90% of China's billionaires are kids of high-ranking officials - <AUTHOR> http://chinesepolitics.blogspot.com/2009/07/interesting-article-on-princeling.html <comment><USER2> "Guanxi" is a huge factor in dealings involving the Chinese government, and even in day to day Chinese business. One difference between the Chinese and American system of connections and favors may be that Chinese put a heavy emphasis on family relations, which doesn't seem overly prevalent here. Well, save for certain notable exceptions.

On another note, the problem of "guanxi" extends to the microlending arena. China's lending capital for microloans is small, and even then, the funds are generally directed to those with connections to the government. I'm working with a nonprofit called Wokai (<http://www.wokai.org>), and we're working to raise loan capital from people around the world for microloans to Chinese farmers. We operate pretty similarly to Kiva, except that due to Chinese regulations we can't return money to lenders - therefore, we solicit contributions that turn into perpetual loan capital.

<comment><USER3> I don't think outsiders grasp how much of an impact the emphasis on "guanxi" and family relations has on everyday life in China. On one hand, you can see this as 90% of Chinese billionaires are the kids of high ranking officials.

Bot on the other hand, you can see this as 90% of Chinese kids of high ranking officials are expected to marry someone who is successful/will make them look good. Anyone who's dated an Chinese girl whose parents are relatively successful (especially if they are East Asian themselves) will probably tell you a thing or two about having to measure up to standards.

In Chinese society, people use their relationships to leverage life (and by extension, business and politics) to the full. Thus, it's not acceptable to marry below you because if you do, you may be forced to hire the relatives of your lowly mate. It is shameful if your family is not doing well, and it is shameful if your close relatives don't have a job. This is the cost of sticking together, having strong friendship and family bonds-- you do not want any relationships that are too one-sided or unsustainable.

While modernization has weakened this system nontrivially, it does feel that it is still the norm, and we have reason to believe it will continue (at least to a greater extent than here in the West). The reason is that China has too many people, too many mouths to feed. China produces many more engineering students than does the US. But most of them aren't hireable. There's a reason why we're still "better".

Finding the right talent in China is even more formidable than it is here, and it always has been, thanks to the fact that China has 3x more people per acre of arable land than the average country (cited from Stratfor but I can't find the link).

 _Now I'm not saying that the system is fair or even efficient compared to the Western system, but using the family to extend one's goals is a byproduct of Chinese society._

I would argue there is some wisdom in what they do. Here in the West, our HR departments often prefer to hire people who are referrals. There's an implicit understanding that good workers like to hang out with other people who are good workers. In this light, the Chinese are merely extending that wisdom beyond the workplace.

<comment><USER4> There may be some wisdom, but not a whole lot. Hiring on referrals is based on the idea that people will not refer idiots to you for fear of depleting their social capital, providing you with a fairly strong selection mechanism for talented candidates. Being forced to hire the relatives of your mate regardless of their skills does not strike me as very beneficial.

<comment><USER3> Hiring on referrals is tricky. It's like what Steve Jobs and Joel Spolsky have said. The A ppl hire the A ppl but the B ppl hire the C ppl. So yes, it's less than ideal when you can be already be reasonably certain that credentials mean _something_ (i.e. someone with a degree in chemical engineering is at least halfway capable of maintaining a part of a chemical plant), or you can look at things like what sort of papers they've published, what OSS projects they've contributed to, etc.

As for the hiring relatives regardless of their skill... this matters when skill _really_ matters. When you're in a winner-takes-all field like finance or tech, it can be very much less than ideal and we myopically don't recognize that the rest of the world gets on without being exceptional at problem solving.

The flip side to the hiring relatives bit is that native-born Chinese are generally able to extract higher loyalty and work ethic from their relatives because of these same bonds. There is the feeling that you are all together.

So for all the talk of China steamrolling the world, I just don't believe it. You have to look at what benefits and costs this sort of culture provides. You get high societal stability, and a caring family that will support you, but one that can in some ways hold you back as well. Their societal structure may have worked extraordinarily well with manufacturing, but tech? I refuse to ever say that someone, or some group _can't_ do X, however I will say the jury is still out on this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's even more "interesting" is the exception to that rule, Huang Gyangyu, up until recently the richest man in China, its "Sam Walton", who was arrested and is still being held for "insider trading", when arresting someone in China for insider trading is sort of like a character on The Sopranos getting arrested for saying fuck. With no formal education or family ties to speak of, he started his business at 16. Of China's billionaires, Wang was the only one who was 1- a Christian and 2- not a member of the Communist Party. And now he's in prison.

</comment><comment><USER6> As many things in life, often it's not what you know but who you know.

And I guess that if you know the big cheese, it's easier to get all the permits, gov. contracts and financing.

</comment><comment><USER7> The link is blocked by GFW, I think, I can not open it here in China.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what I use while I'm in China: <http://www.witopia.net/welcome.php> \- Highly recommended given how much China is blocking these days. On other US/European sites that aren't blocked, I often find it is faster on the VPN than it is direct as well. Because I'm generally in Canada I can now also access Hulu.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The news is from 2006, but it's a reminder following a recent scandal and but it's also a reminder of the difficulties outsiders (both inside and outside of the country) face in trying to become successful in China.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the unavoidable consequence of China's political/economic system. It's not surprising at all.

What makes me worry is that the Chinese government has a far larger influence on Chinese companies than most other countries and that makes economic reliance on China a very dangerous move.

It also makes people used to totalitarian regimes to the point of making them tolerable. They shouldn't be. Chinese people deserve better.

<comment><USER9> 'Chinese people deserve better.'

Really, what business is this of yours? I feel like Westerners are always looking down their noses at the Chinese political situation but people don't seem to take into account China's historical context. China IS getting better (and rather rapidly). Less than 100 years ago, China still had an Emperor. With that in mind, how many centuries has Western democracy had to mature?

My personal belief is that democracy develops very gradually, sometimes punctuated by sharp periods of rapid change (e.g., revolutions, foreign colonization).

<comment><USER8> "Really, what business is this of yours?"

Every human being deserves better, Chinese or not. We are all on the same boat after all.

And yes. China is making some progress, but, still, it has a long way to go. Switching from an imperial totalitarian state to a communist one (also an unavoidable consequence of the past couple thousand years of Chinese history) makes for not that much of a change after all. At least not much when you consider the human condition.

And it _is_ my business as it shifts the "Overton window" towards a position more on the totalitarian end of the spectrum. While recognizing China made a lot of progress in the past century (making up for the couple thousand years before) it is still unacceptable. Mind you my children will have to live in a world where a totalitarian state ruled with iron fist by a political aristocracy is a major commercial partner of just about every other country. And this arrangement may start putting ideas into some minds that would be better if left empty.

At least for me it's not acceptable.

<comment><USER9> Karma for introducing me to the term Overton window. And I do agree with you that we should encourage China to continue to liberalize. I just wanted to try to offset what I feel is a somewhat one-sided view of the Chinese situation.

I'd also like to point out that, despite how the Western media often presents it, the CCP isn't monolithic. Power swings between two poles: Beijing and Shanghai (Beijing being the political and military hub, Shanghai being the economic hub). For example, Jiang Zemin represented the South and was what we would consider more economically liberal and now Hu is more friendly toward the military, more focused on 'political stability', and more representative of the North. I highly suspect the next president will be a conscious swing back to the 'liberal' side of the spectrum.

And the power hubs tend to alternate every decade or so. I suspect when democracy does start to trickle down to the Chinese population, the party will split somewhere along this line. We just need to give it a few more decades.

<comment><USER10> _We just need to give it a few more decades._

Here's hoping that world events allow them time to do so.

What is required is a way for one bunch of people to say "hell, the people running the government right now are idiots. Idiots I say! Let's completely do things differently!" and be able to assume power and change things without force of arms or violence.

And do this on a regular basis.

I know I'll feel better when that day comes. Because well, sometimes the folks running things _are_ idiots. And they have all the guns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's because its harder to bribe people in China compared to the USA. There you need to do a shady deal and pay a ton of money, so family gets the inside track.

In the USA, all it takes is a 100K at election time, and its completely legal.

<comment><USER9> I can't imagine that it's harder to bribe people in China than in the USA. In fact, I think much, much more bribery per capita happens in China than in the US. The Chinese legal system is very weak.

<comment><USER11> not harder per se, but there its done as a backroom deal. In USA, we just call it lobbying and campaign contributions.

<comment><USER12> Still, the U.S. political system allows for such an outlier as Obama[1] to get on the top. It would've been impossible if it was only the issue of getting the most lobbyist beef behind.

[1] Not idealising him here, but his ascent was both extremely untypical and very American at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see anything different in this respect in China than I do in many western societies. Having a leg up is definitely a pre, anywhere. It may differ in degree but certainly not in principle.

<comment><USER14> In which western countries are 90% of the billionaires children of government officials?

<comment><USER13> errm... I said 'degree' didn't I ?

I meant that in any society the number of people that will make it big that have connections will outnumber those that do not.

It's very hard to 'make it on your own', in any society and China is (unsurprisingly) no exception.

News would have been 90% of Chinese billionaires (or millionaires or some other metric) had _no_ family or other connection to power.

