Tech's ruling class casts a big shadow - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/8/14848642/walt-mossberg-tech-gang-of-five-apple-google-microsoft-amazon-facebook <comment><USER2> > To be clear, I'm not alleging that the Gang of Five is colluding with each > other to fix prices, or to actively suppress innovation; or to do anything > illegal. I am certainly not suggesting they be sued for antitrust > violations, like the once-sole dominant platform company, Microsoft, was in > the late 1990's.

I found this an odd comment, because we don't have to "allege collusion". It's been documented and settled in court. It was wage fixing, not price fixing, but it's still clear evidence that the "Gang" is willing to work together against the market.

<comment><USER3> To be clear, the "wage-fixing" was a no cold-call agreement that involved Apple and Google, not the rest of the companies mentioned. [0]

I'm all for criticizing giant companies but can we at least get our facts straight and not sound conspiratorial about it?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

<comment><USER4> Is there a distinction between "a no cold-call agreement" and "wage fixing" that I'm not aware of? This sounds a bit like "I didn't commit assault I only hit him".

<comment><USER5> >Our (Google's) policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period.

Not defending google here, but there is some nuance to the issue.

The scummiest part to me is that they made "agreements that, when offering a position to another company's employee, neither company would counteroffer above the initial offer."

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading the article I tried to think of all of the ways which I interact with the "gang of five" and quantify their importance in my life.

Apple - I'm writing this on a brand new Macbook Pro, and my iPhone is sitting right next to me. I have a $5/month subscription to Apple Music. It would be painful, but with a gun to my head I could easily switch to Windows, Android, and Spotify.

Google - I'm browsing HN in Chrome, by far my favorite browser. I use google search dozens of times throughout the day to figure things out, it's truly an extension of my brain. I could switch to a new browser, but I haven't tried Bing enough recently to know if it would compare to Google.

Amazon - I have a Prime membership, but I'm only a sporadic online shopper. That said, the Amazon shopping experience has provided me with a lot of value. No real alternatives here.

Facebook - I don't use Instagram, I don't use WhatsApp, I do have a Facebook but I don't use my real name and I have very few friends. I use the News Feed Eradicator extension to get rid of the Trending section and the News Feed. Of all of the companies, I consider Facebook the most dispensable from a personal perspective . The only features I regularly use are Chat, which is functionality that existed long before Facebook, and sometimes stalking people that I just met to see more pictures and get a "life resume" on them, which is a habit that I would rather not be able to indulge in to be quite honest.

Microsoft - My work computer runs on Windows, I use Office 365 at work, and of course tons of companies that I rely on in my consumption supply chain and infrastructure are dependent on Microsoft in some form or the other.

I'm truly shocked at Facebook's ascendance to the tech stratosphere. Obviously the numbers don't lie, but Facebook just seems like it has so much lower utility than all of the other companies mentioned here. Yes, it's younger and in a newer category, but all of the other companies provide fundamental building blocks to the modern technological experience. Social media seems so much more superfluous by comparison.

<comment><USER7> By contrast, I don't use any products by any of this "gang of five". Gang, by the way, is a pretty good description, considering most of these companies' behaviour borders on criminal.

Apple with its reliance on child labour.

Amazon has been getting bad press for the way they treat their staff (suicides and whatnot).

Facebook & Google's blatant disregard for everyone's privacy.

Apple, Google & Facebook are all turning into awful walled gardens governed by some weird, moralistic principle where anything that might offend an advertiser is Verboten. Nipples be gone. You want to communicate with someone outside of our walled garden? Tough shit.

Microsoft seems to be the lesser of evils these days.

<comment><USER8> What hardware manufacturers do you buy from that don't have child labour in the supply chain?

I fear you may just be fooling yourself.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/25/smartp...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/25/smartphone- samsung-tin-bangka-island)

>As Nokia, which seems to have done more than any other such firm to investigate its own supply chain, told me, "there has been no credible system in the electronics industry that allows a company to determine the source of their material".

<comment><USER9> Because apple has so much scrutiny, and is able to get away with less, it may even be the most child-labor free option.

[http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/labor-and- human...](http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/labor-and-human- rights/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what the point of this piece is. There is fierce competition between these five and consumers are better for it. I think you can look at the cloud war between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as a great example of competition among these companies producing better technology and lower prices. If there was collusion, we would see cloud costs and technology stagnate like cars from Detroit in the 70s and 80s. Instead the opposite is happening.

<comment><USER11> I guess the natural question is whether or not having markets be owned by a small number of companies prevents new entrants from competing successfully. I leave that point to be debated by others.

On a different note, it's interesting how the presence of the giants affects the startup world. I am reminded of a passage from No Exit by Gideon Lewis- Kraus [0]:

'All the while, Martino's ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent "the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions," doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn't the discovery that you're unlikely to become a billionaire; it's the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.'

