9 ms·

Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

64 points by yotamoron 10y ago

SFJulie 10y ago
Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas... Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated. Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for instance are a poor choice for being innovative. "M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris."
- Lordarminius 10y ago
  > Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would question this assertion
  - prodmerc 10y ago
    I honestly can't understand how people spout some of this crap. I've also grown up in a region where education was overlooked, and living with complete fucking morons is not fun. Especially when these morons themselves think that education is worthless, which is a snowball effect meaning many of their children will be stupid, as well. On the other hand, it's easier to control them if you want to. Like they did in Medieval ages and earlier. Yeah, let's go back to that. The ROI is as indirect and long term as it gets, but it's real and it's massive.
    - ttoinou 10y ago
      You have to compare comparables situations : what could have been done different with the same resources involved ? Having an educational system is a sign that the society is wealthy and can afford it, but doesn't mean it's the best use of resources involved (thus it might have a bad ROI). You said education was overlooked where you come from, was there an educational system there ?
  - qb45 10y ago
    I think it's a matter of value being shaped by under- or oversupply. Speaking of illiteracy, there's an urban legend (not sure if true, anyone with access to data please check it) that literacy rate has actually dropped in the US throughout the 20th century, coinciding with increase of education "supply".
    - VLM 10y ago
      No data exists for that because the definition of illiteracy depends too strongly on the axe being ground. Everything from 1% to 66% illiteracy has been attempted to sell to people. It does seem that illiteracy clusters with various citizenship status, racial and other demographics, simple age distribution of a geographic location, and socioeconomic level to an extent that if you successfully filter those effects out you end up with a boring flat line at 100% literacy when ends up meaning nothing. The largest factor is literacy graphs and maps are basically a restatement of immigration data.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    I believe he is referring to postsecondary education specifically. In North America, K-12 exists to make one a functioning member of society. For what flaws it may have, it has overall shown to be beneficial. With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it's not clear if it has really worked out. In 1970, approximately 10% of the US population had a bachelors degree or higher. In 2017, that number is closer to 30%, yet incomes have remained stagnant throughout that entire period and job quality has declined. Not what you'd expect from the promised higher incomes and better jobs that people were willing to spend large amounts of money for.
    - SFJulie 10y ago
      I was indeed referring to post secondary education. If I was no troll, I would admit a soft tooth for Finland focus on early education and the amazing results they have doing so. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-schools-play-europe-top-education-system-finland-daycare https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-sc...
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    It's worth distinguishing between basic literacy (including basic math skills) and graduate-level specialty degrees. For one, if the labor market in a particular specialty becomes oversaturated, does that mean existing grads need to spend years retraining?
  - Shorel 10y ago
    He is talking about College/University education, and companies sometimes requiring advanced degrees for basic jobs. High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always. However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.
- SlySherZ 10y ago
  It depends a lot on which parts of education you're talking about. The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work. Learning stuff and interacting with other people is a nice way to spend their time. From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes the school almost irreplaceable. In other areas, like programming, you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn, as long as you have enough self discipline to keep yourself on track. There are tons of resources you can learn from and you can practice as much as you want. I did it and it has been working well so far. Overall, I wouldn't say we should ditch education at all, but we should seriously rethink the way it works. We can do much better than this.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > ...you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating. Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.
    - SlySherZ 10y ago
      I completly agree with the need to communicate and program with other people. From my experience, computer science degrees severely lack this communication trainning. You do ~2 small group projects per semester. The group splits the project into parts and everyone goes and does it's own part alone. There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that. I seriously hope other universities do it differently and I just attended the wrong one.
      - humanrebar 10y ago
        I had team projects, somewhat resembling what you describe. No, I had no source control or testing training at all. I chalk that up to more academic programs being oriented towards computer science and mathematics than craftsmanship, engineering, and project management concerns.
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  s/education/higher education in liberal arts and business/g. Next time you need surgery, you probably don't want your doctor to have been self taught.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    If resources were infinite, I wouldn't have any concern about a self-taught doctor. If they are smart enough to perform surgery, they're smart enough to figure out how to do it. The challenge the real world presents is that the resources needed to reach that level, such as access to specialized equipment, is not in reach of the average person. It's not like a software development career where a widely available personal computer that can be purchased for hundreds – even tens – of dollars pretty much sums up everything you need to become among the best in the world. What the schools have been able to provide is a place where people can pool their resources to gain shared access to infrastructure. Education comes as a natural consequence of effectively utilizing that infrastructure, of course.
    - IgorPartola 10y ago
      Smart does not mean experienced. I don't say this often on HN, but you really have no clue with what you are talking about here.
      - randomdata 10y ago
        Where, exactly, do you think experience comes from? By actually utilizing the aforementioned infrastructure that is not accessible to most people. Nobody becomes a surgeon just by watching a lecture in a classroom. If it were that simple, surgeons really could just watch some Youtube videos. I get the impression you didn't actually stop to take in what I wrote.
