Apple cuts 5C orders due to weak demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101116165

<comment><USER2> > At the time of the 5C's launch, tech-watchers said the handset was designed > to beat off Apple's rivals in fast-growing emerging markets.

I am staying in Thailand, which may be one of those emerging markets. I will comment on the situation in Thailand, but the situation in other countries may be similar.

The average salary in Thailand is about $350. But that does not make Thailand a price-sensitive market for high-end smartphones. If you want a cheap phone, chinese iPhones copies are readily available starting from $40 on markets and even malls. The people who do buy a real iPhone don't generally buy it for it's features, hardware or apps. They buy because they have money and want to show it. You also see a lot of German luxury cars on street, despite the fact that these taxed at 200%. I heard that if you don't you don't have a Mercedes in Thailand, people don't want to do business with you because they think you are insolvent. A cheaper plastic version of the iPhone, isn't going to cut it in these markets. Rather a more expensive Gold version. Gold has a special meaning for Asians, especially Chinese, who form most of the elite in Thailand.

To a lesser extent I think that also applies Western countries. My former boss, who drove a Porsche, commented on the iPhone 4s launch, that it didn't matter what Apple's latest killer-feature would be. People (including himself) will always want to have the latest iPhone.

<comment><USER3> But that's mainly a niche market - a market of people who wouldn't care even if the iPhone is $2,000.

Apple may very well continue to sell iPhones _only_ to that market, but they will _definitely_ lose market share. And I think Apple, at the very least, wants some _compromise_ between high-end/quality and market share, and aren't purely focused on high-end, no matter what they say in public.

They know that if their market is 5 percent of smartphones (which is starting to look that way in a few years, if they change nothing about their strategy) they will start losing the developers. iOS won't be the platform to get apps first, or the most (already isn't here). And I think Apple will try to avoid that as much as possible (as futile as I think that will be).

<comment><USER4> I think what GP is saying is that in emerging markets, or at least in Thailand, there is no "compromise" market segment (and it's not going to appear regardless how much Apple "want" it). Normal people get ultra cheap phones, rich people get high-end iPhones, which is why 5c is a miss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If someone can afford a $549 phone, they most probably can afford a $649 phone. At this price range, it's not really a rational decision. It's how desirable the product is (which Apple is very good at projecting). So the customer might as well go all the way and get the top of the line phone. Well I would. Imagine spending $549 and then your friends saying "Oh, but its not 5S".

<comment><USER6> Indeed, the 5c is just a bad deal; You get the iPhone 5, a model that would've been reduced in price anyway if they retained it, with no big/significant changes other than a plastic shell (downgrade if you ask me). Thats fine if they'd set the price to say $399, but at $549 you would be mad not to lay down another $100 for the 5s.

<comment><USER7> Earlier at Apple HQ:

"Listen. Let's put one mid tier phone on the market. Make it expensive but not necessarily any better than its predecessor. Then, we also release a phone which is actually an improvement. Our flagship, if you will. The trick is in making the mid tier marginally cheaper than the flagship. This will make the step to the flagship a lot smaller and as the mid tier is basically its predecessor with a few tweaks and a new housing, the average Joe will not even complain. We are getting rid of the old iPhone fives, improving sales for the more expensive variant and it doesn't cost us a thing!"

<comment><USER8> Actually I've read this (in a more elaborate version) in either Priceless or Influence (maybe even some hints in Scientific Advertising). Which are two very good reads if you are in anything related to sales, money or almost anything else. It's something I've applied many times and works wonders.

<comment><USER7> Actual content would be great!

<comment><USER8> I didn't have time to grab the actual books. You mean chapter numbers, quotes or the general idea in longer form?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good grief, talk about burying the lede. The 5C has lower-than-expected demand because the 5S has been wildly successful, even with it's higher price point (evidence for this: Apple announcing that they exceeded expected sales _for all models of iPhone_ during the first month of sales, and that despite the fact that the 5S is still supply-constrained).

Edit - Here's a better example of how the same facts can be reported: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4843902/apple-said-to- be-...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4843902/apple-said-to-be-trimming- iphone-5c-production-while-increasing-5s)

<comment><USER10> I think "exceeded expected" is a bit of marketing speak here. Did the sales really exceed what they expected? If so, they must be pretty bad at forecasting how much of their own stock they sell, time and time again.

And if the 5C was one of the models that exceeded expected sales, why would they be notifying their suppliers of cuts? Wouldn't they be saying "Good news, sales are better than we thought".

The exceeded expectations is completely meaningless. It clearly didn't.

<comment><USER9> Just to be clear, Apple didn't announce that they exceeded expectations, at least not to my knowledge. They simply (and objectively) announced how many sales they had made, which beat _analysts '_ expectations by a large margin.

<comment><USER10> Right, that would make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I kept reading before launch about the $100 phone Apple was launching and was excited. But to my disappoint I later realised it's $100 + ridiculous contract (apparently the notion of contract free phones doesn't exist in the US)

I think if Apple launched a "budget" phone it would destroy much of the Android market. Maybe it would damage their brand though, who knows.

<comment><USER12> Contract-free phones do exist. But if you want a brand new expensive phone without paying full price and without a contract, it better be your birthday because otherwise I don't see who's going to pay the difference.

>>> I think if Apple launched a "budget" phone it would destroy much of the Android market.

Not likely. Apple core customers would shun it because it's not fancy enough, and Android core customers would shun it because it's Apple-built jail and because they want the apps they're used to. It's like saying if Windows were a bit cheaper Linux wouldn't exist. Not likely.

<comment><USER11> In the UK you can buy a good spec Android phone without contract for £100 (one of the Huawei models).

I personally wouldn't shun an iPhone at a similar price point (I find them more polished but too expensive for my budget), perhaps I'm an irregular customer though.

<comment><USER12> iPhone 5S base cost is estimated around $200-$300[1], so iPhone for £100 should be either seriously inferior model or seriously subsidized. Apple does not need to subsidize it - they sell fine as is. So either carrier subsidizes it and gets their money back in contract fees, or you are paying the cost plus margins of all the middlemen (unless you manage to buy it straight from the assembly line, which you can't).

[1] [http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/22/the-iphone-manufacturing- co...](http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/22/the-iphone-manufacturing-cost- structure/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The 5c isn't hugely less expensive than the 5s (it only looks like half the price due to carrier subsidies). So this doesn't surprise me -- if you're going to locked into a contract, most people are better off ponying up the $100 -- much less than the cost of the cellular service. So consumers are rightly choosing the 5s.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is Apple not concerned about losing developer momentum? Paid apps are on the way down. Market share is becoming more important than ever. Only in the US will a large share of the population pay $600+ for a phone. Strong iPad sales will buy Apple some time but i suspect that more and more developers outside the US will go Android first.

<comment><USER15> Android is a monopoly. The network effect will get worse and worse and worse. Two or three years from now, Apple will be lucky to have 7% of the global smart phone market. The only thing left is for the iPhone to be squeezed into an ever smaller corner, as Windows did to them last time. Tech markets like these are almost always winner take 95%.

Over the next three years, Android will take over 80% of the tablet market as well. The iPad will potentially suffer an even worse fate than the iPhone market share wise, because the subsidies aren't going to be there for much of the tablet market. The iPad will be competing with $125 and $200 tablets that are 90% as good at half the price. The outcome has always been obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Apple began selling it's the new low-price option last month in 11 markets" – low price?

<comment><USER17> Compared to the 5s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple's multi-million dollar trial and error pricing exercise.

The Monday morning quarterback in me will now say that "in order to differentiate an excellent product (5C) with a premium product (5S) is to at least sell the 5C under the €400 level. At a €100 price delta users are 'clearly' price elastic"

If margins of the 5C at a sub-€400 price are not those Apple expects from its products don't build the 5C.

<comment><USER19> Are there really quarterbacks who reason in euro??? ;)

<comment><USER18> only those who use the euro as their reserve currency :-p

I was looking at iPhone prices on the German Apple site, hence the euro explanation. The US Apple site is a pain if you want to compare unsubsidised iPhone prices.

<comment><USER19> I was just kidding of course - moreover I live in Italy ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's no surprise that Apple also announced that it's hiring Angela Ahrenditz, CEO of Burberry. She guided the company from a cheap image crisis to a successful luxury brand.

I think Tim Cook want her to do the same to Apple. The iPhone needs to be seen as a luxury brand.

<comment><USER21> Weren't they already a luxury brand? Aren't they diluting that perception by putting out a plastic phone? They haven't done a plastic case for anything in years.

<comment><USER15> Yes, absolutely. The iPhone IS the luxury brand of smart phones, and always has been. There are only two possible outcomes: they lose that status with lame gimmicks like the iPhone 5C, or maintain it by sticking to what Apple's brand stands for despite the risk of losing more market share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone please explain me something that I don't understand?

I'm quite sure that Apple has smart economists. So why do they call something that costs 15% less than something expensive "low price"?

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER23> The question isn't whether the 5c is selling less then the 5s. It's whether the 5c is selling more than the 5 would. Too early to ask.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if all of this was just a clever trick to provide bigger contrast and thus justification for buying the more expensive model.

