The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/the-new-digg-arrives-ahead-of-schedule/ <comment><USER2> There's something about them calling it "Digg v1" that really annoys me. Digg version 1 was... _the original Digg,_ no? I dunno what particular version of Digg this thing is, except that as a reboot of an existing property/brand _it's obviously not version 1._

It might be _their_ version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union)). "Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!"

It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.

<comment><USER3> original digg was v0. this is not lua

<comment><USER4> And it then went on to several more version over the years, so even if it started at 0 (which is ridiculous, this is version numbers not arrays) it would still end up at more than v1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving away from) and now look like a messy news page.

Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.

<comment><USER6> What is "messy" about it specifically? I don't see much mess here. Good typography and a visually-interesting layout.

<comment><USER7> The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the best layout for information absorption <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not happy about needing to sign into Facebook and then having any story I digg showing up on my Facebook timeline.

That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.

<comment><USER9> I think for a lot of people, being able to keep a pseudonymous identity is one of the few things that differentiates sites like reddit and digg from Facebook and twitter in the first place. Most people I know aren't crazy about letting others know what their reddit username is, let alone slapping everything they do on their Facebook feed.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. My id here is my first name and initial. Correlating my username here with my full name, which is unique worldwide, is easy.

My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's just how I like it.

It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions.

I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my "professional image".

Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen.

There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for example.

And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly matched to their names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So they really did nuke the whole thing. There's no legacy content migration, none of the user DB is intact. It seriously was just a premium domain buy. Fascinating

<comment><USER12> It's all still in their backend - they're making a tool to pull old data out. <http://digg.com/archive>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The cost of running the site seems like a red herring. Reddit is proof that there's no technical reason why a community news site can't be run on a fraction of the cost of Digg.

The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.

</comment><comment><USER14> The cleaner look isn't bad but _it is impossible to resize the text_ , even when attempting manual zooming. This is certainly not the first site to be conceited about text size but come on: this is a site for _reading_ things and who knows better than the user what font size will be comfortable for doing that? Also, I recall something in their blog about designing "for 2012" and focusing on "the user", so where exactly does screwed-up layout fit in to those goals?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency. They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and thin", in their words.

It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.

</comment><comment><USER16> _> According to Borthwick, it would have cost "hundreds of thousands per month" to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it's important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on._

Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).

<comment><USER17> Appears they're using Python/Tornado on Amazon EC2. No idea what DB they're using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This will test my theory that the success of a product launch is directly tied to how many HN users hate it.

<comment><USER19> I'd actually been testing that theory for many months, and was all set to declare it victory when Groupon happened.

I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO would pretty much assure it's success.

But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a little hyperbolically fatalistic).

<comment><USER20> The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN haven't been proven right about anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, Facebook required for sign up. Did they really throw away all of their user accounts?

</comment><comment><USER22> First, having to login with Facebook doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?

<comment><USER23> 1) this is the first release, after only 6 weeks 2) they are working on comments

more on their blog <http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh no, not that "Magazine Layout" crap. I get why designers choose it, they want to make the page look lively and balance content all over the place but it's terrible for readability. It breaks natural eye flow from left to right then top to bottom. With magazine style layouts, your eyes have to go all over the place to skim through the content and that just gets annoying. If they wanted to avoid looking like a blog but still keep the lively look and feel they could have tried a grid like layout where at least the stories are aligned horizontally in a straight line.

The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple, and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title. Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the magazine style layout.

Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.

<comment><USER25> The fundamental issue with the "magazine layout" is that it is completely pointless in a digital world. The reason why magazines are laid out the way they are is because there's a limit on space, so everything has to be crammed in wherever it'll fit. When you've got a website though, there are no such restrictions, so the focus should be on presenting content in the most orderly manner.

<comment><USER26> well to be fair there is some constraint in how much of a site afresh impression is going to look at and the average screen size they will be using. The grid is a less applicable but there's still some advantages to displaying all of your important bits in a semi clean fashion on the landing page with out flowing to far in any direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _According to Borthwick, it would have cost "hundreds of thousands per > month" to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site > was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would > be considered legacy technology by a modern startup._

has anyone some details to expand on it?

<comment><USER12> I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were running the entire thing on Cassandra.

When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.

<comment><USER28> Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's" standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?

<comment><USER16> That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.

<comment><USER28> Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought. Sounds ridiculous to me...

<comment><USER29> Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp- engineeri...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineering- door/)

<comment><USER28> I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with HBase.

Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.

<comment><USER29> Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess Digg is aimed more towards general crowd now that it only allows for login with Facebook. In thier FAQ they mention it is to cut down on spam but something tells me we will never see User registration. What about people like me who do not have Facebook. I certainly do not want to make a Facebook account to use this service. Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?

<comment><USER31> _Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?_

"A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice. I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of discussion up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This new Digg is utter crap. What a waste of the Digg name. I have no words to express just how disappointed I am.

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks very promising. Seems like it'd be a great place to catch up on top stories, sort of like Flipboard. Curious to see what they end up doing with commenting.

The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this as it evolves.

</comment><comment><USER34> It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.

</comment><comment><USER35> The right column is the one that is confusing, looks like its a place for top news or something, however it's just another column with the same relevance, this is a little weird, just content accumulated with no context. Also, why is there no bury button on the home page, having only [digg] = [like] is boring. Overall this looks like a wordpress theme for a magazine, very tired design. I would expect more from a digg redesign.

</comment><comment><USER36> Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means "open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".

</comment><comment><USER37> Oh god no, facebook login no. I bet my balls they will turn on facebook comments in a couple of weeks too.

Sorry digg, me no coming back.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm all in favor of rapid releases and MVP, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction. As many have pointed out, the site is missing many of the core features required to build a community. This seems like a great way to alienate the few remaining Digg loyalists

</comment><comment><USER39> I like that you can submit by tweeting"[url] tip @digg", that seems pretty slick.

Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches the front page?

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it looks very clean, very nice. I also think making it a place to find interesting content to share in people's social networks, were the majority of conversations are happening, instead of making people comment in-site, was a smart move.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well, I don't think any of us were expecting much and it met that expectation succinctly.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm having a hard time trying to find something that I like about the new Digg v1. It feels "meh" to me so far. The layout of the content makes it hard for me to digest...I already hope there is a redesign when v2 is launched.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have a facebook account but I have "deactivated" it (not deleted). I cannot use the new digg. The facebook popup shows up and then immediately disappears. This is frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone.

But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER45> Does this mean it will also fail ahead of schedule?

</comment><comment><USER46> Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it really does is break the page though.

</comment><comment><USER47> Seems like old user accounts wont work any-more - instead requesting to log in with a FB account - guys just forget it right away.

but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)

</comment><comment><USER48> Looks hot but it's pretty pointless without commenting</comment>


Slack Closes $250M Funding Round at $5B Valuation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-17/slack-gets-slice-of-softbank-s-100-billion-tech-bounty <comment><USER2> I'm sorry to be the hater, but I find Slack is a horrible productivity sink for me.

I am currently a member on seven Slacks. Each one has a different username and password combination. I have to log in to each one separately. AFAICT there is no way to link them so I can log into all of them all at once. And then once I'm in, every Slack has multiple channels. Trying to keep up with all of them is hopeless. But if I'm not paying attention to a conversation in real time, going back after the fact and trying to extract meaningful content is difficult (it's hard just to find where a particular conversation starts and ends). Trying to go back and make a contribution to the conversation after the fact is completely hopeless.

Yes, real-time chat can be very handy, but I don't see anything that Slack does that Adium or Skype doesn't do better IMHO. And for archival discussions I'd much rather have a Google group. Keeping a threaded structure makes it so much easier to go back and trace the conversation after the fact.

<comment><USER3> >>> I am currently a member on seven Slacks

There's your problem.

I'm pretty surprised that you think Adium and Skype are better products than Slack - neither are the same and they are pretty clearly much worse at team communication, if you can call it that.

<comment><USER2> > There's your problem.

That's certainly one of my problems. But I work on multiple projects and every one of them has its own Slack. So what exactly am I supposed to do about that?

I also don't think the situation would be much better if I were only on one Slack. One Slack with multiple channels is more or less equivalent to multiple Slacks (except for the multiple login annoyance).

