Why Windows Phone could beat Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnl.net/blog/2012/04/21/windows-phone-to-beat-android/

<comment><USER2> I run mogade.com. Most of the games that use the service are on Windows Phone. The sense that I get is that Microsoft treats its indie developers pretty poorly.

They essentially get no help in terms of promotion, services, and support. Plus there's growing confusion over the future of the platform (fragmentation caused by WP8, the future of Silverlight...)

Some people use mogade just for the very basic real time stats it provides, which blows my mind. I mean, how can't Microsoft provide this kind of basic service. It pretty much boils down to: hincrby app yyyymmdd 1

Until this is fixed, I wouldn't hold my breath. If it was me, I'd be innovating on the developer service/support side at a painful pace. First class facebook library. Great stats. XBox Live Lite/Indie (which would kill the need for mogade, and would make me happy). Discovery and promotion tools. Better store.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very useful info. Thanks for bubbling it up. My goal in writing the article was to get such things to surface as they're not visible today.

In listing my contrarian case for the rise of WP7, I was trying to get opposing viewpoints so I could get a better sense as to what decision to make from a prioritization standpoint at our startup. It's clear we have to do iOS first but after that, where do we go: Android or WP? Android has more people but we might get more press and more uptake from WP so it's a tough call.

Odd indies are treated poorly by MSFT. The FUD from MSFT is that they've been working hard to get more developer over to their platform. Glad to have evidence that that may not be entirely true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most of the arguments seem sane, if a bit superficial. The core point is basically FUD though: Apple and Microsoft are more invested ("all in") in their platforms than Google, so developers should think "if I develop for Android today, what kind of guarantees do I have that the OS will still be supported tomorrow." Yawn.

Most tellingly, the open source and zero-license-cost angle isn't treated at all. It's as if the AOSP and the Kindle didn't exist, which seems strange.

Edit: for clarity, the point isn't that Android is free and therefore "best" -- it's that an analysis of its expected lifespan like this one that _ignores_ the fact that the code is free for anyone is either wrong or incomplete.

<comment><USER4> If Android has a zero license cost then why does HTC pay for it?

[http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/05/27/htc-pays-5-per- andro...](http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/05/27/htc-pays-5-per-android- license-to-microsoft/)

I understand that most developers don't like the current patent system but that doesn't make it go away.

As well the licensing cost of the operating system is of little interest to most app developers who are looking at the ROI of app development. Windows has a $140 to $300 licensing cost yet it provides great developer ROI.

Similarly, iOS, OSX provide great ROI for consumer apps and Linux/Solaris great ROI for server apps.

<comment><USER3> Not sure how that's responsive. Anyone making a phone would have to pay that, either to MS directly for the platform or via a patent license. It's neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to Android or iOS.

I'll say it again, the point wasn't about cost, it was about freedom. Android apps work on Kindles. If Google goes belly up or gives up on Android, Amazon can still make Kindles. That's not true of Apple or MS, yet this article (which is premised on the idea that Android is a "risk" because Google might dump it) ignores that point completely. That tells me the author is either wrong or spinning.

<comment><USER4> There are two trains of thought here that I think are important to differentiate, there's the idea of developing software for yourself, and the idea of developing software for others with the expectation that they pay you.

When developing software for yourself it's very important that if push comes to shove that you can hack the OS to do whatever the hardware is capable of. Yes, you can still make Facebook for Android but Photoshop won't be coming to the platform with out a paying userbase, this is the same reason you don't find Photoshop on Linux.

When developing software for others it's very important that there is a userbase and that the userbase pays for software. It doesn't matter if the reason that few buy software on Android is because of fixable UX issues with the marketplace, I don't know how much of the UX issues are still relevant.

Another important factor is why Google might be dumping android (if they are at all), if it's because of patents it's unlikely that Amazon or anyone else will touch it. If Kindle is the only userbase left then it might not make a whole lot of sense for developers to sink time and money into the platform.

Win Mo will pose a threat to Android and may cause them to dump it if it becomes the alternative to iOS. There are a whole bunch of ifs in the article and honestly I think it's unlikely that Google will dump Android, but the key to it all is how much money developers can make from the platform.

Android isn't going to be very viable as a commericial dev platform if hardware manufacturers aren't producing phones that come pre-installed with Android.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you on the need for a userbase. WP7 is currently at 2 million+ devices, which is pretty extensive but there is less competition than there would be on Android as there are fewer apps. As a result, the uptake on people buying your software might be higher in WP than on Android (a gut guess, I must admit, but it's what's prompted me to write the article).

I don't think Google will drop Android completely but I think that the fragmentation will get worse. For example, I'd develop for the Kindle Fire version of Android before others. Why? Because monetization in the Kindle app store seems to work better (there was an article on HN about this a few weeks back).

I agree with your last line and that's where the Motorola acquisition is puzzling. It strikes me that HTC, Samsung and others may start looking at WP as an alternative now that Motorola is owned by Google. If Nokia shows sign of strength (and early indications point that the Lumia 900 is heading in the right direction), others might follow... and THAT is an issue for Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _During this week's proceedings surrounding Oracle's lawsuit against Google over use of Java code in Android, Larry Page made a very curious remark: he said he wasn't sure that Android was a critical asset to Google and saw it as mainly a vehicle to get Google products to run on mobile devices. This was an odd bit of signaling as it seemed to imply that support for Android as a platform is far from guaranteed._

no it wasn't. it's context is from a few years ago. hint: " _was_ "

 _if I develop for Android today, what kind of guarantees do I have that the OS will still be supported tomorrow._

this kind [http://cdn1.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/3736479/Slide_57...](http://cdn1.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/3736479/Slide_57_gallery_post.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> A similar chart could have been produced a few years ago about RIM. If I were to substitute RIM for Android and Android for WP and write the article in 2007, what would you be saying?

</comment></comment><comment> excuse-me >Android ... mainly a vehicle to get Google products to run on mobile devices.

Isn't that the whole point !!!!!!</comment>


I hired my friends and family, and I'd do it again. - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetingburner.com/blog/2012/10/03/i-hired-my-friends-and-family-and-id-do-it-again/ <comment><USER2> Rockefeller said (roughly): good business makes good friendships, good friendships makes bad business.

There are so many possible risk scenarios not discussed in that essay. It does take more maturity, healthy relationship skills and good communication to work with existing people in your life. But that's fine, we should develop those skills anyway.

It's perfectly possible that a CEO could be 'happy' while his/her friends quietly remain unhappy.

In a way, a company failing could be the best outcome for friends and family getting hired -- everyone tried together and bonded in the crash. The worst could be a quality exit, in which your friend is enriched at 10-100x the amount you are. It's hard to stay friends with someone who just worked you hard for n years and then made 100x the money off the experience.

<comment><USER3> Interesting comment re: the best outcome being failure. I could see failure as going terribly for family/friend relationships. People are often at their most stressed in situations where their economic stability is threatened, and stress generally leads to conflict, in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest challenge would be encouraging growth with people outside of your base.

You become a $50m company, and the young manager you hired is turning out to be better than your sister/brother/wife/husband... are you ready to replace one of those people with an outside person?

As an outside individual I tend to be wary of working for a family run business because the chances are that I will never be able to replace the owner's wife/brother/sister/husband, instead my maximum growth will be the tier below the family.

<comment><USER5> This is true of a lot of founders of companies though. A lot of times the person who is the most invested in leadership for the early success of a company is not necessarily the best person to lead the company in the long term. Zuckerberg is probably the most noticed, recent example: he lead Facebook to the top of the social networking scene, but now investors are scared of him.

Objectivity is something you _always_ need in business.

<comment><USER6> Sure, objectivity is good, but often times difficult decisions have no objectively clear optimal path (eg. there are many good arguments to be made for why MZ should not be replaced, and even time will only evaluate a single path). Emotion has been a useful (though admittedly fallible) cognitive shortcut for our species in those situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't be worried about the effect on the business so much as the effect on the personal relationships. I'm sure working with friends and family is no worse for the business, and in many cases better, for the business.