</comment><comment><USER7> If it were actually cheap and sold at a price with very little to no profit and was simply used as a tool by Apple to gain market share, it could have worked out very well. But no, they thought they could resell old components with little added extra but an increased version number to the masses. The reality distortion field has its limits.

<comment><USER25> iPhone sales are stronger than ever before. They're selling the high margin, high end models hand over fist. And the answer to solving this terrible predicament they find themselves in is to sell the lower end phones at cost?

<comment><USER26> Increasing margins and profits are not a predictor of success in this business:

 _' 'We are experiencing marked improvements in our gross margins as a result of lower component costs and strong sales of the computers we introduced a year ago,'' John Sculley, Apple's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. ''At the same time, we continue to focus on managing the growth in our operating expenses.''_

[http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/19/business/company- earnings-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/19/business/company-earnings- apple-s-profits-rebound-on-strong-foreign-sales.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well for $100 I'd rather get the 5S. It would be a whole different story if the difference was 200-250

</comment><comment><USER28> The 5C does not have to sell. It purely has to be the 'other' choice instead of Android etc. being the 'other' choice. It is there to make the deluxe 5S seem a 'bargain', that is all. This makes purchasing the 5S a lot easier for the customer, psychologically.

As for Apple cutting orders due to weak demand, they simply placed a large initial order with their suppliers to get a better price. They probably told them it was going to sell like hot cakes when all along they only needed a modest quantity. They now go back to them and say 'sorry folks we won't be needing so many for the next order' and the suppliers walk away wishing they had charged more per unit with the first order.

Note this article is thin on sources and the angle implied - 'weak demand' is just interpretation.</comment>


Show HN: Business name generator - <AUTHOR> https://namelix.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was trying to make an RNN-based business name generator for a few weeks, but all the output was pretty random.

then I tried just using a markov chain to generate random names and picking the best (most thematically related) names using fasttext, and it worked pretty well. Check it out and let me know what you think!

my favourite keywords are "sexy, Canadian" and "fun, weed" : ]

</comment><comment><USER2> The site informed me that pitythafoo.com is available if someone wants it.

<comment><AUTHOR> click on the register link on my site. I get 2 bucks :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if I would go for "ensult.com" .

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah the names are still pretty random but occasionally you get some cool ones

<comment><USER3> Yes, tbh, I can see how this might generate some nice passive income for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe eventually, it'll be operating at a loss for a long time I think. The pre-trained fasttext .bin is 8Gb, and the smallest linode that can handle it is $60/month.

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe you get lucky and some "influencer" picks it up and writes about it or whatever ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Brexit Possibility - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2016/the-brexit-possibility/ <comment><USER3> Praising the "gig economy" means he knows nothing about what the "gig economy" means for ordinary workers. The gig economy is when you have to spend more time scrounging up odd jobs than actually working to get paid. The gig economy is having to work multiple part-time jobs since companies won't hire full-time workers—except each of the part-time jobs expect you to be on-call 24 hours/day. The gig economy is non-compete agreements for part-time low-wage service workers. The gig economy is hiring friendly white people for the purposes of branding, then firing them all to cut wages once your image is established. The gig economy is offloading costs of business onto your employees. In short, the "gig economy" is a rebranding is corporate exploitation of low-wage service workers in the context of high unemployment and lack of regulation.

Saying "these sorts of jobs provide the upside to a universal basic income's floor: our goal should be to make it vastly easier for individuals to better themselves if they choose to do so" is just blaming unemployed people for losing their jobs when the financial industry cocked up the economy with "financial innovations" (i.e., fraud).

<comment><USER4> You describe the things that you would miss in the gig exonomy in a language that suggests that you're entitles to those things. May I ask why?

<comment><USER3> I'm not claiming that anyone is entitled to anything; I'm simply pointing out that the labor market is a shit sandwich for a very large class of workers. The OP frames nonparticipation in the "gig economy" as a failure of moral rectitude on the part of those who lack "the desire to better themselves."

Economics concerns the simple exchange of resources, and is unconcerned about whether it is "fair" for a drought to cause famine and death. But we humans live in societies that require a high level of trust, social cooperation, and an expectation of fairness. Those who would tear up the social contract ought well consider what wind they would sow.

<comment><USER5> > Those who would tear up the social contract ought well consider what wind > they would sow.

Which is exactly why the Brexit happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He's right, but he's wrong.

The eutopia he describes is feasible, the arguments are rational, the historical understanding of what he covers is good.

What he misses, however, is social inertia and reactionary forces. The technocratic ideals he espouses have been espoused before, in similar periods, yet they have never flourished. The failing has not been technical - rather, human.

Before any of what he describes is installed, we will descend into chaos - <USER2> from chaos, conservatism and adherence to "old ways" grows, as certainty becomes the principle desire of an uncertain people. Conservatism, if strong enough, manifests into nationalism, the desire for strong leadership, for a return to the glorious past - and from this a whole host of totalitarian regimes have been born. The two best known examples are Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

Why chaos, you ask? Well, the vote has legitimised behaviour that last week was not legitimised, and the populace is becoming rapidly bitterly divided. This leaves the government in a quandary - if they continue with brexit, they face a brain drain and strong, possibly violent opposition from the remain camp. If they halt the exit, the same from the exit camp. If they stay still, the current situation will spill out of control.

We will see the IRA resurge and Scottish nationalism flourish, particularly given the opposition to them having referenda from Westminster, so the division becomes geographical as well as social.

I'm afraid to say there isn't a happy way forwards for the UK from here - every path leads to one form or another of damnation, further division, and potential descent into civil war.

I've already fled the country - I'm not sticking around for this one.

<comment><USER7> I agree about the brain drain if brexit continues, but would there seriously be a brain drain if brexit is halted?

I'm fairly certain the UK would be better off if most of the leave voters left the UK completely. The demographics seem to trend towards older pensioners and those on some type of government assistance.

<comment><USER8> I see it mentioned quite often that the people who tended to vote leave were older and wouldn't have to "live with the consequences for very long" but it's never mentioned that they were the ones who voted to join the EU (what was then called the European Communities) in the first place.

They voted to join 67% to 33% in 1975. They are all 60+ years old now, and polls showed 60+ voters voting to leave by over 60%.

Why were they in favor of EU membership then but against it now? If they voted to leave because of stupidity and xenophobia, as I keep hearing here on HN and on Facebook, why did they ever vote to join in the first place?

It's interesting how the people with the most historical context, the most experience with the system, and indeed the people who brought it about are seen as somehow not worthy of having an opinion on it and that their vote should count less or not at all.

<comment><USER6> Because they've had 25 years of anti-EU propaganda blasted at them, mostly by Boris Johnson.

By his own admission, when he was a journalist in Brussels in the 90's, he fabricated stories from whole cloth - he compared it to chucking stones at the neighbour's greenhouse for fun. He was fired for this repeatedly, and therefore entered politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a thoroughly worthwhile read. Push through the opening if it seems boring; the opening is standard market/governance theory but things perk up afterwards. There's a coherent vision of a new social footing: UBI funded with high taxation, supported by low regulatory burden and a gig economy.

Unfortunately missing from the piece is any acknowledgement of just how strongly we seem to be trending _away_ from this outcome. Supranational corporations have neatly sidestepped taxes, so UBI is unaffordable. Regulatory burden and protectionism trend steadily upwards (in opposition to a high- upside, high-tax-value tech industry), while credentialism, debt, and licensing cripple the labor side of a gig economy.

It's certainly an interesting worldview, and I'd love to see a more formal treatment of it. But I'd also love to see a good breakdown of how it compares to the trends we actually face.

<comment><USER10> "Supranational corporations have neatly sidestepped taxes, so UBI is unaffordable"

That's not necessarily true and depends of your conception of money. States with their own currency are not the consumers of money but the source of money.

I know that it's a strange idea but it's how it really works. The reason we don't heard a lot about that, it's because then, the things that you are describing become possible and people could start asking for them.

[http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/06/24/modern- money-t...](http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/06/24/modern-money-theory- the-basics/)

<comment><USER11> States being the source of money and not a neutral arbiter of it's value is the major problem in my opinion, not the solution. With a set amount of money (or a slow fixed increase) markets are stable and operate efficiently (assuming minimal other burdens) in the allocation of resources and goods. But when governments 'make' money, the markets don't allocate it, a small set of people do. This micromanagement of the economy leads to declining productivity and stagnation as money flows to the politically connected. The former USSR being a good example in the extreme.

So money becomes politics. We've seen that those with money have used this to make even more: regressive taxes, bailouts, corporate inversions, etc. But the spread between rich and poor is becoming worse, so now the talk about UBI. The affect of this money distributed by bureaucratic fiat is that the middle class dies. The rich get richer with access to the new money, the poor get poorer and live off handouts, and those surviving in the middle get pushed to the poor side or figure out how to get to the rich side. A fairly standard state of affairs throughout history (lords and serfs), but not the future I'd like to see.

<comment><USER10> Money is always politic. It seems to me that it's the people that more benefit of the current politics who more insist that this is not the case.

"With a set amount of money (or a slow fixed increase) markets are stable and operate efficiently "

A set amount of money was the gold standard or the Bretton Woods agreement later. The reason those disappeared is not because some governmental conspiracy, but because those kind of systems generate very fast unbalanced situations.