<comment><USER4> You can connect to multiple teams within the Slack client at once; it shows an icon for each vertically on the left side of the client if running the desktop client and lists them within a dropdown for the web client. Also, in the desktop client you can press cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-3, etc. to switch among them.

Screenshot found on Google image search: [https://toky.co/img/integrations/desktop-app- slack.png](https://toky.co/img/integrations/desktop-app-slack.png)

<comment><USER2> Oh, I know that. The problem is if I lose my connection then I have to log back in to each one separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite all the detractors, Slack definitely made collaboration much easier b/w teams. IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate.

However, I don't think the future of collaboration will be Slack. It is just too expensive and quite buggy at the moment. I'm hoping there will be competition that will either make Slack better or replace Slack with a cheaper, less buggy alternative.

<comment><USER6> I struggle to agree, despite being the person who initially championed it at the company. It feels like the worst of both IM and email: people use it instead of email, so delayed responses are ok (although sometimes you want a realtime convo and cannnot get it), but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS).

I was thinking about the impact of taking it away again, if Hangouts supported "channels" that people in the domain could join I think we would have a pretty seamless departure. The channels feature is about all I've remained to love after having slack for 2 years.

<comment><USER7> > but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes

Don't people "just not respond" even more with email? Maybe I'm an outlier but I probably reply to less than 50% of things that come into my email.

And if you need a realtime convo, come tap me on the shoulder or schedule a time to talk. That's the main benefit of slack (and email): async communication. Async is good.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, Slack isn't really really good at async communication at all. If I @mentioned someone and asked them a question, if they haven't responded to it within an hour or two, the odds of them coming back and answering it are extremely slim. People do miss e-mails, but not to that degree.

<comment><USER9> I feel like threads + reply tracking could easily solve that. They already have the concept of unread items and threads, they could just add a channel / tab for DM's you haven't explicitly replied to (or acknowledged).

I feel like slack (and competitors) have a lot of room to grow still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For $200M ARR, in a non-fictional world I may have it as low as 600M valuation and as high $1.2b depending on growth.

But in this world, it's valued @ 5B. The tech world (bubble) is amazing.

Businesses are now being appraised like houses: "Comparable businesses were just bought for X dollars".

At the end of the day the valuations don't rely on businesses bottom line. They are based on two factors:

\- How much Google, Apple, etc. MIGHT buy them for in the future.

\- How much investors THINK Google, Apple, etc. would buy them today for.

Speculative markets have never failed us. /s

<comment><USER11> The 'existential' issue with Slack, is not their growth rate or multiples ...

It's the fact that they don't necessarily have 'vendor lock in' \- and substitution is easy. And it's an easy thing to copy.

It's designed for small teams, and small teams can switch to the 'next, cool thing' in a heartbeat.

At the end of the day _it 's just chat_. That's it. There's nary anything special about it. They did a good job of it.

That said, brands to have sticking power, and if there is no reason to change then why?

They have some new MS execs, who might teach them the ways of 'sinking their claws in' :) and becoming incumbent.

I should add, the larger the company (even with small teams), the bigger the switching costs. After about 500 people, IT kind of becomes 'detached' from the people, and doing anything on one's own becomes harder, so tech becomes entrenched.

This company is the next 'IPO pony' the VC's are building up, hoping to push onto markets at high valuation to get a big bang.

<comment><USER12> If you think there's no lock-in I don't know if you understand what's going on here fully. Slack has lock-in from day one: as soon as people use it, it's hard to move away. We're an organization of 50 people and ripping out Slack, changing user habits and even getting all of our data out of there would be a _massive_ pain – so we'll never do it. This absolutely discounts how high the cost to your employees of continually switching tools is.

<comment><USER11> That people use it and may like it, is not really 'lock in'.

Ultimately, it's an easy-to-reproduce experience, and there will be/are competitors offering 'the same thing' \- and so there will be price competition.

If you want to 'switch to an alternative' it would be a disruption, not a 'massive pain'. Your 'old chats' are not that valuable.

If Slack was integrated into other systems - or integrated with partners, customers etc. - that is 'lock in'.

FYI - It may very well be the 'next cool things' comes along, and you find small teams 'just using that cool thing' already.

Finally I would say that Slack is not even that optimal - there is a lot of 'noise' in those channels, and the value add I believe is not that high.

I consult for startups sometimes, they put me on Slack and it's total noise. I ask to just use email, and it works.

I think 'best practice' is not in a tool, it's in behaviour.

Email, used properly, with the help of a simple chat app for teams, can work just fine.

<comment><USER13> > _If you want to 'switch to an alternative' it would be a disruption, not a > 'massive pain'. Your 'old chats' are not that valuable_

This is the definition of lock-in. Switching would be a disruption so you don't do it. I'm locked into Gmail. There are lots of competing products, but everyone knows my Gmail address and all my old emails are on it. I don't bother exploring switching because I know it will be a disruption.

<comment><USER11> I disagree your definition of what 'lock in' is.

All new technologies and process imply some degree of disruption.

'Lock in' is existential disruption.

\+ You wrote your entire app in .NET - that's lock in. Changing it means gambling the whole company.

\+ You went Oracle/SQL because of regulatory requirements - your app is wrapped around SQL, you have SQL/Oracle exports on board, you're not going to change that.

\+ SAP - your whole company is wrapped around it, it's integrated with a dozen other systems.

\+ You went Cisco - it really only interfaces with other Cisco gear. Lock in.

Slack is a 'chat app'. It's not that big a deal to switch.

If Slack evaporated tomorrow - one could switch to an alternative instantly. Teams would figure out a new protocol for communicating instantly. It's just chat.

<comment><USER13> > _Slack is a 'chat app'. It's not that big a deal to switch._

You're over-constraining lock-in to its technical factors. Facebook has lock- in for totally non-technical reasons. These are equally, if not sometimes more, powerful than technical lock-in.

Lock-in means high switching costs. If it's more disruptive to switch than you could hope to gain from switching, you won't bother even contemplating switching and are, again by definition, locked in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Crazy to me. Slack is a constant distraction - 20+ channels makes it seem like I'm in 20+ day-long, slow meetings.

Real-time chat rooms just to make productive teams, I've found.

<comment><USER15> Totally agree. I work for a 2000+ people company and we have over 2000 channels. Slack just doesn't work well for that size.

<comment><USER16> Why would you be connected to 2000 channels? Just use the ones that are relevant to you.

<comment><USER17> OP hasn't necessarily joined 2000+ channels, their company has 2000+ channels, it's a similar situation in most companies I think…

I work for a 200+ person company and we have approximately 800 channels, maybe 20% of them are work related, the remaining channels are noise. There's a channel wherein some people in the company pick up on grammatical and spelling errors of others in the company and post them for others to laugh at, there's another channel for the three people in the company that think they know latin to make the same Monty Python joke (Romani ite domum) over and over.

For the current project we're working on, we've put in a no robots rule into the channel (no Git/Jira/Travis notifications) and when one of the higher-up managers in the company decided to join the project channel and make two joke- like comments which added no value to the project, we had the project manager remove him from the channel.

Slack has over-casualised our company, for work it sometimes works well, for distractions it almost always works too well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like companies exist nowadays to raise funding. Not to be profitable businesses. Say they go IPO soon after, where does the money come to actually run the company? Is there a designated pool of shares for that? Do they buy back the shares then?

<comment><USER19> Out of all the software this validly applies to, Slack has the most solid business model I've seen in software since Microsoft Office. Almost every modern organization is inclined to stress over whether $6.66 / user / month is worth the price of the substantially enhanced collaboration Slack provides for anywhere between small teams and 1000+ - person companies.

Not a Slack employee or anything, just love the software.

<comment><USER20> The real question is: why buy Slack when relatively equivalent solutions such as Mattermost or even Discord exist?

Seriously, the only thing that could convince a company is either lower admin cost (vs Mattermost) and way better customer service when something fails. (vs Discord) Pretty sure big co mc corp wouldn't like a potential competitor running its comms.

Additionally a strong competitor is as always email. Perhaps enhanced with scheduling and mailing lists. If you don't like to set it up, you could pay Google for example. And both Google and MS are improving their chat/IM offerings.

They can and will undercut such a start-up instead of buying it, unless they see enough value in an acquihire.

<comment><USER12> Because with Mattermost or Discord you have to maintain it yourself, and their tooling isn't very good?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like Slack as a product.