If your life is your business, fine, but I would hate for my working life to invade my personal life to such a degree.

<comment><USER8> I understand your feelings on this, but I suspect that depends upon the degree to which someone is able to compartmentalize and multi-task. Having a work life and a personal life doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, even if you work for people you know. I freely acknowledge that it's not for everyone, however if you have the ability to structure your life properly, it can work wonderfully for both parties.

One of the biggest pluses would be the personality aspect. You can interview and hire someone with a stellar resume and great interview skills, however you cannot truly know their personality until you work with them, and personality is one of the things that can make or break a working relationship. As the article touched upon, you often better know the strengths and weaknesses of those closest to you. This allows you to find the best fit for someone's personality and skills, which benefits everyone. Additionally, your friends and family are likely to give their absolute best effort because they're not just a part of your business, they're a part of your life. That's not always the case I know, as I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of friends and family who have taken advantage of such opportunities. But implementing the steps outlined would aid in preventing such situations, or in remedying them quickly should they arise.

<comment><USER9> > I suspect that depends upon the degree to which someone is able to > compartmentalize and multi-task.

Well yes, it depends on your ability to compartmentalize. The problem is that it depends on your friends' and family's ability to compartmentalize just as much. I know _I_ would be able to handle my wife complaining about my work and keep that out of my personal life. I have much less faith that if I had to sit down and have a "serious talk" with my brother, he wouldn't hold anything against me personally.

When relationships are on the line, it's not all about you. What might not faze you, might still throw a wrench into things for other people, and the end result is just as damaging.

<comment><USER10> I have hired nearly all of my best friends (and even my girlfriend), and a large part of me regrets it; and yes: for the very reasons you describe (personal, not business).

I have had to fire friends, and I have had to negotiate with them. I actually _have_ managed to keep these people as close friends, but it got really tough going at times. :(

The thing that got really really hard for me, though, is that I no longer really just have "friends" in the sense of "someone you can tell your problems to".

Here is an example: let's say work sucks, or things are going badly in some negotiation, or maybe you literally jut hate your job that day and feel like going off on a massive "I wish I could just quit all of this" rant.

It no longer works to do this with your friends: they now have both emotional and economic incentives to argue with you, become frustrated at your opinions, or, even worse, themselves feel bad about their own lives.

In the other direction, I often feel the need to avoid hanging out with some of the people I most cherish in my life, as I know if I do they will ask after the status of something I should have done, or start asking me questions about something they should do.

The result is that I'm, in a way, not even allowed to have work/life separation anymore: whereas I'm totally fine with the idea "this is just dinner, can we not talk about work?", it is nearly impossible to get everyone else to abide.

I therefore have actually been quite happy as some of my friends have gotten larger jobs elsewhere (I really was mostly doing extreme part-time hiring as contractors) as I now can interact with them "normally".

(Now, that all said, I also feel I have seen this "work better" in a previous company I was a part of, but I can't help but wonder if it was because I was the employee as opposed to the employer.)

(I don't really hear my friends complaining about this interaction, for example; that said, maybe they just wouldn't tell me, due to this very same underlying bug.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My older brother admits he likes working with me and would do it again... now I have it in writing!

It is incredible how many people hear about our team which includes quite a few family members and say they can't imagine working with their brother (or sister, cousin, or whatever) but it works well for us. I can't imagine it any other way.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a very YMMV post. Everyone's family/friend situation is different, as is the type of business you're heading into.

Personally I'd rather befriend those that I work with to avoid mixing contexts. But then again I'm very particular about the way I conduct my business and how I get things done. Ultimately when you hire friends and family, you're bringing the social contracts into a different atmosphere. If I hire a friend as a programmer, I'm somewhat socially obligated to listen to his advice about taxes, whereas I have no obligations to a stranger that I hire for that purpose. The absolute worst thing is to ask your significant other for advice on a topic that they know little about, then having to pretend that you're considering it.

<comment><USER13> I disagree, this is a 'I haven't been in a car wreck so I see no value in seat belts' kind of story.

Friends is one thing, family is another. There is a reason every single HR boiler plate policies binder has a section which prohibits members of the same family from having a reporting relationship with each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think that part of the reason why working with your friends and family gets a bad name, is that when it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. So even if it might be successful a decent percentage of the time, the fear of that cataclysmic blow up prevents people from taking the plunge.

I think that using some of the techniques outlined in the article certainly mitigate that risk.

</comment><comment><USER14> I started a company with my then-boyfriend, now husband. I can't imagine founding with anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER15> "You know their strengths and weaknesses"

YES. This is why working with my brother is awesome. We know exactly which work to pass off to each other. There's never any "I could have done that better" competition or awkwardness.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I find interesting is that nepotism is somewhat taboo in western culture. With businesses either deciding not to hire family or being careful to avoid favouritism.

On the other hand, shops in my area that are run by those originally from the east (or descendants thereof) are almost entirely family run with the assumption usually being that the oldest son is effectively the "deputy" and will be the one to run the business when the father retires.

<comment><USER17> Toyota's current CEO is a descendant of the founder of the company. Dynastic family members are dispersed throughout the "group companies". I wonder how much of such behavior would be tolerated in the west. (then again, James Murdoch is pretty high in News Corp so who knows).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Totally agree. There are definite pitfalls and things to watch out for, but working with friends and family can be great when you do it right.

<comment><USER19> Also pays to have complimentary skills rather than the same ones. Helps take ego and competitiveness out of the equation.

<comment><USER11> I think that is why it works well for me and my brother. I handle the tech and he handles everything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Working with a friend and family had a great advantage that even if you mess up something they will be still around to help (now, if your "friends" stop being your friend because of some business failure then they were not real friends anyway).

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Dynasty></comment>


Show HN: Yopp – A very quick way to transfer a file from phone to computer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp <comment><USER2> For the Linux users: Try KDE Connect, it is amazing!

You can easily share files in both directions and you have a shared clipboard which makes exchanging short texts and urls very simple.

<comment><USER3> \+ Phone notifications on your desktop! A really awesome piece of software that doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AirDrop works pretty flawlessly if you're using an iPhone and Mac, which is fortunately + by choice my only setup / workflow.

<comment><USER5> Annoyingly, AirDrop works _directly_ over wifi, meaning that you can't use it to transfer files between an iPhone (connected to router Foo via wifi) and a Mac that's 1. Ethernet-wired to the same router Foo, and 2. has no wifi support.

I'm not sure if (Intel-era) Macs without wireless cards/chipsets exist outside of Hackintoshes, but they're pretty common as Hackintoshes.

<comment><USER6> Well you're using a product built with specific hardware in mind with _totally different_ , unsupported hardware. Apple doesn't sell any devices without WiFi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is how it looks like: [https://i.imgur.com/KqcRwXY.gif](https://i.imgur.com/KqcRwXY.gif)

i.e. "upload with phone, get the file on computer"

<comment><USER7> I don't know if this is a known thing but my problem is in the reverse - getting things from my computer to the phone.

Things like screenshots, gifs, webms etc from my computer to any phone anywhere, without first uploading to imgur or Google Drive / Dropbox / some other Live File-sharing service.

Know of a simple tool that does that?

<comment><USER8> This would take care of that use case as well. It's a webapp that saves only a single file that can only be downloaded once. The idea is that the URL is only known to you. Pretty neat idea for personal file sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a neat little project.

Quick question; why not split the PHP file into index.html and upload.php (or whatever)? I get that simplicity is key ("This one file does everything!"), but you could use that to build a couple more features (maybe some sort of PIN protection). Just throwing some ideas out there, cool utility nonetheless.

Edit: And by splitting the file you could allow other people to build little frontends like native apps or browser extensions.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is very cool! But you need to have a device with a reachable public IP address. For those that don't, Micah Lee's [https://onionshare.org/](https://onionshare.org/) is a decent option. But routinely, I just GnuPG encrypt stuff, and use [https://file.io/](https://file.io/).