A modern example of that, with small differences, is the Euro. A big economy where states have almost nothing to say in the quantity or the use of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who (after considerable deliberation) voted to Remain, and now feels that my country is being dragged to the edge of a very high precipice, this makes for interesting reading.

I sincerely hope that there will be an (unexpected) upside to leaving the EU, but I think that is a forlorn hope. Most of the people I have spoken to about it who voted to Leave have done so on the most narrow-minded of reasons - typically either "stop immigration" or "take our country back" \- both of which are definitely in the "old view" of the world in this article. No-one I know of who voted Leave gave even a moment's thought to the immense amount of work needed to unpick 40 years of integration; to the practicalities of it that will mean it will be the work of Parliament for years to come to simply get to the point where we are today. I am someone who had severe reservations about the European project (i.e. the development into a plan for a superstate, rather than the originally presented idea of a common market), so I really hope that the information in this article turns out to be true, and that somehow the knuckle-dragging imbeciles that I saw on the news last night (Canvey Island piece, if anyone watched it?) have somehow created a masterstroke in political maneuvering which will at least give my step-kids a stab at a decent future. I know none of them think that is the case at the moment.

<comment><USER13> The UK has always had the "islander mentality". The development of a European Superstate would either have had to drag the UK along unwillingly (barring apathy), or happen without them.

The positive I am taking from it all is the fact that for once people are actually talking politics again.

The next general election won't be as apathetic as the last few, which is likely why Boris won't call one if he becomes leader of the party.

This article pictures a gig economy built upon a universal income as a pre- requisite, which I just don't see happening.

Given the current state welfare system, there is potential for something like this to be gradually introduced, such that those on lower/no income could start building the gig industry on top of any basic state benefits (as opposed to earn a pound, lose a pound in benefits).

That would require a huge shift in current mentalities though, possibly greater than the admission that maybe we would be better off as an integral part of any EU superstate.

<comment><USER14> If Labour don't sort themselves out expect an election pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stratechery has many insightful posts but I don't think this one is accurate.

The author writes that the new order will be made up of government, tech and individuals. "Corporations" are intentionally absent from the new order. But people will still need to form organisations to achieve collective goals, which will need legal documents stating their purpose and governance, i.e. "corporations". Corporations will still have to be funded by either selling goods and services, donations, or state funding, ie be for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental.

I don't think the gig economy is a replacement. Unless AI gets much, much better than the state-of-the-art, I don't see skilled professionals or managers being replaced any time soon. All this automation/AI/DAO hype assumes that AI is much more capable than it really is and that most jobs are much simpler than they really are. For a concrete example, visit a large and busy McDonalds and notice how much work the shift managers have to do to deal with surprise situations and blockages (there's a rulebook they follow, but it's nontrivial to apply to reality). That's just one job which couldn't be handled by a deep learning algo. And McDonalds is a well-oiled machine, most businesses are much more error-prone and inefficient.

</comment><comment><USER16> Brexit is a little over-focused on at this point.

As far as the article, the beginning half was pretty good, relatively straight forward and even if you disagree with the conclusions the thought process behind them is well laid out and reasonable.

the second half, which is everything after 'TECH AND A NEW SYSTEM' is just ideology, without much foundation in empiricism... again whether you agree or disagree, its just not coming from a place of reasonable logical conclusion built on basic empirical data.

...

<comment><USER17> " is just ideology, without much foundation in empiricism"

That's pretty much how politics work nowadays...

<comment><USER18> I think that most political issues (as well as personal ones) are matters of opinion anyway, not lending themselves well to mathematical quantification.

<comment><USER19> That doesn't mean the facts and predictions from economic experts should have been ignored in this vote. This was an issue with some pretty clear ramifications.

<comment><USER18> I was talking about politics in general. In this particular case, some economic aspects might be matters of fact to which one can apply forecasting techniques, whereas other aspects (e.g. whether one does or does not accept that power over one's country is given to the EU, and whether one wishes to strive towards or away from being one country with the other European Union countries) are more matters of opinion.

<comment><USER19> Of course - It just seems weird to say that when leaving the E.U. isn't _just_ a matter of opinion. There are certainly some political issues that are _only_ a matter of opinion, but this issue was much, much more.

If anything, it shows that the leave voters in the U.K. are not very interested in facts and forecasts made by experts.

<comment><USER18> > If anything, it shows that the leave voters in the U.K. are not very > interested in facts and forecasts made by experts.

What you describe is at least one possibility. Another one is that the voters consider other aspects more important.

<comment><USER19> >Another one is that the voters consider other aspects more important.

Which is the same as saying they are not very interested in the facts and forecasts made by experts.

The majority of the leave voters are undeducated, older, and xenophobic. [1] The misinformation spread by the leave campaigners fed into their fears about immigration, which lead them to ignore facts. [2] [3]

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng- interactive/2016/jun/...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng- interactive/2016/jun/23/eu-referendum-live-results-and-analysis?CMP=twt_b- gdndata)

[2] [https://www.rt.com/uk/346342-brexit-voters-ignorance- misinfo...](https://www.rt.com/uk/346342-brexit-voters-ignorance- misinformation/)

[3] [https://www.ipsos- mori.com/researchpublications/researcharch...](https://www.ipsos- mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3742/The-Perils-of-Perception- and-the-EU.aspx)

<comment><USER18> > Which is the same as saying they are not very interested in the facts and > forecasts made by experts.

I don't see how that would be the same thing. What I'm saying is that even if you trust a certain forecast that says that X will happen if you vote A and Y will happen if you vote B, and even if you consider X to be more beneficial than Y, you might still choose to vote B because you find it better in other respects.

By the way, I'm not sure linking to Russia Today adds much. I'd be wary of trusting their angle on things. It's all good, though, since you included the original link.

<comment><USER19> Just like with your hypothetical political policy, sure, that hypothetical X,Y,Z situation could make sense somewhere. Except that the facts are different with this political issue and what is known about those who voted for it.

Russia Today is quoting an FT article that's behind a paywall saying the same thing, if you're still uncertain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The solutions are the usual bullshit. Deregulation, etc. "There should be a significant loosening of the regulations and taxation around business creation." This is YC. Anybody in the US having problems filling out their incorporation forms? Getting a business license? Getting an employer identification number? Getting permission to connect to the Internet? Didn't think so.

"The bookkeeping requirements are far too onerous" usually means "we can't go public with the creative accounting we used while private." The Sarbanes-Oxley bookkeeping requirements don't kick in until you go public, and by then you should be big enough to have a real accounting department.

<comment><USER21> "We could create more jobs if we just got rid of these onerous regulations that require us to hire accountants!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think he misdiagnoses "the 2009 rise of the Tea Party on the right, and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement on the left." as being down to globalisation. Those both arose in the aftermath of the 2006-2008 crash which is rather reminiscent of the 1929 crash and the depression of the 30s. In both cases a lot of money was borrowed in the boom against assets that looked valuable but then ceased to be. In the collapse people were left with large debts, spending and hence employment and tax revenues went down, the environment became deflationary as prices were subdued due to low spending and anti immigrant groups arose blaming the lack of employment and money on immigrants and the like. I hope it all plays out better than in the 30s. At least this time round the economists understand it much better.

I agree with the ending "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" and maybe it could lead to saner anti deflationary policies reducing the crappiness of life in the industrial heartlands, through smart government spending as opposed to WW2 as happened in the 30s.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reads like old 1918 Soviet Constitution.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is an excellent read, and the only thing that I really want to add is at this bit:

> Each of these factors is critical: a universal basic income alone offers > some degree of financial security, but it does not offer dignity to the > recipient, or any return for society beyond a reduction in guilt.

It's time we re-thought the idea that you need to work for your fill. Speaking as a strong capitalist, it's simply not the reality anymore. To put it in the context of the tribe working to survive that most people think is a good metaphor, this is akin to having 3 incredibly good hunters in the tribe who catch enough food to feed the tribe 4 times over yet still requiring the other men to go hunting and not letting them eat if they don't catch anything on a given day. Why? We have the resources to feed everyone, and all the lower ends of the economic classes doing all the busy-work they could possibly do in a day cannot generate the kind of wealth that workers at the upper end create with a regular work day on a bad day.

The notion that you MUST do SOMETHING to earn your money is quickly becoming a barrier to efficiency, and with automation on the rise, it's only going to get worse. Simply "getting a better job" is not a sufficient answer for the vast groups in the population that we're set to unemploy.

<comment><USER16> once again this is ideology over reality. Yes, at one level there definitely is factual that the top hunters can supply the rest of the tribe with all necessary resources. The problem is one of motivation... Why should they?

It is the most basic of driving forces behind trade at the conceptual level, and society itself at its most fundamental and basic. IF your world view cannot handle this most basic of questions, it is just ideology and not even a sensible one at that.

<comment><USER24> On the note about the social issue: I recognize the primary obstacle is the social stigma we attach to "people on benefits" or "the welfare queens" and all that other nonsense, it doesn't make the situation any less clear. We spend vast amounts of money subsidizing through inefficient programs the people who are either incapable or unwilling to take care of themselves. We're going to pay for it either way, either by just giving them what they need to live a relatively healthy lifestyle, or by forcing them to live an incredibly unhealthy one and then subsidize the prisons to hold them or the hospitals to keep them on the edge of life.

