will lead either to more sophisticated benchmarks or alternatively gradually more sophisticated and persuasive arguments that machines really have surpassed us in language competence.

I don't think we're yet at a point where we don't know how to make harder benchmarks, and if and when we do hit such a point, I'd definitely bet the result will be a conceptual advance in benchmark design rather than declaring machine superiority once and for all. At least for the first few rounds of this cycle.

<comment><USER11> From the Quanta article:

"But instead of concluding that BERT could apparently imbue neural networks with near-Aristotelian reasoning skills, they suspected a simpler explanation: that BERT was picking up on superficial patterns in the way the warrants were phrased. Indeed, after re-analyzing their training data, the authors found ample evidence of these so-called spurious cues. For example, simply choosing a warrant with the word "not" in it led to correct answers 61% of the time. After these patterns were scrubbed from the data, BERT's score dropped from 77 to 53 — equivalent to random guessing."

<comment><USER12> This is true, and absolutely a weakness of these tests.

 _However_ they don't publish how well a human performs on the dataset without "not" in it.

They do initially note that _Even human beings don't do particularly well on this task without practice_

I've looked at the warrant task. It's pretty tricky! I'd bet real money that untrained humans perform much, much lower than the 80% correct rate they get on the full set on ones without "not". I don't think it would be as low as the 53% BERT gets, but it would drop significantly.

I find the HANS analysis[1] much more compelling, but again I'd note that humans suffer on this dataset too (although again - not as badly as models do).

[1] [https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1334.pdf](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1334.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think classifying this as human level is misleading.

Look at the sub-scores on the page. One score that looks very different from humans is AX-b.

The SuperGlue paper provides more context about AX-b

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00537.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00537.pdf)

AX-b "is the broad-coverage diagnostic task, scored using Matthews' correlation (MCC). "

This is how the paper describes this test

" Analyzing Linguistic and World Knowledge in Models GLUE includes an expert- constructed, diagnostic dataset that automatically tests models for a broad range of linguistic, commonsense, and world knowledge. Each example in this broad-coverage diagnostic is a sentence pair labeled with a three-way entailment relation (entailment, neutral, or contradiction) and tagged with labels that indicate the phenomena that characterize the relationship between the two sentences. Submissions to the GLUE leaderboard are required to include predictions from the submission's MultiNLI classifier on the diagnostic dataset, and analyses of the results were shown alongside the main leaderboard. Since this broad-coverage diagnostic task has proved difficult for top models, we retain it in SuperGLUE. However, since MultiNLI is not part of SuperGLUE, we collapse contradiction and neutral into a single not_entailment label, and request that submissions include predictions on the resulting set from the model used for the RTE task. We collect non-expert annotations to estimate human performance, following the same procedure we use for the main benchmark tasks (Section 5.2). We estimate an accuracy of 88% and a Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC, the two-class variant of the R3 metric used in GLUE) of 0.77. "

If you look at the scores, humans are estimated to score 0.77. Google T5 scores -0.4 on the test.

How did T5 get such a high score if it scored so abysmally on the AX-b test?

The AX scores are not included in the total score.

From the paper: "The Avg column is the overall benchmarkscore on non-AX∗ tasks."

If the AX scores were included, the gap between humans and machines would be bigger than the current score indicates.

<comment><USER14> Hi, one of the paper's authors here. We didn't submit our model's predictions for the AX-b task yet, we just copied over the predictions from the example submission. We will submit predictions for AX-b in the next few days.

<comment><USER15> RcouF1uZ4gsC makes a compelling case for the results on this test to potentially be a significant caveat to the results, and also to the claims of achieving a near-human level of performance. If so, then why would you make such claims before you have these results? Or at least mention this caveat at the points where you are making the claim, such as in the abstract.

<comment><USER14> To be clear, here is the claim we make in the paper (we did not write the title of this post to HN):

> For SuperGLUE, we improved upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin (from > an average score of 84.6 [Liu et al., 2019c] to 88.9). SuperGLUE was > designed to comprise of tasks that were "beyond the scope of current state- > of-the-art systems, but solvable by most college-educated English speakers" > [Wang et al., 2019b]. We nearly match the human performance of 89.8 [Wang et > al., 2019b]. Interestingly, on the reading comprehension tasks (MultiRC and > ReCoRD) we exceed human performance by a large margin, suggesting the > evaluation metrics used for these tasks may be biased towards machine-made > predictions. On the other hand, humans achieve 100% accuracy on both COPA > and WSC, which is significantly better than our model's performance. This > suggests that there remain linguistic tasks that are hard for our model to > perfect, particularly in the low-resource setting.

I'm not sure why the SuperGLUE/GLUE benchmark was designed to omit the AX-* scores from the benchmark score. It may be that they have no corresponding training set.

<comment><USER15> My mistake - I had overlooked the AX-* scores being expressly omitted from these benchmarks. Maybe it is possible, then, that they could provide the additional headroom for further research?

Regardless of the status of the AX-* tests, I am very impressed by your results on the SuperGLUE benchmark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Possibly dumb question: How do you ensure there's no data leakage when benchmarking transfer learning techniques? Is that even a problem anymore when the whole point is to learn "common sense" knowledge?