I hate how a lot of open source projects have adopted it as the de-facto community discussion forum, mainly because it's a product designed for companies/organisations - not a disparate band of interested contributors.

In my password manager I have 8 passwords for different Slack "teams" that I've joined, because you can't just have one account.

Being on some mailing lists, the most annoying spam is from people requesting an invite to the community Slack channel. Every day you'll get at least one or two people wanting an invite.

It's silly, but I don't see what the alternative is - Slack has built a product that people like, it's just it doesn't gel well outside a corporate environment in my opinion

<comment><USER22> Discord is actually fantastic for open source communities. React uses it. We use it at my company. It doesn't have the "8 different team accounts" issue you mention and there's this fantastic cross-protocol bridge called Matterbridge you can use to do n-way mirrors:

[https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/](https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Something interesting

On their last raise @ $3.7b it was thought they were doing around $64m/year - so a 57x of revenue!

On this round they're raising @ $5b with $200m/yr - a ~25x of revenue valuation.

(1) [http://www.businessinsider.com/thrive-leads-slacks-round- of-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/thrive-leads-slacks-round-of-financing- at-a-37-billion-valuation-2016-3)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is awesome & good news in every way. A lot of the comments here seem to really circle around how people treat instant message communication vs e-mail and/or being inundated with being a part of multiple Slacks.

If you are blocking co-workers like one person mentioned or muting them, you have other issues (yes, you can mute a user)

If you're demanding or need instant communication with someone, just call them from Slack. Or, alternatively, make sure you '@' them properly & force a send notification. The issue I see is that not everyone is all about real time comms -- some people put Slack on their phone or on multiple machines. Some don't.

Some people claim it's buggy -- I've had far more issues with HipChat just when it comes to displaying on two monitors than I have ever had with Slack.

I saw a few people complain about productivity sinks but the reality is if you want to be a part of a certain group to keep up top of what's being discussed, that's the pulse & one way to do it if you have a large amount of brain power in the room.

Meh. I'm excited.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow I'm quite surprised at all the negativity towards slack on here... My team hasn't experienced most of these issues and we love using it.

<comment><USER26> So your mobile notifications work without fail? On Android I receive one out of 20 notifications. The desktop app is horribly laggy -- and my computer can handle _a lot_. I have 2x 75Mbps internet links that stream 1080p effortlessly so it's not my net either.

And you're pleased with the lack of granularity of the notification settings, too?

<comment><USER27> >The desktop app is horribly laggy

Just try this out on linux (maybe works on other OSs): open a system manager with a real time CPU usage chart. Open the Slack desktop app (or a session in Chrome, it's the same). Open a channel (#random should work). Scroll up. Watch usage of all your CPU cores skyrocket. Stop scrolling. CPU usage goes back down.

They to hog all of my cores just to scroll up a list of messages.

BTW, this doesn't happen in Firefox: scrolling up doesn't cause CPU usage to go up measurably

<comment><USER26> Check out my other comment so I don't pollute the thhread with copy-pasting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15279602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15279602)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> With Microsoft's Teams catching up, i think Slack need more than just funding and valuation. I have been using it for while and doesn't see much of the development happening. Only thing they have introduced is "Threads", and nothing else which is noticeable. I would love to see few of these in Slack:

\- Video calling \- Storage \- Private Sharing \- Guest member \- Meeting rooms

<comment><USER29> Depending on your definition, it has all of those things.

<comment><USER28> I don't see meeting rooms.. i don't see guest member feature.. i don't see functionality where i can share stuff privately with someone outside of slack... storage?? where is it that feature, i desperately need that..

<comment><USER30> This should cover guest members for you: [https://slackhq.com/new-improved- ways-to-manage-guest-accoun...](https://slackhq.com/new-improved-ways-to- manage-guest-accounts-in-slack-892d4741d984)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can you please just make the mobile app work correctly now?

<comment><USER32> I don't understand how people can continue to use it even though the notifications are extremely unreliable. Unacceptable for any chat-based app.

<comment><USER33> I haven't had any problems with missing notifications over the past year on the iOS client, and I'm signed-in to three different teams simultaneously.

My only complaint about the iOS app is its RAM consumption (it's not an Electron app on mobile too, I hope?) as iOS seems to suspend it and thaw it whenever I switch to another app. Oh, and it's still kinda slow, switching between teams takes 3-6 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Did I read that right - they currently have $200M ARR?

Keep in mind the $5B "valuation" probably is based on share price of the preferred share times total number of all shares. In other words, fiction.

<comment><USER35> 25x sales - high but seems reasonable for high growth b2b saas with network effect. you were expecting more or less? not clear from your qtn

<comment><USER34> Managing to create a network effect for corporate chat rooms _is_ impressive. But it is a bit depressing that centralized unencrypted chat for corporations is a billion dollar product.

<comment><USER36> The chat room isn't what's worth a billion dollars. The fact that they basically own the productivity chat market is.

<comment><USER37> "productivity chat market" <\-- whats that?

<comment><USER36> "Work chat"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There is always a 'pragmatic' silence about PHP on slack discussions here. Wikipedia, Facebook, Slack. PHP has unquestionably delivered on scale.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, pressing Enter and waiting 0.5 to 1.5 secs for the message to appear is indeed an unquestionable progress!

(I have a machine that can run 5 virtual Linuxes and 2 copies of a full HD game on 60fps, _simultaneously_ , and can stream 1080p from my net, so no, it's definitely not my setup.)

Have you used Miranda 10-13 years ago?

<comment><USER39> What are you talking about? Posting a message in Slack? It's instant for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> oh look at that, 5% of the float is dictating the entire valuation. Might be a new low for Silicon Valley, by low I mean percent of cash raised to made-up- on-the-spot valuation.

If they want to go public and keep that valuation with that constricted of a supply, S&P/Nasdaqs/NYSE won't list you, but Hong Kong will love you, alongside the other 1% float unicorns.

<comment><USER41> >> S&P/Nasdaqs/NYSE won't list you Whats the cut off?. Is there a link you can suggest to read more about % of cash raised/valuation?

<comment><USER40> They all have minimum listing criteria that you can find, a private industry solution to curb what they considered abuses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can somebody explain the expenses/need to raise money?

From what I can tell the major competitor to Slack is Basecamp - a profitable company with 50 or so employees?

What is Slack doing with all this money? The slack I used at work was an html version of irc - is there more?

<comment><USER43> Hipchat is the main competitor I'd say.

From what I've heard, Slack hit a pretty big infrastructure wall when it came to big organizations. Teams just didn't scale past 1000 people. So they've had to rebuild significant parts of the product in order to target large corporate customers.

Looking at some of their latest API updates, you can see glimpses of enterprise support. (eg moving away from handles to user ids likely enables active directory integration).

Back to the question: Why raise money? Because enterprise whales are a much more solid backbone than thousands of 20 person startups, and they still have some eng investments they need to make to handle someone like Walmart in an on premise installation with 10s of thousands of users.

<comment><USER44> \---

<comment><USER45> The parent is talking about the size of Slack teams, not the Microsoft product "Teams" which you seem to be talking about. (Why would Slack have to rebuild anything because of MS?!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've stopped trying to understand why such a buggy product with horrible UX is praised as the opposite. To me it seems the takeaway is advertising/hivemind is still much more powerful and good product.

<comment><USER47> A couple of years ago I was praising them as the most perfect product I had ever used. Every single UX element was on point. Two years later, it is one of the most buggy, frustrating pieces of software I have ever used. Clearly somewhere along the way their priorities shifted.

<comment><USER48> Imagine that. They had a lot less staff and funding two years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Thought experiment: how much money and how long would it take you to build a product with complete feature parity to Slack?

<comment> c-smile I personally can do UI of Slack client in 5-8 months (so 5-8 man/months) + one/two backend developers needed. And it will be almost native client with client distribution less than 5mb.

As a proof, it took me 2 months to make this application: [https://notes.sciter.com/](https://notes.sciter.com/) (and site for it in that time too).

<comment><USER50> That's the easy part. The hard part is scaling, marketing, and building a business/platform around the product so that you take it worldwide.

Several people have built Slack clones and there's even multiple open source projects out there. Building a company and business at a scale like Slack is the incredibly difficult part and nobody has managed to replicate that.

