usmeteora

TERMINAL SETUPS

I havnt tried i3 or awesome.

I use VIM almost exclusively except in some more applied settings for maybe specifically an app.. and tmux works really nicely with Vim. That's why everyone says "tmux and vim should just get married and get it over with already" as a quote all over the internet. It could be the case with the other two as well.

tmux also has a really easy way to create your own plugins, and tmux persist sessions for savings windows and setups through reboots.

Again, these were things I wanted and found tmux to offer, while working really well with unique vim setups I had integrated across multiple computers. I don't know if i3 or awesome has these same features, but I think tmux is a good setup and I don't see a need to switch especially with tmux persist.

I'd be happy to hear recommendations about i3 or awesome over tmux advantages. tmux is so great to me, so if you had some good examples of how i3 or awesome trump tmux then I would definitely listen and consider and look into switching more. I've never had an issue with tmux and have really really liked it, and found every aspect I need to be easily customizable through .confs and never had to work with a predecided set of options rendered through a gui type customization, which I always find limiting for me, rather than just knowing or learning what to type in the .conf file for sys configs and having it just work.

DESKTOP THEMES I've only recently switched to gnome and used LXDE before and really liked it. I try to ride with Fedoras upgrades, and I know there were alot of opinions going around about having the default installs being switched to gnome, but I have not had any runtime issues with it.

That being said, I have a really powerful laptop, the one I'm running gnome on (other is a hackintosh but thats not by choice its for dev reasons), so I don't find anything I do on my laptop being compromised due to gnome, maybe my own bad code, but not gnome.

That being said, outside of initial testing of my skylake, I mostly run testing on centos on other systems and my main laptop currently running gnome, is an interface for which to run other setups I effectively use as servers or actual servers (and tmux persist sessions make it great to do that easily and save my entire detailed setup if i have to suddenly walk away from a detailed complex environment and not come back to it for two days and pick up where i left off, and that happens often considering I work simultaneously on multiple projects depending on my priorities for variable work schedules and more entrepreneurial endeavors.) so I don't find myself fighting over computing resources because of gnome.

I have not used gnome since I first tried ubuntu about 7 years ago, so I've had it for about 6 months before and not too many issues, only with integration for other unix setups, which is exactly why I think making dev on it more accessible or inviting to people (gitlab being a good venue for it aside, any venue) is a good option.

so far, I've been really happy with gnome since i came back to it. It took me about 3 hours to be set up and learning how to customize and make my own themes for it.

Gnome is not a bad desktop and it could benefit from more development by users who care about these things, minimalist setups and are constantly aware about runtimes and computational efficiency in every piece of code they write, which sadly...and somehow, many people missed day 1 of learning coding (big 0) and never seem to consider it until everything is breaking, and then say "hey lets throw this on AWS without exploiting the backend at all to optimize for the GPUs were paying for at the kernel level and assume AWS will figure out how to optimize our code at every layer instead"

at the low level, I've never done any custom mods on LXDE, so I can't sit here and pretend like I know some really good comparisons on computational efficiencies and design of LXDE versus gnome, but I think gnome is a fine interface, but could benefit alot still from more user dev.

Thanks for the reply and open to any other suggestions you have.

I still consider myself an amateur at everything computer/compsci related. I only minored in Compsci and code 30% of my time at work and then alot outside of work, but I'm not a top level dev by any means. I'm an Electrical Engineer (one of those I know) and code because I want to..not to mention due to the overlap.

So I'm always grateful to get feedback from people who spend more time exclusively working in this space than I do.

Why has the entire conversation veered away from Gnome to everyone elses projects gone wrong on Gitlab?

I was hoping these comments could be about the benefits that could be had by gnome from enabling dev access through gitlab.

If you have issues with that one project you worked on with gitlab, please contact Gitlab and let them know, as they are very open and responsive and willing to work with you, but this is not the place to change the topic from gnome to complaining about that one project you worked on two years ago and why gitlab sucks even though you never took the effort to submit a ticket with gitlab to fix it

ahem, away from gitlab rants about projects unrelated to gnome, and back to gnome...

yes please

I actually spent most of last week working with Gnome edits.

