System76 News: Coreboot and Linux Advances - <AUTHOR> https://blog.system76.com/post/184439321333/system76-news-platinum-luxury-bonus-april-edition <comment><USER2> I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed.

My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency across GUI frameworks. Surely I can tweak them to my liking, but the rabbit hole goes very deep until it comes to a satisfying result.

Pop!_OS is the first OS that stay out of the way, I barely notice the existence of OS, and neither do I want to tweak it, and that is the way I want from a distro. The workspace arranging and switching is a nice touch, making it feel like home for tiling window manager users, coming from i3wm, xmonad or whatsnot.

I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Pop!_OS provides by far the closest experience I get.

<comment><USER3> > I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

<comment> Jean-Philipe > This is why I became a Mac user.

Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a decent software management. brew is miles away from apt.

So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent keyboard and put Linux on it.

<comment><USER3> The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard.

Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.

<comment><USER4> If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora "tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from the beginning even in between updates with _zero_ regressions in usability for you personally?

If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach "bullshit".

<comment><USER3> I agree, configuration was just part of the "bullshit".

I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn't great. Maybe that's better in 2019, but it's never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that.

Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better.

My external displays never really worked without problems.

Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads.

It's a range of stuff like that.

I'm sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don't want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that's why I turned to Linux in the first place. I've spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do people actually buy laptop/desktop from system76? I tried to price a laptop from them before and it was quite expensive compare to main stream vendors like Dell.

Its cheaper just buy a OEM laptop and slap ubuntu on it.

<comment><USER6> I consider the cost acceptable given they don't just "slap Ubuntu on it". The hardware is curated towards 100% Linux compatibility, and their custom OS (admittedly an Ubuntu variant) is tweaked to suit the hardware. It's a good marriage and to some it's worth the extra cost.

Look at it like you would a Macbook; Apple charges a premium but the benefit the buyer receives from that extra cost is hardware and software that feels cohesive and works perfectly together. I'm not saying System76 has reached that same mark just yet, but it's what they are working towards and they have made great progress in that endeavor.

With all of that said, there's something to buying a used or marked-down Thinkpad and installing your distro of choice; you'll (usually) get a great device with excellent Linux community support, and in my opinion the industrial design of the Thinkpad series is more appealing than System76 machines. Personally I don't care for Lenovo because of their past malware shenanigans, but they do make solid hardware.

<comment><USER7> Have you purchased a Lenovo lately? I've not had good luck with them. Despite 2 returns for service my Thinkpad T500 remained with a loose charging connector. My next Lenovo (notably not a Thinkpad) was a Y50 Ideapad. Audio to the speakers failed, the housing developed cracks at the hinge. The Ethernet connector broke (though used very little.) and now the SD card slot has failed.

I'm giving Dell a try. You can buy them with Ubuntu factory installed or buy with Windows and 'slap the distro of your choice' on it. I have an XPS-13 9370 and after nearly a year, the WiFi finally seems to be working reliably (using Debian Testing.)

<comment><USER8> > WiFi finally seems to be working reliably

I got the XPS15 and installed Ubuntu 18.04 (best choice of laptop I could find that had an i9 8950hk, although only Windows is officially supported).

I had heard it was best to replace the Killer WiFi with an Intel mini card. However the Killer WiFi has been rock solid for me with Ubuntu (I have read that Windows has more problems with Killer WiFi than Linux!).

Regular Linux BIOS updates from Dell from within Ubuntu 18.04 - I'm a happy customer.

Edit: comment from elsewhere in this thread: "only three years ago I had to replace the default wireless card in my Dell XPS 13 because the broadcom one was flaky as hell in Linux"

<comment><USER9> Yep, replaced both the NVMe and the Broadcom wifi in my 9350. I'm not buying this year's model as the Killer wifi is soldered down. Killer indeed.

<comment><USER10> For what its worth, I've had zero issues with WiFi on my 9380. The "killer" wifi is just an ath10k:

      02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
      Subsystem: Bigfoot Networks, Inc. Killer 1435 Wireless-AC
      Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci

As far as I can tell, its no different from any other Qualcomm Atheros WiFi. I believe the "killer" differences are just in the Windows drivers.

<comment><USER9> That's interesting - the only other issue is that I then can't upgrade to Wifi 6 or whatever, but that's probably not an issue until a few years down the track when all my other devices support the same standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I bought a Galago Pro (since discontinued) in 2015. It's still my daily driver and it's held up very well. I even once dropped it from a second-floor balcony.

<comment><USER12> It will serve you well for many years to come. My gazp6 from 2011 still runs solid

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love the idea of System76 and Coreboot and keep checking in on them every few months but the story seems to remain the same - horrible battery life. I can't see dropping over 1k on a laptop that barely lasts 4 hours out of the box.

<comment><USER14> The new darter pro gets decent battery life, I get around 7 hours on mine. It has similar hardware to the galago pro, but with a 54 whr battery instead of 35 whr.

Their other models do have poor battery life though. The galago pro is especially egregious, I don't know why anyone would buy a 13 inch laptop that only gets 3 hours of battery.

<comment><USER15> I actually had considered it at one point. Sometimes the reason you want something small & compact is you don't need to run it for that long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the story with AMD and coreboot? Why can't AMD support it? Their whole AGESA is a glaring blob.

<comment><USER17> Neither intel nor AMD supports core boot. Community efforts to add core boot focus entirely on intel because of market share (although intel is also plenty hostile to floss in this regard).

<comment><USER18> Not sure about the support. Intel employees regularly submit to coreboot repo. I know at least for the Atom based designs that I've been involved in Intel provides reference designs using coreboot and supports it.

<comment><USER19> AMD is a sponsor of coreboot according to [https://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors](https://www.coreboot.org/Sponsors)

Personally, I think the fundamental issue relates to IP. If the hardware design is made transparent by amazing and freely available documentation you invite infringement claims, particularly from IP trolls. (Threats from competitors are probably more existential, though, at least for large companies.) Often time companies will say that their products contain third- party IP that they cannot disclose, but that's just a roundabout way of saying neither the company nor its suppliers want the hassle.

There are other reasons, too. For example, if you can't consistently provide such documentation it can make you look worse than if you had never bothered as it makes you appear unreliable. But I think the IP issue is what makes it a simple decision, notwithstanding whether the threats are actually substantial.

<comment><USER20> I think it's that DRM doesn't work if they don't have a place that the user doesn't own, combined with that core is also used for system init because it's in the right place and you already want similar crypto you'd need for DRM for secure boot.

There's not really any interesting IP in those cores from what we've seen.

<comment><USER19> But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs or convoluted setup is useless.

If the issue is why Intel, AMD, NXP, etc aren't more transparent with their references, DRM doesn't really explain any of that. The only reason that makes sense to me other than sheer neglect is fear of IP infringement claims, a fear that any developer contemplating releasing their source code has surely struggled with. The patent landscape is a fscking field of indiscriminate landmines.

The "obviousness" test for patent eligibility is farcical. Just because the implementation of some driver seems obvious and straight-forward doesn't mean there doesn't exist a patent. Because of how technology develops--path dependency, foreseeable constraints--the vast majority of implementation details (including patented details) are obvious as understood by engineers, even if they've never encountered them before. But in practice obvious has effectively come to mean novel; were it any other way the vast majority of patents would never issue. And without omniscience you can never consistently know ahead of time whether something is novel or not; not if you're doing anything worthwhile. (Copyright is predicated on novelty, but copyright law permits independent development; patent law does not.)

Patent claims usually turn on minute implementation details. (A result, no doubt, of the surfeit of patents. Were it otherwise patents would stop industry completely rather than slowly bleeding it.) I'm not a patent lawyer, but I know that in general (in the U.S.) any claim needs to make a prima facie showing, which over the past several decades SCOTUS has required provide increasingly direct evidence. In as much as you raise the costs of discovering the evidence necessary to make a prima facie case, you've reduced your exposure to lawsuits.

If you're intent on targeting a particular company, and especially on targeting a particular company with a particular patent, opaque implementations are not much of a hurdle. But if you have a mountain of patents, the transactional costs of matching those patents to particular instances of [potential] infringement are quite significant. You not only need to expend effort to reverse engineer, but also effort to craft an argument to convince a court that your discoveries are legitimate. If an implementation is open it's much cheaper to accomplish both. Remember, labor is the single biggest expense in the Western world, and these types of activities are the epitome of labor intensive tasks. Reverse engineering a binary blob may be easy conceptually, but its absolutely costly in terms of labor, especially when it comes to pinning down the details in a way that matches particular claims in a patent.

The reverse is also true: if you have a mountain of products and components with significant exposure to infringement liability, opaqueness can substantially reduce your risk and effective liability. Even if exposure merely scales linearly with market or company size it suffices to explain the behavior of large companies, but I doubt it scales linearly. For one thing, larger companies are juicier targets, all else being equal, from the perspective of an individual claimant.

