Wall Street Journal Staff Erupts over Race and Opinion - tech-historian https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/wall-street-journal-staff-erupts-over-race-and-opinion <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like less opinions please. Maybe (don't wanna get greedy) none? How about that great idea of 2 papers for the price of 1, only stop sending the opinion paper?

</comment><comment><USER2> It's a pretty important point to make in this historical moment: lies are not opinions, they are just lies.</comment>


Ryzen Community Update #2 - <AUTHOR> https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/03/30/amd-ryzen-community-update-2 <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this with a more informative title, but a mod reverted it to the vague original title. So let me explain what this is about...

The big news is that on the Ryzen launch day, despite benchmarks in general looking outstanding, the gaming ones were somewhat disappointing. AMD said it is due to software problems (eg. detecting the CPU vendor through cpuid and enabling Intel-only optimizations only for Intel CPUs). People seemed to be dubious or overlooked this.

But now AMD proved that with software-only optimizations that took 1-2 weeks they were able to boost the Ryzen gaming performance by 15-30% on the 2 major games they worked on.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the article states that the improvement in performance isn't the same for intel CPUs.

maybe they just optimized the game.

<comment><USER3> Benchmarks with Intel vs AMD here:

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ashes- Singularity-G...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ashes-Singularity- Gets-Ryzen-Performance-Update)

Whatever they did for AoS significantly increased 1800x performance while keeping 6900k performance essentially flat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: That social media bar is killing me. It takes up the firsts few columns of letters making it difficult to read, and it keeps reappearing whenever I scroll the page.

Who does stuff like that?

Edit: I actually stopped reading the article because it became so annoying.

<comment><USER5> I don't see any social media bar when using uBlock Origin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >6ns improvement

That's actually a lot for a memory access. All these launch day benchmarks will be obsoleted.

</comment><comment><USER7> HardOCP has a video showing the boost: [https://youtu.be/9ZLfJcHEMog](https://youtu.be/9ZLfJcHEMog).

</comment><comment><USER8> My Ryzen 1800x box is so disgustingly fast that it almost makes up for the consistent stability issues I've encountered while using it

<comment><USER9> What kind of stability issues are you seeing? Have you OC'd? What are you running as OS? Windows or Linux?

<comment><USER8> Failure to boot, random freezes in Windows and Linux.

That said, I got it sorted out. It turned out to be an incompatibility with both the NVMe disk I was using as well as an incompatibility with the memory I had purchased.

Getting the exact parts listed in your motherboard manufacturer's compatibility list appears to be pretty important for Ryzen currently. It's been rock solid since I swapped out those components.

<comment><USER9> Awesome! Thank you for the follow up. I'm planning on building one out at the end of the summer so I'll keep that in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You are now aware we live in a world where even CPUs have microcode patches.

<comment><USER11> We've been living in that world for a while - what do you think is new here? E.g. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx- instru...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/intel-disables-tsx-instructions- erratum-found-in-haswell-haswelleep-broadwelly) (and Intel is suspiciously tight-lipped about the (security?) impact of the TSX bug, while AMD's FMA3 bug seems to be a comparatively-harmless hang.)

<comment><USER12> What security impact of the Haswell/early-Broadwell TSX bug? The support for all TSX instructions where really disabled by the microcode update, and we know that for sure because it crashed the world instantly (in Linux).

Now, _working_ TSX can have a security impact, yes. At least on TSX as implemented on later Broadwell/early Skylake, memory accesses done from _inside_ an speculative region are allowed to bypass stuff they shouldn't. Is that what you meant?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> King of odd they're testing with an Nvidia GPU, instead of... I don't know, AMD? Or at least both?

<comment><USER14> They've been demoing with nvidia cards for months. It is kind of odd, but nvidia has quite a performance lead at the moment. If you're selling a CPU to people who have a lot of money, and those people are worried about their top- end GPUs being bottlenecked by the CPU, it's a more effective demo. I do expect the demos to change when Vega comes out later this year.</comment></comment>


Tips for moving across the country to the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a Chicagoan who's been looking to relocate to the Bay Area (not SF).  Unfortunately, I see a lot of companies posting "Local candidates only" positions.
I'd really appreciate any tips folks can offer on how to job hunt across states like that without getting immediately disregarded for being out of state.
Also, are there any good comprehensive guides on moving to the Bay Area that give overviews of the various areas, housing considerations, transport, etc.?  I know this is all scattered out there in some form or another but I haven't found any good consolidated guides and was wondering if something like that exists.
Also, any general suggestions on making the shift would be appreciated.  I'm looking for online marketing/digital media director-level roles FWIW if anyone is hiring ;)
And before anyone asks, the reason I am not looking at SF is because of the astronomical rents and my wife's and my desire to live in a quieter suburban neighborhood with nicer weather than SF typically offers. <comment><USER2> "not SF" can be "Peninsula", "South Bay," or "East Bay." Look in craigslist jobs section for cities (and type of work available) in these areas.

I'd suggest an intermediate approach. Instead of worrying so much about [what looks like] a big step such as moving, plan to take a 1-2 week "interviewing vacation" in the Bay Area. Contact companies beforehand so your days here are scheduled with interviews.

Tell companies you talk to you'd relocate here if they offer you a job. Preferably, they'd pay for relocation, or if you really want to move here, you can pay for it yourself.

Once you have a job offer, then worry about the move.</comment>


Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular? He Understands Men Better Than Most People - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/my-joe-rogan-experience/594802/ <comment><USER2> This article devotes an unusual amount of time discussing Rogan's ad roll.</comment>


Unlawful gun owners commit 80 percent of gun crimes - <AUTHOR> http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/unlawful-gun-owners-commit-80-percent-gun-crimes <comment><USER2> I love the fervor of the poster as I strongly support the 2nd amendment and find leftist/democrat arguments to be hypocritical...

But... I don't see the relevance to HN and if this were a leftist post I'd flag it and I want to be intellectually consistent, so... Flagged. Sorry.

If I'm wrong on flagging it, please let me know. Trying to adapt my HN behavior to the general decorum.

<comment><USER3> I have strong opinions on guns and gun control, and they likely differ from yours. But I don't come to HN to debate that topic, whether an article aligns with my opinions or not. Some I'm with you on flagging. Bring me another article about yet-another-javascript-framework!

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, but does this mean gun enthusiasts should similarly flag articles about "yet another JavaScript framework"?

I'm not sure HN's algorithms are up to the task of sorting that out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So most crimes are committed with guns stolen from or lost by the legal owners. Is that what gun rights advocates want to be saying?

Maybe it's because I'm not an American and I've never been to America but this all just seems strange.