One thing to note however. I use Fedora and the latest version moved away from X11 to using Wayland as a default (they can be switched).

Wayland is fine except its not viable for the gaming community. I am not a gamer, but I work with GPUs, so up until the past year with big moves from khronos to get GPU dev abstracted from just the gaming dev community, my dev dependencies are still tightly tied to the gaming community.

Theres also some things about Wayland that make it a bit premature in my opinion to be a Fedora default, though I appreciate Fedora being experimental in all of their releases.

To switch back to X11 from Wayland, which in my case was not for anything fancy GPU related, just to actually disable the touchscreen on my Asus UX303ub zenbook with a skylake processor. Wayland can't do that....

I had to downgrade gnome, and edit both wayland.conf and X11.conf files to switch X11 back as a default and then force disable the touchscreen.

This requires me to use an older version of gnome.

Why is this relevant? Because I'm not the only one right now retrograding gnome because of Wayland/X11 defaults. A huge majority of the PC gaming community operating outside of Windows OS is.

For me, in addition to doing all this, which only took a few hours to figure out, I had to reconfig releases of the gnome themes I use to get everything working. That being said, I'm obsessive about minimalist set ups and having a synchronized desktop/terminal tmux/vim setup for development, so I will spend 6 hours to get a tiny aspect working the way I want it to.

Right now, alot of experimental OSes using gnome are using different versions of gnome, so there might be overall less convergence on people using versus working on the latest gnome if it were moved to git.

That also being said, people who do that kind of thing are the people who will be deving on gnome, and it's what got me into UI linux dev in the first place.

That also being said, people in this world of gnome dev, are all using different versions of gnome.

That being said, it could help expediate convergence of gnome with upgrades to various Linux distros, as I know theres some mismatch between what I'm using with Fedora right now to have some basic default settings work.

However, I'm still in favour of moving it to git. I would love to have access to gnome dev that way.

I know I'm not the only one...

It utilizes OpenGL and you can bind those objects to your own user defined physics with resources and actions, much like javascript binds to events.

you can see the WebGL shapes objects and components they have in the Kivy library, which is very nicely documented online.

OpenGl and Kivy are opensource so you should be able to make a wrapper module install, which would be similiar to an npm package in javascript, for Kivy, which would be a combination of Python and OpenGL if you wanted to create your own SDL components.

Kivy has embedded Opengl, and is really easy to learn. You can make dashboards extremely easy, and video games with working physics engines in less than twenty minutes. Overall, its basic settings are beautiful.

I havn't used Pygame but I don't consider Kivy to be heavy with alot of moving parts at all. Not to mention, unlike many Python libraries and platforms, this one has good documentation. Defined but simple and no handwaving techniques.

if you are familiar with Javascript, Kivy employs similiar callback like ideas, but not specific mechanism, to animate physics engines based on WebGL, which bind very nicely to it's widget resources.

In fact, if I had to choose a platform in which to teach middle school aged kids to code video games, Kivy would be it.

That being said, I've only used it for a desktop app kind of like in sandbox a environment. But in regards to your heavy comments, when it comes to Python, I honestly have to say anything build in Python when it comes to any type of SDL rendering, even scaled webapps, are limited for distributed systems and exponential scaling.

Python is great for learning, and college apps, and even dynamic languages for high level engineering analysis but when it comes to scaling for webapps or in maybe your case you are talking about RAM and power usage for phone apps, anything with Python is generally never a top choice.

If you think Kivy is hard, I recommend downloading it and going through one of their two tutorials, a ping pong game and a paint app.

I honestly can't see how you would think its heavy or overly complicated unless you are not familiar with widgets, or graphics period.

in general, OpenGl and WebGl is a definite win over strictly javascript based graphical rendering so if that is the gap that makes it complex, read up on OpenGl and WebGL because that is where the future is going even on the web.

I work with Kivy in Windows at work using pip. I tried binary wheels but manually installing can be tricky with windows, but not impossible.

Kivy and its modules install fine using Kivy with me. The issues I had were setting up the correct path variables in Windows.

