Where Is Nokia Now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-29/they-built-the-first-phone-you-loved-where-in-the-world-is-nokia-now <comment><USER4> My paranoid brain often thought that Microsoft not only acquired their stake in Nokia for Windows phones but also to control some aspects of Qt as it was quickly unloaded from Nokia after Microsoft entered the picture. A sort of power play which we all saw later on with Xamarin without the feel-good outcome that Xamarin eventually had. Qt Creator is a joy to work with for open source software in my opinion for even just non-Qt projects. Back then I was using it on my BSD desktop before switching to XCode for vanilla C++ projects. Anyhow, it was extremely portable I could code with MinGW on Windows and then move the same project to BSD and then move it into XCode with minor changes. I would imagine Nokia at that time would seem extremely unique to Microsoft for just Qt alone. Just some food for thought...I still have Qt built ANGLE libs in my GH repo I think. Yeah, it was also an OpenGL ES 2 emulator that ran on DirectX which you could optionally run Qt Creator on top of and I remember Nokia's name was all over it. It was possible to do cross-platform Windows and Android code this way with just a JNI wrapper. It was a hot mess and I loved it! Here are a couple links that back up this strange tale:

[https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5_on_Windows_ANGLE_and_OpenGL](https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5_on_Windows_ANGLE_and_OpenGL)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_\(software\))

<comment><USER5> Even in 2017, with several uses across Symbian, Blackberry, Ubuntu and Jolla SDKs, Qt is lacking in regards to mobile OS API support.

Unless one is doing GUI apps required without integration with OS APIs or their native UIs, replicating everything in QML (C++ widgets are not supported) and writting JNI and Objective-C++ wrappers isn't that much fun.

Xamarin gets more love from app developers, because even before Microsoft's acquisition they had a whole set of teams dedicated to doing nothing else other than achieving parity with iOS and Android native APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes when I'm in the mood for a little self-congratulation, I look back on a blog piece I wrote shortly after the Burning Platform memo and subsequent move towards Windows Phone:

[http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2011/02/18/0...](http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2011/02/18/00:00/Why- Nokia-is-Doomed)

I was pretty ignorant of the rest of Nokia's business outside of mobile devices, and there are some particulars that differed a bit, but I think I called basic trajectory they traced in the mobile market from that point pretty well: premier hardware maker loses lead in market shift, turns to Microsoft for software partnership, finds itself _still_ struggling in a competitive market, now working with _another_ failing software platform whose destiny it can't control on top of its other problems, eventually is "married" by Microsoft.

Now divorced, and looking to make a new life, it would seem.

<comment><USER7> Can't help thinking that selling the phones to Microsoft was the plan-B all along and one of the reasons why they brought in Elop and decided to go with Windows.

Selling to Microsoft when things went bad was a pretty big thing. If they had not been able to sell the mobile phone business for decent price, it might have taken down the whole company. Considering what happened, the outcome for Nokia was (IMHO) pretty spectacular.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the feeling it was plan-A for Microsoft all the time. Shuttling someone loyal to your company to the top job of a struggling acquisition target is a genius move.

Nokia _was_ struggling to differentiate itself by making their own OS, which is, in retrospect, a huge mistake. Had they gone with Android, they'd leverage all their knowledge of the Linux kernel on their own hardware. Getting Android to run on the N9 would probably have been trivial and they would have a compelling product in no time.

The whole model of the handset market changed - instead of courting telcos, they needed to court end-users and they totally blew that up.

<comment><USER8> The N9 was probably the most successful unmarketed and unavailable (not in any primary markets that could afford it) phone in history. It's big brother was only available as a dev device.

There's plenty of evidence that there was demand. I'd love to see them relaunch a similar device with updated specs today. I'd certainly get one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time the fall of Nokia is mentioned I always retell the feelings I had sitting in Ruholahti, Helsinki on February 2011- the Friday of my first week at the company; and hearing the news that R&D was shutting down in favour of Windows Phone.

Many considered it an inferior product, many had just lost the work of their lives. Most just went to the bar across the street.

I feel the heart and soul of Nokia, just like those engineers, is off of the main building somewhere. Getting drunk and telling stories of how great things were and could have been.

<comment><USER10> Ruho = cadaver

Ruoho = grass

You were in Ruoholahti, although I suppose there's some irony in that typo.

<comment><USER11> This is just marvellous

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where are they now? Acquiring and aggressively ruining my Withings Body Composition scale, that's where.

<comment><USER13> Yep... it's amazing they could screw that up. Can anyone recommend a replacement for the Withings scale? All I want it to do is record my weight every time I step on it, send it up to the Internet, and let me view it in my browser and iPhone.

<comment><USER14> I've built a such a scale using a raspberry Pi 3 and a Wii balance board. Step on the scale and it sends to my phone where an app records it in Samsung health.

It's still a work in progress but it's functional.

<comment><USER15> Nice! Have you shared it somewhere?

(No judgement if not, but awesome if you have : )

<comment><USER14> I haven't shared yet but I'm planning on it. I used a lot of code and information available online but some of it is out of date and/or wrong now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nokia is now primarily doing networks, something they were doing before doing mobile. A long while ago Nokia was a conglomerate and one of key reasons it was raising to the top spot in mobile phones and networks was a relentless focus over a decade where all non-core businesses were sold off or shut down and the money plowed back to the core. This focus part of the Nokia Group strategy was not sustainable. The networks part of Nokia peaked with the 3G networks where their base station was a real hot seller due to superior performance.

The network side of Nokia is heavily dependent on big buyers. It used to be that telecom service providers were national and fragmented. That allowed many companies with localized services to serve them. Of course there are efficiencies to be gained by running networks across borders and buying in bulk. The consolidation on the service provider side prompted a consolidation on the network equipment provider side.

Nokia's networks part merged with Siemens Networks part in a "merger of equals" imho. not the most effective manner to do these things. Then Alcatel- Lucent was folded in as well. It is worth contrasting Nokia's strategy with it's Nordic arch rival Ericsson who went through a consolidation and rejuvenation a few years earlier and pursued a more organic growth path.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article confused me on the reality of today's 'Nokia' phones. The recently released and 'back to basics' phones are not legitimate Nokia in my estimation, they are some generic OEM phones with a Nokia label slapped on them.

I am not sure why this badge engineering bugs me, to make me think they are not real Nokia. More generally, why is it that badge engineering sometimes is seen as okay and sometimes not?

To take an automotive analogy, in the VW group there are various high end brands, e.g. Bentley and Bugatti. Both these marques are seen as having heritage even if the engines are 'glorified Golf engines' to a certain extent, even if built in heritage locations (e.g. Crewe, UK) rather than straight out of Wolfsburg. Same with the BMW brands - the Mini and Rolls Royce cars aren't seen as badly styled BMWs, but with heritage intact.

Perhaps the reason that these auto brands are okay is that there really has been innovation, the product line has evolved and the reputation survives. Getting back to the Nokia 'phones', there is no innovation in bringing out a ten-year-old product, OEM made by some randoms. This product makes 'Nokia' one of those fake brands in my estimation and obfuscates the real Nokia that is innovating with the backend hardware.

Imagine if IBM, when they sold their PC hardware, decided to let Lenovo use not just 'ThinkPad' but 'IBM' on the products. You would have no idea as a casual observer that 'IBM were still going'. Nokia just had numbers for their product line, no household name for that, as per 'ThinkPad'.

I am most amazed that Microsoft could not make this work and I think it was the death of the evil Microsoft that cowards used to love and the rest of us used to hate. The once fearsome Microsoft were humbled by it. Even today there is definite scope for being able to carry your office PC around in mini-form in a phone in some seamless way, as hinted at with 'Continuum' and so forth. But whatever happens on the Microsoft Phone platform is negated by things like 'not being able to play YouTube' on it.

<comment><USER18> Has there been innovation in car brands? Apart from electric batteries, a lot of minor unimportant stuff.

Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.

<comment><USER19> That seems like a very limited view: a lot of that "unimportant stuff " has been massive improvements in safety, durability, fuel economy and emissions, ride quality and comfort, etc.

The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using?

(and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some of the most talented people I have ever met in my 30 years in IT worked at Nokia (USA and Finland).

There was something about the culture there that just made it an incredible place to work for everyone. An environment where people were treated with dignity and respect and rewarded with generosity.

The Fins are incredibly hard working and talented along with their US counterparts. I imagine any company that hired an ex Nokia employee was rewarded well.

The company has greatness in it, would not surprise me at all if it rose like a phoenix from the ashes.