<comment><USER6> This is perhaps why neither side of the debate have picked up on this research. If you look at the WaPo[0] pie chart[1], it could also be reported as, "97% of gun crime committed using traceable firearms."

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new-e...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new- evidence-confirms-what-gun-rights-advocates-have-been-saying-for-a-long-time- about-crime/)

[1] [https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/07/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/07/resp.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ...in a single U.S. city (Pittsburgh).

This write-up is more about the (lack of) reporting on the research. Here is the actual relevant WaPo article that is referenced: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new-e...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new- evidence-confirms-what-gun-rights-advocates-have-been-saying-for-a-long-time- about-crime/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure why this is on hacker news, but regardless, this article doesn't say much that isn't new. It even mentions specifically that...

"all guns start out as legally purchased weapons but "huge number of them" fall into the hands of unlawful owners"

And that's the issue. The USA has a massive amount of guns available for legal purchase, which countries with less gun violence do not have. Some of these guns make their way into criminal hands and are used in crimes. Why do other first world countries not have this issue? Because they do not have massive amounts of guns available for purchase.

Banning legal guns decreases the number of guns that will fall into criminal hands to be used in crimes. This is what other countries are doing, and it works. I don't understand the issue with this, I get that shooting is a fun sport, but people are dying. LOTS of people. Get a new hobby.

<comment><USER8> America has a lot of guns, guns are ingrained in it's culture, and despite of having that many guns, it isn't a third world hell hole.

Talking about gun bans in other countries is like trying to convince Australia to ban Kangaroos based on how it worked in America.

The situation hasn't changed since the times of founding fathers. In Federalist Paper #46, James Madison was bragging about how because of American gun ownership, totalitarian governments can never take over America, like they can do in Europe.

[Reformatted]

>> Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. <<

>> Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.<<

>> But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. <<

>> Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures which must precede and produce it. <<

[http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm](http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm)

<comment><USER9> Do you really think people in Australia are afraid of totalitarianism?

Do you really guns are going to help, when the real threat is government overreach and the inaction of the populace? Keep electing "pro 2nd amendment" politicians who also happen to vote for the patriot act and support NSA spying.

<comment><USER8> > Do you really guns are going to help, when the real threat is government > overreach and the inaction of the populace? Keep electing "pro 2nd > amendment" politicians who also happen to vote for the patriot act and > support NSA spying. <

So your logic is, "because politicians have passed Patriot Act and govt spies through NSA, give up your gun rights"??

I see similar argument being made by other people, "there is no way you will be able to fight a totalitarian government with your guns", (even if it were true) the point is that we should give up our guns because we are already doomed? Isn't that even more reason to fight for gun rights?

Quoting again from Federalist Papers #46, where James Madison responds to the argument similar to being made by you (you really should read it, because I am skipping a lot of meat):

>>Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed 1/100th part of the whole number of souls; or one 1/25th part of the number able to bear arms.<<

>> This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than 25 or 30 thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. <<

>> It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. <<

<comment><USER9> > So your logic is, "because politicians have passed Patriot Act and govt > spies through NSA, give up your gun rights"??

No, my logic is that it's a problem to give up your other rights but throw a fit about any mention of gun control because "MAH GUNS"!

My argument is also that it's incredible paranoia to talk about how your guns are going to keep you safe from your government.

Again, do you really think Australians are having trouble sleeping at night because they are afraid they might wake up and "Oh, military rule. Guess we'll just go with that then".

<comment><USER8> > No, my logic is that it's a problem to give up your other rights but throw a > fit about any mention of gun control because "MAH GUNS"! My argument is also > that it's incredible paranoia to talk about how your guns are going to keep > you safe from your government. <

I am sorry, but I refuse to believe that you're participating in this thread because you care so much about our other rights. You don't, period.

Every other argument you're making(like bringing up Australia) betrays your sentiment.

I don't want to give any of my rights, but I DEFINITELY don't want to give my right to keep and bear arms nor my first amendment rights.

> Again, do you really think Australians are having trouble sleeping at night > because they are afraid they might wake up and "Oh, military rule. Guess > we'll just go with that then". <

Let them sleep peacefully. I don't give a crap. If you live in America, then move to Australia. If you already live in Australia then sleep peacefully there.

As far as I am concerned, the healthy skepticism about the government is the best thing about America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Instead of tackling legal gun sale, the government should focus more on taking down the illegal black market gun sale.

<comment><USER11> The overwhelming majority of guns on the black market have been sold legally at one point. Obviously, legal gun sales are much easier to limit than illegal ones. How _would_ you tackle illegal sales?

The same statistic probably applies to countries with stricter gun laws, it's the sheer amount of weapons available that make the difference. The US gun laws have created a flood of weapons into black markets, especially in South America, where the Mafia is often armed better than the police.

It's safe to say that this development cannot be reversed at this point, but it can still be curbed.

<comment><USER12> Hold the legal owner liable for anything done with the gun?

Secondarily, this would lead to insurance on gun ownership, which would lead to insurance companies rewarding responsible gun ownership with lower rates and punish irresponsible actors.

<comment><USER11> This implies that gun ownership can be reliably tracked, which is not the case today, though certainly possible in theory.

You basically want to increase legal liabilities (which already exist) to an extreme, but you will then have trouble finding any insurance company that is willing to cover the kinds of damages that can be caused by guns at a rate affordable to an individual.

Either of these things will require legislation that will receive massive pushback from the gun lobby. In a country where even basic background checks or limiting of certain weapon types hasn't been realized, your ideas seem almost utopian.

Having said that, I don't disagree in principle.

<comment><USER13> Switzerland seems to have this one nailed. Both parties are required by law to have documentation of a firearm sale, and that documentation must be retained for ten years. If you don't have control of the weapon and you don't have documentation then you're in trouble. And I suspect you insurance won't cover any costs if you're in violation of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I recall correctly most gun crimes are committed with firearms purchased from a small minority of dealers (<5%?). As such this article and the research it reports upon really says nothing new.

<comment><USER13> Aslso, please correct me if I am wrong in what I have just said.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best informed AI blogs/ bloggers? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for AI news sources who avoid the temptation to generate hype.<p>Recently, I discovered Skynet Today (https://www.skynettoday.com/) and really enjoy their coverage. So I wondered what other good sources are out there? (Not necessarily a publication, could be just a trustworthy writer ) <comment><USER2> I actually subscribed to: [https://lettergram.net/](https://lettergram.net/)

Follow "Artificial Intelligence | AI", "Machine Learning | ML", etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks good but I wish they didn't require me to add my credit card after selecting the free plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://distill.pub](http://distill.pub)

[http://www.wildml.com/](http://www.wildml.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't believe I hadn't heard of Distill before. This is great thanks!