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    Having a father who was a surgeon (and quite good), I have enough real life feedback to say that apprenticeship/internship in medecine may matter more than the years of theoretical studies that actually are used mostly for selecting the «right persons». Not to say theoretical education worth naught, I say there is a cursor that is way tilted in favour of theory that costs less and make universities earn more. Let's call it a corporatism behaviour. You don't want a surgeon that was good at school, you want a surgeon that when his hospital is poor will use his earning to buy medical reviews to stay up to date, say fuck to the hospital and take unpaid vacations to go in conferences to stay up to date. You want a surgeon that don't care about his diploma, or the titles but stay focused on his craft and will go on learning without caring for what society legally requires him to do in order to practice.
zubairq 10y ago
In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
- mortehu 10y ago
  What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
  - on_and_off 10y ago
    Working for somebody else I would say. My anecdotal case : I currently work for a very well known French startup. I am paid a bit under 50k€/y (and no equity). The company really struggle to attract skilled engineers and to be honest there are not that many skilled engineers in a given field in the country. I could get 70-80k€/y in some other less known French startups that do their best to attract top talent. I got an offer for an US based startup a little bit under 200k$/y with some advantages and a good amount of equity. If I can get an US work visa, I am going to take that offer, otherwise I will follow other opportunities but I am not staying with that first company in the long run.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelt 10y ago
    I assume he thinks the prices should rise until demand drops off, and at that equilibrium price we shouldn't say there's a shortage. Lots of people would like a rolex and don't have one, but nobody would say there's a rolex shortage.
    - mortehu 10y ago
      If rolexes could only be bought from other consumers who actually want to keep them unless they can sell well above their purchase price, people might say there's a shortage.
  - 10y ago
EliRivers 10y ago
The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed, fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code. I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.
- alok-g 10y ago
  The same applies to hardware design at many companies, including reputed ones. I witnessed a case were they went from an R&D prototype to product with no quality control in the design process. Product failures in the market were followed by blame games.
- slachance 10y ago
  Amen. I work at one of the most well-reputed software product companies in the world. We pride ourselves in hiring the very best, and try to do so through an interviewing program that simulates real life coding instead of an academic whiteboard situation. Even amongst smart people, the bar for software quality is shockingly low. You will find ostensibly senior people again and again who given half a chance with espouse all day long the importance of high quality code, well-designed abstraction, separation of concerns, and good testing. You can then let these people operate for a few hours by themselves and examine the result. In all but a few situations, it'll be a pile of mud that's designed counter to every one of the values they talk about. Often they're not aware of this, but it's also very common that they know it's sloppy, and don't really care. People don't do what's right, they do what's easy. In a corporate environment, there is never a structure to identify the developers who are most likely to write good and maintainable code (it's too subjective) so that they can be put into a review capacity, and even if there were, there just isn't the bandwidth to review new additions to the depth that's required. In an ideal situation, many patches would be returned to author essentially asking for a complete rewrite, but that's difficult to justify given that building strong relationships inside the team needs to be considered. The result is that all software developed in industry trends towards bad over time, and it appears to be as absolute of a universal constant as entropy. You can find localized exceptions, but they're often only temporarily good as eventually more people contribute more features.
pards 10y ago
Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spreadsheet works. Changes to the spreadsheets are not controlled in any manner, are not tracked in source control, but are often (thankfully) backed up by virtue of being saved on a network drive. The business prefers spreadsheets over "real software" because they have complete control of it whereas their internal IT department are slow and expensive, and the resulting custom-coded products are often substandard (see zubairq's comment about paying market rate).
- powmonk 10y ago
  The insurance industry has a lot of this too. Not as much by the sounds of it but our internal reporting relies on it a great deal.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    A lot of reporting depends on it - a lot of high end financial reporting applications have Excel spreadsheets as their main output mechanism (e.g. Oracle Hyperion FM).
  - ethbro 10y ago
    In my experience, a huge amount of insurance is (various front end systems run by various external sources) -> semi-standardized mainframe intake -> mainframe heavy duty processing -> kick out report of manual work items -> Excel sheet -> manual resolution.
- brongondwana 10y ago
  A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.
reasonattlm 10y ago
That we are actually quite close to the development of a panoply of working rejuvenation therapies capable of significantly extending human life spans, were the right lines of research and development just more aggressively funded than is the case at present.
- prodmerc 10y ago
  Head transplants are actually considered feasible today. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-surgeon-who-wants-to-perform-a-head-transplant-by-2017 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-surgeon-w...
- tomrod 10y ago
  Name and shame, with links to the promising methods?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  The title question contains the word 'fact'.
- dennis_jeeves 10y ago
  I've seen your posts before (I'm a lurking life-extensionist so it's difficult not to notice). My question to you: Are any credible organisations offering even rudimentary rejuvenation therapies? If yes can you list them, with links and costs if possible?
contingencies 10y ago
1. SWIFT was founded as a 'Belgian Cooperative' in the 1970s by an ex American Express executive and grew at a rate unprecedented for its era, its first 'international center of operations' was located in Virginia, co-opened by the then-governor, and nearly co-located with CIA HQ. EU authorities have confirmed that, despite political backlash and a 'SWIFT 2' nominally designed to resolve the problem, every single SWIFT transaction since at least 2001 (read: forever) has been provided in full to the US. 2. The Israeli business AMDOCS with alleged Mossad links is an outsourced and hosted billing provider for telecommunication carriers, whose client list includes large portions of the developed world. Just sayin'.
alok-g 10y ago
