Ask HN: Agency developers, how do you estimate time accurately? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Most likely you won't be able to estimate project accurately. I've co-founded a digital agency, and after 5 years we still can get 100% accuracy.

But here are few things that will impact the accuracy:

\- how familiar are you with the technology \- how quickly the dependencies change (tech dependencies). \- how technical your project manager is - <USER2> will likely to spend more time in the meeting explaining some trivial stuff if PM isn't technical. \- how many visual design revisions you need to implement during this estimate \- how big is the task - if it's bigger than 2 days your accuracy drops.

My advise is to keep the tasks small, no more than 2 days (3 days or 20 hours max). And total phase smaller than around 200 hours. You also need to make sure that everyone is on the same page - if there is no good communications your estimate might need to be revised during the development phase.

Even if you implement the same project the second time - it still not guaranteed to be faster than the first project.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I join Amazon? Why? Or Why not? - <AUTHOR> Edit - removed details for privacy reasons. <comment><USER3> I'm sure you've heard that Amazon's corporate culture is considered to be "harsh" ... maybe it's not so bad for dev's, but I were you I'd take the job, but keep my options open at the same time, just in case things get unpleasant. There's nothing wrong with working long hours as long as you're being appropriately compensated, but big co's like Amazon are all the time finding new and creative ways to _not_ have to do that. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am an immigrant from small east asian country. So while on visa it complicates things a lot.

<comment><USER4> I've learned to not trust what people say about a company's culture. Different people evaluate things very differently.

Unless you have some really good friend inside the group that can vouch for the presence of sanity, just assume your new group's management is a bunch of lunatics. Subsequently, decide whether what you're getting paid and what you will (likely) learn is worth dealing with said lunatics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked there 2004–2007. I had a great time and I learned a lot. If you like the team that made you an offer, and you're excited about what you'd be working on there, then go for it.

A few things I've written about what Amazon is like:

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cultural-faux-pas- when-w...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cultural-faux-pas-when-working- at-Amazon/answer/Jason-Crawford)

[https://www.quora.com/What-allows-Amazon-to-be-so- innovative...](https://www.quora.com/What-allows-Amazon-to-be-so- innovative/answer/Jason-Crawford)

[http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza- teams](http://blog.jasoncrawford.org/two-pizza-teams)

</comment><comment><USER6> People have wildly different experiences there. Some hate it and burn out after a year. Others really like the work environment and get promoted quickly.

One good thing I'll say about Amazon is that it's a great way to break into the "big four" tech companies. If you didn't get into Google or Facebook initially but got into Amazon you can pretty much guarantee you'll get recruiter spam from lots of top companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Current employee with Amazon.

I have worked with other big names, small and mid size startups.

Amazon in itself is a sub-culture in software and technology. I would recommend anyone getting an opportunity to work here to go for it. Even if you leave after a year or two, I am sure you will learn things that will shape your career in a positive manner.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are you talking about 'Amazon' or Amazon as in 'AWS'? If 'AWS', then I would go for it - it is probably one of the hottest platform/tech-company these days.

Don't know much about 'Amazon' outside of 'AWS' so can't comment on it.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's a lot of information here... watch out in case someone from that team reads HN

<comment><USER10> Over time I have found who I am directly reporting to as the bigger influence on how I have enjoyed my time in a company. Get a handle on what your immediate boss is like - and let that weigh into your decision.

With that said, if you are looking for adding a good name to your resume - <USER2> not join and see how it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have a good feeling about your manager and co-workers and like the sound of the work you are going to be doing, do it!

If you have reservations about the people or the work, don't do it. You'll burn out if your in the wrong fit.</comment>


Apple Announces macOS High Sierra - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-macos-high-sierra/ <comment><USER2> "Safari also now blocks auto-playing videos and will use machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site trackers so advertisers won't be able to easily track you across sites."

Finally, I feel a corporation is using ML to project me, rather than sell me.

<comment> vhost- I totally agree with this. I hate auto-playing videos too. But I am curious what people's opinions are on youtube auto-playing. when I go to youtube or click on a youtube video, I kind of have the expectation that it will start playing for me when the page loads. What does everyone else think?

<comment><USER3> Maybe it will be possible to whitelist certain sites like Youtube, that would be useful. Even more useful if it did figure out that by itself.

<comment><USER4> Yes it is exactly that, and says so on the macOS High Sierra page. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple adding native support for eGPUs is huge.

(Can't believe Microsoft missed a beat and didn't add an official eGPU dock to their Surface line. A couple people I know passed on the Surface Studio because it isn't powerful enough despite loving the hardware otherwise)

<comment><USER6> Is it really huge, though? They still don't support Vulkan or even OpenGL 4.2 (2011)

What are you even going to use that eGPU with other than installing Windows through bootcamp so you can actually make use of the hardware?

<comment><USER7> It's been pretty clear for a while that OpenGL on Macs is dead, and that it's "Metal or GTFO". If modern OpenGL is still a requirement for you, grit your teeth and choose Windows or Linux.

<comment><USER8> OpenGL is also dead on Windows for UWP applications. The only available option is via ANGLE or stay on Win32 until it gets kicked out.

<comment><USER9> Does this mean opengl is going to work on less and less platforms?

Are there real crosspolatform options left? Or are people going to rely more and more on things like Unity to capture that extra complexity?

<comment><USER10> With everything realistically heading towards lower level API's like DirectX 12, Vulkan and Metal I doubt many people are going to be rolling their own engines anymore. OpenGL and D3D11 made it fairly doable, but these new API's are more than most people will want to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...and XCode 9 beta seems to be available as well with refactoring support (finally). [https://developer.apple.com/xcode/](https://developer.apple.com/xcode/)

</comment><comment> throwaway-1209 Lots for ML, and their Accelerate framework is already second to none on the CPU. Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't even bundle BLAS with their OS.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know about geography but High Sierra was also the name of the 1985-era CD ROM data specification. Apple was a participant. Named (if Wikipedia is to be believed) after the High Sierra Hotel and Casino that hosted the working group.

<comment><USER13> That occurred to me too during the keynote. Memories of the days when installing a CD-ROM meant fiddling with a half dozen settings in CONFIG.SYS to ensure all the drivers loaded properly.

<comment><USER14> If you miss those days you can install a driver to get your camera working on a MacBook with Linux. It worked fine for me but took about an hour or so of fiddling: [https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie](https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No mention of Vulkan? Is Apple determined to avoid supporting it?

<comment><USER8> Vulkan might become the next OpenCL, with the focus being Android (7% devices as of today) and GNU/Linux thing.

All major game engines already support Metal, DX 12, NVN (the actual Switch main GX API) and LibGCM. Middleware is what counts, switching the graphics API on a compilation switch.

Apple just announced on the Keynote, Metal 2, Metal VR and updated Metal Compute, with the Window Manger being ported from OpenGL to Metal.

Also how ILM is now using Metal on their production pipelines.

It remains to be seen what will be shown later on the technical sessions.

<comment><USER6> Except OpenCL was more like Metal - designed by Apple, pushed by Apple, used by nobody.

The major game engines already support Vulkan, too, and Vulkan is getting _far_ more game developer support than Metal is. A few of the major engines, like Source 2 & ID Tech 6, also chose to only support Vulkan and not DX12. Largely because DX12 requires Win10 which means out the gate you've eliminated half of your Windows gaming population compared to Vulkan.

Currently all signs point towards Vulkan edging out DX12 in the Windows gaming market. That could change, of course, but Microsoft making DX12 win10-only as well as the closed access preview thing have so far put it at a pretty large disadvantage vs. Vulkan in these early days. Which matters as otherwise the APIs are pretty much the same, so why go with the Win10-exclusive when you can have the exact same thing but everywhere?

Then for your content creation apps where unity/unreal middleware isn't really an option, that's going to be extra painful. Or they just ignore the problem and run OpenGL 4.1 on OSX and OpenGL 4.5+/Vulkan on Windows, and say "suck to all you pro consumers on mac, you should have bought a windows workstation instead"?

<comment><USER8> > Except OpenCL was more like Metal - designed by Apple, pushed by Apple, used > by nobody.

Because Apple could not stand Khronos politics.

Also Apple isn't to blame Khronos could not make something as usable as CUDA.

Really. only now they start to care about C alternatives for GPGPU?!

> Currently all signs point towards Vulkan edging out DX12 in the Windows > gaming market.

Vulkan and OpenGL don't work in UWP, which is the future of Windows application model, nor on XBox.

<comment><USER6> > Also Apple isn't to blame Khronos could not make something as usable as > CUDA.

Apple is the one that developed OpenCL. Apple submitted OpenCL to Khronos. So if Apple isn't to blame then who is?

> Vulkan and OpenGL don't work in UWP, which is the future of Windows > application model

It's only the future if applications adopt it. Which since it's win10 only there's no real chance of that happening anytime soon.

Keep in mind Steam is the dominate marketplace for gaming on Windows, not the Microsoft app store (followed by a few other stores - Origin, Battle.net, etc...). So what Microsoft wants to happen is pretty irrelevant to what will actually happen since nobody really cares about Microsoft's store.

> Vulkan and OpenGL don't work [...] on XBox.