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902)

<comment><USER12> > whether or not having markets be owned by a small number of companies > prevents new entrants from competing successfully

If you consider markets to be an optimization strategy for resource allocation, I think an industry being owned by a small number of successful companies represents a signal that a local maximum has been reached. That's assuming there aren't artificial barriers put up to prevent competition--there often are and I consider a patent an artificial barrier.

If your mission is to generate billions of dollars of value where there was none before, a mature industry is not where you should be looking. "The next google" is not a search engine company as we understand the concept today.

It's not that consolidation makes it hard to compete, it's that the value has fundamentally been wrung out already. In fact, that "value being wrung out"/profit-growth-at-the-top-of-the-sigmoid-curve is what drives consolidation in the first place.

<comment><USER13> >I think an industry being owned by a small number of successful companies represents a signal that a local maximum has been reached.

Why do you think that?

<comment><USER12> Because it happens over and over. Can you point to an example where it doesn't apply?

I mean, easiest example is probably cars. Sure, Elon started Tesla, but they're tiiiiiny compared to other auto manufacturers. They're also doing some things very differently, so it's not quite the "same industry" now. In 1908 there were 253 auto makers, in 1929 only 44, and now there are ~10? So what happened?

There was an initial boom (lower half of the sigmoid curve/hockey stick), followed by lots of competition from startups (because they can compete on method there's some nice profit margins there), followed by brutal competition and diminished profit margins (as best method is adopted and firms sell against each other, things get cheaper), followed by consolidation (because when profit margins are shrinking, next step is consolidation and "belt tightening"), followed by an industry no one wants to touch anymore (because it's run by a bunch of idiot middle managers). If you wait long enough, those idiots eventually miss some major developments and this creates a new opportunity to do things very different (eg Tesla). Or nothing really changes, as in the case of air travel.

Also, history of all kinds of consumer electronics.

Also, how many companies on the fortune 100 50 years ago are still on it? Nothing lasts. If you're lucky and successful, you eventually hit the top of the sigmoid curve.

Also, software (yes, it's true)

What industry does this trend not apply to? What's the argument for "I think an industry being owned by a small number of successful companies represents a signal that a local maximum has NOT been reached (there's tons of opportunity there, just have to unlock it!)"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The exascale technology corporation of the 21st century is a completely different beast than the mega-corporations of the 20th century in one absolutely key way: They are disrupting themselves to successfully stay relevant in a fast moving market.

Back before Google became Alphabet, they made a huge decision to realign themselves around Machine Learning as the core of how they do business in all aspects [1].

It could do that because 1. Their services could benefit from the improvement directly and 2. it didn't need to build a new machine factory, or assembly line like GE would have had to, if it wanted to completely realign themselves to eg. solar production or a 21st century technology.

It sounds trivial and obvious but Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are all information management companies. They are all trying to become the central nervous system for consumer behavior in all aspects. That means collecting ungodly amounts of data, having a dense psychometric profile of users and then feeding users what they want to feed them. The better data they have the more locked in people become and there are fewer sources of data available for other people.

So they most important thing is to get users to become part of their ecosystem - that means having some kind of insight into every digital system that a user interacts with. Unless you can create a new ecosystem that people interact with at such scale (Snap is probably the closest) then you can't compete with them. Also notice that Snap is still relying on Google Cloud [2] so Google wins either way.

The fact that the top 5 have so much money, talent etc... also means that any company that isn't a leap beyond in user interaction, can be easily wooed through a lucrative acquisition and access to user data at massive scale.

It's only going to get more consolidated because the average person only cares about usability and interoperability - so even if you aren't locked into just Apple, or Google, they all touch each other in some way that you are going to be part of the big 5 ecosystem no matter what.

[1][https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-facebook-microsoft- rema...](https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-facebook-microsoft-remaking- around-ai/)

[2] [http://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14492026/snap- ipo-2-billion-c...](http://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14492026/snap- ipo-2-billion-contract-with-google-cloud)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you can consider 5 companies to be an oligopoly especially when you don't see monopolistic practices. These companies regularly undercut each other and innovate.

<comment><USER16> I find this kind of learned helplessness to be fascinating. Do you think big companies need apologists? Do you think there would be more or less innovation with more smaller firms?

<comment><USER15> Helplessness? Apologist? I don't consider Google/Facebook/etc my enemy like you seem to. These companies are not exploiting me, I have no reason to be hostile to them (profit is not exploitation).

> Do you think there would be more or less innovation with more smaller firms?

Likely less, I do not think that private space exploration or self driving cars would be possible without the massive accumulation of capital enabled by tech giants.

Now let's look at the counterfactual, the US has massive tech giants and the majority innovation comes from or to the US. Other countries don't, other countries don't have nearly as much innovation bar a few exceptions.

And truthfully, I find people that are anti capitalism to be far more interesting. It's amazing that people can convince themselves that private ownership is wrong while living in the most prosperous time in history and also believing that stripping those better off of their wealth will somehow lead to a more prosperous society when every time it has been done it has lead to disaster.