Publicly known but not commonly known: (I get asked about these frequently.) Electronic Displays Industry: LED TVs are also LCD TVs. When I explain this to people, some even retaliate! The picture is formed in both by LCD only, just that the backlight is built out of LEDs in what is called an LED TV. Specifications given for power output in music systems, contrast ratio in TVs, frequency response for earbuds, etc. are mostly fake.
- Avernar 10y ago
  That's a result of having the marketing department as the ones who interact with the public. Pretty much every industry has this problem. To get at the truth you have to find some enthusiast website and find someone there who has done enough digging to find the real technical information and specs. Speaking of LED TVs, the next one is QDLED TVs where again it is still an LCD TV but the backlight is now improved with Quantum Dots. Confused the heck out of the public who are looking/waiting for a true Quantum Dot display.
hnhg 10y ago
Not my industry any more, but a PhD isn't about pushing the frontiers of knowledge so much as being a training program for working in academia.
- tomrod 10y ago
  I agree to a degree, but this is dependent on field. Some fields it's about networking, some its about getting a foot into a door into a lab.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kapauldo 10y ago
ACH transactions (bank to bank) cost 1/10000th of a dollar. PayPal charges 3% plus 29 cents for branded ACH.
- randomnumber314 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but aren't ACH transactions just an SFTP upload?
johan_larson 10y ago
Every piece of commercial software ships with large numbers of known problems, limitations, and deficiencies. For old, broadly distributed software, the bug databases can easily have millions of issues, some of which have never even been investigated.
ex3xu 10y ago
I do marketing and AdWords for a company that specializes in local contractors. Modern online marketing is a race to the bottom that only Google wins. Fundamentally, regardles of industry, marketing is a simple logistics problem -- connect clients to service providers. But the distribution of attention is incredibly imbalanced -- the top 3 search results get nearly 50% of clicks with the top ten results getting 90%. So what I am seeing happen for many local industries and problems is that even though there are probably dozens or hundreds of local service providers that can provide adequate service for a problem, the ones that show up on the first page get a disproportionate, overwhelming amount of business, and the rest of the providers end up fighting over scraps. Unless they too want to start shelling out 10 grand a month or more to show up at the very top for every search and get more business than they can handle. There's got to be a better way.
- calvano915 10y ago
  Isn't this the problem that Angies List/Amazon Home Services/etc is attempting to solve and monetize? For a goof I submitted a plumbing work order to Amazon and received at least three competitive bids, all from businesses I had never heard of before that are vouched for to some degree by Amazon. It seems to be either the above or Yelp/word of mouth are the only ways that contractors can be seen by prospective clients, at least until they grow large enough to have more marketing funds and return business.
mstaoru 10y ago
I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food. China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide. There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the seller. When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Most of the time it's handled by your hoster "transparently" in the form of "license application tokens". (Yes, you can trick them if you colocate your own bare metal.) 25% is an average ingredient cost for restaurant meals.
- comboy 10y ago
  > When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Wow, I'd like to know more, this seems especially interesting in regard to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. They can keep most of their bitcoins in cold storage, but still having root access to the web server means user passwords, TLs, and so on. Is it just a web server directly connected to the internet that they need to have root access to? Or do you e.g. also need to provide access to the db server used? edit: Also what's with the license? It's possible for me to buy hosting in China without any licenses.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ http://sf-express.com/ ) Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries. (Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)
ubernostrum 10y ago
In the US, how hard it is even for your insurance company to figure out if a doctor/hospital/etc. is in or out of their contracted network. You'd think "how hard can it be, you either signed a contract with them and have it on file, or not". Well... When the insurer signs a contract with, say, a doctor, what is happening is not "anything this doctor does for someone on one of our plans is covered by this contract". Instead, whether something falls under the contract or not depends on a whole bunch of factors, including but not limited to: * The doctor's NPI (provider identification number, issued by US Medicare/Medicaid). * The particular medical specialties and credentials of the doctor. * The location(s) where the doctor renders services and the type(s) of services rendered. * The federal tax identification number and billing entity the doctor bills as. * The address the doctor submits on the bill. So suppose Dr. Jane Doe signs on to your insurer's network. She's contracted as a primary-care physician, rendering services in her office at 123 Main Street Suite B, under NPI 1111111111, and will bill as Jane Doe Medical, tax ID 222-22-2222, payment to be sent to her billing office at 234 Second Street. And you go to Dr. Jane Doe and have no trouble, until one day you get a notice back from your insurance company that suddenly she's no longer in network. She swears up and down that she's still in network with them, so it must be the insurance company's fault, right? Well, the thing is that she merged operations with Dr. John Roe in the next office suite over, and now is billing as Doe & Roe Medical, tax ID 333-33-3333, payment to be sent to 345 Elm Avenue. And there's no contract for that! Or she outsourced all her medical billing to MedBillCo, which again changes information the contract is keyed to. Or she also holds credentials for other types of medical practice and was rendering service of that type, maybe at a local hospital. Or she kept her tax ID and billing the same but moved her office from 123 Main Street Suite B to 123 Main Street Suite C. Or the post office realigned the boundaries of her zip code, and she "moved" from zip 11111 to zip code 11112 as a result. This sort of thing happens all the time. I'm told that LexisNexis once came to an (I think optimistic) estimate that the half-life of medical provider data is 18 months. So gather up all the information on your network of doctors and hospitals, carefully vet and double-check it, make sure everything is full and correct and up-to-date... and 18 months later half of it will be wrong, just due to the background rate of changes to office locations, credentials, billing entities, etc. So after working for a little over a year at a company that has to deal with this, I am not surprised at all when I hear someone complain that "it's the same doctor I went to last time, nothing changed, they're still in network, so why can't the insurance figure that out?" Nothing visible to the person complaining has changed, sure. But that tells you nothing. I am more often surprised that anyone is ever able to correctly determine in- or out-of-network status; being able to do it even a fraction of the time is frankly a minor miracle, and requires a whole lot of people toiling away behind the scenes. For the record: I work for a company in the Medicare space, and we're required to revalidate all our provider information at least once every 90 days, precisely for this reason. Also, you don't want to know what the industry average is for correctness of printed provider-directory booklets. Even if it's sent off to the printers the day the up-to-date data has been validated, some not-insignificant proportion of it will already be wrong by the time it arrives in someone's mailbox, just because of how often and how quickly the information changes.