<comment><USER7> Is there a solution that doesn't require you to type out the tedious URL [http://asxmi4q6i7pajg2b.onion/egg-cain](http://asxmi4q6i7pajg2b.onion/egg- cain) [1] for example, on your computer or your phone (when doing the reverse -- computer to phone) ?

Sometimes its not even a file but a block of text that you want quickly transferred from your computer to your phone or vice-versa that shouldnt require the use of a third party service.

I'm stunned to learn that there's really no such tool that lets you push URLs / Links / Text / GIFs / Screenshots between devices that you own & have on you.

There's QPush which has a Chrome extension and an app but really nothing else close to what I describe. [2]

[1] Onionshare - How to Use

[https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare/wiki](https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare/wiki)

[2] QPush

[http://qpush.me/en/](http://qpush.me/en/)

<comment><USER11> For block-of-text transfer between computer and phone I use qrencode [1] to encode text on my computer as a QR code, Barcode Scanner [2] on my Android phone to read the text or generate a QR code from text on the phone, and QtQR [3] to scan a code on the phone screen using my laptop webcam.

The QR code detection in QtQR is a bit uncomfortable (you need to press a key to confirm, while holding the phone into the camera) and requires me to set my phone screen to maximum brightness, but otherwise it works quite well. It doesn't really solve the problem for large files like images, but I have successfully used it with long HN comments I started on my phone but wanted to finish on my laptop.

[1] [https://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/](https://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/) There's a Debian package you can just apt-get install

[2] [https://f-droid.org/packages/com.google.zxing.client.android...](https://f-droid.org/packages/com.google.zxing.client.android/)

[3] [https://launchpad.net/qr-tools](https://launchpad.net/qr-tools)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b I may be not using the latest and greatest, but email works pretty well for me... if I need more than 10mb, I use wetransfer. Sure it goes through the internet, but yes I don't want to think more than 1second about how to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but then, you have to think about deleting it once it's downloaded (or you'll have a growing email box), or ask WeTransfer to delete the files... See [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/blob/master/README.md#m...](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/blob/master/README.md#minimalist- ux)

<comment><USER12> Wetransfer delete the file after 7 Days for a free account and after 4 weeks with a pro account.

[https://wetransfer.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/202603916-H...](https://wetransfer.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/202603916-How-long-are-uploads-available-to-download-)

<comment><AUTHOR> With Yopp, we use 7 atomic actions to perform the task (see [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/blob/master/README.md#m...](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/blob/master/README.md#minimalist- ux)).

I tried with WeTransfer and we have 10 taps/clicks + 16 alphanumeric characters to type on keyboard:

        Open browser on phone [1 tap], Open wetransfer page [1 tap if in bookmarks], "Take me to free" [1 tap], "I agree" [1 tap],
        "Add your files" [1 tap], Choose the file [1 action], "..." round icon [1 tap], "Send as link" [1 tap], "Transfer" [1 tap].
        Open browser on computer [1 double click], write URL [at least 16 alphanumeric keystrokes], e.g. we.tl/aqNXmKTjFO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> termux + woof

woof -i <ip_address> -p <port> <filename>

termux: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en)

woof: [http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/woof.html](http://www.home.unix- ag.org/simon/woof.html)

Edit:

1\. Allows directory upload/download (tar/gzip/bzip2 compressed)

2\. Local file server (doesn't go over the internet)

3\. Allows upload form (-U option)

4\. Allows file to be served <count> number of times (-c option)

<comment><AUTHOR> The key thing with Yopp is that it only requires 7 actions: [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist- ux](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist-ux).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Have you ever spent more than 1 second wondering"

They should add:

\- Run a static file server but huh, I don't have a full blown web server and/or php installed on my work station.

Seriously, I think syncthing provides a rather good solution for this problem. You have to install it on every machine though.

<comment><USER15> Their premise is x <-> y.

Saying "I can run `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`" doesn't help- it's not the problem they seem to be solving. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER14> From what I gather, it's a php page. You upload 1??? file or download that file - for that you have to know the URL. So it's rather x<->anyone who knows the URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> sharedrop.io works great for devices on the same wifi network.

There is also pushbullet - I generally take screenshots and like to transfer to desktop. I can 'share' a screenshot I took using pushbullet and it will appear in a new browser tab in my desktop, and then I can save it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently wrote [https://justa.ml](https://justa.ml)

Was looking for something ready-to-use and simple (without login or giving too much details) for the situations when AirDrop or PushBullet <3 is not an option.

Hastily written code code is available at [https://github.com/mustakimali/JustA.ML](https://github.com/mustakimali/JustA.ML) Learned a thing or two about end-to-end encryption while working on that.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is cool.

 _put on old man's hat_

I remember in the good old days of flip phones, I just use Bluetooth OBEX to locally transfer the file(s) to another Bluetooth enabled device. It's a bit slow but otherwise works fine. It was simple too—just select the picture, hit send via Bluetooth, select the receiving Bluetooth device, and hit Send. All these file transfer over the cloud using google/Dropbox/amazon/etc for local devices feel like Rube Goldberg to me...

 _done ranting_

</comment><comment><USER19> How do you transfer a bunch on pictures rather than just one ? I just go in the gallery, select the pictures and share them with Box. Would be the same with Dropbox, can't you keep the connection active on both sides? (no need to type the password)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there a way a web app can add itself to the Android ACTION_SEND intent list? That would make it simpler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please ping me if you find a solution for this (please post on [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/issues](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp/issues)), I'm highly interested!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> AirDrop not work on my side. I have iOS 10 and OSX El Capitan. Maybe this is a reason but I do not want really to update it.

Instead of Airdrop I'm using Telegram messager and share files to myself. It's quick and I'm always have access to them in the cloud.

<comment><USER22> You're not alone. I have High Sierra and iOS 11 and still find it to be finicky. Of course, it was worse with prior OSes, but even now I find it takes a long time for devices to "find" each other when transferring from iOS to MacOS, or vice-versa. I seriously end up using Dropbox sometimes because Airdrop won't work.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The real key idea of this tool is to _require 7 actions only_ : [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist- ux](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist-ux).

</comment><comment><USER23> Very nice idea. Since I'm a newb at PHP, I would prefer it to be in a language I can hack in, but this is a clever way to solve one of the most annoying problems in the world :-)

(I totally do the Google Drive thing right now)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're a newbie at PHP, it could be fun to read the code: there's < 50 lines of PHP code, and that's it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Shame the server needs to be there. Would be good if you could do some auto negotiation between two browsers.

Partner 'still' has failed to liberate photos from smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER25> Also Dukto: [http://www.msec.it/blog/?page_id=11](http://www.msec.it/blog/?page_id=11)

</comment><comment><USER26> You can do something similar with [https://www.qkast.com](https://www.qkast.com) and web content.

</comment><comment><USER27> Alternatively: [https://send.firefox.com/](https://send.firefox.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but not really. Imagine it is uploaded on phone. The URL is [https://send.firefox.com/share/bec9e0497c](https://send.firefox.com/share/bec9e0497c). Will you spend 30 seconds writing this URL in the URL bar of your computer browser? (oh no, I made a typo in the URL, let's start again...).

Once again, the idea with Yopp is _7 atomic actions and no more_ : [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist- ux](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist-ux)

<comment><USER28> >Will you spend 30 seconds writing this URL in the URL bar of your computer browser? (oh no, I made a typo in the URL, let's start again...)

Firefox lets you send a tab/link to another device (if you use Firefox sync). No typing necessary.

>Yopp is 7 atomic actions and no more

I like the UX well enough, but calling it just 7 actions completely ignores that you need to have an internet facing webserver with PHP, configured. Many of us here could arrange that pretty easily, but it greatly adds to complexity versus using an existing web-service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh that's interesting, I didn't know that about Firefox sync. How does it work? You connect, once for all (with a login/pwd?) 2 browsers (e.g. phone Firefox and computer Firefox)?