For example their "Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus" (C4), a dataset consisting of hundreds of gigabytes of clean English text scraped from the web, might contain much of the same information as the benchmark datasets, which I presume is also scraped from the web.

<comment><USER14> Hi, one of the paper authors here. Indeed this is a good question. A couple of comments:

\- Common Crawl overall is a sparse web dump, it is unlikely that the month we used includes any of the data that are in any of the test sets.

\- In order for the data to be useful to our model, it would have to be in the correct preprocessed format. ("mnli: hypothesis: ... premise: ...") with the label in a format our model could extract meaning from. We introduced this preprocessing format so I don't believe this would ever happen.

\- Further, most of these datasets live in .zip files. The Common Crawl dump doesn't unzip zip files.

\- C4 is so large that our model sees each example (corresponding to a block of text from a website) roughly once ever over the entire course of training. Big neural nets trained with SGD are unlikely to memorize something if they only see it once over the course of one million training steps.

<comment><USER16> > Big neural nets trained with SGD are unlikely to memorize something if they > only see it once over the course of one million training steps

I am not so sure about that. Have you seen this thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dfky70/dis...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dfky70/discussion_exfiltrating_copyright_notices_news/)

Apparently lots of sentence fragments were memorized in GPT-2 (including real world URLs, entire conversations, username/emails and other PII).

<comment><USER14> It actually can be more pernicious than that: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08232)

However note that the dataset used to train GPT-2 is about 20x smaller than C4. I'm not 100% sure how many times the training set was repeated over the course of training for GPT-2, but it was likely many times. I stand by my statement (that memorization is _unlikely_ with SGD and no repetition of training data) but I would be happy to be proven otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi This surprised me a bit, on the creation of the corpus they use for training:

"We removed any page that contained any word on the "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene or Otherwise Bad Words"."

I don't understand this decision. This list contains words that can be used in a perfectly objective sense, like "anus", "bastard", "erotic", "eunuch", "fecal", etc.

I can understand that they want to avoid websites full of expletives and with no useful content, but outright excluding any website with even one occurrence of such words sounds too radical. If we ask this model a text comprehension question about a legitimized bastard that inherited the throne, or about fecal transplants, I suppose it would easily fail. Strange way of limiting such a powerful model.

<comment><USER17> They say they removed pages, not websites. Having false positives isn't a problem when you're still left with 750GB of data—quality matters more than slightly higher quantity at that point.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Sorry, I was thinking about pages even though I said websites. Native language interference (typically, we use the same term for pages and websites in my language).

Anyway, my point is not a matter of quantity. The way they're doing it, they have 750 GB of data, but they have exactly zero data that talks about bastards, fecal transplants, etc. So they may have a hard time answering questions about those specific subjects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone working in the field, I congratulate the excellent accomplishment but agree with the authors that we shouldn't get too excited yet (their quote below after the four reasons). Here are some reasons:

1) Most likely, the model is still susceptible to adversarial triggers as demonstrated on other systems here: [http://www.ericswallace.com/triggers](http://www.ericswallace.com/triggers)

2) T5 was trained with ~750GB of texts or ~150 billion words, which is > 100 times the number of words native English speakers acquire by the age of 20.

3) Most or all of the tests are multiple-choice. Learning complex correlations from sufficient data should help solve most of them. This is useful but human- level understanding is more than correlations.

4) The performance on datasets that require commonsense knowledge, COPA and WSC, are the weakest relative to humans (who score 100.0 on both).

Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer, p.32 [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683.pdf)

"Interestingly, on the reading comprehension tasks (MultiRC and ReCoRD) we exceed human performance by a large margin, suggesting the evaluation metrics used for these tasks may be biased towards machine-made predictions. On the other hand, humans achieve 100% accuracy on both COPA and WSC, which is significantly better than our model's performance. This suggests that there remain linguistic tasks that are hard for our model to perfect, particularly in the low-resource setting."

I'd like to emphasize that the work and the paper are excellent. Still, we are quite far from human-level language understanding.

\---

We may need more advanced tests to probe the actual language _understanding_ ability of AI systems. Here are some ideas:

* Test for conceptual understanding in a non-multiple-choice format. Example: Write a summary for a New Yorker article, rather than standard news pieces (which tend to follow repeated patterns).

* Commonsense test with longer chains of inference than those needed for solving Winograd Schema and set in non-standard situations (e.g. fantasy world). This should greatly reduce the chance that an approach can simply detect correlations from huge datasets.

* Understanding novel, creative metaphors like those used in some essays by professional writers or some of the Economist's title articles.

<comment><USER19> > 2) T5 was trained with ~750GB of texts or ~150 billion words, which is > 100 > times the number of words native English speakers acquire by the age of 20.

...but, humans evolved the ability to use language over hundreds of generations... So... Maybe that's not such a bad thing?

<comment><USER20> Indeed this is important to realize: Training such a generic model from scratch does not only reiterate learning, but the entire evolutionary process that led to the emergence of neural circuits actually capable of such learning. That perspective makes many of the current achievements -- error- prone as they might be -- even more impressive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark is a collection of resources for training, evaluating, and analyzing natural language understanding systems."