<comment><USER17> It's funny you make it sound sound like Darpa had no part in self driving cars. or that the government space program didn't set the standard and the foundation for private space exploration.

Yes Capitalism and Liberal Democracy is the most powerful system man has ever created. Hopefully we don't screw it up by giving all the credit to the guy handing you the apple from the orchard we call the "western world"

Football is an awesome game but without the guys in the black and white uniforms it would be nothing but chaos.

<comment><USER18> I didn't read the parent's comment as anti-government. It is certainly pro- business, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. Your analogy with sports and referees seems apt: referees are important but it wouldn't be a very good game without having the players as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> IS this not just a symptom of a maturing industry? At one point America had hundreds of automotive companies, those hundreds consolidated down to three. 100 years later, those three are still dominate. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it sounds like something that has happened before and from that we can drive the discussion on weather this is good or bad, or something we can ignore.

<comment><USER20> It is a symptom of capitalism in general. Capital tends to consolidate in monopolies or colluding oligopolies within 1 industry, because of economies of scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Funny how amazon gets thrown in with facebook under the 'consumer tech industry' moniker. facebook sells ads to make money. amazon sells physical stuff. how are they related besides both using technology? I think we should group businesses by how they make money and who they compete against. 'technology company' doesn't mean anything in a world where every company has technology.

<comment><USER22> Google is a technology company that sells ads. Amazon is a technology company that sells goods. It's not what you have, it's what you are.

The future isn't bright for companies that just "have" technology.

<comment><USER23> Agree and why these latest "tech" companies that do NOT actually sell their tech will not fall as easily from industry changes.

I have a tough time seeing the new three, Google, Amazon and FB going away. I can see it with MS and Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's quite interesting to speculate who would be the sixth empire. Based on their attempts to dip their fingers into as many pies as possible, I'd say Uber is a would-be contender, and the platform they've been trying to own is the real world. As far as on-demand service economy startups go, they're certainly preeminent.

<comment><USER24> Verizon just bought aol and yahoo and are looking for more companies to buy.

<comment><USER2> Verizon seems like a strong contender. They're well placed to follow the Gang's general model of using a profitable near-monopoly business to enable lots speculative purchases and projects. (Amazon: AWS and sales, Google: search/ads, Apple: hardware, Facebook: FB and Instagram)

If we're going to see a sixth player, it will be someone who can get massive, hard-to-threaten control over some major part of the web ecosystem. Data access sounds like a winner to me, especially if net neutrality crumbles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > In fact, I'd be amazed if there weren't plenty of startups whose main goal > is to be purchased by the Gang.

This happens whenever an industry has a dominant player with deep pockets. For example, back when telecom was a much healthier industry, the main reason why anyone would start a telecom startup was to get acquired by Cisco.

</comment><comment><USER26> Very large companies are keeping a lot of money overseas. It seems be very inefficient if their saving are not used in investments that are closely connected to consumer financial benefits.

Should society be concerned with the flow of money out of the local economy? Isn't it a idea (for the companies) to move hundreds of billion dollars out of the economy their customers need to make a living?

I wonder if these companies should offer low interests loans to people to buy their products in much the same way that China buys US treasury bonds.

Maybe there should be limits to how much a company should be allowed to save and it should return the rest to investors.

</comment><comment><USER27> The way I deal with it is not to put all my eggs in one basket. For instance, don't link your online accounts to one email, have one separate email address just for those. And try to use a different email provider to the company who makes your mobile OS. And just don't use proprietary OSs where possible, go with Linux or BSD. In fact these days I'd recommend BSD if you really want to avoid too much bad data-gathering practice (even though I still use Linux myself out of habit), just because BSD still has a relatively unsullied rep.

</comment><comment><USER28> As everything else on HN, this is a very American-centric perception. There are a lot of other companies that are not "big whales in the see but are crocodiles on the Yang-Tse", as Jack Ma once said.

China is the most obvious example (Alibaba, Taobao, Weibo) but there are also some European and Indian companies worth paying attention. If Asian growth takes a hold on this century and if Europe keeps getting freaked out about American espionage then this "Gang of five" will face some tough competition.</comment>


Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html <comment><USER2> This actual first page of the series is even more pointed for US Citizens [0]:

"In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again."

[0] [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses- power...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful- toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html)

<comment><USER3> 99% of home garage doors have a manual cable release which detaches the pulley from the chain drive and allows you to manually open the door... I'm surprised people wouldn't know this especially in Texas

<comment><USER4> The release is inside of the garage, so unless you have the key (not as common as you'd think) you're out of luck. Also I'm sure it'd get annoying to manually open the garage all the time, especially since this article seems to imply that the phenomenon lasted for a while

<comment><USER3> If you have a garage door opener button that is not working, you likely have a key to get into the house enter the garage and manually open the door.