<comment><USER20> > But DRM only requires a secret key in the hardware. None of the implementing > code needs to be secret, and indeed DRM that relies on opaque binary blobs > or convoluted setup is useless.

DRM for a general purpose device needs way more than that. You need a full 'Trusted Execution Environment' to run the code that uses those keys.

<comment><USER16> Trusted execution doesn't need blobs, no? I.e. you can have secure boot with perfectly open booting. DRM is only used _against_ the user, not for making things secure for the user. That's why DRM is relying on blobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The exclamation point in "Pop!_OS" is making me uncomfortable.

<comment><USER22> I've heard good things about it, but oh, that name... it makes it sound like an early-2000s kids' toy. Just name it Pop OS. And get rid of the underscore if you want to be user-friendly to the average person.

<comment><USER23> You're talking about the toy "Bop It" aren't you?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF91cJQQONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF91cJQQONs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If System76 had all their laptops come with Coreboot I would strongly consider buying from them next time I refresh my laptop.

<comment><USER25> Coreboot is just not that relevant anymore. There is no clear line between hardware and software, so CPUs contain lots of totally closed software and of course totally closed hardware. That means you aren't really gaining much by moving that line 1% closer to total freedom, but it takes lots of effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wish System76 had better build quality. I've been looking for a Linux vendor to support. They seem to be an EVGA reseller with terrible customized cases. Even the new woodgrain case feels janky and cheap.

</comment><comment><USER27> Aside: page doesn't load with uBlock enabled...

<comment><USER28> I have uBlock Origin installed and it works fine with the default lists.

<comment><USER27> To my recollection, I never changed the install... unless a new google profile login to chrome carries settings from another, previous chrome install for the plugin. Because if I did change the lists, it was literally years ago, and I wouldn't have added an esoteric option.

I only know it didn't render when I came in... disabled uBlock Origin, and it did render.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do these have 4k screens and work with 4k monitors?

<comment><USER30> The highest res I see is 1080p, which seems fairly low, especially for their 15 and 17" screens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is cool and all, but I can't help but cringe when I see a corporate entity using Tumblr for official communication.

<comment><USER32> What would be better? Twitter?

<comment><USER28> Maybe Medium or running their own WordPress install?

<comment><USER33> Medium is much, much worse than Tumblr. It's always full of annoying banners, a useless popup appears whenever you select text, and visually it's nothing to write home about. Just look at this [1] atrocity and determine how much of the screen area is devoted to absolutely useless crap.

[1] [https://u.teknik.io/SJxU2.png](https://u.teknik.io/SJxU2.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I admire the efforts to get coreboot support, and love their open hardware initiatives, but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome.

There was no need for them to create their own distro. That is a huge expense just to reinvent a wheel that has already been reinvented ten thousand times. And in the end most of their users will probably just load up the one they use already.

<comment><USER35> _> but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome._

Many free/open-source advocates have been complaining about NIH syndrome for years and years and years... to no avail.

Consider, for example, the situation with window managers and desktop environments. Off the top of my head, we have Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, Openbox, dwm, Gala, KWin, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, JWM, and Ratpoison -- to name only 12 of the remarkably large number available for Linux. I suspect there are well over 100 window managers/desktop environments for Linux actively used in the wild today. And that's just _window managers /desktop environments_.

The number of people who have complained over the decades about this proliferation is... quite large. The number of words that have been written and spoken in waste, and the number of flame wars that have raged on, over which particular choice is best is also... remarkably large. Search for "Gnome versus KDE" or "Unity versus Gnome" if you want to see some examples.

I've come to accept this is _The Way_ of free/open-source software.

On the flip side, some people love all this variety and choice.

<comment><USER36> I am often reminded that there are multiple personality types showing up in many things, such as software.

To my personality type, I would wonder why you _wouldn 't_ want a replaceable window manager, and I consider a reaction like yours to be the product of some kind of odd software design authoritarianism.

But we're not both right or both wrong, this is just a point where we differ.

PS: a bunch of those desktop environments you cite are not actually window managers.

<comment><USER35> Thanks. Corrected!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moore's Law limit hit by 2014? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-limit-hit-by-2014/

<comment> T-A Pretty much. From last year: [http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc25/](http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc25/) Scroll down a bit for "The Chip Design Game at the End of Moore's Law" by Robert Colwell at DARPA (formerly Intel).</comment>


This Design Generation Has Failed – Mike Monteiro - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90161166/this-design-generation-has-failed <comment><USER2> design? again and again i find myself just going back to terminal applications because what designers give me is always dog shit</comment>


House Oversight to Apple, Google: Step Up Security on Apps with Foreign Ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2020/07/house-oversight-lawmaker-wants-apple-google-step-security-apps-foreign-ties/166890/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original title was too long. It was:

House Oversight Lawmaker Wants Apple, Google to Step Up Security on Apps With Foreign Ties</comment>


IE9, XP, and Apple - <AUTHOR> http://aggregated.alanhogan.com/post/1230103873/ie9-xp-and-apple

<comment><USER2> Was pretty hilarious listening to their evasive answers to every question in the Reddit IE9 Devs AMA.

It basically equated to: we're not making this for XP because of new technology we're using that's only preset in Vista/7's OS. When asked why they didn't just selectively make use of the features if they were present instead of crippling the entire browser's backwards-capability, they never responded. It was pretty obvious that they're only doing it to try and force people to upgrade from XP (which is hilarious in and of itself, spend $400 on a new OS for an inferior browser that other competitors offer for free).

Oh, and Chrome/Firefox will both work on XP, will both have equivalent if not better hardware accelerate graphics, and will both probably go stable before IE9 releases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not just Firefox and Chrome, but Safari as well! Imagine, better OS support in a browser from a direct competitor…

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IE9 can't run on XP because it has 'hardware acceleration', that can be turned off. XP is good enough for the insane amount of 3D games, that use 'hardware acceleration' you know like Star Craft 2, but hey it's not good enough for a web browser. Well what else should I expect from Microsoft?

Note: I know that the hw acceleration uses some API, that XP lacks, but if there is one thing Microsoft is good at it's emulation/backward compatibility, they just don't want to do it so that you have to go and spend your money on a new PC and a shiny new Windows.</comment>


Ask HN: Is microfinance a smart way to park your savings? - <AUTHOR>

Here's the post that prompted me:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12/is-micro-credit.html
In the context of PG's essay "Be Good" (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html), this makes a lot of sense. Not in terms of fleecing the world's poor, but as a smart investment that happens to be nearly indistiguishable from charity.
At the moment I'm still a little averse to the stock market, but I do have some savings and I'd like to put some portion of it to better use (no major financial commitments on the horizon). These organizations piqued my interest:
Kiva -- http://www.kiva.org/
United Prosperity -- http://unitedprosperity.org/
Silicon Valley Microfinance Network -- http://svmn.net/
Anyone here have some experience with these groups, or other microfinance ventures? <comment><USER2> _At the moment I'm still a little averse to the stock market_

You're smart to have recognized that you need to diversify, but don't fear the stock market! How much of this applies to you depends on your age (I'm 22), but this is when most people should be setting aside a little money for higher-risk investments. Risk doesn't mean invest into a poorly-performing company and start praying, but try to find a couple profitable micro-caps or small-caps and stick $500-$1k or so into them. Personally, I look for foreign micro-caps that run great profit margins and make physical products that people need (primarily healthcare / transportation). Patented products are even better.

Not only that, but right now there are plenty of large-cap companies that have lost a lot of value not because they're bad companies or losing money, but because everyone is simply dumping stocks out of fear.

Either way, do your research on the balance sheets + income statements, take a good look at how they well they approach their core competencies/products and make an informed decision. Regardless, the job losses and increasing foreclosures have only begun to take effect, so don't be surprised when 2009 brings the market lower and opens up even more investment opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. My best investment so far has been Illumina a few years ago, which I found because they were blanketing the job boards. Why hire like mad unless you expect to blow up soon? However, I'm not really willing to be a full-time investor at the moment. Index funds and a high-yield savings account do a good enough job of keeping up with the market for very little intellectual investment.

Regarding high-risk, high-yield investing, the Kelly criterion comes to mind. It says that given some bias in the outcome of some bet, and a return proportional to the expected result (without the bias), there's an optimal portion of your principal to wager in each round to get the best yield over time. And it's surprisingly low -- in the case of a coin toss rigged 51% in favor of heads, for example, you should only bet 2% of your principal. If you go all in each round, even though the odds are in your favor, you will probably lose everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> you missed a new cool one: <http://qifang.cn> China education loans. They just were recognized as a World Economic Forum 2009 Technology Pioneer.

Its not my company, but I keep a close eye on them and they have good things happening.