"We take into account the lessons learnt from original GLUE benchmark and present SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard."

</comment><comment><USER22> Assuming that the baseline human score was set according to the performance of adult humans, then according to these results T5 has a language understanding ability at least as accurate as a human child.

In fact it's not just T5 that should be able to understand language as well as a human child, but also BERT++, BERT-mtl and RoBERTa, each of which has a score of 70 or more. There really shouldn't be anything else on the planet that has 70% of human language understanding, other than humans.

So if the benchmarks mean what they think they mean, there are currently fully-fledged strongly artificially intelligent systems. That must mean that, in a very short time we should see strong evidence of having created human- like intelligence.

Because make no mistake: language _understanding_ is not like image recognition, say, or speech processing. Understanding anything is an AI- complete task, to use a colloquial term.

Let's wait and see then. It shouldn't take more than five or six years to figure out what all this means.

<comment><USER22> To clarify, I meant this comment as an expression of skepticism- I don't believe that the SuperGLUE benchmark really evaluates language understanding, or that BERT and friends are within a few percents of human language understanding. I think SuperGLUE is just another benchmark that is measuring something else than what it's supposed to be measuring (machine learning benchmarks usually do).

It seems that the teams behind the attempts to beat such benchmarks are aware of the weaknesses of the benchmarks though, so that's encouraging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I attended one of the talks(1) of the Sam Bowman. His talk was about "Task- Independent Language Understanding" and he also talked about GLUE and super GLUE; he mentioned that some models are passing an average person in experiments. They did some experiments to understand BERT's performance (2). (similar to article 'NLP's Clever Hans Moment') But they found a different answer to question "what BERT really knows," so he was skeptical about all conclusions. Check these out if you are interested in.

(1)[[https://www.nyu.edu/projects/bowman/TILU- talk-19-09.pdf](https://www.nyu.edu/projects/bowman/TILU-talk-19-09.pdf)]

(2)[[https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.06316](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.06316)]

</comment><comment><USER24> The AIs in the benchmark are all trained exclusively on text, correct?

My assumption has always been that to get human-level understanding, the AI systems need to be trained on things like visual data in addition to text. This is because there is a fair amount of information that is not encoded at all in text, or at least is not described in enough detail.

I mean, humans can't learn to understand language properly without using their other senses. You need something visual or auditory or to associate with the words which are really supposed to represent full systems that are complex and detailed.

I think it would be much more obvious if there were questions that involved things like spatial reasoning, or combining image recognition with that and comprehension.

<comment><USER25> Mmm. The philosophical position that it's essential to be embodied in order to have intelligence seems intuitively reasonable but is very much unproven. You will find philosophers and cognitive scientists who are sure you're right, but they don't have much hard evidence, and you will also find people like me who are pretty sure you're wrong but likewise have no hard evidence.

In the specific remember that deaf-blind people exist, so if you're sure that you "need something visual or auditory" then those people are not, according to your beliefs, able to understand language. I think they'll disagree with you quite strongly.

<comment><USER26> > remember that deaf-blind people exist [... ...] able to understand language

I got curious if/how deafblind people learn to communicate in the first place, if they are completely deafblind from birth. If humans can learn not just communication but language without either vision or hearing, that seems to suggest either extreme adaptability or language learning being quite decoupled from vision and hearing. From an evolutionary standpoint, I imagine that both deafness and blindness are probably uncommon enough that language learning could have explicit dependencies on both hearing and vision.

I found an old-looking video about communication with deafblind people. At the linked timestamp is a woman who is deafblind since age 2.

[https://youtu.be/usaf3bVVvjY?t=840](https://youtu.be/usaf3bVVvjY?t=840)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10683](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10683)

<comment><USER16> Twitter summary: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1187161460033458177.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1187161460033458177.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Attention is all you need", indeed. Of course, our instinct tells us there is more to language inference than word proximity. And so results approaching or exceeding expert-level human baseline raise more questions than providing cause for popping champagne corks.

In Question Answering, which is also advancing rapidly with insights from transformers and denoising auto-encoders, but still far from human baseline. The ease with which these models can answer a sample question such as: "Who was the first human in space", demonstrates both their efficacy and limitations. Pre-trained on a large corpus of text, almost every document that contains the the name "Yuri Gagarin" will in its near vicinity describe him in relation to his pioneering accomplishment for which he became a cultural icon.

And for even more generalizable scenarios, such as "what might you find on a Mayan monument"? It becomes imperative that an agent _explain_ its reasoning in natural language as well to enable self-correcting backpropagation of error correction.

Language may be considered low-dimensional relatively speaking. And sentence prediction across quotidian tasks manageable in current state-of-the-art architectures. But looking at how difficult it is to predict the next N frames of video given a short input example demonstrates the intractability of the problem in higher dimensional spaces.

Neural Models for Speech and Language: Successes, Challenges, and the Relationship to COmputational Models of the Brain - Michael Collins

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVnFKmPaU8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVnFKmPaU8c)

</comment><comment><USER28> They came up with the SuperGLUE benchmark because they found that the GLUE benchmark was flawed and too easy to game. There were correlations in the dataset that made it possible to get questions right without real understanding, and so the results didn't generalize.