Neither does DX12. Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for Direct3D. UWP on xbox sounds like that old XNA thing - something for maybe indie devs but since indie devs now have a choice of engines to pick from they probably will care even less now than they did back when XNA was a thing.

<comment><USER8> > Apple is the one that developed OpenCL. Apple submitted OpenCL to Khronos. > So if Apple isn't to blame then who is?

The Khronos group that wanted OpenCL to look something else than what Apple cared about.

When one is in minority, better leave.

> Which since it's win10 only there's no real chance of that happening anytime > soon.

I remember hearing the same about DX 10/Vista, DX 11/Windows 7 and how GNU/Linux would save the world of gaming with SteamOS and here we are.

> Neither does DX12.

I guess you don't follow XBox SDK news, UWP is irrelevant in XBox context.

<comment><USER6> > I remember hearing the same about DX 10/Vista, DX 11/Windows 7

And DX 10 & 11 adoption took _forever_ to happen. Those claims were completely accurate. The difference now is that Vulkan is actually good with good tools, debugging, and support (probably because it came out of AMD instead of Khronos), so DX12 brings nothing to the table other than reduced platform support including worse support on Windows. Particularly since both are massive breaking API changes, so you're basically starting from scratch anyway not just porting over your DX11 code to DX12.

I didn't claim GNU/Linux would save the world, so why are you trotting out that claim as if I did?

> I guess you don't follow XBox SDK news, UWP is irrelevant in XBox context.

Huh? I literally said "Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for Direct3D." as the very next sentence. So I'm obviously aware of that, why are you pretending I'm not?

<comment><USER8> > I didn't claim GNU/Linux would save the world, so why are you trotting out > that claim as if I did?

Because it is the only OS where Vulkan is actually relevant in practice.

Also Vulkan tools only look good to developers that never used graphical debugging tools outside OpenGL, specially in regarding to shader debugging and frame level information.

> Huh? I literally said "Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for > Direct3D." as the very next sentence. So I'm obviously aware of that, why > are you pretending I'm not?

Because you reveal not knowing about DirectX, by mentioning Direct3D, which has died long time ago and then go on to compare UWP and DirectX 12 to XNA.

While what XBox game developers care about is XBox SDK, which already has support for DirectX 12.

<comment><USER6> > Because it is the only OS where Vulkan is actually relevant in practice.

Vulkan has a very strong presence on Windows, which is what I focused on entirely.

> Also Vulkan tools only look good to developers that never used graphical > debugging tools outside OpenGL, specially in regarding to shader debugging > and frame level information

RenderDoc, one of the major graphical debugging tools, has Vulkan support in addition to Direct3D 11 & 12 support. It seems you're just entirely oblivious of everything about vulkan...

> Because you reveal not knowing about DirectX, by mentioning Direct3D, which > has died long time ago

Direct3D is the 3D graphics API of DirectX. It's not dead. If it was we wouldn't be having this discussion at all as Direct3D 12 wouldn't even exist. DirectX is more than just 3D graphics APIs - that's what D3D is. DirectX also includes Direct2D (not dead, either), DirectCompute for GPGPU, and XAudio2 for low-level audio access.

Most of DirectX, though, has died over the years - like DirectInput, DirectSound, and DirectSound3D. Direct3D & Direct2D/DirectWrite are largely the only parts of DirectX that matter anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else able to pitch in on the JS performance claims? How honest is it?

<comment><USER17> [https://webkit.org/blog/7536/jsc-loves- es6/](https://webkit.org/blog/7536/jsc-loves-es6/) :)

<comment><USER18> Would be nice if this translated into real world apps and Apple allowed embedding new WebKit into native apps.

WKWebKit doesn't even support printing properly from 3rd party code.

<comment><USER19> Sadly Apple has no interest in helping developers make hybrid iOS apps. WKWebView and UIWebView will only give you headaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hopefully it improves the Bluetooth support as on my 2013 rMBP it's really flaky. Unable to use my Magic Mouse and keyboard without getting annoyed by the constant disconnects.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds great.

I think most of the Safari updates are as well in it's webkit js engine.

Although I'm really still confused why does Apple bounds their Safari browser with it's OS updates.

I will be very, very happy if I can receive up-to-date battery-savvy browser, without having to wait for a full-blown conference.

<comment><USER22> Apple are a bit old-school about releases, they seem to bundle all major updates together and only give security and minor updates to their previous releases, and they follow that for all of the software they provide.

This is how it has historically been for 90's and early 00's unix-like operating systems like *BSD and Solaris. A lot of things come bundled with the base so everything in the operating system's base release is updated with a new release of the kernel that comes bundled with it.

<comment><USER23> It's in Apple's interest to get everyone onto the latest macOS, so packaging app updates into the OS update helps accomplish that.

<comment><USER9> The counterpoint is that doing these releases means having to roll out 100 changes at once instead of trickling them out continuously

The reason people hate upgrading is half "losing features", half "everything breaks". Imagine if they rolled out changes continuously?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, Win 10 and Arch Linux are poster children for "everything just works".

<comment><USER9> well... Chrome updates all the time (version 50 now, can you believe it?)

I haven't used Win 10, but even Win 8 was pretty good for me (crashed less than Sierra + the new MBP).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wonder how Steve Jobs would feel about all these Dad jokes becoming a part of Apple's brand.

<comment><USER7> Didn't Jobs once say taking LSD was "one of the most important things that ever happened" to him? I'm sure he'd be just fine with the weed jokes ;)

<comment><USER25> Sure, weed jokes — but the general "dadness" of the last few keynotes seems new and a bit weird.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's every presenter though, just Federighi. He's been known as "the dad joke guy" for a while now. Personally, I kinda like it when each presenter has a distinct personality, it keeps it all from blurring together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will new APFS mean a beast of an upgrade as it changes my fs?

<comment><USER27> If you're on iOS 10.3, you've already been upgraded from HFS+ to APFS. I believe this was done for all iOS users without much notice.

[https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/ios-10-3-will-be- apple...](https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/ios-10-3-will-be-apples-first- update-to-convert-storage-to-apfs/)

So to answer your question, maybe not so beastly.

<comment><USER28> This is about the macOS update. High Sierra is the first macOS release with APFS as default

<comment><USER27> Yes, I was just showing as an example of how seamlessly they were able to upgrade iOS devices to APFS.

<comment><USER28> It's a far more constrained (and typically, more frequently backed up) environment. I don't think it really answers the question of 'how is it going to work out on macOS'.

<comment><USER29> Of course not, but it shows that transparent in-place update should be possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The pitch meeting for that must have been something else.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, everyone's making a big deal out of the name. Is "Sierra" some sort of stoner reference I don't understand, or is it really just the fact that they put the word "High" in there? Is that really how grade-school we've all gotten?

<comment><USER30> I think it's half funny because of the 'high' and half funny because it's just a really lazy naming scheme.

<comment><USER32> It'd be fine if it were actually consistent and they picked different locations. But 'High Sierra' is a region, 'Yosemite' is a park in that region and 'El Capitan' is a large rock in that park (side note...a large rock that was climbed without ropes this weekend...Alex Honnold is both insane and a huge inspiration). They've essentially made the last three releases about the same place. It's lazy and inconsistent. And it's not like there's a shortage of exquisite places in California. Big Sur, Shasta, Lassen, Mendocino, Lost Coast, San Simeon, Joshua Tree, Catalina, Monterrey Bay...just off the top of my head, I've named 9 better California places that they could have used for their releases.

It'd also be kinda funny for them to jab at Microsoft's advertising and have an OS X Mojave, since it would fit with their naming scheme.

<comment><USER33> Some of those names I recognise from other IT-related products (Mendocino, Catalina, Monterey...). Generally speaking, naming products after CA landmarks has been done for 30+ years in this industry, it just feels very unoriginal. I think it's a desperate attempt from Apple to remind you (or themselves) that they "design in California", despite manufacturing in China, selling in Europe, and stashing profits in Bermuda; and to suggest the OS is "hard as a rock", as opposed to the wobbly and airy "windows".

I very much preferred the big-cats theme. It humanised the OS in powerful ways, making it an extremely powerful and very intelligent animal that dominates through speed and elegance. Rocks are just dumb and static.

<comment><USER34> Advocate here; rocks are quite dynamic on geologic timescales. Also, I don't think it really makes sense to call them dumb, as that is a quality one would apply to something with a central nervous system and capacity to self-identify in conjunction with capacity for intelligence.

We know that rocks don't have a CNS; if they can self-identify the mechanism for this and their experience is obviously quite alien to our own so it doesn't make much sense to project human qualities onto them without more information.

It is true that the qualities of rocks are quite different than those of large felines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm going to hold out for High Sierra Plus.

<comment><USER36> Plus

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Woah Woah .. how does one get a VR headset to run on a Mac? Are they referring to a macbook pro and Oculus?

<comment><USER30> The demo was a Vive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Auto video-blocking and tracking blocking built in is huge.

</comment><comment><USER39> "It's all about deep technologies which are the foundation for new technologies".

What an utterly pointless statement.

</comment><comment><USER40> APFS don't support compression like HFS+ ?

<comment><USER13> During the 2016 talk on APFS they mentioned it was dropped for various reasons. SSD performance is so ridiculous now that the CPU can't decompress quickly enough, so it'd impair performance. The new notebooks and desktops do 3GB/s read/write, so that's a lot to crunch through in real-time.