Then you go to send.firefox.com, on phone, and you upload a file. And then how do I get the tab with the right URL on the PC? I guess I open Firefox, and then how can I see "tabs opened on my phone"? (Would you have a screenshot?)

<comment><USER29> Yes, you set up Sync once on each device, with a password. You can configure what you want to sync (bookmarks, tabs, preferences, ...). I only sync bookmarks, those just appear automatically. I never tried syncing tabs. I see now there is a "Sync now" command in the old Alt-menu, and a "Synced Tabs" window in the new hamburger-menu, but I never used those.

Screenshots: [https://imgur.com/a/QkhNQ](https://imgur.com/a/QkhNQ)

[https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/features/sync/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/features/sync/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also [https://sendcatch.com](https://sendcatch.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> The beauty of this lies in how simple it is. I love it!

</comment><comment><USER32> Ummm Google Drive?

</comment><comment><USER33> Airdroid

<comment><AUTHOR> If you count everything (opening Airdroid app on phone, choosing the file, opening airdroid on PC, etc.), how many actions (including _every_ click / tap) does it require? See [https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist- ux](https://github.com/josephernest/Yopp#minimalist-ux).

<comment><USER33> You're not wrong but I don't have to run a server to use Airdroid.</comment></comment></comment>


Baidu and KFC's new smart restaurant suggests what to order based on your face - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/23/baidu-and-kfcs-new-smart-restaurant-suggests-what-to-order-based-on-your-face/ <comment><USER2> That is a bit unimpressive, right?

They could just randomly pick anything from the menu, and say it was because of the scan, and it would still have the same PR effect, wouldn't it? (since no one would suspect it of getting it perfectly right in the first place)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really want the restaurant that adjusts your portion size depending on your body shape. Something like 1000 calories - (BMI^2). It'd keep me around BMI=20.</comment>


The Breathtaking Magnitude of Our Technology - <AUTHOR> http://blog.abi.sh/2010/the-breathtaking-magnitude-of-our-technology/

<comment><USER2> People make fun of me all the time when I stop in the middle of what I (or we) am doing and say, "Holy cow man, look at what we CAN do! Look at what we ARE doing!" Dreams of 10 years ago became realities yesterday.

We have the ability to see things that are so small, you wouldn't even know they were there otherwise. We can compute Pi to millions (billions!) of digits before I can even say the first 4 out loud. [Mentioned in article] I live video chat with a friend in China, which is on the other side of the planet, thousands of KM and miles away. Millions (billions!) of people can all access information from their homes or their phones, in the middle of no where. We are communicating with a man made object that is over 20 BILLION kilometers away from us. We can store thousands (millions!) of books in a device no larger than a human finger. We can move several times faster than the speed of sound. We can...

Simply amazing. It is humbling to be able to work with technology every day and see what we can do. It is truly a blessing to know that even 5 years from now we, the human race, will be doing things that people are only beginning to imagine now. Here is to you technology, you make my pants shrink.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only commercial supersonic jet no longer flies. The Space Shuttle is being retired without a replacement. It has taken months to stop the spill in the Gulf. Billions of dollars spent and we can't cure cancer. We can't even cure the common cold. Only a small fraction of the world even contributes to progress. Most people live on a few dollars a day and are just trying to survive.

In short, we have a long way to go, and there's a lot of work to do.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a non-tech community like HN? - <AUTHOR>

When I send non-tech articles that surface on HN to my friends or mention in conversation that I had just recently read an article about some random topic, people always ask where I get all this information.
I usually send people that have an interest in technology straight to Hacker News. Unfortunately many of my friends won't care for most of what is posted here.
Is there any forum where other intelligent and curious people hang out and discuss articles that are similar to the non-tech ones that surface on HN? Could a single such a forum even exist with an audience that comes from a wide range of backgrounds?
In other news, the non-tech articles that surface on HN do give you a rather broad sampling of interesting things to read. I know that many people here would prefer to keep politics and "random" articles of the front page, but I'm personally very grateful for this education that I otherwise wouldn't get. <comment><USER2> I like Reddit's /r/science ([http://www.reddit.com/r/science](http://www.reddit.com/r/science)). You'll find some of the same articles as Hacker News, plus some great discussion from smart people who aren't necessarily computer geeks.

For straight computer geekery, there's /r/technology ([http://www.reddit.com/r/technology](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology)) -- but I like it less than Hacker News since the comments can be more immature. (There also seems to be a large population of gamers on that subreddit, and I'm not a gamer, so I have less in common with the people there than with many people here on HN.)

For marketing and _some_ general startup business advice, I like [http://www.inbound.org/](http://www.inbound.org/) \-- they are also starting to do AMAs ("Ask me anything") like Reddit does with well-known startup/marketing folks.

For intelligent interviews with successful entrepreneurs, you can't beat Mixergy ([http://mixergy.com/](http://mixergy.com/)). Disclaimer: I've done two interviews with Andrew. Here's one I did on finding the right business idea, which might be useful to your less-technical-but-still-entrepreneurial friends: [http://mixergy.com/course-cheat-sheet-find-your-biz- idea/](http://mixergy.com/course-cheat-sheet-find-your-biz-idea/)

I also like [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/) and [http://www.reddit.com/r/askreddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/askreddit) when I'm just ready to zone out and enjoy some Internet strangeness after a long day running a startup.

<comment><USER3> Good list of subreddits. I also recommend:

/r/Ask Science ([http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/)) /r/DataIsBeautiful ([http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/](http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> metafilter.com

To elaborate on this answer, it's one of the coolest general communities on the Internet. It has a good, developed culture. Peruse the wiki for a bit...

[http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, sometimes I wish I knew some HN's like communities for finance careers or accountants. Any idea?

</comment><comment><USER6> I would love to hear if you find any good communities out.

</comment><comment><USER7> One word for you: METAFILTER.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe check out MetaFilter

</comment><comment><USER9> reddit?

<comment><USER10> I'm not the OP but this might be more helpful if you have any subreddits to recommend? Reddit is big :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> if somebody join hands we could start a non-tech website, it's not a big deal. I am ready to invest my time and contribute little money.

I am in! who else could join?</comment>


Efficiency with Sublime Text and ruby - <AUTHOR> https://thunderboltlabs.com/blog/2013/11/19/efficiency-with-sublime-text-and-ruby/

<comment><USER2> This is very detailed post about my favorite editor. It shows you some of the great things Sublime Text is capable of. I don't do any Ruby development and I still found the post very interesting and useful - Most of the tricks shown there are applicable to other programming languages / editing needs too.</comment>


Clojure Obscura - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2012/07/09/clojure-obscura/#post-4392 <comment><USER2> +1 great list Michael. I liked the contracts/Trammel link. I have never really got into contracts but this looks lite enough on ceremony that I can visualize using it. A long time ago I was very enthusiastic about the Little Schemer and Little Reasoner books, and sometime I need to make the plunge into core.logic.

I wish that I could (mostly) "go all in" with Clojure but there are also so many things I enjoy about Ruby. These two languages compete for my dev attention, and sometimes it is a brutal fight :-) Almost like there is too much good/useful/fun tech (cornucopia complex: [http://blog.markwatson.com/2005/11/cornucopia-complex- ruby-o...](http://blog.markwatson.com/2005/11/cornucopia-complex-ruby-on- rails-vs.html))

</comment><comment><USER3> Good to see the compilation target list is growing. The Clojure->Scheme->C target has previously been discussed on HN, sad to see it isn't being actively worked on now. The Clojure->C target is new to me though, and is active. The documentation is a bit light and I can't gleam how to use it from the tests. Has anyone here played with it and know what's going on?

<https://github.com/schani/clojurec>

<comment><USER4> What is it about Clojure that makes implementation towards other targets so appealing / approachable to devs?