You need Python\Scripts and Python in your Windows path like so:

C:\Python34\Scripts;C:\Python34;

Please note, another issue you might run into is if you have two different version of Python on your machine. You might already have an older versions of python and not realize it, which can make setting it up difficult.

I had to take Python 2.7 out of my path, and Windows seems to only want one version in it's path at a time, from my limited experience.

Work Firewalls (obvious but some people still report troubles for installing due to this when its not a python issue or Kivy issue, just a work environment)

depending on your work environment (I assume anyone working with Windows is doing it because they have to due to work environments) you will need to potentially (with sys admin approval of course) install by bypassing a firewall.

I work at an extremely locked down secure environment and the only issues I had installing Kivy and its modules were working with my IT department to work with security protocols and firewalls, and I'm running Windows 7 even.

I highly recommend Kivy for desktop only based Apps and it renders some beautiful phone apps as well. I am looking into electron for desktop apps too, but I did alot of research on this and Kivy is a really good option even over qt in my opinion.

The only issue I have is its lack of ability to do node based plotting. It's more of a physics engine based environment and good for Dashboard settings and real time chronological plotting, music apps, interactive games as it has an embedded webgl library and touchscreen binding events.

There is a matplotlib module but honestly who wants a screen shot of a matlab plot in Kivy?

You can install NetworkX with WebGL but it is outdated for Python 3.4

On my long list of todos is getting a node based graphing module wrapped for Kivy.

if you will be continuing to develop in Kivy, I highly recommend r/kivy. It's moderators are alive, well and responsive and it is a good community for Kivy dev.

You are correct, but just as a point out for people, wind I am not sure, but Photovoltaics I am positive are accumulate per panel, or per unit for newer panels redesigned as solar roofing materials, intead of panels on roofing materials, utilize inverters, which are some of the most lossy circuit designs for power conversion right now.

Until inverters are made to be more efficient, this will always be a huge bottleneck for dynamic energy input and output for the solar industry, and should be considered as apart of the losses for a solar unit.

not true. Just because I'm a female introvert doesn't mean everytime I leave my apartment I'm out to socialize.

If I go to a music show or a coffee shop or on a walk it doesn't mean I left my kitchen for the exclusive purpose of finding a dating partner.

Alot of girls actually prefer places where they can be in public and be left alone and not shamed for it or assumed to be advertising themselves, or otherwise prone to mental disease or emotional inadequacies because they don't want to socialize.

In fact places like bars, gyms and other places where women go for the same reasons men go, to enjoy a stiff drink or get in a good workout, pride and advertise themselves for being safe havens with no tolerance for making women feel like they are out of place for existing alone outside of the home.

Sure sorry for the delay. With Sparse Matrices, CUDA utilizes the same compressed CSR txt format, and compression form on its chip, that CPUs do. They use the same compression format, but NVIDIA takes some of the parsed squares and just parallelizes the computation on GPUs and saves the zero values in memory to throw in at the end of the computation, which is still a fine way to do the computation, and utilizing GPU performance over CPU performance, but it never redesigned the CSR compression intake format.

OpenCL does something similiar with the null values, but redesigns the entire compression format reading in matrix data and the entire computation of accessing the tiles of data differently based on the format they have for parsing and accessing the data.

I am trying to find a good explanation online, but I can only find what I have in the OpenCL 1.2 Book Chapter 22 on SPMV, where they visualize and explain CUDAs format, and then OpenCLs format, and provide performance comparisons between the two methods using the standard 22 matrix sets provided by the University of Florida.

OpenCLs performance was better on every metric, the smallest increase in performance cutting computation time by one half, the rest were closer to a third. They ran their own CUDA testing, but also provide the whitepaper results from CUDAs testing, and use NVIDIAs reported results as their official comparison.

For an influx of repetitive real time data reading in millions of data points every few seconds, this kind of advantage is not of a negligible significance.

It took a long time to work with but of course now I can reap the benefits every few seconds on large datasets forever so I found it worth diving into the performance specs on this case.

While I cant find an online visual of the designs for CUDA vs OpenCL explained in CH22, the source code for the std SPMV I speak of here is on one of the authors github: "bgaster" is the username. You should be able to download the code working cross platform and read in matrices of your choice, and compare performance on your own if you have datasets you want to look at.