<comment><USER3> [https://jalammar.github.io/](https://jalammar.github.io/)</comment></comment></comment>


What is a safest way to set all bits of a variable to true in C? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/809227/is-it-safe-to-use-1-to-set-all-bits-to-true/809341#809341 <comment><USER2> Personally I'd use: unsigned int a = 0xFFFF, not unsigned int a = -1.

This is a classic case of a readability issue. 0xFFFF is, in my mind, much clearer on your intention than -1. The only problem is that you're assuming a specific int size, but really, if you're working with bits, chances are good that you're working on a platform where you _know_ the architecture size (at least on embedded platforms).

<comment><USER3> The problem is that you can't be sure how many bytes and int is on any given platform. So your way is more readable, but not portable.

<comment><USER3> Crap. This is why you don't respond without fully reading a comment. Where is my delete option? :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "limits.h" (ISO C99 Standard) defines UINT_MAX as the maximum value for a variable of type unsigned int which is 4294967295 (0xffffffff).

<comment><USER5> _Sigh_ :

"The contents of the header <limits.h> are given below, in alphabetical order. The minimum magnitudes shown shall be replaced by implementation-defined magnitudes with the same sign."

      #define UINT_MAX 65535

Key here is _implementation-defined_ , with a minimum of 65535.

<comment><USER4> Platforms differ, and the limits.h reflects this, that's the point. We should use the abstractions (the #defines) of the standard library, i.e. refer to these values by their names, that's the way to write portable software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many 'ones complement' machines exist?

<comment><USER7> The most well-known are 30-40 years old by now and predate ANSI C (=c89), some predate even K&R C. They also have 18- or 36-bit words and other oddities.

Compare that to non-ASCII systems (e.g. AS/400), which are still much in use now and probably have a sizable bit of C/C++ programs running on them (besides COBOL and Java).

If you're programming for one of the more common platforms (i.e., x86, x64, ARM, PowerPC, 68k, MIPS, SPARC, VAX, 8080/Z80, 6502), you'll be safe to assume that ((unsigned)-1), ((unsigned)~0) and ~((unsigned)0) are all the same.

<comment><USER8> It's been quite a while since I heard VAX called one of the "more common" platforms. I'm too young. The only one I ever saw was in an ASU computer lab and we wrote our assembly language assignments on it (86HC11 assembly via some external test board... I don't even know what was in the VAX).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In C99, integer types can have padding bits that may not be writable, and writing all ones can be 'a trap representation' (except for the cas of unsigned char). So, I would guess that the portable way to do this requires taking the address of the variable, casting to (char unsigned *), and writing sizeof(var) all-ones unsigned char patterns (however that has to be done). I am not a C expert, though, so feel free to correct me.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant But but but, this doesn't answer the question!? It explicitly acknowledges that -1 will not always set all bits to one, yet it recommends it!

That makes me very surprised by (1) the number of up-votes, and (2) the green "check" mark of approval.

<comment><USER10> But but but, you apparently didn't understand the answer. It doesn't matter what the representation of -1 is. The C standard defines the cast of a negative number to an unsigned int as the (UINT_MAX + 1) modulo of the number. _By definition_ ,

      unsigned int foo = -1;

will set foo to 0xFFFF..., automatically setting all bits to 1 regardless of the number of bits in int types and without respect to the representation of negative numbers.

<comment> loup-vaillant EDIT : OK, just got it: I got the logic backwards: first, -1 is converted to uint. Second, -1 uint means UINT_MAX. Third, the binary representation of UINT_MAX is all 1s. The way I previously understood it, the -1 would be a _signed_ integer which has some binary representation, and _that_ binary representation would become the uint.

Weird bit of arcana. Below is my mistaken comment. (Notice that I pretended that UINT_MAX is not all 1s, which is silly. I suppose I made that mistake because I "couldn't be wrong" or something.)

As far as I know, your _definition_ can't be inferred from the C standard. The answer itself acknowledges that -1 doesn't yield 0xFFFF… on every platform. The only guarantee is that it will yield UINT_MAX, which is not what was asked.

Otherwise, that would mean that C basically mandates a two's complement representation. Does it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The next question: Why?

(To clarify: I mean, "why do you care what the bits are set to".)

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you mean.

If you meant "why worry about bits, you should be dealing with values", then there are plenty of cases where that isn't true. Lots of programs (e.g. embedded programs) have to deal with actual bits, not with the values themselves. Just as an example, flags.

(I don't know if this is what you meant, so apologies if I misunderstood your question.)

<comment><USER11> So why not have a type that's "bitfield64" or something, and not worry how the machine represents your integer.

This seems like too much abstraction for a C programmer, I know, but there is already precedent. int and int * are not the same type; if you use one as the other the compiler will tell you not to, even though they are the exact same bits in memory.

<comment><USER2> That's a great idea, actually. In the projects I worked on, there were usually typedefs of various sizes, for example byte -> unsigned char, word -> unsigned int, dword -> unsigned long, etc.

We made sure that each one of these had the correct bit amounts in the mapping, and that way, you always knew exactly how many bits you were working with, which is important in embedded systems (where memory is important, and where you usually have structures which directly map to e.g. ip headers, so you need exact sizes).

By the way, even the words byte/word/dword might cause confusion, cause none of them are well defined either. Some architectures assign a word 16 bits, some 32 bits. And believe it or not, some architectures even assign bytes a number of bits different than 8! The "officially correct" term, I believe, is Octet, which is defined as 8 bits. Of course, we just decided internally what we meant by byte, word and dword, and that worked fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Protecting open-source based commercial software? - <AUTHOR> My team and I have created a product that is based on a few existing open source technologies. The value is in the system as a whole, the infrastructure we built around these tools, and how we've made them interact with one another, not to mention backend. Since we are primarily open source based I am worried that someone could come along, see our "big idea" for how these tools can interact, and then clone us. How do i protect my (future) company and my idea in a situation like this? Does a patent even make sense? <comment><USER2> What is the license of the original projects? GPL, LPL, Apache, MIT, BSD, other?

Does your software run in your server or the users have to download it to run it in theirs computers?

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless you have deep coffers and are willing/able to litigate, my opinion is that patents are of little value in terms of preventing copying. Ianal.</comment>


Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/357269/Stadia_owners_on_Reddit_are_blasting_Google_over_radio_silence_and_lack_of_support.php <comment><USER2> 1) The reddit post this article is based on is titled "Stadia has officially gone 40 days without a new game announcement/release, feature update, or real community update" [1]. Presumably the Stadia team is US-based and took a 2 week holiday during this time, meaning they didn't release right before their holiday and had nothing to deliver immediately after. Not an excuse, especially because other industry competitors are really active during the Christmas season because thats when so many sales are, but you see other studios like Dice's Battlefield V go utterly dark during this time.