beyondcompute 10y ago
● The two most successful and widely used to solve everyday problems paradigms/environments: spreadsheets and shell scripting (with pipes, etc.) are the ones that have the least attention from “industrial” and academic programmers. Lessons and strong points from those systems are being ignored. ● There are “clusters of bugs”, i.e., finding a bug in a certain module increases a chance to find a subsequent bug in the same module. This is understood intuitively by most people yet very few act on it, discarding modules that have too many bugs (and rewriting them from scratch) instead of continuing to sink resources into maintenance. ● While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :( ● Managers and programmers think that personality traits and team members' individualities do not matter and there's no role “human factor” plays in development. Ditto for self-organization vs constantly “organizing”/policing employees. ● There were pretty cool systems back in the day (with orthogonal persistence, ability to inspect and modify any object on-the-fly, etc.). The modern ones are not “bad” either but some lessons could still be learned. ● Sometimes there are notions that bad software is created due to sales people/economic pressure but analysis of, say, build tools shows that it is not the case. ;)
- nueded 10y ago
  >While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :( i have to disagree with you here. most of the tools we use as programmers are so precise, adaptable and refined for the job that would make your average industry professional cry. having those tools run on a guacamole-recipe machine is only a testimony to their power. it's not just the software either; through services like AWS we have access to some of the most sophisticated and optimized computation and storage hardware on the planet.
  - beyondcompute 10y ago
    So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro keyboard) 'Ctrl(Caps Lock)-Command(Alt)-Enter' remapped to 'Alt-Backspace' (in parentheses — the original key) using a Lua-scripted software. If it's your idea of “refined” and “precise” then that's fine :) Moreover most of programmers I know (hundreds and hundreds) use a “minimalist slick” keyboard from a Californian company. It's a good keyboard for googling a guacamole recipe and a nice example of a “good-looking“ industrial design. But it's not a professional tool by any means. I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro” labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by professionals. About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Where, I remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are “highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors). Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the positive side of things!
rodolphoarruda 10y ago
In online learning for higher education: if you don't make mobile learning your first priority you will struggle to stay relevant in the market.
- akulbe 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by "mobile learning"? Do you mean development for mobile as a platform? Do you mean the ability to learn on the move? Something else entirely?
  - rodolphoarruda 10y ago
    It's M-Learning. You can check it in Wikipedia for starters. It is the combination of processes and technologies to allow people to engage into formal learning programs using mobile devices. It is different from traditional desktop based e-Learning.
blargles 10y ago
The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like computers.
blargles 10y ago
The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like computers.
ethbro 10y ago
Commercially available desktop automation systems are pretty terrible in terms of modern software design. Specifically lifecycle management, code versioning, third party tooling integration, and readability. Unfortunately, they're aided by a compatibility moat built up of custom control support. Basically everything that doesn't support Microsoft UI Automation requires memory hijinks. And you'd be surprised by how much legacy software used weird third party libraries. If you want more impressions or to chat, feel free to flip a mail at ethbro.co a g mail. Happy to talk, as god knows automation software could be improved.
owenversteeg 10y ago
I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here. Li-ion battery energy density grows in spurts. Realistically, there have been a few major improvements, with very small incremental improvements in between. For example, in 2001 we were at 180 Wh/kg. In just a handful of months we jumped to 260 Wh/kg, then to 280 Wh/kg as manufacturing processes improved. In the last 11 years, however, improvements have been maybe a few Wh/kg per year, and there have been literally zero improvements whatsoever in the past four years, by anyone. Eleven years is a very long time, especially for something that everybody just assumes is constantly silently improving. And it's not like the battery industry stopped investing in growth: there are absolutely insane amounts of money invested in battery R&D, since whoever figures out how to make a cheap, energy-dense battery will become absolutely infathomably rich and make Madoff-level growth look like US savings bonds. Bonus fact: nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The "explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'. Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.) - "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat" - "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat" - "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat" - "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat" People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with heat. Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't explode. Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far."
- dsacco 10y ago
  Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1) widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is just outrageously hard? I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or 2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery industry veterans.
VLM 10y ago
The telecom side of media is really boring, but on the production side almost all mass market media comes from about five corporations plus or minus a couple.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BerislavLopac 10y ago
This one: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