On another note, there are only 9 Chinese billionaires in all (10 if you count HK); see [http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/10/07billionaires_The- World...](http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/10/07billionaires_The-Worlds- Billionaires_CountryOfPrmRes_3.html)

<comment><USER14> The news was 90% of Chinese billionaires are actually kids of government officials. That would be like if the billionaires in the UK were children of parliamentary officials or if the billionaires in the USA were children of senators and representatives. It's wrong to equivocate the Chinese situation with simply having "connections." It's a fundamental structural difference between China and "western societies."

Also, what you're implying in the weak sense is probably wrong. Billionaire lists are easily found on the internet and if you look at the bios of the people on such lists, I would assert the opposite - most of the billionaires in western countries started out with few significant connections at all.

<comment><USER13> Gates: son of a lawyer, Buffet: son of a politician, Slim: son of a real estate broker and so on...

Connections help. In a totalitarian society they help more.

The only thing that stops the situation from being much worse is term limits.

<comment><USER15> There's a difference in degree here too though: there's a massive difference between "son of a lawyer" and "son of a central committee member". Gates is considered one of the more privileged billionaires, because his mother was on the board of directors for United Way and his father was a prominent lawyer. That seems like a crack down from his parents being President or in the Cabinet.

It also ignores counterexamples like Steve Jobs (from a working class, blue collar family), Larry Ellison (Jewish immigrants who worked as modest government employees) or Larry Page and Sergey Brin (children of professors).

<comment><USER16> Hm well professor is not exactly middle class either... Actually children of professors are probably the best prepared to make a _great_ career more than anyone else. Parents with connections, lots of knowledge and more time than people working in the industry - that's the perfect mix. I know a few sons of professors, they just surf through life.

<comment><USER17> But even so, being a Professor is earned by hard academic work, and not connections.

<comment><USER18> Being a _son/daughter_ of a Professor isn't earned.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rust: The Hard Parts – Part One: References, Borrowing, and Ownership - <AUTHOR> https://naftuli.wtf/2019/03/20/rust-the-hard-parts/ <comment><USER2> This is super fantastic. Well written and just the right amount of approachfulness and wit. Sometimes articles about things like this go too far into metaphor and lose the reader. I'd recommment going over

        fn mv_mutable(mut a : MyThing) {}

a little bit as in when you might want to do this and especially

        fn mutable_ref_mutable(mut a : &mut MyThing) {}

as I write a lot fo rust and still never understand how this works or why its useful. Lastly maybe an explainer of conforming to `Copy` and if you should do this because I believe currently the recommendation is conform to it for any type you can and I still have to stop and think how that's more performant. But again really great article, I bookmarked it for reference ;)

<comment><USER3> > fn mv_mutable(mut a : MyThing) {}

Compared to simply `a: MyThing`, there are two main reasons when you'd want to do this, namely a) when you want to reassign a different value to `a` or b) when you want to make a mutable reference to `a` (i.e. `&mut a`).

> fn mutable_ref_mutable(mut a : &mut MyThing) {}

Since you already have an `&mut MyThing`, reason "b" from above doesn't apply here, generally the only reason you'd need to do this is if you wanted to reassign a different value to `a`. Technically you would also need it if for some reason you needed an `&mut &mut MyThing`, but that isn't likely to be something you need very often.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.</comment></comment></comment>


Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brunch/brunch-guide/blob/master/content/en/chapter01-whats-brunch.md <comment><USER2> The worst part about web dev is the amount of time spent investigating every little new tool that comes out. It could be useful, it could not, how do you know unless you investigate it yourself? You could easily spend 20+ hours a week just evaluating tools. And not only that, but some of the most adopted tool aren't performant. Grunt sucks. It really does. Angular is needlessly confusing and overly complex for what it actually does. It also doesn't scale and you need to get super hacky with it to perform properly. You spend more time trying to learn new tools than you do actually coding, then find out the tools aren't even well thought out.

Then what happens when you leave your position and someone comes in a year later? Oooh, that sass preprocessor doesn't work? What's an angular, some kind of measuring tool? The entire system has a "doesn't matter I'll be at the next startup in 2 years" kind of feel to it.

I should really move into Java or C....

<comment><USER3> The worst part about the comments under any "JS" submission is the amount of time I have to spend to weed through all the "there are too many tools" comments.

Brunch is older than Grunt and Gulp, how is your comment in any way relevant? If this was a post about the advantages of Java over Go would you complain about the amount of time you have to spend investigating various language platforms?

The world is changing rapidly around us, whether we like it or not.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the endless complaining that something new-to-the-poster exists is the most tedious aspect of HN. Nobody has time to look at anything new, but they have plenty of time to bitch about it at length.

If people said to themselves, "Nope, don't have time to read some docs," and went about their business without dropping coder angst-bombs, there might actually be useful comments to read that would help someone decide whether looking into Brunch or whatever was worth the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Created an account for this post only.

As a novice javascript programmer, I am hugely confused by the variety of tools being recommended on Hacker News. Choosing and setting up tooling was harder than writing my first app in React. Not a new complaint, I know, but:

Is there anything like a best practice in modern javascript development that someone can point me to? Or is there a site that gathers the setups used by prominent front-end developers? Thanks for any advice.

<comment><USER6> I'm an experienced web developer but most of my projects were started a decade ago. I decided to use all modern tools and techniques for a very small (think two database tables) application. It had to work on mobile and have a good UI.

And on my god, the tools, so many tools. And so much boilerplate. And so much plumbing. I've spent only 50% of my time so far doing actual coding and the remaining 50% configuring tools, pulling down packages, pulling down tools which install other packages, and so on.

Now I will fully admit, the tools are very cool and the results are good but it still feels a bit ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> I feel your pain; try this starter project I created in response [https://github.com/mindeavor/node- catapult](https://github.com/mindeavor/node-catapult) . It only has three dependencies, yet it gives you a starting point to "npm install" in any direction you need (in the front end too, since browserify lets you require npm modules).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You definitely need a comparison with webpack. As far as I can tell from a quick scan, webpack has all of the capabilities that brunch does. More importantly, it's much more popular, so the plugins and help you need are likely to be available.

<comment><USER9> I agree that Webpack is a serious competitor, and it's rather odd to not even mention it [1]. But I don't think Webpack does incremental compilation, since it usually takes quite a long time for me to compile my modestly-sized assets..

[1] [https://github.com/brunch/brunch- guide/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...](https://github.com/brunch/brunch- guide/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=webpack)

<comment><USER8> It does incremental compilation when run in dev server mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like this document is a work in progress. Were you looking for feedback on the document?

I have used build systems like this (and webpack) so I think I am the sort of person you're looking to win over.

The heavy use of bolding makes this read like a pyramid scam and made it hard for me to take it seriously.

In all documentation, my main feedback is: the more words you use, the less you're respecting your reader. Your goal should be to wordsmith your text down to convey the maximal information in the least space.

You spend a lot of words talking about things about your product rather than talking about your product itself. I was also flabbergasted to discover that popular build systems are not incremental but it'd be more useful to just highlight the distinction and move on. I think it's ok to include a bit of that in your blurb, but even in chapter three you're saying stuff like "We've been preaching JS modules for six years" (again with the superfluous bold) which is irrelevant to someone looking to understand what your system does.

For another example, you're asking your users to read three paragraphs of "should I use a skeleton" discussion before ever even giving them any insight into whether your system will work for them. I think you could shave that section down to a sentence or two: (1) to get started, I recommend [X]; (2) more experienced users will prefer a skeleton via the [Y] command [link here to the full documentation].

Writing useful documentation is really hard. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! We'll adjust some wording. We are always looking for ways to improve the docs / product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've used brunch for a few years now and found it to be quite performant for my personal projects. Once it's set up it just works smoothly. Getting it set up though with the various plugins you need for your own build process can be a bit of a headache sometimes, and I've felt hedged in at certain points by its largely declarative config. I do think the benefits of its building and caching system are worth it for the standard frontend workflow needs and wish it had more mindshare/general community love.

<comment><USER12> Totally agree with you here. Brunch is fantastic for its minimal config requirements and super-fast performance. Oddly enough, in the JS world I've found it best to ignore all the hype around the latest and newest framework, and just go with something that has a small and loyal following and stick with it.

I mean, look at all the people who moved to working with Angular because it was "made by Google, so you could trust it to stick around". Now those people are using React, and soon they'll move to Angular 2. I've found that hyped technologies almost never have a fraction of the robustness and staying power that they claim to...

<comment><USER13> At the time I'd been as long with AngularJS as I have been with React now, I despised AngularJS and wanted to violently murder past-me who decided to use it.

With React I'm still as confident in my choice as I was a week into using it. In fact, the more I get to know it, the more confident I grow. With AngularJS, it was quite the opposite.

If anything I'd say that AngularJS being promoted by Google only made me more cautious about technologies promoted by Google. Google doesn't actually dogfood AngularJS. I know, they have some tool somewhere that uses it and apparently there are people using that tool, but it's not nearly as customer- facing as the code in which Facebook and Instagram use React.

But I didn't chose React because of the hype. In fact, AngularJS was still being hyped when I decided to try React. I tried React because someone recommend it to me and told me to give it five minutes of suspended judgement. If I had gone by my first impression, JSX and Facebook both would have scared me off.

