I'm not sure why people find the 401k changes confusing, here is how it works:
The employee defers up to 18K (IRS limit), MSFT matches 50% of it, which is up to 9K.
Previously they contributed 50% of the first 6% the employee deferred = a maximum of 3% of the salary. So for anyone who makes less than 300K (9K / 0.03), this means a higher match from MSFT.
I don't get the big deal with free OS X updates. Apple sells hardware at a premium and you get the software with it. You can't buy Apple software, so why should you be able to buy software upgrades? It should have always been free, just like iOS upgrades are free.
The comparison isn't germane anyway. Apple charges $20-30 for something Microsoft calls a "service pack", which they've always given away for free. I just downloaded Windows 8.1 -- no cost. Amazing how these guys spin stuff and people just eat it up.
Yup - making it sound like paying for software is bad. Considering how long Windows 7 is lasting me, it was worth every penny since I can transfer it between devices!
When you put it that way it doesn't sound nearly as impressive:
Real World:
A) Upgrading the software on our hardware costs money.
B) Upgrading the software on our hardware does not cost money.
Reality Distortion Field:
A) Our software upgrades cost money.
B) Our software upgrades are free! (Look how nice we are now!)
In a way, it reminds me of enterprise updates and services...
My NAS is about 4 years old now, yet I'm still getting brand new software for it, because making that available to me as a brand-loyal customer comes at no extra cost to the manufacturer, because the value is in the upcoming hardware.
(Additionally, I'm less inclined to upgrade my old software when I'm forced to purchase hardware to get access to the same software later anyway)
This is a great idea (assuming that the budget exist), because it takes care of retention, not just recruiting.
I'd split the bonus between the two employees, and have it stop if either leave the company. This way both employees (who might have some influence on one another) have an incentive to keep each other happy at that company. This can boost the retention effect of this strategy.
I'd argue that HN has a built-in mechanism for determining what's interesting to its users. If a Bitcoin related story gets voted up to appear in the top page every day, then maybe it should be there.
This. There's been so much talk about curation/deletion of posts lately. Letting the algorithm do it's job is the only way to determine what's HN worthy in my view.
There is value in curating HN. People come to HN because it has a reasonably high signal to noise ratio in a certain realm. Highly charged topics tend to drive upvotes, even if it's just a 'like' or a, 'yeah, that's important, I'll up-vote it'. I didn't really start visiting HN for politics or shocking stories; those tend to disproportionately draw upvotes. I'm not in favor of downmodding non-tech articles, but there's something to be said for those who do.
There are more important things in the world than Bitcoin, but I'm happy to see a bitcoin article, perhaps two, on the front page anytime something interesting is happening.
What's worse, as I understand the algorithm's explanation here previously, flagging stories that are much upvoted counts against the flagger. So if the attempt to flag it off fails, those who tried will be penalized.
Disclaimer: I have no idea if that explanation is true. But if so, then you don't want to be the kid with his finger in the dike.
The difference here might be that people who own bitcoin have a financial interest in keeping interest in bitcoin up, so they form a kind of implicit voting cartel, regardless of the real interestingness of the items?
No, there aren't downvotes. If 20% of users really love something, and 80% hate it (assuming they only use flagging for spam) it will still keep making the top page.
The guidelines suggest that people flag for spam or off-topic:
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Some people (but not me) flag all Bitcoin articles. Other people appear to flag many of them.
Bitcoin is fascinating. Lots of the technical stuff is poorly understood. Lots of the economics stuff is poorly understood. Unfortunately most of the threads are more heat than light, so I understand why people do flag Bitcoin threads.
It's interesting that the flagging rights would be removed instead of being ignored.
I thought the flagging system used a scale of importance based on the users history. If you show good history of flagging, your action is more important. Same goes if you show poor history of flagging.
This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account. To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control.
Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out):
1. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use yourname@gmail.com, but yourname@yourdomain.com.
2. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all emails to it.
If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need to get locked out again...).
Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server.
It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your account back.
Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time). It works great.
I used to own and manage my own mail server when I had to do it for my business back in the day. I had to be up to date in all involved email server management and its perks anyway, so it wasn't a lot of extra work. Now it would be. For a normal email user, it would be a nightmare.
I'm the kind of person who's very disrupted by having a ton of small tasks in the background all the time. Maintaining your own email server adds a bunch of them, even if you are already knowledgeable (keeping your domain(s), storage & redundancy, having to maintain a server with good uptime and with a lot of security concerns - it's online and it broadcasts its IP in headers, it's immediately spotted as running an email server and targeted to be made a spam-relay or worse).