<comment><USER21> That feeling is called socialism.

<comment><USER22> OP said Finland and USA.

Also, as far as Socialist countries go, there are plenty that come short when it comes to business (Italy, Spain, Greece,etc...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent who previously bought Timetra which was a silicon valley start up that at one time was meant to compete with Cisco, a pretty bold move for sure. They had some pretty amazing stuff (IMHO) but I think one acquisition after another ruined them, sad I think.

<comment><USER24> Wait, Microsoft owns bell labs now? That's pretty weird.

<comment><USER5> Nokia!

<comment><USER25> Nokia? own bell labs? when did that happen????

<comment><USER26> Last year, when they bought Alcatel-Lucent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Funny just yesterday I was discussing Nokia history. As a simple westerner I only new Nokia telco, early GSM glory and recent demise. But Nokia was founded in the 19th century, dealing with wood and rubber. Later they moved into military equipment and telco.

They also did consumer electronics (VHS, TV) and PCs (desktop and laptops) using sub brands though.

<comment><USER28> Read about samsung too if you want to be surprised.

<comment><USER27> I actually knew about them but never about Nokia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There are certain brands that I will go out of my way to purchase... Nokia is one of them.

They could be selling euthanasia kits and I'd get in line for one.

<comment><USER30> Well, euthanasia is one of the things where you really like that things are done properly.

Though unfortunately Nokia isn't going there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I currently work at Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs/foo and there's a lot of restructuring going on. Lots of layoffs and org changes which is making everyone's head spin and adding a lot of uncertainty into the workplace.

A big part of the Alcatel acquisition was acquiring their customers - in a recent All Hands meeting, Nokia stated they were planning to move away from "nuts and bolts engineering". In America at least.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timeframe in the EU

<comment><USER33> We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

<comment><USER34> > We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and > computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been > terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that > software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja > vu all over again, maybe?

As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of.

What we are _really_ bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.

<comment><USER33> I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Urs Hölzle at Google, Johnny Ive at Apple. There are technical reasons - <USER2> of deep VC capital markets and data protection laws as you point out. There are also cultural reasons - we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.

<comment><USER35> > data protection laws as you point out

I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else.

For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law.

However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here)

And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It seems that Nokia is trying to make up for their missed shot at smartphones by aiming at every emerging, cool market.

I know Nokia is a strong brand, but I doubt that is the proper way for them to get back to being loved company.

<comment><USER37> The Nokia of today is first and foremost a business-to-business network supplier: even its name is back to Nokia Networks. All the consumer investments on the side are only side bets that may or may not take off.

<comment><USER38> Their brand name everywhere is Nokia, not Nokia Networks. Networks is a division (and subsidiary) of Nokia. They have networks, health, virtual reality and phones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > As part of the euro zone, Finland was also unable to devalue its currency to > stimulate spending.

I see this a lot with respect to poorer eurozone countries like Greece. I wonder if it's part of the reason why some U.S. states like West Virginia are (apparently permanently) poor. Would the U.S. economy be more dynamic and productive if each state had its own dollar?

<comment><USER40> Quite possibly. The idea is that there is an Optimum Currency Area, i.e. a region over which a single currency makes sense.

Larger countries (including the UK) are not necessarily Optimum Currency Areas but can mask the effects by using fiscal transfers between richer areas (or states) and poorer areas (or states).

Some smaller countries do better sharing a currency even without the fiscal transfers, (such as Switzerland and Luxembourg I believe).

The Euro is a classic example of far too large an area, encompassing widely disparate economies, and without sufficient balancing fiscal transfers - <USER3> the considered opinion of many people that the Euro as it is currently constituted is not viable over a longer time period. To survive, the Euro requires one of: (a) Strong Political Union and Fiscal Transfers (b) The Departure of Weaker Economies (such as Greece) (c) Breakup, into for example a "Northern" Euro and a "Southern" Euro

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't figured out the actual arrangement behind HDM Global, but can't helping thinking this is just some temporary arrangement and Nokia will acquire it if the phones turn out to be a success. I would say they are definitely planning a real comeback to consumer market.

</comment><comment><USER41> ctrl+f Elop … Well, thought so. Only a few years later, history is already forgotten.

[http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the- sun...](http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of- nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all- waterloo.html)

[http://communities- dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/11/nokia-u...](http://communities- dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/11/nokia-under-elop-his-3-years-performance- review-worst-ceo-of-all-time-all-the-facts-in-pictures.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting how Blackberry-née-R.I.M. is also making driverless vehicles a major priority now.

</comment><comment><USER43> They have been an absolute star of my portfolio since shortly before they sold a whole load of stuff to Microsoft. Doubled in price, fantastic dividends. Whatever they're doing, I hope they keep doing it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Hmm. First phone I loved is a toss up between the Treo 600 and the Startac, though leaning mostly towards the Treo. I still miss that keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER45> Probably still in Finland.

Source: I went to school with a Son of a Nokia employee who informed me the origin of the name wasn't anything exotic, but a specific town in Finland. Thus, I gather it's still there.

<comment><USER46> The Bloomberg article said that Nokia was founded near the city of Tampere. In fact, it was founded in a smaller town near Tampere, called... Nokia. Originally it would have been called something to "the Nokia wood pulp company" or whatever, but they kept the name Nokia when they expanded and moved.

Nokia's headquarters have been in the city of Espoo for a long time (near Helsinki). The area in Espoo where they have their office, Otaniemi, is home to many Helsinki-area tech companies, Aalto University, and many science and engineering institutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I can't help but thinking that Nokia is horribly managed. The amount of inferior products they sold to their loyal audience over and over again, until we were all so fed up with it: different proprietary cables on same-years' devices, stagnant software development and replacing durable with cheap plastics and materials.

Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.

To that extend, there are very little highlights since then.

<comment><USER34> > Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone > days, it's been an utter mess since.

In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)

<comment><USER48> I'm afraid I cannot let a mention of the N900 pass by without babbling about it. I _still_ use my N900, from 2009, every day. It's a full pocket Linux workstation. I can't believe any company actually made such a thing; it'll never happen again.

<comment><USER49> Am using mine ATM. It may lack "elegant design" and 4g but it makes up for it with usability, physical keyboard, swappable battery & expandable storage. It also can be reassembled and used after _most_ falls up to 20 feet onto solid surfaces(my Nexus 4 failed after dropping from my pants pocket onto carpet). It is the only smart smartphone I have encountered since 2007.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pythran: A Python subset to C++ compiler that takes advantage of SIMD - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/serge-sans-paille/pythran <comment><USER2> There are quite a few attempts to make faster python implementation these days from pypy (A JIT built on top of rpython), pyston (yet another JIT that which uses llvm as a backend), pyparallel, nukita and I'm pretty sure there are a lot more.

Either the python community is being very prolific, or has no clue what will actually solve the problem, hence its trying everything.

<comment><USER3> Well, these things are fun to hack on and then each might solve a part of the generally near-unsolvable problem, and for each such part there are people caring about _that_ part the most so the solution has its uses. (Incidentally, my own preference to date has been to only use CPython and fall back to C extension modules when speed starts to matter... But I could have a different preference in a different environment working on different things.)

Kind of like making C or C++ safe is a near-unsolvable problem for most values of "safe" and there's an ever-growing set of static and dynamic analysis tools detecting things like uninitialized memory access, out of bounds access, data races, integer overflow, etc. etc. etc. And each of these tools gives you a different mix of false positives, false negatives, build time overhead (including getting the program to build with the tool at all) and runtime overhead (including getting the program to run), not to mention availability on a given platform and pricing. And different people have a different preference with respect to what this mix should be for their tool of choice. But the problem is unsolvable which is why it's _worth_ to be "trying everything."

<comment><USER4> As a longtime programmer of Python, C & C++ (and a longtime appreciator of your FQA Lite, by the way), my preference until recently was also to use CPython & fall back on extension modules for speed.

But I grew weary of writing all the Python C-API boilerplate -- especially checking parameter types and managing reference counts properly.

So I created (and recently open-sourced) Pymod, a Nim+Python project that auto-generates all the Python C-API boilerplate & auto-compiles a Python C extension module, to wrap the functions in a Nim module: [https://github.com/jboy/nim-pymod](https://github.com/jboy/nim-pymod)

As a pragmatic Python programmer, Pymod may be of interest to you too...

(As someone who learned C++ in 1999 and spent most of 200x working in C++, I also grew weary of staying on top of C++0x's new features & new gotchas. So about a year ago, I switched from C++ to Nim-lang and haven't looked back. To me, Nim combines all the best features of Python & C++, while avoiding most of the worst: C++ speed, C++ static types, C++ generics, C++ operator overloading; combined with a clean Pythonic syntax & Lispy macros.)