Could the same thing happen again with the better benchmark due to more subtle correlations? These things are tough to judge, so I'd say wait and see if it turns out to be a real result.

</comment><comment><USER29> Although those are some great results, I wish I could try it out locally...

[https://github.com/google-research/text-to-text-transfer- tra...](https://github.com/google-research/text-to-text-transfer-transformer)

It drives me nuts that most of these papers / publications don't have code where I can just run:

> python evaluate_model.py

Still exciting, just annoying that I'd have to set up google cloud to try this out.

<comment><USER30> They often do setup Python notebooks / Colabs you can simply run, especially with the data hosted on GCloud. Unfortunately not this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My experience with image classification benchmarks was that they approached human levels only because the scoring only counts how much they get "right" and doesn't penalize completely whack answers as much as they should (like getting full credit for being pretty sure a picture of a dog was either a dog or an alligator). I suspect there's something similar going on in these language benchmarks.

</comment><comment><USER32> > T5-11B (11 billion parameters)

So, this is largest language model so far?

<comment><USER33> Yes. The last one was 8.3B [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08053.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08053.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Use of Natural Language Understanding term in context of this benchmark is preposterous. No understanding takes place there. Please stick to NLP (Natural Language Processing) term for the next couple of decades. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER35> This clearly demonstrates once again that Google is miles ahead of the competition in AI. I mean, they just have the best data.

If you want to have an every day example of Google's AI skills: Switch you phone's keyboard to GBoard, especially all iOS users, and you will face a night and day difference to any other keyboard esepcially the stock one. When using multiple languages at the same time the leap to other keyboards gets even bigger.

GBoard is my phone's killer app and if Google dropped it for iOS I'd left the same day to Android.

<comment><USER36> Have you tried the iOS 13 keyboard's built in swipe feature?

Are you aware of Swiftkey?

<comment><USER37> I think GP is talking about predictive text, rather than keyboard ergonomics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Where do I take the SuperGLUE test?

</comment><comment><USER39> Several of the systems in this leaderboard utilize the BERT model, a clever approach devised by Google for natural language processing. A nice laymen's guide to BERT:

[https://towardsdatascience.com/bert-explained-state-of- the-a...](https://towardsdatascience.com/bert-explained-state-of-the-art- language-model-for-nlp-f8b21a9b6270)

</comment><comment><USER40> This is cool. Since they released a 11B pre-trained model, can we finally reproduce "unicorn-level" text generation now?

<comment><USER41> My understanding is that a lot of these really high performance models that reach for every percentage-point possible require an absurd amount of hardware - specifically an absurd amount of GPU memory.

For example I have what I consider a fairly "high end" rig for being a hobbyist individual, with 32GB of RAM, i7 8700k, 1080ti - there's 0 chance their model would fit on my system.

So I mean maybe if you have a ton of money? Usually what happens is a slimmer model with not "quite" as high of a score gets released that actually fits on consumer hardware.

<comment><USER40> Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but it seems to me that once you have the model trained, it should be possible to partition it somehow when inferencing, to fit smaller machines. At least for a proof of concept it should be possible.

<comment><USER42> I'm not aware of any "partioning" strategies per se (at least during inference), but it's now common practice to distill a larger model to a smaller one by either (a) training a smaller "student" network to replicate the larger "teacher" network, or (b) pruning smaller weights from the larger network to reduce the size.

Just brainstorming here, but a vanilla network partition strategy might be to load each layer's weight into memory and perform the forward pass sequentially. I think that would be prohibitively slow - some of these models (e.g. BERT) can already take up to 3-4 seconds to perform a single forward pass on a CPU, and that's with all model weights already loaded into main memory. I suspect fetching/loading each layer separately would blow this out by an order of magnitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wonder what I would score on this test. Are these things correlated to standardized test scores at all for humans ?

</comment><comment><USER44> [http://www.irc.org/history_docs/tao.html](http://www.irc.org/history_docs/tao.html)</comment>


The business of sperm banks - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21728982-modern-families-and-differing-national-laws-mean-opportunities-companies-business?frsc=dg%7Ce <comment><USER2> "Seed capital" is how this article was categorized by the economist.</comment>


Amit's Game Programming Information - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html <comment><USER2> We're currently building a Reddit community around these kind of interactive explanations: [https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables](https://www.reddit.com/r/explorables) Lots of more examples there, have a look! :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. This is nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was just skimming some of the AI stuff on "The AI of F.E.A.R" that was linked from this article. I remember that game was just a tad more scary just because of how smart the AI of the game was when I played it. I never knew if the game was going to do something like flank me when playing and I couldn't easily "game" the AI.

What's amazing is how elegently simple they make it seem. I guess that goes to the old saying. The more you use "simply" in a text, the harder it gets. In this case it would be the more simple you make it look, the more infinitly difficult it will be.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those of us old enough to remember BBS door games, this Amit is Amit Patel, author of SRE.

<comment><USER6> _Solar Realms Elite_ :

[http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Docu...](http://www- cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Documentation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great resource that helped me for learning Dijkstra's algorithm and A* when I was learning about graphs in general, not just for game programming.