[http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb2008...](http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb2008123_970055.htm?chan=globalbiz_special+report+--+tech+pioneers+of+2009_special+report+-+tech+pioneers+of+2009)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've given 10 loans so far at Kiva, and 3 have been totally repaid (others are in various stages of repayment). I don't think you should look at microfinance as investment options. That said, there are a few micro finance organizations that give out a small percent of interest. Microplace is one example. But as noodle says, an online savings account would fetch you more.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe invest $100-200 in microloans but Kiva at least doesn't pay you any interest on the loans. I don't know about the other two organizations. These are different from charities in that they aren't tax deductible so if that's important for you then look elsewhere.

I heard some advice on the radio the other day: invest your age in bonds. So a 40 year old would put 40% of their invesments into bonds. Bonds are slow but reliable sources of income and are basically the same as a loan to a large corporation. Try that if you're looking to back loans and earn interest.

</comment><comment><USER6> well, it depends on what you're trying to do.

microfinance charity-type organizations have little risk, but no matter what, you're not really making any money on your investments. you'd make more from an online savings account.

if you want to do some good, those are good options. if you want to grow your savings, they're not that good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking to strike a balance, mostly. If I can match the 3.3% my savings account pays and do some good in the world, I'm happy. Currently I fire off the occasional small check to environmental groups; I consider that a good enough investment. But to commit a significant chunk of my savings, I'd want to see some return.</comment></comment>


How do you follow a daily schedule without becoming discouraged? - <AUTHOR> I have tried to follow a daily schedule and to-do list many times in the past, but never succeeded in sticking to it. It's discouraging to look at my schedule and know how much needs to be done, and to know that my entire day is planned ahead of time. Every time I try to follow a daily schedule I always end up avoiding it, because it's intimidating.<p>Have any fellow procrastinators succeeded in implementing a daily schedule in your life? Tips? Hand written schedule or software? <comment><USER2> All that really matters is that you get things accomplished.

A rigid schedule of tasks to accomplish might be one way to do that, but I've found it's better for me to just have a simple list of things to do (features to implement, bugs to squash, etc) and a general plan for the day (work a few hours, wander into town for lunch, work some more). The exact start and stop times don't matter, the exact order I finish the tasks doesn't matter. All that matters are the medium term goals for finishing projext X by next week and project Y by the month after that.</comment>


Ask YC: scaling a one-person business - <AUTHOR>

How does one scale a one person business  to something bigger? I have enough income for me with my current business, but I would like to scale this to a new level, with employees, bigger clients. This is the usual one-person web development business.<p>Somebody told me that I could valuate my company in income * 24, and then use that value to have an external investor join the business, to try to scale it to something bigger. I'm a little skeptic about it, I think there are too many one-man shows after all, they are probably worthless anyway. What does YC think? <comment><USER2> Another approach could be to hire employee to run your current business for you, while you work on to expand your offering nationally or internationally.</comment>


Ask HN: How to know if my ego is the greatest motivation on my carreer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It's a good question. Perhaps the best question anyone can ask of themselves in relation to "why are you doing what you are doing?"

And the way to prove if it is true or not is by "reverse induction." Remove one-by-one all the supposed "fruits" (wealth, glory, honor, respect, celebrity, etc) of your labors. And determine if it is still really important to you. Or to Us.

Alan Watts ~ Egocentricity In Humanity

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkhR9c17ibE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkhR9c17ibE)

<comment><USER3> Isn't contribution to others also a "fruit?"

If we speak of basic human needs, contribution is close to the top. And, safety, acceptance, accomplishment, acknowledgment and even approval are all legitimate needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ryan Holiday recently authored a book on Ego, here's a podcast where reads a brief selection > [http://fourhourworkweek.com/tag/ego-is-the- enemy/](http://fourhourworkweek.com/tag/ego-is-the-enemy/)

<comment><USER5> Great book, would recommend it to anyone struggling with this question.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: VC spread risk why not employees - <AUTHOR> Looking at how VCs spread their investments across many different startups, we should try to foster a model where employees can join multiple startups (with commiserate equity). Kind of like Freelancers Union where they pool for insurance coverage, and then work %time at a variety of startups which can offer relative salary. Would this make startups more attractive than FAANG b/c you hopefully have a better chance of some upside? Y would be a great place to help start this land build a marketplace for work. <comment><USER2> My understanding is this is basically what happens in the bay area, but since you can only work at one company at a time due to employment agreements, many people work the minimum time to get some options and then hop to the next employer and do the same, building a portfolio of options where hopefully some become worth something.

</comment><comment><USER3> My partner is managing consulting company and for delivering successful projects it is important to have key employee's 100% attention to the project.

He is having constant issues with 2 guys who are in "...sorry could you repeat the question?" \- type of attention span.

</comment><comment><USER4> I heard a funny story about a set of grad students at Stanford. They all committed to pooling some percent of any startups they created.

One version of this legend included Google as one of the companies.</comment>


I Charged $18k for a Static HTML Page - <AUTHOR> https://idiallo.com/blog/18000-dollars-static-web-page <comment><USER2> My parents had been running their own tailor shop in the 80's, barely making ends meet, pulling in less than $20K a year.

It wasn't for lack of business, father was a master tailor trained in Italy and capable of elite bespoke craftsmanship. They had as much business as they could handle. The problem was that they were charging what _they_ thought the work was worth rather than what their customers were willing to pay.

At some point, during the Reagan years, my mother had an epiphany and jacked up the prices massively, far beyond what my father thought was remotely reasonable. The result? Even more business, more pressure, more return customers. That put me and my brother through an expensive college.

There's something about high rates that makes customers feel more important, it's a status-thing and it also propels them to take you more seriously even if they have you do low-value stuff.

<comment><USER3> This is a classic example of a Veblen good [1].

"Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. Some goods become more desirable because of their high prices."

The suits are expensive, so they must be good. It's also a status signal to others that you can afford such goods. (Edit minor typo).

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

<comment> n-exploit As the Director of Technology at a non-profit organization, how am I supposed to staff software engineering resources when these pricing practices like these are commonplace in the for-profit world? How am I supposed to make an argument to the board that a single technology staff member, let alone a working team, is 5x-10x more valuable than the rest of the workforce? I'm going to admit it - it's hard to see stuff like this and not be extremely frustrated. Tech is already one of the largest cost centers in an enterprise, and it's proving to be nearly impossible to find any tech staff willing to work for, admittedly, crumbs.

<comment><USER4> Don't compete on the price then. Compete on something else, like the working conditions.

The author describes how they had to drive 50 miles every day, use the corporate laptop (or install shady software on their own one), not get a response for many days. Basically, their rate (and the total cost) covers not just the work they do, but all the frustration that comes with the work.

Now, if you treat your staff better than that — remove all the hurdles, answer their emails promptly etc. — then there will be many talented people who'd prefer it over a meaningless-but-highly-paid alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A valuable lesson I learned at a young age from one of my first 'customers' when doing computer repair jobs for friends and neighbours was is that you don't get paid for what you can or do but for the value you add or time (money) you save someone.

Most of the time the problems I had to solve where easy ones. Install printer, update software, remove toolbars, email settings, etc. All 5 minute work jobs, seldom totalling to more than an hour or 2 an evening. Not even worth asking money for in my opinion, because it was so easy en quick for me to do. But my neighbour always insisted I accept his money. Because for him, having to solve these issues himself would cost him multiple evenings. So the money he was giving me, which felt like too much to me, was stil a bargain for him. Also in his words it was easy for me because I had spend years in training to acquire this knowledge, or as others might call it: wasting your time behind that computer playing video games.

<comment><USER6> That's lucky. When I sas 19, around the height of IE and 'every Windows box with malware,' I tried to start a similar business.

Probably my most wealthy client, with an oversized SUV in the driveway, had a home computer rendered unusable by malware--something I had fixed before. But she ended up asking me to leave. She decided she wanted "real professionals" working on her computer. She told me I didn't know what I was doing, saying 'are you really going to fix it for this much or do you actually need to just start searching the web for what you are doing? (she saw that I had performed a google search...).'

It took me way, way too long in life to learn most of it is just perception and learning how to manage dealing with less-than-ideal people.

<comment><USER7> This attitude to googling is poisonous. I once helped an elderly relative in my teens with his router and I got the same treatment after I googled the answer. Later we watched a court drama the entire family, with the same relative present, and there was a scene where the lawyers crack the books and review the legal paper work. Being the obnoxious teen I was I couldn't help myself from blurting out "Wow, what terrible lawyers, look at them doing research for their cases before they solve the problems. Wow, I figured they could recite every law and ruling ever by heart since they supposedly know what they're doing, now I question why the defendant doesn't just represent himself, I mean everyone can read a book, right? This movie is so unrealistic!"

I got scolded by my parents but at the end of the day: worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Entertaining story - although as advice to anyone reading it, running up the clock without proactively notifying people that you're going way beyond your original estimate is a very good way to make getting paid incredibly difficult.

<comment><USER9> It was my impression that that's what he did. Of course the whole situation still could've made it difficult to get paid, but I don't think there's anything else he could've done.