If you're not even knowledgeable about it, the amount of stuff you need to learn and be familiar with is ridiculous. Maybe they don't even occur to you off the top of your head now, but the amount of little things one learns over the years about server maintenance is massive and a lot of it is absolutely necessary to run an email server with guarantees. Having to "insource" all that shit work is something I've been trying to avoid but I'm afraid I will have to do. I rent, this means sometimes I have to move and keeping servers 365/24/7 is a problem. Typical home connections are rather shitty for an email server in terms of uptime - you'd have the occasional email silently not arriving (depending on sender retry config) and also the occasional bounce (server coming back up but not properly - happens) and that doesn't look good for serious communications this day an age. And like that, a large number of concerns both particular and common to each email user.
Having backups (also involves shit work but not as much) mitigates the problem but for some of us, simply to stop receiving email at a certain address for a couple of days can cause a lot of trouble.
I agree with you. There are quite a few commercial webmail/imap/pop providers, though. I've been using one for years now. I refuse to do free email since I lost my yahoo mail over a decade ago, and I like the peace of mind of knowing I can call up some someone for support.
1) Spam filtering. The Google spam filters are likely going to be orders of magnitude better than anything you run in-house.
2) You value your time. Some people don't, it's not really worth arguing this point. But it is a reason running a mail server is a bad idea for most people.
Orders of magnitude is an exaggeration. My account is very visible and very old, and gets 6-700 spam deliveries a day. Plain vanilla spamassassin catches 93% of those, and a little perl filter I wrote gets me to 98-99%. I get a handful of unwanted messages each day. That's just one order of magnitude from perfect; and I know for a fact gmail isn't perfect.
And #2 is just wrong, sorry. I spend minutes a week doing anything at all related to maintenance on that box (I use it far more regularly for productive purposes, though). If you can handle running a linux box from a console, you can learn to do it too. Or don't, it's up to you. But telling me I don't value my time is just out of line.
Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your post:
>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time).
For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot (and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do well.
Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is different now.
Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness, a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're running.
GMail isn't perfect. I usually get at least one spam per day, usually for stuff which should've been picked up by any decent spam filter (all caps, or "Hello I am Mr. Otogonoyu from Nigeria and I have US$4.8M to give you...")
I sometimes wonder if GMail lets these through for certain people, and relies on the "mark this as spam" button as some sort of mechanical turk...
Spam filtering got much easier for me once I started using different emails for each website and person. You can just route that particular address to /dev/null without affecting the rest of your emails.
There are paid services that relatively cheaply fix this by being your MX-record and forwarding mail to your own local SMTP server at a configurable port.
Yup. There are free ones too (for example, http://domainmx.net/ -- if you are willing to trust any third party, with your data, or can convince everyone emailing you to use encryption) but, even the pay services put us squarely back in the realm of not owning our data. I can use Gmail that way already (as intermediate storage for when my server's not running, and I can use + in addresses to sort incoming mail for local users).
What gets me is that email was one of the first peer-to-peer networks, and 90% of people, including myself, on residential links, are excluded from using it as designed. It seems more wrong to pay to solve a man-made problem. Free webmail is "good enough" if I'm just going to pull my messages offline and use it as a relay...
I remember there being "more internet" on my 28kbps modem... Port 25 and 80 worked from home, SMTP servers didn't reject mail from anyone on a residential ISP. I actually wrote a letter to my ISPs when they started blocking SMTP (yeah, I'm THAT guy)... Their argument was "but spammers," and they wouldn't make an exception for 1 out of a thousand. I even wound up switching providers over it. A year later everyone was doing it and there was no stand left to make. Spam is our "airport security" scarecrow (among others... copyright, porn, etc)... We'll undo the whole thing if we have to.
And so Gmail it is, until Email 2.0 comes around, and is new enough not to be intentionally broken, or I decide to shell out and license the real internet from my oversubscribed ISP that throttles uploads so noone can offer new and interesting services using their networks that might compete with them.
Don't get me started on QoS -- the neutrality killer... (We moan when people throttle BitTorrent, but when it's called QoS, it's "Smart"!)
Behold, de-evolution.
claps the disappointed clap... of the disappointed :o)
I agree, it's not necessarily a bad idea. I meant that most people (even most hackers) probably won't do it. I think the biggest issue is reliability, since if your SMTP server is down emails sent to you are rejected.
Meh. I had it running on a line at my home for years. It's been on Linode for the last 2.5 with near zero downtime (Linode had one outage in Texas, I've rebooted a few times, and did a distro upgrade once). Looking at moving it to AWS at the moment. Really, it's easy.
Most SMTP servers trying to send to you will try for many days before giving up. A typical configuration for a sender may get give a warning after the first 24 hours and then a bounce after another 48 hours, so normally you'll need to get your server back up and running within three days before you'll actually lose mail.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how SMTP works.