I'd suppose if compression is imporatant, do it in your application.

<comment><USER41> Thanks for sharing Apple's rationale, but I disagree. The bottleneck is space, not speed, of SSDs. Few people need a GB per second of read or write more than they need space. If compression gives me even a GB of extra space on a 128GB SSD, I'd take it.

In fact, a 7200RPM hard disc is adequate for me.

<comment><USER42> I would respectfully argue that you perhaps are the outlier, rather than the people who want more speed out of their direct-attached storage.

Disk speed was the most significant performance bottleneck for years — a point that Apple has repeatedly made in their developer guidelines on performance[1].

I think this is (happily) starting to be less of a concern with these new SSDs capable of 2GB-3GB/second. The 1TB SSD in my 2013 Mac Pro benchmarks at 1GB/sec and I find doubling/tripling that an extremely attractive proposition.

Other than offline backups and archiving systems, I literally haven't used a spinning-magnetic-media storage device since 2013 (and avoided them when possible before that). And I definitely don't plan to ever do so again.

[1]: e.g. [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/PerformanceOverview/DevelopingForPerf/DevelopingForPerf.html)

<comment><USER41> I wonder if this is a divide between geeks / power users / developers on one hand, who want more speed, and average users, who want more space. Every time someone talks about speed, that statement comes from a geek. By contrast, I have heard non-technical people complain about insufficient space on their 128GB Macbooks, but not about the speed. Maybe my sample size isn't big enough. I don't know.

When you said that people want more speed out of their storage, sure, we all want it in the abstract, but did you mean even at the cost of having less space for a higher price?

My iMac's Fusion Drive failed, in the sense of not using the SSD at all, and I didn't notice much difference except in specific situations, like booting, app startup and swapping. On the whole, I wasn't any less productive or more irritated with a hard disc. A small screen, a slower Internet connection and having to move data back and forth to external hard discs are a bigger pain for me than the speed of a hard disc, assuming it's 7200 RPM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I still maintain that even I can come up with a better naming scheme than "places in California you've never heard of."

[https://medium.com/@nathanstocks/dear-apple-your-naming- sche...](https://medium.com/@nathanstocks/dear-apple-your-naming-scheme- stinks-here-let-me-fix-it-for-you-d4dd697c51a8)

</comment><comment><USER44> Can anyone confirm that they finally fixed the bug prevents an ethernet connected computer from becoming a hotspot?

</comment><comment><USER45> slightly off topic but we should have alternates lik puri.sm guys. if the privacy is quite important at this age, their slick linux hardware woth to look at it.

</comment><comment><USER46> There are only two hard things in Computer Science..

</comment><comment><USER47> Off topic: can I just say how much I hate TechCrunch articles? Clearly poorly and hastily written, with grammar issues, calling HEVC a "container" format, and WTF is a "Thunderbolt 3 enclosure" when it comes to external graphics cards? Like I get it, first to market wins the ad clicks, but come on. Do we have to keep upvoting this crap on HN?

<comment><USER48> A Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for External GPUs is exactly what it sounds like: A GPU that sits external to your computer, and connects to it via Thunderbolt 3.

It's hardly TC's fault you don't know what that is. Just Google it.

<comment><USER47> I know what an external GPU is. But the external graphics aren't powered by an external GPU "enclosure". They are powered by an external GPU.

<comment><USER49> The external GPU is in an enclosure and that enclosure doesn't have to have a GPU in it. Most of the Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe enclosures support other PCIe devices.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. You can put whatever you want in it, but the only thing that people would want to, generally speaking, is a GPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Really inspired OS names Apple's got these days...

I mean if they're going for geographical places in California, why not "macOS Sierra Nevada" ?</comment>


Office365 users shared hundreds of sensitive docs publicly through docs.com - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/doxed-by-microsofts-docs-com-users-unwittingly-shared-sensitive-docs-publicly/ <comment><USER2> I don't get it. It's a site designed for public sharing -- the word "showcase" is right on the front page, as username223 points out. I just loaded it up and walked through uploading a file to it. It's incredibly explicit about what it's doing. Under "Visibility," it says:

"Public on the web Anyone can find it on the web. Search engines will find the doc, giving it a larger audience."

It's not unambiguous. It's very clear. The only way you can't tell what it's doing is if you just pay no attention whatsoever to what you're doing. It's not the default sharing method from either Office 365 (web, traditional or Android/iOS) or OneDrive. You have to opt into using it at all at an IT department level if you have a corporate Office 365 department. You really just can't stop users from footgunning themselves when they're on the open Internet.

<comment><USER3> When we deployed O365 to 100k+ people, we ran into a few things like this.

A big one was the meaning of "everyone" in OneDrive. Many people thought that it meant "everyone on my team", and posted all sorts of wacky stuff.

<comment><USER4> My work switched pretty recently (December last year) that is one thing I've noticed that has really annoyed me is that all the Office apps have One Drive set as the default location to save anything. I've never used One Drive, I don't want to use One Drive but every time I hit save in word or excel it defaults to "One Drive" I have to physically click "This PC" button and browse to my local disk to save a copy locally every single time.

No one in my building uses one drive, no one asked for one drive but Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down our throats. It feels like an anti-pattern like the forced windows 10 "upgrade" for home users.

According to word I have Office 365 ProPlus version - I note there is no option to save to docs.com.

<comment><USER5> I am curious what your resistance is to OneDrive. Personally, I try to put as much in there as I can as I frequently switch machines that I am working on. I keep my work code in there as well (Git repo and all) and it's convenient when switching between VMs or when needing to wipe my workstation and start fresh.

I encounter many co-workers though who like to do things "the old way" and just email copies of documents around and then spend time merging them back together instead of sending a link to their OneDrive. Just more files for me to juggle on my computer. No thanks.

<comment><USER4> There are a few reasons, partly because of corporate policy which says no sensitive documents on cloud.

Partly because I need to access stuff offline so prefer to have a local copy. For example if I have to take my laptop travelling with between sites I may not have access to a internet connection.

Your right that a large part is familiarity - we use Sharepoint (which I also hate) to share documents between teams rather than email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft clearly made this to be a Scribd alternative. O365 defaults to private sharing everywhere. To quote from the article, "Office 365 and Azure Tenant administrators must 'opt-in' to enable users with organizational accounts to use the service".

On [https://docs.com/docscom](https://docs.com/docscom) the description of the service is "Docs.com by Microsoft is an Internet site for publishing Office documents that anyone can find, browse, and share". The only way this could be clearer is if the word 'anyone' was changed to 'anyone in the world'.

Finally, (for some license types) O365 offers precisely the kind of DLP capabilities that would let users use such a service while blocking the sharing of SSN's etc.

For business accounts, not only has someone actively turned on this capability, they have then failed to communicate its purpose to users. The users themselves have then failed to understand what they were doing.

I'm sorry, but while I can sympathise with people this is clearly not MS' problem.

For the record, my current employer (a university) has not enabled this function.

</comment><comment><USER7> It _does_ say right on the front page: "Showcase and discover Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Sway, Minecraft world and PDF documents for free," so it's pretty clearly intended for public distribution of e.g. document templates. On the other hand, how on earth did MS release it and let it live without noticing that people were using it completely wrong? They should have quickly noticed that people were using it to exchange sensitive documents, then pulled the service and redesigned it so that sort of behavior became exceedingly rare.

Even sophisticated users will misuse these services: remember the fad of putting all your dot-files on Github, when a bunch of people uploaded their Amazon credentials? This is giving the same opportunity to much less sophisticated users, with predictable results.

<comment><USER8> basically they thought no one would bother... and then thought fudge we;re screwed

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand people may want to upload documents for sharing by link for example, but its obviously not clear enough to users that their documents can be searched by anyone and MS is even providing a document search with OCR it seems.

I doubt these people intended to share, in a publicly searchable form, copies of their tax forms, passports, medical records, client lists, etc.

It's easy to call the users careless or stupid, but that expectation should've been baked into the product. For a document to be indexed and publicly searchable should be an explicit setting, not a default.

<comment><USER10> The messed up thing here, if I understand the article correctly, is that documents shared via a private URL containing a private key were all searchable via the search box on docs.com.

That's beyond being a UX issue, it's just.. wrong. So wrong that I could see lawsuits from this issue.

It's also a class of bug that I really couldn't imagine happening outside of Microsoft in terms of consumer software services from large-scale companies.

Here's a free idea for Google: Create a safety index service for saas stuff and then apply it to Chrome. I'd use it.

<comment><USER11> I guess technically it could be an API or a permissions issue. But yeah, not UX

<comment><USER9> Maybe a UX issue because it allows people to, easily without proper warning, create a link for sharing like Dropbox, but unlike Dropbox it not only makes everything indexable, they even do it themselves and provide a search engine for the docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I dont understand why docs.com even has a search bar in the first place?

Apart from a "direct link" \- who would want to go to docs.com and search for a topic?

I've been able to find lots of interesting documents searching for some medical, business and financial terms. There must be thousands if not tens of thousands of sensitive documents available...

<comment><USER13> > I dont understand why docs.com even has a search bar in the first place?

Because it was designed for public sharing of documents and templates, and public sharing without discoverability sucks.