The OpenCL book I highly recommend. It explains how to use opencl and provides comprehensive examples, walking through concepts with code for 22 chapters. The source code for that book is there with the rest of bgasters stuff. It's definitely not a trivial language to take on. The learning curve is steep. However, I learned GPUs through OpenCL, so I don't know if it would be easier coming from CUDA, biases about what to expect because the learner is already reaping the benefits of CUDA aside.

I took time initially to read through the entire 1.2 openCL API over a couple of weeks. It's one of the most comprehensive and detailed API's I've ever read and I find myself dissapointed with documentation of other groups in comparison. Once you are familiar with the scope of functionality available to you, I typically keep the PDF API open and search F for concepts and find whats available to me as I code through things. The most recent API is just as good and can be found here:https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/specs/opencl-2.2.pdf

Also, one of the authors of OpenCL works fulltime at Apple now, and opencl comes installed and simply working on any OSX operating system. So if you happen to have a mac, it should be relatively easy to download some working source code and try out.

I have OSX, and was also able to download an SDK for my NVIDIA graphics card on an asus zenbook running fedora 24, and got it up and running just fine in an hour or so, for total install and testing.

I want to VR around the earth. I was kind of excited and hoping this was that

ha, yeh United DOES NOT wait for its customers even if 90% of the customers boarding the flight miss the flight because they were delayed on another United flight and couldn't run fast enough to the new terminal gate that the United Employees on the late flight were not abler to provide to them. This has happened to me multiple times this year with them.

Unfortunately for me, alot of these flights are booked through companies I work for, leaving me few options, but I will expressing my preferences going forward, and not buying United personalyl ever again.

I understand that corporations like airlines are doing difficult things that very few groups are doing, and theres alot of logistics involved, including but not limited to spiky gas prices and coping with the disparities between dozens of international policies and financial regulations.

Stuff happens and people and companies mess up soemtimes. (to be clear, I don't consider this most recent event with the doctor a mess up, its an unexcusable event and way to treat a human being, and they deserve the criticism and then some)

but it's not the fact that United airlines is constantly late for its flights, overbooking, switching gates due to disorganization leaving customers on connecting flights on their same airlines scrambling across multiple terminals only to find they were 2 minutes late and United doesnt have the courtesy to acknowledge their own systematic failure and wait for its customers, or the fact that its providing horrible customer service all around.

It's the ATTITUDE they have about it. Everytime a company messes up, you have an opportunity to actually leave a really great impression by handling it well. Alot of good reviews on Amazon, restaurants and otherwise actually result form an initial messup, but the customer going out of their way to comment with how they were impressed they were with the way they handled it.

United has a blatant "we provide this to you and you obviously dont have any other choice, so deal with it" attitude. And while its somewhat true, its rubbing salt in the wound of its customers and being semi belligerantly braggatory about their stance to abuse its customers because it's one of the only choices around.

They don't notify customers when planes are late, they don't apologize, they don't initialize alternate routes, they don't apologize when they kick you off flights, they dont work with other airlines to reroute you and will make you wait days to get another flights. They don't wait for you when their own planes arrive late and other ones reroute to a new terminal for a connecting flight. Their customers are in a constant state of scramble and uncertainty.

This attitude has never worked out well in history in capitalistic environments or otherwise.

This on top of the interview I saw of the CEO yesterday and his passive attitude about the whole thing, in addition to the leaked emails telling the United Airlines employees they did the right thing, is just the icing on top of the cake failure (thats all I got right now).

meglev trains anyone? Japan has some that go 400mph

but other than its easier, are there any performance benefits?

I think the whole point of Vulkan and particularly SPIR-V, was to offer support for broadened languages including but not limited to Javascript.

OpenCL even has go bindings now.

SPIR-V allows you to define your own SHADER APIs.

Right now, it's alot to learn, but going forward, it hard to ignore the advantages in the functionalities and the broadened support to lower the barrier for learning by increasing the number of languages you can work with OpenCL in, particularly ones that predominately support web dev as we move to cloud developing and hosting AWS and Google Cloud with GPUs.