<comment><USER10> Specifically telling them that they had kept him over his initial estimate (and so his estimate was increasing) when he neared or passed that point. He didn't sound terribly proactive about bringing this up while talking to people, either. Lunches with the manager where they didn't talk any business, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know someone working as a contractor for a big company.

1 year contract.

6 months have gone by and they've done ... nothing. Their boss keeps saying "Don't worry we'll get to you, we're just swamped right now, you're good."

They're already talking about extending the contract.

<comment><USER12> Big companies (rather, people at big companies) WANT to spend money on this kind of stuff for all sorts of reasons.

-A team might have use-it-or-lose-it budget, so they have to spend it on something, and a contractor might be the lucky recipient!

-Tax purposes!

-Spending a lot on a contractor gives them someone to "fire" when they need to explain why something wasn't getting done or something went poorly!

The list goes on!

All that being said, as a consultant myself, I consider those types of projects windfall, as they tend to be the ones that end abruptly. It's kind of a scary feeling getting paid without actual work to do. I have found I 100% prefer the projects where there are clear tasks, goals, and results to report, if for nothing else than my own sanity.

<comment><USER13> Its stories (and personal experience) like this that make me laugh when people try and say that governments are inefficient and lacks accountability.

<comment><USER14> Big things are more likely to be inefficient and lack accountability. Governments are big, so are big corporations.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly enough there is also evidence, that a government structure with much smaller parts (decentralization) is even more inefficent, and especially prone to corruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've got similar experiences working for corporate clients, but it was legal work, not tech stuff. It was a bit more complex than the equivalent of a static HTML, but something that anyone with an IQ of > 90 could learn in less than half a year.

There were days when I'd charge clients $15k... for a day's work. This wouldn't have been possible if I worked on-site. But I was essentially completing $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed- fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total.

Corporations get kind of crazy, there's extreme focus on some areas (mainly, those with KPIs and KPI owners attached), and extreme nonchalance on others. They're so big that there's just lots of insane things like this that slip through.

<comment><USER17> > $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in > return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in > total.

This sounds like a SaaS waiting to happen.

<comment><USER16> I'd mostly disagree.

If you have an extremely high-margin service, e.g. perform bill $10k of work for $100 of salary, there's absolutely no incentive to automate things on the seller's side. It essentially means hiring someone to build out a (software) solution to squeeze the $100 into a dollar of payments on a cloud provider. All you're doing is raising your margin from 99% to 99.99%, it's meaningless, your profits increases by 1%, assuming the Capex for development was zero. And given this is typically a low-volume kind of transaction, with considerable development costs to build a Saas solution, this assumption is way too generous.

It's exactly these kinds of services which are completely fine to have humans perform.

It's the type of legal work where you bill $200 for a simple contract review and have to pay a paralegal say $100 for the work, which would be great to automate to a $1 of AWS payments. Here you're increasing margins from 50% to 99%, doubling profits. Any development costs can be averaged out to approach zero, as document review is a high-volume task in any organisation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You should try working in an investment bank as a contractor. You need to find the right team, but a lot of them are massive collections of people doing virtually nothing but getting paid great daily rates. The trick is to look busy and wrap your team/yourself in a perceived sense of enigma and complexity. If you play your cards right, you can end up in a situation where no one will ask questions as long as you fire off an email now and again. You can keep getting paid for doing almost nothing for _years_.

<comment><USER19> Ugh, but who wants to do nothing all day? You get one life; why waste your days?

<comment><USER20> Are your days any less "wasted" laboring away?

<comment><USER18> Labouring away can be hell, unless you're like me and doing what you love :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is how corporate works. They have budgets for things. The money doesn't come out of the pocket of the person who cuts the cheque. You send in an invoice and it gets paid. If it doesn't, the company is insolvent or they are at risk to lawsuits which will cost them more than your paltry $18000. But they don't even think about the lawsuit part. Bill comes in, cheque goes out.

<comment><USER22> How do they prevent paying random people who decide it'd be funny to send them an invoice?

<comment><USER23> This is actually a really big problem called invoice fraud. Many companies struggle in setting up some workable system to prevent it.

The problem usually is that someone at the accounts payable department (sometimes in a different building or country) must pay all the hundreds or thousands of incoming invoices. Having a robust system in place for them to check if the product/service is actually delivered for the price agreed upon (or even delivered at all) is hard.

<comment><USER24> Usually they use purchase orders initiated by the buyer/manager to solve this sort of problem.

Hiring a freelancer? Issue a purchase order to the freelancer for the maximum amount you think you'll pay them. They then bill you for how many hours it actually took, after completing the job. Then accounting can process it if it's under the PO value.

No PO, invoice doesn't get paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great illustration of why hourly billing makes no sense, for either side.

In this case, as usual, the amount of hours "spent" on the project has little to do with actual value provided.

From the contractor's side, he's excited about getting 12x the original quote, instead of realizing he's been severely undercharging for his work and could've been earning 10x or more all this time. I wonder if the author will start charging appropriately for the value he's providing, or if he'll consider this a fluke and continue with $75/hour.

Phrased another way... How many times did you complete a project within the estimated time and get paid $1,500, when actually the company would have been glad to pay $18,000?

Last week there was a thread about consulting tips. I couldn't believe how many people were arguing _for_ hourly billing. One person was even proud of billing by the minute! I hope those people see this story and realize what they're leaving on the table.

I have similar stories to this, where work got delayed due to issues on client's end. One time, I spent a month doing nothing while the client was dealing with something, which later turned out to be a big acquisition. If I billed by "hours worked" then I'd get nothing, but because I had a monthly retainer I still got paid.

Edit: I'm not advocating "fixed price." I'm advocating monthly retainers.

<comment><USER26> I'm gonna disagree that hourly billing makes no sense for the contractor. He clearly just didn't charge enough per hour; $75/hour is way too low for contract work, and his $21k could have been $56k at $200/hour.

What if the project was billed at a fixed cost, he negotiated $21k, but the project took a year to complete because the company moved so slowly? That'd be a terrible salary. He'd have to quit and somehow bill even with no deliverables. How hairy would a contract covering that be to defend when you sue?

<comment><USER22> I don't think that the parent means that you shouldn't be structuring your billing to be per hour/day/week of work. Rather, their point is that you shouldn't be doing math like this:

1\. "I think I'm worth $75/hr"

2\. "the job will take 40 hours"

3\. "I'll charge $3000 for it"

but rather, like this:

1\. "I think they would be willing to pay me 40k for this, and I think the project _should_ take 40 hours"

3\. "Therefore, I'll negotiate for a $1000/hr pay-hourly contract with a projected end-date of two weeks."

<comment><USER27> Well, the problem is you have to estimate how much they are willing to pay and this varies wildly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't find this to be beyond belief, but there are a few things the author should have done differently.

1) Notify when hours were exceeded 2) Get written notification that he was still required to come in to the office while waiting for assets or otherwise at a blocker 3) Ask questions to further cement the requirements 4) pick up a phone?

I think that ethically this was not a great move on this persons part, but we live and learn, and hopefully they did learn from the experience.

Large companies have budgets that usually are "use it or lose it", so the ROI doesnt really matter most of the time. Secondly, large companies are less likely have "gate keeper" folks ensuring that there are not wasting hours when the timescale is less than one month. As costs escalate and budgets get blown, that is when they thin out the contractors.

<comment><USER29> I mean they were pretty clear they didn't care about the money. Emailing daily to check in on progress is good enough. I've been in a similar situation. The manager isn't really concerned about the money. They just need someone to justify their expenses.

> We need your full undivided attention to complete this project. For the > duration of the contract, you will work exclusively with us to deliver > result in a timely manner. We plan to compensate you for the trouble.

<comment><USER28> In my experience as a contractor, the client doesn't care about the money until they do. The contractors that I have seen thrive and the times that I have thrived as a contractor is when I showed that I was there to provide value and not just "coast". Most businesses don't have time to deal with coasters until they need to cut their burn rate. If you are providing more than what you're asked you can usually stay or be first in line to return when help is required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author basically just had a job for a while. They aren't charging 18K for a web page, they're charging 18K to commute/be there for 7 weeks.

A lot of big companies aren't paying for output, they're paying for butts in seats. Why they do this has been discussed somewhat already in these comments.

<comment><USER31> > they're paying for butts in seats

There's also the case, which IMO is the standard case, that the company is _trying_ to pay for output but it's a long and winding road from the butt in the seat to the output to the sale.

Within that, if you're say a dev manager, and it's really hard to get head count allocated, then it can be totally rational to keep an idle butt in a paid-for seat so you don't lose the seat.

Even if the Mr Idlebutt is terrible at his job you have at least some possibility of replacing him later on, when you have a need for some work to be done and probably wouldn't easily get a new seat allocated for it.

Not only is it nearly impossible to establish a direct relationship between any particular butt-in-seat and your budget, in principle it's probably a good thing to operate with a little excess capacity.