<comment> c-smile That's true. My personal educated estimation is that only 5-10% of income is spent on R&D in established companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Maybe _now_ they'll have the budget to support Github style markdown / code formatting.

<comment><USER17> Why should Slack support GitHub's implementation of markdown, why shouldn't they just use the common markdown standard?

<comment><USER22> Is that really a question? For convenience of course.

Also, [https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github- markd...](https://githubengineering.com/a-formal-spec-for-github-markdown/)

<comment><USER17> It's only convenient for users of GitHub, there is surely a large number of users that use both, but there is also a common standard.

<comment><USER22> But you realize that there _isn 't_ a common standard, right? Markdown is a language which has no official spec.

CommonMark is as close as it gets to one and that one does include github- style code fencing, so I don't know what you're even on about.

<comment><USER17> It was CommonMark I was thinking of, it just seemed to make more sense (to me at least) to implement that reference, rather than one that seems specific to GitHub (nothing against GitHub flavoured markdown, I use it and I like it's simplicity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> All this and I still can't use Screenhero on Ubuntu? Way to destroy a useful platform for the open source community, Slack.

</comment><comment><USER53> Congrats. Please allocate $1 million to build a native (i.e., non-electron) client application.

</comment><comment><USER54> Nobody mentioned matrix/riot.im as potential open source alternative?

<comment><USER55> Glad you mentioned it! I use it for most of my chat nowadays. You can use it with bridges to irc, gitter, slack and more. No problem for me. They plan to improve the native experience with more native code (Qt or GTK).

<comment><USER56> I'll definitely be on the lookout for a better, more native desktop client as I personally find the UI of Riot to be painful. Maybe I'm alone but I find the amount of screen real estate the Riot requires to be obscene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Surprised no one here has mentioned Twist. [https://twistapp.com/](https://twistapp.com/) We're currently evaluating it in lieu of Slack on our team of ~10 people because of the vast array of issues Slack has. I don't know if it's something that could be considered for larger organizations, but the way it puts together channels and threads is very intuitive, and cuts out a lot of noise for individuals.

In terms of Slack's misgivings, I don't think I've used a more incredibly bloated, buggy, slow electron app. Multiple team logins with no centralized account is _insane_ to mange across teams, this single point frustrates me and most people I talk to a lot. Not to mention the more teams you have, the more your electron app slows to an absolute crawl. The notifications leave a lot to be desired in terms of granularity per channel. They've done a really terrible job on "threads", the UI around it is messy and confusing, and the concept doesn't inline well. Those are just the most apparent daily gripes.

<comment><USER58> Slack is basically the "open office" of communications. It has become almost mandatory even though most people seem to hate it (at least some of the time).

<comment><USER59> I wish Slack had some features that Discord has...

* Text channel 'voice' restricted by user level. Eg: a read-only channel

* Dark mode

* Option to mute someone in voice channel

* Push-to-talk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Slack lacks a truly broad network effect. Already loads of competitors with equivalent or better products - lots of people seem to be using telegram now. Whatsapp rooms are just as good too. They are really going to struggle to aggressively price such a commodity product.</comment>


New PRISM slides say the program allows NSA to eavesdrop on live conversations - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/06/29/new-prism-slides-say-the-program-allows-nsa-to-eavesdrop-on-live-conversations/ <comment><USER2> I think this does clean up some of the language of Googles prism statement. [1]

        First, we have not joined any program that would give
        the U.S. government—or any other government—direct
        access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does
        not have direct access or a "back door" to the
        information stored in our data centers. We had not
        heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

So they did not hear of the NSA codename for FBI operated equipment. ( And note that they do not deny wiretapping, just 'direct access' and 'back door.')

        Second, we provide user data to governments only in
        accordance with the law. [...] Press reports that
        suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to
        our users' data are false, period.

That seems to indicate that here Google defines 'provide user data' as a specific database access. Which seems to be reinforced by

        Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the broad
        type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears
        to have required them to hand over millions of users'
        call records.

Note they talk about records, not about live interception. ( And the order against Verizon seems than to indicate that Verizon did not participate in live wire tapping.)

IMHO, this points in the direction, that there is FBI equipment in the Google datacenters. This equipment is tapping into the network connections and pipes them to the NSA. So the Guardians allegations [2] that

        "Collection directly from the servers of these US service
        providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL,
        Skype, YouTube, Apple."

means that there is nothing between the servers and the wiretapping equipment. While the companies take the view, that only a account on a database server constitutes 'direct access.'

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5841228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5841228)

[2][http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/google- facebook-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/google-facebook- prism-surveillance-program)

<comment><USER3> This is an incredibly fanciful interpretation of language. If these reports are correct then Google is simply outright lying. If you have to strain to read a statement to mean the exact opposite if what it plainly says and that opposite is the truth, then what practical difference is there between that statement and a lie?

Statements from Google:

      we have not joined any program that would
      give the U.S. government—or any other
      government—direct access to our servers.

      Our legal team reviews each and every request,
      and frequently pushes back when requests are overly
      broad or don't follow the correct process. Press
      reports that suggest that Google is providing
      open-ended access to our users' data are false, period.

      Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the
      broad type of order that Verizon received—an order
      that appears to have required them to hand over
      millions of users' call records. We were very surprised
      to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion
      that Google is disclosing information about our
      users' Internet activity on such a scale is
      completely false.

      We cannot say this more clearly -- the government does
      not have access to Google servers--not directly, or via
      a back door, or a so-called drop box. Nor have we
      received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in
      the media. It is quite wrong to insinuate otherwise.

      Google participates in that allows the kind of access
      that the media originally reported. Note that I
      say "originally" because you'll see that many of
      those original sources corrected their articles after
      it became clear that the PRISM slides were not accurate.

      There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no
      indirect access, no back door, no drop box.

      We're not in the business of lying and we're absolutely
      telling the truth about all of this. Our business
      depends on the trust of our users. And I'm an executive
      officer of a large publicly traded company, so lying to
      the public wouldn't be the greatest career move.

      If by what has now been "revealed" you mean the allegation
      that Google is allowing the NSA unfettered access to user
      data or that we're handing over data willy-nilly to the
      government, again, that's just not true. It's not
      rhetoric, it's just a fact.

      QUESTION: Without giving any specifics which might put you
      in violation of such an order, are you legally bound to \
      lie about anything to the public? (Yes or no is fine)
      ANSWER: Nope. No gun to my head.

      I'm really troubled if you've lost trust in us because of
      this idea that we're collaborating in a broad surveillance
      program. We're not, and that's why we are pushing back so
      hard on these allegations.

I really don't know how you could say NO more strongly. How would you say it? It is manifestly apparent at this point that there is no possible way that you could say it without someone who wants to believe otherwise reading whatever they want out of it.

<comment><USER2> In your examples, Google again just talks about 'servers.' There is no language which indicates that there is no wiretapping equipment in their datacenters, except for

        There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no
        indirect access, no back door, no drop box.

Which is clearly wrong, since there is a indirect access to user data ( via court order). [1]

However at this point Google is trying to prove a negative, that it does _not_ knowingly participates in _covert_ surveillance of its users. ( With the added complexity, that AdWords analytics should qualify as surveillance.) So Google will have a very hard time to convince me. However a published privacy policy, verified by a third party, would go quite a long way.

[1] [http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/?h...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/?hl=en_US)

<comment><USER3> You seem to read only the lines that you can creatively contort to validate your belief and ignore the rest. I don't think you are intentionally doing this, but it seems quite apparent that it is happening anyway from my vantage point. The Google comments mention user data in addition to the servers themselves, and many of the comments refer to surveillance in general.

If the media claims turn out to be true nobody is going to think "Oh, Google was telling the truth the whole time!" As I mentioned, there is no practical difference between this statement being "true" in the sense that you creatively "read" it and an outright lie. No reasonable person would read these statements in the way that you have.

You seem to be having a really hard time simultaneously holding the idea that the media reports are correct and the idea that Google/the big tech industry is trustworthy, hence the mental gymnastics. You're going to have to drop one of those two ideas. You will eventually.

<comment><USER2> Of course I am discarding some texts and doing a hostile interpretation of others. The reason for this is, that not all texts are created equal. Some, like the Larry Page one, are created by lawyers and PR specialists in endless meetings. The Google blog post in particular has the purpose of limiting the damage to the Google brand. For this it needs to sound good first of all, but it also needs to contain a sliver of truth so that the company can not be forced to retract it, which would just further damage the brand.