64 points by yotamoron 10y ago

Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas... Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated. Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for instance are a poor choice for being innovative. "M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris."

Lordarminius 10y ago
> Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would question this assertion
- prodmerc 10y ago
  I honestly can't understand how people spout some of this crap. I've also grown up in a region where education was overlooked, and living with complete fucking morons is not fun. Especially when these morons themselves think that education is worthless, which is a snowball effect meaning many of their children will be stupid, as well. On the other hand, it's easier to control them if you want to. Like they did in Medieval ages and earlier. Yeah, let's go back to that. The ROI is as indirect and long term as it gets, but it's real and it's massive.
  - ttoinou 10y ago
    You have to compare comparables situations : what could have been done different with the same resources involved ? Having an educational system is a sign that the society is wealthy and can afford it, but doesn't mean it's the best use of resources involved (thus it might have a bad ROI). You said education was overlooked where you come from, was there an educational system there ?
- qb45 10y ago
  I think it's a matter of value being shaped by under- or oversupply. Speaking of illiteracy, there's an urban legend (not sure if true, anyone with access to data please check it) that literacy rate has actually dropped in the US throughout the 20th century, coinciding with increase of education "supply".
  - VLM 10y ago
    No data exists for that because the definition of illiteracy depends too strongly on the axe being ground. Everything from 1% to 66% illiteracy has been attempted to sell to people. It does seem that illiteracy clusters with various citizenship status, racial and other demographics, simple age distribution of a geographic location, and socioeconomic level to an extent that if you successfully filter those effects out you end up with a boring flat line at 100% literacy when ends up meaning nothing. The largest factor is literacy graphs and maps are basically a restatement of immigration data.
- randomdata 10y ago
  I believe he is referring to postsecondary education specifically. In North America, K-12 exists to make one a functioning member of society. For what flaws it may have, it has overall shown to be beneficial. With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it's not clear if it has really worked out. In 1970, approximately 10% of the US population had a bachelors degree or higher. In 2017, that number is closer to 30%, yet incomes have remained stagnant throughout that entire period and job quality has declined. Not what you'd expect from the promised higher incomes and better jobs that people were willing to spend large amounts of money for.
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    I was indeed referring to post secondary education. If I was no troll, I would admit a soft tooth for Finland focus on early education and the amazing results they have doing so. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-schools-play-europe-top-education-system-finland-daycare https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-sc...
- humanrebar 10y ago
  It's worth distinguishing between basic literacy (including basic math skills) and graduate-level specialty degrees. For one, if the labor market in a particular specialty becomes oversaturated, does that mean existing grads need to spend years retraining?
- Shorel 10y ago
  He is talking about College/University education, and companies sometimes requiring advanced degrees for basic jobs. High school is and will always be needed. Also, for some careers university education is obviously necessary. Just not always. However, this probably only applies to the USA, or other places (South America as well) where students get into high debt to get degrees.
SlySherZ 10y ago
It depends a lot on which parts of education you're talking about. The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work. Learning stuff and interacting with other people is a nice way to spend their time. From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes the school almost irreplaceable. In other areas, like programming, you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn, as long as you have enough self discipline to keep yourself on track. There are tons of resources you can learn from and you can practice as much as you want. I did it and it has been working well so far. Overall, I wouldn't say we should ditch education at all, but we should seriously rethink the way it works. We can do much better than this.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > ...you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating. Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.
  - SlySherZ 10y ago
    I completly agree with the need to communicate and program with other people. From my experience, computer science degrees severely lack this communication trainning. You do ~2 small group projects per semester. The group splits the project into parts and everyone goes and does it's own part alone. There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that. I seriously hope other universities do it differently and I just attended the wrong one.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      I had team projects, somewhat resembling what you describe. No, I had no source control or testing training at all. I chalk that up to more academic programs being oriented towards computer science and mathematics than craftsmanship, engineering, and project management concerns.
IgorPartola 10y ago
s/education/higher education in liberal arts and business/g. Next time you need surgery, you probably don't want your doctor to have been self taught.
- randomdata 10y ago
  If resources were infinite, I wouldn't have any concern about a self-taught doctor. If they are smart enough to perform surgery, they're smart enough to figure out how to do it. The challenge the real world presents is that the resources needed to reach that level, such as access to specialized equipment, is not in reach of the average person. It's not like a software development career where a widely available personal computer that can be purchased for hundreds – even tens – of dollars pretty much sums up everything you need to become among the best in the world. What the schools have been able to provide is a place where people can pool their resources to gain shared access to infrastructure. Education comes as a natural consequence of effectively utilizing that infrastructure, of course.
  - IgorPartola 10y ago
    Smart does not mean experienced. I don't say this often on HN, but you really have no clue with what you are talking about here.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      Where, exactly, do you think experience comes from? By actually utilizing the aforementioned infrastructure that is not accessible to most people. Nobody becomes a surgeon just by watching a lecture in a classroom. If it were that simple, surgeons really could just watch some Youtube videos. I get the impression you didn't actually stop to take in what I wrote.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Having a father who was a surgeon (and quite good), I have enough real life feedback to say that apprenticeship/internship in medecine may matter more than the years of theoretical studies that actually are used mostly for selecting the «right persons». Not to say theoretical education worth naught, I say there is a cursor that is way tilted in favour of theory that costs less and make universities earn more. Let's call it a corporatism behaviour. You don't want a surgeon that was good at school, you want a surgeon that when his hospital is poor will use his earning to buy medical reviews to stay up to date, say fuck to the hospital and take unpaid vacations to go in conferences to stay up to date. You want a surgeon that don't care about his diploma, or the titles but stay focused on his craft and will go on learning without caring for what society legally requires him to do in order to practice.