If you run and maintain your own SMTP server and it goes down, you won't be able to send email.
Everyone else will still be able to send email to you, and it will be delivered to you, and you'll be able to read it.
Now, if you break Postfix or something on your server and start bouncing emails then you can be in trouble, or if you mess up the DNS somehow.
But generally running your own mail server is a set it up and leave it alone type of affair. Any junior level hacker can cobble one together with guides online and have it up and running with no problems in a few hours.
Senders will keep mail for you in the queue only for a limited time, after a few days (IIRC) your mail will bounce. So if your host or ISP unfairly takes down your SMTP server and you have to go to court with them, you WILL lose mail.
Generally, running an SMTP server is quite a responsibility: not losing mail, not being exploited to send spam. What matters is not so much that you can set up in a few hours, but whether you want to take on that responsibility.
What? No. You just get another host somewhere (free amazon micro EC2, etc...) and point your DNS to that via your registrar. The only thing that can prevent mail service with longer than ~24 hours latency is a seizure of the domain.
No, the misunderstanding is yours. Postfix IS an SMTP server. SMTP servers connect to other SMTP servers to deliver mail. Your mail comes into an SMTP server just as it goes out an SMTP server.
ocelotpotpie meant that SMTP servers are designed to reliably queue mail and retransmit. If your mail server goes down, you don't lose mail. The senders will just try again later. Downtime on an SMTP server impacts delivery latency, not reliability.
Some paid services have a feature that forwards a copy of all of your sent messages to another address in real time. They do this by adding a BCC to every sent message. This allows you to have copies of every single message, both sent and received.
As a gadget freak and a hacker, I love this product. But I wonder how many people use a watch these days. Of course this is no ordinary watch, but when you have a supercomputer (in the shape of a phone) in your pocket, is it really needed? I suppose it's great for sports, but I'm not sure whether it has mass market potential (selling ~10K in a few hours is amazing, but isn't mass market yet). I'm actually on the fence with this one...
In general I think that watches will make a comeback only if they become the phone. Maybe Pebble will be well positioned to do that in the future (remember iPod -> iPhone?).
BTW It's nice to see a hardware company coming out of YC. Also nice to know that Eric is from Vancouver. Good luck Pebble! I'll buy one as soon as I stop being a starving bootstrapper.
To us the iPhone is a powerful computing device. But I think the truth is that most people who buy an iPhone, are really buying a fashion item. How many apps do most people actually have installed? And how many of them do they use regularly? Not a lot.
Now, people who wear watches these days also are also doing so to be fashionable. This is why I think this has mass market potential.
Most people watch video's and surf the web even without installing apps. This takes a lot more processing power than you might think. What they don't use is the GPU, but that's a small fraction of the cost of an iPhone.
I find the use of cell phones as pocket watches tacky. As a grad student, I've seen many speakers come in and open a cell phone in the middle of a talk to check their time usage, which I find utterly unacceptable.
Depending on your situation, look around a bit and see who's wearing a watch. It may not be the norm anymore, but it's still not an unusual thing to do at all. If nothing else, they are a good fashion accessory.
Don't you think 'utterly unacceptable' is a just little harsh, remembering that technology, fashion, and language are not fixed things and are always changing. I think it is quite acceptable that mobile phones have replaced wrist watches. Or maybe we should go back to giving lectures in a top hat and monocle, and checking our time usage with a fob watch? ;)
It's not the change in fashion that I'm taking issue with. Standing in front of a group of people with your attention fixed on a communication device is not good presentation. If it were glancing down at a clock sitting on a podium or table, that would be fine. This is not how it happens in practice. The biggest difference between a cell phone and a watch or other timepiece on a surface is that a cell phone requires interaction to extract the time. The extent of that interaction really doesn't matter. It goes from a momentary action of pulling a phone out and pressing a wake button to a nervous speaker confounded by a single button press and a screen too dim to see without making a spectacle of the action. This is the more common of the cell phone users I witness. The trouble is that every minute thing a speaker does is on display and just as a speaker expects (or hopes for) respect from the audience, I as an audience member expect the speaker to be attentive and professional.
So can it be done gracefully without my ire? Probably. I have yet to be pleasantly surprised.
I normally wear a watch, but still use my phone's stopwatch to keep time during a talk. I find that looking at a stopwatch during a presentation requires less mental distraction than: (i) keeping track of the time at which my talk started (I am talking about conference talks where the talks usually start a few minutes later than the scheduled time), (ii) looking at the current time and calculating how much time is remaining (it usually takes less than a second, but it is more time consuming that a tap on my phone).