The cloud is a big one here to consider for potential shift in market share because if one group hosting the cloud finds OpenCL to be particularly beneficial, all they have to do is offer support ontop of a stack like Blazing DB, which I imagine a GPU server support stack will be engulfed within cloud platforms backend within 5 years anyways, and suddenly thousands and thousands of companies rely on it and it becomes and industry standard.

The shift in a market where cloud hosting exists on GPUs, becomes more based on what large companies who have the money and talent to go in depth and scale out support for OpenCL based functionalities moreso than the barrier every single developer or hip web dev hosting on the cloud is wanting to overcome to invest in low level kernel writing and hardware optimization.

Throw the games industry in with Vulkan, with opensource games on PCS always competing with console based games, and I see alot more support in the long run with OpenCL.

not to mention SPIR-V integrates OpenGL with Vulkan and and for OpenCL, moving towards a broader range of language support outside of mere wrappers including but not limited to even Javascript.

Since SPIR-V allows you to effectively define your own Shader APIs, and OpenCL has more and more bindings with other platforms, including ones that support the web like Go, Javascript and a new support layer for WebGL, it is absolutely a game (no pun intended) for Nvidia to lose in the longrun.

When has a monopoly never not been caught frantically trying to buy out knockoff companies that spawned from teams developing on opensrouce alternatives in innovative places after they became comfortable and confident with being a closed source monopoly?

On top of this, graphics programmers, the games industry and advanced web support, especially now that AWS and I think google cloud integrate server hosting with GPUs (and companies like Blazing DB for easier integration) will only exponeniate the rate of advantage opensource has since this is a race with some of the best programmers in the world, with a ton of money behind it.

I am curious what NVIDIAS end game is here. Already they were trailing behind the after party with their releases post AMD Ryzen, and I havn't heard anything at all exciting on NVIDIAs part to counter since the Vulkan release and SPIR-V integration announcements, which are some of the most promising I've seen yet, and expansive for programmers who have otherwise avoided this platform due to the extremely indepth learning curve and requirements to be somewhat experienced C/C++ programmers.

It took me 8months to be able to write a good kernel and some good host code with opencl because I did the entire integration in C and C++ and I've been developing with it since 1.2, but with more languages a broader range of support applications, perspectives and contributions will go to the opensource dev.

So far, outside of currently dominating the industry and embedding some long term runway with large contracts and having a head on red tape involved with larger corporations they have contracts for hardware and support embedded with, I don't see what advantages NVIDIA is getting the industry excited about in the long run.

When it comes to savvy programmers in Silicon Valley, a friend of mine who works as a PhD programmer in Deep Learning with Google Scientists did an unofficial ad hoc poll on her twitter, asking people why so much opencl hate and so much CUDA in the valley? There were lots of responses from lots of people, but I only saw on repeated reason over and over again, the initial learning curve is lower with CUDA and its more convenient. There were no specs of performance advantages in discussion.

In the functionalities I apply OpenCL to, CUDA doesn't even offer the same functionality, and in many ways processes algorithms by simply parsing out algorithms CPUs utilized, but OpenCL never assumed this as an optimal path, and reconsiders the entire structure of the algorithm and data its working with, often times reorganizing formats for processing entirely different from CPUs that NVIDIA incorporates as a default.

It's more work to learn than CUDA, but the advantages are worth it in my experience so far.

As a last consideration, When it comes to NVIDIA trying to make their products compatible with OpenCL and OpenGL, I predict that promise of that to be delayed at best, as it took NVIDIA 5 years to make their hardware std OpenCl 1.2 compatible. Vulkan is extremely large in terms of the source code, and SPIR-V is nontrivial, OpenCL is standard 2.0 now, so if getting OpenCL 1.2 was hard for them to integrate in under 5 years, we can expect a lot longer given the new releases.

The learning curve is now going away with the recent releases, so whats the next step with NVIDIA? Good question. The only advantage they seem to have is that they have an advantage right now, but that becomes circular and perhaps backwards going forward.