<comment><USER5> At least some of the recent Clojure implementations are based on ClojureScript's compiler, which from what I understand is relatively moduler: [http://blog.fogus.me/2012/03/27/compiling-clojure-to- javascr...](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/03/27/compiling-clojure-to-javascript- pt-3-the-himera-model/)

Lisps in general are appealing to implement. Clojure's core language is about as small as Scheme's, and there are a lot of Scheme implementations too. The parts of Clojure that set it apart from other Lisps (STM, persistent data structures) aren't always ported. I don't think any of the recent approaches to targeting C (Clj->Scheme->C, Clj->C) include STM or persistent data structures. I'd be happy to be pleasantly surprised though.

<comment><USER6> persistent data structures are implemented in ClojureScript. So they don't need to be ported for new compilation targets of ClojureScript like C in clojurec, I think.

<comment><USER7> ClojureScript's core library has a dependency on Google Closure, and are optimized with knowledge of javascript vms. david nolen said that v8, for example, is blazingly fast at sequential instructions so they take great care to avoid function calls in critical paths.

here's some discussion that alludes to performance concerns in js vms: <http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJS-284>

here's the original commit for PersistentVector, note how low level the code is: [https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/commit/e615f4cd326e...](https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/commit/e615f4cd326e7c608050272c64c4dfaff9a34689)

here's more discusson by david nolen: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/clojur...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/clojure/clojurescript$20performance/clojure/c3ho-Y8o6Wg/CwzSLHio0-QJ)

more discussion about allowing low level code access to js-specific special forms for numerics: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/clojur...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/clojure- dev/clojurescript$20performance/clojure-dev/NbvLeJRLQtc/kTzJaZsh6gAJ)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Open-source submission rather than a resume for job applicants? - <AUTHOR>

Sparked by the recent 37signals post on not using tests for hiring I've been thinking about ways to incorporate open-source work as part of a requirement for hiring.
Interested in everyones thoughts on how they would respond to the following hiring technique:
To apply for an engineering role, find an open source project on github, get a patch accepted for a feature request or significant bug fix. It has to be of useful scope, with a unit test. Object-oriented code only.
Send us the diff, a brief work history, a reference and why you want to work for us.
If we like it, come work with us for a day, paid at market rates. If you like us, and we like you, we'll make you an offer the following day. <comment><USER2> When I knew I would be looking at the job market, I ended up making my own Open Source project as a kind of resume.

It was something to show off my code, my architecture, and my attention to UX. Did it get me a job? No, not directly (although it did get me a number of possible offers). It was something that I could feel confident passing on to potential employers, though, and I can only feel that it helped my case.

Of course, I wouldn't suggest that everyone start their own medium-large open source project, but I agree that being able to show code is vital, and Open Source projects are the best way to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. I'm amazed at how many developers don't have some sort of code to show that they can code.

The thing I like about asking for open-sourced work is that it's not wasted effort like tests. You write something inherently useful and it either gets you that job, or helps for the next job you apply for, as happened to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do this as a rule. Chances are the companies I'd work best at won't be the type to value a resume.

I'm going to be looking for a job very soon, so I built:

<https://github.com/plusjade/jekyll-bootstrap>

and

<https://github.com/plusjade/narly>

I always get "it depends on the company" from naysayers - but I guess that's the point. I believe in Open Source so I'd need to work for a company that has the same values.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd do it, but then I hate interviews so much that I have been thinking of starting a business just so I don't have to interview for a position.</comment>


Economists Are Obsessed with Job Creation – How About Less Work? (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/less-work-job-creation-peter-gray/ <comment><USER2> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume.

But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.

So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle ([https://www.en.uni- muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...](https://www.en.uni- muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_socialcapital.html))

Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.

<comment><USER3> To rephrase:

Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.

This leads to the following conundrum:

If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.

Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

<comment><USER4> We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does.

The US labor market only really has shortages by design.

<comment><USER3> I agree that _some_ labor shortages are the product of artificial restriction. But I strongly disagree that _all_ labor shortages in the US have this property. Some labor shortages are unambiguously intrinsic and very difficult to eliminate. Sometimes there simply aren't enough people with deep expertise necessarily acquired over several years to meet demand.

Take my specialty for example. I mostly work on operational multi-modal spatial and sensor analytics at extremely large scales and high velocities (as is typical for these data models). Right now, half the Fortune 500 are trying to hire people that know how to design these systems and throwing silly money at anyone that seems like they can. There is no open source software that can do it and half the required computer science is not in literature, it is an extremely deep technical specialty that takes years of experience to learn. There are, maybe, a half-dozen people in the world right now that know how to design these systems end-to-end from first principles and likely a demand for several hundred. There is no way to manufacture that supply on a time horizon that matters to anyone that wants to hire them.

Even one level lower, high-end systems engineering talent demand is _at least_ an order of magnitude higher than the actual supply. This requires very deep experience to be competent that you can't learn in bootcamp or six months of on-the-job training. Yet despite being paid extremely well even by software engineering standards, as an industry we don't come remotely close to producing enough of them. In fairness, it takes serious devotion to craft and no small amount of talent to become high-end systems engineer -- but few people with the raw talent have that ambition or interest, even though it pays extremely well. You can't force people to do what they have no interest in doing.

<comment><USER4> 6 months may not be enough to train up someone without a technical background, but when a skill shortage extends beyond the time horizon of training a pool of 100's of thousands of people up it's very much self inflicted as the company simply does not want to pay market rate + training.

PS: People with related skills can always pick up these deep specialty skills with extreme speeds. I have seen someone paid contractor rates to learn a extreme specialty. Including that training, he actually finished the project in less time than the original team had wasted.

<comment><USER3> There are many deep specialties that _no one_ picks up with "extreme speed" no matter how technical they are, certainly not to the level required by companies that want to hire these skills. Think database kernel engineering or non-trivial parallel systems design. Acquiring these skills happens almost exclusively by apprenticing for years with real experts. In six months you could go from no skills to mediocre skills with a lot of training, but no one wants "mediocre" working on their database kernel for good reason.

It would be like me assuming that I, a broadly competent technical expert, could quickly and easily develop a deep expertise in e.g. high-performance graphics engines. A diagnosis of Dunning-Kruger would not be incorrect were I to make such an assertion.

<comment><USER4> This is not a new problem.

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

Look into it's history and Walt Disney has been training animators for decades. It's a deep skill that is takes significant time to master, so you need an actual pipeline.

Continuing the idea, NASA trains astronauts. They don't need very many world wide, but they need a few and the only way to get them is to train these people.

I could go on, but outside of a months to few years for absolutely new fields shortages are by design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If market competition wasn't so aggressive, we could start to focus more on value creation. Right now the economy is all about capturing existing value, monopolizing markets to keep competitors out and using targeted advertising to divert people's attention away from real value. Journalism is in such bad shape that if an independent scientist invented a cure for cancer, most people probably wouldn't hear about it and that scientist would end up homeless. If there is no big money behind something, nobody cares!

Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor who will pay them.

Journalism is dead, now everything we believe in is decided by so-called 'influencers' but these are typically the most shallow, superficial, scheming, manipulative individuals that have ever walked the face of the earth. These people wouldn't know how to tell the difference between real value and a steaming pile of shit. Most influencers are just idiots with rich friends.

Capital has replaced our values. We need to bring back real values like honesty, integrity, humility, experience, pursuit of knowledge, empathy, efficiency...

<comment><USER6> > Try starting an open source project these days; your chance of getting any > traction is close to zero. Influencers are unlikely to help you to spread > awareness of your project unless there is something in it for them > financially; they're more likely to help promote an enterprise competitor > who will pay them.

This is interesting. You're saying you would be giving away something valueable for free, and yet there would be no takers? Maybe it's not so valueable after all then? Stuff that is genuinely solving some yet unsolved pain or problem should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

<comment><USER5> >> Stuff that is genuinely helpful and valueable and unique should, given time, take on its own, without influencers.