2) reddit.com/r/stadia is pretty bullish on the tech otherwise

3) reddit.com/r/stadia has Google employees as moderators which is against "reddiquette" but pretty common on product-oriented subs. Take that as you will.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/eusxgc/stadia_has_officially_gone_40_days_without_a_new/)

<comment><USER3> Meanwhile on Switch eShop: 10 to 20 new games released every single week of the year (many of them mediocre, but still).

When you're a massive global video game streaming service, you're supposed to plan ahead a bit, don't you think. This is not a mom and pop store.

<comment><USER4> It's tough to compare a company's first few steps into gaming to the established machine that is Nintendo.

<comment><USER5> I think a company with Google's resources would have hired people with the necessary experience to run the project.

<comment><USER6> They're a "me too!" company that pretends they are the leader in all the projects that others are doing, and merely offer a service/product to tick a box next to their competitors.

The only case where this isn't true is Search (but getting worse), AdWords, and YouTube. But everything else is not uniquely Google (eg. Drive, GMail, phones, Android, Chromebooks).

Then they may or may not abandon the project based on the uptake, leaving the adopters high and dry. I personally would not risk buying anything from them based on their proven approach to product launches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been following this situation somewhat, and although Google's outreach has been lacking, there are signs that they're working hard behind the scenes. Apparently they have over 100 games launching this year [1], have been consistent in releasing new games with the pro subscription [2], and are delivering a number of talks at the upcoming GDC [3].

I can see why gamers are frustrated, but from my point of view the community hasn't been particularly happy with any kind of news. Not to be derisive, but I don't really understand the tribal fanaticism both for and against the service.

Yes, the service is missing promised features, but it's actually pretty good. For someone like me (in my 30s, don't want another box that I have to keep upgraded), I've been enjoying it for what it is — with a decent internet connection, you can play a modern looking game with very little effort.

Google did promise more, but I still haven't given up on their ability to deliver. Seems like a lot of moving parts, and maybe only their community management is missing.

1\. [https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google- stadia-12...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21068913/google- stadia-120-games-2020-10-exclusives-4k-controller)

2\. [https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia- pro...](https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21112300/google-stadia-pro- february-2020-metro-exodus-gylt)

3\. [https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for- it...](https://www.neowin.net/news/google-announces-schedule-for-its-games- developer-summit-at-gdc-2020/)

<comment><USER8> Hype is truly a double-edged sword, and its surprising to me that companies are so cavalier about it, especially in the gaming industry where the consumers are so brutal and unforgiving.

Stadia is an amazing technology... and a fine product. Just fine. They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up hard. Stadia hasn't (yet). It very much smells like a disconnect between their business/marketing and the product development.

<comment><USER9> > _They go into marketing this thing with guns blazing, positioning it as the > future to play games and the one-stop-shop, they better back that talk up > hard._

Stadia development is expected to pick back up as soon as the Google Fiber rollout is complete...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a world where even Valve can manage to start communicating properly, like they've recently done with Half-Life: Alyx, it shouldn't be impossible for Google to do so too.

They deserve all the flak they get, they need to stop treating their paying costumers so badly.

<comment><USER11> Except the 2nd most popular post on /r/Games is about how Artifact hasn't had any updates in over a year now... So 4 weeks in the middle of the holidays seems a lot more trivial.

<comment><USER10> That's a quite different situation, Artifact is a dead product while Stadia is a recently launched product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From /u/GraceFromGoogle's response:

"While I don't have product updates to share right at this second, I can promise you that I have been, and will continue taking feedback posted to r/Stadia and other channels, like the Stadia Community Forum, back to the Stadia team."

They can't even scrape together an update for a thread of thousands of people who paid good money and are foaming at the mouth.

Gaming, community, and customer service could not be further from Google's DNA.

<comment><USER13> This was my main concern when Stadia was launched. I knew that Google could figure out the tech but their product development and customer support would be their Achilles heel _, especially when it comes to gaming. Gamers go all in with their passion and if you as a company aren 't _heavily* community oriented, their passion can quickly turn destructive.

* Their reputation for prematurely closing down products too but that's not something they can directly affect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did people not see this project as clearly stillborn? The radio silence (when it comes to fixes, issues) is not new, nor have I heard a single positive comment about the service. This feels like investors and users alike got scammed by a product not ready for prime time. Did they assume they could fix it after boot? I really, really hate this trend of building the plane in flight with passengers present (paying customers), and coasting on expectation of fixes.

<comment><USER15> I had the same impression since the first announcement. Stadia is an enthusiast product (for now), but enthusiast don't need it.

Stadia might become lucrative in a few years with slow adoption and improvements but if you get into it right now, you just pay to be a beta tester.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was predictable both specifically and in general. Google _does not support their products_ , period. They stop updating them meaningfully -- years before announcing that they're terminated -- and they refuse to have a human customer service team. G Suite is possibly the only exception.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, but 4 weeks, 2 of weeks were the holidays, is by NO means "not supporting their products". What company releases an update faster than every 4 weeks?

<comment><USER17> What company leaves their hyped up product mostly useless for 4 weeks after launch?

<comment><USER11> > mostly useless

What? The product works just fine, people use it and can play games. How is it useless? Just because brand new flashy features weren't released doesn't make it "useless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They made a post on /r/stadia a few hours ago announcing some free games for the month which has been well received.

I agree the radio silence wasn't great but blasting Google has become the new pasttime here.

Does anyone else feel like we're just becoming a predictable echo chamber?

<comment><USER11> Yep, Google has over delivered by giving two free games per months instead of the promised one. Yes, since they are more of a tech company and don't do crunches, updates can be a bit slower, but 4 weeks is nowhere close to "abandoning a product"...

<comment><USER19> * Ad company _

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good. I really hope Stadia fails. Gaming is one of the major drivers of continued demand for "real computers" at the edge. Take that away and we'll lose even more momentum there.

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, its an inefficient allocation of resources for infrequent gamers (who might play games 100 hours a year or less) to need to own expensive consoles or PCs to play games.

I hope Stadia or a similar service succeeds, because I'm one of those people.

<comment><USER22> You can just sign up for Geforce NOW beta, it's free for now, you automatically get all the games you have on Steam, it works and it probably won't go away anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am siding with Google on this one. Stadia is amazing. I play games with zero lag on both my TV and MBP when normally I would have to buy two copies. Reddit has been freaking out at every step to get more features for a platform they supposedly hate. Products over promise on timelines all the time. Chill.

<comment><USER2> My problem is that I don't know who to trust.

Clearly I can't trust Googles marketing or Sales copy after how it handled this initial launch.