The question we need to answer as a society is whether the latter option which is much, much more expensive is worthwhile to do just to keep this imagined requirement going. Frankly I think if all the counter arguments boil down to "that's just the way we are" I would reply with "that's not good enough for me, because we can change."

<comment><USER25> > The question we need to answer as a society

The problem is that society is made up of individuals, so if you can't answer the 'why should they' question for the individuals it doesn't matter what society at large decides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My reading of the article:

1) "Tech industry" is infrastructure that leads to mass efficiency at scale. When this happens it means that individuals can now compete on a cost basis with corporations. Brands will retain their power as long as they retain their relevancy, but I suspect even branding can be made more efficient through tech.

Corporations will have to go 1 of 3 routes:

\- become infrastructure (reduce goods and services until they become part of the tech industry) \- be an infrastructure/goods + service hybrid (develop their own tech infrastructure while keeping their brand) \- become a goods and service provider that relies on tech infrastructure (become part of the gig economy)

Corporations will benefit from access to volume discounts, but the big winners will be the tech platforms.

2) Tech is already too profitable and will suck the world dry in the same manner as corporations since globalization. It's about what generates the best efficiencies. Previously, economies of scale drove it. Now, tech is driving it and will drive it into the future.

3) Being too profitable is not the issue; being too greedy is. Tech, by nature, will be extremely profitable compared to the rest of society. To restore that balance on a social level, tech should pay more taxes, not less. Otherwise, the rest of society will revolt as history has shown.

4) Government is the mediator that moderates efficiencies and society. It exists to make sure massive efficiencies don't suck society dry, and that society doesn't revolt because of it. It does this by siphoning off the wealth of extremely efficient industries and individuals and redistributing it through basic income.

5) With this view, the world is not split between the lazy and hardworking (which has never really been the case), but the efficient and inefficient industries and workers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Insightful read and an interesting thought experiment. Unfortunately, executing this in reality is much harder than it seems.

While he rightly observes that the new order will largely be built on supranationals (like Google & Facebook), it is still difficult to run away from nationalistic & economic realities (Brexit is a case in point).

Different nations, states, regions and people are experiencing growth at vastly different rates (in the old order). And it is this widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that is preventing us from achieving the utopia the author speaks about.

We see this in the US, the UK (as seen in Brexit poll results), Europe in general (with Eastern Europeans moving west in search of opportunities), and also in Asia (which sees a growing gap between the affluent and those left behind).

It's well and good to think about ideals, but the real question is really what is the route we must take (and the obstacles we have to overcome) to reach that objective.

</comment><comment><USER28> I found the way the author put together how the system came to be amazingly well written, very quickly stated of a very complex reality.

As he got into universal income and a gig economy I was lost, not because I think they're terrible ideas but the ideas presented just don't stick in my mind. Regardless, a good read to hear a different way of thinking from my own.

</comment><comment><USER29> In the 'new system', the government gives basic income to labor, which pays taxes back to the government. It's probably likely that more goes out via basic income than comes in via income taxes, so one has to wonder: do income taxes really make sense in this model?

<comment><USER14> When business can shift profits around the world the biggest change we need to make is to shift away from corporation tax, probably towards more land, purchase and income tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The assumption that exporting manufacturing to the third-world is generally good for humanity is a bit hard to stomach.

</comment><comment><USER31> Even this is outdated and backwards. By the time it would ever become a reality the "Government" portion of this system will have already been replaced with "Tech". We are already at a place where software could successfully manage many of the functions of government. We simply haven't found a nation to prototype it, yet.

But I think the test case would be less the UK and more Venezuela

<comment><USER32> In what way is tech supposed to replace the legislative duties of government? Whatever you say about lawmakers, I think they have a higher than average understanding of the laws and how they interact, and the consequences of certain actions (even if "higher than average" isn't that high). I don't believe a true democracy where everyone votes yields a better system, just a more democratic one. For example, brexit. It was truly democratic, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea, or that if everyone was presented with an impartial, truthful display of the facts the same people would have voted the same way. There are some negative aspects of our psychology that we haven't found a good way to curb yet.

<comment><USER31> Most of the management of government services could be automated, direct democracy is possible with software. There's certainly a lot of potential for AI augmentation in day-to-day governance.

It certainly wouldn't be perfect at first. I'm sure some people would suffer from the mistakes made in the prototyping phase.

But this isn't about Brexit. The question I believe will be answered is would someone living in an already failed state suffer worse with an augmented or fully automated administrator, or under current horror of war, starvation, fear? Civil wars start over ideological differences, political failures are the result of corruptions of government officials, power plays of individuals, mistakes of management. Nations split and crumble against the best interest of the people because leaders have human agendas. The cold impartiality of software takes the politics out of governance, it favors sustainability over the long term.

We in the tech world see things from a position of privilege, protected by relative wealth, a large seemingly stable system of governance, but in many places in the world a new system of administration would be a gift to cherish.

<comment><USER32> The problem with immediate and direct democratic representation is that humans have many mental foibles due to our evolution which can combine into feedback loops which have disastrous consequences (lynch mobs are inherently democratic in nature). Non-representation or representation that is delayed too long is problematic because it disenfranchises people and they eventually resort to violence to reassert their representation. These are the extremes we need to walk between, Democracy and the Dictator. If you think just allowing people to vote directly will somehow circumvent the natural tendency of people for herd mentality, confirmation bias, and valuing anecdotes and personal experience over statistics, then I think you're vastly underestimating those problems.

The role of technology is to help is increase the positive aspects of whatever point along that spectrum we've settled, and decrease the negative aspects. For example, making it very easy for representatives to quickly and accurately poll their constituents (and making these polls and their results public) rather than relying on lobbying and the varying abilities of special interest groups to activate advocates would probably yield much better representation for the average person. A very vocal 2% should not drown out the other 98%, but they should not necessarily be _ingored_ either. Good polls would likely have a question and a scale of how much you strongly agree, somewhat agree, abstain, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree, and have the question asked at least 2-3 different ways, from different perspectives.

<comment><USER31> _> > If you think just allowing people to vote directly will somehow circumvent the natural tendency of people for herd mentality, confirmation bias, and valuing anecdotes and personal experience over statistics, then I think you're vastly underestimating those problems._

That's why software makes it possible. Large scale polling systems are well understood at this point. Abuse detection is a solved problem, correcting for bias is well understood too. Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the number of truly informed constituents when voting.

This doesn't completely reinforce my point, but if you're interested in the topic it's worth the listen: [http://www.flashforwardpod.com/2016/04/19/episode-11-swipe-r...](http://www.flashforwardpod.com/2016/04/19/episode-11-swipe- right-for-democracy/)

<comment><USER32> > Abuse detection is a solved problem, correcting for bias is well understood > too.

What about the bias introduced from the initiative name and/or description?[1] Who decides this? Who writes the laws that are proposed by initiatives? What if there's no counter side to a law proposed, or it's very complex, and hard to understand? Right now we have people whose job it is to keep track of these laws, make sure small provisions don't overstep, and come to an agreement on what should be acceptable to vote one. We elect those people (or we elect the people that employ and control those people). Who does this in a direct democracy? Do we still elect officials, and they do everything except they don't vote?

> Giving people access to information, while at the poll, will increase the > number of truly informed constituents when voting.

If we have a direct democracy, there will be a lot more initiatives. 15 things every day, if we are keeping up with congress, according to to the flashforward link you supplied (thanks, I'm listening to it in the background right now). Looking up all the relevant information for each initiative to make an informed decision will take quite a while. Assuming a minimum of 15 minutes per item to research and consider each item, that's close to four hours, each day. Even halving that is a significant time investment. I think people will naturally defer to authorities they suggest. There's even less incentive for the random authorities people might choose to be accountable for their speech, and I'm also quite worried that people would choose non- qualified people for their queues on what to vote for very poor reasons (pick your Kardashian or their relation). If we want to defer to someone for our vote, why not our elected official?

What I think _would_ be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a _chance_ to have a direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative. For example, if I'm in CA, and my senators are voting on a bill, and I vote specifically a certain way, then their votes count for (CA vote eligible population -1)(CA vote eligible population) each, and my vote counts for 2/(CA vote eligible population), one for each senator, and assuming nobody else votes directly. For important issues, we can wrest control from our legislators, but otherwise the system will perform as it has. I'm still not entirely sure it would be a good idea given our predisposition as a species for poor judgement in certain situations, but I think it's a lot more feasible than a direct democracy on everything (and it keeps people around to design and present bills, and still incentivizes them to do so).

1: [http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states- ballot-l...](http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/dec/10/states-ballot- language-rules-worth-imitating/)

<comment><USER31> To your first block of questions - the crowdsourced moderation methods employed in public forums (like for example HN, Reddit, Wikipedia) have evolved to a point where they work very well. It's possible that a government- grade moderation system could be developed by augmenting with machine learning. There could be a grading system employed for the quality, fairness of any legislation submitted that uses both machine-based checks and human moderation to balance the quality grade of the legislation up for vote. "Hard to understand" is something we can detect with software even today. A check by both a human panel and a machine that's parsing language should be enough to ensure that a law is being fairly presented. (Which is a hell of a lot better than the system we have today, where politicians create bills even the people who wrote them don't understand.)