Until the dream of the Fully Fungible Knowledge Worker is achieved, which it won't be, this is a lot more rational than the implied waste would lead you to believe. Of course this doesn't factor in morale impact...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sometimes I do kinda wish to get back into consulting because of situations like these. In almost all cases the work is never used, but instead of bailing the company out, it's really just bailing some situation out. It's all internal politics.

Back when I was in my 20s during my walks from the light rail to the office I would have constant thoughts about how idiotic programming and office work is. The ONLY reason it all exists is because people can't trust each other. And that maybe trust isn't really necessary in a society that lessens personal ownership and has more of a share-all-but-do-your-part approach.

It's literally so unfair the way we've segmented people into knowledge zones. Bankers know how easy it is to double money without taking risk. Programmers know how to pretend something will take 3 weeks when it will only take 2 days.

Recently I've learned how easy it is to set up solar. I cry every time I hear someone get trapped in some solar contract when they sell their house. It's literally mind warping how fucked up every aspect of this economy is.

<comment><USER33> Taking a left turn here, but how is it "easy" to setup solar? At the minimum you'll need a master electrician to sign-off on your install and might be hard to find after-the-fact.

<comment><USER34> Parent is probably talking about some sort of solar lease where you get paid/receive electricity for providing roof space to install the panels on but you don't actually own them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Anyone else think $21k for this much time is too low? That's $156k a year assuming full-time hours which a contractor probably isn't going to get. Plus the guy lives in California. Plus health insurance.

What's a typical rate for this length of contracting work in California?

<comment><USER36> Keep in mind the work being done. He emphasizes its simplicity. This is not a senior role requiring a huge amount of expertise.

Of course, he's probably charging too little in general. Everyone is.

<comment><USER37> 3x salary is the general advice given to contractors starting out.

<comment><USER38> $156k is 3x my salary from a few months ago and I'm building out business critical systems, not dreamweaver level websites

<comment><USER37> Having been severely underpaid myself in the past, please know that you are _severely underpaid_.

You should definitely look for somewhere else that will pay you more money. If you'd like to discuss it offline, I'm happy to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Had a similar story was a subcontractor to a huge digital agency on an advertising related project for F50 company. Was a small webapp (40h of pure dev time) we were actually on a fixed price contract 15k. Had a bunch of meetings with up to 20 people on the call (copyrighter from digital agency present in every single meeting for an app that had a single button with a single word submit). Eventually we had a meeting with actual VP of the F50 who said he forgot to email that he no longer needed the project and to pay everyone. We got our 15k and digital agency got prob to the tune of 500K.

</comment><comment><USER40> I used to live with this guy when we were studying. He got himself a job with the largest DIY retailer in the country.It was an office job with a relatively good salary. Eventually I moved out nad only saw him again after half a year or so. I asked how's the job to whoch he replied thst he quit after 3 month.I asked why..He said he used come to the office every day and ask around if he could help with anything.. Everyone was nice but kept saying no help is required.He got bored after 3 month of doing nothing and quit. He now runs his own business...

<comment><USER41> The early winners of the UK Apprentice were awarded £100k jobs as a prize, which didn't actually entail doing anything, because the only reason they had been created was as a prize for winning a TV competition. One of them sued for 'constructive dismissal' on the basis she felt that not creating any work for her was an attempt to force her to quit. She lost, presumably on the basis that most people given nothing to do on 3x average salary would either find something to do or consider themselves extremely lucky...

<comment><USER42> To be fair it can hurt your long term prospects to have a do nothing job, especially if it's public knowledge it's a do nothing job. It's an understandable thing to be unhappy about if you were told otherwise.

<comment><USER41> Hurts your long term prospects a lot more if you sue your employer for not giving you the sort of work or access to the celebrity boss you wanted...

(nobody else said anything about the roles they'd been given being a non-job, although everybody else found something better to do elsewhere after a couple of years. Looking like a smart businessperson on TV is actually incredibly good for career prospects)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> As a teenager I once got paid a flat rate of $300 for what turned out to be a ten minute job with Excel vlookups.

Funny that my hourly rate peaked at 17.

<comment><USER44> You probably saved the company 1h of work per week for some years. Finding another expert would have taken them half a day of searching. So it made economic sense from their part as well. Did you learn to seek such situations to profit?

<comment><USER43> They were very happy to pay me, and gave me that same spiel themselves.

Turned out they had budgeted twice that amount for an external professional consultant to look into it, and just figured they'd let me have a whack at it first because why not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love this article. I had a similar thing once. I worked for this deeply, deeply dysfunctional company (salary). My project ended. I asked my boss for something to do, and he said something to the effect--"we're kicking off a new project at the end of the week until then look into XYZ because we'll be using those technologies."

So for political reasons, this new project was delayed and delayed again. I asked my boss for a project, he said, he'd get back to me. This ends up going on for a year. I stopped asking for new projects because I've done my duty frankly by asking several times, and at this time, I'm just reminding him to fire me.

It might sound like fun to get paid to do nothing, but, it's pretty demoralizing. There's a certain amount of paranoia associated with it as well. Eventually, I started taking long lunch breaks and going to the gym.

This went on for a year, then one day... We started a big new project, and I had something to do again. Very weird year, though.

</comment><comment><USER46> For those trying to understand the behavior of big companies, Marc Andreessen has The Moby Dick theory: [https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part5.html)

Which is: "The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside."

</comment><comment><USER47> The adventures of enterprise/corporate payments. They can be annoying, slow, bureaucratic but boy when the time comes, invoice gets paid. One of our smaller business customers recently got acquired by a large corporate so the next $5000 "small enhancement" project had to go through their procurement who then apologized when we demanded the payment immediately. Why ? Because they thought they had not paid on time even though we literally had sent them the invoice a week ago (our smaller business clients will pay "due upon receipt"). This corporate client apologized profusely but when we finally realized it was not 30 days (they pay net 30), we backed off :). Still got a couple of apologies.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm in midst of a contract that was supposed to take 2-3 weeks - my mate asked for help, they desperately need good developers.

I think it's 6 months now ($60k++), while past 3 were "we are almost there now". It's all typical crap - trying to squish some crap into JIRA, molesting Slack in some weirdest ways, tester reporting bugs in less than 6 sentences... All I can think of is that I didn't ask for a high enough hourly rate and I want this over ASAP.

<comment><USER49> If you've signed a contact for a fixed period, demand that they raise your rate at each renewal. Don't give them the entire benefit of your flexibility without some concession on their end. If they want you month-to-month, your rate changes month-to-month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Amazing. It kind of sound unbelievable, but I don't have that much experience working with big corporations.

This should be read by everyone concerned about, how few people in a startup can beat big corporations

<comment><USER51> Big corporations are batshit.

One division will be counting paperclips and another dropping $50k on a machine no one needs to do their job.

It entirely comes down to management in each place.

<comment><USER52> Be on a project where you billed over a 100 hours for some aspect of it that they decide to cancel. It is amazing how group decisions can blow so much.

Now, I do not mean experiments and throwing the artifacts of that experimenting. That makes perfect sense. Its when they have a need for something that is part of their current business and they just don't execute properly to the point of cancellation.

<comment><USER53> I work for a Fortune 100 company. I've seen $5+ million spent on some software that was abandoned a year later, and nobody loses their job! It happens frequently enough that everyone is basically blase about it.

<comment><USER54> Ive heard $300 million was spent on a system at a comoany I worked at which didnt work at all. They bought it because a competitor did. The lower-level managers had to tell the higher-level ones that it was OK "despite some problems." They kept tying more things into it and recommending it to others. Media reports same thing.

Funny that the supplier's entire business model seems to be to charge so much for a BS solution that each company is forced to recommend it to others to avoid reporting the loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> People think government is wasteful, but in my experience big corporations are an order of magnitude worse.

</comment><comment><USER56> We did some agency work Ad agency / sub contract) in NYC. I said to the agency we will deliver HTML/CSS/JS and its $12,500 for the site / pages. They came back with NO our budget is $25k and we will pay that. Im like ok wire be the bread, here is my ACH ( They did) I delivered the HTML/CSS/JS. They came back with but who is gonna do the API work with our back end guy. Seems they could not make a distinction connecting the front end to the back end. I can only do HTML/CSS i can't do the API stuff and i told them in writing very clearly. they had a back end guy we delivered the work to. I got played too many times NOT to get my money upfront and send a bill when I use up the time. They said sorry for the confusion , ok so how much for the api and will cut you a check from accounting. Accounting has no clue what marketing is buying.

<comment><USER57> In my experience, where the Front End stops and the Back End starts is always a fuzzy line for non-technical clients (even if that have devs on staff). Especially when you're talking to the marketing department and devs work in IT or another similarly separated department. It pays to have the discussion and get it in writing up front (plus, if you CAN do API work, it may provide additional revenue that you didn't necessarily know was available).