zubairq 10y ago

In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills

mortehu 10y ago
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
- on_and_off 10y ago
  Working for somebody else I would say. My anecdotal case : I currently work for a very well known French startup. I am paid a bit under 50k€/y (and no equity). The company really struggle to attract skilled engineers and to be honest there are not that many skilled engineers in a given field in the country. I could get 70-80k€/y in some other less known French startups that do their best to attract top talent. I got an offer for an US based startup a little bit under 200k$/y with some advantages and a good amount of equity. If I can get an US work visa, I am going to take that offer, otherwise I will follow other opportunities but I am not staying with that first company in the long run.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelt 10y ago
  I assume he thinks the prices should rise until demand drops off, and at that equilibrium price we shouldn't say there's a shortage. Lots of people would like a rolex and don't have one, but nobody would say there's a rolex shortage.
  - mortehu 10y ago
    If rolexes could only be bought from other consumers who actually want to keep them unless they can sell well above their purchase price, people might say there's a shortage.
- 10y ago

EliRivers 10y ago

The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed, fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code. I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.

alok-g 10y ago
The same applies to hardware design at many companies, including reputed ones. I witnessed a case were they went from an R&D prototype to product with no quality control in the design process. Product failures in the market were followed by blame games.
slachance 10y ago
Amen. I work at one of the most well-reputed software product companies in the world. We pride ourselves in hiring the very best, and try to do so through an interviewing program that simulates real life coding instead of an academic whiteboard situation. Even amongst smart people, the bar for software quality is shockingly low. You will find ostensibly senior people again and again who given half a chance with espouse all day long the importance of high quality code, well-designed abstraction, separation of concerns, and good testing. You can then let these people operate for a few hours by themselves and examine the result. In all but a few situations, it'll be a pile of mud that's designed counter to every one of the values they talk about. Often they're not aware of this, but it's also very common that they know it's sloppy, and don't really care. People don't do what's right, they do what's easy. In a corporate environment, there is never a structure to identify the developers who are most likely to write good and maintainable code (it's too subjective) so that they can be put into a review capacity, and even if there were, there just isn't the bandwidth to review new additions to the depth that's required. In an ideal situation, many patches would be returned to author essentially asking for a complete rewrite, but that's difficult to justify given that building strong relationships inside the team needs to be considered. The result is that all software developed in industry trends towards bad over time, and it appears to be as absolute of a universal constant as entropy. You can find localized exceptions, but they're often only temporarily good as eventually more people contribute more features.

pards 10y ago

Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spreadsheet works. Changes to the spreadsheets are not controlled in any manner, are not tracked in source control, but are often (thankfully) backed up by virtue of being saved on a network drive. The business prefers spreadsheets over "real software" because they have complete control of it whereas their internal IT department are slow and expensive, and the resulting custom-coded products are often substandard (see zubairq's comment about paying market rate).

powmonk 10y ago
The insurance industry has a lot of this too. Not as much by the sounds of it but our internal reporting relies on it a great deal.
- arethuza 10y ago
  A lot of reporting depends on it - a lot of high end financial reporting applications have Excel spreadsheets as their main output mechanism (e.g. Oracle Hyperion FM).
- ethbro 10y ago
  In my experience, a huge amount of insurance is (various front end systems run by various external sources) -> semi-standardized mainframe intake -> mainframe heavy duty processing -> kick out report of manual work items -> Excel sheet -> manual resolution.
brongondwana 10y ago
A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.

reasonattlm 10y ago

That we are actually quite close to the development of a panoply of working rejuvenation therapies capable of significantly extending human life spans, were the right lines of research and development just more aggressively funded than is the case at present.

prodmerc 10y ago
Head transplants are actually considered feasible today. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-surgeon-who-wants-to-perform-a-head-transplant-by-2017 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-surgeon-w...
tomrod 10y ago
Name and shame, with links to the promising methods?
jacquesm 10y ago
The title question contains the word 'fact'.
dennis_jeeves 10y ago
I've seen your posts before (I'm a lurking life-extensionist so it's difficult not to notice). My question to you: Are any credible organisations offering even rudimentary rejuvenation therapies? If yes can you list them, with links and costs if possible?

contingencies 10y ago

1. SWIFT was founded as a 'Belgian Cooperative' in the 1970s by an ex American Express executive and grew at a rate unprecedented for its era, its first 'international center of operations' was located in Virginia, co-opened by the then-governor, and nearly co-located with CIA HQ. EU authorities have confirmed that, despite political backlash and a 'SWIFT 2' nominally designed to resolve the problem, every single SWIFT transaction since at least 2001 (read: forever) has been provided in full to the US. 2. The Israeli business AMDOCS with alleged Mossad links is an outsourced and hosted billing provider for telecommunication carriers, whose client list includes large portions of the developed world. Just sayin'.

alok-g 10y ago

Publicly known but not commonly known: (I get asked about these frequently.) Electronic Displays Industry: LED TVs are also LCD TVs. When I explain this to people, some even retaliate! The picture is formed in both by LCD only, just that the backlight is built out of LEDs in what is called an LED TV. Specifications given for power output in music systems, contrast ratio in TVs, frequency response for earbuds, etc. are mostly fake.