> What I think would be interesting, was a way to wrest my vote from my > representative on a by-vote basis. That is, we all get a chance to have a > direct vote, but if we don't, our share goes to our representative.

That's a very clever idea. I like that a lot.

To this second block, here's my brainstorm on how it could work - it's possible to counter the potential fatigue by clustering the vote in tiered node cluster groups.

Let's say we made the smallest vote cluster maybe 150 people at any given point, and we'll distribute these groups evenly by geography and population density (adjusted in realtime as demographics shift). The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment (not party affiliation) using a set of simple surveys and voting behavior so there is an even representation of the political voices in each sample. This is collected with voter registration, or after non-participation for X time period.

Anyone can log in and vote on any legislation they chose each day but the cluster always stays neutral. We apply abuse detection to detect if the cluster is being stuffed or gerrymandered in some way, and the software rejects and reorgs a cluster when abuse is detected. If someone suffers voter intimidation or outside influence they simply report abuse and the system identifies their cluster for review.

Take that model and scale it up, each cluster node is part of a larger node. The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node. If the system needs an extra human layer in a node to recount a vote, it can get swapped with no consequences to other nodes. One node fails, the vote is rerouted elsewhere.

The question really comes down to the participation rate. In social network systems this is best solved with physical rewards at first and later with social rewards. Same can be applied. If nodes get low voter participation, they trigger an automatic vote reward system. Some will try to game the system to get the rewards, pick random answers. This will trigger fraud detection by inserting control questions, honeypots.

Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test environment. And the political willpower to implement it.

Probably wouldn't become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level, but a fun thought exercise nonetheless

<comment><USER32> > the crowdsourced moderation methods employed in public forums (like for > example HN, Reddit, Wikipedia) have evolved to a point where they work very > well.

That's an interesting thought, but I have to wonder how resilient they really are to manipulation. I think it's a matter of expected return on investment. As of right now, there is really very little usefulness to gaming the moderation system in these sites. You get internet points, but those points are worth very little (reputation within that system only, really). If internet points could be traded and had some market where they could be monetized, we might have stories about how it's much harder to keep things from being gamed. The closest we probably have to this is Twitter and followers. I'm fairly certain there are companies that sell followers by tricking people into following. It doesn't conceptually map to moderation exactly, so it's a stretched comparison at best, but I think it should cause concern.

Additionally, the idea that a foreign power could game, or outright hack, either the law moderation or the voting itself, is fairly worrisome. I'm not too worried about millions of foreign agents showing up to skew an election, or the buying of enough legislators being persuaded to vote a specific direction to significantly affect us (it might change the outcome of a vote, but it would have to have significant support anyways, legislators rotate out of office, and it only takes one to talk for it to all fall down).

> The group is politically neutral - assigned based on political sentiment > (not party affiliation)

> The vote from each node counts as a whole for that node.

Does that mean each group ends up with one "vote", sort of like the electoral college, but more direct? If so, I really don't think we want it to be forced to be neutral. Any smoothing you do might end up having odd unintended consequences.

> Anyhow it's all doable just a matter of prototyping and iterating in a test > environment. And the political willpower to implement it. Probably wouldn't > become reality in our lifetimes, at least at the national level

Indeed. It has to be made as constitutional amendments, which requires a two- thirds majority vote by people that would be voting away their own power and authority, and weakening a system that they generally buy into as working (thus their current position). That is to say, _not very likely_.

> but a fun thought exercise nonetheless

Yes it is! To be clear, if we could find ways to mitigate a lot of our current technological and psychological shortcomings, it would be very interesting to implement. As it stands _right now_ , I have serious misgivings about the ability of the average citizen to make informed decisions on the scale required, the ability of the population as a whole to sanely assess issues, the functionality of the social constructs required, and the technology involved. Multiple decades in the future, that may be a different story. Then again, maybe buy that time some nations will have less cohesive identities, and we'll have free-floating blocks of political identities with exert more or less power based on the issue, and people will generally have membership in multiple of those, and _those_ will be the guiding and warring force in politics that craft the majority of the laws and individuals then vote on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> While I agree with the tenets of this article (global capitalism is bad and needs to be replaced with technological socialism (which, in my view, would ultimately enable the formation of a true Marxist society)), there's some really bad assumptions being made that I have to point out:

> Companies like Apple and Google should strive to be technology leaders, not > tax avoidance ones...

Yeah, they should, but... it's not going to happen. The executives of Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. benefit from a system of political and economic highway robbery where their massive influence in their respective markets allows them near monopolies. These institutions have become so powerful that they can flip off the government/"we the people" to their hearts' content (e.g. when the USA wanted an iPhone backdoor, when Verizon decided to just give the government everyone's phone calls without permission, when many of the world's workers have little choice but to work in a so-called sweatshop to make the goods that Amazon sells).

These are not the type of people who care about what they "should do" \- they're businessmen who are in it to make money, after all. Assuming some degree of morality from the executives of multinational corporations is essentially the height of naivete.

> What makes today's world so different than the 1950s are the means with > which ambition and creativity can be realized...

This is just blatantly wrong - it might be correct if you're an American white person whose parents can help pay for college and you have the natural aptitude to excel in a technical or business field. But if you're like a lot of people, your opportunity to start the next Facebook is close to zero: you don't have the skills, money, free-time, friends or family support you need to succeed.

> It would be against the self-interest of both consumers and politicians to > hold tech back...

The problem is that "tech" isn't just one thing or one group of companies - pretty much every multinational corporation has a deep interest in technology. It is in these companies self-interest to avoid paying taxes, eliminate labor from the production pipeline, create consumers who depend on their products entirely, and maximize their own outcomes at the expense of anything else they can externalize costs unto.

It is then in the both the interest of consumer (whose money will fuel global inequality, destruction of the environment, corruption) and the interest of the government (or society as a whole) to limit the influence of these super- corporations: they care only for themselves, despite their vaguely liberal public appearances. They exist to serve the stock holders, nothing more. To suggest otherwise is, again, the height of naivete.

</comment><comment><USER34> fantastic post!</comment>


Motorola Xoom price official: $799 unsubsidized on Verizon, $600 for WiFi-only - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/16/motorola-xoom-price-official-799-unsubsidized-on-verizon-600/

<comment><USER2> I can buy a 3G USB dongle for, what, £20? Heck, for that price difference, I can buy a whole 3G Kindle.

I find it very hard to believe they're both subsidised _that_ heavily by their respective backers, so why (other than supporting the price of overpriced 3.7" tablets, er smartphones) is the 3G enabled tablet _so_ much more expensive?

</comment><comment><USER3> The main problem for me is that they destroyed trust by refusing to update the Android OS on some of their phones. Presumably the same thing will happen on the tablet.

I wish for a "Nexus One" of Honeycomb tablets...

<comment><USER4> Google got burned when they tried to sell Nexus phones directly; they couldn't match the carriers' bundled prices. But it might make sense for Google to sell a WiFi-only tablet directly.

<comment><USER5> Via which retail store? They need someone to actually sell the product, and Google has no experience with end-customer product sales.

<comment><USER6> The Nexus S is in Best Buy. Having no retail for the Nexus One was dumb, but Google _has_ learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, completely amazing pricing. Going to get the wi-fi version. This completely blow away the current iPad. Has front/back facing camera with video capture, better resolution, dual-core processor with graphics acceleration, HDMI, USB, microSD, Android 3.0 etc. Good strategy of going after the high end. After all, in another 6 months you will be able to get the current iPad like specs on the low end for $300/$400 from commodity players.

</comment><comment><USER8> Then it's doomed. Any tablet with a higher price than the iPad fails to generate any kind of lasting interest, I don't see why it will be different here.

Which is sad, the Xoom looks like a great tablet.

<comment><USER9> The Xoom will mostly compete with the yet-to-be-announced iPad 2. The Xoom's specs completely blow the original iPad out of the water, so it's likely okay that it's priced above the current iPad; we'll have to wait and see what the iPad 2 brings to the table. If Apple can hit similar specs at a cheaper price then you might be right, but I doubt that'll happen.

The Xoom also has the Honeycomb advantage; I wonder what iPad 2's UI will look like. I think you underestimate how impressed average people will be when casually browsing tablets in stores. Honeycomb is _gorgeous_.

<comment><USER10> It needs to have higher specs, as it is running a knocked off Java. And as good as honeycomb cereal is, Android is pretty sluggish and ugly compared to iOS. iOS is gorgeous.

Nobody bought the iPad because of specs, aside from the battery life. If you think they did, you still do not understand the market, and are probably baffled that people are not buying Intel based tablets.

<comment><USER9> > It needs to have higher specs, as it is running a knocked off Java

What? This makes no sense at all. How are those two thoughts related at all? And Android runs real Java, not "knocked off" Java.

> And as good as honeycomb cereal is, Android is pretty sluggish and ugly > compared to iOS. iOS is gorgeous.