<comment><USER5> Cython (and before it Pyrex) occupies a similar space between C and Python.

Was any of your design inspired by them? I also wonder how practical it would be to reuse parts of it when making a bridge for another language.

<comment><USER4> Actually, Pymod was designed to be almost an anti-Cython. :)

My issue with Cython is that it's a limited sub-language within Python, where you add Cython elements incrementally & iteratively (diverging from Python in the process) until the code runs "fast enough". I'd rather work directly in a full-featured, internally-self-consistent language from the start. Nim has a clean Pythonic syntax, with all the best parts of C++ (including its runtime speed).

Hence, Pymod takes the form of an `exportpy` annotation (a user-defined Nim pragma) onto existing Nim functions, which are then auto-compiled into a Python extension module.

So there's no gradual divergence of my Python code (as it becomes more "Cythonized"); rather, the high-performance code is written directly in pure Nim. :)

<comment><USER5> Right, but Cython also supports the external library use case:

[http://docs.cython.org/src/tutorial/clibraries.html](http://docs.cython.org/src/tutorial/clibraries.html)

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Thanks for the link.

After browsing that page, I observe that even when Cython is wrapping an external C library, there's still a notable difference between the way Cython does things & the way Pymod does things.

The explanation on that Cython page begins: "To get started, the first step is to redefine the C API in a .pxd file, say, cqueue.pxd". So to wrap an external C library using Cython, you still need to define an entirely new header-like definition file in Cython's intermediate language.

In contrast, Pymod only requires an `exportpy` pragma annotation at the end of an existing Nim procedure function header -- you don't need to create any intermediate definition files. And the `exportpy` pragma is _inert_ unless you invoke the "pmgen.py" script (a Python script in Pymod that determines the Python C-API system configuration & automates all the compilation), so your Nim code is still completely valid Nim code after you apply the `exportpy` annotation.

<comment><USER5> I'm now largely out of my depth, but much of that will just come down to what is available from Nim and what is available from C? And perhaps some of it from the complexity of supporting arbitrary C code in a flexible way?

The Cython wrapper code is still pretty trivial compared to the C code ( [https://github.com/fragglet/c-algorithms/blob/master/src/que...](https://github.com/fragglet/c-algorithms/blob/master/src/queue.c) ), and this is a pretty small piece of C.

<comment><USER4> Oh absolutely, Nim should definitely get the vast majority of the credit.

It's not just because Nim compiles to C; it's also due to Nim's powerful macro system, which: (1) allows me to define my own first-class pragmas such as `exportpy`; (2) supplies my pragma with a detailed & expressive AST of the Nim function onto which my pragma was annotated; (3) enables my pragma to auto- generate the C-API boilerplate code, and write it to disk as a newly-created C source file, all within the Nim compilation pass. Nim is a fantastic language, perfectly suited to this scenario.

I merely spotted an opportunity. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just wondered if anyone had any insight in how this differs from shedskin - [https://code.google.com/p/shedskin/](https://code.google.com/p/shedskin/)

From the shedskin website: Shed Skin is an experimental compiler, that can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python (2.4-2.6) programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or extension modules that can be imported and used in larger Python programs.

<comment><USER7> Don't know about the differences, but I think shedskin had died some years ago.

<comment><USER8> Nope, they are still responsive on the bug list, I think it lives - just very slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But does it retain the python semantics? for example:

      def fac(n):
          if n == 0 :
              return 1
          else:
              return n * fac(n-1)

      print fac(100)

will yield a big string, while any naive C++ translation will print the string "0" due to overflow.

<comment><USER10> Good question (and I don't know the answer, as I'm not familiar with this project). Note that a naive c++ translation will also error out on simply i=2 * * 524. Automatic extension/promotion of numbers is pretty fundamental to python.</comment></comment>


China Gears Up to Weaponize Rare Earths in Trade War - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/china-gears-up-to-weaponize-rare-earths-dominance-in-trade-war <comment><USER2> active thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037160)</comment>


FlatBuffers: a memory efficient serialization library - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2014/06/flatbuffers-memory-efficient.html <comment><USER2> Interesting that Cap'n Proto[1] is not even mentioned given that this library has similar if not the same goals and lineage.

[1] [http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/](http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/)

<comment><USER3> Deeper in the site they have a benchmarks page[1] that has a short "why not Cap'n Proto":

"Cap'n'Proto promises to reduce Protocol Buffers much like FlatBuffers does, though with a more complicated binary encoding and less flexibility (no optional fields to allow deprecating fields or serializing with missing fields for which defaults exist). It currently also isn't fully cross-platform portable (lack of VS support)."

[1] [http://google.github.io/flatbuffers/md__benchmarks.html](http://google.github.io/flatbuffers/md__benchmarks.html)

<comment><USER4> Hmm, my personal (biased) opinion is that using variable offsets and vtables (as FlatBuffer does) is a lot more complicated than Cap'n Proto's fixed offsets.

"Optional" fields (ones that don't take space on the wire at all) are not clearly much of an advantage. The usual use of optional fields in Protobufs was to emulate unions, which Protobufs itself never supported directly, but Cap'n Proto does. Also, when wire size really matters, Cap'n Proto offers a very fast compression pass which deflates zeros, and unset fields are always zero, largely mitigating this issue.

The lack of VS support in Cap'n Proto is of course a very fair criticism, and a huge sore point in Cap'n Proto adoption. MSVC is finally catching up in its C++11 support so I hope this can be solved soon.

(Disclosure: I'm the author of Cap'n Proto, and also the former maintainer of Protocol Buffers.)

<comment><USER5> I think you have maybe misunderstood the purpose of why flatbuffers exists; message packing for real time high performance games. It's not a replacement for Protocol Buffers or Cap'n Proto.

You've heard of Valve Software right? Their game engine, being a distant relative of Quake, used the old quake message packing format up until 1 or 2 years ago. Since then they have retrofitted all their popular games to use protocol buffers instead since it allows them to more easily extend their net code without breaking backwards compatibility (up to a point of course). In the context of games, optional fields are very important as are default values.

Also in this context; the author of flatbuffers is Wouter van Oortmerssen, author of the Cube and Cube2 game engines: [http://sauerbraten.org](http://sauerbraten.org)

From the white paper:

> In particular, FlatBuffers focus is on mobile hardware (where memory size > and memory bandwidth is even more constrained than on desktop hardware), and > applications that have the highest performance needs: games.

<comment><USER4> I think there's some confusion here. To be clear, Cap'n Proto allows you to add new fields to a message without breaking backwards compatibility, and Cap'n Proto implements default values.

The question is how a field is represented on the wire if it's defined in the schema but you don't assign it a value before serializing. With FlatBuffers, it won't take any space on the wire (although it still takes space in the vtable, but that can be amortized with many instances of the same structure). With Cap'n Proto, all fields are located at fixed offsets from the start of the struct, therefore they take space even if they aren't set. You can truncate unused fields off the end, but not from the middle.

Also, note that Cap'n Proto uses pointers for variable-width fields. The pointer can be null if the field is not set. So the maximum wasted space for an unset field is 8 bytes, all of which are zero and therefore compress nicely.

Cap'n Proto's approach is exactly the approach used by in-memory data structures in C, C++, and all other high-performance programming languages. If your C struct contains a field you don't use, it still takes space in memory. I would think this would be preferable for games.

<comment><USER6> IME, optional fields are used for...optional fields. Like when you have a 50-field data object but only want to transmit 5 of those fields.

<comment><USER7> I think if you have a 50 field data object, and you have cases where you transmit only 5 of those fields, the problem is your data modelling, not the serialization library.

<comment><USER8> I think you haven't worked on games. 99% of the fields in game objects are the defaults, with some minor customization (e.g. position).

<comment><USER7> Games are all I've worked on for over a decade. See my other comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Huh. So Google is releasing a competitor to Cap'n Proto. As the former maintainer of Protobufs (at Google) and author of Cap'n Proto (after Google), I'm pretty surprised that I hadn't heard about this. I also don't recognize any of the names, so this is not from the people who were working on Protobufs at the time I left.

I'm the main competitor, so take me with a grain of salt here.

The docs don't look very detailed, but taking a quick look through...

> "On purpose, the format leaves a lot of details about where exactly things > live in memory undefined, e.g. fields in a table can have any order... To be > able to access fields regardless of these uncertainties, we go through a > vtable of offsets. Vtables are shared between any objects that happen to > have the same vtable values."