Avernar 10y ago
That's a result of having the marketing department as the ones who interact with the public. Pretty much every industry has this problem. To get at the truth you have to find some enthusiast website and find someone there who has done enough digging to find the real technical information and specs. Speaking of LED TVs, the next one is QDLED TVs where again it is still an LCD TV but the backlight is now improved with Quantum Dots. Confused the heck out of the public who are looking/waiting for a true Quantum Dot display.

hnhg 10y ago

Not my industry any more, but a PhD isn't about pushing the frontiers of knowledge so much as being a training program for working in academia.

tomrod 10y ago
I agree to a degree, but this is dependent on field. Some fields it's about networking, some its about getting a foot into a door into a lab.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

kapauldo 10y ago

ACH transactions (bank to bank) cost 1/10000th of a dollar. PayPal charges 3% plus 29 cents for branded ACH.

randomnumber314 10y ago
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but aren't ACH transactions just an SFTP upload?

johan_larson 10y ago

Every piece of commercial software ships with large numbers of known problems, limitations, and deficiencies. For old, broadly distributed software, the bug databases can easily have millions of issues, some of which have never even been investigated.

ex3xu 10y ago

I do marketing and AdWords for a company that specializes in local contractors. Modern online marketing is a race to the bottom that only Google wins. Fundamentally, regardles of industry, marketing is a simple logistics problem -- connect clients to service providers. But the distribution of attention is incredibly imbalanced -- the top 3 search results get nearly 50% of clicks with the top ten results getting 90%. So what I am seeing happen for many local industries and problems is that even though there are probably dozens or hundreds of local service providers that can provide adequate service for a problem, the ones that show up on the first page get a disproportionate, overwhelming amount of business, and the rest of the providers end up fighting over scraps. Unless they too want to start shelling out 10 grand a month or more to show up at the very top for every search and get more business than they can handle. There's got to be a better way.

calvano915 10y ago
Isn't this the problem that Angies List/Amazon Home Services/etc is attempting to solve and monetize? For a goof I submitted a plumbing work order to Amazon and received at least three competitive bids, all from businesses I had never heard of before that are vouched for to some degree by Amazon. It seems to be either the above or Yelp/word of mouth are the only ways that contractors can be seen by prospective clients, at least until they grow large enough to have more marketing funds and return business.

mstaoru 10y ago

I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food. China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide. There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the seller. When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Most of the time it's handled by your hoster "transparently" in the form of "license application tokens". (Yes, you can trick them if you colocate your own bare metal.) 25% is an average ingredient cost for restaurant meals.

comboy 10y ago
> When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Wow, I'd like to know more, this seems especially interesting in regard to Chinese Bitcoin exchanges. They can keep most of their bitcoins in cold storage, but still having root access to the web server means user passwords, TLs, and so on. Is it just a web server directly connected to the internet that they need to have root access to? Or do you e.g. also need to provide access to the db server used? edit: Also what's with the license? It's possible for me to buy hosting in China without any licenses.
contingencies 10y ago
Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port, economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the best of which is http://sf-express.com/ http://sf-express.com/ ) Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other countries. (Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my experience/impression)

ubernostrum 10y ago

In the US, how hard it is even for your insurance company to figure out if a doctor/hospital/etc. is in or out of their contracted network. You'd think "how hard can it be, you either signed a contract with them and have it on file, or not". Well... When the insurer signs a contract with, say, a doctor, what is happening is not "anything this doctor does for someone on one of our plans is covered by this contract". Instead, whether something falls under the contract or not depends on a whole bunch of factors, including but not limited to: * The doctor's NPI (provider identification number, issued by US Medicare/Medicaid). * The particular medical specialties and credentials of the doctor. * The location(s) where the doctor renders services and the type(s) of services rendered. * The federal tax identification number and billing entity the doctor bills as. * The address the doctor submits on the bill. So suppose Dr. Jane Doe signs on to your insurer's network. She's contracted as a primary-care physician, rendering services in her office at 123 Main Street Suite B, under NPI 1111111111, and will bill as Jane Doe Medical, tax ID 222-22-2222, payment to be sent to her billing office at 234 Second Street. And you go to Dr. Jane Doe and have no trouble, until one day you get a notice back from your insurance company that suddenly she's no longer in network. She swears up and down that she's still in network with them, so it must be the insurance company's fault, right? Well, the thing is that she merged operations with Dr. John Roe in the next office suite over, and now is billing as Doe & Roe Medical, tax ID 333-33-3333, payment to be sent to 345 Elm Avenue. And there's no contract for that! Or she outsourced all her medical billing to MedBillCo, which again changes information the contract is keyed to. Or she also holds credentials for other types of medical practice and was rendering service of that type, maybe at a local hospital. Or she kept her tax ID and billing the same but moved her office from 123 Main Street Suite B to 123 Main Street Suite C. Or the post office realigned the boundaries of her zip code, and she "moved" from zip 11111 to zip code 11112 as a result. This sort of thing happens all the time. I'm told that LexisNexis once came to an (I think optimistic) estimate that the half-life of medical provider data is 18 months. So gather up all the information on your network of doctors and hospitals, carefully vet and double-check it, make sure everything is full and correct and up-to-date... and 18 months later half of it will be wrong, just due to the background rate of changes to office locations, credentials, billing entities, etc. So after working for a little over a year at a company that has to deal with this, I am not surprised at all when I hear someone complain that "it's the same doctor I went to last time, nothing changed, they're still in network, so why can't the insurance figure that out?" Nothing visible to the person complaining has changed, sure. But that tells you nothing. I am more often surprised that anyone is ever able to correctly determine in- or out-of-network status; being able to do it even a fraction of the time is frankly a minor miracle, and requires a whole lot of people toiling away behind the scenes. For the record: I work for a company in the Medicare space, and we're required to revalidate all our provider information at least once every 90 days, precisely for this reason. Also, you don't want to know what the industry average is for correctness of printed provider-directory booklets. Even if it's sent off to the printers the day the up-to-date data has been validated, some not-insignificant proportion of it will already be wrong by the time it arrives in someone's mailbox, just because of how often and how quickly the information changes.