So implying something, while actually reporting something different is a lie, but it is a highly specific type of lie. And it is quite often quite interesting to do these mental gymnastics to uncover the sliver of truth in these statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait until your phone call winds up on youtube. Think it can't go that far? Imagine an NSA contractor or employee with a gambling problem who needs cash. Your data is now their ticket out of trouble.

<comment><USER5> I doubt the NSA would build such a sophisticated system without layers of security and extensive audit trails to prevent misuse. If not only because misuse of the system would be a disaster for the NSA and potentially be a bigger national security problem than what the system is designed to prevent in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Yet by the very nature of a secret agency you will never know what safeguards they have or how effective they are. Plus there are a lot of really really smart people likely working there who know exactly how everything works. Aldrich Ames took advantage of his position and knowledge to out CIA spies for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit is a group of people. See, e.g., this memo.[1] Does the Washington Post have some other information that the FBI's "interception unit" is technology on the premises of the private companies?

[1][https://www.eff.org/files/FBI_CIPAV-08-p9.pdf](https://www.eff.org/files/FBI_CIPAV-08-p9.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> The only thing I do on the phone now is yell into it "fuck communism" and hang up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does someone keep the raw materials somewhere (the slides and others non- article stuffs) a la wikileaks?

<comment><USER9> I think both the Guardian and Washington Post have them. Greenwald said before he had thousands of pages he wanted to analyze before posting more. It's better to do it this way, than post all in bulk. The latest WP article already seemed a bit overwhelming.

<comment><USER10> This way laying it out step by step federal government is covering itself in a web of incremental lies, discrediting itself every step forward. All in all looks more like a ginormous clusterfluff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Snowden didn't 'make up' these slides. These are government slides. I would trust them over what the government is telling you now if only because the government decided to outright tell you nothing prior to Snowden revealing this information.

Whenever you want to know the truth, just go to original sources instead of someone's 'interpretation' of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The slides do not say that. They only show real time monitoring of chat login/logout and email send/receive. The content only appears to be accessible to the analyst through the paths on the right side of the slides, which are for accessing stored data, not live data.

</comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like CALEA, to me. Inasmuch, it doesn't surprise me, even if it doesn't entirely please me.

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

The questions I have are whether they are indeed doing it wholesale, e.g. widespread "phrase monitoring" and whether they are archiving (particularly, wholesale) the content [1] without a _target /content specific search warrant_ in place.

P.S. Also, whether they are doing it to political and/or economic ends.

\--

[1] We already know about the disposition of the so-called "metadata".

</comment><comment><USER14> That's the one I have no problems with. Whenever I rant on the phone about politics, I hope _someone of those I actually mean by that, instead of just a friend who did me no harm_ , is listening to it. The same goes for any other medium (as phone conversations don't seem to be included in this)

Well, let's say I _would_ have no problems with it, if I wouldn't worry about the chilling effects it would have on others.

<comment><USER15> The politicians themselves aren't listening - and by being a surveillance target, you've already been othered to the point that your viewpoint will simply be taken as a sign you're untrustworthy and a dangerous element.

It would be nice if the politicians _were_ required to hear complaints, but that only works if you're rich enough to make a difference in the Game.

<comment><USER14> Oh, I don't think it would change anything, I guess people deep into it are briefed on more arguments than I could ever dream of. They're probably perfectly aware of and okay with what they're doing, too. I still find this is one of the rare cases where narcissism actually is helpful, because I am not intimidated in the least by the idea of being spied on. I'm like fuck yeah:

[http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2660](http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2660)

Being caught spying on others = super embarrassing, being spied on = hilarious. But then again, I never had anything used against me, I would sing a different tune real quick in that case. So I don't mean to belittle it in general. But if anyone can get a kick out of it _while_ being against it and vocal about that, more power to them, right?

<comment><USER15> I have to agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Be sure to make a direct reference to the boys listening at some point in each call so that they can feel good that they're not being ignored. Remember, one of the most important aspects of networking is about establishing a warm relationship.

Right, boys?

</comment><comment><USER17> If you are looking for a job, simply type into any comment field on the Internet "HEY NSA I WANT A JOB" and someone will contact you shortly.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is something we all have to do now:

Never give 1 cent to these companies, again.

Our only vote with them is our dollars.</comment>


There's enough wind energy over the oceans to power human civilization - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/10/09/theres-enough-wind-energy-over-the-oceans-to-power-human-civilization-scientists-say/ <comment><AUTHOR> NB: Title edited for space.</comment>


CSV as a Data Source - <AUTHOR> http://chartio.com/blog/2013/08/csvdata <comment><USER2> MySQL has supported CSV as a data source for quite some time: [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/csv-storage- engine.ht...](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/csv-storage-engine.html)

You can run full SQL queries directly against a text file as if it was a table.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, and that's how we used to direct customers who wanted upload CSV data. We even wrote some nice tutorials on how to set it up

[https://chartio.com/education/databases/excel-to- mysql](https://chartio.com/education/databases/excel-to-mysql)

But we found that many people either aren't technical enough, or didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a MySQL instance, defining a schema, and cleaning the data. So now we do that for them.

<comment><USER3> Good call. I'm a financial analyst who is becoming increasingly comfortable with code in general, but I can tell you 80-90% of business users lose interest as soon as anything SQL comes up. Heck, 70% of business users chicken out if an Access db is involved.

So this should really get a much, much bigger audience to use chartio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Data isn't "locked up" in CSV, rather it is available in CSV.

CSV is one of the most open things possible.

As a programmer I do a lot of one-time makeshift data reports for other people, and I always use CSV (or precisely, tab separated) because that's what every program happily emits and consumes. If it does not, it's trivial to transform thanks to UNIX sort, awk and uniq.

<comment><USER4> Once your CSV (or TSV) files start having quoted fields, they become _very_ tricky to parse using standard multi-purpose tools like sort, awk, & uniq.

It's hard enough when you have delimiters in quoted fields, but dealing with quoted newlines starts to become unreasonable, especially for line-based tools.

CSV files, as you say, are absolutely _wonderful_ to create. Problems come up when you try to parse files _other_ people write. Not everyone follows RFC 4180.

<comment> guard-of-terra With tab separated values this is not a big problem in practice. On the other hand, you can sort tsv, but you can't sort quoted csv.

<comment><USER5> Why not? I ask in earnest.

<comment> guard-of-terra sort -n gets confused by quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CSV is the biggest pile of nuisance you'd never expect from a seemingly simple data format.

\- Header line or none?

\- "\n" or "\r\n"?

\- Is there a newline at the last line? How about two?

\- Escape quotes with doubling or backslash? How about both in the same file? How about both, inconsistently, in different fields? How about quotes including a newline and commas?

\- Strings always quoted? Only if necessary? Is ,, a null or an empty string, or an error?

\- How about mixed line lengths? Are missing trailing entries nulls? How about multiple data types in a file, with the first field being type, and line length only fixed per type?

I have generally found "TSV with a rule that data cannot represent tabs or newlines, period" as vastly superior.

<comment><USER7> TSV has all those same issues. However, you just have less frequent need of a tab, so most of the escaping edge cases never come up.

Those aspects are defined in RFC 4180 - just a lot of systems don't bother. How would you define a simpler data format?

<comment><USER6> It's a lot easier to administratively ban tabs/newlines in your data than it is to ban commas, and TSV doesn't have escape mechanisms or quoting. So you actually can parse it with line.chomp().split("\t"), and that doesn't break horrendously.

TSV is streamable and minimally wasteful, I rather approve of it. Netstrings are better though if having sized data and nested data is needed. They are proof against all the ills of quoting and escapes.

<comment><USER7> Largely agree. I was just picking up on "vastly superior". All the issues of line breaks, nulls, column lengths, headers still remain.

You're adding the constraint that you can't use tabs or newlines in your data (to use a newline in your String, you'd need to escape it). In all other cases, you need escaping, and once you've assumed escaping then CSV and TSV aren't really any different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it possible to set this up so that you can point it to a remote URL to fetch the CSV? For example, I'd love it if I could point it towards a Yahoo! Finance API call that returns a CSV file and have my dashboard auto-update. Or Dropbox URL. Or any remote URL. That would be awesome.