<comment><USER58> 20 coins for the horse? Done, and done, Sir.

Now, how much will you pay me for the tack and saddle?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is how your tax payer money is wasted in State & Federal Gov IT agencies. I spent an entire year doing nothing in a Gov agency and in the end I was so bored that I quit. Fannie & Freddie hires tons of non citizen constractors with usually no work. It's a big carnival.

<comment><USER60> It's all big orgs, everywhere. Seen a lot of it even at hip modern BigCorps. Leave your axe and grinder at home :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The larger your company is the more costly it is to do something even as simple as a static html page. That's because everything that goes out to the public has to be subject to a heavy review process. You're not being paid to write an html page you're being paid to shepherd new information to the public. That's why you can never just estimate cost only on how hard you think it would be to do the task you need to get enough information about the customer's process to understand how much work its going to take not just to complete the task but to shepherd it through their review process and the larger the company the more layers of review and process they are likely to have.

</comment><comment><USER62> At this point it is mandatory to remind us all the story of the forgotten employee. [https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

<comment><USER63> Is this real ?

<comment><USER64> Well, this one sure is: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-35557725](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35557725)

Spanish civil servant off work unnoticed for six years

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Pfft that's nothing. We just had a contractor charge us $50k to setup a simple HTTP proxy. I looked at the code; it's a .NET starter app with our endpoints in it that route to other endpoints. $50k and it probably took them 2 hours, which was probably mostly just packages downloading.

<comment><USER66> did you pay it? that's crazy!

<comment><USER53> He didn't, but I'm sure his non-technical business boss did.

<comment><USER67> If that was the amount that was in the contract, of course they paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's okay to be a value-based consultant or contractor. There is no ethical requirement that your work be priced by the hour. You've potentially spent thousands of hours (25k in my case) honing your skills, and those skills could help your client make a lot of money. If a static site can make a company millions (they can!) then it's not unreasonable, nor unwelcome from the client, to charge a couple hundred thousand dollars, regardless of the time spent!

</comment><comment><USER68> Ha ha cute! Meanwhile that's about half of what we pay teachers for a full year of work tending to the emotional and intellectual well-being of children.

<comment><USER69> This is misguided anger at best, and trolling at worst. What were you hoping to achieve with this?

<comment><USER68> Oh, it was perhaps some cathartic snark that doesn't add much to the overall discussion, but considering that the majority of comments on articles like these tend to be made up of people glorifying such income, talking about why such income isn't enough, hoping to someday have such an income, or otherwise somehow on the hedonic treadmill that makes programmers some of the wealthiest workers that have ever existed on earth, yet always looking at the coder that got better stock options and/or explaining how capitalism is simultaneously the best socioeconomic system yet ha! of course every BigCorp doing little of value in the world has such money to waste...

Well, I think it's a measured dose of realism and maybe /every single article/ posted on HN about compensation, IPOs, exits, salary negotiations, etc should have a reminder that much of the world is doing far more important things for far less money than whatever ad-tech startup got some VC money from their fellow Stanford grads this week.

<comment><USER70> I appreciated your original comment for the reasons you listed in this one. +1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> So much waste - I'm not saying he didn't earn his money but how is it possible for a company to run cash positive when it wastes like that?

<comment><USER72> Large companies operate on a completely different scale of money. If this was a page for a product that's going to make a million dollars, this expense was still a rounding error.

<comment><USER73> But why are they so stingy with salaries, then?

<comment><USER74> It's the largest line item for most companies, so apply pressure there and get the most dramatic result in the shortest time. Do that to every project and it takes too much mental overhead.

<comment> le-mark That's also why when companies start talking about "cost cutting" on the order of $millions, it almost always means layoffs. That's a big lever to push on earnings, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Back in the 90's, I got a buddy hired at my work, and typically all co-workers come through a contracting agency. Work hired him as a direct contractor without the agency BUT at agency rates. He did his 90 day contractor probation period and then hired directly.

After he left the company years later, he told us the story of the 175 hourly rate they gave him for 3 months, instead of 25 for a junior admin.

Good times.

</comment><comment><USER76> The moment you do the work on-site with the client, with their resources, their equipment, on their laptop that you first need to configure and install, with their environment and everything, dealing with their bureaucracy, work time goes way up.

Had you done this from home on your own machine after they quickly mailed you the necessary resources, you'd have been done within those 20 hours, but frankly, large corporations don't really care. $18,000 is still pocket money for them, and they apparently prefer if you do everything their way instead of your own.

You didn't just deliver a static html page, you delivered a static html page as part of their process.

Let them pay. You earned it. They wasted your time, you didn't waste theirs. It's not the most fulfilling way of working, but it pays the bills.

I do almost entirely projects for large clients like that, and it's not unusual that just getting started takes a week. I used to get frustrated about that, but it's their choice, and now I just go along with it.

It does underscore how unbelievably inefficient large companies really are.

</comment><comment><USER77> Ha! Imagine how much a Deloitte-like company would've charged them for making that html page.

<comment><USER78> 10x just to come up with the PowerPoints saying they could do it for another 50x. Then still fuck it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I had worked for a big bank doing financial modelling, reporting, random ad- hoc stuff for about 3.5 years before getting fairly bored. I quit and went to work for a small AI/ML* consulting firm whose biggest client turned out to be the same bank I used to work for.

Before I left, I gave my boss an opportunity to beat the new salary that was offered to me. He said he couldn't.

My annual pay was ~170k at the bank, but now they pay $2500 a DAY for me to be there, and, as a consultant, I work FAR less hard and far fewer hours (albeit in a completely different division). I've been here for 10 months now and it seems like it will continue indefinitely...

This article has strongly reminded me to start doing my own thing and charge even more.

*In reality, all I do is data engineering/munging because their data models and systems are so poor.

</comment><comment><USER80> Icing on the cake would have been if he had made a little extra effort and got additional contracts from the same company

</comment><comment><USER81> Some static HTML pages (e.g. ICO landings when it was still a thing) could well be worth $18k and more.

<comment><USER82> Indeed! Consider a simple brochure-style marketing page, which is often a good use case for static HTML. Such a page should be centered around content, and that content (photography, illustration, copy, animation, etc.) may need to be specially built for the page and may be expensive to produce. Everything has to fit together flawlessly, telling a compelling story while staying on-brand. Performance needs to be great. And if the page is generating much revenue, it is easy to justify spending even more money in optimizations if they are likely to improve conversion rates.

I realize this has nothing to do with the ridiculous situation described in the article, but I do think it's worth pointing out that $18k is not at all an inherently ridiculous amount of money to charge for a static HTML page. In some cases, it may not be nearly enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I worked for a large company who wanted their public website re done to be "mobile friendly" (in 2015).

It's Drupal, with a custom theme. Everything that was actually "tricky" was de-scoped, so it wound up being something my university buddies and I would have charged $5k for back in the day, probably would have charged $30k these days.

That project cost well over $1mil. For a Drupal site with a custom "Mobile friendly" theme.

<comment><USER84> When I worked for a non-profit they paid like a quarter million dollars for a Drupal site with some slight modifications that never even got completed. I had to trudge through months of debugging and solving problems, and ultimately I couldn't be bothered with Drupal Core so we brought in some contractors to solve the biggest issues while I worked on rebuilding the whole stack. Drupal knowledge seems to pay well, they were able to charge us $150 an hour at their non-profit discount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Years ago a company similarly contacted me for some "emergency" tasks. I flied all the way to Japan and realise they haven't got the tasks ready, more than half of the time I wasn't doing anything. I honestly (stupidly?) charged them with my actual working hours, they seems surprised. A lesson learnt and the next time it'll be a different story.

</comment><comment><USER49> After the hours in the initial estimate were used, I would have renegotiated and charged a nonrefundable retainer in order to be on call to deliver the project as soon as the assets were ready. This retainer would be my normal rate, and the hours would not carry over to another billing period. I would not be driving to their office every day.

</comment><comment><USER86> Would love to see the finely-crafted, artisanal HTML and heirloom CSS.

<comment><USER86> ^ organic Javascript, ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I read the title, expecting it to be kind of a 'scam', or at least that they overcharged and got away with it. Turns out he did spent that time at the company where they hired him and it only seems fair to me. Even though they probably just wasted too much of his time - and their money.

</comment><comment><USER88> Federal government is the only place I've worked that had a reasonable work/pay ratio. Every private company has either been eye-bleeding amounts of work and weekly hours for unsatisfying compensation or doing almost nothing and then getting a check that made me feel guilty.

</comment><comment><USER89> Randomly enough, the writer of this previously achieved HN fame when he was unstoppably fired by a machine:

[https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired- me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

<comment><USER90> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645)

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I'm shocked at how much this person undercharged, for a contract like this to a large company $1K P/D AUD time and materials is not even particularly high. A consulting firm would be 2.5-3.5 so it's a bargain.