Hrm, that sounds like a lot of complexity and a big performance hit. In order to read a field from a struct, you have to do a vtable lookup to find the offset? Maybe you can still get that done in an inline accessor, but it will make the optimizer sad.

How is de-duping of vtables accomplished? It doesn't look like the API exposes any details about vtables, meaning you'd have to do it magically behind the scenes, which seems expensive?

It looks like the authors may have been trying to maintain the concept of "optional fields" from Protobufs, where if you don't set an optional field, it takes zero bytes on the wire. But the main use of optional fields in practice is to implement unions -- i.e. a list of fields where only one should be filled in at a time.

Cap'n Proto's solution to this was just to build unions into the language, something Protobufs should have done a long time ago.

> "FlatBuffers relies on new field declarations being added at the end, and > earlier declarations to not be removed, but be marked deprecated when > needed. We think this is an improvement over the manual number assignment > that happens in Protocol Buffers."

That's not an improvement at all. Declarations should be ordered semantically, so that related things go together. More importantly, even if you say that they can't be, developers will still do it, and will accidentally introduce incompatibilities. To make matters worse, it tends to be hard to detect these issues in testing, because your tests are probably build from the latest code. Simply adding field numbers as in Protobufs and Cap'n Proto has proven an effective solution to this in practice.

Very surprised to see Google get this wrong, since they have more experience with this than anyone.

> Benchmarks

I couldn't find the benchmark code in the github repo, so it's hard to say what they may be measuring here. FlatBuffers presumably shares Cap'n Proto's property that encodes and decodes take zero time, which makes it hard to create a meaningful benchmark in the first place. Indeed the numbers they put up kind of look like they're timing a noop loop. I can't see how the "traverse" time could be so much better than with protobufs, which makes me think the code might be written in such a way that the compiler was able to optimize away all the traverse time for FlatBuffers because it thought the results were unused anyway -- a mistake that's easy to make.

But I'd love to see the code to verify. Hopefully I just missed it when digging through the repo.

<comment><USER4> OK, AFAICT there is _no bounds checking_. When you want to read a message, you give FlatBuffers a bare pointer to the start of the message -- no size. So you can't use this to read data you don't trust I guess.

Which is an OK trade-off for certain situations (like reading your game data from disk). But... not for any kind of secure network protocol.

Maybe I'm missing something, though. I've only been looking at this for a few minutes.

<comment><USER9> Most readers of binary file formats can be made to read memory outside the buffer by corrupting the data, and FlatBuffers is no different.

That said, an option to bounds-check every offset would be possible, at a certain cost. Might be a nice optional feature to have.

<comment><USER4> > Most readers of binary file formats can be made to read memory outside the > buffer by corrupting the data

I'm pretty sure that would be considered a serious security bug for any format likely to be displayed in a web browser. For instance, an image format with such a bug would allow you to implement a heartbleed-like attack on a user's browser by displaying a malicious image and then reading back the pixel values. That would be very, very bad.

But I can believe that your statement applies to formats used by games for their own assets, where those assets come directly from the game developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you don't want the code generation step and C++ is the only language to use, Dumpable[1] can be useful.

[1][https://github.com/ipkn/dumpable](https://github.com/ipkn/dumpable)

</comment><comment><USER11> Just because I'm a fan of his, I'd like to point out that the author, Wouter van Oortmerssen aka Aardappel (strlen.com) is creator of the Cube 3d engine and lots of other interesting stuff.

Oh I'm also a fan of Kenton's in case it matters :-)

<comment><USER12> And lobster [http://strlen.com/lobster](http://strlen.com/lobster) (game programming language open source). He's a personal friend as well, one of the wisest dorks I know :)

"Wouter van Oortmerssen is a humorous guy preferring strange names for his programming languages and often also programming examples."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Their doc site doesn't scroll in Chrome for Android, which seems a bit embarrassing if you're Google.

<comment><USER14> This has been fixed. Thanks for reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with FlatBuffers and Cap'n Proto is that while in-memory rep matching serialization formats are much faster (infinitely faster as Cap'n Proto says tongue in cheek) for languages with unsafe direct memory access (like C/C++), they're actually slower and more cumbersome to use in any language without unsafe direct memory access (like Java, Rust, Python, Go, JavaScript/Node, Swift and... well, most languages).

The other problem is that Google tends to release random stuff as open source and then modify it (breaking BC) or abandon it without regard for the people who are using it.

So caveat emptor, I guess.

<comment><USER4> Java has ByteBuffer, Javascript has TypedArrays, Python has the "struct" module, and other languages have other fine ways of reading raw data in this kind of format. Some languages may lack the ability to inline calls well enough for true zero-copy to be efficient, but the worst case is you fall back to parsing the message upfront like you would with any other encoding. That upfront parse is still going to be faster, because it's just easier to read fixed-width values than variable-width.

<comment><USER15> I don't get it, you can't read anything out of a ByteBuffer, except a bunch of bytes.

You can't map 1:1 any more complicated in-memory structure to that buffer, or am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> ByteBuffer has methods for reading primitive values of all sizes -- ints, floats, etc. -- from arbitrary offsets within the buffer. So you just need a wrapper object with nice generated methods for each field which in turn call the ByteBuffer getters.

None that the C++ code works this way too. We don't cleverly generate a struct that just happens to have the right layout; we generate a class that wraps a pointer and provides inline accessors that read/write values from the correct offset relative to that pointer. After inlining, it's just as fast.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thinkst.com/p/if-nsa-has-been-hacking-everything-how.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone watched 'Enemy of the State'?

Yeah... people have known the NSA and other intelligence outfits to be doing everything they can to get information since forever.

Think of ECHELON[1]. That's been recording a LOT of data for a long time. I think it's basically a wiretap, simply speaking (please correct me if I'm wrong). So they've been 'hacking' (more like intercepting) communications for a damn long time. You'd be stupid or very naive to think otherwise.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

</comment><comment><USER3> Haven't read the article, but I can say from just the title that the answer is "We did". When you saturate legitimate signals with lots of noise you inevitably conceal the obvious. This is what has been happening in the conspiracy theory circles and it's why no one listened when exactly these issues were detailed.</comment>


Do Startups Need PR Agencies?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2011/11/24/do-startups-need-pr-agencies/ <comment><USER2> PR person says "yes, if you're big enough!"</comment>


PowerShell Core 6.0: Generally Available (GA) and Supported - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2018/01/10/powershell-core-6-0-generally-available-ga-and-supported/ <comment><USER2> Way, _way_ faster. Opening a new tab in ConEmu (with default terminal set to 'pwsh' instead of the old 'powershell') is almost instant and my giant profile load time is halved (1.5s to 726ms).

Also: your $profile dir has changed, so move/copy it to the new place.

</comment><comment><USER3> _However, there are currently no plans to introduce new functionality to Windows PowerShell._

<comment><USER2> Yes, but that's because it's Powershell Core now. Powershell Core 6 + upcoming Windows specific plugins will replace the old Powershell 5.</comment></comment>


Groupon Is Laying Off 1,100, Shutters Operations in 7 Countries - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/groupon-is-laying-off-1100-at-a-cost-of-35m-shutters-operations-in-7-countries/ <comment><USER2> I'll be honest, I know Groupon and its ilk are terrible business, but as a user of the service I've had lots of fun exploring activities and restaurants that I literally would never have bothered with or known about. In the last few weeks I've taken a Scuba lesson, a Horse Riding lesson, an intro to art class, found a couple new amazing sandwich shops. I took an amazing trip to Ireland for something like 50% off the lowest rate we could find, and it forced us to explore virtually the entire country since the package had us in different castles every couple nights. I've visited some oddball museums I hadn't bothered with before.

I would have probably not done almost any of these things, or been more judicious in what I went to. I've found some new things that I'll be returning to, and some things that I won't.

As a customer, these kinds of services are amazing. And really all they're doing is centralizing good deals. A less "grow fast and explode like a Unicorn" business model would probably make it work better for participating businesses.

<comment><USER3> I stopped using groupon because of the near-universal resentment I felt from the employees of the stores selling the groupons. Clearly, these businesses weren't getting the value they thought they would get, but I wonder how much of that was the way they treated the new customers that the groupon generated.

<comment><USER4> My experiences with Groupon mirror your own. Whenever my friends and I would show up to a business with a Groupon, we would be treated with bad attitudes, worse service and just general reluctance when the exact opposite should have been true. I mean, that is the entire point of Groupon right? To promote a business -to spread the word on the street about how great your restaurant/bowling alley/pub is.