<comment><USER9> That exact use case is not currently possible, but it's something we've talked a bit about. We're still considering doing something like it in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who has worked in an industry where FTP'ing massive CSV files was the norm, I must say this looks really nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest issue I have with csv files, is when the people sending them _don 't get the $%^&@ quotes right_. The second biggest issue, is when they say "sorry, we're not able to do that" after I tell them exactly how to fix what they're sending.

<comment><USER12> What is the proper way to encode the quotes? I'm playing around with writing a Livejournal data dump reader and will have to do the quote dance pretty soon. In LJ files they are encoded like so:

col1,col2,col3,"Longer data and somethin ""with"" quotes",col5

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's how they're supposed to be. Any field with quotes, or commas, or newlines in the data needs to have quotes around it. Any quotes in the data need to be escaped by preceding them with another quote.

<comment><USER13> From what I understand, you're basically right, but you're basically right only in a sense that that's what most people do. There's no "CSV Data Format" spec. It's all just what most people agree on, most of the time. Unless someone has another idea.

<comment><USER14> text/csv is defined in RFC 4180: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180)

<comment><USER15> Strictly, the definition in RFC 4180 mandates ASCII which makes it unusable for many purposes. I guess there's nothing practical stopping you from using another encoding though.

<comment><USER14>
      >      Common usage of CSV is US-ASCII, but other character sets defined
      >      by IANA for the "text" tree may be used in conjunction with the
      >      "charset" parameter.

[http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6657.txt](http://www.rfc- editor.org/rfc/rfc6657.txt)

[https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character- se...](https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you use SQL, check out [http://github.com/dergachev/csv2sqlite](http://github.com/dergachev/csv2sqlite)

Its a little ruby script that in 1 command takes one or several CSV files, parses their structure into simplistic sqlite table definitions, and then creates a new sqlite database file populated with structure and data from these CSVs.

<comment><USER17> Hey neat. A csv2sqlite script is one of the first things I wrote in Python: [https://github.com/elidickinson/csv- tools](https://github.com/elidickinson/csv-tools)

It's a terrible hack, but I actually still use it pretty frequently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That is really nice. I remember implementing something similar to step 2 and 3 on AppEngine a few years back for a project. It turned out quite nice and non tech-savvy users used it without much problems. We managed to have something that could easily work with different CSV formats (MS Excel and others).

</comment><comment><USER19> The type/error detection would be really cool paired with something like DataWrangler: [http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/](http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, DataWrangler is an awesome project. There are actually a few great companies coming out with products based around it. We may just integrate with one of those.

<comment><USER20> Ooh, which companies? I haven't come across any yet.

<comment><USER21> Eg. [http://www.trifacta.com/](http://www.trifacta.com/) founded by the guys who started DataWrangler :)

<comment><USER20> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm rather fond of using [1] csvkit for doing my csv wrangling. That and google refine (now open refine).

[1] [http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/](http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER23> CSV format does not define encoding. Also customers usually think about CSV as export/import format from/to Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately each Office localization uses different output encoding and delimiters (and date format). And you cannot suppose that the encoding is UTF-8. The most complete importer of CSV file which I have seen is in Open Office. It is also worth mentioning that Excel can import CSV with other than system locale and different delimiters - but it just not work through open file command.

<comment><USER4> This also detects the file encoding & delimiters.

<comment><USER23> Automatic file encoding detection is only heuristic and cannot be in principle exact. But I do not want to criticize the import functionality. I just wanted to say that CSV is an obsolete format and should not be used for data interchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is really cool! Are there any open source libraries to do steps 2 and 3 - auto type detection and error correction/detection?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. We utilize python-dateutil to help recognize the different date formats, but everything else we built ourselves.

[http://labix.org/python-dateutil](http://labix.org/python-dateutil)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A vastly under-rated and under-appreciated art form, indeed.</comment>


Choice quotes from Startup School 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.circleci.com/choice-quotes-from-startup-school/

<comment><USER2> driving up from LA tonight, going to camp in the hills and swoop down for Startup School tomorrow morning. Should be good!

</comment><comment><USER3> you've got to pay the toll troll to get into the boy's hole</comment>


Tim Cook's Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-06/tim-cooks-freshman-year-the-apple-ceo-speaks <comment><USER2> From the interview - "Eighty percent of our revenues are from products that didn't exist 60 days ago. Is there any other company that would do that?". If accurate, this is truly remarkable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly, in the response about the number of products Apple sells ("Well, we have a few..."), Cook does not mention the Apple TV. Apparently it's not on his mind much.

<comment><USER4> He also leaves out the Airport Extreme/Express base stations, Cinema Displays, and keyboards and mice. The Apple TV (as it stands now) is really more of a peripheral than a core product.</comment></comment>


Albert Stevens - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens <comment><USER2> (Stevens was used - with several others - as an _unwitting_ Guinea pig for experiments on the effect of radiation on the human body. The "justification" was he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer - the diagnosis was wrong.)

Appalling arrogance by the perpetrators - who were apparently neither prosecuted or even condemned.

Further context:

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Related: Discussion around the linear no-threshold model as it applies to absorbed radiation does: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no- threshold_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model)

<comment><USER4> relative to the ethical facet, it almost feels myopic for me to direct my energy toward the scientific facet of the story.

anyone else affected by this?</comment></comment>


Information Visualization Tools and Frameworks(A Collection) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shivkumarganesh/InfoVizGeek

<comment><AUTHOR> InfoVizGeek is a project which talks about the different tools and technologies which would enable an individual to create data visualizations. This repository has a vast list of tools along with their licensing available. This is an exhaustive list and I would be glad to accept additional tools which you guys out there in community use. Bookmark it, Fork it,Follow it & Contribute to the ever Growing list.(Still work in Progress)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a cool documentation. Nicely put forward.</comment></comment>


H-1B visa shift may favor tech companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/H-1B-shift-may-favor-tech-companies-13434868.php <comment><USER2> > The Department of Homeland Security wants to switch the order of these > lotteries, it said in a notice of the proposed rule change, which would — > somewhat counterintuitively — improve the odds for those highly educated > workers

> ... with a master's or doctoral degree from an American college or > university

This is a welcome change. But this biases the playing field in favor of those graduating from American degree mills. As a counter-measure against abuse from those, I hope DHS also intensifies scrutiny on the many American staffing companies who bend the H-1B rules to hire these foreign graduates. There is indication that they have started on it, for example [1].

Also,

> The lottery change could be aimed at hindering those outsourcing firms' > applications, Rand said. Three Indian firms, Tata Consultancy Services, > Infosys and Wipro, have dominated H-1B applications since 2012, government > data shows.

> "Most of the visas are snapped up by these body shops," said Ira Mehlman, a > spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR.

Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro are _outsourcing companies_ , not "body shops". Body shops are staffing companies - they are mostly American and run out of places like Edison.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425341)

<comment><USER3> Staffing companies should get no H1 visas at all. They are the biggest abusers.

<comment><USER4> The key problem is that the visa is given to the company, not the person, leaving the employee at the mercy of the company, leading to abuses like underpay and overwork in even direct jobs. If you lose your job, you lose your green card application if it's not past a certain stage and may have to leave the country immediately in case of layoffs, being fired. The rules are byzantine and a bureacratic nightmare with long processing delays.

The Trump administration even tried to make it so that if you're working legally while waiting on your extension visa(can take more than 8 months) and it happens to get rejected, they will report you to ICE for deportation proceedings calling the period you worked legally as being illegal, creating a Catch-22 where you're accruing illegal stay after you have to stop working, but cannot leave the country because you're waiting for a court date, since not showing up in a court is another new crime in itself. You have to live without a salary and being able to work at all, and the immigration courts are overloaded and once you accrue 6 months of illegal stay, you can be banned from entering the US for 10 years on any visa.

If you think that sounds too ridiculous to be true, read this:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new- uscis-policy-will-carry-harsh-consequences-for-applicants/#632d7dea4615)

This is the reason that many talented folks prefer to work for companies on a contract through a staffing company that holds the visa that allows for easier job hopping without losing your chance of getting a green card, or getting fired on Friday and accruing illegal stay starting from Saturday. Otherwise, why would you give away 40% to >50% of your hourly rate to a middleman?