<comment><USER8> The post on programming hex grids is another really good one

<comment><USER9> I've actually written one based on his guide: [https://github.com/Hexworks/hexameter](https://github.com/Hexworks/hexameter)

<comment><USER8> Neat. Bookmarked

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I first learned about a new search engine called "Google" when he went to work for them.</comment>


ThinkPad Mods, Done Right - <AUTHOR> https://thinkmods.store/ <comment> yjftsjthsd-h That's a slightly odd name for a store with only one product. Hope to see more in the future:)

<comment> VvR-Ox I agree!

It would be awesome to see more stuff like:

\- BIOS with core/libreboot[0]

\- mainboard replacement (e.g. to support USB 3) [1]

\- better screens [2]

\- something to deal with that awful touchpad

There is already people out there doing it and clearly TP's are some of the most used laptops on this planet for a reason so there is a market.

[0]: [https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html](https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/x200.html) [1]: [http://panacek.net/post/frankenpad_x225/](http://panacek.net/post/frankenpad_x225/) [2]: [https://hackaday.com/2019/02/21/hack-a-thinkpad- display/](https://hackaday.com/2019/02/21/hack-a-thinkpad-display/)

<comment><USER2> Don't get me wrong, I really want all those things. So much so that I actually spent a hefty sum on my current TP (X1 Yoga '3rd', 2018) to get all those things 'guaranteed' _now_ and _option_ for later (I'm not much of a hardware tinkerer, but I could already see 2028 and me tweaking it up).

That being said,

I think it's still a small market. All of TPs I mean, new, used & yet to come ( _I 've got a solid theory that ThinkPads may outlast the heat death of the universe, paper coming soon(tm)_ ). Seriously, the reason is that the used market is precisely interesting because it's cheap (it's almost a commodity market at that point) whereas the new market is becoming niche like all laptops, like desktops before — think that, for all their glory, GPUs only sell in the single-digit millions to consumers per year — no wonder the juice for these lies in enterprise.

So I think you've got room for maybe a few small businesses, small custom shops of a single to few employees, shipping worldwide of course (and I'm not a logistics expert but this is the kind of space where ideally you really want to 'shopify' directly from factory to customer because each cent will be hard fought for). Most of what people use to tweak TPs is already cheap as hell on Aliexpress or eq.

I wish it weren't so. Please tell me I''m wrong about this.

<comment><USER3> I feel like there's room for a couple of hobbyists to design and manufacture niche mods, as you've suggested. We've already seen it take off with Nitrocaster, and I think there's still room for a few more.

My hope with ThinkMods is that I can offset the overall cost of the brand by having a number of different mods; creating a store where you might pay slightly more than Aliexpress knockoffs, but you get a reliable mod shipped quickly to your door without worrying about returns, or if it'll even work.

I also want to be the first to design new mods. There will only be Aliexpress knock-offs of existing mods. ThinkMods will always have the newest and most innovative, with the service to back it up - and I will always do my best to keep costs down.

<comment><USER2> Well, you sound like you've really got the ideal approach, just about the best business model IMHO for that kind of endeavor. Hope it goes _really well_.

I would just encourage you to allow yourself to make _enough_ margin to not just keep the business afloat but grow it — notably to fuel your apparent desire to design great things, enforce great QA, etc. These things have a cost, that people are willing to pay for as you suggest, and it is always a disservice to everyone to undervalue one's work. ;-)

So, seeing as how your heart is in the right place — go TPs! — rest assured you won't overcharge any time soon. People will tell you if that day ever comes. :wink again:

Have a great one, and thanks for the awesome initiative. Best of courage and success to you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nicely looking idea. Not sure about the benefit though. SSD can be fitted in ThinkPad in several ways already 1) swap internal HDD 2) use the optical drivebay, needs a caddy 3) attach M2 SSD instead of WWAN card (this option is slower) 4) attach externally via eSATA (with adapter cable)

All of the options above are bootable (not sure about eSATA, but can test).

One more option is nice, of course, though not sure that booting off ExpressCard SSD could be directly supported by the BIOS.

In my experience, the most demanded mod was HDMI adapter for DisplayPort, just to attach an occasional larger screen/TV.

<comment><USER5> Those older ThinkPads predate M.2 standard and since M.2 is longer than mSATA/mPCIe they simply don't fit in case they needed a PCIe based storage.

<comment><USER6> > M.2 is longer than mSATA

There are 42mm long M.2 drives and as all M.2 cards, they are 2mm wide. The largest 2242 SATA drives are 1TB from such reputable brands as Kingspec and Dogfish and I strongly recommend avoiding them like the plague. I'd stick with the Transcend MTS 430S at 512GB, it's the first SSD in such a size with a DRAM cache, launched last year. (At least the first retail, no idea what goes on with industrial SSDs.)

Full height Mini PCIe cards are 30×50.95 mm. You can indeed buy an msata to 2242 adapter and it's cheap as dirt because it is completely passive, just the PCB with the right edge connector with the M.2 key B connector mounted on top. Zero electronics necessary. It's just SATA.