<comment><USER14> I wrote Angular for 18 months and this is 100% the process I went through and the decisions I came to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also relevant, How to use npm as a build tool:

[http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build- tool...](http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/)

<comment><USER16> I'm rather impressed, especially after using npm for some 4 years without considering this. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Show me the code!

There is a _lot_ of documentation here - which isn't a bad thing - but when I'm assessing new tools like this I want to see the code I'll be using with them. My reasons for disliking Grunt can be summed up just be looking at how confusing/verbose the average Gruntfile is. An example of how I declare my Brunch build would be invaluable.

<comment><USER18> Do these help?

[https://github.com/paulmillr/brunch-with- chaplin/blob/master...](https://github.com/paulmillr/brunch-with- chaplin/blob/master/brunch-config.coffee) [https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/eb3ae139aadbbb87ab9b#file-...](https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/eb3ae139aadbbb87ab9b#file- gulp-js) [https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/eb3ae139aadbbb87ab9b#file-...](https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/eb3ae139aadbbb87ab9b#file- grunt-js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do appreciate when tools/libraries take the time to explain the problem and how they differ from their competition. Especially in cases like this, where it's an underlying architecture difference.

The various Rake servers (Puma, Unicorn, etc.) have also done a great job of this.

<comment><USER20> _> The various Rake servers (Puma, Unicorn, etc.)_

nitpick: they're Rack servers. Rake is the ruby make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the configuration over code approach, but I feel like brunch swings too much into the direction of configuration without being able to code. There needs to be a middle ground because there will always be a need for specialized tasks without having to rely on creating plugins.

I stuck with gulp, but got rid of the repetitive nature of declaring the same task code over and over again by creating a centralized set of functions which generate the tasks for me from configuration and a simple API to execute those functions.

This had some other positive side effects, such as making my package.json and gulpfile much smaller. I can also create fixes / features to tasks and all my projects benefit immediately. The main downside to this centralization is that if you need a specific version of a dependency, you have to fork my project and update separately. That said, brunch effectively has this same issue.

A lot of the OP's complaints such as slow build times and incremental builds can be solved with a proper pipeline in gulp, but it is harder than it should be to do and really hard to do if you are copying a bunch of random tasks from projects strewn all over the web. wtf is plumber? =)

Anyway, I published my little project if you're interested in using it. I use it on a daily basis so it will be actively maintained for a long time to come. I welcome PR's for additional tasks that you think others could use.

[https://github.com/lookfirst/gulp-helpers](https://github.com/lookfirst/gulp- helpers)

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp- helpers](https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-helpers)

</comment><comment><USER22> We use grunt at work, and it starts to pain us. Now that our assets pipeline got pretty big, our whole grunt built takes ~30 sec (+10s just for sass and browserify, each).

I do feel like most of the slowness is the actual compile time though, not because of grunt or whatever runs the compilation.

I'll try to implement brunch and see how it can outperform grunt on this. Hopefully it will make it better!

<comment><USER23> If you're doing the whole thing every time, that would be your biggest problem, regardless of tools. It sounds like Brunch does incremental builds out of the box, which would definitely help you, but you can setup Grunt or gulp to do the same thing. It just takes a little work.

We do that with gulp, and after the initial file runs (~8-10 seconds), updates are instant every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> have always been a huge fan of brunch but lately wanted to take advantage of Gulp and Browserify ([https://github.com/mikew/browserify- brunch](https://github.com/mikew/browserify-brunch) doesn't really cut it) so I wrote parched[1] and parched-tasks-webapp[2]

[1] [https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched](https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched)

[2] [https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched-tasks- webapp](https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched-tasks-webapp)

<comment><USER25> I haven't seen anything that matches what gulp can do to make both browserify and babel have working sourcemaps.

<comment><USER24> It's a great combo. For a while though, Brunch did very similar things, sourcemaps et al, with very little configuration (which is still very clever when you need it).

With parched, the idea is very similar:

       npm install parched parched-tasks-webapp parched-babel

And you're good to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Huh, I always thought Brunch was more of a Yeoman competitor than Grunt or Gulp.

</comment><comment><USER27> The odd bold emphasis on phrases, especially those deserving citation, makes this feel and read like a spam site.</comment>


Java 8, Initializing Maps in the Smartest Way - <AUTHOR> http://minborgsjavapot.blogspot.com/2014/12/java-8-initializing-maps-in-smartest-way.html

<comment><USER2> While the points are valid and interesting, it shows how much Java is still not functional. 8 brings some niceties, but little more.</comment>


Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/08/13/red-hat-ceo-centos-open-source#awesm=~oepAt4q3aFlCno <comment><USER2> Scientific Linux [1] is also a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) derivative and heavily used by government labs (i.e. Fermilab/CERN) and universities. Red hat makes lots of money off subscriptions and support, you might wonder why you would run RHEL when you could run CentOS/SL for free. Many software vendors like vmware/oracle/sybase will require you to run a "supported" operating system, so you would typically run RHEL on these types of boxes, which allows you to get support from vmware/oracle/sybase.

[1] [https://www.scientificlinux.org/](https://www.scientificlinux.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Red Hat main business is services, support, training, not software by itself. In the end, their product is their people. That a lot of business uses CentOS just grows his potential market

And, btw, one of the factors of Microsoft dominance is copying their software too (along with forcing hardware vendors to include it by default, of course)</comment>


Ask HN: Best meatspace "stack" (benefits, legal, etc) for a new startup in 2018? - <AUTHOR> If you were founding a new startup with a couple of employees, what set of SAAS or firms would you choose to take care of your non-tech needs like health insurance, banking, and legal?
To get the ball rolling:
- Just today Stripe Atlas released support for LLCs[1], which is great news.
- In their Playbook[2], thoughtbot recommends things like
-- Earth Class Mail[3] to digitize snail mail.
-- Supporting Strategies[4] for outsourced bookkeeping.
-- Tallie[5] for expense tracking.
- What's the latest in the world of HR options? Did Zenefits come through their troubles intact? Are there better alternatives?
- What other helpful services surprised you by their existence?
[1]: https://stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc?c
[2]: https://thoughtbot.com/playbook/our-company/operations
[3]: https://www.earthclassmail.com
[4]: https://www.supportingstrategies.com
[5]: https://usetallie.com <comment><USER2> At Sourcegraph we use Officengine for accounting and other back office stuff. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gusto for Payroll, Zenefits for HR, and replace Tallie with Expensify.

<comment><USER4> Expensify sent images with personal data to Mechanical Turkers, calls it a feature: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/11/expen...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/11/expensify-acknowledges-potential-privacy-problem-by- calling-it-a-feature/)

Expensify CEO says its 'automated' service is 'proud' to use humans to process receipts: [http://www.businessinsider.com/expensify-is-proud-to-use- hum...](http://www.businessinsider.com/expensify-is-proud-to-use-humans-in- its-automated-service-2017-11)

Avoid Expensify if you are a healthcare company, do business in EU (ref GDRP) or care about your PII. Read their Privacy policy if you don't believe me ;-)

<comment><USER5> Expensify suck for other reasons, too.

Sometimes it just stops updating from your bank or whatever and doesn't notify you. You have to somehow figure out it hasn't updated and go to the page and give it your auth details again.

And even when you reauth they won't fetch all the missed expenses and then you ask them about that and they tell you to enter them manually.

Good times.

Oh yeah, also their CEO is... abrasive.</comment></comment></comment>


Creative People Say No - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/bad7c34842a2

<comment><USER2> Huh? So 2/3 of pre-selected "Creative People" (not defined) effectively said no. What does that mean about the other 1/3? And what about "Non-Creative People"?

Maybe 2/3 of productive people also don't have time and would say no? Assume not all productive people are creative.

Maybe 2/3 of jerks say no? Assume not all jerks are creative?

</comment><comment><USER3> While many creative people are recluses, a person shouldn't have to become antisocial to be creative.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is so great. Thank you.</comment>


Skype cancels Asterisk integration - <AUTHOR> http://now.eloqua.com/es.asp?s=491&e=162556

<comment><USER2> Skype are probably just dropping support for the Asterisk specific plugin. They still have the standards based Skype for SIP (<http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/business/skype-connect/>), which Asterisk should also be able to support via its own SIP support.

</comment><comment><USER3> Other VoIP endpoint vendors have hacked around Skype quite a bit:

[http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_skypopen_Skype_Endpoint_...](http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_skypopen_Skype_Endpoint_and_Trunk)

... which is good until Skype starts trying to detect this kind of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else wonder if this has anything to do with Skype's recent acquisition by Microsoft?

<comment><AUTHOR> The title on Slashdot was "Microsoft Kills Skype For Asterisk", but I thought that was too speculative for HN.

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/24/2010222/Microsoft- Ki...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/24/2010222/Microsoft-Kills-Skype- For-Asterisk)

<comment><USER5> It's the first thing I thought of, and it could be a clue as to where MS may lead Skype. Are they going to come out with some killer VOIP app for Windows 7 mobiles phones that will cause us all to drop our iPhones & 'droids?

<comment><USER6> I hope they realize that the 'killer app' part of Skype is the amount of people using it. If they kill platforms, they lose people. If they lose people, they kill Skype.