<comment><USER11> Then putting it under a brand that for so long has been associated with (and pushed on, and designed for) internal enterprise documents or other sensitive/personal docs might not've been the best move?

I don't know that there's a "social docs" brand, to figure out what it would call itself; but if MS exerted the minimal effort to understand its audience (which is required of any tech company that sells to domain experts who are more occupied with their work than what the workspace is configured to do), it wouldn't take them long to figure out how to pitch things to those users to accomplish whatever it is they're trying to do.

<comment><USER14> My guess is docs.com will be merged into LinkedIn at some point; that would largely solve the problem since people already have a mental model of LI's purpose and sharing semantics, etc. (or at least the cost of acquiring one is amortized over other services/features that are part of LI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In many ways the real story here is that the cloud makes certain kind of shortcuts thats incredibly common in aggressive organizations where "does" are promoted over "critics" exponentially more likely to lead to serious negative consequences.

In the past an insecure shortcut was a unsecured and unaudited consumer grade network-share sitting somewhere on a lan, today it and Internet facing cloud service designed for publication used to collaborate on "internal only" document that should not even have been viable to the entire company.

It's not that the cloud is "insecure" but that it makes it way to easy for those who should not make IT decisions to turn to shadow IT solutions in order to avoid having to adhere to cumbersome bureaucratic processes and corporate governance frameworks and "get stuff done".

</comment><comment><USER16> Facebook sneaked in Docs.com to all Facebook users due to a deal with Microsoft (they bought 2% of the shares around the same time). So back then, one had to search through the mess of Facebook settings only to deactivate Docs.com. Otherwise users uploaded Office documents got shared with Docs.com for friends and the internet. Facebook had some simple note taking and user pages feature that allows uploading Office docs back then. I wouldn't be surprised if these old files still somewhere online even after the repurposed and their service.

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

</comment><comment><USER17> > No results found for 1040 donald trump site:docs.com.

Dammit.

<comment> at-fates-hands Maybe not, but just searching "ssn" gives any identity thief a goldmine of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apart from whether "publicly searchable" should be an explicit / implicit setting, this seems like something that could also largely be mitigated with some simple keyword flags. Words like "SSN" or "confidential" or the like are probably good indicators that this doc shouldn't have been shared and something that requires an extra approval dialog. That keyword list could also be something you'd expand over time and could use to retroactively remind users that they might have inadvertently shared something they shouldn't have.

<comment><USER11> If your UX involves introspecting content to determine whether it is being misfiled, you're already doing something wrong. Such gimmicks work as 'syntactic sugar' (think google's "did you forget an attachment" message) but they shouldn't be the first the user sees of the feature (in goog's case, having an always-visible attachment icon.)

If they absolutely want to go the idiotic route of public-by-default, a 'private'/'public switch might be too noisy; a 'create new document'/'create new private document' too redundant... Honestly, I don't see why they would want to go that route anyways. The model is practically handed to them on a silver platter; most users want to keep docs private, unless and until they wish to have a document pool for sharing (easy to build infrastructure for), explicitly share single docs (again, just add a 'share' button and people get it), or make it publically accessible (i.e. "post" or "publish" to a platform.)

As I said in another comment here - everything gets explained away once you assume MS' incompetence in things. (I mean for god's sake, there are so many other solutions in this space that they have all the hard thinking be done for them!)

<comment><USER14> I think you're missing the context. Office Online/OneDrive/etc. already implement more or less the default behavior you recommend. docs.com is a separate service intended specifically for public sharing, i.e., it's a platform to which you post or publish.

I would guess this is less of a technical or UI design problem and more of a branding/product concept/positioning problem, i.e., (some) people don't seem to understand the overall concept of the product, possibly because of the name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it's hard to say how well this was communicated to the public without knowing the total amount of users of the service. Maybe 99.99% of people did NOT upload public documents by mistake. Maybe only 95%. Depends on how many documents are safely private.

</comment><comment><USER20> Searching for "1099" brings up quite a few interesting documents

</comment><comment><USER21> #OfficeBleed anyone?

</comment><comment><USER22> Ouch. That seems pretty egregious. I would hope that Microsoft would at least make 'public' sharing the thing you would have to select and authorize rather than making it the default. But apparently that wasn't the choice here.

<comment><USER11> "It's not like we can just flip a switch"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shameless plug: I'm working on a private (encrypted) alternative to Google Docs & Office 365: [https://www.airbornos.com](https://www.airbornos.com).

</comment><comment><USER10> So Microsoft is still mediocre security-wise, despite all of those people claiming the company has been reinvented?

I can belive the reinvented claim (that's the kind of thing a new, good CEO can influence), but quality goes very deep, into each employee. Any one hire can screw up fatally. It takes a lot of hard work to build a security conscious culture/company hierarchy.

(Edit: Hello Redmond people!)

<comment><USER11> Not just the people, but the structure. You can't just change the head and assume the body will change itself. If aspects of design and execution stay the same, you're not magically going to build better QA or better-thought- through systems/architecture because "new face".

It's far safer to operate on the assumption that MS is just through-and- through incompetent at this point than try and pinpoint the cause of any one problem in a long history of them. I gave up on them around the mid-IE days (think I might've been particularly miffed when they scrapped the Courier concept) but I haven't looked back and haven't regretted it since.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Maybe in 20 years they'll be competent when 95% of the current code has been retired but until then: Sayonara.

(Well, I doubt it, but there's at least a theoretical chance, right?)

<comment><USER11> I dunno, I'm inclined to agree with your first impulse - after all, the assumption of "well it's been a while, surely they've gotten their shit together by now?" would be the reason one would think they'd be on the ball _today_ :P

If the code's retired, it could just as easily be because some inferior process led by devs without the proper guiding vision just swapped it out for some overengineered platform they 'know how to code in better' that's being hailed as the future of such-and-such that doesn't reimplement nearly as completely or robustly features that people had come to expect, and is less stable to boot. ("Secure time" [0] anyone?) But hey, just spitballing here.

MS is like the Hammer Industries of our world; never rely on Hammertech. Though I guess as long as they keep enough enterprise dinosaur contracts they'll keep limping on like Hammer too. _shrug_

[0] [https://redd.it/61o8p0](https://redd.it/61o8p0)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scroll's New Collaboration with Mozilla - <AUTHOR> https://scroll.blog/2019/02/25/scrolls-new-collaboration-with-mozilla/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to see where Mozilla reaches its tendrils. They're on a bit of a news trend lately (Pocket).

I wonder, how far this will extend?</comment>


If transistors can't get smaller, then software developers have to get smarter - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-06-transistors-smaller-software-smarter.html <comment><USER2> I keep hoping that we'll get to a point where we take efficient software seriously instead of just dismissing it out of hand with a shallow interpretation of Donald Knuth's famous quote. If nothing else, we're wasting so much electricity by almost deliberately developing inefficient software to save what is only perceived to be quicker development.

</comment><comment><USER3> They are. It's only when we look at web software that we have the excess computing power of all the clients to use at will that we can do more(?) with more.

> In 2009, a chess engine running on slower hardware, a 528 MHz HTC Touch HD > mobile phone, reached the grandmaster level. The mobile phone won a category > 6 tournament with a performance rating of 2898. The chess engine Hiarcs 13 > runs inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD. Pocket Fritz 4 > won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and > 1 draw on 4–14 August 2009.[33] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 > positions per second.[34] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep > Blue that searched 200 million positions per second. Pocket Fritz 4 achieves > a higher performance level than Deep Blue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436830)

</comment><comment><USER4> We'll get used to sluggish software, in fact we are already there: all contemporary web browsers (the two that are left) became laggy monsters. Such as when you hit "back" and there's absolutely no response for several seconds. Even 10 years ago, this would be considered serious bug. There's no change in sight, everyone just keeps piling code on web.</comment>


Think you have a secret life?  Think again. - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071109_003391.html

<comment><USER4> "Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity"...

Yahoo has as much, if not more data about us than Google - and for longer. Yahoo knows everyone I emailed for the past 10+ years (Yahoo! Mail), what links I find interesting (del.icio.us), what links I find interesting but don't want you to know about (Private del.icio.us), where I've been and who I meet (Flickr photos), who my trusted friends and family are (Flickr Contacts/Family), what online communities I take part in (Yahoo Groups) - <USER2> we haven't even touched on Yahoo Web Search History. Plus I've bought domains from them so they have my CC and home address.

If Yahoo wanted, I am sure they could build a frighteningly accurate dossier on most of us.

Why is it that all these Big Brother scenarios worry about Google finding out everything and more about us rather than Yahoo?

Is Yahoo such a has-been or has Google taken on quite the Sauron persona - <USER3> all-seeing eye?

<comment><USER5> Because Google has proven that they know how to index, and cluster, information better than anyone else. Having all the information in the world at your fingertips is a _necessary_ , but not _sufficient_ , condition for omniscience; you must also know _which box_ the ark of the covenant is in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The important bit is the metadata plus the uniqueness of the phone number. Whereas an IP address or, as he notes, a SSN can be used by many people, how many people use the same cell number/phone? And the IP is tied to a specific location while the SSN has no real world significance except as a verifier. By contrast, it's easy to see if a phone number is live and _where_ it is. What's better from a marketing perspective, especially since you're out in the world uniquely traveling around with it?