Sadly, it has been my experience that a lot of the businesses that sign up for Groupon don't know what they are getting themselves into and as a result, take out their frustrations on customers when they can't break even for the month... which is, I think, a fatal flaw in the human psychology aspect of the business model. I'd rather just pay the sticker price and enjoy better service than have to deal with all that.

<comment><USER5> My experience has been different. I used a Cheesecake Factory Groupon once and was given a special meal that reflected the "value" of my Groupon. It felt like a complete rip-off on top of a restaurant that was already overpriced. $30 for Cheese, bread, and a few grapes and strawberries? I stopped using Groupon after that.

It reminds me of Massdrop. You expect to get a deal by purchasing something in "mass" with others but it turns out you are paying at best Amazon retail price but most likely MORE than you would pay buying from Amazon not to mention shipping costs.

<comment><USER6> Off topic, but this reminds me very much of being put up in a hotel by the airline Avianca when they oversold a flight I was checking in for, meaning I had to take a different flight the next morning.

We were told that dinner would be provided, and given a coupon for the hotel's restaurant. Upon presenting said coupon prior to being seated, we were greeted with a look that I can only describe as 'oh, I see' \- promptly seated at the absolutely worst table in the place, and given a 'special menu' with one or two very plain options (think, chicken with vegetables and a plain sauce) in an otherwise very nice-looking restaurant. We were summarily ignored for a very long time before our order was collected, and when the food was served it was sort of plonked down with no ceremony or pleasantries.

It's an awful experience to be treated this way, as a second class customer. As though you've broken a social contract by being allowed in through some hack, and the staff will 'serve' you to the absolute letter of the definition and no further. Almost pointedly so as though to emphasise how unhappy they are with your presence.

I never used groupon for a restaurant, but I can completely see that something like this might happen and understand why you never went back!

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi I had a similar experience in Stockholm, and the restaurant wouldn't even serve us a standard beer, only low-alcohol beer. I'd rather had paid the difference for the real stuff, but they didn't even give us the option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone getting their emails has known it was coming for a long time. They used up all the good places pretty quickly - they got the return customers and didn't need to re-run coupons. Now it's all weight loss scams, online courses "worth" $2k but sold for $20, and even sex toys lately.

<comment><USER8> Exactly this. It stopped being a good way to discover local places you may not have heard of and instead became a way to shove cheaply mass produced junk or freely mass produced digital junk in to eveyone's mailbox.

<comment><USER9> With that in mind, what services are good at finding local places? I figure services like Yelp and Groupon had this in mind, but generally attract the people who have negative experiences or opinions to share them.

<comment><USER7> I discount any Yelp review that's 1 or 5 stars. Tends to have good results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like businesses have collectively realised that groupon is a miserable deal and it's finally caught up with them, after having been running on fumes [1] for a couple years now.

[1] [http://blog.bodellconsulting.com/2013/03/01/groupon-a-bad- de...](http://blog.bodellconsulting.com/2013/03/01/groupon-a-bad-deal-for- restaurants-and-everyone-else-including-groupon/)

<comment><USER11> My brother in law runs a restaurant back east, and he said that Groupon has been a great channel for driving business. Anecdata, I know.

I think there's a business opportunity to help people running groupons capture the most value out of the leads (at the least, sign them up for an email newsletter).

<comment><USER12> I think it depends on the business. Someone up top mentioned it was a great way for them to try scuba, sky diving, etc. That's not the sort of thing you necessarily see a lot of repeat traffic for. Not sure.

<comment><USER13> Scuba and skydiving are the exact type of hobbies where _if_ you make people interested, then you can get a lot of very expensive follow-up business. You won't get most of them hooked up; and if you make the first experience a lousy one because of Groupon pricing issues, then you won't get any of them hooked up, but in general if your business current weak point is excess capacity and a need to bring in new people to the hobby (since your current customers are doing it as much as they can and won't do more), then a deeply discounted first trial is pretty much the main way to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article doesn't tell the whole story. As a user of Groupon Panama, I can tell you that they face stiff competition here from a Groupon clone, ofertasimple. I think they're exiting because it was a small market to begin with and they haven't been able to win it. Many people, including myself, find the competing service superior.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "We believe that in order for our geographic footprint to be an even bigger > advantage, we need to focus our energy and dollars on fewer countries."

Did this company spokesperson just pass first year business writing? It's like the writing prompt was, "Your company is downsizing, what is the most absurd way you can describe it?" I couldn't help but laugh at the sentence.

<comment><USER16> Glad someone else noticed this. I kinda glossed over it at first, then read it again and broke it down thusly:

1\. Our footprint is a big advantage today (presumably this means more reach).

2\. We want to make that advantage bigger.

3\. Therefore we are reducing our footprint.

At first it sounds like an outright contradiction. But it does make sense, in a very convoluted sort of way. The advantage of having broad reach will be increased by exiting those markets that are losers for them, because the (still presumably fairly broad) range of markets they're staying in will be more profitable overall. But it would have been much simpler to just say "We're exiting a handful of smaller markets where we aren't leading or growing, focusing our efforts where they're doing the most good." But I guess you can't say that these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting when taken in the context of yesterday's Unit Economics post.

[http://blog.samaltman.com/unit-economics](http://blog.samaltman.com/unit- economics)

 _I have never seen Silicon Valley so willing to invest in companies that have well-understood financials showing they will probably always lose money._

<comment><USER18> Groupon was a deliberately calculated scam once it started getting huge investment though. Investors are always willing to burn the long term (the public) if they can pop the short term (themselves).

<comment><USER19> If it was a scam they would have cashed out at the top.

<comment><USER20> Well, they basically did.

"Altogether, $946.8 million, or roughly 86% of the funds raised across the three investments, was paid out to Groupon directors, officers and stockholders. Just $151.4 million was retained by the company to use as working capital and for general corporate purposes."

June 2011 - [http://mashable.com/2011/06/02/groupon-cash- out/#AoBOlTTNEqk...](http://mashable.com/2011/06/02/groupon-cash- out/#AoBOlTTNEqk8)

<comment><USER21> That was an amazingly effective scam, and nobody putting into those F and G rounds said boo. Just mind-blowing.

<comment><USER16> It's mind-blowing that anyone would subscribe to an F or G round in the first place. That they would do so despite the obvious scammy nature of the whole thing is probably criminal, at least if they were managing OPM.

<comment><USER22> Greater fool theory, they're thinking they'll make money on the IPO. They might have, actually, or they were very close to doing so -- a couple more weeks before the bad press Groupon started getting around the IPO and they'd have been sitting pretty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone else notice they refer to Puerto Rico as "international"? Fun Fact 1: It's a US territory, where residents are US citizens but can't vote for president. Fun Fact 2: Journalists these days ain't what they used to be.

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

<comment><USER24> Puerto Rico is a US territory, but technically it's not part of the US. They refer to it as "international" because it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The deals I saw, felt rather crazy to me.

A friend of mine paid 100€ for 100 pizzas, one every day. Also 100€ for 100 pasta dishes.

The idea seemed to be, that the service could plan ahead, because he knew months before how much ingredients to buy.

The delivery service who offered this deals closed down after a month, so in the end every meal did cost my friend about ~3€, which isn't bad.

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel very similar to this blog post I read a few years ago, calling the Groupon era "The Locust Economy".. It wasn't good for businesses, consumers logically just abused the mechanism until these companies were ruined..

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust- economy/](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/)

        Thinking about locusts and the behavior of
        customers around services like Groupon, I've
        become convinced that the phrase "sharing
        economy" is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a
        pig. What we have here is a locust economy.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sad for a startup that showed great promise. How's LivingSocial doing?

<comment><USER28> going pretty strong i gather from someone who works there - they did get acquired though a while ago

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've never heard of this negative reaction to Groupon like you folks are describing. What was the negative side? Was it not a good advertising investment for companies? Were expectations not being set correctly by Groupon? Do they take too much of a cut? Are they just jerks to the companies?

Is there room in this space to not be a shitty actor?

<comment><USER30> I think some of this is inherent to the model, and part of the problem is that businesses aren't building the right expectation in to their budget. They're thinking in terms of getting a bunch of ordinary customers in by giving them 50% off of an entree, and given their metrics on ordinary customers, that seems like a good deal -- a coupon of the same sort, sent out in one of those mailers, would pay for itself easily. But Groupon is bringing in a different set of customers -- _low-value_ customers who don't provide much repeat business and often pick a fight over trying to get an even steeper discount.