This strangely reminds me of Microsoft getting ubuntu to run in a Windows partition checksum for checksum, to offer cross compatibility with other operating systems as an advantage to stay competitive in the demographic that produces the most advancement within their own industry.

With your caveats in place, I think we agree. And equivocation was just to provide an alternative reference point before I realized you were pointing out the upper echelon. In general, I still think its worth pointing out because what you did was over generalize, and while with the caveats here I agree with you, whether accidental or not, the media and the commentors on high profile forums really need to stop over generalizing things to make a point.

It is a horrible habit and one encouraged by mainstream media. Criticising people in power is a great thing enabled somewhat by western democracy, european socialism, and great places like this and other on the internet, but the over generalizing is hurting not only the United States but our ability to gain traction en masse as people on effective action versus aggregate ignorant responses to emotional appeals, which are harder and harder to track who has the most influence in.

For example, note the article last week on HN about how so many people have concerns about AI, which have evolved into worries and now very emotionally charged political opinions, but there is a huge mismatch between understanding what AI is, what different forms of it are, the concept versus the level at which it exists in reality, the challenges, the inherent differences between AI and the brain, how little we know about the brain, and the ways in which it can be employed. I literally can't tell you how many people believe in the next 3 years everyone will be reading the newspaper on the way to work in self driving cars and that this is just right on its way to happening and in 8 years we will all be over run by robots.

Having the facts and educating the masses as more Tech Ceos and tech ideas influence society at a fundamental level of oepration is crucial in the next 10-50-100 years, and keeping CEOs of corporations making this technology is a priority too, but I don't think demonizing them off the bat from the get go and assuming everyone in those positions is a sociopath is either data based, accurate, or productive moving forward as a society.

By over generalizing, stereotyping and demonizing anyone who fits into a mainstream stereotype (tree hugging liberals, evil republicans) I argue that we as people are giving our ideas, definitions, and opinions away to be swayed by mass media instead of scrutinizing core issues and communicating an empowered (not just emotionally strong) response with effective action.

That being said, I actually really like the idea of what you said regarding asking other intelligent females why they chose other paths despite there being some obvious cultural influences/good initial guesses such that it does not offer as much prestige as being a lawyer or doctor.

I also agree with you, of the few other women I interact with at work and my technical school, most are Asian or Indian based ethnicity. I would say in the countries they come from, providing concrete and measurable value measured by income is encouraged over more abstract forms of valuation (being an Art History major) because of globalization and the countries need to catch up in realms of measureable competition with first world countries.

In addition, theres probably not many work visas lying around for art history majors, and less of a chance for people working in other countries who desire to experience western work world and benefit from it to actually accomplish that.

The work visa issue in the tech force is a whole different story but not too hard to figure out/find out about.

At the end of the day, all women in general, not just looking at ones already in high performing roles (doctors, lawyers versus engineers) humans tend to operate on incentive, and as a 26 yr old female who is not entirely hideous and is able to have a decent conversation with a human being, I can tell you for myself it is way too easy to underperform, get shoved into auxiliary roles, marketing roles, front facing roles, sales roles, marry one of the many men to choose from in the industry and thats after going through years of emotional isolation from being a minority in all of my classes and struggling to maintain healthy boundaries with friends because they were mostly guys and I was one of the only girls around, and one of the only girls around with shared interests.

I have actively and deliberately avoided being in these roles but the number of times I've been asked approached about it or given the opportunity, highly encouraged or crticisized for not engaging in these less technically developing roles is really high and not even close to being on par with my male colleagues. "oh youre an ambitious female in a tech job, lets have you spend 80% of your time being the poster child for a female in tech, instead of actually being a female in tech"

good intentions pave the way to...umm I don't want to sell hell but "unintended socioeconomic repercussions"

Being and staying a highly technical female engineer and staying in core disciplines development (aka for me GPU kernel dev, Graphics programming ...etc I was Electrical Engineering with Computer Science minor) and shaking off all the men who want to put you in the kitchen because your the best thing on their team department or even company since sliced bread is not just not easy but emotionally burdensome sometimes.