If that's the Google play - wow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Soon, Google will be able to hire without interviewing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I believe Google will make free service available on the 700 megahertz spectrum but I don't see them making the leap into identify verification -- that would even start to creep me out.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, that was far-fetched.

I'm starting to wonder, is there a limit on the number of ad-based services we can have in the economy? (i.e. are there are fixed number of ad dollars to be spent)

<comment><USER10> Probably not. Advertising is slowly becoming less like brainwashing and more like a valuable service to the consumer. Where there is value, there will be money. The only limit on that value I can think of will be reached when Google (or whoever) learns to read our minds perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm betting the Social Security number with 3,000 people using it must belong to the guy from Lifelock.

</comment><comment><USER12> I see 1984 in our future. Eric Schmitt is Big Brother!!!

</comment><comment><USER13> thats a lot of ifs.</comment>


Twist, startup behind AirPlay-powered smart home light, abruptly shuts down - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/16/twist-shut-down-no-refunds/ <comment><USER2> > Website disappeared and app is now dead. No way to control Lights. I hold > you accountable

Are we sure this is not a joke? So customers can't turn on their lights anymore because the company went bankrupt.

That just reads like something straight out of the Onion. "Carpenter buys hammer. But then hammer making company goes out of business. So now the carpenter can't use the hammer anymore".

> We are unable to fulfill any more pre-orders at this time, but are still > working on finding a solution that could make that possible.

So they are working hard to find a way for customers to get their orders of lights ... which can't be turned on because the servers have all been shut down. Why would anyone want those products at this point?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why it's a very bad idea to buy a product that relies on the company's existence (and goodwill) to keep it working. Make sure it has a local fall- back mode so if the company goes out of business or just decides to stop supporting it, you can still use it.

I still refuse to "buy" digital movies from Amazon, Google, etc since my ability to use my purchased product relies on them continually supporting the service.

Plus it's usually cheaper to buy a used DVD and rip it myself, then I can play it on any device. (albeit with dubious legality)

<comment><USER4> The only products which are cloud-reliant which I am comfortable buying are those with a "critical mass" of reliant users. Philips Hue and Nest, for example, would have a PR disaster on their hands for the large parent companies if they discontinued cloud services.

Everything smaller, I check if I can control it via Homebridge from a spare Raspberry Pi. At least then it's in my control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> wow. That's quite a black smudge they left there. So over-extended they can't refund orders that are in the works. How much can that possibly be? Step up and make that right, founder.

Orders aside, the existing installations and the app also stop working. So they didn't even have a limp-along mode -it just bricks. As an engineer I think I would have worked for free on that final release to untether it all (be free, little ones, be free!). this is so shabby.

<comment><USER3> If they've declared bankruptcy, the company doesn't get to decide what order to pay creditors in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Most notably, however, the email says that anyone who has placed an order > directly from Twist Home will not have their order fulfilled, nor will they > be eligible for a refund.

Wait, what? You can do this?

<comment><USER3> When a business runs out of money, it's out of money, so sure, a bankrupt company can be unable to provide product or refunds. Customers are considered unsecured creditors, so will likely not get anything in the bankruptcy.

You can try to pierce the corporate veil and get money from shareholders and/or owners, but without gross negligence or outright fraud, that's going to be hard to do (with high legal expenses)

<comment><USER7> Chargebacks are the least painful method to being made whole when a merchant defaults. Always pay with a credit card when possible (but do not carry a balance!).

<comment><USER8> I know that in most typical cases merchants eat the cost of chargebacks, but in this case I guess the credit card issuer just becomes yet another creditor? (and presumably eats the cost)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get rid of switch/case/if - <AUTHOR> http://piotrgankiewicz.com/2016/07/04/get-rid-of-switchcaseif/ <comment><USER3> But does it perform better? I have not noticed any indication from this article and I do not have enough experience to derive it just from looking. I assume the only reason to do this, given that it seems less readable, is performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> It just makes your code more readable, but as it is with such things - <USER2> depends on preference :)</comment></comment>


You Tried to Find a Technical Cofounder and This is What Happened... - <AUTHOR> http://matchist.com/blog/you-tried-to-find-a-technical-co-founder-and-this-is-what-happened/

<comment><USER2> I would never partner with an ideas guy unless they are bringing money to the table.

They also have no skin in the game, which allows them to change their mind at a moments notice.</comment>


PostPartisan - A final warning to WikiLeaks? - <AUTHOR> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/08/a_final_warning_to_wikileaks.html <comment><USER2> This is very interesting to me. The statement from Geoff Morrell seems weirdly passive-aggressive.

"Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell made clear this was not a request"

Which implies legal ramifications.

"We are making a demand of them," Morrell said. "We are asking them to do the right thing."

It's not a request, it's a demand, but they are _asking_ them to do the right thing. If you're in the position to make demands, you don't cross your fingers and hope people do what you think is right. You just make sure they do it.

"If doing the right thing is not good enough for them," the Pentagon spokesman said, alternatives will be explored "to make them do the right thing."

Well thus far the Pentagon is basically begging. If they had a legal stick to hand I'm sure they'd be using it already. So, what I'm interested to know, is how they plan on compelling Wikileaks to withhold the information. My sense is that they're not exactly on a firm footing.

That's not to say they won't come up with a strategy eventually, it's just this statement makes them seem uncertain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wikileaks might be heralding a time when state secrets are bandied around like MP3, It is a bottom-up demand, and no matter what you think of its motivations, its impact will be lasting.</comment>


How I Hacked DePauw University Using Hidden Inputs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@thomasring/how-i-hacked-depauw-university-using-hidden-inputs-79377c3dca7e <comment><USER2> Unless you have some kind of legal protection, (Work for Google Project Zero, the NSA, or live in a country with no extradition treaty with the US) always disclose anonymously. If they ignore you, full disclose.

Nontechnical institutions are embarrassed by security problems, and will always seek to retaliate. When they did stuff like this in the 80s, you could call it simple ignorance, but 30 years later you can only call it a durable pattern of behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't ever expect the emperor to be grateful when you point out that he's not wearing clothes.</comment>


Pure CSS Clickable Events Without :target - <AUTHOR> http://www.ryancollins.me/?p=1041 <comment><USER2> Interesting: on my Mac laptop running Firefox (11.0), physically clicking the trackpad works, but a single tap (my usual) does nothing. A double tap does work, but it selects the first word in the menu as well. It's a cute demo, but as it stands I wouldn't want to use it for anything serious.

<comment><USER3> Confirmed on mine, same setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny how things circle back.

This was the norm for drop-down menus before jQuery took over (more commonly used with :hover instead of :active). It's still used as a fallback and for simple drop-downs/tooltips.

<comment><USER5> This wasn't the norm because IE at the time couldn't handle :hover events properly on all delegations.

So everytime you used CSS :hover, you still needed a javascript shim to keep IE happy.

<comment><USER4> That's IE6, IE7 is fine. It was the norm, javascript was just a fallback. And if you go further back to Dreamweaver days, javascript was the norm again (remember MM_clusterufck)?

<comment><USER6> Can you enlighten me what MM_clisterufck is?

<comment><USER7> If I'm not mistaken, Dreamweaver uses a lot of custom JS code to generate pages and usually prefixes it with "MM_".

I've had the displeasure of seeing one of these functions recently, and let's just say it's not pretty JS.

<comment><USER8> No doubt an abbreviation for Macromedia, Dreamweaver's original creator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty slick. A couple of tiny problems, though: it doesn't work in Opera, the dropdowns close immediately in Firefox, and clicking on an open dropdown doesn't close it again. Still, very neat. Even works on iOS!

</comment><comment><USER10> I put a pure CSS drop down navigation thing on <http://www.lfgss.com/> a few weeks ago and the users love it for being usable before the page has finished loading.

I love it for reducing some of the need for maintaining JavaScript for this kind of thing and that it works better than jQuery tabs (reflows on smaller screens).

The result is that I'm now looking at CSS for more things.

I would recommend making the drop down element an anchor though, rather than mucking around with adding cursors to try and get the interactivity communicated.

</comment><comment><USER11> This works _really_ well on touchscreens. A common problem with pure :hover dropdowns is that they only display for like a half second when you touch with your finger. I would have :hover AND :active do the exact same behavior to make this cross-platform.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand it doesn't work at all with keyboard.

<comment><USER11> True, you would need :focus, but then it wouldn't hide on mouseout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is preferable to :hover if it works ok cross-browser. I think/hope that most web developers have realized by now that displaying new UI-elements on hover is a bad idea, at least if they will hide other elements. Moving your mouse around is not "intent" to perform an action. A slight delay on a mouseover event is less evil though.

</comment><comment><USER14> The cool thing :target allowed was those css3 only lightboxs (<http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/CSS3Lightbox/>). I might play around with this method and see if it works as well.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are there never any job postings for non web positions? - <AUTHOR> Why are there never any job postings for non web or mobile jobs on Hacker News?  Even in software engineering, there are a lot of other fields. <comment><USER3> Web development is hot right now. Really really hot. In Atlanta, code school grads with little experience are getting snapped up as soon as they graduate. I'm having to look to Eastern European remote talent because salary expectations in the US are unreal.

Literally every company needs a web presence, and it's quickly getting to the point where the usual crappy UX just isn't cutting it.