Case in point: If they kill either the Mac client or the iOS client, they will lose _me_ , and thus all my family. I hope they realize that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if they will see a huge spike in orders over the next 2 months... I am certainly more likely to buy it now, just in case I need it in the next 2 years.

<comment><USER8> Except you'll probably loose support sometime in the next few years and as soon as they consider it a burden or a threat they'll pull the plug on it. For hobby use it would be really cool for any business I'd stay far away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like as good a place as any to ask: I work at a company that's distributed all across the US and East Asia. We don't really have a coherent phone system. This isn't my area per se, but I'm curious to see what options are out there. What should I look at? Is Skype the way to go or are there better "corporate" options?

<comment><USER10> Our small company linked free open source Asterisk servers in US, Philippines, and India (10-100 people per location). It's doable, but has a significant learning curve. I'd recommend hiring a professional to help you set it up and train your IT staff.

If you want to pay for a higher end option, Avaya is a common choice. They power many companies (including huge call centers) all over the world.

<comment><USER11> If you have moderate experience with Linux and can read manpages then you should have no real problem linking Asterisk servers between locations and setting up all common phone functions.

Asterisk (and its derivatives) are really quite powerful and easy to use. We use it everywhere that the commercial systems fail (like having working SIP without paying tens of thousands in licenses)

<comment><USER12> I have worked with Asterisk and would recommend using FreeSWITCH instead.

<comment><USER13> I would not. Not yet, anyway. Configuration of Asterisk is significantly easier with the FreePBX GUI. The FreeSWITCH equivalent is 2600hz which, although prettier, is missing a number of features* and is more difficult to use in some ways.

It's very promising, though.

* I don't remember which features specifically, but I do remember being unable to completely replicate a moderately complex Asterisk setup in the 2600hz GUI. It might have been related to the AVR system.

<comment><USER14> Hi - founder of blue.box, the product from 2600hz you are referring to.

I'd be curious to know which features, but more importantly, have you seen Whistle? It's an API-driven control system for clustered FreeSWITCH. You can probably do whatever you need to in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I posted something on this a little bit ago. Seems to correlate with Microsoft's decision to revoke free access to their VXML studio product (and thus Skype purchase) - <https://studio.tellme.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Uh-oh. What's next? The API?</comment>


Mill vs. Spectre: Performance and Security [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E4qs2irmpc <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, here are links to the slides and the accompanying white paper.

[Slides] [https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/20...](https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/2018-03-14.Spectre.03.pptx)

[White Paper] [https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/Sp...](https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/Spectre.03.pdf)

I haven't read the paper yet; hopefully it offers more detail than the talk does because I am still confused about how the Mill avoids cache pollution from speculative loads.

EDIT: Here is my attempt at a summary of the relevant bits of the whitepaper:

The Mill is immune to Meltdown for the same reason AMD et al. are; it does permission checks before loading rather than in parallel and thus the load faults before going to memory.

The Mill is immune to Spectre because "Current Mill configurations will [speculatively] issue, and revoke, a maximum of two instructions. Revocation includes all cache and other micro-architectural side effects."

Neither of those points is covered in the talk. I don't know enough about the subject to judge, but the arguments in the paper seem a bit glib. I'd like to hear from an expert on the subject.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty surprised if they don't leave speculatively loaded (and still correct) data in the cache. My understanding of speculation is that was sort of the point: often you won't compute the right value (because you have to be right in every instance) but you will have loaded nearly all of the relevant data into the cache, so it's comparatively fast the second time around.

<comment><USER4> This argument holds better for an OoO CPU that is speculating 100 instructions ahead, so there's significant work done in this window. When your speculative execution is only 2 cycles ahead, you aren't throwing away much work; you'd be lucky to even _have_ work to throw away by that point, at least as it applies to cache misses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Started watching at 24:30, thanks y'all).

Everything he's saying misses the mark. If the only issue was hiding the memory latency of a load when you know the address, you could solve this with existing techniques like simultaneous multithreading (a la HyperThreading), prefetch hints, etc.

The need for speculation arises when you do not know ahead of time which address to access, which branch to take, etc. For example, you're accessing an element in an array and need to multiply the index by the element size. You don't know which address to load until the multiply completes, so you speculate. I don't see how the Mill's deferred load semantics help you any more than a prefetch or dummy load would. Actually, unless I'm missing something you couldn't even use the deferred load because, again, you don't have the address.

<comment><USER6> > The need for speculation arises when you do not know ahead of time which > address to access, which branch to take, etc. For example, you're accessing > an element in an array and need to multiply the index by the element size. > You don't know which address to load until the multiply completes, so you > speculate. I don't see how the Mill's deferred load semantics help you any > more than a prefetch or dummy load would. Actually, unless I'm missing > something you couldn't even use the deferred load because, again, you don't > have the address.

You kind of hit three different issues here, there's three completely different scenarios I can think of off the top of my head to cover and the Mill design ties with out-of-order designs in the worst case and beats them in the other two.

1\. Random I/O on array elements - nobody wins here because branch prediction and speculative loads will consistently fail, you hope your data is in cache and everybody stalls if not.

2\. Sequential I/O on array elements - Mill can perform equally to an out-of- order design in most cases and beat it in others, you don't rely on the CPU seeing far enough ahead to reorder loads and have much better facilities for parallelizing common operations (their strstr example using their smear instruction, NaR values and pervasive vectors is truly mindblowing).

3\. Switche statements with jump tables, the Mill's wide-issue design handles many of these cases without needing jump tables to begin with, especially when paired with speculative operations on potential NaR's. When you need to call code at another address you are again at the hands of the branch predictor and instruction prefetch, which the Mill does do and has some novel designs for that provides a low mispredict penalty and purportedly better prediction results. Ultimately though, if you keep hitting mispredicts you're in the same worst-case as you have on out-of-order designs.

The Mill can't beat out-of-order designs where your code just thrashes cache, causes mispredicts all the time, etc, but it can match them without eating gobs of power.

<comment><USER7> You talk about the mill as if it exists. There is no hardware, there are no benchmarks. Bloviating about the excellent performance of the mill is not valuable - showing SPEC CPU results is. VLIW performance was great too, until it wasn't. You can statically schedule everything in theory and the performance will be great, but experience suggests that giving hardware the capability to react dynamically cannot be replaced by static scheduling, except in code with limited branching and a known execution pattern. This is why VLIW works nicely for DSP, and fairly poorly for general purpose computing.

The mill has been in development for 15 years, and almost done for 5. Forgive me for not holding my breath.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why people are so willing to say "it won't work" without actually taking the time to understand it. They literally spend like every one of their talks addressing how they overcome traditional vliw problems.

<comment><USER5> He's not saying it won't work, he's saying it doesn't exist yet, so talking about it as if it does is a bit silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 24:30 to reach info about Mill architecture, beforehand is building context by explaining Spectre

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this thing even exist on an FPGA yet?

<comment><USER4> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have a link to the slides? I find that a much preferable way to access this sort of stuff...

<comment><AUTHOR> Presumably it will show up at [https://millcomputing.com/docs/](https://millcomputing.com/docs/) eventually but it doesn't seem to be there yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Discussion on Mill begins at about 24:30.

</comment><comment><USER13> This Mill guy is the gift that keeps on giving. With any luck he'll still be around to explain how the soon-to-be-released Mill 1.0 cpu would have avoided the year 2038 problem.

<comment><USER14> > With any luck he'll still be around to explain how the soon-to-be-released > Mill 1.0 cpu would have avoided the year 2038 problem.

What? Software working with a 64-bit time_t is not the CPU's problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Talk is cheap.

The TL;DW is that the mill cpu will have better performance than existing CPUs without speculative execution because it has "deferred loads," while the straw man not-mill architecture doesn't and therefore stalls after every load. Also, newsflash - Spectre doesn't impact architectures that don't speculate.

This is great, except for that existing CPUs don't stall after issuing a load. Scoreboarding + prefetch are together capable of more than this "deferred load," and require less work from the compiler. If you have independent instructions following a load, any existing architecture worth its salt will notice that and execute them while the load is in progress.

It's potentially a neat idea to include the number of cycles until load retire in the instruction, but it's a joke to pretend that it's higher performance than what x86 does and will get you back all the performance lost by not speculating.

I can't help but think that the mill architecture gets a lot of hype from a lot of people that don't know very much about computer architecture. There have been lots of great ideas that didn't pan out for general purpose computing, and I'm not sure that this vaporware architecture deserves to be thought about.

<comment><USER6> > This is great, except for that existing CPUs don't stall after issuing a > load. Scoreboarding + prefetch are together capable of more than this > "deferred load" [...]

Except existing CPU's spend a lot of die space and power budget on doing speculative execution to hide the stall, the point of a deferred load is you don't need all this hardware to extract the same performance.

> and require less work from the compiler. [...]

Three words: static single assignment. If you can work out the dataflow of a function you already have everything you need to order loads in the most efficient way possible, this is why all of Mill Computing's work has been around LLVM because LLVM IR _forces_ SSA by design. Hell, your compiler doesn't even need to think about the ordering if it relies on LLVM to do the native code generation, because the Mill backend is supposed to do all of this for you.