Anywhere I work, it takes all the men who are interested in me men about two years for it to slowly kick in as if this is an algorithm they have to develop inside their head and debug until an output comes out, that I'm actually not at work husband shopping. Men have said this to me quote above like...its some kind of novel.

The saddest part is alot of these men actually want high performing women to be housewives, so if you even get to the already thinned out demographic of being a female engineer in a highly technical role in a male dominated environment, now you have conservatively 1/10 men at your company who would rather you be having their family and staying at home, and unlike other men, they have the money to do it and support you. While this is not the path I have or plan to take, I have seen many women take this path, and by many I mean the many of the few who end up in highly technical roles.

If you look at stats, even more alarming than the high performing women who choose to go to to other careers outside of STEM, are the ones who leave the workforce all together to be full time moms. No opinion or judgment on that, raising humans is not trivial and every person gets to decide how they do that within reasonable bounds of law, but to pretend its not a significant factor is delaying addressing the issue.

Google health insurance allows females to freeze their eggs to give birth later, and to me thats just an initial example of goign in the right direction towards technology development in healthcare and the business around it so that women don't have to feel like raising children and working is a choice they have to make. Some women pull it off, but it could be easier, alot easier and alot healthier, and we could increase the time range at which women could have healthy kids safely by alot. I hope to see biotech focus on women reproduction and kids going forward to help address this issue as well.

I think at the end of the day for high to low performing women, its very easy to not be high performing or highly technical. There's not enough incentive at the individual level, and too many easy ways out, even if at the other end we can see the cumulative benefits on many fronts cultural ,technical, impact, integration, design etc that could be had from having 50/50 in the tech force.

Where is the chorus project hosted? Was browsing around on github for related devs and YC but couldn't find it. Have these tools been officially released yet? reply

I'm glad you are taking all the feedback in stride but I think this is a great idea. For all the people saying signing up is a big commitment, buying or ripping off (as thats what everyone I know did in college who couldn't afford it) Ableton Live or for me using fruity loops or a linux knockoff is a big commitment either financially or learning the ins and outs.

At the very least, this takes away some of the

a. intimidation of merely experimenting with music to someone curious about it, and could be a leeway to people investing in desktop based software or a group of users could grow with you as you go along.

b. financial commitment or technical search/compare contrast, and download/ripoff of existing software and finding compliance with operating systems.

Most of your feedback here is probably going to be from experienced music makers but as an Electrical Engineer who loves music, and playing with music is only something I have to do in my spare time since I work two full time jobs, this is really cool and allows me to play with stuff easily.

It also enables me to login and work on this at my work computer, so even if I make a sample, I can send it to myself elsewhere.

I think this is a great idea. There is some cool music software and I have audactiy, ardour, ableton live and fruity loops but the webapp idea is actually a great one and there are some huge advantages here. You are

1. Lowering the barrier for entry level music makers and making it a little less intimidating to be honest

2. Allowing increased access so people can play and edit in their spare time or on a lunch break at work, or just pull it up to play around with friends at a coffee shop on their laptops.

Going through the process of finding downloading/paying for a piece of music making software is alot of work and might otherwise deter two people from sitting down and just mixing up something on the fly quickly

3. I know alot of highshoolers who would use this in school that can't bring their laptops to school.

4. On a globalscale, feedback here is really underestimating the lack of ability many people in many countries have to liscenses to good music making software we have in Westernized society. Now anyone who has internet or the future phone apps can have access to this without having to torrent software or be a linux guru to know about the free distros out there. This is a huge advantage.

5. As shown in another comment, someone who does speech processing has already found this to be advantageous, there are some clear uses outside of experienced DJs and music makers for other industries. Watch your demographic closely because there could be some great uses for this otherwise that come through in later funding rounds if you need support to scale.

6. The basic features despite immediate feedback from people that it seems pretty basic, is not a bad thing when you are starting out in my opinion. You can grow and respond better with your user group than having a panel of overhwleming options to anyone other than already experienced music makers. Their feedback is one of the most important, but I think your initial userbase is going to grow with you and that's not a bad thing.

Like everyone else said, I would put a cool little mini walkthrough tutorial of how to make a cool 20 second sample with your software and have it on the front page so people could actually click through see some of the features and make a little sample or something. If they want to save the sample to edit, share or collaborate, then they can be prompted to make a login.