There are a lot of videos and reviews that mark it as a poor product I.e. it's launch title Destiny having an impossibly small player population for multiplayer activities.

And then there are people who give it shining reviews such as yourself who seems like a reasonable human but is still only one data point.

So I'll wait and remember this consumer experience for every google product that gets pitched to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> On a tangential note, I saw this graphic on Reddit that shows the venerable PS2 still having the largest number of console sales of all time: [https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png](https://i.redd.it/24zu04bbtvc41.png)

I loved my PS2, and I loved going to play N64 (actual console, not emulators) at friend's houses. That was the real deal for me.

<comment><USER25> Related - I think instead of Stadia being pitched as a competitor to cutting edge gaming platforms it would have been interesting if they had started out with offering "classic" gaming content. A cloud service which offered me the ability to switch between (for example) Atari 2600, SNES, NeoGeo, Dreamcast and old school PC games is something I might consider depending on the price model. Yes, emulators exist but they can be fiddly to setup depending on the platform and not everyone is comfortable with downloading ROMs of questionable legality. Presumably, Google engineers could get older games running pitch- perfect on their server hardware and we could stream the results.

Once people were comfortable with "game streaming" they could move forward with new/exclusive content. Which is basically what Netflix has been doing. I appreciate licensing old games is probably a nightmare, but a service offering opportunities to play old classics would have got a lot more goodwill than this mess.

<comment><USER26> There's nothing stopping someone from adapting an emulator to Stadia's rendering framework, although I'm not sure Google would approve the result. I agree with you that Google acquihiring (for example) Good Old Games might have been cool, but IMHO Google is pitching the other end of the performance spectrum: play AAA games on a Chromebook.

If they had done both then they could have released GOG titles as filler between AAA releases and that would have been something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> can't say we didn't see this coming. unfortunately this a pattern that google has exhibited again and again with consumer based products. you think that people would have learned after the google glass fiasco, but i guess not.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm sort of surprised anyone bought Stadia. What problem does it really solve?

<comment><USER29> There are a number of things it offers. Being able to play high end triple A games on a chromebook or a cheap computer would be a huge boon. Not everyone wants to(or has the means to) spend 1300+ dollars on a gaming computer. Also there is also the casual market. Even the people who do want to play games and have the money, it's hard to justify the cost if you just play like 1 or 2 games per year. Another huge boon is the ability to switch between devices and places. Going from your television to your office to your laptop, or from your house to a hotel, to a friends house, or whatever has huge amounts of utility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google and silence+lack of support go together like peanut butter and jelly

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be more newsworthy if Google _weren 't_ behaving this way.

<comment><USER32> Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS's infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P or allowing players to host their own servers."

In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire.

(There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google, a company that sells adds for a living, has absolutely no marketing skills whatsoever. Anyone that uses any of Google's products, you are living on borrowed time. This has been illustrated over and over and over. Its not even a meme anymore.

I wanted to say that I fear for the "do no evil" Google, but that company has long since disappeard.

</comment><comment><USER34> When Stadia was launched I was very hopeful that it might bring a lot of other innovations, like provide a training ground for future surgeons through interactive controls and gamified simulation of complex surgery. Might provide a large gamified solution to simulate outbreaks like happening now with Wuhan Virus. I hoped it will provide a cheaper alternative to global researchers the computing power and software infrastructure for large scale simulation, which at present is limited to some big university, corporations and large government organization.

But to do this google needs to first serve it's core community of Stadia which are gamers and so far I believe it failed there. It will abandoned Stadia if it can't generate enough revenue from advertising or services through it, as it has far fewer number of users than products Google abandon with millions of users.

Google is a for profit advertising company driven by technology and attracts guinea pigs for it's new service using its network due to search and other products.

This guinea pigs used by google comes at much cheaper costs than focus group and people recruited to test services. Google is an advertising company with search, android and all the other services supporting it. So given at root Google's main business is to attract eye-balls and attention from an organization perspective it might be right to abandon such business. But this is a great disservice to people who relied on a false implicit promise that the service will be supported and continue to stay even if its unprofitable.

I hope there is a real viable alternative open internet with distributed peer to peer network to break this monopoly of walled internet cornered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

<comment><USER34> Another example of how google index it's criticism and use it's PR mechanical turks or staff to downvote critical comments.</comment></comment>


The financial mistakes behind why a startup laid off 400 employees overnight - <AUTHOR> https://www.teampay.co/blog/3-mistakes-that-crushed-zirtual-overnight/ <comment><USER2> These mistakes and the ending advice are pretty distracting tangents to a fundamental flaw: The business model can't afford employee overhead at even poverty salary levels. Everything else is just noise.

The best take away is yet another damning piece of evidence against the "gig" economy.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't the "gig" economy. Having flexible part time work hours can work for some people if they want some extra money and they aren't the primary bread winner.

Also $12-$14 hour is a livable wage in rural America, for full time hours, if you didn't have to worry about health care.

The biggest issue with the gig economy is our insane health insurance system where the only way you can get affordable insurance is through your job.

But expecting college students to work for that amount is crazy.

<comment><USER4> "...if you didn't have to worry about health care" Also known as That Thing Everyone Will Need To Worry About Eventually.

<comment><USER5> >That Thing Everyone Will Need To Worry About Eventually

(in USA #1)

I never have, and do not ever expect to have to, worry about it, because Euro

<comment><USER4> Everyone will have to worry about healthcare eventually, even Europeans. You might not have to _pay_ for it, but that's different from being able to ignore it.

Also, if a scenario is about a U.S. company, and pay in USD, talking about America seems reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uggh, these kinds of stories send me into a rage. Here's someone who evidently knew little about technology, Silicon Valley, or running a business, and yet, she had access to incubators, co-founders, and business-starting capital that many of us (who are actually competent) only dream of. So jealous! More evidence that life is not fair and it's all about connections and schmoozing.

<comment><USER7> >> that life is not fair

Yes, this shouldn't be a surprise.

>> it's all about connections

Getting anything done requires the help of others. That's how society works. The best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. Focus on the people and you will be 100x better equipped to deal with anything than any amount of technical or operational knowledge.

<comment><USER8> > Focus on the people and you will be 100x better equipped to deal with > anything than any amount of technical or operational knowledge.

this is only true if what you're doing isn't innovation, but just making business.

<comment><USER7> What is "innovation"? You need people to get things done even if you're doing research on new tech, unless you're Tony Stark inventing fusion reactors in a cave.

<comment><USER9> And that forgets that Tony Stark came from a wealthy family and inherited his wealth and made most of his money off of taxpayers through defense contractors. We only like him because he finally started to do something other than starlets or for himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _...discovered that Keating's payroll projections assumed two pay periods a month for a total of 24 pay periods a year. In reality, since Zirtual was on a two-week pay cycle, the company had 26 pay periods a year._

ZOMG. Who is this "Ryan Keating", a high school intern?