> It's potentially a neat idea to include the number of cycles until load > retire in the instruction, but it's a joke to pretend that it's higher > performance than what x86 does and will get you back all the performance > lost by not speculating.

Deferred loads alone aren't there to beat x86 in terms of performance, they're there to avoid needing all the costly out-of-order hardware while avoiding memory stalls that previous statically scheduled/in-order machines incur. There's other features in the architecture to bring better performance, but that's all around the VLIW-like design.

<comment><USER15> As far as I know (and I don't know much because I'm not a compiler guy) LLVM (and most compilers) doesn't keep everything in SSA form. Any value whole address has escaped (most of the things not in the C stack and evem some local variables as well) must treated as memory. I think that not automatic, not recently used variables would also be the values that would benefit the most from deferred loads. So IIRC Mill has hardware to help with aliasing but it wouldn't in fact plug out of the box in LLVM.

Do the Mill guys even have an LLVM backend yet? Or even any compiler at all?

<comment><USER4> I believe the latest we've heard is that their LLVM backend is mostly working but still pretty buggy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Europas European Startup Awards 2010 – The Winners and Finalists - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/11/20/the-europas-european-startup-awards-2010-the-winners-and-finalists/

<comment><USER2> I wish for the Flattr guys (winner best Startup010) "ThePirateBay gone legit" and for the European startup scene, the same fate as for the (quite controversial in their time) Kazaa guys, which then started... Skype.</comment>


Paul Allen's giant plane takes shape in the desert, but its market is unclear - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/paul-allens-giant-plane-takes-shape-in-the-desert-but-its-market-is-unclear/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those interested in learning about the many parties involved in the launch market this gives a pretty good general overview. I thought this article did a good job of going over not only Paul Allen's foray, but also the other well known (SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA) and lesser known (Rocket Lab) start ups. It also speaks a little about how the satellite market has changed in 5 years as well.

As an aside I find it interesting that there is a definite trend of men who have made their wealth in through computer science competing now in this area.</comment>


How to Hide In Ikea - <AUTHOR> http://dornob.com/the-contemporary-art-of-commercial-camouflage/

<comment><USER2> Off topic Reddit nonsense

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but this is it's second appearance at HN, and I think this time it's on someone else's blog = spam. Flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I pity any Ikea customer that happened to be on hallucinogens that day.</comment>


Building a Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode - <AUTHOR> https://praxis.fortelabs.co/building-a-second-brain-in-emacs-and-org-mode-faa20ae06fc <comment><AUTHOR> Be sure to read the second post in the series here, which dives deeper into particular configurations:

[https://medium.com/@mwfogleman/implementing-a-second- brain-i...](https://medium.com/@mwfogleman/implementing-a-second-brain-in- emacs-and-org-mode-ef0e44fb7ca5)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you take notes when reading a book? - <AUTHOR> For example, I'm currently reading Designing Data-Intesive Applications and am taking notes digitally on OneNote (one page per chapter).<p>How do you guys do it? <comment><USER2> This might sound nuts, but I have settled on a three step process that mostly involves keeping most notes in my head.

 _Step 1_ is using the method of loci (MoL) to memorize up to 30 things throughout the day. For context, MoL is a strategy where you visualize things you want to remember in a room. I have one "room" for each day of the month, with 10 spots in a room, and will often visualize up to 3 things in a spot (so 10 x 3 = 30 a day). I have 4 paths that each lead between 7 rooms, one path per week.

 _Step 2_ is just keeping a page of notes per day in a planner. This is really helpful for jotting miscellaneous things down (like future things to read, possible connections).

 _Step 3_ is that often as I'm thinking back over notes from step 1, or reading new things, I'll want to sort of "put it all together", or write up something that cuts across multiple days. There, I'll often refer to my planner, and might start a spreadsheet to keep references on.

I think the problem before was that I'd wanted to write useful longterm notes when first learning / studying something. But that's probably when I'm least qualified to take really insightful notes. It's been nice to let things marinade, and focus on keeping the "building blocks" around!

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I try to read books/papers on mac as it's faster to google and go deep into things I don't get. Select text (a+space and it queries selected text on google).

Then it's trivial to open any note (with alfred) from my wiki ([https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge)) & edit it under appropriate topic.

On the go, I usually note things down in Telegram saved messages and later transfer it to wiki or turn it into articles. Have macro to open saved messages instantly ([https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my- ios#widgets](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-ios#widgets)). Or I just pass it via share sheet.

[https://excalidraw.com](https://excalidraw.com) & Figma is also great for visual thinking (tying concepts together).

After I read a book, I review it in goodreads and recently realized that more useful reviews aren't just thoughts on the book but are summaries. So I try summarize my learnings from a book there.

For fiction books, I usually listen to it & Audible has nice highlighting feature but mostly the same applies. Important stuff gets noted in Telegram.

And as for apps I use PDF Expert to read PDFs on mac (love multi tab support), the Files app to read PDFs on iOS. And epub I read via Books app on mac/ios.

I'm quite excited for [http://holloway.com](http://holloway.com) because all books should be online by default. PDFs/Epub is archaic and lose ability to link to specific parts of a book instantly. i.e. just looks at this ([https://www.holloway.com/g/alice-in- wonderland](https://www.holloway.com/g/alice-in-wonderland)), so much nicer to read.

What would be even more amazing is when you can take ability to note under any line in a book (as Holloway already lets you), and see everyone's notes for any line/chapter of the book/paper you are reading. Similar to what [https://fermatslibrary.com](https://fermatslibrary.com) is doing.

<comment><USER4> I have a similar workflow for adding content to my wiki ([https://github.com/davidgasquez/handbook](https://github.com/davidgasquez/handbook)) from the computer.

On the go I'll add a task to taskwarrior and get reminded when I sync it from the PC.

>What would be even more amazing is when you can take ability to note under any line in a book (as Holloway already lets you), and see everyone's notes for any line/chapter of the book/paper you are reading.

I haven't used it but sounds similar to what [https://web.hypothes.is/](https://web.hypothes.is/) is trying to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't take notes. I find it distracting. I end up absorbing less information. The few times I did try taking notes, I rarely referred back to them, and when I did, found that they weren't very valuable. I've got a good memory, and I'm willing to reread something to absorb more, but notes have never helped me.

Not criticizing note-taking; just offering another perspective.

<comment><USER6> If you just write notes down, that is what will happen. Your note pile ends up being a graveyard of stuff you don't even know you forgot (but will never rediscover or reread) and stuff that's still nicely in your mind.

One key strategy to avoid this kind of note graveyard forming is to interlink notes. That way seeing a note can essentially lead you to wiki-binging through old ideas, trains of thought or re-stumbling on reference you thought was interesting once upon a time.

The value of interlinked notes is showcased by the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann's notetaking system which he used to rediscover things he'd forgotten. His knowledge base consisted of ~90,000 index cards that were apparently worth referring to because of the wiki binge type effect his hyperlinking system allowed.

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the- zettel...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten- method-1)

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction- ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction- ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use the excellent Ulysses writing app that allows me to take notes in multimarkdown. I use it as a slide over app so I can just slide from the edge of the screen while reading and never lose sight of the book. I create a sheet for each chapter.

</comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, reading a book and knowing How to Read a Book is a skill.

I highly recommend this book for that reason: [https://www.amazon.com/How- Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book- Classic-Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been scriblling points on 3x5 in note cards which I use as a bookmark. Might go through several notecards in a book. I then summarize/transfer over to my Notion workspace.

Interesting in seeing what others do!

</comment><comment><USER10> On the front inside cover, I write the page number of each thing I find interesting/ useful. Especially the diagrams.

Then on the page to the right of that I jot down the things I want to learn more about and the ideas I come up with.

</comment><comment><USER11> If it's important for me to memorize, the only way that works for me is writing down what needs memorizing, like with a pen and paper.

</comment><comment><USER12> A project I want to build some day is a tool that pulls highlights from kindle / play books and turns them into a morning email to help recall. If you steal the idea I'll be your first customer :)

<comment><USER13> Looks like this will be right up your alley, then: [https://readwise.io/](https://readwise.io/)

<comment><USER12> That looks perfect. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use voice dictation on my phone to transcribe notes into a Google doc, along with the page number or timestamp (for audiobooks)

My note taking process used to be either whatever I could fit in the margin (not much) or require a separate note book.

Switching to my phone has been seriously transformative. Not only is voice dictation way faster than my handwriting, but I can do it in many more contexts because I always have my phone with me. I can also take much more detailed notes in context where handwriting isn't ideal (like a jerky bus ride).

<comment><USER15> Is there any way I could talk to you a bit more about your note taking process? My email is ishan2 at gmail. Would really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I believe strongly in continuing education. I have interests in literature, philosophy, science, math, computing. I study and take notes differently depending on my purpose and goals.

My tech research mostly collects snippets of information. Not terribly worried about attribution of any given phrase, fact or passage as paraphrase or quote from the author (though I am always careful to note the source, mostly so I can find it again ;)

For academic and thought research I am extremely careful. I take notes, riff on what I read [1], and take care to quote accurately.