</comment><comment><USER92> * Your time is worth something, even if your employer isn't making the best use of it

* I'm surprised he waited 7 weeks before submitting a bill (especially given the hurry up and wait circumstances).

</comment><comment><USER93> That's the problem with corporations; it's not the manager's own money, they don't know where it comes from, who the shareholders are, what the real goal of the company is, what high quality work looks like, etc... So if you're friends with the right people, you can get whatever amount you want and nobody cares.

The company is like a giant communal wallet. It sucks money out of lord-knows- where and dispenses it back to you. You just have to physically sit at your desk and waste time for 8 hours a day.

</comment><comment><USER94> This sounds like an awful experience. You were brought in to write a single, trivial HTML page and thought the job would take you about 2 days, give or take (which, it would have). Then, it ended up taking 7 weeks because the company's communication was incredibly poor. The error here is so large, I'd be pretty upset. At least they paid you for your two months of service, though. How are companies _this_ inefficient? They completely wasted about $20k for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER9> The traditional wisdom is that as a technical employee, you don't want to work for a non-technical company. Sounds like as a contractor it's the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER95> Companies don't seem to realize that the bad practices they engage in are actively harmful to themselves financially. Maintaining that office that doesn't produce as much value as it destroys in expense. Not investing in IT infrastructure (whether real or virtual). Not actively working on making communication efficient and valuable. These things don't just get on peoples nerves, they cost money.

</comment><comment><USER96> Look at Apple. People are buying their over priced products years now. If you compared them equally based on the actual hardware and leave their software out, you'll clearly see that market is offering you the same products at half price. If Apple release a laptop at 5K$ with a 4K screen and a (hypothetical) screen keyboard or something fancy, people will go crazy and start buying it.

</comment><comment><USER97> At a company a few years ago, we paid about $25k for a website layout delivered in .psd, a coloursheet as a .pdf and a recommendation on a typeface. The boss was not happy and the defence was sort of "It was very hard work to select just the right colors and font, we have used many hours!" (Not exact words but something in that direction)

So yeah, they beat you :-)

</comment><comment><USER98> Tangentially: I liked listening to the article, with the background soothing music, in the author's voice.

<comment><USER99> If only we could change the speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I like the story, as my experiences resonate with it, but I dislike the title. The pay was fair for the time spent -- especially since it was exclusive and included travel. He effectively became a full-time employee during that time span. No benefits, and his profits will be taxed by the IRS.

</comment><comment><USER101> I charged $500 for a single static HTML page in the early 2010s. I figured out free hosting using Google App Engine. Also I was on a Skype call the whole time and it had to be done by the end of the day with the client . I don't think the author did anything wrong .

<comment><USER87> the money is good, but the working condition seems to be bad :D I'd hate having to work with soemone constantly 'peering over my shoulder' even if just virtually.

<comment><USER101> I sent them pictures not a live video screen cast..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> I've had a couple experiences getting paid to do nothing for a couple months, one during a summer research project in undergrad and one at a big tech company. I found it far more stressful and less valuable than if I'd had actual work to do.

</comment><comment><USER103> Why has no one mentioned the American Dream: [https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

</comment><comment><USER104> This isn't that crazy of a story. The static page part is the hook but he was on site for a month. I've been on projects clearing 40k in 2 months for onsite work. Doesn't matter if it's static or api work.

</comment><comment><USER105> Cool article, one thing:

> The designer had sent me some Adobe Illustrator files, and I couldn't open > it on the MacBook.

Can't you just change the file extension to _pdf_ to open an Adobe Illustrator file?

</comment><comment><USER106> Reading the article and the comments here makes me consider raising the price of a self-hosted help desk software I recently released. Or at least, adding a new premium price package.

</comment><comment><USER107> Title should read "I charged $18,000 for many hours of my time"

</comment><comment><USER108> Cool story.

Now, how can I find such jobs/companies, minus the commute? :P

</comment><comment> martin-adams This might be one of those cases where they want to keep spending money so they get a budget renewal for the next quarter.

</comment><comment><USER109> He's lucky to have got paid at all. But his experience is totally normal for how large companies operate.

</comment><comment><USER110> Wow. I listened to the post and felt like I was in the developer equivalent of the twilight zone. Love it!

</comment><comment><USER111> Man I thought I was doing good at $1k.

</comment><comment><USER112> But is this really want to do with your time, even if you are getting paid?

</comment><comment><USER113> Sounds like real-life to me unfortunately :D

</comment><comment><USER114> Saving you a click: He charged $75/hr for a job that included a ton of waiting around and idling on-location at the client's office. :)

</comment><comment><USER115> who says that businesses are any guarantee to be any more than large government bureaucracies?

</comment><comment><USER116> I would have billed incrementally.

</comment><comment><USER117> Legit the definition of corporate

</comment><comment><USER118> Sell value not cost.

</comment><comment><USER119> Spoilers : he did not actually get paid $18,000

<comment><USER26> ... he got paid $21,000

<comment><USER119> I did not want to spoil it all :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> lmao

</comment><comment><USER121> This is an impressive story! It's unbelievable to read about how some big companies function. The funniest part is that he didn't get paid $18,000 like the title says - but $21,000!

</comment><comment><USER122> I charge $30,000 and did absolutely nothing.

I was hired by a publishing company to take their 1990s web site into the modern age, a couple of years ago. I reported directly to the owner of this small but well known company in their industry. On day one, he sat with me for 10 minutes and outlined what he wanted done and then promptly left for a publishing conference for two weeks. He gave me nothing to access the web server or any of the source.

So, I spent two weeks putting together a few potential designs and showed them around to influential persons inside the company. They loved it! But when the CEO returned, he immediately pushed back against the hamburger icon for a menu selection among other things he thought his customers would find difficult to use.

I said I would work on that, made some changes I thought he would like, but when it came time to present them, he was gone again on another sales meeting out of town for a few days.

When he came back, he asked me to work with his graphic designer to create some animations for an iPad program they sold. I had never done that but quickly learned. He then went to France. He called me twice to ask about the progress and some additions he wanted but, when he returned, he was too busy to meet with me about that project.

I continued to ask for access to the server but never received a response.

Then, he presented me with an iPad app they had some company in India develop. He said it had some minor issues but he wanted me to work on it. It was written in ObjectiveC but I knew nothing about it and had never developed anything for Apple products before. He gave me access to his Lynda account but he needed the app fixed in two weeks. I told him it was impossible.

So, he hired a college kid who was fluent in all that. He gave the kid two months to solve the problem but he hit a road block and last I heard it past the three month mark trying to get that to work.

For me, since he didn't have time to work with me on the company web site, he said his mother had an event coming up for a charity she ran and she needed a web site right away. I knew nothing of the charity or the event. I had no pictures, no text, no idea what she would want beyond a general outline the CEO gave me but he wanted the whole thing up and running...in two weeks.

I said I can't do that. So he fired me.

I had accomplished absolute nothing. I asked him why he thought I could write iPad apps. He said it was because I said in the interview I once wrote an app for the iPhone. I said, no, I wrote a little test program--a "Hello World"\--using Cordova but that was it.

</comment><comment><USER123> Got it, so I need to start working as a contractor for various big corporations.

</comment><comment><USER124> He didn't charge 18K. He got lucky while he did not keep his promise of his quote.

He kept his mouth shut, even though he knew he needed to have a difficult talk about assets and time reserved etc. Instead of that, he waited for weeks before he nervousy crafted an invoice full of mistakes because he was probably editting and re-editing because he knew he was doing something wrong, but had a conflicted mind because he felt entitled to get paid a daily rate instead of fixed price like he agreed. He then sent the email safely from home miles away.</comment>


You've Got Mail.Ru: Russian Internet Giant Looks For U.S. Expansion With My.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/11/19/youve-got-mail-ru-russian-internet-looks-to-u-s-for-expansion-with-my-com/

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/311fabca-5090-11e3-befe-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/311fabca-5090-11e3-befe-00144feabdc0.html)

 _" Mr Grishin said the data centres for its US services would be based in the Netherlands, which he said was a "good neutral place" outside of the US and Russia that was "very liberal" and "respected globally"._

 _US internet companies have come under fire for handing over private data to US authorities since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing a mass NSA surveillance programme earlier this year. Many technology companies insist they simply comply with the law and have even spoken out against reported attempts to siphon off information about their users._

 _The Netherlands has robust data protection laws and a broad definition of what constitutes personal data, as well as some large data centres. However, some privacy experts say keeping the data offshore would not be enough to stop the NSA accessing it._

 _Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in the US, said the data may be more secure in Europe but the problem was it had to be shipped from the US._

 _"I don't think it keeps it from the NSA at all because the data are collected here and shipped to the cloud, it doesn't make a difference where it goes," he said. "The NSA can access it during the transportation process."_

 _James Lewis, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: "The location of the server makes absolutely no difference, particularly for Russian companies that have very close relations with their security services. Ask Snowden if he feels like his email is safer."_</comment>


Web pages are becoming too hard to read - <AUTHOR> https://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-cant-read-your-website.html <comment><USER2> Recently I put together a command line tool that helps this exact problem. WCAG-Zoo helps with lots of the simple accessibility checks, and it even prints out to the command line how it thinks the text in the page would look once rendered (even taking into account transparencies).