<comment><USER5> I do not think that we are to take from the article that these home owners left their cars inside their garages until the NSA changed their frequencies. I understood that for a while they were interrupted in what they were planning to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title should contain [2013]

</comment><comment><USER7> Link goes to part 2 of a 3-part series for some reason.</comment>


New Facebook Campus Won't Get a Cafeteria, Thanks to Mountain View, CA - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/2018/7/23/17603424/facebook-mountain-view-ca-free-cafeteria-ban <comment><USER3> Weren't they previously complaining about their /presence/ in local restaurants before? The whole thing strikes me as foolish and entitled - <USER2> always there is no such thing as a right to a business model.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's easily dodged. They could open restaurants to the public, charge exorbitant prices to the public, and comp employee meals.</comment>


How DC police use citizens as spies - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/17/exclusive-how-dcpoliceusecitizensasspies.html

<comment><USER2> This is just wrong. Five police officers with psychological problems cracking down on a gamer kid because of a couple of curses... I think US police is over-staffed.</comment>


Avoid hemorrhoids: Improve Hacking and Health by Moving Your Chair - <AUTHOR> https://spideroak.com/blog/201003291900-improve-productivity-and-health-by-relocating-the-chair

<comment><USER2> I'm typing this from a standing desk: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1038179/Fredrik2.jpg>

It's a "Fredrik" from Ikea, which courteously lets you choose the height of the desk and shelves, and doesn't stop you from putting them in the wrong spots. I've been using it for almost a year, and it's perfectly sturdy.

One caveat: make sure you make it high enough. Using a standing desk when the keyboard is even a few inches too low can be miserable on your back. The desk should be at the height of your elbows, and no lower.

<comment><USER3> are you a dwarf? i might be seeing it wrong but it looks pretty low for a standing desk.

<comment><USER2> I'm 6'0". The desk surface is 3'9" from the ground. It's not low. My girlfriend is 5'6" and can't use it comfortably without standing on a yoga block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been sitting on an exercise ball for the last couple years, since I read a local newspaper article about schools in my community that offer those to schoolchildren to sit on. But only last week I discovered that most school exercise balls have knobs on them that keep them in place. Mine is a regular ball, which can roll in any direction. Maintaining my balance provides subtle movement any time I am at the computer, which is a lot of each day for me.

P.S. What do all of you recommend for more ergonomic keyboards and pointing devices? I am not happy with my Dell keyboard nor with any mouse, but the last trackball I tried was even more annoying than my current mouse. (I have liked trackballs very well in the past, but I have to favor my thumb basal joints now that I am older.)

<comment><USER5> I tried trackballs and various kinds of mice. Then, I switched to laptops and I decided to only rely on the touchpad. So I forced myself to learn keyboard shortcuts for all the programs that I use regularly, which sped up my productivity and now I only use a mouse for occational gaming.

<comment><USER6> Truth be told, I never liked trackpads, then I came across TrackPoint (i.e. 'the nipple') on a ThinkPad. Best... pointing... device... ever...

<comment><USER7> Moreover, you can buy a USB version of that ThinkPad keyboard which plugs into any computer: "ThinkPad USB Keyboard with TrackPoint" (part 55Y9003), $59, link to Lenovo store is [http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...](http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=55Y9003&current- category-id=E6710B8C5A5F44239217E34D281CCDD9&&hide_menu_area=yes)

<comment><USER6> TrackPoint is the one reason I'm really reluctant to get a netbook. I'll just stick with my X41 (or maybe get a used X60 or X61) until they get a netbook with TrackPoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have one question as regards ergonomics. How do you keep good neck posture? I've a habit of protruding my head outward really close to the monitor, and reading books at a very close distance (like 6 inches). As a result, my shoulders, neck, and head now make out the x^3 curve (it should of course ideally be somewhat straight). I have to consciously think about keeping my neck straight... but it's very hard to be mindful of this 24/7.

<comment><USER2> Raise the monitor until you have to look straight ahead to use it. Bring it closer to you if necessary. Get glasses.

<comment><USER8> My eye sight is perfectly fine (well, with the glasses on), so that's not a problem. It's just a habit I've had for as long as I can remember. I would bring it closer to me, but I think that's bad for the eyes. I'd kill for the E-ink technology to come to computer screen monitors, even if it's with a bad refresh rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This stand-up hacking approach, does not only make my hacking productive, but also helps me on critical thinking. When I'm not typing, I just walk away from screen, and do some critical thinking instead. After I cleared my head, I'll continue typing and hacking.

Looking at screen while thinking would make me scatterbrained, and get nothing done.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used a standing workstation for about a year. I now have a really nice ergonomic chair and a good desk. The standing workstation was pretty nice, and the OP is right, you do get used to standing after a couple weeks of doing it. The fact was, however, that because it took more effort to stand than sit, on the days I didn't really feel like working I was much more inclined to sit on my couch or at the kitchen table than I was to use my standing workstation, which of course negated any benefit I had from using the standing workstation. So I eventually abandoned the idea. I encourage people to try it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most people grow tired of it and move back to a desk eventually.