Throughout all of this productivity, my reading is surprisingly the same. I filter every text with a narrow set of categories [2], and if it doesn't fit into one of these categories, then the text should be quoted (see?) or I'm not interested in the text (yet).

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23476470)

[2]: Marginalia: Sign-posting a text [https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/139g4uFXFCL1ZYrcWKTShbPsw...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/139g4uFXFCL1ZYrcWKTShbPswnV6ti7ost_584pC9QmU/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER17> Trello all day. Each book gets its own list. Each item in the list is something I want to remember.

Yes you have to write it out but this cost:

1\. forces you to only save what matters 2\. encourages you to compress the info which requires you to understand its essential parts

I record the notes as I encounter noteworthy things. At the end of a book the trello list is effectively a compressed book and index to the actual text.

<comment><USER18> I do like Trello. Currently moving over to Notion to tag all bots and items so that ideas naturally coalesce into something new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I write the problematic parts on a whiteboard (well, the wall because I have whiteboard paint and it makes note taking a fun activity actually) and after a chapter I read my notes again together with the book hoping now it's clear. If necessary, I will jot down my notes into a Google doc. I found it exceptionally helpful when learning frameworks to write a blog post even if noone will ever read it on how I figured out things, it basically cements what I learned.

One of the best univ classes I went to allowed a single handwritten page "cheat sheet" at the exam -- in reality, the only one cheated was yourself because if you actually put in the work of condensing the semester into a single sheet then you usually learned the material during the process... sneaky.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this depends on: why are you taking notes?

Sometimes I'll take notes to help me process and remember things. These can literally be throwaway, as in the piece of paper gets thrown away at the end of the day, or the TextEdit window gets closed without saving. So I focus on the material rather than organization on the page, or even legibility/grammar.

Sometimes I'll be very focused on one thing and whenever I encounter a tangent/sidequest, I'll scribble it down so I can feel comfortable ignoring it until I've finished reading.

Sometimes I'll take notes for my own future reference. Sometimes I'll take notes I'd like to share with other people. Those are different goals and I'll do different things.

</comment><comment><USER21> I argue in the margins, as we've done for millennia.

<comment><USER22> But what if "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain"?

<comment><USER23> Then you write that and wait until Andrew Wiles (version 2.0) figures out how to prove it for himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I underline and write in the margin, using my own symbolic shorthand for common words. I list all the symbols on the title page so I can decipher it in 5 years.

At the end of a chapter, I go back and make long-form notes in markdown, then commit to a git repo.

</comment><comment><USER25> Personal/private notes:

org-mode. With org-noter when the reading material is compatible (most PDFs and EPUBs), otherwise manually written (copied, lightly edited if needed) headings. Manual notes follow the same hierarchy as the material (part, chapter, section etc.).

Shared notes:

If the notes are few and small, and the source material supports annotations (PDFs and other documents), then in-document annotations. Otherwise I make a separate document that can be rendered into its own PDF/HTML/EPUB forms and edited and maintained by others. This can be in the form of an office document, an org-mode file, a Sphinx or AsciiDoc project, whatever suits my collaborators.

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone is interested in reading books in foreign languages, and then easily adding notes that are automatically translated, I would be interested in hearing from you.

Here is a demo, one of the most famous Japanese books ever: Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki.

[https://public.do/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki/](https://public.do/kokoro-by- natsume-soseki/)

You can select a word to capture it, it gets translated for you, and then you can build Anki cards to review your notes.

It's still under development, but you can see the concept.

The goal is first and foremost: mobile-first so no browser plugins.

If you have thoughts, I would be happy to hear them: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER27> I create a summary document for every new book that I start. I copy and paste the title, authors, cover thumbnail, description, and table of contents if I can find it inline. I print this 1-2 page document and use it as a starting point to add hand written notes.

If I'm reading an eBook, I use the highlighter feature and review my previous chapter highlights before starting a new chapter.

For paper books I usually have a stack of plain paper bookmarks that I cut from blank index cards (1.5" x 5"). I write keywords on the bookmark as I read so I normally have a tersely annotated bookmark for each finished book that I staple to my printed summary page.

</comment><comment><USER28> The idea is to write notes in my own words ([https://www.amazon.com/How-Take- Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes- Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y)) on roamresearch.com, instead of just highlighting the book/article like I do now.

But I have to say I feel like that is only worth doing if you're reseraching a topic that is important to you. Little value to take notes on the articles we read day to day here in HN and Reddit IMO.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a whole book on that ('How to Take Smart Notes'), which I highly recommend: [https://www.amazon.com/-/pt/How-Take-Smart-Notes- Nonfiction-...](https://www.amazon.com/-/pt/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction- ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=2942CZ2BXWXQQ&dchild=1&keywords=how+to+take+smart+notes&qid=1592800313&sprefix=how+to+take+smart%2Caps%2C294&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER30> Hands down one of my favorite (non fiction) books I read this year. The book is written by an academic, who I actually reached out to for a 1 on 1 consultation to help me with integrating Zettelkasten into my daily routine.

<comment><USER6> Ahrens' writing is amazingly dense. I don't think I've read a book that's that heavy to read apart from Aristoteles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Step 1: make highlights and inline comments in my ebook app as I go.

Step 2: batch export all the highlights and comments out and paste them into my notes app as a new note

Step 3: go through that note and highlight the ones that are the most valuable (i.e., progressive summarization)

Step 4: summarize and re-state those points as notes in my zettelkasten

I find this process really helps me keep track of the things that I find valuable without clogging up my notes with all the fluff. And the last step helps me build connections to other unrelated thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER32> Marginal notes. Occasional use of tiny Post-It flag thingies to mark stuff I want to be able to find again.

Sometimes I will grab a highlighter and mark the edges of pages to make it easier to find sections in a reference work. Possibly with short versions of the section names written next to them, possibly with several colors denoting different kinds of information and a color key written on the flyleaf.

</comment><comment><USER33> While reading I tried to come up with lots of questions which I am going to encounter in real life scenario like while reading chapter 5 first para, I come up with question "why replication is needed?" After finishing the chapter, these questions can become an anchor to build up the notes in my own language.

Notes also contains questions so that reviewing the content become better(recalling).

</comment><comment><USER34> Underline/circle directly in the book, write notes in the margins, etc. Then when finished reading it, go back through to find all the highlights/notes and write them in a permanent doc. That second phase has really helped my retention.

For permanent storage, I almost always use a personal, public blog, just in case someone else could find the notes useful...

<comment><USER35> Yep I do it in the same way. Mostly if I decide to read a book, I print it out buy the book. Then I use (), [] underline and .x. symbols to make it important and keep reading the book and after each chapter I reread the marked point and scratch off if it feels unimportant after reading the whole chapter amd ghen proceed on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've a book where I keep notes on the books I read. Most of the time, I re- read the notes from the the last reading when I pick up the book again which is a great memory refresher. It's works as great notes for the whole book when I need. I also make relationship maps to remember anything that has a lot of relationships.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've experimented with a few different methods (keeping a notebook next to me, Gdocs, etc.) but in the end I keep defaulting to just using notes on my phone because I don't like to have my laptop open when I'm reading and when I want to jot something down, I want to do it then and there

</comment><comment><USER38> I usually have a pencil with me while reading. I will add a 'N' letter next to the paragraph that is the key takeaway in the page. Once I finish reading a chapter, I will quickly skim through the markings and keep a note of it in Evernote. This helps me to remember a book much better.

</comment><comment><USER39> Hi!

I write a blog post. How?

I split the book by the headings section (not whole chapter), this is usually one or two pages. Then I try to explain what I understood in my own words. If the author used an example, then I come up with my example.

If the book is about programming, I put code on public GitHub.

After I finish a chapter, I reread my blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER40> I use a couple of different Mac apps. First is the Calibre that converts ePub to pdf so I can use the Highlights app for research. That I can then export to DevonThink3 for organizing and writing of ideas. My favorite writing app is Scrivener and usually the last in my workflow.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't like to desecrate the book, I use small stickies notes to take notes and put them near the margin.

</comment><comment><USER42> I use these things to bookmark interesting things. Usually I end up with 10-20 in each book I read. [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000SHU86Q/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000SHU86Q/)

</comment><comment><USER43> I circle, underline and star things that I feel were noteworthy directly in a book. One day when my son inherits my books I want him to know what I thought was interesting. I also write in the margins (or wherever there is space) if I must write something.

</comment><comment><USER44> I annotate inside the book. Great if you own the book and really annoying if you don't.

<comment><USER45> I agree. My solution FWIW is to use a pencil to put a small dot adjacent to the paragraph or sentence of interest and write the number of that page on the back inside cover. It allows other people to read my books without disfiguring them. The books that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I write in the margins and anywhere there is white-space.

From Sutton and Barton - Reinforcement Learning:

[https://imgur.com/a/wh6p8BP](https://imgur.com/a/wh6p8BP)

</comment><comment><USER47> I stopped this because it was just slowing me down too much. Takes both the fun and pace out of reading. There are way to many interesting books out there for that

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't take notes, but I put little colored arrow bookmark stickers pointing at the text on the page to come back to after I've finished reading.

</comment><comment><USER49> Taking a step back: Why take notes when reading a book?

Do you take notes for every book you read or just some?