beyondcompute 10y ago

● The two most successful and widely used to solve everyday problems paradigms/environments: spreadsheets and shell scripting (with pipes, etc.) are the ones that have the least attention from “industrial” and academic programmers. Lessons and strong points from those systems are being ignored. ● There are “clusters of bugs”, i.e., finding a bug in a certain module increases a chance to find a subsequent bug in the same module. This is understood intuitively by most people yet very few act on it, discarding modules that have too many bugs (and rewriting them from scratch) instead of continuing to sink resources into maintenance. ● While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :( ● Managers and programmers think that personality traits and team members' individualities do not matter and there's no role “human factor” plays in development. Ditto for self-organization vs constantly “organizing”/policing employees. ● There were pretty cool systems back in the day (with orthogonal persistence, ability to inspect and modify any object on-the-fly, etc.). The modern ones are not “bad” either but some lessons could still be learned. ● Sometimes there are notions that bad software is created due to sales people/economic pressure but analysis of, say, build tools shows that it is not the case. ;)

nueded 10y ago
>While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google a guacamole recipe). :( i have to disagree with you here. most of the tools we use as programmers are so precise, adaptable and refined for the job that would make your average industry professional cry. having those tools run on a guacamole-recipe machine is only a testimony to their power. it's not just the software either; through services like AWS we have access to some of the most sophisticated and optimized computation and storage hardware on the planet.
- beyondcompute 10y ago
  So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro keyboard) 'Ctrl(Caps Lock)-Command(Alt)-Enter' remapped to 'Alt-Backspace' (in parentheses — the original key) using a Lua-scripted software. If it's your idea of “refined” and “precise” then that's fine :) Moreover most of programmers I know (hundreds and hundreds) use a “minimalist slick” keyboard from a Californian company. It's a good keyboard for googling a guacamole recipe and a nice example of a “good-looking“ industrial design. But it's not a professional tool by any means. I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro” labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by professionals. About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Where, I remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are “highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors). Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the positive side of things!

rodolphoarruda 10y ago

In online learning for higher education: if you don't make mobile learning your first priority you will struggle to stay relevant in the market.

akulbe 10y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "mobile learning"? Do you mean development for mobile as a platform? Do you mean the ability to learn on the move? Something else entirely?
- rodolphoarruda 10y ago
  It's M-Learning. You can check it in Wikipedia for starters. It is the combination of processes and technologies to allow people to engage into formal learning programs using mobile devices. It is different from traditional desktop based e-Learning.

blargles 10y ago

The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like computers.

blargles 10y ago

ethbro 10y ago

Commercially available desktop automation systems are pretty terrible in terms of modern software design. Specifically lifecycle management, code versioning, third party tooling integration, and readability. Unfortunately, they're aided by a compatibility moat built up of custom control support. Basically everything that doesn't support Microsoft UI Automation requires memory hijinks. And you'd be surprised by how much legacy software used weird third party libraries. If you want more impressions or to chat, feel free to flip a mail at ethbro.co a g mail. Happy to talk, as god knows automation software could be improved.

owenversteeg 10y ago

I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here. Li-ion battery energy density grows in spurts. Realistically, there have been a few major improvements, with very small incremental improvements in between. For example, in 2001 we were at 180 Wh/kg. In just a handful of months we jumped to 260 Wh/kg, then to 280 Wh/kg as manufacturing processes improved. In the last 11 years, however, improvements have been maybe a few Wh/kg per year, and there have been literally zero improvements whatsoever in the past four years, by anyone. Eleven years is a very long time, especially for something that everybody just assumes is constantly silently improving. And it's not like the battery industry stopped investing in growth: there are absolutely insane amounts of money invested in battery R&D, since whoever figures out how to make a cheap, energy-dense battery will become absolutely infathomably rich and make Madoff-level growth look like US savings bonds. Bonus fact: nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The "explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'. Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.) - "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat" - "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat" - "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat" - "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat" People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with heat. Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't explode. Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far."

dsacco 10y ago
Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1) widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is just outrageously hard? I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or 2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery industry veterans.

VLM 10y ago

The telecom side of media is really boring, but on the production side almost all mass market media comes from about five corporations plus or minus a couple.

deleted 10y ago

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BerislavLopac 10y ago

This one: https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1