<comment><USER2> I've had a standing desk for about a year, and largely for the reason you're describing. I have a tendency to stay up late coding, and a standing desk makes it harder to waste time staring at a bright screen when I'm tired enough that I should be sleeping. It's a feature in my book, but probably not so much if you're someone with a morning deadline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reading this from my chair

<comment><USER12> I stand all day as it is, so I prefer my computer time to be spent with my buttocks in a nice comfy chair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like this idea but couldn't implement it due to problems with my heart. I think the old company of diet + exercise + not being grossly overweight should never be overlooked. Also I find frequent walks (on the pretense of getting coffee) can be very beneficial.

</comment><comment><USER14> or more importantly: workout regularly

</comment><comment><USER15> Donald Rumsfeld does this. He used it to justify "stress positions."

[http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,6582...](http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,658285,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> If you stand, proper keyboard height is very important. Your wrists should not be bent while you type; otherwise, you risk a repetitive stress injury.

<comment><USER17> People get this wrong all the time, and use cheap, sticky keyboards. I made this mistake, and got a repetitive stress injury that made typing painful.

Now I've got a better keyboard and zealous devotion to proper keyboard height, and my hands don't hurt anymore. Don't make the mistakes I did. POSITION YOUR KEYBOARD CORRECTLY! This is important, and warrants capital letters.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it is important. I've met two programmers who can no longer type at all because of a repetitive stress injury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a standing desk now. Highly recommended.</comment>


Female Computer Scientists Make the Same Salary as Their Male Counterparts - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/female-computer-scientists-make-same-salary-their-male-counterparts-180949965/?no-ist <comment><USER3> This article seems to have fallen into a common misinterpretation of the results of the study. They assume that failing to reject the null hypothesis automatically accepts the null hypothesis.

The article says "The study authors did find that, on average, women in fields like programming earn 6.6 percent less than men (a Bureau of Labor Statistics study showed that women actually earn 11 percent more, however). But that difference is not statistically significant."

But that the difference is not statistically significant does not mean there is no difference. To show there is no difference, you'd need to show that the power used to run the study was sufficiently high to be confident.

The correct interpretation would be "the study failed to find a significant difference in salaries between men and women, but that does not mean there isn't one." Not as exciting of a headline I guess.

Update: I skimmed the study pdf and the study does not make the mistake as the article. In fact, I applaud the study for using two-tailed tests that gave them less power but more neutrality (so they were checking for gender differences in pay rather than if men were paid more than women). The study shows significant differences in pay in several professions but not engineering or math/CS.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a really, really bad article, the author clearly didn't bother to read the study.

I just skimmed it, 64 pages is a bit much right now, but from first look:

First of all, the study [1] just checked graduates one year after graduation - i.e., absolute entry-level. This may say some things but doesn't say anything about female computer scientists in general.

Second of all, the study checked many, many differences in pay - some of which are statistically significant, some are not. The author of OP's article just listed one of these comparisons. To quote from the text:

>All gender differences reported in the text and shown in the figures are statistically significant (p < 0.05, two-tailed t-test) unless otherwise indicated

Moneyquote: >Women working full time earned $35,296 on average, while men working full time earned $42,918

and

>In fact, the pay gap exists within nearly every category of institution and level of selectivity. Among public and private college graduates, women earned 81 percent and 86 percent, respectively, of what men earned one year after graduation. Women who graduated from public universities earned 86 percent of what their male peers earned. The pay gap was largest among graduates of private universities, where women earned just 75 percent of what men earned

And yes, that's a statistically significant difference. It's the very first two figures. (Edit: And depending at which paygroup you look, OP's 6.6% is really low - it goes up to 25% difference!)

tl;dr: There is a pay gap and it's statistically significant.

[1] [http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap- th...](http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings- of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf)

Edit: The only thing I can find that is _not_ statistically significant is the pooled pay for women in "Biological, physicial sciences, science technology, mathematics and agricultural sciences" and "Business" \- i.e., something different than what OP claims, especially since the average of these jobs is likely to be different from the average of each job itself.

Edit2: I finally found OP's 6.6% pay difference, which is a complete misunderstanding of the article they copied from here [2].

>According to the study, there are seven professions with pay equity. When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don't know.

So the 6.6% are _not the pay gap in computer science_ , but the pay gap for _all_ jobs clustered together! Then it's no wonder that the 6.6% are not statistically significant, several different populations with different means are merged, and since t-tests compare the means, you get no significance.