For the sake of completeness, I must note some newer 2242 drives are key M / NVMe / PCI Express and I haven't seen such an adapter yet. The Sabrent 2TB Rocket is the largest 2242 SSD I am aware of and it's key M.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice to know what material/process is used to make the plastic(?) enclosure. Given that the funding goal is $1400 / $1600, I'm assuming it's 3d printed rather than injection molded, but maybe they were able to get a standard part?

Otherwise, this appears to be a (rare) good example of a well-planned crowdfunding campaign. The actual design is either completely or almost completely de-risked via one or more prototypes. Both the funding goal and anticipated timeline appear reasonable, and make it clear that the funds are being used for production rather than for development. Number of reward items in each category is capped so that sudden unexpected popularity doesn't doom the project.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it's a commercial part - if you look closely at the photo of the first prototype, the left side of the sled shows some distinct lines that look like FDM layers.

It also seems like the maker is producing these in small batches in his home lab, so 3D printing makes sense. That said, the CAD model of v2 seems to show some kind of ejector or retention mechanism (in green, again on the left) which could be tricky to print reliably.

<comment><USER9> A lot of people are integrating FDM or other AM techniques into their production, so it doesn't meant it will be home-produced. You can order small batches from Stratasys, 3D Systems or any of the other big manufacturers and you get reliable parts with good tolerances and post-treatment etc., without committing to with injection molding.

<comment><USER8> That's true! I think next-gen manufacturing is actually one of the most interesting areas of research going right now.

In this case, though, I meant _commercial part_ more like "generic component that you could buy from fifty random aliexpress suppliers" rather than simply "part produced commercially."

<comment><USER9> I agree! It's a very interesting new world. And now I get what you meant. I think the best term for that is COTS (commercial off-the-shelf).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using laptops now for 28 years.

I can't think of a more rugged, long-lasting, and well-performing laptop than the Thinkpad series.

As a result, I can see this product being a total hit. Most of my students buy used Thinkpads because they're inexpensive and easy to upgrade, so I'm going to show them this link!

<comment><USER11> The trackpoint is way beyond anything else ergonomically on a laptop. The hands never leaves the typing position. When correctly calibrated, it's controlled only by applying varying pressure. I've yet to find anything that works as good.

For those of us who find chiclet style keys a step in the wrong direction, and maybe even prefer matte displays to glossy, older Thinkpads is pretty much the pinnacle of laptops as a productivity tool.

<comment><USER12> I really need a new laptop, my old t410s is falling to bits. I'd love to get a new thinkpad but since they changed they keyboards about 2012ish I'm been procrastinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does that "51nb" Chinese company still make modded Thinkpads?

I bought their "51nb X62" model Thinkpad a few years back from an eBay user, though unfortunately it eventually died.

It was a motherboard replacement of the old Thinkpad X60 from many years ago. Replacing the old single core CPU with an Intel Broadwell era i5 and up to 32 gigs of memory

You could also install an M.2 SSD in it I believe. Along with USB 3 and other useful new features

<comment><USER14> [http://www.cnmod.cn/](http://www.cnmod.cn/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Semi related, but has anyone used the T420's ExpressCard port for USB3 expansion?

I bought a USB3 card [0], but the write speed is only barely faster than USB2 for flash media. (interestingly, the write speed _is_ much faster when uploading an image to my FPGA dev board)

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/ExpressCard-34mm-Adapter-Dual- Port/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/ExpressCard-34mm-Adapter-Dual- Port/dp/B0045BLP1S)

<comment><USER16> I did, it runs way too warm.

I am a bit afraid this mod will have the same problem.

Instead of plastic, it would be better to use a material that can conduct heat.

<comment><USER3> The reason that those USB adapters get hot is because they have to actively convert 3.3V to 5V. That's an inefficient process and it's what causes excess heat.

My mod doesn't have that problem, so the only heat generated will be from the drives themselves, which don't put out much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm afraid the 2242 requirement makes this much less of a slam dunk than it should be. Last time I looked for one, only the Toshibas were available as 2242 NVMe drives. (Many more similarly-sized drives are available, but they use SATA which won't work with this adapter.)

I've been looking for an upgrade to my 2242 PCIe drive but they rarely appear, and usually by the time I find one you can't actually order it anymore.

<comment><USER18> It's a major upgrade, if your best storage is currently SATA 2; even if you have to select a relatively obscure SSD manufacturer.

<comment><USER19> Which Thinkpad would that be? The switch over to SATA 3 happened between T410 and T420, coincidentally thats the same time they switched from Gen1 (PCIe 1.1, 2.5Gbps) to Gen2 (PCIe 2.0, 5Gbps). SATA 2/3 is faster than single lane of PCIe 1.1/2.0.

example test on T410 [https://pt.aliexpress.com/item/32260935657.html](https://pt.aliexpress.com/item/32260935657.html) 180MB/s max read out of a drive easily reaching 600MB/s in normal circumstances [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6961/plextor-m6e-black- edi...](https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6961/plextor-m6e-black- edition-128gb-pcie-ssd-review/index4.html)

TLDR: its ALWAYS inferior to simply using SATA drive in HDD slot.

<comment><USER18> I forgot about the ExpressCard being one lane of PCIe; what a waste. ExpressCard seems extra silly since it was often available on machines with USB 2.0, which was faster than PCIe 1 1x. No wonder it never took off for most.