This is completely false. It depends entirely on your social network.

My main OSS project has over 5K stars on GitHub; it's used by thousands of companies and has been growing steadily but I'm certain that if it hadn't been on the front page of HN 5 years ago, nobody would be using it today. These days it accumulates more GitHub stars every day and I don't do any marketing at all. GitHub stars compound like dollars in a bank account. It got to this point because of HN. Being a useful product was just the prerequisite. There are plenty of potentially very useful products which no one will ever use because people are poorly informed.

Some niche projects are obviously useful, but there is a significant category of projects which are highly valuable but whose value is not immediately obvious; in these cases it can take years to build momentum and you NEED influencers to help you to get that once in a lifetime chance to make even a small impact in your industry.

Also, the opposite is true; there are projects that seem valuable at a glance and which can get a lot of attention (if promoted by the right influencers) but they are an anti-pattern and they provide negative value in the medium and long term.

I've seen many great projects go nowhere and I've seen really terrible projects become exceedingly popular.

The masses are not rational at all; most decisions are based on shared delusions. How many times in human history have huge amounts of people believed things that were proven to be completely false. Too many to count. There are many things that we believe today which will someday be proven to be false. Humanity has not gotten smarter over the past few decades, if anything, we've become complacent and as a result we've developed tunnel vision and have become dumber.

<comment><USER7> In other words, marketing is very important. I think as technical people we like to "evaluate things on merit," but the reality is that the technological complexity of our society has become such that it is virtually impossible for someone to gauge the quality of a product in a field where we're not an expert. That's part of why marketing takes on such importance.

<comment><USER5> Yes it is. It's just extremely frustrating that even though people are aware of how powerful marketing is, that no one seems to acknowledge its effects on themselves and on society. Marketing doesn't create value, it redistributes existing value by creating an illusion of added value. The reality is that it takes value from a large number of small players and gives it to a few large players; and this has nothing to do with the true underlying value of the products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer."

\--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

<comment><USER9> I disagree. I think it largely depends on the work you do. If you are doing something you dont enjoy.or don't find meaningful, the work is just a means to an end. But for many people a job is something they derrive meaning from, many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work. I think probably the best example is people who work with the mentally handocapped, studies reveal they tend to be the happiest and most fulfilled, likely because they are getting that sense of fulfillment from their work.

I think the author is wrong about our work culture impaacting peoples need for work. I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, like they are useful. The question to me isnt how do we create less work, its how do we make work more meaningful for people

<comment><USER10> I don't need a job to give my life meaning. Thanks, but I already have friends, family, hobbies, etc. It's the need to have a job to pay my bills, that reduces the time I can actually spend with my friends, family, hobbies, etc.

So, the current system gives meaning to some, and takes meaning from some. I'd have to see some math first, in order to believe it is actually a net benefit on average.

> many craftspeople have notions of pride in their work

Yeah, the job keeps me advancing at my craft; I think alone I would be doing similar things anyway, but probably more slowly. At the same time, the job often forces me to cut corners; alone I would prefer to do things properly, rather than hurry up towards a bullshit deadline only to fix things later when they start falling apart. Again, the pride is both given and taken.

> I think people actually want to feel like they are contributing to society, > like they are useful.

But that's quite different from having a job. With more free time, I could contribute to society in ways that are not predictably profitable (which is why I am not doing as a source of income now), but would probably have more meaning that what I am doing now.

> how do we make work more meaningful for people

If you make it voluntary, at least the smart people will have freedom to optimize it towards more meaning. Maybe stupid people will need more guidance. If so, let there be some provided, but again, make it a bit more voluntary than "obey or starve".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I live in SF and I have been in and out of the tech industry, so I know the city from both perspectives. (I now work at one of the big tech companies.) So many people outside of the industry work more than one job. They need to. Wages are too low. That is the problem, wages. Focus on that, economists, so ordinary people can get by on one job's wages.

<comment><USER12> Wish there were more comments about this. Like you, I too worked in an industry that wasn't technology (home repair services, carpenters, electricians and plumbers), and saw it for what it was.

It's atrocious what some of these people are asked to do and the wages they're expected to perform at.

But beyond that, even wages aren't even the entire picture. I live in Chicago. I managed a fleet of workers who not only had to content with a company that paid laughable wages, workers were on their own for parking, vehicle maintenance, equipment and materials, ancillary costs of maintaining their tools.

End of the day the $25 we paid to our _licensed and insured_ electrician translated to $12/hr coming home.

I fought for a year to get those fellas better pay. Our managing company was hearing none of it. The guy who ran the entire operation took home six figures. I know this because I saw the books.

<comment><USER13> Labor's been screwed the last 50 years. What kind of six figures are we talking, mid?

<comment><USER12> _What kind of six figures are we talking, mid?_

The kind that go into his bank account? Is there another kind I'm unaware of presently-I'm unsure how to answer your question here?

<comment><USER14> I think the commenter was trying to ascertain _just how deep_ the implied inequality was -- if the guy who ran the entire operation is barely clearing $100,000, then as far as I understand, in the context of San Francisco the owner is struggling as well -- that says something else about the economic situation of the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are economists obsessed with job creation? Government economists tend to focus on it because that's literally their job, but my sense of academic economists has always been that they're pretty good at not eliding distinctions like between employment and economic value.

<comment><USER16> 100% employment is possible. Just look at any U.S. military base. Without poverty, capitalists lose some of the leverage over the working class which makes the current levels of exploitation difficult to maintain without massive price hikes. I think the U.K. had an experience with mass employment that convinced capitalists to raise the prices of their goods just to maintain the exploitation which poverty allowed.

<comment><USER17> Sure, we once had an entire country with 300 million population, living like on a military base: barracks as residences, the same assortment available in department stores, symbolic salaries, some involuntary labor, and no freedom of movement. It was the USSR.

Not everyone liked this lifestyle. At least the personnel on military bases know when their contract ends, so they could return to life of freedom and opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Neat! Gray is the person who first pointed me towards anarchism (back in 1999, wow) as a political philosophy, after reading about his Sudbury Valley School and following a link to the Anarchist FAQ.

[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq- ed...](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial- collective-an-anarchist-faq)

</comment><comment><USER19> "Band hunter-gatherers, who, as I said, lived a life of play, are famous among anthropologists for their eagerness to share and help one another"

I can find a lot of similarities with the IT industry, or at least in the early days. This is what other industries misses a lot.

"Work less. Play more" I totally buy this slogan, our life is about us and our loved ones at the end.

</comment><comment><USER20> They're also under concerned about useless and wasteful jobs.

</comment><comment><USER21> In principle from a capital stand point, it is always better to have one unemployed person and one over worked person who is terrified of becoming unemployed than two employed people. So reducing workload to increase employment rates is completely unacceptable to those who own society.

Wage presure from near full employment is also undesireable to them but must be considered the lesser of two evils and is fairly fudge-able by changing the definition of employed.

<comment><USER22> That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up.

Do you think it's the "terror" that makes that situation prefferable from a "capital stand point"? In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror. And even so, why would splitting the work reduce this terror?

<comment><USER21> >That's a pretty big claim you're making with nothing to back it up.

It includes the following assumptions:

Low unemployment causes upward wage pressure.

Organizations are aware of this.

Organizations cooperate politically to achieve their goals.

>In times of historically low unemployment, I hardly think the general populace is holding such terror.

Exactly. Lower unemployment increases confidence. (and reduced hours would lower unemployment)

Higher up in this thread is a suggestion that: 1) almost all productivity comes from a few workers and 2) it is impossible to reduce their work load and 3) employers retain low productivity workers for long hours to encourage them. All of these assumptions are highly dubious but the theory is popular because it appeals to comforting, entrenched ideas. Which is why no one notices that is a big claim with nothing backing it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There already was great efficiency growth that would have enabled "less work".

It was all taken by the ruling "elite".