Repo: [https://github.com/data61/wcag-zoo](https://github.com/data61/wcag-zoo)

Screenshots: [https://github.com/data61/wcag- zoo/wiki/Screenshots](https://github.com/data61/wcag-zoo/wiki/Screenshots)

<comment><USER3> That's awesome, I was far too lazy to implement something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's ironic this article complains about lack of readability on the web. Yet, he uses a font that's hard to read on his blog.

It uses the Cantarell font that's very popular on the web and some people argue is easier to read. But my experience is the opposite. It's harder to read. To me it feels and looks like the font is not fully rendered. It's not only harder to read but it's both psychologically and visually annoying.

To me that's a big problem, the use of fonts because they look cool and stylish rather than readability. Cool does not always mean good.

<comment><USER5> And I find all non-serif fonts harder to read. Serif fonts are harder to read on the low-resolution devices, but easier on paper and high-def devices, that's why I always searched for other kind of displays, and considered the Apple's introduction of "retina" screens as the biggest event in years in computing, as everybody had to start "me too."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never thought too much about contrast until I had to do some ADA compliance work. Now when a designer says something looks better but it's hard for me to personally read I can always go back to the WCAG guidelines and use it to make a stronger argument for a higher contrast.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stupidly tiny fonts is another readability issue. The problem is compounded by the way web browsers handle zooming. The problem affects mobile the most.

Most of my zooming efforts is to increase font size. Yet, every single element on the page puffs-up making reading a chore. Because, I'd have to scroll the page from left to right, back and down to read.

I hope, one browser would bake in a "zoom text only" functionality. (Yes, I use the chrome extension, but I want it on my phone too)

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree with the article headline, but font color is only a small part of it.

What makes Web page unreadable?

> Constantly shifting color contrast of text blocks. Page starts with dark on > light, then shifts to light on dark as you scroll down, then shifts back. > You can literally feel your pupil dilating and undilating.

> Massive font, especially serif like the one you see on the author's page. > [https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-became- > unreadable-a781dd...](https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-became- > unreadable-a781ddc711b6#.hax2uko6y)

> Acres of poorly laid out photos and poorly aligned text with several > different font sizes, type face, and weight. theverge.com home page being > one of them.

<comment><USER9> I understand that we are discussing readability here, with 'most readable' being the general consensus in the comments as being synonymous with 'better.'

That said, I see readability as something that is part of a greater equation. Take your last example of the Verge homepage. Often designs like this are intentionally designed to throw the viewer out of the flow of easy information consumption and disrupt your sense of hierarchy on the page. They are trying to get you to snack on different sections, not read left-right, top-bottom.

This sense of confusion also serves to hide the fact that they place the same article multiple times on the same page, in different contexts. This gives the reader the sense that there have a lot of content and a lot going on.

My point is that readablility is a sliding scale that can be used as a tool to varying effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All 3 examples are readable but I prefer middle, with dark grey. Pure black and pure white is not great, most displays have enough contrast to make it painful.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the comments __, Jim Hall mentions having made a BASH script to get the ratio - but doesn 't post it. So I crapped out a Python script ([https://gist.github.com/anonymous/51a19ccb44e554affbdca69310...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/51a19ccb44e554affbdca69310bb77d3)).

It makes me happy to see that my favorite color combo of black and plasma orange (0xFF8000)* is well above acceptable. As is green on black.

* Among the first computers I ever used were terminals with plasma orange on black background - I've always loved it.

 __I mean the comments in the blog, not the HN comments.

<comment><USER2> This is really cool, I've done something really similar - except it grabs the colors from the HTML itself, so you can use it to check against a HTML file for any issues: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13683096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13683096)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find the white on dark grey much easier to read than any of the others.

Black text on white is pretty terrible. The glare is awful.

</comment><comment><USER12> Alt-V, Y, N is my very favourite key combo in Firefox.

<comment><USER3> I completely forgot about that. It's second only in my eyes to disabling Javascript.</comment></comment>


Most popular domains: .net bigger than .com - <AUTHOR> http://ftp.isc.org/www/survey/reports/current/bynum.txt

<comment><USER2> Anybody care to explain the values in that chart? It says there are 332,395 level 2 domains under .net and 2,705,157 under .com. Perhaps the chart is quite old?

E.g. <http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/> gives different values: 13,100,186 registered .net domains and 87,707,437 .com domains.

In any case, I think .com clearly outweighs .net in terms of registered domains. Hostnames don't really matter anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> .net doesn't mean anything these days. .com is still mostly limited to companies (that is, .com, .org, .edu and .mil partition the space of real- world organizations), but .net has always meant "a _computer_ network", which, these days, could be attached to any or none of these organization types. ISPs have never really favored .net over .com either. (They stick their users' IPs' reverse-resolution names under a <provider>.net domain, but they could just as easily put them under the .com, since they always already own it as well.)

I really wish all the current .net registrations could be shunted into the .com namespace, and then .net redefined to mean _social_ networks. That is, every .net domain would be expected to have a public Diaspora/other social- networking-mesh-server running, in the same way that every .com is expected to have a public web server running.

<comment><USER4> I for one do not except every .com to have a public web server running. And I rather not bind TLDs to services.

<comment><USER3> You, for one, are not an average user. :) By "expect", I meant something closer to "grandma knows that .net addresses go at the end of emails and usernames, the way .com goes at the end of websites, and since she only visits five sites and has three people she e-mails, she doesn't need to worry about the exceptions" sense, not a hard and fast rule.

There wouldn't be a _binding_ any more than TLDs today are bound to the web—the .net TLD would just mean "owned by a social network", just like .name means "owned by by a single person/family" or .org means "owned by an organization." All services that collected users for the explicit purpose of letting them communicate with external services and/or one another—Facebook, Gmail (or rather, Google Accounts), Twitter, Reddit and HN, any forum, Battle _.net_ , etc.—would qualify as .net domains. The fact that they're currently _web-based_ (or custom-protocol based) social networks makes no technical difference.

(And alternatively, services like Google Wave and Buzz wouldn't really be separate .net domains—since they're not separate social networks, but rather subsets of the Google network that have a flag in their accounts flipped. The _clients_ for them could live on the website at "google.net", but the services themselves would no longer give you separate, secondary identities.)

It's just that, once something like Diaspora got going, social networks would become a distinct kind of site—they'd be the only kind that would bother running Diaspora servers at all (why run one for your company/organization? Everyone's already going to have an externally-bound identity anyway.) So, being able to guess that something is a social network/is running a Diaspora server by seeing the TLD (like grandma is able to guess that something is a website because it ends in .com: a "type it in and see" kind of guess, not one you place bets on) would be a nice convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.registrarstats.com/Public/TLDDomainCounts.aspx>

I don't know where these numbers come from (original article) but they are wrong or I've misunderstood their meaning.

</comment><comment><USER6> That makes plenty of sense to me based on what they used to mean. Nowadays, most people seem to think of the domain as the part they put into the browser to see your web page.

</comment><comment><USER7> I dont think its accurate. Why does it only show a few domains for .mp ? Theres literally hundreds of thousands of .mp domains

</comment><comment><USER8> And why do you think that is?

<comment><USER9> These aren't registrations; these are hostnames in use.

For some reason -- perhaps just traditions -- it's especially common for bulk service providers to assign individual machine/address subdomains from .NET rather than .COM.

Indeed: I'm using a Comcast cable modem, and you reach Comcast's web page at comcast.com -- but my dynamic IP reverse-resolves to a comcast.net subdomain, and is obviously one of many thousands from its formulaic construction (including within it the IP address and region hints).

<comment><USER10> If this is 'hosts in use' then discrepancy comes from security concerns. The majority of computers in *.com concerns will be behind firewall and not have publicly exposed names. The .net orgs are more likely to let it all hang out.</comment></comment></comment>


US Bank employee fired after giving struggling man $20 of own money to get home - <AUTHOR> https://www.foxnews.com/us/oregon-woman-fired-bank-after-giving-struggling-man-money <comment><AUTHOR> Full title: Oregon woman fired from bank job after giving struggling man $20 of her own money to get home for Christmas.

She first cleared it with her manager. Manager was fired too.

<comment><USER2> And people wonder why shit is so hectic right now. If this woman wanted to give someone $20 of her own hard earned money, her generosity shouldn't be punished. The fact that two people were fired over an act of kindness that totaled $20 is absurd.

Think about how much money it'll cost US Bank to replace both the employee and manager they fired. Over $20 that didn't even come out of their pocket? Sounds pretty clear who the assholes are here.</comment></comment>