Oh I see, you're a troll. I'll respond anyway. Android is not sluggish compared to iOS; especially given that Honeycomb isn't even out in the wild running on real devices yet, this statement is totally unfounded. I'll grant you that iOS is gorgeous, though. But so is Honeycomb. :)

> Nobody bought the iPad because of specs, aside from the battery life. If you > think they did, you still do not understand the market, and are probably > baffled that people are not buying Intel based tablets.

iPad was a new product in a new form factor. It was a "game-changer". Nobody bought it based on specs because they had nothing to compare it to. I'm definitely not suggesting that people will buy new tablets based on specs either, but it will matter that the two devices are in the same league.

<comment><USER10> I'm not a troll, I'm perfectly serious. I am pointing out that Google claims that Dalvik "IS NOT JAVA!!!" which is funny because everybody knows Android runs Java™.

Additionally, the specs are irrelevant when comparing the iPad, which runs C applications, to something that must ram everything through a Java VM. And I mean, irrelevant to geeks, as the platforms are so different that it is impossible to compare them based on specifications. To normal people, the specs are completely, 100%, totally irrelevant, aside from battery life.

The new iteration of Android has some UI tweaks, but it's still awfully busy. It's clearly made for the power user who cares about specs. I mean, yeah, you can see two things at once. Ordinary people will just say "I typed in the wrong window." It seems like an important spec to be able to have an arbitrary number of things going on at once on the device, and their Expose knockoff is, well, an Expose knockoff, but I just wonder if they thought this through all the way, or if they are thinking in a Microsoft sort of way, that one more bullet point on a spec sheet will make that sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's also Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1" coming out soon, wonder what the price would be for that device. With all this new subscription policy mess Apple is making, I'd rather be sure I have a Kindle and an Audible apps and not overpaying for the content, so I'm seriously considering an Android tablet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Glad to see Moto doing the most sensible thing - Very appealing price even when compared against the yet-hypothetical iPad 2 which is not likely to have 1Gb of RAM, dual cameras or USB 2.0 port for that matter.

<comment><USER13> I'm almost certain the iPad 2 will have 1gb RAM, a dual Core CPU, and at least a front facing camera. It won't have a USB port though.

Guess we'll have to wait and see though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What an awful name. Of course the iPad gas a lame name, but at least it has an obvious pronunciation. I see "Xoom" and say "exhume" which means to dig a body up.

I think I smell the reek of death. Now if the exhume was only say, $300 for the wifi only unit, they'd have something. Even $400 would be too much for what consumers will call a "generic iPad" as even the hard-up could find another $99 if they already had $400 to drop on a toy like a tablet.

Exhume indeed. This may illustrate to clever marketers that for a lot of people, the obvious and seemingly correct pronunciation for a clever brand might bite them. My grandpa called Qwest "queue west" as they made him wait for a customer service agent too long for his liking. He was onto something.

<comment><AUTHOR> when the Apple tablet was announced, the chosen name for the device was subject to ridicule for weeks on the internet. After it became one of the fastest selling tech products ever, the internet whiners were nowhere to be found...

<comment><USER10> What do you mean? The name is still awful.

Hell I am writing this on my iPad, and I still think it is an awful name.

On edit: you missed my main point, which is that Xoom has no clear pronunciation. Is it "zoom?" I am supposing that is what they want me to call it, but "exhume" is what it looks like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $600 is a good price point. Great to see that they will not only be selling a $800 model.

</comment><comment><USER15> That $600 is a good price point for this device. I'm tempted to get one...

</comment><comment><USER16> $299 for the 3g, $250 for the wifi, then we'll talk.</comment>


"Currently, it is not possible to add an SSL certificate to your site." - <AUTHOR> https://www.wix.com/support/html5/article/request-adding-an-ssl-certificate-https-to-your-site <comment><USER2> WIX is not supporting SSL Certificate, thats the reason and there is no option to Add it.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deploy and scale ML (±DL) models? - <AUTHOR> Broad answers to the broad question are OK too, everyone will benefit from them, but more specifically:
1. Why is there so little "unbiased" info about production deploying/serving ML models? (I mean except the official docs of frameworks like eg. TensorFlow which obviously suggest their mothership's own services/solutions.)
2. Do you hand code microservices around your TF or Pytorch (or sklearn / homebrewed / "shallow" learning) models?
3. Do you use TensorFlow Serving? (If so, is this working fine for you with Pytorch models too?)
4. Is using Go infra like eg. Cortex framework common? (Keep reading about it, love the point and I'd love using static language here but not Java, but talked with noooone who's actually used it.)
5. And going beyond the basics: is there any good established recipe for deploying and scaling models with dynamic re-training (eg. the user app expose something like a "retrain with params X + Y + Z" API action, callable in response to user actions - eg. the user control training too) that does not break horribly with more than tens of users?
P.S. Links to any collections of "established best practices" or "playbooks" would be awesome! <comment><USER2> 1\. By unbiased, do you mean opinionated? The MLOps industry is still in the very early stages and there's no single standard. Every dev and company has come up with an implementation but there are so many tiny little use cases that sometimes forces new implementations to spring up. The closest standard you get is a Docker/Kubernetes flavour.

2\. Handcoding to begin with is fine but as you start to scale the number of production models and actually productionalize the model at scale, it's unfeasible and leads to plenty of maintenance issues. There are a few model infrastructure tools that help with this but again, many are homegrown because the market is still new. Algorithmia, Seldon are pretty good starts.

3\. Rarely use serving options provided as the challenge is integrating it with the rest of engineering. Service monitoring gets handled by different teams.

4\. Depends on the industry and usecase. Again integrating and maintenance comes into play. Go/Cortex might make sense but a lot of companies leverage Spark so Scala/Java could be the choice for production models.

5\. We're working on creating this recipe for enterprises. I believe Seldon (open source) might contain this capability. The challenge as you pointed out is ensuring things don't break!

</comment><comment><USER3> Cortex contributor here/the guy who wrote that article about using Go. The project is on the young side, so we don't have the "footprint" of older projects yet, but if you want to talk to people deploying models with Cortex I'd recommend checking out our Gitter channel: [https://gitter.im/cortexlabs/cortex](https://gitter.im/cortexlabs/cortex)

All of our core contributors + a good number of users are in there, and we're all happy to chat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will digg more into Cortex and/vs MLflow now ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We're building an internal platform for that. Description in my profile. Please get in touch if you'd like to know more or play with it, we'd love your feedback. We have given access to about thirty students to prepare their final year projects in vision, NLP, etc.

We've been doing consulting for more than six years and we're building a platform precisely to solve the problems we have encountered and you are writing about. We have learned some things that we are encoding in the platform, in case you want to build your own. We have started doing this because we hit a ceiling on the projects we could do, and we were under stress. We're a tiny, tiny team.

The problems are in interfaces between different roles, with each role having a stack with a gazillion tools, and a different "language" they speak and universe they live in. The stitching of people's interaction together, the workflow, the business problems, and the fragmented tooling is problematic. The inflexibility of said tooling and frameworks that you addressed also made us not be able to use them, or other platforms. This is why we are working hard to build a coherent, integrated experience, while still trying to bulid abstractions that allow us to substitute tools and view the tools as simple components, not to be tied.

For now, it allows you to create a notebook from several images with most libraries pre-installed. The infra it's deployed on allows Tesla K80 which you can use. You can of course install additional libraries.

This solves the problem of setting the environment, CUDA, docker engine, runtime versions, and the usual yak shaving. We're only using JupyterHub and JupyterLab for Python notebooks for now, as it is what our colleagues use, but we plan to support more.

It also solves the problem of the "it works on my machine" and running a colleague's notebook.

You can click on a button and publish an AppBook and share it with a domain expert right away to play with. It is automatically parametrized for you so you don't play with widgets, and automatically generates form fields for parameters. The parameters, metrics are tracked behind the scenes without you doing anything, and the models are saved to object storage. Again, one role we target is the ML practitioner who does not necessarily remember to do these things, so we do it for them.

Here's a video from a very early version: [https://app.box.com/s/mwsw79g3d5b974o625f1mw979cc4znf0](https://app.box.com/s/mwsw79g3d5b974o625f1mw979cc4znf0)

We're using MLFlow for that, but plan to support GuildAI, and Cortex. We think hard to make things loosely coupled and configurable, so you get to pick the stack and easily integrate the platform with existing stack.

The AppBook is super useful in that you can publish it and then use it to train the model, or share it with a domain expert so they can play with different parameters. One of the problems we've seen was that some features are considered unimportant for an ML practitioner, but are critical to domain experts.

Thightening that feedback loop from notebook to domain expert makes the one click AppBook important because it saves you scheduling meetings and how to "show" the domain expert the work, while allowing them to interact with it.

You can also deploy models you choose with one click and it will give you an endpoint and generate a tutorial on how to hit that endpoint to invoke the model with curl or Python requests. You can generate a token and invoke the model in other places or services.

This self service feature is important because it allows an ML practitioner to "deploy" their own model, without asking a colleague to do so who might be doing other things. Self service is super important through this.

Right now, we're focusing on fixing bugs and improving tests and have added monitoring before going back to feature development. Some features we were working on were a more flexible and scalable model deployment strategies, monitoring, collaboration, retraining, and data streams, and building the SDK.