It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering. You have to stay on top of trends, keep building your skills. You don't deal with algorithms much, but your OOP needs to be on point if you hope to build something maintainable for the web.

Most of the potential talent has a subtle disdain for web work, everyone wants to be a game dev or do stuff that's math-heavy or algorithmic.

So giant shortage of good web programmers.

<comment><USER4> "It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering."

I would disagree with this point, as evidenced by the fact that people coming out of code schools are still getting hired. To do software engineering in other fields (financial, embedded systems, game dev, operating systems, enterprise LOB, cloud platform, crypto, big data/distributed systems, etc) takes a lot more experience and training. A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business site in less than a day. You can't really crank out Big Table, or Unreal Engine. However, the market size for small business web sites vastly exceeds that for Big Table.

<comment><USER5> > A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business > site in less than a day.

I never wrote any code in C, but given a tutorial I'm pretty sure I could create a client-server application to exchange time in milliseconds between two hosts. Would you use it instead of your NTPd daemon in a production server? Of course you wouldn't.

Likewise, I'm very sceptical when I read about programmers who _learned_ Javascript in a weekend or wrote a rails application in one week without knowing Ruby. Is it possible yes? Do I trust the app or the programmer absolutely not.

Web development is not considered programming by friends of mine that indulge themselves in (linux) kernel development, write (or try to write) code for drivers, do reverse engineering and what not.

But to create a modern website these days you need to know lots of things: CSS3, HTML5, Rails, Ruby, Javascript (Angnular? Ember?), you also need to know how to combine them. How to setup everything in order to mitigate attacks, etc.

Ruby and Rails are easy to learn but hard to master, same goes for JS (with all the whistles and bells that the language comes and the various frameworks try to elude one way or another). There's also Go, Python, PHP... Same goes for all these languages: Easy to learn hard to master.

So, any language can be _hard_ or _easy_ depending on a wide variety of things, but web-dev is not _easy_ these days. It's easy to be mediocre, it's not easy to be _good_.

<comment><USER6> Having done both for a living, I would argue that Linux driver development is easier than web dev.

To do either well, you have to have a model in your head of what the entire stack is doing.

With Linux driver development, you have to have a much more accurate model of a much smaller stack compared to web dev.

Broad or deep? Specialist or Generalist? Some people are better at one than the other, but others will be the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Because this site has been overrun by (and/or revolves around) Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who don't give a damn about something unless it's in the form of a single-page noSQL web-scale big-data in-the-cloud CrappucinoScript imperatively dysfunctional HTTP2 Wangular.js monstrosity written by "hipster rockstar ninja devs" wielding Macbooks and plaid shirts and pocket calculators and half the inventory of ThinkGeek in a mockery of actual programming? ;)

More seriously, it's because web developers are in high demand, so there are going to be more postings for them; having a proper web presence is absolutely vital to modern businesses nowadays, and that requires developers to establish that presence. Hacker News is also run by YCombinator, which specializes in funding startups - a market which tends to lean very heavily on web development, since many of those startups are based on web apps - <USER2> therefore will already have an inflated quantity of web development jobs by that virtue alone.

</comment><comment><USER8> Journalists and novelists are both writers, but they do not compete in the same niche.

The former will need to do several hundred writing jobs per year, while the latter may only need two. Thus, 99.5% of writing jobs may be for journalist stories. Any novelist looking for commissioned work will not want to sift through 200 posts to find even one relevant listing. So people posting such jobs would probably get better results on a site that explicitly excludes the noise.

In short, there are more "lightweight" postings because the people who solicit them and do them need to secure new work more often. If you can make 20 websites in the same time that you could build one enterprise application, you will probably see that job advertisements are 95% for websites and 5% for business software.

</comment><comment><USER9> The job postings are only for YC companies, of which there are not-as-many non-web/mobile companies.

<comment><USER10> FYI see these monthly posts as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822817)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As others have said, web development is hot right now. In my experience, it's hard to find people willing to build customized back-end stuff. It's probably too expensive, and companies just buy whatever ready-made solutions that kind- of cover their needs. (think ERP, CRM's etc)

The demand for web-devs might be artificially high right now, as most normal people have not yet discovered that they do not really need a programmer to build their website. I think Squarespace / Wix / WP etc, maybe with a custom design, should cover most websites.

I've been doing back-end web programming as a freelancer for a few months, but it's _really_ hard to find good clients, so I'm moving to something else.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's partly selection bias. The content here probably doesn't have as much appeal for the middle managers who do a lot of the hiring at big companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> All YC companies build technology, however many (most?) are building technology for markets that traditionally have not used technology in a modern way. These are things like cleaning (HomeJoy), flower delivery (Bloomthat), t-shirts (Teespring), etc etc. Theses technology enabled businesses are the ones that primarily use web/mobile, and thus all the jobs.

</comment><comment><USER14> I always assumed it was because HN is somewhat specific to YC and SV startups, and pretty much everything that YC and other VCs are investing in right now is mobile and/or web stuff.

There are plenty of other tech jobs, just not necessarily in the startups that YC focuses on.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you are referring to the monthly jobs threads i was wondering the same thing, i would have expected more people searching for mobile developer (especially freelancers), but i guess mobile apps are not yet the new "website".

<comment><USER16> Over the past 6 months I've had multiple clients drop their mobile requirement to focus on web. I think it has mainly to do with scope creep and cost.

All those extra features that you can cram on a web page need that much more effort on mobile. People, for some reason, seem to be understanding that mobile costs a LOT of money, so they wait until later. But they expect to be able to build the web side really cheap, so they stick with that and argue price.

Just my little anecdote....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The warning sign of 1999 was Marketing majors becoming web developers. Are we there again?

</comment><comment><USER18> "Why does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? There are lots more musicians than just her."

<comment><USER19> Yeah, why is that?</comment></comment>


Thesis HN: People are now targeting blog posts at Hacker News - <AUTHOR>

Over the past few months, a shift in the popular content showing up on Hacker News has occurred.  More and more stories are blog posts catering specifically to hacker news readers.  True or False?   If this is true, I'm not sure what the implications are except a possible decrease in the quality of the content that gets to the top due to it being upvoted for superficial characteristics that are known to please HN users rather than real insight/value provided by the content. <comment><USER3> Why overthink this? Writing blog posts to HN, instead of trying to express tangential thoughts through link submission ("This new Apple app rejection shows their policies are the worst ever!") is something the site guidelines specifically ask you to do.

What I'm noticing is not that the submissions are becoming bait-ier, but that _everything_ is immediately getting enough votes to get onto the RSS feed, no matter how flagrantly it violates the site guidelines. Whatever force is automatically providing 2-3 ambient votes to every crap posting here is the thing I'd actually be concerned about.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I think more about it (sorry :D), it seems like the more blog posts targeted for HN that reach the top, the more "closed" the site becomes to ideas and insights outside of the current set of memes circulating through HN. In otherwords, the insight level gets stuck at a local maximum. On the other hand, I don't think anything can be done about this.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's true. I've written quite a few postings that were interesting to the HN audience and not so much to others that normally read my blog, but I actually get more and better feedback from the HN crowd anyway.

There are lots of links posted every day still and I think we're nowhere near becoming a navel gazing self centered community. When you suggest that I'm thinking of K5, HN is very far away from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always written my blog posts targeted to HN. Taking a few minutes to think about whether or not your audience will find something insightful or informative before writing and posting it seems like it would generally improve the quality of the front page.

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems a bit odd to me. Standard advice on writing is to have a particular audience in mind when you write. The Hacker News audience is characterised by greater than usual interest in startups, business hacks and programming, but not everyone in that demographic is on Hacker News.

Are you drawing a distinction between targeting the HN demographic and targeting HN itself? The former seems to me an entirely normal way to write a blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't really about blogging, it's more about the content submitted to Hacker News. Before Hacker News was big, people didn't write blog posts targeted at Hacker News, so there weren't many blog posts targeted at Hacker News ON Hacker News. Now that Hacker News is big, ratio of blog posts targeted at hacker news to all other links is increasing. So I, as a Hacker News reader am experiencing something of an echo chamber effect.

<comment><USER4> I used to write longish 'self posts' but people were complaining about reading 'gray on gray' so I moved them to my blog with the comments turned off.

So that's one example of posts specifically targeted to the HN audience.

The echo chamber is in the end only as large as the world is, the bigger HN gets the smaller such an effect would be, even if people targeted HN specifically in their writings. But the vast majority of the postings are not like that, and those that are are - at least to me - quite often either useful or interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't that encouraged? From the guidelines:

 _Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead._

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I think posts written for HN are not generally a bad thing - I've written several blogs either with HN in mind or directly for consumption here - <USER2> is actually encouraged by the guidelines.

But you're right - people ''tailoring'' articles for HN could be a problem. I realised a while ago that the right title can get you on the main page, but I can't bring myself to play the system :) It's only a blog, not really worth it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is true and mostly because a news in HN triggers an idea in the reader and instead of writing a comment which will be missed by masses they write a blog post and submit to HN, I think it's good but I wish there was a way to link these discussion so new comers to that topic knew what the hell the blog post was talking about.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like to keep an eye on things like this and, yes, what I'm seeing leads me to believe you're right. But it's a part of a larger trend of people "targeting" and reworking content to do better on social sites generally - just getting the "right" title can make all the difference, especially on HN where titles rule.