[2] [http://qz.com/182977/there-is-no-gender-gap-in-tech- salaries...](http://qz.com/182977/there-is-no-gender-gap-in-tech-salaries/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for linking the study. I find these articles interesting, but I always end up skipping them, instead of looking for the core data. For some reason my brain is too lazy to skim the two page article to find the source, but is interested enough to skim and potentially read the 40 page source when found directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing is, salary is so arbitrary. People make up the number. How many tech companies out there actually says "all junior level developers make $80K, level 2 makes $85K"? Some people are paid more. If you are a frontend developer, you are likely getting less than a backend developer or a full stack. Sometimes fullstack engineers get the same salary as a frontend/backend but does two people's job. And I was told by people that asking other people's salary in American culture is rude. How can I find out what my co-workers are making. And even if I knew, how would I know my salary, as a male engineer, is too high? How do we judge? When we do an average on salary, we need several categories: companies (you can't compare Google to a local small business IT firm), location (NYC vs Portland), education, job performance (this is also quite arbitrary).

<comment><USER5> Assuming you're not american, by the way you reference it. Thought I'd throw in a few things I've experienced in America, that I think are pretty common.

Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.

You're still right though, that in my experience there's a social pressure not to share as well.

I also definitely agree that saying "a junior programmer makes x dollars a year" or "a senior programmer makes y dollars a year" has been pretty meaningless at the major corps I've worked with. They're typically had some kind of pay band where "junior" meant x to y, and the closer you got to y, or if you crossed y, meant getting approval from higher levels of management. I'd be interested to know if this has been other peoples experience as well.

As an example, I know a guy (not in programming) who went from being in a realtime data monitor to a supervisor in a call center, and jumped his salary probably 15%, then went back to being the data monitor a year later, and retained the salary increase, which was way larger an increase than the company at the time would have allowed, had he stayed the data monitor.

<comment><USER7> > Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten > years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty > clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately > fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be > typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to > know.

Almost every job may say that, but in almost every case that provision is illegal[1] and grounds for a lawsuit if they actually carried it out.

[1] [http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/efte/salary_discussions.html](http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/efte/salary_discussions.html)

<comment><USER5> Interesting; thanks for the link. I'm going to read it over in a little bit (making food).

I'm not beyond believing that it's mostly just common lore, and I'm definitely going to look into it.

An unrelated instance of something like this would be how most hourly workers think they're legally obligated to get a lunch break and a paid break if they work x hours, when in the states I've lived in there's no legal requirement, except under specific circumstances (I think missouri was for employees under 16 working in certain kinds of service industries).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please stop reposting this.

<comment><USER9> I hadn't seen this article... and it's actually quite surprising seeing as every other mention of this issue seems to say women aren't treated fairly in this industry and are belittled by their peers and paid half as much.

If you've seen it, ignore it.

<comment><USER10> >belittled by their peers and paid half as much

That is rarely said because those of us working know it's not true. We're just concerned for the low gender ratio. I haven't felt belittled for years (mostly due to older men retiring).

<comment><USER11> Nice ageist stereotype. But that's alright for you to do right?

<comment><USER12> If it's her personal experience, then yes, she can say that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the kind of "science journalism" that I strongly dislike (and is promulgated by _both sides_ in politically tinged debates like this one). Basically the author has a point of view, and sees in the study some numbers that support said point of view.

That aside, I think the biggest problem is not understanding _where_ (the obvious) disparity in tech comes from. It's not discrimination, and least conscious discrimination. And I don't even think it's unconscious discrimination or side effects of so called "privilege".

It's simply that when tech startups _are small_ , for various reasons (I'll get to this), they have a lot more males than females.* If the startup does well, early hires rise in rank by virtue of being there longer. If/when the reach the size where they are recognized by name, _it 's too late_, most of the top roles (both engineering and management) are filled by males. _Even if there was zero discrimination_ (or feelings of isolation), you would get the topsy turvy industry we see now.

Most studies focus on _income_ but the far bigger disparity is _wealth_ (both in this case and generally). The earlier employees in successful startups are phenomenally more _wealthy_ than latecomers. These people are the ones who go on to start and fund more startups, and the cycle continues.

This is why PG's now infamous remarks about there being few female _hackers_ (as opposed to CS students/engineers) are really insightful. Having Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer as visible leaders in large companies won't really change much (or anything when it comes to tiny startups). When these large companies hire, it's quite likely they do so scrupulously fairly. But even though the disparity is _much_ better when it comes to new hires, the females amongst them (just as the males) start at the bottom.

Having more female _founders_ is a start, _perhaps_ , but it doesn't really solve the problem of too few female hackers. What you need are more female _technical founders_. I'm not saying that the non-technical founder role is less important (in fact it can often be a lot _more_ important). But the technical founders are responsible for building the technical team from the ground up. Males tend to have more male friends, just as women tend to have more female friends. And the first people you try to hire are friends.

But even more than just _technical founders_ , if you want to reduce the disparity at the source, there need to be more female "Mark Zuckerbergs" who come up with the idea and hack version 0 when everyone else is out partying (and, importantly, _before fundraising is even a thought_ ). This is when a founder has most leverage: when he/she has built the kernel of something that people want and everybody else wants in. Think of the scene from The Social Network (admittedly a hollywood movie) where Zuckerberg assigns roles and equity to his co-founders and basically brushes of the girls' offers to help.