<comment><USER4> One of the problems is that the demos in PyData or SparkSummit and what not do not survive first contact with reality. For really simple things.

For example, some libraries expect a filepath for their data. Say you want to use Keras from a notebook and your data is somewhere else than on disk (like if your job isn't to write blog posts on ML deployments, but you have real clients who expect you to explore data, build, deploy, and manage models, then build applications that use them that also look pretty, with money on the line, not toy projects), you suddenly have to dive into the framework internals to make it work with say, object storage.

Another example, say your project is for image classification and you have 100+k images. Min.io does not support pagination because it's not really "S3", so you have to build pagination for the users because you're displaying it like a directory, and it must act like a directory. The way Min.io does it in their front end is they download the whole list recursively, and then do an infinite scroll. This can be 20MB+ of data through the network. It works great if you have great internet bandwidth, but for a lot of parts in the world having maybe 1Mbps (notice Mbps, not MBps), this won't work when a user just wants to "explore the directory structure".

Heck, one of our colleagues was not using the product and when pressed, she said the notebook is taking forever to load. There were 30 megabytes of static files being downloaded and she had a 5kB/second during confinement. We dug into rebuilding it, then compressing static files, and caching. And she's having trouble using the AppBook doing real projects in vision, for example, specifying a data source and having the boxes display properly.

One way we're developing the product is by going through the _real projects we have worked on, with real data_ and doing them retrospectively on our platform to make sure it works with real problems. We're not optimizing for a demo in an event, we're optimizing for something that really works for us because we don't have teams of "data scientists", "ML engineers", "deployment engineers" and we want to be able to allow the couple of ML practitioners we have to get data projects running in a self service way, which means that by definition you have to inherit of all the complexity you're trying to spare users.

The same problems when you can't trivially create an "empty bucket". Users don't care that S3 is not the same as a filesystem, you're pretending it is by having a "folder" icon and you damn better get it to work like a "folder" where one can create structures for image classes, and then traverse them. The API does not allow that, so you have to write the code to give it the look and feel of a directory and you must thus write something that make "pagination" work to display hundreds of thousands of images. And that's just 100K+ images, not millions or billions. But you wouldn't have that problem with a hello world example or the talk you give.

The deployment problem, for instance. Yes, you see the example and it looks great. Then you try to reproduce the example in the repo, and it does not work.

Let's say you use MLflow to "deploy". It has a client and a server. As far as you'd expect, the client makes a request to the server, and the server does "things". But let's say you're deploying a model that's in object storage: object storage credentials must be put server side _and_ client side. You can't just make a request from the client to save a model and then the server handles it in the backend with whatever solution you're having. No, you must specify the object storage URL, and credentials in the client code.

Which means, if you don't want to play house, you have to proxy requests and then authenticate them in a "Man in the middle" fashion between the mlflow client and the mlflow server itself, just so that your credentials do not leak.

This would be mitigated if you're using Min.io in a multi tenant mode so each user has their own "object storage", but Min.io does not have an API with which you can can do that (user creation, etc), and you must do it with their `mc` client. Which means you have to create this on the fly for each user and wrap these.

There's also the problem of work load scheduling, notebook collaboration and versioning. You give 2GB or RAM? OK. Users need way more. What do you do next? You give 100GB of RAM? You make it elastic? How do you deal with "runway models" (as opposed to Instagram models) that are hemorraging your resources? You have to think about resource management and workload management. Do you instaure quotas so that one user, doesn't monopolize all the resources?

How do you deal with real time collaboration and versioning? Because you know, you're working on real projects with real people? Do they have to version their notebooks? They don't know how to use Git when they do ML. Do you hack on the Contents API and have a custom ContentsManager? Do you dig through operational transformation or CRDT to give it the look and feel people expect now for collaboration?

It is that stitching and managing these fragmented tools idiosyncrasies that make it that the posts I read on some data science medium blog posts or watch talks about machine learning lifecycle management completely shock me, as I really would love it to be that way, but it simply isn't. Maybe it is when you're toying with a jupyter notebook or on Kaggle and, training a model on data on your disk, and wrapping a Flask application on it, then writing a blog post on how easy it is.

Let's then say that you have "deployed" your model with the super ml lifecycle management library, which really just starts a process and launches a flask application. How do you shut it down or manage it? Drifting? How do you retrain it? Do you use Airflow or NiFi or the like? Who configures them, the use? What's the schedule?

So, yes.. I understand why your question is: "Since everybody has it figured and blogs about it and demos in conferences, am I that stupid or is everyone full of baloney? Is there something everyone knows that I don't or what?"</comment></comment>


What CSS minifiers also leave behind - <AUTHOR> https://luisant.ca/css-opts-survey2 <comment><USER2> The scientific notation one is a bug. Scientific notation isn't part of the CSS spec[1], and its not supported in all browsers.

I learned this one the hard way a few months ago. We ran into a flexbox bug in one browser which we worked around by adding some-rule: 0.0000001px instead of 0px. However, our minifier collapsed that using scientific notation, which triggered a rendering issue in a _different_ browser due to the out-of-spec CSS. The whole adventure left me feeling like I'd travelled back in time.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#numbers](https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#numbers)

<comment><USER3> Scientific notation seems to be part of CCS3:

[https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#numbers](https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#numbers)

Which browser had problems with it?

<comment><USER4> "q" is also CSS3, incidentally, and its background is interesting[0]: it's a mostly japanese metric typographical unit[1], it replaces the point, and is slightly smaller: q is 0.25mm while pt is ~0.3528mm (precisely 1/72th of an inch which is 25.4mm).

[0] [http://tosche.net/2013/10/font-size-in-the-metric- system_e.h...](http://tosche.net/2013/10/font-size-in-the-metric- system_e.html)

[1] although non-japanese typographers like Otl Aicher have recommended its use it doesn't seem to have had much success outside Japan

<comment><USER5> "q" seems to be doomed to failure. If I were that interested in moving away from points and ems, why would I adopt arbitrary fractions of a millimeter when I could just use plain old SI units that are universally understood? It doesn't even save a byte at typical font sizes: 20q == 5mm.

<comment><USER6> Saving bytes in CSS was probably not the primary concern upon standardization in 1976. Note that the PostScript point (now the most common definition) is younger than that. Common usage doesn't always follow the best option that's available, as evident by many examples throughout history.

Furthermore, having a measurement that can frequently be used with integer dimensions is _convenient_ , which is probably a large part why we still use points. 12 pt is a convenient font size, so is 4 mm (technically 4.2 mm, as 11.8 pt would be 4 mm), but while 10 pt is still convenient, 3.5 mm is less so. Smaller units lead to more useful integer values (within reason, of course).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here.

Wow. #1 on HN. Wow.

I'd usually hang around a bit more, but I'm really tired. I posted this past my midnight. 00:51 now, and I'm fading fast.

Thanks for all the love, everyone. I'll come over tomorrow (12 hours from now, or so) to answer any questions or to pick up any corrections.

<comment><USER7> I hope you sleep well.

<comment><AUTHOR> :3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I'm guessing that at nine nines that is pretty much a one anyway and it > would not even change a single pixel on the screen.

There used to be a bug with flex-wrap: wrap; where an element would wrap to the next line while it should have fit. You could fix it by instead using width: 25%; use width: 24.999999%; so it would be 25% on the screen but it would fix the problem so it didn't wrap to the next line. So you should look out with this.

<comment><USER9> That sounds like the time-honored single whitespace bug. Usually fix it with margin-left: -4px on all but the first element in the row.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks like a fun project indeed!

Unfortunately every time I read something about minifiers I got the feeling that people are optimizing the wrong problem.

If you gzip data over the line it's already compressed. So minifying your stuff will only help you a little.

The problem is on the client side. You can compress what you like but if the browser starts dropping frames because it has to compile/handle a ton of Javascript and CSS then minifying doesn't help the end user.

<comment><USER11> _> If you gzip data over the line it's already compressed. So minifying your stuff will only help you a little._

For small files you might be mostly correct, but for larger ones min+compress can product much better gains than compression alone.

IIRC the algorithm used employs a rolling compression window, and can only match strings of tokens whose distance apart is smaller than that window. IIRC the default window is 8KBytes and the maximum is 32KBytes. Even if you use the maximum at the expense of CPU time that isn't going to cover many large files. Minifying increases the effective range of the compression window, each match is shorter but you will find more matches and usually this balances out in a way that benefits the compression result.

It isn't quite that simple in reality as there is huffman encoding and other tricks in the mix. This means that even for inputs smaller than the compression window you may see some benefit as minifying can reduce the input data's alphabet significantly.

Ignoring the "why it helps", it is easy to show that it _does_ help in a great many real cases:

      ds@s2:/tmp$ wget --quiet https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.0.min.js
      ds@s2:/tmp$ wget --quiet https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.2.0.js
      ds@s2:/tmp$ gzip jquery-3.2.0.min.js
      ds@s2:/tmp$ gzip jquery-3.2.0.js
      ds@s2:/tmp$ ls -l j*
      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds 79201 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.js.gz
      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds 30023 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.min.js.gz

In this example the result of min+comp is less than 40% the size of the result from compression alone.