</comment><comment><USER11> Content targeted to HN can lead to well catered content and in-depth discussions with multiple posts on similar topics.

I think as long as the community doesn't just vote up articles because they pander, content targeted towards HN is a great thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Your consensus seems reasonable to me. It would be interesting to see how many links submitted are by the author. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just saying I would be curious to see.

<comment><USER13> That's already available, it's just not particularly convenient. For example, <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=retroafroman> shows that you've submitted two stories ;)

<comment><USER14> True. But I can't always tell by someone's HN username if they are the author of a blog post that they have submitted.

<comment><USER4> Especially not when their profile is blank and their nickname does not hold a direct link to the site posted. But usually when you check their submissions like suggested above if they are mostly submitting from one site that's a pretty good indicator they're at least affiliated somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm glad you did this post on HN; a blog post wouldve been pretty ironic.

</comment><comment><USER16> I haven't yet written some of the posts I've been thinking about, but I will absolutely be targeting them at HN. The discussion here is much better than other places and I can rely on a general "base knowledge" of the audience. If people don't like it they don't have to vote it up, but I don't see a problem with keeping the audience in mind. I don't even have blog comments because I'd rather have the comments on HN.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with you. I think HN focused blog post decrease the HN quality in general. There should be something like "Ask HN" but in this case for the blogs, something like "blog to HN", to warn the readers what kind of information they are reading.

<comment><USER18> Yeah something like "HN Blog: Erlang and the Use of Monads in Haskell", or at least "Author Post: ...".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't one of the major parts of writing considering who the audience is?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it's fine...as long as the person doesn't do the whole "I've read so and so story on HN...but instead of replying in comments, here is my reply as a blog post"

</comment><comment><USER21> "Every public place is a market"

</comment><comment><USER22> I do not have a problem with that. I prefer it that way. Content written by us, for us.</comment>


Lasers vs. Microwaves: A Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lasers-vs-microwaves-the-billiondollar-bet-on-the-future-of-magnetic-storage <comment><USER2> Both technologies sound interesting, but I worry about reliablility and the cooling needed at the data center scale with the heat approach. With current overall failure rate at about 1% per year[0], I wonder how much higher-density storage will affect the longevity of these drives.

[0]: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats- for-q2-2018/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q2-2018/)

<comment><USER3> In the era before common use of SSDs there were a lot more 10k and even 15k rpm hard drives, which generate a lot of heat. Without seeing datasheet figures on what the TDP of a HAMR 3.5" drive will be, I am cautiously optimistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Both HAMR and MAMR make use of a simple strategy: Shoot some energy into the > targeted grains on a hard disk and you can temporarily make it possible to > flip their magnetic orientation with an external magnetic field of practical > magnitude. And as soon as the energy dissipates, the grains regain their > immunity to spontaneous room-temperature flips.

Is this the ~same principle magneto-optical drives like Minidisc used? The thing I miss about that technology is how much more robust it is than flash or recordable optical media.

</comment><comment><USER5> Single digit nanometers seems to be the limit we currently have both for photo lithography and magnetic storage. Considering the diameter of an atom is just an order of magnitude less (0.1nm to 0.5nm), I feel we are really close to the physical limit. Scaling down feature size will become impossible really soon.

</comment><comment><USER6> English is not my mother tongue and I had never encountered the expression "to hedge one's bet" so I "skipped" over it without noticing and the next sentence read like HAMR and MAMR were reversed by mistake. Funny.

<comment><USER7> Just for interest - probably somewhere you've heard this before perhaps without realising is "hedge fund" in finance - the name coming from the strategy of hedging literal bets with money on markets in such a way as to try to manipulate odds in your favour (oversimplification probably, I'm not an expert).

<comment><USER8> Hedging has more to do with minimization of risks (and correspondingly reliability of expected outcome) in finance as well</comment></comment></comment>


How the artificial intelligence revolution was born in a Vancouver hotel - <AUTHOR> http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/how-the-artificial-intelligence-revolution-was-born-in-a-vancouver-hotel?__lsa=92b6-01ad <comment><USER2> The history seems drastically short-sighted, such that what it's talking about makes no sense to me. Could someone explain what this is supposed to be about?

Here are my issues:

> They believed it was possible to teach a machine to learn the same way a > child does, through artificial neural networks that mimic the function of > the human brain. In the process of teaching a machine to learn like a human, > they figured there was likely a lot to discover about how humans learn as > well.

That's been part of AI thought for a very long time. In 1950 Alan Turing wrote (quoting from [http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html](http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html) ):

> Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not > rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?

or the work put into Cyc (from [http://www.businessinsider.com/cycorp- ai-2014-7?op=1&IR=T](http://www.businessinsider.com/cycorp- ai-2014-7?op=1&IR=T) ):

> Cycorp's product, Cyc, isn't "programmed" in the conventional sense. It's > much more accurate to say it's being "taught." Lenat told us that most > people think of computer programs as "procedural, [like] a flowchart," but > building Cyc is "much more like educating a child."

This is part of the constructivist approach to AI. See [http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/proc/proceedings/12...](http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/proc/proceedings/12%20Computing%20and%20Philosophy/04.pdf) for a quickly found example of a constructivist vs. non-constructivist approach with respect to AI.

Nor is the idea of using neural nets for this anything new. Indeed, neural nets and AI date from the 1950s.

Thus, the next paragraph makes little sense:

> The consensus among most computer scientists at the time was that this was > nuts. The way to get a computer to do something was to program it to do it, > not ask it to learn the task itself. If he had been a computer scientist, > Silverman probably would have thanked them for their time and moved on.

I don't know what "nuts" means here. Was the consensus of most computer scientists that the constructivist approach wouldn't work? I know that subsumption architecture and genetic algorithms were a hot topic 20 years ago, so it doesn't makes sense that people thought that 'program it' was the only effective solution.

> Silverman convinced CIFAR to give that band of self-identified weirdoes > about $10 million over 10 years, making it pretty much the only organization > at the time to back the research of artificial neural networks.

I have no idea what this means. The article suggests a timeframe starting in 2004. I remember people doing back-prop in the early 1990s. I did some consulting work integrating an ANN prediction system around 2005. A Google Scholar search ( [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=sv&q=artificial+neural...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=sv&q=artificial+neural+net&btnG=) ) shows plenty of diverse research in ANNs before 2000 .</comment>


LLInt: new JS interpreter in webkit with 2-2.5x speedup - <AUTHOR> http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/108309

<comment> t-crayford Nice to see similar approaches to luajit making it elsewhere.

<comment><USER2> How is it like LuaJIT? The calling convention thing means they have a method JIT, the assembly isn't hand-written, and I don't anything in the commit message that relates to this list of LuaJIT's innovations: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908>

I'd be curious in seeing more JITs using crankshaft's approach: generate machine code directly, that both executes the original js and gathers runtime feedback.

<comment><USER3> The "old" baseline jit (the middle tier) is a simple "method" hit in the same vein as V8, it executes directly and accumulates runtime type info -- the still takes longer to generate and uses more memory than the interpreter. A lot of short run programs take less time to run than to do codegen for (JSONP for instance can do really unpleasant things to codegen time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a development note, is it normal to drop large features like this a single commit?

<comment><USER5> It's Apple's (and Google's) modus operandi. They work in secret, and then they make huge code drops every so often.

<comment><USER3> If you actually look at the commit logs for javascriptcore you see all development goes on in public, all patches follow the webkit review rules (you can't do an unreviewed code dump, and large code dumps aren't pleasant when you need reviews). JSC is developed in the open, everyone can see the work we're doing, and the progress we're making, as we're making it. If you had actually followed the link you would have seen a change log pointing to a bug on bugs.webkit.org that shows the huge amount of (public) work that preceded actually landing this <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75812> . Additionally there was substantial refactoring in multiple commits leading up to the final landing of LLInt in order to reduce the patch size as much as possible.

The reason the LLInt landed as a "code dump" is because that is the minimal size possible - you can't land part of an execution engine, as by definition part of an engine is not sufficient to pass tests. As it is, this is only 32 bit for the simple reason that 32-bit x86 is the easiest way to stress register allocation, our value encoding requires two 32bit registers per value and 32bit x86 has very few registers.

TLDR; You can't really do massive codedumps in the webkit repository, the commit rules make it very hard. Alas some patches are intrinsically large though as a partial patch won't be sufficient to pass tests, but even then we don't like them.

<comment><USER5> My apologies then. Google does do that with V8, but your practices sound great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that the offline assembler is written in Ruby. Does anyone know of any other Webkit work being done in the language?

<comment><USER3> There are various tool scripts in WebKit written in a collection of basically every common script languages - perl, python, ruby, shell(!!!) are the ones i can think of off the top of my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, this means that Google will abandon V8? Or Chrome will continue with it?

<comment><USER8> JavaScriptCore is used by Safari, iOS and Mac OS. My guess is that Google will focus on speeding up V8 rather than adopt JSC, but that's just a hunch.

<comment><USER9> HP just released the source code for their Isis browser for webOS on GitHub and their comments about it all trumpet its use of Javascriptcore (and QtWebKit). They appear to be using code from around r104935 and it's likely they'll want to pull in the LLInt/three-tier VM.