Wait staff often complain of Groupon'ers either not tipping at all, or tipping a low percentage and basing their low percentage off of the discounted bill (such that the net tip is like 1/4 to 1/3 of what it would normally be for the same meal.) Some places complain about Groupon'ers overstaying their welcome -- they come in for half price entrees, don't order appetizers or drinks or dessert, and stay at the table for 3 hours eating wave after wave of complimentary breadsticks. They're the ones still at the water park when the staff locked the gates ten minutes ago. They come in multiple times in the next week trying to return something for full price or otherwise scam the store. Many places report an excess of complaints of the "I'd like to speak to your manager, you're doing a terrible job" variety directed at their best employees, because people are unhappy paying 50% when they think they can somehow get it down to 45%, or they're unhappy paying 50% for 100% of the experience when they think they can stretch it to 105% of the experience.

This doesn't happen to every company, but it does happen to some companies and leaves them feeling pretty burned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even if it was a good deal, who has room in their life for the 1046-th marketing gimmick?

Please, interweb geniuses, think of something better.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, is there a medical condition called "Marginally Useful Apps Used as a Trojan Horse for Marketing Crap You Don't Need" Fatigue? Because I'm pretty sure I've got that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Have any of the groupon competitors reached critical mass? I realize that a large number of "me-too" competitors were started when Groupon exploded, but it seems to me a "groupon that doesn't suck" could be a pretty good business.

<comment><USER34> In Denmark we have [http://downtown.dk](http://downtown.dk), they managed to get traction here before Groupon, so they have had most of the market, however it seems like Groupon have been eating parts of their business recently.

As an aside Groupon seems to be 100% https, where downtown is only partly https :(

<comment><USER35> We have a lot of Groupon alternatives in Denmark, from online sites to discount boxes you buy physically in stores, most of them taking considerably less than 50%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> That's a long fall from Google practically begging them to take fat stacks of cash.

<comment><USER37> I remember, back during their heyday, listening to pundits discuss how Groupon was going to run Google out of business if Google couldn't find a better way to offer daily deals. I regularly saw people mentioning Groupon in the same breath as Amazon and Apple when speaking of tech giants.

<comment><USER38> All I remember what thinking that they were insane to not take the buyout. Seems I was right.

<comment><USER39> Couldn't agree more. Creation of a Google-Groupon axis would've been powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Will Groupon founder Brad Keywell's newer venture, Uptake, face a similar outcome? A recent Forbes article suggests he's better at starting a company than running it.

<comment><USER41> Is this it? Looks ridiculous.

[http://uptake.com](http://uptake.com)

<comment><USER42> That's a crowded space to get into these days. You're competing directly with the big boys at Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc. as well as countless other startups. This seems especially difficult to do when you don't even have a product to sell.

Also that website is horrendous.

<comment><USER43> I agree. That uptake website needs a lot of work. What the heck is that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 1,100 ? On what did they all work?

<comment><USER45> Outbound sales I'd imagine. It takes a lot of people to make calls to businesses to convince them to sign up for Groupon, how to structure their deals etc.

<comment><USER46> Wasn't that a scene in Silicon Valley? Their competitor had like 3 developers and 100 salesmen.

<comment><USER47> That sounds about right though. The developers are really just building a CMS that should be able to in theory handle an infinite amount of cities, while securing a new sale for one city every day could be a full time job (and probably done best by someone actually in that city).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> At first I thought this was bad news for Groupon, but after reading about it, it seems like a logical strategy. Groupon recently exited Turkey and Greece, which makes a lot of sense considering the economic turmoil in those countries and in the region in general. The 7 countries that were affected in this news were fairly small markets. Since when was Uruguay a major player in the global economy? The layoffs of 1100 mostly in sales and customer service seems reasonable when operations in 7 countries are shut down. Groupon has over 10,000 employees. A 10% reduction in staff trims some of the low performers. Microsoft and Amazon probably cut more staff each year with their stack rankings. (I know MS supposedly killed off their stack rankings, but I have a feeling it still exists albeit in a less visible capacity.) Overall, I think these moves make Groupon stronger, more competitive, more focused and more capable in a cutthroat market.

</comment><comment><USER49> Half of Groupon's failure is the email spam model, another half is the business partners. If you signed up for a service where you give discounts and got any less than a shining smiling face when I come in with one, guess what - I'm not coming back to you. Groupon should have screened businesses the same way Apple screens apps, very carefully.

</comment><comment><USER50> I feel like the small business man or woman was hurt the most by groupon, whether it be the mom pop shop or the family owned franchise. And when you exploit them, you hurt America basically. And that isn't a biz model that people can get behind. Had groupon done things differently, we'd be reading a very different article today.

</comment><comment><USER51> A good article to read and reflect on - From 5 years ago.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/groupon- clippin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/groupon-clipping)

Some points that caught my attention (edited by me)

...Groupon's got a healthy business. Almost forty million people, in more than a hundred and fifty cities around the world, have signed up for its e-mails,...Groupon isn't going away. Unlike many Web companies, it's been profitable from the start. (It takes fifty per cent of the revenue in every deal.) This year, it had half a billion dollars in sales, and estimates are that, before long, it could have as much as two billion dollars in revenue." End of my edits.

India, where groupon is hugely popular, has behaved like a spin-off. It recently independently raised 20MM from Sequoia.

</comment><comment><USER52> Good.

I got on their mailing list through a permutation generator on names/emails and it took me months to get off that craplist.

</comment><comment><USER53> I've had in a hand in a few Groupon/daily deal campaigns for some clients and their experiences all seemed to depend on the quality of the product/service they could provide. An established restaurant I would find it hard to believe they would extract value out of this type of discount. However, a new product to market that believes a customer can have a good enough experience and can deliver on that the first time they try it out, may be more apt to succeed on daily deal type of sites. It follows the "free trial" model of direct response (without the shady autobilling on the backend), just get the product in their hands and let it do the talking for you.

As a consumer, I love the model. As a business owner/marketer, the results have been so/so.

</comment><comment><USER54> Wondered when that was going to happen. Don't get me wrong, I liked the concept but when you don't get repeat business because the structure is so bad it's just not a good sign.

At least they sold high...wait...

</comment><comment><USER55> What is the significance of this line? "taking a pre-tax charge of $35 million in the process" It cost them 35 million to lay off 1,100 folks? They are getting a tax cut?

</comment><comment><USER56> So on what contract were these 1100 people employed? 0 hours guaranteed, get in and get paid for the hours you work and your contract can be terminated any day? It always baffles me to see a thousand(s) of people getting laid of with the flick of a finger. That's like an equal amount of people added to the economy unemployed, right now.

<comment><USER57> Illinois is an at-will state, so like any other employee in the state they can be let go at any time for any reason, with the exception of a few protected classes, since we also have a state Employment Non-Discrimination law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> With this announcement coming shortly after the OrderUp acquisition I wonder if this is signaling a larger shift at Groupon.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm not terribly surprised. I stopped using Groupon 3-4 years ago after a couple of bad experiences, watching the CEO in an interview on TV and also learning about how some small businesses were negatively affected.

I think there is a class of business ideas that may seem good in the beginning but eventually fail for various reasons.

</comment><comment><USER60> Much to my surprise, I've found Groupon to feature killer deals for discounted refurbished phones, tablets, etc. I've gotten a 32GB Nexus 7 (2nd gen) LTE for $200 , they have a Samsung S5 right now for $270 (but check reviews, caveat emptor etc).

</comment><comment><USER61> Sometimes you dont see the flaws in a business idea until it is practiced for a while. In Groupons case it was an idea to easy to copy and businesses who though they were get a short deal. I thought it was worthwhile to try out.

</comment><comment><USER62> It is just a badly ran business. The Chinese version of Groupon is ran by the very competent Xing WANG, who was a physics graduate student. And last time I looked at it Meituan was worth $15B.

<comment><USER63> Not really sure why "was a physics graduate student" means anything about his business acumen here. Eric Lefkofsky has a law degree, Brad Keywell has a JD _and_ an MBA, we could do this all day. Having a graduate degree in a hard science could certainly suggest a person has a different way of approaching business, but Wang dropped out so he could unapologetically clone other people's ideas.

<comment><USER64> I think the OP is stating the opposite, that being a physics grad student would imply he probably couldn't run the business as well as the Groupon founders.

<comment><USER65> However, in the same sentence he's described as 'very competent'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> some quotes from the snake oil salesman

Groupon May Be Fastest-Growing Company Ever

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/40454493](http://www.cnbc.com/id/40454493)

Groupon is going to be wildly profitable.