<comment><USER19> Single lane of pcie 2.0 is over 14x faster than usb 2.0 (realistic 35 MB/s in optimal circumstances), pcie 1.0 is still >7x faster.

<comment><USER3> This, the 480Mbit/s rating for USB 2.0 is bits, not bytes. USB2 theoretically caps out at 80MB/s (realistically much much lower) whereas even PCI-E 1.1 can hit 250MB/s (2.5Gbit/s before 8b/10b encoding overhead) in a single lane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why did people buy these? I just have a 2.5" SSD in mine and RAM has always been the bottleneck. A cool project from a technical perspective IMO.

<comment><USER16> Because some of us enjoy having software raid setups in a laptop!

This will allow raid10 setup with 3 drives for best read performance, e.g. "\--level=10 --layout=f3"

You can also do the o3 if you want best write performance

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given it's limited to SATA3 speeds, why not just replace the internal hdd with a SATA3 SSD? My X260 is very happy with a 2tb Samsung drive. I suppose this would be lighter, but we are talking about 50g of extra weight for a 2.5" SSD.

Some of the future mods though look very cool. I particularly would like the Unifying Mod & WHQD mods.

<comment><USER22> Is it actually limited to Sata 3 speeds? Assuming ExpressCard can at least get you a PCI Express 2.0 lane I'd expect it to be at least a couple hundred MB/s faster at least theoretically. Also I assume NVMe's long command queue really benefits SSD performance for random access, so I suspect it may even be worth it just for the interface...

<comment><USER23> The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the transfer rate compared with PCIe 1.0 to 5 GT/s and the per-lane throughput rises from 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s.

So it's actually less than SATA 3 speeds (600MB/s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unrelated story. Back in the day, I got myself a T510. It was a tinkerer's dream - heck, I even learned how to hand-solder SMD on it.

Besides the standard mods (swapping the screen and upgrading to the W-series heatsink), I noticed that there was a spare spot on the PCB that looked like it was made for some component. Looking up the teardown of the more professional variant, turns out that it was missing a connector for a mini- PCIE slot. An ebay hunt and hours with a soldering iron later, I had a seemingly-working miniPCIe slot. Didn't really have a use for it though, other than bragging rights.

I eventually killed that laptop by bricking the BIOS, and then ruining the motherboard while trying to resolder the SPI BIOS chip.

Now, I have a 701CS lying around. Been trying to find the right hardware to restomod it.

<comment><USER3> >An ebay hunt and hours with a soldering iron later, I had a seemingly-working miniPCIe slot. Didn't really have a use for it though, other than bragging rights.

T440p supports this as well! It has a secret third M.2 2280 B-key slot with SATA3 lanes going to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> God I love my ThinkPads! going to order two tonight.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there really a market for modding a 7+ year old laptop? I know thinkpads used to be great (And some still are), but, I just don't get the point in trying to give more life to something so so old - most likely ~3rd-4th gen intel.

<comment><USER27> I'd be happy to buy a replacement battery for my X220 from a non-sketchy source if I knew it had new, matched cells and wasn't going to explode.

<comment><USER16> If you have sources for X61 batteries tell me!

I left a good one in it while docked but unplugged, the dock apparently killed the battery.

I'm pondering whether changing the 16550 cells make senses

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I modified several ThinkPads to use the Wintec Expresscard SSD's back when they were still available. Although they weren't capable of great benchmark scores, they were way, way better than the 2.5" and 1.8" HDD's of the day (think 80GB)

[http://www.wintecind.com/features/filemate/ssd/wf_expresscar...](http://www.wintecind.com/features/filemate/ssd/wf_expresscard_ssd.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to see the real prototype myself: those connectors on top of a PCB seem too thick to fit into an EC slot - but there have been SSDs made in that form factor.

Edit: nevermind, he found a thinner connector. I should've read the Indiegogo page before commenting :)

Other than that, this adapter would be great for any laptop with an ExpressCard slot. I can't believe no one's made one before. Kind of late now that new laptops don't have the port, though.

<comment><USER3> It was! I had to remove the entire ExpressCard cage on the X230 I was using for testing. However, as noted in your edit, I've since slimmed the drive down further. This is what it looks like now: [https://i.imgur.com/A0XEkW5.png](https://i.imgur.com/A0XEkW5.png) Perfectly fits the EC spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are all Thinkpads with ExpressCard/54 supported?

[http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ExpressCard_slot](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ExpressCard_slot)

I have an old X200 laying around and I was thinking of reactivating it, but it's from 2008..

<comment><USER30> According to this Reddit thread, it should be: [https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/evtje2/its_finall...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/evtje2/its_finally_here_the_launch_of_thinkmods/ffxvxaw/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wouldn't you be better off installing a SATA SSD instead of limiting your nvme drive to expresscard speeds? Besides, if you've got an expresscard slot by far the best thing to put in it is a bluetooth mouse.

<comment><USER3> >the best thing to put in it is a bluetooth mouse

If you're talking about a dongle and not a mouse itself, I've got a mod coming for that too~

<comment><USER31> No, there are a series of folding Bluetooth mice that fit entirely inside Express card and PC card slots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know how to get in touch with the project founder? Kickstarter does not seem to provide any way. I would like a two pack, with one of each size, but right now you have to choose one or the other.