For completeness, minifying alone achieves less than compression alone:

      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds 267686 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.js
      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds  79201 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.js.gz
      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds  86596 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.min.js
      -rw-r--r-- 1 ds ds  30023 Mar 16 21:30 jquery-3.2.0.min.js.gz

One further factor is CPU time consumed on the client decompressing and parsing the content but this is likely to be insignificant compared to the network or local IO time, if a device's CPU is under-powered enough that this _is_ significant then it is unlikely to be able to run the decompressed code with useful performance.

<comment><USER12> Most of the gains in there are from stripping out comments. That plus whitespace removal gets you most of the benefit. I don't think the parent was advocating for dropping minification completely, but investing massive effort when you're already at the crest of the curve.

<comment><USER13> Stripping out comments would be one, but eventually remove _all_ useless code and optimizing it using tools like Google Closure Compiler is way more effective in most websites that use a single bundle for everything.

<comment><USER12> When the subject is CSS, dead code removal is a way more complex problem, and only possible if your usage falls within certain constraints. Best bet is a component system with scopes styles that ensures you are only loading what is required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't mean to squash any enthusiasm, but these types of 1byte optimization savings don't really have real-world benefits due to over-the-wire compression like gzip and Brotli.

A more interesting problem to solve, I think, is that of optimising CSS rules for browser rendering.

<comment><USER15> I think that there is merit in designing a minifier that is explicitly designed to optimise the gziped size rather than the uncompressed size.

Things like:

* Rearrange rules within the file to put similar rules within the sliding window.

* Rearrange rules so that tail of the last declaration of one rule and the start of the next selector create the longest possible common substring.

* Rearrange the order of declarations within the rules to maximize the length of common substrings that span two declarations, ie ": 2em;\nbackground-color: rgb("

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on one, though I'm not sure if it will ever see the light of the day. I have four months of free time and if someone would feed and house me for that time, I'd do it and open source it.

Any sponsors? No? Didn't think so. Not even you, big G? Aww...

For now some minifiers do sort the values, which helps.

<comment><USER16> Maybe open-source it anyways? :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I won't have it any other way.

The "not starving to death" thing is a bit of an issue on the way there... Well, I have savings, but...

And if I get a horrid job, then I won't have the energy. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's the same author's earlier post on this subject, "The missed chances: What minifiers leave behind", from last week:

[https://luisant.ca/css-opts-survey](https://luisant.ca/css-opts-survey)

<comment><USER18> Anybody know if the transparency one is actually a desirable optimization? Iirc, you might want to assign a color to your transparency so it's not shifting hue as you fade it in through CSS transitions, animations, or JS.

<comment><USER19> Author of crass here. That's interesting: if you have a specific case where the browser doesn't do what you'd expect, I'd love to see it in a Github issue!

[https://github.com/mattbasta/crass/issues/new](https://github.com/mattbasta/crass/issues/new)

<comment><USER18> I was thinking of the fact that transparent is supposedly an alias for rgba(0,0,0,0), but this doesn't seem to cause an issue when I try it out, in Firefox at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> crass is doing some really wonderful stuff here -- I'm impressed!

It's very interesting, however, that no one minifier is a consistent winner in these test cases, and that running CSS through multiple minifiers is actually, potentially, not all that crazy. (The very debatable _real_ value in doing that notwithstanding.)

<comment><USER19> I appreciate the compliment! (author of crass here)

I've mentioned it before, but it's really not a great idea to use multiple minifiers. Minifier bugs can get nasty, and using multiple minifiers exponentially increases the likelihood that you'll encounter some weird or broken behavior. Make sure to test thoroughly.

<comment><AUTHOR> And I will mention it one more time: I totally agree with you. It needs to be said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a slightly-related question for those of you familiar with Webpack, css modules (css-loader/style-loader), and perhaps React as well: is there any reason not to use the 'default' approach where the styles for the components are simply inserted in a <style> (with unique, generated classnames)?

To be clear: I don't mean philosophical reasons. I personally love letting javascript deal with the 'cascading' part and I don't have a problem with the idea of having styling embedded in the final page.

What I'm curious about is if this has any kind of negative impact on performance, bandwidth, etc. Because the CSS is loaded on the component level, and because Webpack 2 does tree shaking, the page will be guaranteed to only contain CSS for the components that are on the page. And if I'd 'lazy-load' parts of the app, I'd get that benefit for my CSS as well with no extra effort.

On the other hand, any benefits of having a compiled (and hopefully cached) bundle.css are offset by the need for an extra request for the css file, as well as the very likely situation that there'll be a bunch of unused css in that bundle.

Am I missing some drawback to the above-mentioned approach?

<comment><USER19> When you're using a loader, the CSS still exists, it's just a big string in your JS bundle. By default, I believe css-loader/style-loader will use cssnano to minify the CSS within your bundle.

What will be very interesting in the coming years (as the work gets done around it) is "full css" optimization. That is, when you know you have all of the styles for the whole page available to the minifier. If the minifier knows that no other CSS is being loaded, it can do a lot more work to remove and merge rulesets. In the case of styles bundled with Webpack, common CSS could be reduced even further, after tree shaking has taken place.

<comment><USER21> In the long run I think we're more likely to end up with a full js-based styling approach that, similar to JSX, might look like CSS but really directly styles individual nodes and 'manages' them.

But this is probably quite a ways off.

<comment><USER19> The tricky part is handling things like hover states and pseudoelements. I think scoped CSS and shadow DOM (and other new techniques) will probably be the key to making this work long-term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Didn't know about all of those units. q, mm, cm… scientific notation?!

Also didn't know one could use counters already. Browser support is great. I thought it was still under approval.

Amazing stuff, thanks

<comment><USER19> CSS is a far bigger spec than anyone knows. Did you know that you can put dots and spaces in your CSS classnames? Bonus points if you can figure out how to escape characters in CSS identifiers ;)

<comment><USER22> That I did know.

But scientific notation? C'mon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone provide some hard numbers from real projects as to is it really worth it assuming we can gzip/brotili?

<comment><USER13> Don't forget that gzip/brotli only affects the shipping time. This would be the process:

      1. Server: check Accept-encoding header for gzip or brotili support
      2. Server: compress either brotli or gzipped file, or fall back to a raw file
      3. Server: send data to client
      4. Client: receive (and decompress, if not raw)
      5. Client: parse (big) resource

Also, compression through uglifying/minifying improves parse speed, which is really helpful on (old) mobile devices. Adding compression through gzip or brotli introduces additional overhead, because the uncompressing step will be in-memory and stalls the processing of the file.

<comment><USER24> > 2\. compress

No, you don't need to waste CPU cycles on compression for each connection. You can store the .css.gz on the filesystem along with the .css and have the webserver pick up the appropriate file based on Accept-encoding.

That way you can precompress with the slowest compression options.

<comment><USER13> Of course, there are multiple ways to optimize it (like storing stuff at a CDN), but I'm pretty sure 95% of the people do not precompress their assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If folks tend to use some higher level abstraction (isn't that what SASS and LESS are?) maybe it makes sense to provide a new way to encode the information in CSS. Similar to how WASM is supposed to be easier to parse than JavaScript, right?

</comment><comment><USER26> I liked the writing style, fun read AND very informative!

<comment><AUTHOR> My pleasure, I'm glad you liked it! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are there any good tools for deobfuscating css/js if you want to study a technique used on some web page?

<comment><USER19> If you're using Crass, it has a --pretty flag that will pretty-print your CSS, even after minification. You can play with it online here, too:

[http://www.mattbasta.com/crass/](http://www.mattbasta.com/crass/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like your site design. Very clean and readable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aww... Thanks!

My pleasure! All from scratch, designed for nothing but readability.

I am building textbooks on the same code, so the blog is a great stress and user test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _I 'm for hire now. Le Sigh. Email's in the footer._

Remy: I'd suggest posting a CV and linking to it from this post. I looked and couldn't find one anywhere on your site; you'll get a lot more qualified interest if people can find out more about you than just a few blog posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about it, but I'm way too shy for that.

Not like it would lead to anywhere either, you know. :P

Two years of teaching university, MSc in computing, love of automation, combinatiorial optimization without any significant amount of deep math skill, circuit design, gate array stuff, low-level CPU optimization stuff, hardware counters, microcontrollers, SQLite, Julia language, C, shell, a bunch more programming languages, basic CSS and HTML, Mustache templates, Linux. No JavaScript. The whole of luisant.ca is done by hand and from scratch, so you can see what I can do with that. Also statistics.

I'm uncommonly silly and not at all serious, while still standing up for what I believe is right, even if everyone disagrees with me. I do integrity though and while I can stand my ground, I will yield to good evidence any day.

I wear goofy clothes to work, usually very colourful stuff. Don't expect conformity.

And I have no love greater than the one for the cause of nature conservation, and all research that goes with that.

That's about me in a nutshell.

Told you nothing will come of it. :P

<comment><USER30> Man, just post a link to CV like you're advised and let good things happen to you. If they don't, you lose nothing, but if they do, you got something out of your effort.

<comment><USER18> Seriously, somebody saw he's looking for a job, and _was actually looking for his CV as somebody in charge of hiring might do_</comment></comment></comment></comment>