-Eric Lefkofsky

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-06-05/groupon- ch...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-06-05/groupon-chairman- lefkofsky-says-coupon-company-will-be-wildly-profitable-)

Is Andrew Mason still a YC part-time partner?

</comment><comment><USER67> Good.</comment>


Ask HN: My new employer have a stock options program, what should I know? - <AUTHOR> I've never been offered stock options before as part of compensation, I am not even sure how it really works ... Any advice, links, gotchas? stuff I should in the look out for or avoid? etc. <comment><USER2> I'd highly recommend spending some time familiarizing yourself with what options are.

The best resource I've found so far that does that is this - [https://www.holloway.com/g/equity- compensation](https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems really good! thank you!</comment></comment>


Hoomi Delivers on Facebook Login's Broken Promise - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hoomi.co/2015/04/hoomi-delivers-on-facebook-logins-broken-promise/

<comment><USER2> I'd say Mozilla's Persona delivers it best:

* Mozilla doesn't have any information on you

* Mozilla doesn't store your password if possible, and instead falls back to your email provider (but they do NOT learn which site you logged into)

* It can eventually be decentralised and browser-integrated (though this may have been abandoned)

* The site only knows your email address

I can't remember, but I don't know if Mozilla knows which sites you log into, either.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty darn easy to integrate, too; I used it for a toy project, and it was really quite pleasant!

<comment><USER2> Yep. I've used it for a few sites because it's simple to implement and saves me the hassle of making my own registration system. Actually, I've used it for every site I've made requiring login, except for one which sadly couldn't use it (targeting the Nintendo 3DS web browser, which is legacy WebKit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Excited to start showing this stuff to the world. We think identity and login are really broken today, especially on devices that are becoming smarter (mobile, TV, etc.), and we are hoping to provide a solution that lets you take an identity with you wherever you want/need it.

Since we're not a social network, we can avoid a lot of the risk and confusion about how to use the product without accidentally sharing too much information, and really focus on building a first-class identity product.

We're happy to answer questions if you have them. There's more to come, soon!

<comment><USER4> So, the biggest draw of the social-network-based logins (as well as their biggest flaw) was that you probably already had an account. With Hoomi, what's the advantage of using your Hoomi account rather than just giving an email address?

Also, how does this compare (in both features and privacy) to Persona?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hoomi sits somewhere between email/password login and social login. Users still get the benefit of Single Sign-on (that grows as more developers adopt), but don't have to have (or tie their account to) a social profile. You're also welcome to use your phone number to create a Hoomi account.

As far as Persona goes, one of the major differences is the primacy of mobile as a medium for login. And while Persona focuses on using email addresses as identifiers, we go one step further than that, isolating users/apps into their own ID spaces that aren't tied to any particular existing identifier. As a result, a user can change their email address with us without disrupting their service or updating their applications ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Persona/The_implementor_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Persona/The_implementor_s_guide/Enabling_users_to_change_their_email_address)), and users don't have to divulge this information if it's not necessary, as with apps that just use login for personalization.

We're rapidly building and adding features to Hoomi, and you can expect to see the benefits to users and develoeprs grow as we flesh out users' ability to create profiles for themselves that they can give their apps access to.

<comment><USER5> Unlike Persona, Hoomi will be able to know which application the user logs into, and for how long, correct? From what I've seen so far, it seems like the user and/or the application will have to make requests to Hoomi's servers.

Does this mean that Hoomi will become essentially a single point of failure: if Hoomi's servers get compromised, the malicious agent will be able to collect the user's identities and activities? Especially if a lot of apps implement Hoomi, then it may even be possible for the malicious agent to profile the user's entire digital life by tracking them everywhere.

This is what Persona aimed to prevent: it delegates the responsibility of identifying users to a third party and multiple such third parties can exists. Also, as far as I remember from when I used it, it also is designed to ensure that the authenticator have no knowledge of what the user is up to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm excited for the possibilities this opens up, but I have some questions.

How does this service pay for itself? If its not a for-pay service how can I know you're not trying to amass a database of info to resell to marketers?

I like the idea of anonymous login, but how anonymous exactly is this? Of course I have to auth to your site so you know my IP, how long do you keep logs for? If I don't login for 6 months can I rest assured that my IP is gone from your logs and can't be tied to my account until I auth again?

<comment><AUTHOR> We will eventually have some premium services that developers can get access to that will help them engage with their users or administer their services.

As for "Anonymous" login, that's Facebook's term for the service they promised (and we don't use it in our own description of the product for exactly the reasons you mentioned). We act as brokers between apps and users for their data, which includes an identifier that can be used for login. When an app chooses not to ask for personal data, we let the user know that we won't be sharing any of their information with the application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would successful developers and publishers integrate Hoomi?

Is user demand for Hoomi their only incentive? Or is there a positive benefit for them as well?

If the former, it's not clear why developers would rush to support it until it accumulates a very large and uncompromising user base; and building that user base will be hard without a lot of apps/sites already integrating it.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's definitely a benefit to developers. Hoomi provides an alternative to social login as well as an easy way to get single sign-on across their suites of applications. Furthermore, developers can adopt Hoomi rather than adding their own email/password-based login mechanism and avoid having to build screens for login, signup, email/phone verification, password reset, account management, etc. Essentially, developers can treat Hoomi as their login-as-a- service provider.

<comment><USER8> >> Hoomi provides an alternative to social login as well as an easy way to get single sign-on across their suites of applications

How does "an alternative to social login" itself benefit developers? Every other benefit you've listed out is already being provided by social login providers.

<comment><USER9> Users are reluctant to use social login given the context of social login being sharing. This sharing sometimes results in accidental sharing or over sharing with the application and its users or "friends" on the providers social network.

<comment><USER8> I'm not trying to be rude, but you're conflating developers with end-users, and didn't really answer my question. I'm curious how developers specifically benefit from integrating with Hoomi, over other social identity providers.

<comment><USER9> Developers want to convert as many users as possible into their apps. Social login turns off individuals that care about their privacy. Developers that adopt Hoomi don't have to implement an alternative to social login.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _We even move the "Cancel" button up to the corner and out of the main authorization experience because the risk is so low_

I don't care how good anyone thinks their product is, it does not justify implementing a dark pattern like this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to be a bit blunt maybe, but this is my response to this 'yet another single sign on mechanism' post

\- Who is Hoomi, and why should I trust them with credentials for other sites?

\- Who is using this already, and why will users trust this? Any big names?

\- How long will this project live? How is it funded?

\- Do you know that your logo looks way too much like utorrent's, but upsidedown?

\- Has this been battle-tested against hackers?

I'm sorry, but i'm not excited.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why not take this all the way? Why require e-mail and/or cell phone?

You could also distinguish yourself vis-a-vis persona which requires an e-mail address.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're exactly right. We don't require email addresses or phone numbers to be requested from users by apps. Those are just ways to get and verify a Hoomi account. Once a user authorizes an app, the app only gets a stable, unique identifier (unrelated to the email address or phone number on the account).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do!"

</comment><comment><USER14> The name reminds me of Hooli from HBO's Silicon Valley.</comment>


My Adventures Raising VC - AMA - <AUTHOR>

Briefly, this is my 4th company or so, first time trying to raise capital. We currently have a few employees and do 60k/mo in revenue (profitable). I met with a bunch of VCs over the past few mos trying to boost the company into hyperdrive. We are in a not so sexy part of the consumer internet space. Ask me almost anything. Almost all intros were done by a portfolio company c-level or someone who knew a partner - unless noted.
I left out about 10-15 VCs we are currently still speaking to or I can't remember. Currently we have no funds committed to our Series A and looks like we might not be able to raise. Luckily, we are profitable, but growing slower than I'd like.
In no particular order:
Sean Marsh - Point Judith - No response.
Mark Suster - GRP - Very difficult through email - very helpful if you can get in front of him.
All of Foundry Group - #1 VC IMO - super helpful even though we aren't in their theme.
Alfred Lin (cold email) - Sequoia - Very nice & honest.
Charlie O'Donnell (cold email) - First Round Capital - Nice, helpful, busy.
David Skok - Matrix - Very nice, responded to all emails promptly.
Jon Flint - Polaris - No Response.
Jeremy Liew - Lightspeed - Very busy, nice & honest on phone.
Tony Conrad - True Ventures - Quick response time, quick no as we weren't in a market he knew.
Michelle Goldberg - Ignition - Not friendly at all - maybe we got her on a bad day.
Ian Sigalow - Greycroft - Friendly on phone - didn't respond to follow up email.
Axel Bichara - Atlas - Very nice even though he knew he wouldn't invest.
Patricia Nakache (cold email) - Trinty - Helpful as she could be.
Jim Robinson - RRE - No response. <comment><USER2> What does your company do?