<comment><USER33> I thought you could just do two transactions?

The founder is on the [https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad) subreddit and discord, [https://www.reddit.com/u/yttriumtyclief](https://www.reddit.com/u/yttriumtyclief) or Discord [http://discord.gg/Ybdz7AS](http://discord.gg/Ybdz7AS) @yttrium.

Launch post on the subreddit a few days ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/evtje2/its_finall...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/evtje2/its_finally_here_the_launch_of_thinkmods)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can you run linux on it? Just want a dual boot win/linux portable, not necessarily latest.

<comment><USER35> Can an old Thinkpad run Linux? Is that the question? The answer is, definitely. Source: I have seven of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Excellent idea!

With NVMe now a thing it feels as if the express card slot is ready for a comeback.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would this have any real performance benefit over a traditional SSD?

<comment><USER38> Size, and I'm assuming speed but I don't know anything about the express card interface so it might be slow.

Also if you just want to cram more drive in your laptop

<comment><USER39> Mentioned on the linked Indiegogo page¹:

" _What 's the speed limit?

The ExpressCard slot is limited to a single PCI-E 2.0 lane. This means the real-world speed bottleneck is 500MB/s, which is roughly the speed of SATA 6Gb/s (SATA 3).

Pre-Sandy Bridge models (T410/X201 and older) are limited to PCI-E 1.1, which is roughly 250MB/s._"

――――――

¹ — [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thinkmods-expresscard- nvm...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thinkmods-expresscard-nvme- adapter/)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pak – a command line tool for everything – my first open source project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tburnam/pak <comment><USER2> It seems a bit barebones but it's clear where to add functionality. However, you talk about the ability to 'share' scripts and this is where I think you have something interesting... but it's not really there yet.

If you were able to wrap up scripts, for example a utility to create GitHub repos from the command line (something I recently built for myself, actually), and share that in a similar fashion to npm - that would be really useful. I'm sure others could use my GitHub script and I'm sure there are a plethora of awesome scripts floating around on developers' machines. I see some potential there.

You also mentioned work on an 'API to various languages', but I don't see anything in the issues regarding this. This also has a lot of potential in the open source realm, since many commands are system specific - so abstracting those out into factories would really improve cross-platform functionality tremendously... and would be much more lightweight than something like Docker...

You should provide better documentation of what you have. I had to pull the repo and run the code to find out what was going on. But most contributors won't take the time to look at code (even if it is very readable) if the README doesn't contain documentation (or a link to the documentation). And better describe the goals for the project. What is the end goal? How does this help? etc. And lastly, your issues are there (good), but they aren't very consistent or descriptive (bad). You should have clear issues that follow some convention of continuity. Feature requests and bugs should be separable, at least. If you have navigable issues, you will attract contributors. This project seems to have a lot of work to be done in several areas, so a good issues section is particularly important because it will draw a diverse set of contributors.

I think you're definitely on to something here, but you'll need to mature the code base to attract more contributors. I was peeking around the pak source myself and may even submit a PR or 2, this looks like a fun project.

Good luck :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This thing has some real potential if it matures. I think it's easy to get excited about the direction this could take, especially as a build environment tool. It could be much more efficient than Docker. That being said, it certainly needs to mature, as voiture points out. You have a neat idea but your platform is not really even complete yet. Open source is a good choice.</comment>


The stakes have never been higher for Apple software - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17419154/apple-wwdc-2018-ios-12-mac-macos-rebuild-trust <comment><USER3> Apple needs to figure out what _Pro_ means in each of their computer product categories: tablets, laptops and desktops. These "pros" are developers, physicians, fashion designers, graphics artists, musicians, photographers, videographers, et al. - do they even know how these pros use these products? Their needs and expectations? There's a lot of money to be made chasing the consumer but ultimately it's that consumer envisioning themselves as a pro or becoming a prosumer that's going to really drive your sales.

<comment><USER4> This has bothered me for years. Stop screwing around with anything with the word Pro in it and just iterate and improve. Faster, more memory, better screen, etc... The Macbook Pro should be the Thinkpad of back in the day. Never a redesign (but in the case of apple, when a new, better material becomes cheap) - just consistent, incremental improvements.

Leave the play ground - new keyboard, touch bar, tackpad, etc... to the Macbook and vet the features there.

As for phones, watches and such - I think many would say there should be an iPhone Pro - maybe that's the X right now? Maybe something else. Something to complement the super user / professional / someone who wants the top of the top.

<comment><USER3> I _love_ your idea of doing incremental improvements on the products in the _Pro_ line. Pros need proven performance and reliability - their livelihood is literally at stake.

Though I wasn't thinking it I see the potential need for an iPhone Pro - <USER2> people are taking their business mobile and they need a device on which they can run their business while they're out and about. Just like the rest of the _Pro_ line we're envisioning it'd be a rugged device with incremental improvements. Leave the play ground for the iPhone.</comment></comment></comment>


Vancouver's 'freak show' property market - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36369108 <comment><USER2> This time is different!</comment>