In this new environment, if you somehow get caught in an ICE raid while selling your car for pennies and puting all your belongings that dont fit in luggage in the dumpster or whilepacking your bags, you might get shipped to jail inspite of not violating a single law before you got fired.

The companies oppose these fixes because they will less leverage over their employees on visas and they might job hop more if underpaid or overworked.

Fix these problems instead of creating weird custom rules against staffing companies and the problem will fix itself for the most part.

<comment><USER5> Even if you give the visa to the employee, now you run the risk of employers sizing up an employee's status (are they a citizen or an immigrant who needs a job to stay in the country) and hiring or offering salaries based on that. It'll still lead to the wrong behaviors.

Citizenship questions are illegal but still get asked. Are you going to outlaw asking about an employee's immigration status? Good luck enforcing that.

<comment><USER4> My point is that it will make it easier for employees stuck in a bad spot due to employee abuse to switch jobs. Lets say they join the company you cite and the boss dumps 80 hours a week worth of work every week and doesn't pay overtime. Currently it's a huge hassle and risky to switch jobs, so that employee may continue thus hurting the job market. If you give the employee the visa, they can shop around for jobs like citizens and the company they left will have to find someone else to replace them, hopefully at better market rates this time.

The biggest leverage the companies have on immigrant labor is the threat of being fired and deported, if you make that less costly and not turn their life upside down in a day, the problem will be lessened and make the job market more fair and competitive for everyone looking for jobs, and also greatly hurt staffing companies. It also lets the employee say "No." more easily when asked to work 80 hours for the fourth week in a row with no extra pay. This is the reason companies lobby against making this happen.

<comment><USER3> In my company most H1 workers that come from Infosys and others are mainly there because they are cheap and not because they are "highly qualified" as the intent of H1 is. If Infosys just had to pay market rates they would lose competitiveness and open up visa spots for the people who truly deserve one.

<comment><USER2> You Infosys colleagues might be slightly underpaid than you, but not by much. But real cost saving Infosys offers to your employer is the team that works _offshore_. Your Infosys colleagues are acting as bridges between that team and yours.

Infosys made almost $11B in 2018. They are not going to sweat the salary of few H-1B engineers. If American engineers, or Indian ones having Green Card, will do the job - liaison the communication between onshore and offshore teams - they will hire those if H-1Bs are not available. Or, your employer might move the whole operation to India, laying off the onshore team.

TL;DR: You are probably barking up the wrong tree. The "cheap" H-1Bs you hear about are hired by American staffing companies, not outsourcers.

<comment><USER6> I've seen the difference in pay, and it's very large. They aren't proxying offshore either. Not at the big tech companies who use them for staff augmentation anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the one hand, screw outsourcing firms.

On the other hand, this _really_ isn't the reform these visas _need_ right now. Lets work on the fact that visa holders live and die by their employers whims first, giving them basically zero leverage in an already low-leverage situation and diluting the value of native workers at the same time. This should come first if we're going to muck with anything, considering that's the raging dumpster fire consuming most of the towering garbage heap that is the h1-b visa process, imo.

</comment><comment><USER8> Merit-based visa system used by Canada and Australia should be preferred.

It is better for the country (more fluid job market; more long-term high- quality immigrants who will contribute more to social security and other social needs; increased competitiveness of companies and startups; larger tax base), the immigrants (more freedom to change companies), and the Americans (less need to compete with people accepting low wage to gain corporate sponsorship of a future permanent visa; more funding for social security).

<comment><USER9> The problem with the merit based visa system is it locks out highly talented self-taught individuals without college degrees. There's a lot of them in tech. Even though they have tons of experience in their respected fields the 'merit' systems are weighed heavily on education.

<comment><USER10> Well this is immigration we are talking about. Generally people without college degrees don't even get a H1 visa to come and work in the US. So its not really a problem with the merit based system. Infact a merit based system which does not _require_ college degree and simply provides some points is better suited to such individuals as they could get high score in other factors.

<comment><USER9> I know a few of them. I was one of them but on an E3 (Australian version of a H1-B). This is the problem with generalising, you screw over lots of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too little...

Wow, that change is not very ambitious. Abuse could be solved by simply requiring a salary above 100k, and verify this with the IRS. Then banning companies who seem to fail this.

It's crude, but simple. As for the number 100k, I suppose you could let each state set its own number. Or let the administration change it at it sees fit.

Yeah, these ideas aren't perfect, but why let that get in the way of good.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why not just go to an auction system, where the group that is going to give the highest salary gets the visa? You could adjust it for CoL so all H1Bs don't end up in SF and NYC. What would be bad about this system?

<comment><USER13> I thought this too, until it was pointed out to me that not every H1-B is an engineer.

For example, if you want to bring in someone to teach a rare foreign language at a University, they have a qualifying special skill but they certainly aren't making the six figure engineer salary.

<comment><USER14> Maybe they should get paid more to teach the rare language. Supply and demand.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you understand. Their wage _is high_ for what they do, but there is not as much demand for a language teacher as there is for an engineer. So even their above average salary is still low compared to an engineer. It's not fair to put them in the same ranking system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This will probably encourage more and more fake universities to offer "Masters" programs. ex: [1]

[1] [https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/04/24/international-t...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/04/24/international- technological-university-san-jose-college-foreign-students/)

</comment><comment><USER16> We should auction these spots off, so the companies which get the most economic value from bringing people in can do so. I like implementing this by ordering applications by salary, but you could also have some part go to the government.

</comment><comment><USER17> It might decrease the chances for outsourcing shops. But it also decreases the chance for everyone else who has not studied in the US. E.g. myself (european degree, with various jobs at leading tech companies in their field) would have an even worse chance than it is already at the moment.

<comment><USER18> Most countries give somewhat preferential treatment to graduates of their own Universities (including most European ones). Why shouldn't the US?

Foreign graduates who earn a degree from the US have:

* already contributed to the American economy * demonstrated some amount of "success" in American education and social system * likely have created social and work networks that allow them to succeed after graduation

So from the perspective of choosing folks who are both 1) Skilled and 2) Will likely adapt/succeed in American society and economy, the case for favoring US University degrees seems reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have a simple system we use to determine the value of many things. Money. Whichever applicants are bringing in the highest salary should be picked. It's kind of crazy that a genius with specialized skills is in the same process as the warm bodies the outsourcing firms are dumping in there.

Salaries should be paid a year in advance to the government, who then passes it to the workers, to ensure the high salary is real. Then, so the workers aren't locked, slavelike, into a particular company, they should have the option to stay in the country for at least the amount of time they were working, looking for a new job. Starting with a year minimum. And their visa stays with them, not the company, subject to minimum salary requirements.

</comment><comment><USER20> -Gather all applications, with salary information for the offered job that must be correct by law, else $lol fines for everyone.

-Sort the applications by pay, descending.

-Approve the top-k.

-Deny the rest.

Let the market sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The lottery change could be aimed at hindering those outsourcing firms' > applications, Rand said. Three Indian firms, Tata Consultancy Services, > Infosys and Wipro, have dominated H-1B applications since 2012, government > data shows.

This would be great. Almost, all my well qualified peers (on F-1,or H1B) hate the contract coding body shops. Even people who end up working there, hate their time over there, and often choose it as a way to stay in the US, until they get a "proper" job.

Assuming there isn't some hidden fine script that screws qualified people over, this should help weed out the bad actors, without changing much else.

> In addition to the new lottery order, the department also proposed a new way > for companies to enter their H-1B visa applicants into the lottery. Right > now, employers have to prepare a full petition for each applicant before > they're picked. The proposed rule change would let employers register them > online before the lottery, and work on their cases only if applicants are > selected.

I wonder if this will make companies more likely to hire h1b candidates, as the legal expense only manifests after they are picked in the lottery.

I am glad they did not put sweeping salary requirements into place. This would have hurt many competent candidates who joined startups (where stocks > base pay) or ones in engineering fields where salaries have historically been much lower than that in the CS industry.

</comment><comment><USER22> _> Graham said he will recommend clients prepare their full cases as they normally would. That means hiring an immigration attorney, collecting the necessary documents_

I don't understand, why is this whole heavy bureaucracy necessary? The employer should pledge to pay an above average paycheck and the respective taxes, say 100K for 5 years, and the employee should commit to maintain employment to either his sponsor or any other employer willing to pay him at least say 75% of the original pledge, with a decent job seeking hiatus.