</comment><comment><USER50> digitally doesn't work well, it'll stick more in your head if you use pencil and paper. my process is read something, try to summarize in plain english in my own words, repeat.

</comment><comment><USER51> As said in other comments, Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book is great for this.

I'll split it into three parts. First, you want to know what the book is about and whether it's worth reading. Second, your notes should summarize the core of it, so that as soon as you glance your notes, you understand what it's about. Third, and optionally, you want to criticize the book and compare it to similar books on the topic.

Before reading: Outline the book

Find out what kind of book it is - scientific, practical, philosophical, or historical. Some books, like Flow, are usually read by people for practical reasons, but it's philosophical in writing. The difference between scientific and philosophical is that philosophy expects no prerequisite knowledge, whereas scientific is unreadable without knowledge.

If it's a practical book, your notes should be focused around what to do. If it hasn't clearly explained what to do, then it's useless.

Get an overview of the book. Reading reviews or online summaries helps. Intro is great. Simplify it into one line what it really teaches you.

Skim the table of contents. Most books summarize a chapter at the end of each chapter or beginning. Get a feel of the skeleton of the book.

By now, you've skimmed the whole book, congratulations.

If it's a good book, it will tempt you read it in detail. If it's not, don't waste any more time on it. There are lots of books worth reading.

While reading: Terms and propositions

Put aside a section of your notes as a glossary of terms. This is extra useful for scientific books, where a term is often repeated, and philosophy, where different books use the same term to mean different things. Business books can be especially frustrating without defining terms.

Every time you see a new term, write it down in the glossary. You'll know a term is important when several paragraphs and figures are written to define it. The term might act as a pillar, supporting a whole chapter at times.

Next, write down propositions. What is the book trying to explain? A good book will be extremely dense - several propositions in just a few paragraphs. Some bad self-help books might only have one per chapter. The harder books will usually be most information dense and hardest to read, and this identifies them. Read them slowly.

After reading: What's the point of the book?

If you have properly read the book, it should elevate your knowledge to the same level as the author. Now you should criticize the book. If you have nothing to criticize, it either said little, or your understanding is not good enough.

Is the book true?

Check if the book is understood properly and dispute is not contentious. If criticizing, show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical. Otherwise what she says is not false, but incomplete.

What now? How does this change you? What do you do? If the book is practical, it must be acted upon. Otherwise, it is incorrect. Ask yourself why you don't act upon it.

This last part is actually quite exhausting to do and I recommend you skip it if you're still new or if the book just wasn't that good.

</comment><comment><USER52> i love Workflowy! but find it takes me out of the moment a bit.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have to read a lot as a programmer? - <AUTHOR> Not just code, I mean a lot of text in English. Can you rely mostly on videos, if you have a hard time reading, and minimize reading to small amount of text? <comment><USER2> There's some you can learn from videos and other tutorials, but really you need to read books. You need to read books and you need to write a lot of code. Coding teaches you how to be better at coding, but reading books teaches you what your code actually means. Reading is where you learn the terminology you need to know to really understand what's going on in your code. It also helps you to be a better communicator with other programmers. Programmers who don't read books can't communicate to other programmers what their programs do. Being a good communicator is part of being a good programmer. So yes, read books, lots of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Over a career - one will learn lot of frameworks, languages, technologies, tools - before jumping to code - there is sometimes dense documentation to go through. At time this can be daunting as things might be poorly documented (eg mongoose documentation).

A handy trick is to make small diagrams of your readings - it can be as simple as writing a timing diagram of calls while reading documentation. This kinds of expands on what one reads - I found them really useful. Also, first search in google images - eg: you want to understand "angular architecture" \- usually first few of images will be very relevant to grasp things in a abstract way. By doing this first you get component names and how they are connected (by seeing the image) then you read documentation - you kind of know what documentation is trying to tell now.

Understanding meaning of words are important if you are non-native speakers. Say there is a word you have never come across eg: convolution neural networks. One needs to know 'convolution' means then 'neural networks' before going any further.

So the key takeaway I feel is how quickly can one abstract new concepts or relate them to what is known or build new models of understanding.

<comment><USER3> \+ add google dictionary extension on chrome - double click any word will tell meaning of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, there is a lot of reading involved. Educational sources, bug reports, commit messages, logs, documentation and code itself, these all require reading and are things you have to do multiple times a day.

As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific? I'm a very slow reader myself (can listen to an audiobook faster than I can read the same book) and it's not something that's ever worried me professionally.

<comment><AUTHOR> > As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific?

I read slow, like you mentioned, and have lack of confidence in my ability to read.

</comment></comment><comment> a-saleh As I slowly advance in my career, I have realized I need to write a lot as well. Most of the conversations within my teams are done in text:

* irc chat * slack chat * email * wiki with shared information * issues * specification documents

My greatest achievement past three months was not a piece of code but a 2700 word document describing our new testing process.</comment>


How to find a partner safely? - <AUTHOR>

My startup is 90% ready. I need another developer to focus on the development and I will focus on marketing or a marketing person and I will focus on the rest of the development. Or a person who will bring an angel. I desperately need a partner because I cant do it all by myself but at the same time I dont feel comfortable to share everything with a total stranger. Anybody has an idea how to protect myself,my startup with a new partnership? What can be the process to get a partner safely? <comment><USER3> In brief, I would look to your community, whatever that is. Ideally you live in a place with an active development/startup culture with lots of talented and motivated people, and all you have to do is lean out your window and ask technical questions. But it's not 1998 anymore.

Do you have an alumni group or some kind of online social network you rely on? When something big is at stake, it's risky to trust a complete stranger. You may both have the best of intentions, but they could end up being not having the skills or (maybe more importantly) the personality you need.

Craigslist, from my experience, leads to more misses than hits. LinkedIn is just beginning to be a non-worthless social network.

If you've put the feelers out and no one has emerged, one last resort could be to get some college interns. Some colleges will give credit to students as long as you fill out the paperwork to call your job an internship. I did this in New York City long ago. We had to pay minimum wage, but in return got an intelligent, hard-working person who (for better or worse) was not vested in the project long-term

</comment><comment><USER4> I am working on a hardware project and was in the same position you are.. Finding a partner came from an unexpected angle for me.

Since I had no idea what I was doing and I was learning everything from the web on the fly after a while I realized that just talking to the right people helps a lot.

I reached out to a few people that were in the same position I was a few years back and now running successful companies in the industry (old successful kickstarter projects are a great source but, just following the news in your field helps too) - I really reached out just to get advice and to learn from them.

One of them, really liked the idea and offered to help me bring it to market.. it was a no brainer for me, it's been 1.5 months since, he helped me get the patent pending and now working with me really hard to make this happen...

So to sum up I really think that if you just reach out, not even with the agenda of finding a cofounder/partner but just to get advice from the right people you'd be surprised how many people are willing to help, and, you might even find a partner that will be passionate about the idea just as you. -because your goal is not find someone who's just qualified, you need someone who is also passionate about it at least as much as you are.

Hope that helps...

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my side project. It started very small and it became advance in time. I have a full time job so this project is kinda secret from everyone which puts me into a position that I can not ask anybody publicly.

It is already being used by a company that I developed for. I see that there is a potential for going public.

I am good at creating but I am not good at marketing. I can do the marketing if I need to but doing everything is sufficating. I've been already pushing 4-5 AM days. That's why I decided to get a partner.

I am not sure how hard to find the right partner but I guess the real problem is how to share, how to calculate the value of my side project, how to protect myself without insulting the partner.

HN was the first place to start my search, let's see what time brings.

I am located in NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finding a business partner is just like finding a life partner. You have to start out with a business date and see if you can take the relationship to the next level. Running a business is all about conviction and hardwork. You will go through lots and lots of ups and downs and for better or worst your business partner will be there to share your burden. From your post, it appears you are a coder. Are you a good marketer as well? In partner - <USER2> definitely want to look for something that you don't have. That person should be bringing you something that you cannot do. If you need marketing help, try your local SCORE. They are usually very good and are completely Free.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have never heard score before but I will definitely dig into that.

<comment><USER5> The SCORE is Service Corps Of Retired Executives backed by SBA and they help you via email. Their service is free and you can have a Marketing Executive (As oppose to an intern) help you via email for your plans etc. You shold definitely take a look at it. What I am not clear is that if your idea is 90% ready then why not just test it to see if you get any traction? If you have users - I think the rest will really fall into place :)

I am assuming you don't really need a whole lot of marketing budget. Can you test your idea using adwords? For about $500 dollars, you can get fairly targeted customers and you can study their bheavior using analytics? Just a thought!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a very niche market and it wont be hard for me to get in touch with the possible users. But all of this is a full time work. I already have a full time work and putting another full time work hours for development. From my past experiences, trying to do everything by yourself just doesn't work. So that's why I thought partnership would be better. These are my last steps before quitting my fulltime job. That's why I am trying to get as much help as I can while I am still safe.

<comment><USER5> Okay - that sounds good. Although, one thing I forgot to mention is - if you can - please stay away from angel investors who are non-value added.

The problem with non value added investors is that they may or may not know what you are trying to create (and how difficult it is or will be) so they will get impatient very fast and will run for shelter at the first sign of trouble. They are known for running start-ups down!