This is a _very difficult problem_ to have, if you want to increase the presence of women in this industry. It's difficult because there's _nothing_ you can do to future "Mark Zuckerbergs" to force him to pick a more diverse set of co-founders. There can _be no law_ , because this is almost like choosing your friends or significant others. A not insignificant percentage of startups with female founders in fact have their significant others as co- founders. This could be great for the startup (I know many great teams like this, obviously pg/jessica being one), but it again points to how difficult it is for females to find co-founders _the way males do_.

The only thing that would really work is for "these girls" to have been hacking since they were children and think that this is the coolest thing they could be doing. _And_ there needs to be a critical mass of them so they can make friends _with each other_ , because if you think that telling adult male developers to "play nice" is hard, try forcing 10 year old boys to invite 10 year old girls into their crew, (cooties and all).

* It would be cool if there was data to track the ratio of male engineers to female engineers as a successful startup grows. My hunch is the ratio improves steadily along with company size.

</comment><comment><USER14> is it so hard to believe that women don't enjoy stem fields as much as men?

that men and women are actually different and that it implies different behaviour?

that actually you know what... the more freedom women get the /less likely/ they are to work in a stem field?

maybe we should pay them more in our naive quest to make the unequal equal - because it is 'politcally correct' \- which ever kind of correct that is because it certainly isn't 'true'

<comment><USER15> As a female developer, yes, those things are hard to believe.

This is a great example of why I was hesitant of entering the field. You feel totally comfortable saying this when your profile links to your blog with your real name and place of employment. If you're that comfortable in this belief you can't expect me to believe that you don't treat women in your work place differently and with less respect.

Gender roles still very much exist. If something biological were keeping women from entering the IT industry it wouldn't vary so much from culture to culture. [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/gsf/12220332.0001.103?rgn=main;v...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/gsf/12220332.0001.103?rgn=main;view=fulltext)

<comment><USER14> i'm not ashamed to speak my opinion, nor associate it with my name. i don't think i'm making especially ridiculous or unbackable claims...

it shouldn't be offensive to women imo. i am not offended by the many opportunities that women have and i don't - that they are /generally/ more socially adept, need to make significantly less investment to find a mate /in general/, and are constantly treated with special care an attention in particular areas (e.g. violence against women is constantly considered especially distasteful even though 90%+ of violent crimes are between men exclusively, there are more illnesses and disabilities specific to men - <USER2> most research focuses on those specific to women etc...)

i don't think my opinion that women and men are measurably different should imply that i will treat women with less respect... why should it? i'm not saying women are somehow distatsteful or undesirable in some moral or value sense - just that they are different, measurably so and that claiming we are all equal in the sense of political correctness, and shoehorning every possible behaviour into that ideal is ignorant - it does disservice to humanity - not just men or women as a sex.

i've had a look at that article, but it is authored with a tremendous bias imo... the fact that its hosted on an openly feminist website does of course skew me but the wording itself is highly presumptuous (perhaps iam too?). i will not deny that their data does show a large variation... but i will gladly deny your conclusion because reorganising that graph shows a reasonable correlation between those countries we consider 'most free' and those we do not... with outliers and natural variation as you would expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Woo! Let the back patting begin! We ended sexism!

</comment><comment><USER17> Where "the same" is 6.6% less.</comment>


Ask HN: Please suggest some good books on software product management. - <AUTHOR>

Please suggest some good books, articles, or blogs on software product management. <comment><USER2> \--- Books ---

Tuned In - great book, describes how to really understand user perspectives as opposed to 'inside-out' development. The book's based on many principles taught in the Pragmatic Marketing prodm course.

Inspired (Marty Cagan) - good cross section of PM, covers People, Process and Product separately. Startups to large companies.

The Art of Product Management - a series of articles, describes software PM in startups to larger companies. More about the role of PM rather than product itself.

Rules for Revolutionaries - Guy Kawasaki's book, half entrepreneur morale book and half how to create a product quickly.

\--- Blogs ---

Cranky Product Manager - crankypm.com

Silicon Valley Product Group - svpg.com (Marty Cagan's blog)

\--- I would avoid: ---

Value Prop (Jose Palomino)

Will It Fly? (Thomas McKnight)

</comment><comment><USER3> Joel on Software would be a first recommendation.</comment>


Ask HN: IPs to put in your hosts file – to block ads and tracking - <AUTHOR> This includes tracking from google-facebook <comment><USER2> In a sense, the pi-hole project is a very well marketed hosts file config script.

This is where they keep the URLs for the said hosts file: [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/automated%20i...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/blob/master/automated%20install/basic-install.sh#L1163)

</comment><comment><USER3> Theres a bunch on github, just search for blacklist hostfiles.