This creates a nice market dinamic where only highly skilled people are brought in, because their skills make them valuable on the labour market guaranteing their future employment, without abusing their circumstances or depressing the wages of lower skilled nationals.

In retrospect, this could never fly because it also affects professions with strong lobbies, like doctors. The lobbies in tech are one-sided to the employers interests, which of course need to sell a "tech labour crisis" before they are allowed to depress the wages of their own laborers. Cue in bureaucrats and bottom feeders.

</comment><comment><USER23> Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think H1B should slowly move to something like an EB1, where candidates can file a self-petition (but without immigration intent, and apply for a regular GC after a few years if they really want to immigrate). They can set some criteria for testing 'high skills'.

This way, a candidate can choose a company based on their interest and skill set match, rather than filtering by whether a company sponsors a H1B.

Sure, even EB1 is being gamed, but at the very least this is a fair chance to candidates.

\- Eliminating the not-so-random 'lottery'

\- Avoiding the body shops or the so-called fake consulting companies where students go for their OPT

\- Eliminate the need to succumb to the whims of employers just to get a visa sponsorship

\- Companies, big or small, need not worry about not hiring skillful employees, just because 'it is a looong and random process'

\- Not entirely based on higher salaries. Sure, a high salary is a pseudo metric to indicate high skill, but what about early stage startups? This eliminates that unfair advantage

<comment><USER24> This already exists - the O-1 visa. EB1 is a green card type, you are confusing visas with residency permits here.

<comment><USER23> I don't think you can self-petition for an O-1 without job offer (at least that is what I remember). Just checked again, just to be sure [0].

I didn't suggest a new category in EBX, I said something similar for a visa where one can self-petition without a job offer, get the visa and work for whichever company she wants to work for, all without a need for an employer sponsorship. "self-petition without a job offer" being the key phrase.

[0] [https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary- worker...](https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary- workers/o-1-visa-individuals-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement)

<comment><USER24> Technically you need a registered company to "sponsor" you, but it can be your own company, where you are CEO and have 100% ownership. In the end, it's just a formality, the visa is granted on a personal basis. Compared to H1B where USCIS relies on a company to establish your credibility as a skilled worker, with O-1 they evaluate credibility themselves via multiple factors mostly involving peer validation (i.e. publications, articles, etc).

So yes, technically you need a job offer for O-1, but it's just a formality. Personally, I agree that it doesn't make much rational sense either, but then again barely anything makes sense when it comes to (US) immigration laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why this change though, instead of changing to a pay-based system (give visas to the 85k workers with the highest salaries)?

<comment><USER26> Probably because it would actually solve the problem (or just give an extra ticket per application for every 10k above a certain yearly salary value, for example)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Too little and too late since Indians mastered the art of corruption [https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2016/09/22/india-is- the-...](https://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2016/09/22/india-is-the-fastest- growing-source-of-new-illegal-immigrants-to-the-u-s/) and [http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians- among-...](http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most- corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm)

</comment><comment><USER28> I know it's a small constituency, but this makes it difficult for foreign- language schools who want to hire teachers from the "source" country. The timing uncertainty and calendar schedule simply doesn't work.

I am sure there are many such tiny segments.

<comment><USER29> If your university associated, then you have an unlimited H1-B queue! Not much of a solution, but it is a solution that isn't available to most business types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They have raised the chances of folks with advanced degress getting hired by a paltry 16%, or 5000 in number to be exact.

Is this a significant difference?

<comment><USER31> The regulatory bang-for-buck is pretty high, though -- no complex rule-making, no significant change in procedure, just a 16% bump for practically nothing.

<comment><USER30> I see, but can't they do that anytime they want?

I mean, they can do it by 50% even if they so wish, why aim for 16%?

<comment><USER31> They're not _aiming_ for 16%. They're not changing any of the numbers involved, they're just changing the _order_ of two dice rolls. It's a creative little rejig they probably hadn't thought to do before (or perhaps previous administrations hadn't _wanted_ to do it before.)

<comment><USER30> Now the clouds are parting. Thanks for your explaination :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Something something Sherlock.

It was not like this back in 'the day', by the way.

Not that anyone actually cares.

</comment><comment><USER24> It appears that this change would only benefit holders of advanced degrees from US universities, and make the situation worse for highly skilled immigrants in general.

</comment><comment><USER33> Now people who graduate with a bachelors from an American University will have even less of a chance of getting a visa?

</comment><comment><USER34> There are similar policy changes being discussed and or implemented all over the world.

In my opinion there should be a discriminatory reciprocal system based on the country you are from.

Meaning a high income country like Norway should set up a reciprocal residency for work program with say Australia that would have more relaxed conditions than the general program.

Similar to how visa free travel works.

The economic incentive in migrating from a poor to a rich country are just too dominating at the detriment of both the poor country (which looses educated workforce) and the rich country (whose citizens face heavily skewed labor competition in some areas).

</comment><comment><USER35> Feels like modern day complicated depressing slavery

</comment><comment><USER36> Duh. H-1B has always favored tech companies because it increases the labor supply and indirectly decreases salaries. Perfect example of how companies only want free markets when it benefits them.

Honestly, I was hoping Trump would end the entire program, but who am I kidding? Google and friends spend way too much on lobbying for that to happen.

<comment><USER37> > Perfect example of how companies only want free markets when it benefits > them.

There are many cases where corporations show hypocritical behavior, but this criticism seems off the mark as the companies actually do want free market in this case (i.e. free labor market where they can get a labor from anywhere), and in this case, they are not getting it (there's a lot of legal barrier making it difficult to import labor - thus it is a protected market). They want less protection in this case to favor them. It sounds like you want more protection, which is a reasonable position, but that's not a free or free-er market.

<comment><USER36> No, the free market solution would be to raise wages to attract more people into the industry. There's nothing stopping them from doing that, but instead they're lobbying the government to let them import workers.

<comment><USER38> Your definition of free market requires legal restrictions on labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As a person from New Zealand without an advanced degree (from anywhere) but with 30+ years industry experience (and previously granted an H-1B in 2001), this seems like the wrong way to tackle the problem of Indian body shops.

I was selected in this year's lottery in April and am still waiting for them to _start_ processing the case -- according to their web site it could easily take until sometime in February, ten months after submitting the paperwork. Thank goodness I'm able to do contract work for the company remotely in the meantime.

As for pushing US salaries down ... my salary is well into six figures, thank you. And was, even in my previous job, in Moscow.

If you want to hinder the Indian meat market companies, how about putting in a per country quota, as there is for Green card?

Or, just get moving with the proposed increase in the minimum salary from $60k to $130k. I'm above that already, but apparently most of the Indians aren't.

And the processing times are criminal. It's probably going to be a year from submitting the paperwork until actually moving to the US -- and with six months of the three years of the visa (starting October 1) already gone.

Getting the Russian equivalent "Highly Skilled Specialist" visa (3 years, plus one 3 year renewal, minimum salary 2 million rubles a year) only took two months.

<comment><USER6> Country quotas are bad. It's not Indians that are the problem, it's specifically the Indian body shops. No sense penalizing the good candidates who are doing things right.

American tech giants are the ones to blame for this problem. They are hiring massive amounts of contractors ("vendors") through these companies so they don't have to have FTEs on their balance sheet. They'll go away on their own once the market stops supporting them.

<comment><USER40> This is a good point, but realistically, most of the body shops are based in India, and that's not likely to change.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo & Nokia announcement next week - <AUTHOR> http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Yahoo--Nokia-Reportedly-Teaming-Up/story.xhtml?story_id=11100CE7VUSO&full_skip=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the article completely off? They talk about Yahoo search (isn't that now bing)?

Would Nokia really be willing to kill the Ovi store after less than a year?

</comment><comment><USER2> There are way too many 'mays' in that story. I can see Nike being psyched about this too.</comment>


A US airline has unveiled the most complicated boarding system of all time - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/the-worlds-largest-airline-american-airlines-unveils-new-boarding-system/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I used to have Group 1 boarding and free business/first class upgrades with US Airways before American gobbled them up, and now I'm going to be even lower than the Premium Economy customers.

Thanks a lot, American Airlines.</comment>