</comment><comment><USER24> Economists aren't "obsessed with job creation". _Politicians_ are.

<comment><USER25> …and they are obsessed because _voters_ are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Time for a period of degrowth, the only way we are going to deal with depleting natural resources and global warming.

</comment><comment><USER27> Less work is harder then it sounds because (in advanced economies) MOST jobs are skilled jobs, even the ones that don't seem that way, and developing skill takes time, skill, and practice. As others have noted, labor isn't nearly fungible as we often pretend, and two workers doing 20 hour schedules generally aren't as productive as one worker doing a 40 schedule. This shows up in the "part time penalty" for workers amongst other things, but should resonate with anyone who's had to onboard others to a team or project.

There is also obviously a point where more effort out of individual workers is counter productive (see Ford and the 40h work week), but it seems 32-40h weeks may be near optimum generally.

</comment><comment><USER28> for many, it is a huge ideological taboo to even consider distributing resources outside current investment/wage model

</comment><comment><USER29> Outside of a autocratic, centralized economy I would wager that it's natural for an economy to "find new work" for labor. The fact that we have increased automation does not mean that the labor force should shrink along with it, it should mean that over generations people do new things. An office supply company in the 70s would bet big on fax machines, with the ubiquity of email a comparable company today might focus on ergonomic office supplies.

</comment><comment><USER30> Theoretically it's fine, why not. In practice, who would opt to coordinate twice as big group of people with halved worktime?

<comment><USER31> Why don't we have half as many people working 80 hours then?

<comment> barry-cotter Because employers aren't generally willing to pay the premium necessary to get workers to do that. In some fields they are and the workers do, e.g. law, investment banking, medicine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Worth reading on Keynes famous prediction that productivity gains will result in 15 hours workweek.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequal...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality- work-hours/422775/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I dunno, I like working. I don't think I would want to go on an extended period without working hard. In fact, retiring early increases mortality[1].

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/627711)

<comment><USER34> Surveys indicate you're in the minority. Most people don't enjoy their job, or want to work less.

We're long overdue to move past "maximizing employment" at an economic policy level (looking at you US Federal Reserve).

<comment><USER27> I don't think you are right about people not enjoying their work, in the US context at least. The vast majority of workers seem to have pretty high job satisfaction. In fact, a quick search shows concern when average nationwide job satisfaction drops below the mid 80%s, which seems phenomenal. ([https://news.gallup.com/poll/147833/Job-Satisfaction- Struggl...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/147833/Job-Satisfaction-Struggles- Recover-2008-Levels.aspx))

As for wanting to work less, that's probably true, but I'll bet you could get that result for almost any question involving extensive time commitment- for example, I love my kids dearly and love spending time with them, but if grandma offers to watch them I'll take her up in a hot second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Economists are obsessed with job creation because the leading ones started their careers in the late 70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking, but the number of people who wanted a job was growing faster than ever.

<comment><USER36> "70s and early 80s when the number of jobs was shrinking"

That's very interesting. Got any cites for that? Would like to explore. Thx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> ...or how about let's just create more jobs?</comment>


Build Your Dream Job - <AUTHOR> http://sprouter.com/blog/build-your-dream-job/

<comment><USER2> Interesting title, not so interesting article :(

<comment><USER3> I kind of hope someone on here could address the title and write their own thoughts on how one does "build their dream job."

For example, I know I want to work for myself, and I would LOVE to own my own business - I want to make the world a better place.

But projecting that into both a concept that is a viable business and also knowing which concept to pull the trigger on is hard... Do I invest $200 here, $200 there? etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly off topic but, I've got a lot of respect for Veen. When I was younger, I picked up a copy of "The HotWired Style Guide", which is the best book I've ever read on web design. I'd say it's still worth reading today, even though it came out in the mid-nineties. The designers and developers at HotWired did big, foundational work within the constraints of the early web.</comment>


Zeo - a new device that can help you sleep better - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/how-the-zeo-sleep-device-works.html

<comment><USER2> I have one and it does work or at least give me data that looks about what I am experiencing.

So far I found that I wake up far too much in the middle of the night than I thought where I would think I only woke up once I would wake up around 9 more times that were only a few minutes and would forget about.

I ignored the sleep consoling on the site and just did my own experiments with the data.

I have a sleep number bed and turns out I needed to deflate the bed more to keep me from waking up all those time.

Nothing like insomnia to make you look at a $400 alarm clock and say "Hey! What a good idea!"

</comment><comment><USER3> My brother got one of these. He said the only problem with it was the headband, which he didn't want to wear to sleep all the time.

<comment><USER2> The headband didn't bother me so much, yeah you look like a dork wearing it.</comment></comment>


Q and A with Ballmer Discussing Bing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/companies/29ballmer.html <comment> brown9-2 I'm waiting for the point where Microsoft realizes that by continually playing catch-up in things like "search", they're doing nothing but burning tons of cash and getting no where fast.

Are the ad profits really that lucrative? Because from the outside it sounds like they waste a lot of time/money/effort on projects like this that are always destined to fail.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it is destined to fail. Do you think search _can't_ be done better than Google can do it? I am certain it can.

<comment><USER3> I'm certain a better search won't come from a top-down corporation like Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> With some of the Live stuff it -- for a short time at least -- seemed like Microsoft was finally starting to realize that the web is different than packaged software, and that instead of hyping a product like this while it's still "Coming soon," you should launch small and iterate.

When you buy a pre-marketed Office 20XX, you're stuck with Office 20XX -- when you try out a hyped up Cui...I mean Bing, you laugh and search Google to see if anybody's ridiculed it yet.

But, I guess since the Live stuff failed so badly that they have to continue working on stuff like Bing and buying companies like Powerset, they've decided to blame the process and go back to their tried and true web mantra of "promise veal, deliver a poop sandwich".

<comment><USER4> because of the slow economy and less people purchasing new computers, microsoft is gonna have a very hard time pushing this to users, as it is a not default search engine of a default bundled browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry, I haven't read TFA, and I don't know what Bing is about. It might even be something worth taking a look at. Maybe.

But seriously... Bing? BING? Come on, they can do better than that.

"It's Gaelic for 'thy turkey is done'"

</comment><comment><USER6> babble, rabble, optimism, babble, super interesting, rabble, babble, opportunity, wabble, innovation...

wait, he said innovation?

he got me there for a moment, hahaha</comment>


Do Alkaline foods reduce susceptibility to Corona Virus? - <AUTHOR> https://drsircus.com/general/viruses-are-ph-sensitive/ <comment><USER2> No. Coronavirus is not transmitted via food.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/03/25/is-e...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2020/03/25/is- eating-takeout-food-safe-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/)

Now if you want to pour lye into your nose and lungs, please report on the results...

</comment><comment><USER3> No.

No, they do not.</comment>


Why shopping on mobile is broken - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getrockerbox.com/post/hello-from-rockerbox

<comment><USER2> I use my phone in a different way to purchase products. I was recently on a camping trip and we were playing a game of "Cards Against Humanity," I thought it was fun and wanted to buy a set. I fired up Amazon's app and scanned the barcode. Confirmed the purchase and then in a 3-5 days I had the game. It took less than 20 seconds even with limited internet connectivity.

In this case, I got to test out the product, liked it and bought one for myself. I don't know if I would do the same with swiping left and right to get a product that I would ultimately purchase without trying it out first, unless there were some solid reviews backing up the product.

There are apps like Fancy, but they are image heavy and slow to load. I really don't think it's the right strategy in getting people to buy a product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon works great on mobile. Sounds like shopping on mobile is broken _for you_.

<comment><USER4> I agree, Amazon has put together a great product for mobile when you know what you are looking to buy, similar to the use case described by andy andyjsong. However, I would argue that this use case does not capture all shopping experiences. Many shoppers are preference oriented and need a way to browse through products while making a decision (e.g, apparel, travel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dont know, its not broken for me: I cant tell you how many times ive compared prices for something im looking at to Amazon and placed an order right there if the price difference was significant enough.