The trick is to disable your phone's auto lock, open the stop watch and run it. That way, you can just tap the screen (I am assuming iphone like smart phone) to see the current time. I think this can be done as discreetly as checking my watch.
The biggest advantage of using a stopwatch is that it provides evidence of how long you have been speaking for. I have had cases where the previous speaker overshot his/her time and a session chair tried to get back on time by cutting time from my talk. In such cases, I have had to point to my stopwatch to say that I still have more than five minutes left. (Usually the talks are twenty minutes, so having five less minutes is a big deal). This (a session chair punishing me for the previous speaker's tardiness) has happened twice to me in the last year.
It was loaned, I had no idea it was so expensive. Good design, though. The stopwatch can be 'pumped up' in 5 minute increments to the time for one's talk. All there, nothing else to fiddle with.
Slight off topic, but I am always puzzled how most conference rooms fail to have a large clock at the back of the room such that a speaker can easily see how they are tracking for time.
If not at the back of the room, a large display at the foot of the stage facing the speaker - the way TED talks display the time to the speaker.
If meeting rooms can remember to embed projectors and speakers in a room, putting a clock on the back wall can't be that difficult.
Here is something ironic. I bet you many of DDG's users are hackers who use it for privacy reasons. The same hackers who rely on Google Analytics in their own websites. If DuckDuckGo grows to become more than a niche search engine, the same hackers who use it will have to reinvent Analytics somehow. This is reason #1 why DDG will stay small. Reason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View.
I don't understand your line of reasoning. Yes, Google Analytics is useful, and we would have to replace it if Google the company went out of business or discontinued it, but why is that going to motivate people to use Google the search engine?
I don't think we're in a bubble. How can the author compare the IPO of Facebook, a company with a billion users and billion dollar in revenue, to those IPOs of the late 90s of companies with no revenue and no viable plan to have any in the foreseeable future? In fact most IPOs since LinkedIn started the trend are of mature companies. That's not what happened in the bubble days.
It's true that more companies are being created and seed valuations are going up. But the selection process still occurs at the series A stage and crappy companies usually still can't pass that hurdle.
As for the JOBS act: if I'm not mistaken investment is capped at (the lowest of) $10K or 10% of the annual salary. I believe you even have to go through a course before you can invest though the JOBS act. Conversely, in the stock market you can invest as much as you want, without any training, and lose everything overnight.
The fact is that economy fluctuates. Whenever there's an upswing people scream bubble. It's a result of the traumatic effect of previous bubbles. But the irony is that real bubbles sneak on you. Hardly anyone sees them coming. So keep screaming bubble, it makes me feel safe.
"But the irony is that real bubbles sneak on you. Hardly anyone sees them coming. So keep screaming bubble, it makes me feel safe."
I think there is a bubble and I can accept the rest of your viewpoint, but this part is not true. Most people who have a well developed understanding of an industry and basic financial sense easily recognize bubbles and have always done so in the past. The people who it sneaks up on are those who listen to the media and listen to their friends who listen to the media. Bubbles typically start out of real economic growth. The problem is that they outgrow market indicators when you get too many lemmings playing the telephone game and ignoring fundamentals. From what I see around the bay area there seem to be a lot of indicators of this social dynamic playing out. There is lots of money chasing other money to nowhere but Ill agree its not as bad as it was in 2000.
"Most people who have a well developed understanding of an industry and basic financial sense easily recognize bubbles and have always done so in the past."
I try to listen to what people I trust from the industry say about the existence of a bubble. Pretty much all of them say that there is none. For example Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) consistently argues that there is absolutely no bubble (and he was around for the real bubble occurred). See 5:10 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xzcJnqcTP4
I think that often when markets become hot, people automatically think of a bubble, but that's not necessarily true. The internet has grown from 50 million users to over 2 billion and smartphones were non-existent in the 90s. So perhaps higher valuations for tech companies are justified due to higher potential.
The overheated market causes high valuation, which some argue, hurts investors. By saying bubble and discouraging unsophisticated investors from bidding, he probably stands to gain, not lose.
Everyone has a vested interest in what they deal with (or they're amateurs, hence I don't need their opinion). That doesn't mean they never say the truth.
Bubbles are not about believing in the wrong trends, they are about believing the trend will materialize too fast.
E.g. dot com boom: Basic premise was right, "software will eat the world", only the speed at which it would happen is overestimated.
This is what makes growth investing so difficult: Quite easy to predict solar or electric cars will take off, very hard to predict which company in the cambrian explosion will win.
Overall history has proven over and again that in aggregate, value investing beats growth investing for exactly this reason.
I believe the critic is more about the fact Facebook buying a company with no business plan, let alone revenue, for $ 1b, and how that reflects on the industry.