[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts](https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts)</comment>


Ask HN: How many GPUs do you own? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I only own one on my personal computer for gaming, but I have 4 Titan X's on my desk at work and access to hundreds (maybe thousands?) more when I need to. Kinda gonna miss this when I leave...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have three I'm using for mining, but I plan on going through some deep learning tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER3> 14 in my house</comment>


Student Loans In US More Than China's Total External Debt - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/outstanding-student-loans-in-the-us-is-more-than-chinas-total-external-debt/

<comment><USER2> New headline: My car loan is more than the net external debt of Norway (which is negative).

<comment><USER3> Or how about the more straightforward: "Cherry-picking statistics for fun and profit"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, as long as we don't want to talk about China's internal local government debts...which is all coming out of our savings (hence...internal debt).

Sheesh.

</comment><comment><USER5> So the United States has built a society in which its (former) students owe the government and large financial corporations more money than the government of China owes the rest of the world. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it sure sounds self-destructive.

<comment><USER6> It means absolutely nothing. As the first sentence of the article says, "a comparison like that does not make any sense".

US student debt is ridiculous, but comparing it to the external debt of an export-heavy sovereign doesn't help anyone's understanding. It only perpetuates magical thinking.

<comment><USER7> The comparison is not done for the sake of drawing any conclusion about China debt, it was just to "visualize" how big the debt is. I guess the author could have compared it with the value of total beer production in the world in the last decade, but comparing this debt with the debt of the biggest country in the world gives better impression how big the debt is, at least to someone that thinks there are to many zeroes there.

EDIT: s/depth/debt/g ;)

<comment><USER6> The numbers are meaningless without context, and in context, the comparison is meaningless. External debt can be huge or tiny.

Luxembourg, population 524,853, has 2.14 trillion in external debt, or >2.7 times China's. While China's per-capita external debt is just $396, to the US's $52,170. Or how about Monaco, population 36,371, external debt, 16.5 billion.

You could add a couple more zeros by denominating the external debt in cents instead of dollars, and comparing it to student debt in dollars, and it would be exactly as useful.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage - <AUTHOR> https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html <comment><USER2> Cool stuff, I have a thing for reliable, low tech solutions. Anyone see a problem with this approach?</comment>


Show HN: 0-fee decentralized asset issuance and exchange - <AUTHOR> https://settle.network/posts/intro/?attempt=3 <comment><AUTHOR> A friend of mine shared this this morning right before I released the blog post (translated from French):

> It reminds me of the US before the introduction of the FED in 1913, each > bank "issued" its own currency. Money was exchanged with a discount, as an > example a bank in Chicago could accept money from JP Morgan in New York at a > 50% discount. There were a lot of financial crisis, mostly because money was > not elastic enough and the interest rates would skyrocket when everyone was > asking money, which ruined mostly farmers. It does not apply direclty to > Settle (anyone can issue IOUs) but it's probably worth looking into this"

Found it quite interesting, and worth sharing it here as well.

</comment><comment><USER2> Reviewing this project might be a fun assignment for an undergrad economics class.</comment>


Ask HN: SOPA = Is it time for Internet #2? - <AUTHOR>

Yes, i know, things are not black and white. I had a large text i was going to post here, but when it comes down to practical reality this is it, politicians/old-business/lobbyists caught up with the tech we call "Internet".
Is it time for a out of the box new technology?
Something they will again, take 30 years to understand and legislate. <comment><USER2> Something will be centralized, a weak point politically. I'm surprised how quiet DARPA, CERN and Verisign have been so far, as they are very important. ISPs and Godaddy don't matter as much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately, we need another/more physical medium of transfer.

Mesh may yet have its uses (though beware of signal localization).

If nothing else, dust off NNTP and sneakernet.

P.S. I'm not advocating rampant infringement of reasonable rights and obligations. I am saying that we should ensure transmission, even if laggy, in the face of autocracy.</comment>


Show HN: A password manager for your grandma - <AUTHOR> http://password-diary.webflow.io/ <comment><USER2> Quick suggestion, from what little I can see, I feel many grandmas are going to get confused by the icons, like the eyeball for 'show password' and the copy/paste icon.

First, they are small detailed shapes that would be difficult for people with poor vision; but second, while icons are intuitive for a younger generation exposed to certain patterns and associations, many elderly have no clue what some of these graphics imply. You should really consider full, clear buttons for these features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree! I've changed those in the developed app so they're more intuitive :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can say this:

1) A product like this is definitely needed. I find iOS' password handling intuitive, yet it always flummoxes my parents.

2) Perfect tagline!

This is just a tiny nit - but the webflow slug kind of turns me off a bit, but that's likely just me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you sir! It'll be awesome to have you jump on board (I mean... your parents :)

Thanks for the feedback! Definitely will move to my domain once I release the alpha

Thanks for the tip :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You need https if you are touting a security product

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just adding the domain now, that's probably why it hasn't worked yet! In progress... give me five minutes :)

<comment><USER4> Cool

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://password-diary.webflow.io/](https://password-diary.webflow.io/)

Does the link work with https?

<comment><USER4> Yup

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! There we go :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>