What would you need the money for that 60k/month could not provide eventually?

<comment><AUTHOR> I prefer to stay anonymous as maybe one day we might talk with one of the above again.

Our goal is $100mm/yr in 6 years - $60k/mo is very very tiny compared to that goal. The $ we were trying to raise would be to hire a much larger team and scale out. So instead of hiring 30 right away, we are now hiring 1 or so a month.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: NIPS 2015 – Tutorial Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to access the video for the deep learning tutorial linked in [1], but the link doesn't work (It's hosted in the Microsoft research website). Does anyone know if that's the only place where this video is available? (I searched in Youtube and other websites related with NIPS but I don't find anything).<p>[1] https://nips.cc/Conferences/2015/Schedule?type=Tutorial <comment><USER2> There is another one from google. You could try with the link in bellow

[https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning-- ud730](https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi mamuninfo, I'm looking for the NIPS video,not another tutorial for deep learning. Anyway, thanks for the reference.</comment></comment>


Real YCSB numbers for VoltDB running on EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://voltdb.com/blog/voltdb-in-memory-database-achieves-best-in-class-results-running-in-the-cloud-on-the-ycsb-benchmark-3/

<comment><USER2> Millisecond latency... sounds cool...</comment>


Apple MacBook - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/macbook/ <comment><USER2> "we removed the row of LEDs and the light guide panel that distributed light throughout the keyboard and instead placed an individual LED under each key."

I'm looking forward to seeing creative hacks based on this...

</comment><comment><USER3> Considering I've bust two X201s, I can't imagine that lasting for more than a few weeks. Looks very fragile.</comment>


Google Reader - RIP. Now go try something new - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewhatnoise.com/2013/03/google-reader-rip-now-go-try-something.html <comment><USER2> I'm actually getting a bit tired of having to evangelize google reader and RSS in general. I personally don't believe that this is the end of the world, and I believe that the most harm was actually done by Google when they neglected reader for years so that it couldn't grow along with the internet.

That being said, I'm getting the feeling that these bloggers don't understand how these social sites, and the internet actually work. There is a point in time before your story is on reddit or HN where it will eventually get most of it's eyeballs. At this point your content still needs to be discovered. You have only a few options:

1.) I check my RSS feeds and read your story (not necessarily skim - unless it sucks)

2.) You post a headline on twitter (definitely skimming here) AND I happen to be watching the stream the moment you post.

3.) You get lucky and facebook doesn't hide your hard work from me, or you pay facebook to distribute it.

4.) I happen to see the post during my bi-annual checking G+.

From a user perspective, RSS is hands down the most reliable way to keep up with sources that I really care about. Everything else causes me to miss articles from sources that I love all together.</comment>


Uber Reports First Quarter 2019 Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190530005819/en/Uber-Reports-Quarter-2019-Results <comment><AUTHOR> Press Release: [https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release- details/2019/Uber-Q1-2019-Earnings/)

Slides: [https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1...](https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1/Q1-2019-supplemental- slides.pdf)

Webcast (starting at 4:30pm EST): [https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2016299/F60DB6E5F5C638310AF5667...](https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2016299/F60DB6E5F5C638310AF5667048D9AD3C)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Overall, seems like growth is slowing, especially in the ridesharing business, and losses keep expanding.

Will be interesting to see how they frame that on the call, as 9% YoY growth in the ridesharing business (10% YoY on adjusted net revenue) does not typically garner a 4.5x+ revenue multiple when you're burning so much cash ($1B in the first quarter)</comment>


Ask HN: Programming Advice. - <AUTHOR>

I am a 19 year old student and all the jobs I have held at startups have been BD/Marketing/Sales. I have always been interested in programming and have taught myself HTML/CSS and the barebones of Javascript. In the recent months, I have also started to pick up Ruby on Rails and although building small apps is fun, I really want to work on interesting problems.<p>I feel like being able to work with existing code with a team of people will allow me to learn the most. I really want to solve interesting problems with Javascript and Ruby on Rails. So what should I do? <comment><USER2> Working with existing code doesn't necessarily help you much in the learning process. Just have a read of thedailywtf.com. Those stories are more common than you'd think. Just keep working on little apps you find interesting and put them out there! Eventually you'll have a portfolio to show prospective employers. There's plenty of sample code out there for "proper" way of doing things. Search through github for real examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you are in a very fortunate position. You should be able to get into a startup doing "interesting problems" on the strength of your BD/Marketing/Sales experience. Then work take on programming tasks with the dev group. In a smallish startup, being versatile, i.e. doing BD one day, cutting code the next should be prized.</comment>


Flappy Bird? Try Bucket Copter - <AUTHOR> http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zerobudgetdev.BucketCopter

<comment><USER2> Very nice, good job! ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> also the game will be soon available on iOS.</comment>


Salesforce CEO examines 16k workers' salaries to make sure women are paid fairly - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/04/27/salesforce-ceo-combs-through-16000-workers-salaries-to-make-sure-women-are-paid-fairly/

<comment><USER2> "was that companies with flexible work policies or maternity leave benefits were actually linked with a slower promotion of women into top ranks"

This actually makes sense. Women with children most likely spend more time away from work, taking time off for appointments, and leaving work at normal times (and most likely spending time with the family instead of working on weekends). All of these things hurt your career opportunities. When I was working a corporate job, you needed to do all of these things to advance. Some men with families were also passed up for promotions because they were unwilling and unable to spend more time at the office.

"My job is to make sure that women are treated 100 percent equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity and advancement."

One of the reasons two people in the same position get better pay is better negotiating skills. At my first job, I found out how much my co-workers made, by chance. I was paid $20,000 more per year for pretty much the same position (and almost the same education). He was even there 3 years prior to my being hired.

Was there some sort of discrimination involved? no. I just knew what I was worth and wouldn't accept anything less.

Will they also compare men in the same position (one man to another)?

The end result of all of this will be a normalization of salaries meaning everyone in the same position will be paid exactly the same, which is great for companies because you will not be able to negotiate.

I'm glad I'm no longer an employee. The IT crowd seems to love making it that much easier to outsource to foreign countries, pay Americans less, and remove any leverage an employee actually has, all in the name of "equality".

Why stop at jobs? Should we also make it difficult for any sort of business deal (which is what an employment contact is) to be negotiated by forcing a specific rate? Is it fair that I bought my house for a cheaper rate than the previous owner?

</comment><comment><USER3> "was that companies with flexible work policies or maternity leave benefits were actually linked with a slower promotion of women into top ranks. The explanation: Such benefits can lead to a check-the-box mentality, in which companies think they've done enough to help women along."

Or how about the more likely (but less P.C.) explanation : taking more time off work leads to well... less opportunities at work. As it arguably should be (because meritocracy)

Is the alternative (artificially "correcting" pay gaps) really fair to other colleagues who worked their asses off ? I can understand the good intent but it's a slippery slope : is that also going to apply to men who decide to take time off for hobbies, or is it a female-only privilege btw ?

<comment><USER4> Time off for hobbies and maternity leave are two very, very different things. Also, slippery slope arguments are considered so fallacious because they're often the most extreme visions of what will happen, when the most likely change will be very, very little. The same rhetoric was used to inhibit women's voting rights, but ended up being fallacious as well.

<comment><USER5> Are hobbies and child-rearing really that much different? Hobbies can be just as time consuming and expensive. Some hobbies can interfere with work in a long term way just like maternity leave. Really the similarity only falls part that maternity is sometimes not a choice... and I'd rather not open the can of worms that is abortion; let's just assume that just like a hobby, you have chosen this path.

<comment><USER6> One may also be 'exposed' to a hobby and their degree of involvement is not a choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a good idea. An even better implementation is to have an independent third-party review the salaries and issue some kind of official report or recommendations.

Smart CEOs would use such services. It's not perfect, but at least you could address any flagrant pay disparity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just a wild guess here the answers "NO" I could be wrong of course :-)</comment>


IPhone 3G S, the best phone out there, but power users should wait it out  - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/06/22/review-iphone-3g-s-the-best-phone-out-there-but-power-users-should-wait-it-out/ <comment><USER2> I stopped reading after "Before the iPhone, cell phone cameras were an add-on, something that you used in a pinch when you didn't have anything else."</comment>