<comment><USER11> For whatever reason, instead of counting the extra pay periods in the specific months he raised the per-pay-period cost to compensate. An odd way to do it, but there we are.

There's also a "his side of the story": [http://fortune.com/2015/08/13/zirtuals-outsourced-cfo- gives-...](http://fortune.com/2015/08/13/zirtuals-outsourced-cfo-gives-his- side-of-the-shutdown-story/)

<comment><USER10> He's very polite, and really that is admirable after getting thrown under this particular bus, but nothing he said here or there really explains why he would have done this. The CEO needed projections she could use without deep analysis on her part. Instead he gave her some riddles in spreadsheet form. There are probably some SV CEOs who enjoy that sort of thing...

<comment><USER3> What's a riddle about that? You would calculate a monthly budget and 10 months out of the year your salary budget would be higher based on 2 pay periods a year and 2 months it would be lower. Most other expenses besides salary would be monthly. You would accrue a monthly liability for salaries even though you wouldn't pay them out evenly. On the months with 3 pay periods, you would deduct from your "salary account".

I'm probably using the words wrong, but I would understand the concept from two courses of accounting I took over 20 years ago. What business does anyone have being a CEO that doesn't understand simple accounting?

<comment><USER12> The most basic part of a CFO's job would be to make sure the CEO understands that which he apparently did not do.

<comment><USER3> I think a CEO should understand basic accounting. It's part of Sarbanes Oxley that _that senior executives take individual responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of corporate financial reports._ If the company ever did go public, she would be responsible for making sure reports are accurate.

For instance, as a private citizen, I would be responsible for making sure I pay the appropriate amount of taxes even if I had an accountant if I was a self employed consultant. If I get audited, my neck is on the line.

Ignorance is the reason that most professional football players go broke shortly after they retire and they depend on "professionals".

<comment><USER12> Yes. But shame on her for trusting the CFO firm they paid for this information? The whole point of hiring a CFO or paying a contractor to do it is so that you don't have to do everything yourself as the CEO. It would be unreasonable to expect every CEO to know the financial details down to a difference in 2 pay periods a year.

But that brings us to the real issue, which is that they were obviously operating way too tight if a difference of 2 pay periods a year was enough to bankrupt them.

<comment><USER13> Unreasonable? Most of the company's expenses are employees, and a lot of this stuff is common sense. It's hardly advanced math.

No way were they bankrupted just because of 2 pay periods. There is more to the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What was wild to me was watching the founder being interviewed, getting praise for a potential billion dollar valuation then going out of business the next week.

[https://thisweekinstartups.com/maren-kate-donovan- zirtual/](https://thisweekinstartups.com/maren-kate-donovan-zirtual/)

<comment><USER6> LOL I couldn't make it past a minute without throwing up. So much gushing and hero worship, especially considering what we now know. Shades of Theranos there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      Donovan "dug into the numbers herself" and discovered that Keating's payroll projections assumed two pay
     periods a month for a total of 24 pay periods a year. In reality, since Zirtual was on a two-week pay cycle, the company had 26 pay periods a year.

Umm, that's pretty dang fundamental. How the heck do the people keeping the books not know the payroll schedule !?!

</comment><comment><USER16> This, plus Keating's Fortune rebuttal, is fascinating stuff. Fundamentally, she was the CEO so the buck stops with her; if the company folds because she didn't understand the financials or the practical operations of the business, then the blame is on her. But, you also have to wonder why Keating didn't offer any guidance about the iceberg at which she was steering the ship.

It almost sounds like he wrote up some kind of simplified model, not something meant as an actual operating document. She wanted to convert people to employee status and took the doc as justification, rather than understanding the actual data presented. Keating was not employed as CFO or similar role, so apparently decided he was under no real obligation to provide further guidance.

I think what's most interesting about this is that I recall doing case studies on basics like this 20 years ago as an undergrad; because it's just that basic. One is left wondering if there's a deeper story that would make these seemingly obvious mistakes (IE: there is no way they could afford to make those people employees) less obvious. Or, was it just hubris that they could keep growing the business / an investor would come along and rescue them.

<comment><USER17> I imagine that convincing a CEO of important details of finance when she won't even hire someone as a CFO goes about as well as convincing the CEO of important details of technology when they don't think it's worth hiring a CTO.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but isn't the outsourced CFO company's entire business model based on providing services to CEOs who "won't even hire a CFO"? If so, it would be extremely odd for them to scoff about how it's hard to explain finance stuff to their core target customers.

<comment><USER17> I don't know if you ever worked in large companies that outsource critical pieces of their company to contractors. I have routinely seen contracting companies who were ostensibly there to provide service X, but in practice they were there to make the management think that they were making all the right choices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So many of these postmortems end in "we should have hired an expert". I don't really understand what drives people to not hire experts.

<comment><USER20> Experts are expensive. And there's hubris or what I jokingly like to call the maxim of management myopia: "Anything I don't understand must be easy."

<comment><USER21> > And there's hubris or what I jokingly like to call the maxim of management > myopia: "Anything I don't understand must be easy."

So much this.

I know of a case where a company hired a junior java dev for a desktop project and after his second week on the job the manager posted a ticket instructing the newbie to implement a component to receive a video stream from a drone, stitch the video stream into a 3D model, and render the 3D model in real time. "How many days do you need to finish this?"

<comment><USER9> This is a manager who doesn't understand what they are asking or the complexity involved. I suppose the appropriate response should be that time to completion depends on the accuracy needed of the final 3D model as it's going to take a few months minimum to learn entirely different skill sets, oh and you'll need to include the hardware and compute costs for the storage and rendering time. Also you'll need either a sim card or a physical base station for the drone with an internet link. I..uh...may like trying to solve problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _You can't quit paying an employee if you lose the client he's working for; you have to keep on paying his wages and other expenses even when you no longer have revenues coming in to balance it._

This isn't _quite true_ if said employee is not salaried. You can still have an hourly employee and then cut their hours if there is no work for them. Employees may not like it, but businesses do this all the time. There are some minimum hours according to each states wage laws, however.

<comment><USER6> I worked for a startup that hit hard times, as a salaried employee. They cut us all to 1/2 paychecks for months, then down to 1/4 paychecks. So it's definitely possible. Probably nobody ended up below minimum wage so legal too? Some people left and others accepted IOUs.

<comment><USER23> Why would you continue working there for 1/2 cut pay?