It's newer than anything they've shipped (actually just about everything is, which is a nice change of pace) and we're all waiting like kids on a sugar buzz for the HP-supported effort by the homebrew community to get all the new pieces out through Preware. I will be amused if this hits webOS as an official release before any of the other tablet OSes, but HP seems to be taking the Dadaist approach to the platform.

<http://isis-project.org/projects.html> <https://github.com/isis-project/> [https://github.com/isis- project/WebKit/commit/3c619797d896fd...](https://github.com/isis- project/WebKit/commit/3c619797d896fd34777ea7e51c1170307e60003f)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would we know if the tech bubble "popped"? - <AUTHOR>

Since the money is tied up in private equity, we don't have the transparency that the public markets provide.  So, how would someone outside of VC know if the bubble "popped"? <comment><USER2> News will get around if there's no money to be had for future projects. That said, don't focus on the bubble, focus on your ideas. Distractions kill.</comment>


Find the fastest AWS region from your location - <AUTHOR> http://aws-latency.altaircp.com <comment><USER2> This is cool. Thanks for sharing...!</comment>


Valdimir Lenin on Late Stage Capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this not to advocate for Communism at all (I have a nice job in tech, and I don't want to to be subject to the reprisals that so marked the Communist take over of the Russian economy). However, the analysis is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER2> TLDR? Man that's a hefty article, especially on mobile!</comment>


The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/rohitbhargava/the-25-basic-styles-of-blogging-and-when-to-use-each-one/ <comment><USER2> While it is easy to poke holes in something like this, it is a brilliant structuring of the canonical types of blogging. Would have been neat to see how traffic is impacted by following or breaking these rules, or at least a case study, but a very enjoyable presentation.</comment>


Free Open Source Matomo Tag Manager Now Available as a Beta - <AUTHOR> https://matomo.org/blog/2018/06/free-open-source-matomo-tag-manager-now-available-as-a-beta/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome!</comment>


Y Combinator vs TechStars: Whose Companies Are Bringing In More Funding? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/11/ycombinatortechstars/

<comment><USER2> "Another metric would be valuations — are companies becoming more valuable over time? — but we also don't have good access to that."

That is the real test, and we've published those numbers:

<http://ycombinator.com/nums.html>

(The number I quoted in June is now out of date. The combined value of the top 21 companies we've funded is now slightly over $7 billion, and the average value of all the companies we funded up to summer 2010 is thus about $33 million.)

<comment><USER3> PG - What is the median valuation of those fundraising rounds? Averages are not a great metric because the few big valuation winners (Dropbox, Airbnb) skew the average big time and bring up the "normals" a ton.

If Airbnb is valued at $1B and if there are 200 YC alums who've raised, that adds $5M to the "average valuation" of each YC startup. (I know those #s are not right but just for purposes of the example).

Those median valuation figures available?

<comment><USER4> For funding, the median is less useful. I wouldn't be surprised if the median series A returned a loss.

If optimizing for the median outcome is your goal, VC funding is probably not a good plan.

<comment><USER3> Not sure I understand your point. I'm asking for median valuations as averages often distort reality.

Plus, "median series A returned a loss" - huh? Can you clarify?

If 5 companies have valuations of $5, $10, $15, 20, $1000, the avg is $210 million. The median is $15 million. I'd argue the median is more representative of valuations received than averages. And if you're a startup founder, the median is more useful to gauge the program as that is more likely what your valuation will be near than the average.

<comment><USER5> Average is the important metric in startup investing, because the distribution of outcomes is _extremely_ skewed, and the median is likely a net negative outcome at re series A stage. It's those few blockbuster hits that make VC investing work.

New founders might care more about the median, but big investors, not so much.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. But it seemed the original TC article was trying to suggest which program was best for startups. So if trying to figure out which program is better for general partners/limited partners, I agree average makes sense. For startup founders, median is what matters.

<comment><USER5> Fair. That also depends on whether you're the type of person who wants to make something hugely impactful. If you are, average might still be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I appreciate the attempt, this was pretty shoddy data analysis. First, Crunchbase's data is pretty bad. I saw a spreadsheet floated around some time ago that had a lot more YC companies listed on it (~200) so this is def not comprehensive. I'd imagine their TechStars data is even less complete given they tend to cover TS less than YC.

In terms of the analysis, some attempt to normalize the data would have been good.

Also, time-series figures would be more interesting as it would help show which program might be gaining or losing momentum.

In general, the idea of total funding being the best metric is laughable given how a few outliers skew the data.

It would have been interesting to see how quickly companies raise after the programs conclude. In a sense, analyzing by vintage/class would be more useful.

And then to conclude with the following "Y Combinator beat TechStars in many of these metrics, but none of these numbers translate to which (if either) is the best fit for your startup. That's for you and them to figure out."

If your going to do some data analysis, try to make it actionable/useful and stand by it or take an opinion vs just a shallow attempt at data analysis which you neuter with caveats.

<comment><USER6> _It would have been interesting to see how quickly companies raise after the programs conclude._

A bit harsh on TS, considering every YC startup automatically raises an extra $150k right away...

<comment><USER3> TS also something similar. All TechStars companies can get $100k.

[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2011/09/techstars_raises_24m_to_offer_every_startup_100000.html)

<comment><USER7> At least in Seattle, no such offer is available until next year's TS class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> More funding? Who cares, how about whose companies are making more revenue and holding onto more of their equity?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the better question would be, whose companies are making more money, rather than raising it to spend.

<comment><USER10> That is the better question. Unfortunately the revenues of startups are usually trade secrets. Funding events are based on investors looking at revenues, so they're the best indication available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish they were also showing the amount of profits generated by the startups. The amount of founding doesn't translate directly in success...

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, Bill Clerico from WePay was on Millionaire Matchmaker... that's gotta count!

</comment><comment><USER13> Can a reality show - that several of the founders involved with have spoken negatively of - really be an advantage for TechStars?

Also, why do the plot areas go above the maximum axis labels?

</comment><comment><USER14> This analysis would be more interesting if it were more sophisticated. At the very least, the metrics could be normalized by the number of companies.

<comment><USER15> Notably, median money raised after seed funding is normalized, as it is not scaled by the number of companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How about an analysis as to which companies have created more jobs or generating more revenue?

</comment><comment><USER17> Neat little comparison and nice tidbit of info derived.

But as a fellow data scientist, the choice of bar graphs to represent this compact bit of info really just feels like padding to the article which could really use a bit more analysis.

</comment><comment><USER18> Obviously measuring success by capital raised is silly. Is there a better alternative? Some function of pageviews (for more 'social' companies) vs. money raised? Tough to say.

In any case, I wouldn't read much into the OP.

<comment><USER19> how about profits earned?

<comment><USER18> I meant in lieu of having full access to their books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> shouldn't the focus be on profitability rather than funding.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm thinking the first version of Justin.tv makes YC and TechStars even on the reality TV show front. Have a feeling it turned out better too.

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe they could use revenue as a metric. but I thinks its not very important regarding startups...

</comment><comment><USER23> techcrunch analysis should standardize their metrics with dividing by total number of startups funded. in addition to including revenues/profits, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> HN is more populated in recent weeks with TC titles which would make it less read by some. Maybe the name should change from Hacker News to Crunch News or Hacker Crunch. :: eyeroll ::</comment>


VMWare Lightwave - <AUTHOR> https://vmware.github.io/lightwave/

<comment><USER2> "Project Lightwave is an open source project comprised of enterprise-grade, identity and access management services targeting critical security, governance, and compliance challenges for Cloud-Native Apps within the enterprise. "

oh ... that's what it is ...

?????

<comment><USER3> For anyone working in the lucrative space of backasswards, miserable enterprise IT systems, this is really easy to understand. However, because it's so broad in actual scope of what it actually does (no actual law / compliance standards mentioned like PCI, HIPAA, FIPS, etc), it is really just a marketing headline. Tack on a bunch of standards like Kerberos, OAuth, LDAP, etc. and most people that are the target audience will roll their eyes and just write the project off as neckbeard-ware because they don't have a peer that they can talk about high level enterprise BS with.

Basically, the point of the project is to make it easier for programs written by folks like the usual HN reader (not J2EE enterprise crapware) to be compliant with the needs of Big IT that is primarily focused around security and consolidating herds of acquired and bought applications while being able to say that these services all meet different regulatory requirements with a straight face. This is quite different of an approach than most in that this is open sourced, not some proprietary thing made by a system integrator nobody on HN would recognize.

Disclaimer: I've been pitching and writing stuff like this as an engineer for years, so I am probably biased a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Poor choice in name.. and how they can TM lightwave is beyond me. LightWave is a registered trademark of NewTek Inc.

<comment><USER5> You can ™ anything you like. That doesn't make it valid. You have to file to ® and that's more enforceable. I say more because USPTO just accepts your filing and its up to you to enforce it with lawyers and courts.

Maybe NewTek licensed to VMware. Maybe they didn't. In any case, NewTek has to get involved to prevent us all being confused...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may be the highest ratio of buzzwords to meaning that I've ever seen. It took three or four reads to figure out what this is ... i think...

</comment><comment><USER7> What an unfortunate name...</comment>