Instead, find a technical invester. Having an investor who is technically sound and who understands your concept well will be much harder to convince but in long run you will have great return from him/her.

There is nothing better than a technical expert committing money in your start up. It will instantly validate your idea and I think that is the first step to a great success.

In my humble opinion, you should leaverage you leaving your job based on an investment from a technical investor.

And, trust me - I know how difficult it is to have a technical investor commit their seed money but also trust me that if you can pull it - you will be a very happy founder even after leaving your job.

Best of Luck :)

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been very useful for me, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anybody interested in more info please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com with a brief explanation why you are interested. I will send you the demo link.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you provide any additional details about your startup and what it will do?

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are you located?</comment>


Apple reports $9.5 billion second quarter profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/04/23/apple-reports-9-5-billion-second-quarter-profit/ <comment><USER2> Official Apple press release: [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-Reports- Seco...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-Reports-Second- Quarter-Results.html)

65% more iPads sold and 7% more iPhones sold than in last year's FQ2. Mac sales remain stable, while the rest of the PC market continues to shrink.

Profit margin decreases as Apple offers cheaper tablets (iPad mini) and phones (iPhone 4 & 4S). Profit margin on Macs is also lower because of retina screens, but Mac sales represent only a small part of Apple's income, it's not significant on the whole.

<comment><USER3> it's actually impressive that they sold 37.4M iPhones this quarter considering they sold an amazing 47.8M iPhones last quarter. Compare that to last years numbers.

Q1 2012 = 37M iPhone, 15.4M iPads

Q2 2012 = 35.1M iPhones, 11.8M iPads

Q1 2013 = 47.8M iPhones, 22.9M iPads

Q2. 2013 = 37.4M iPhones, 19.5M iPads

<comment><USER4> Really just mind-boggling numbers. Just the ability to ship that many. Mind you they are smaller-sized consumer products, still need a lot of factories making them though.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how it is all that impressive. Nokia has been shipping a million plus phones a day from a long time ago.

<comment><USER6> A few things here are impressive.

You have cleverly made the distinction of phones, rather than smartphones, in your assertion that Apple's supply chain isn't impressive in the act of shipping 0.6m iPhone/iPad devices each day for a quarter.

When all unit shipments are considered Nokia actually ships slightly fewer than 1m phones per day (2012 it was approx 340m units shipped) or 0.93m per day.

Apple doesn't manufacture phones, they manufacture smartphones. Same for a huge portion of Samsung's unit shipments. Same for a small portion of Nokia's shipment, but the real grist here is in how much easier it is to make a dumbphone than a smartphone. It's practically prefabbed for you.

Here's a dumbphone teardown: <http://www.formymobile.co.uk/3310disassembly.php>

Here's an S5 teardown: [http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S+4G+Teardown/...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S+4G+Teardown/4977/1)

Manufacturing and assembling a dumbphone is easy, comparatively. Fewer components overall. Nothing fragile or fiddly requiring human QA (wifi). Nothing expensive (gorilla glass, capacitive screen) which hasn't had 20 years of mass-production driving its margins up.

So that's impressive.

Also impressive is shipping different devices in these quantities each year. Apple currently manufactures and sells iPhone 5 (16, 32, 64GB), iPhone 4S (16, 32, 64GB), iPod Touch (16, 32, 64GB), iPad (16, 32, 64, 128GB) and iPad Mini (16, 32, 64GB). Judging by revenue ($180 per iPod sold), a big portion of the 5m iPods sold in the quarter were iPod Touch.

Also impressive, I think, is that every two years, Apple ignores what its supply chain can do and goes back to the same 10-15 people to ask what they can do to improve on an already high quality device. Then they gut the supply chain and build it again from the ground up to make the better device.

They're in a tock rather than tick year for a new iPhone, but that just means that their supply chain managers and fabrication designers are in a tick year, preparing factories for what it will take to build iPhone 6 _whilst iPhone 5.1 is still being shipped to 37 million people each quarter_.

In brief, the impressiveness here is in the complexity of the devices; the breadth of different devices being manufactured; and the philosophy that leads to innovation not just in design but manufacture.

This is also true of Samsung. They are accomplishing astonishing things with their supply chain and, unlike Nokia, genuinely do ship well over 1m phones a day, of many more varieties than Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It feels like Apple is now on the defensive by announcing a buyback initiative and a higher dividend. They realized their growth peaked from insane highs and they have no new product to give it another boost in the short term. Very smart move.

However, I will say that they really need a killer new product by 2015, which is when their stock buyback initiative ends. Repurposing the iOS in various form factors such as the iPhone, iPod, and iPad has run its course.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by "they really need a killer new product"?

They're the most profitable company in the world. What pressure are they under?

<comment><USER9> The issue is that they don't have a big moat like Google, Facebook and Amazon do. Competitors are nipping at their heels(the big decline in margin from a year ago shows it) and one bad iteration of their products is enough to turn the tide against them.

<comment><USER10> I would not use Facebook and Amazon when comparing margins and profit. Both of these two companies aren't even in the same universe right now with Apple. Google is the only company that can play with Apple and Microsoft.

Last time I checked, Amazon posted in Q4 of 2012 around $90M (Million) in net income while Facebook did about $60M in Q1 of 2013 compared to Apple's $9.5B (Billion!!) in net income.

What drive me absolutely crazy is the fact that it would take Amazon/Facebook well over a decade to even come close to what Apple makes in three months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems they sold more iPad Mini's and their profit dropped. I imagine it would be even worse for their profit if they ever released an "iPhone Mini" or whatever that cheap iPhone everyone talks about would be named.

<comment><USER12> It's a tough position. Do they also go after countries where subsidized plans aren't common by making a cheaper iPhone (Europe/India/etc)? The iPhone 4 which is 2 years old is still around $400 unsubsidized. Or do they try to keep high margins and let competition (which lets face it, is Samsung) dominate those markets.

<comment><USER13> _"The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly," says Jobs. "Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late '80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens."_

<comment><USER3> nic try but..

Cook+Ive+Schiller,Cue,etc. >>> Ballmer.

<comment><USER14> Talk about damning with faint praise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> iPhone growth has slowed: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/23/4258068/apple- posts-9-5b-p...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/23/4258068/apple- posts-9-5b-profit-on-43-6b-in-revenue)

<comment><USER16> I think it's because their iphone 4S was so good that most people weren't willing to "upgrade". It's getting hard to justify buying a new phone every year considering the great advancements made to them in the past few years.

<comment><USER17> the 4s was so good, and the 5 has been very very "meh"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are they going to do with their massive bank account?

Maybe something in the services sector (not directly dependent on a piece of hardware)...

Do a GE? Become a bank? Buy Disney?

<comment><USER2> A lot of Apple's stash can't be spent freely, with a lot of it in Braeburn Capital[1] and set aside in tax havens[2]. To use those funds would mean sacrificing a lot of it in taxes. They haven't been willing to do so in the past, but today Apple announced it will return $100 billion to shareholders in the next few years[3]. Last year, Apple also launched a program in which it matches employee donations to charities, up to $25,000 a year per employee.

Of course, there will still be plenty left to build new offices, open new retail stores, and acquire companies[4] – as they have done in the past.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital>

[2] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9829894/Apple- shelters-almost-1bn-a-week-from-US-tax-man.html)

[3] "Apple More than Doubles Capital Return Program – Total of $100 Billion to be Returned to Shareholders by End of 2015" [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-More-than- Do...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-More-than-Doubles- Capital-Return-Program.html)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> White dwarf collapse down to a neutron star. Sad.

</comment><comment><USER9> The real news is that their margins seems to have shrunk dramatically from 48% to 38% and profit is down 18% from the year ago quarter.

Looks like they're facing pressure and are dropping prices to maintain sales.

<comment><USER20> To be clear: this is _great_ news for anyone who isn't an Apple shareholder. If you're a fan of the hardware, it's getting cheaper! If you like the other brands, iOS's margins are shrinking and competition is working! It's a win-win all around. The kind of profit's Apple's been making over the last half decade really aren't a good thing, even for Apple. They can barely spend it, and that money could be driving growth elsewhere.

<comment><USER21> I was with you until you said that amazing profits aren't a good thing, even for Apple.

Yes, the amount of money is more than what Apple can realistically spend but they can give that money to shareholders who could invest that money in other ventures. That's an amazing result of great profits.

<comment><USER20> How is that different from not taking that money from consumers (or investors) in the first place? If a consumer gives Apple $1 to hold for N months before Apple hands it over to a shareholder, that is clearly _less effective_ than the consumer simply giving that dollar to the investor in the first place (e.g. by dropping it in the stock market).

I'm not saying that "Apple doesn't deserve its profits". I'm saying that past a certain point, the marginal value to society of huge profits drops to zero, and that Apple is past that point.

<comment><USER21> _"the marginal value to society of huge profits drops to zero, and that Apple is past that point"_

It wasn't a discussion about value to society. It was discussion about too much money being a bad thing for Apple, which I disputed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Time to pay the employees more.

<comment><USER23> Share buyback will do that for many Apple employees.

<comment><USER22> If I have a penny every time I hear this...</comment></comment></comment>