<comment><USER6> The founders were genuinely good people and I was young enough to risk that we'd be made whole. Also the dot com bubble was just recently obliterated so I was lucky to have any job at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like valid issues noted in the article they point out but they really didn't say why revenues declined so much... sure they made choices that made that harder to deal with but the cause of "that" (the revenue decline) isn't really addressed.

<comment><USER25> As the article points out, the company's turnover rate surged and the quality of employees went down.

What the article does not address seems to be the changes to the incentive structure after the transition. Which I believe contribute to the failure to an extent.

<comment><USER24> Yeah the article seems to reference what might have been a bigger issue... but rather just blames making people full time and some other dork ups.

I think this was a larger systematic thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thought of the day: in the same way that Uber succeeds by exploiting the depreciation of its "driver-partners" cars, Zirtual failed because people value a larger paycheck but no benefits over a pay package with benefits but a smaller cash component, even when the package costs the company more to provide and (at least on paper) has more value.

<comment><USER27> >people value a larger paycheck but no benefits over a pay package with benefits but a smaller cash component

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

<comment><USER28> The increased churn that Zirtual faced after moving to employees, keeping total cost around the same and making up for it the difference by reducing pay.

<comment><USER27> That doesn't really answer my question. What shows that these employees preferred $15 over $12 with presumably employer subsidized health care (they wouldn't have it on contract, I assure you), 401k, and other standard benefits?

<comment><USER29> The thing that "showed" that they valued the wages more was the fact that they quit over it, and that it was more difficult to hire people.

That's literally what the article says. That people started quiting because of it.

<comment><USER27> You can't then make the assumption that they prefer a higher wage over benefits. You can merely take away that they started quitting over having _their wages cut_.

<comment><USER26> No, the article says they had great difficulty _hiring new people_ at the lower wage (plus benefits), which they did not at the higher wage (without benefits).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mods: Can you please update the title? It should be "The 3 Mistakes That Crushed Zirtual Overnight"

<comment><USER31> _If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we 'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_

<comment><USER32> The edited title is arguably more clickbaity in that it replaces the actual company name with "this startup". I also think the exception applies here because the number is more meaningful, not just an "X things that Y" list.

<comment><USER33> I strongly second editing at least the "this startup" part; it's plain clickbait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If they didn't have work for all the employees for all the hours, couldn't they have reduced the employee count? And only bring full time contractors that had full cycles in the past? And work with a mix of full timers and contractors to take care of variable load?

It seems like the actual reason they had to go down was because they didn't have enough customers as opposed to the 20% extra employee costs. Plus every where in the industry the hourly rate of contractors is higher than the the employees because of the benefits. Was the CEO a high schooler?

<comment><USER35> Good question. Maybe they buried their heads in the sand until they went broke and had to fire everyone. Rather than make a tough decision earlier.

Another theory if they cut staff they'd have to cut clients and therefore revenue would take a hit which would be bad for their image raising most more money. Might as well go "all in" hope to raise some more. If you go bust start another startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This whole story doesn't hold water. It sounds much more like what happens when you have pushed your funding round right to the limit and then suddenly it evaporates.

</comment><comment><USER37> > You can't quit paying an employee if you lose the client he's working for

Yeah you can. It's called firing them under right-to-work.

<comment><USER38> > It's called firing them under right-to-work.

You probably mean "at-will employment." "Right to work" is related to union membership.

Each of these concepts is applicable in some U.S. states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I read this and then the comments. A fundamental take away of many is that switching from contractors to employees was wrong. I think it was right, but the way they did it was wrong. They could have done the shift slower, planned better, and not have had as many problems.

The gig economy done right is a great idea. Right being fair to both the contractor and the employer. Problem is, I almost never see it done right. Instead, I see gig economy workers being taken advantage of left and right.

Let's take the middle of the pay, $13 per hour. For comparison, median pay for plumbers in 2017 was $20.17 per hour[1]. Figure 2080 paid hours in a year for a contractor for our purposes (that's no vacation). That's $27,040 per year gross. Now let's adjust that to reality (i.e., net spendable income). For ease, I'll round to the nearest whole dollar.

First, taxes. $27,040 puts the person squarely in the 12% federal income tax bracket. Remember we are assuming fresh out of college, not married. Social security self-employment tax was 12.4% is 2017. Medicare self-employment tax was 2.9% in 2017. Let's assume they live in a state that levies income tax (excludes WA, NV, WY, SD, TX, AK, FL), but they live in PA, one of the lowest tax rates at 3.07% in 2018. Let's also assume no deductions for ease (unrealistic, but I am not a tax accountant). So that's a total tax levy of 12%+12.4%+2.9%+3.07%=30.37%, bringing us down to $18,828.

Second, healthcare. You can't say that this is for people with insured spouses, so healthcare is hand-waived. Instead, healthcare.gov defines affordable health care at 9.56% of salary. Typically an employer pays two- thirds the cost of the health care plan, so let's say 28.68% and round up to 30% because insurance companies charge more for individuals (could easily be more than ~2% extra, but lets go with that). That's 30% of the initial gross, not our after taxes figure, so a cost of $8112, bringing us down to $10,715. That's $206 a week, or $893 a month, to cover rent, food, transportation, internet costs (digital remote worker), and clothing.

To put that into perspective, it's $1425 below the 2018 Federal Poverty Level for an individual: $12,140. Some agencies compare the FPL to before taxes, some after taxes, but it's still almost $1500 below the FPL.

Another thing is that gig economy workers are often asked to shoulder costs that would have been the responsibility of an employer, forcing some gig workers to work crazy hours or in crazy conditions[2]. In Zirtual's case, gig workers could have been paying for their computers, internet, and any software when they were contractors.

When you are a contractor you need to be making 160% of what you would if you were an employee, to cover insurance, increased taxes, and expenditures that now come out of your pocket. You also shouldn't be charging at a dollar rate, as it's an accounting nightmare and lends itself to some clients (or gig economy startups) nickel & diming you or micromanaging your time.

Instead, charge a flat weekly fee based on assuming each week you'll work 36 hours on client work, 10+ hours on business marketing and administration, and that you'll take a two week vacation. So let's say as a fresh college grad I want to make the equivalent of if I was an employee making $45k per year. That means I need to gross $72k. Dividing that by 2000 hours to allow for two weeks vacation, I need to make $36 per hour. Remember that you have to assume you are only going to get 36 billed hours, so multiply that by 40/36, which handily works out to $40 per hour (I swear I did not plan that). Now multiply that by 40 to get a rate of $1600 per week. That's not contributing anything to your retirement or emergency fund (yes, you should start right out of college - I didn't and regret it mightily). Especially if you are a contractor, you must have a enough in an emergency fund to last you 2 months without pay. So add %10 to your emergency fund, taking it to a weekly charged rate of $1760, until your emergency fund is 2 months. Put any windfalls (tax refunds, gift checks, etc.) into that emergency fund until it is up to two months of pay, and hopefully it will be there by the end of a year. Two years is more realistic.