Where does Rockerbox source the products it sells? Is it simply a mobile facade for a shopping.com API or amazon referrals?

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon is great for getting a pricing point of comparison - can't argue with that. In fact Amazon is great if you know exactly what you want to be / for finding the best price. I'd argue it's not the best place to find what you want.

We source from each individual retailer. No APIs.

<comment><USER5> >> Amazon is great for getting a pricing point of comparison - can't argue with that. In fact Amazon is great if you know exactly what you want to be / for finding the best price. I'd argue it's not the best place to find what you want.

Im not sure I understand your argument: are you saying that amazon mobile suffers from item availability and/or discoverability?

<comment><AUTHOR> Primarily discoverability.

For example, if I know I want a new iPod dock - sorting through all of the potential products and processing all of the information associated through each one is a lot of work. Amazon doesn't do a great job of making this process simpler.

Availability is also an issue with clothing in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Swipe one way to like, the other to dislike? I do not like that. I'm used to navigating forward and back using those gestures.

Also, and I know I'm being nitpicky, but there's an empty button on the top right of your mockup.

</comment><comment><USER7> What about the additional security implications?</comment>


Show HN: Prototyping Tool Alpha - <AUTHOR> http://design-tool.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> I like it. Could use a little more contextual help and maybe a demo. Maybe bootstrap an interface that is great and let me then start fiddling with it. It was slow in my browser at first and I thought it was broken, so maybe some preloading would help.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on this browser-based interaction prototyping tool. The goal is to provide a a simple workspace where you can brainstorm and build clickable prototypes quickly and easily.

I'd love to get some feedback/suggestions.</comment>


If Software Is Eating the World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect? (2011) - <AUTHOR> Stumbled upon this old thread and curious to hear whether folks think this has changed eight years later.
 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2919708 <comment><USER2> That was in 2011. Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Uber, AirBnB were very much on their way up. I think coders get huge amounts of respect nowdays and I heard CS is one of the hottest majors now. The persona of the basement dwelling, thick lens glasses wearing, cheetos covered, socially awkward software programmer has been replaced by the hoodie wearing, anti-establishment, hyperintelligent, socially savvy rich entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because coders are mostly considered to be line workers.

They're comparatively well-paid labourers but their work more often than not is perceived as a cost centre with the actual value creation happening elsewhere (product development, design, marketing).

At least partly, coders have themselves to blame for that. By identifying as a "Java / JavaScript / Whatever developer" rather than someone who solves business problems developers commoditise themselves and their services.

If you're essentially marketing yourself as a set of TLAs you become a fungible resource.

</comment><comment><USER4> For the same reason that when industries were eating the world workers didn't get any respect . Why should programmers be treated in any way better than the rest of the world ? Are we somehow more worthy ?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think software innovation is good. But still you have to know the world so softwares won't eat it.</comment>


Is the Anonymous Threat to 'Erase' the NYSE Legit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394128,00.asp#fbid=obfQWV7Jjhf

<comment><USER2> _The video threat against the NYSE included a call for Anonymous supporters to utilize the so-called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) voluntary botnet tool to launch a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack against the NYSE's website on the target date._

Regardless of whether this is a threat from Anonymous or a fake, I really don't think DDOSing the web server(s) of the NYSE would have any affect whatsoever on their actual trading systems. I would assume (or hope) that there is no internal connection between the two.

<comment><USER3> Last time I checked, NYSE internal trading is on a Savvis backbone while nyse.com is on an Akamai CDN. I highly doubt there's _ANY_ connection between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. The main anonymous twitter accounts have denied it and they suspect it is a ploy to get people to use LOIC to arrest activists associated with #OccupyWallStreet

<comment><USER5> Ah, the real, canonical Anonymous then :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If they could do it, they would do it. There really is no point in announcing these sorts of things.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps they can knock down the wibsite www.nyse.com for some time but thats not a very big thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you would need several very powerful bombs in order to erase the NYSE. Even then, pretty much every firm that trades equities has an internal database with tick-by-tick ask/bid information.

I don't understand all the hate for Wall Street. They are doing as poorly as anyone else. Compare BAC's YTD share price:

[http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...](http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1317844800000&chddm=74676&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:BAC&ntsp=0)

And take a look at it 5 years ago:

[http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...](http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1317844800000&chddm=494615&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:BAC&ntsp=0)

<comment><USER9> Bank of America isn't exactly part of Wall Street. When I think of Wall Street, I think of the big (and not so big) investment banks.

While their stocks are(currently)down, and most of these banks are laying off employees, I think the hatred stems from the fact that these investment banks profited from the inflation of the housing bubble, and for the most part walked away clean, despite the fact that their actions were borderline criminal.

edit: Bank of America, is technically involved with investment banking, however that is because they acquired Merrill Lynch during the collapse. Before that, i believe that they were strictly retail.

<comment><USER8> Bank of America owns Merrill Lynch, which is a pretty big investment bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Attacking www.nyse.com !== 'erasing' the NYSE

<comment><USER11> I like that you used !==.

<comment><USER10> It's the JavaScript developer in me peeking out :x

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No. They're just a bunch of script kiddies. Ignore them.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought it didn't sound like the way Anonymous would act, from the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's tough being anonymous and set yourself apart from copycats. Actually the best attack some agency can do against anonymous is keep spamming "anonymous" videos to the point where there is so much noise that their message is tuned out.

The thing is, if there really is no leadership, how does anyone even tell if someone is "really" in Anonymous? Or if some video is "really" from them? Can even members of Anonymous tell? Otherwise it's like github and forking, except of idealistic concerns.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ahahah! Wait, they really took this prank as serious?

</comment><comment><USER16> They just want attention. Which you just gave them.

</comment><comment><USER17> queue the pixies

<comment><USER18> where is my mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nope

</comment><comment><USER20> In this terrorism culture, what does this message sound like other than .. terrorism?

<comment><USER21> In this terrorized culture, everything sounds terrifying.</comment></comment>


FiveThirtyEight analyses Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/?ex_cid=story-twitter <comment><USER2> Basic income as a cure to robots replacing everyone's job? Not too reassuring. I go from working and earning a living wage, to not working, collecting a free check from the Govt. that barely keeps me above the poverty line. Hard to get enthusiastic about that. People who own the robots will love basic income. It prevents social unrest.

The main problem with our economy and income equality is in the way Government deals with corporations. Corporations have the right to pay little or no taxes, and no responsibility to employ people or pay a real living wage ($7 hr is not a living wage unless you're a teen who lives at home). Their lowest wage workers are subsidized by things like welfare programs and the Earned Income Tax Credit. People have the EITC all wrong. The EITC is taxpayers paying workers what their employers don't.

<comment><USER3> > Hard to get enthusiastic about that.

What's a more appealing way to deal with the problem of many people having little or nothing to contribute?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Free, geeky ecards for Valentine's day - <AUTHOR> http://ecards.postkin.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a weekend project I created to make e-cards out of the fantastic US Patent Office valentine's day cards from Steve Hoefer (with permission of course)

While building it, I also got a chance to play with some of the newest tech that we all read about here on HackerNews - NodeJS, Express, Mongo, iced coffeescript (with await and defer), and heroku custom buildpacks (to support node 0.6.1)

Feedback on the UX, functionality, and overall experience are appreciated.

This project was also another chance to test a larger thesis of mine. When building a startup (as my wife and I are doing with Postkin.com), it's often helpful to create free, fun "viral side-along" projects. Although seemingly a diversion from your core business, fun sideprojects like this can introduce new people to your idea and help build your audience.

We've create viral side-alongs for several of our projects here at Qlabs, and so far they seem to be some of the most effective ways to expose people to our products while adding a bit more awesome to the internet.

I'm happy to answer any tech questions anyone has about the project, as well as talk more about the viral side-along concept if anyone is interested.</comment>