If you are a more experienced contractor, things get wonky at the $128k level, because social security not longer applies and retirement stuff is different. If you are a contractor on the side (make sure your employer's IPR agreement allows this, or get a explicit written statement allowing it), you can probably charge 120-140% of what you want to make from your contracting work.

Make sure your employer's work comes first though, or you will find yourself out of a job. That also assumes you work for 'Big Corp', not a startup at the ground floor. If you work for a startup and you have non-trivial equity, you are working for yourself and should be pouring everything into the startup.

The cost of living comfortably relative to the average income in the U.S. seems to me to be higher now than it's ever been in my lifetime (50 years). One estimate in 2012 says it took $150k to live comfortably in the U.S. then, and it seems to have gotten worse since[3].

I am not an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, and you should not construe any of the above as legal, accounting, or medical advice.

[1] [https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate)

[2] [https://philadelphiapartisan.com/2018/05/17/the-perilous- gig...](https://philadelphiapartisan.com/2018/05/17/the-perilous-gig-economy- why-caviar-must-pay-for-bike-couriers-death/)

[3] [https://www.businessinsider.com/the-basic-annual-income- ever...](https://www.businessinsider.com/the-basic-annual-income-every- american-would-need-is-150000-2012-3)</comment>


Sam Soffes open sources Cheddar for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios

<comment><USER2> For people learning iOS development, this is an awesome project to download and tinker with. Learning how to use Core Data managed objects? It's in here. Custom tableviews? Here, too. Custom fonts? Yup. Blocks? Yes. External RESTful APIs? That, too.

<comment><USER3> This is _the best_ "learn by doing" iOS example around to date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just saw this come across Twitter:

"What @samsoffes has built with @cheddar is amazing for a solo gig: website, iOS app, API, open source, blog, store. Many startups do less." - @bb

After checking everything out and struggling with finishing up a thousand little side projects myself, I really respect the thoroughness.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. EVERYTHING is polished and complete. Amazing work for a single developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I love seeing example apps like this I think beginners probably need to be cautious looking at this code. Here are a couple things that concern me:

* The UI is all hand coded. Not to start a religious war but interface builder makes supporting different devices a lot easier.

* There is some hairy concurrency stuff going on like this [https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Cl...](https://github.com/nothingmagical/cheddar-ios/blob/master/Classes/CDIListViewController.m#L414)

<comment><USER7> That "hairy" stuff is a straightforward use of GCD semaphores to signal when an animation has finished. I just spent 20 minutes reading up on GCD and dispatch_semaphore_wait(). This technique is elegant rather than hairy.

<comment><USER6> I just picked a line out of the area to point to. I'll pose a few questions that go into more about why I believe this is code that isn't straightforward and in general a bad reference point for a beginner:

* Can you tell me why that entire block of code gets dispatched to one queue then right into the main queue?

* Can you tell me what queue the animation completion blocks run on and why it might matter?

* Can you tell me what queue the network request runs on?

* Do you think the animation completes before the network request finishes? Can you tell me why/why not?

* What happens if the network request fails?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cheddar's syncing is a bit hit-or-miss. On one hand you know that when you post a task it's synced instantly and you know when it's finished but on the other you have to have a constant internet connection.

I use these apps on the Underground to plan my day and always get errors when trying to do anything in app. It's also a huge battery drain, after each small change I see that my iPhone is connecting to the internet and using the app for a few minutes can drain a large percentage.

Forgetting about those problems, it's a beautiful app and is very functional although slightly limited. Which could be a selling point vs it's tedious competition.

<comment><USER9> I'm adding offline in the next update. The current stuff totally sucks. Shipping was more important than amazing tech.

<comment><USER10> sweet! I had to abandon Cheddar when I went abroad for 2 weeks (no constant data plan) due to no offline support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Neat.

After a quick poke around, this looks like a great codebase to learn from -- I will certainly point aspiring iOS developers in its direction. All the basics (CoreData, custom table views) are there, as are nice uses of more modern features like blocks and APIs like in-app purchase.

Out of curiosity, what's the deal with the CDKHTTPClient? It looks like the implementation is stubbed out for this release -- aka there is a back-end, but none of the back-end code is made available (at least so far)? I only took a quick look, so I might have missed something obvious.

<comment><USER12> It's a subclass of AFHTTPClient. See:

<https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/>

<comment><USER11> Ah, I hadn't run rake setup to pull in submodules. It's in CheddarKit -- makes sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised he included the app's resources (icon, etc.) under the BSD license -- rewriting the data store to use iCloud instead of his service (where Cheddar makes money, but also the source of many complaints in reviews) while keeping the UI would make a quick (though somewhat seedy) buck on the App Store.

<comment><USER14> It's not a big idea, because if you use iCloud, you can't have a webapp that use Cheddar, you can use only on iOS devices and Mac OS X, that would be a HUGE limit. I love the webapp, and I like the idea that multiplatforms clients can be made in fucture (windows, wp7, android, etc...)

<comment><USER13> There are plenty of todo apps for syncing to every device you own. Atleast I would pay $1.99 for a gorgeous, dead-simple to use todo list just for my iOS devices (that works offline too).

<comment><USER15> Apologies for blatant plug but it feels on topic.

If you are willing to pass up on the gorgeous you could give my app a try <http://iTunes.com/apps/fastlists>

Reusable tick able lists for things like shopping and packing. Functional rather than beautiful and import/export by email (no syncing yet). No ads yet (there will be a cheap no-ads in-app purchase when it does have ads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for this.

Even though I've made a few apps It still is really hard to get an idea of how big projects come together. It can be hard to organize everything so it isn't one big mess!

As a solo developer I dont have a superior telling me "this is how the code is organized" or "when doing this. use this pattern instead". This is going to help me a LOT I'm not about to rewrite months of code but now I'll have a frame of reference of how things should be.

</comment><comment><USER17> Excellent! I've been meaning to get into Emacs Lisp, so maybe I'll use the API to create an extension or lightweight alternative to org-mobile, with this client as inspiration. I've been meaning to do the same for Google Tasks (which I use) but their product and API is much more complicated and intimidating.

</comment><comment><USER18> When I was learning iOS development I found it hard to find full, modern example applications out there in the wild like this to learn from. Does anybody know of any more?

</comment><comment><USER19> Who produces the high quality photos and video on the site?

</comment><comment><USER20> the app reviews in iTunes store seem to hilight some deficiencies

<comment><USER21> I'm sure he'd accept pull requests.

<comment><USER9> :)</comment></comment></comment>