When you roll out to the paid app, provide a discount if people to invite, share on twitter, fb etc and provide a link for them to do so. It sounds cheesy but don't be ashamed to have your own users advertise.

Don't be discouraged by the feedback of experienced users. This is a really good idea.

scale for phone apps and make a twitter account.

yeh well my friend is the CEO of a company and its evaluated at millions of dollars but shes salaried less than an entry level engineer and has a tight budget. She had student loans and $300 in her bank account when she started her company. Her dad was a carpenter in Brooklyn and her mom a school teacher. She gave up her personal paycheck for 2 months to keep from laying off her best employees when she was in between funding rounds. An evaluation is way different than an individuals salary.

Maybe a primer on how funding works will help, not all multilmillion dollar companies mean the ceos are millionaries, most of them gave up everything and risked everything and some dropped out of college to pursue something they wanted to do.

yes there are a bunch of pompous CEOs out there and I deal with them too as a women working in a tech male dominated environment. Believe, I'm not any more stoked about this than you are and it is certainly damaging to the idea that other personalities could contribute positively in the same realm of influence and level of decision making.

I understand you have observations but the top 5 CEOs advertised on tech crunch everyday are not neessarily reflective of the literally hundreds of thousands of CEOs in this country.

I know 3 CEOs, two of them their companies are evaluated at 10million, and one at over 100million, and they both are salaried and the higher paid one rents an apartment, and hise wife took his house, sued him for all his money, takes her boyfriends on vacations with his salaries while he works 20+ hour days and rearranges all of his work travel so he can spend 3 days with his daughters no matter who it is that wants to meet him, he doesnt sacrifice time with his daughters.

He hasnt had a vacation in 5 years because he works so much and buying a house isn't an option for him right now. He still has to go before boards of investors to ask for a raise and the market in tech is super competitive, even with the evaluation it could all go under and the pressure is high. From what I see being good friends with these people they are not spending their friday nights at lavish parties, they are sleeping or working late or every now and then binge drinking the stress away, which is not a life i envy to be honest, but I don't consider them sociopaths.

I think your idea that all CEOs are sociopaths who run companies into the ground with lavish parties and that there is no relationship between the standards and engineering ideas they founded and the companies and the culture they set for all the rank and file engineers are all unfounded. I absolutely believe CEOs who are non sociopathic females who dont bring bikini models to launch parties might actually result in a more culturally inviting environment for female engineers, though I can't really tell form the data is that is the root cause of why women are lacking so I don't know if that would solve it.

I do know that Sheryl Sandberg wrote a pretty great book about women in business called Lean In, and it is positive and focuses on what women can do to improve themselves working in business and tech instead of waiting for men to fix all the problems, and overall it is is a very positive attitude about taking ownership of your own destiny instead of waiting for a man to give it to you and I think if you read the book the word "sociopath" would not exactly be the term that comes to your mind in regards to her, os Marissa Meyer for that matter if youve ever heard her speak or interact with people or teach on her operable business standards and principles...

I'm not really offended I guess. Youre definitely not even close to the top of the list of people who have said remarkably offensive things to me, I just think youre wrong.

I think CEOs are the easy bad guys. Everyone needs someone to point to and say hey its all your fault.

Thats what modern media has done to us. We just bully humiliate make assumptions and criticise everyone in leadership positions. I don't think what the trending instagram hashtag is or CNN headline is necessarily an accurate representation of these hardworking brilliant people, but thats just my opinion. You are obviously welcome to your own.

I'm not saying we should pity CEOs, I'm just saying as a whole in society we quickly jump to blame people, and female CEOs DO objectively (google analytics man) get it worse than men and gets far more personal jabs about their bodies and sexual comments I've never seen male CEOs publicly endure.

The question is irrelevant, they could all have Phds in deep learning and transistor design. But that doesnt seem to be the reason this man is depicting himself as validated in this portrayal. Anyways, I almost regret making this comment because of all the feedback. Sorry I pointed out the authors specific comments on how he DOES NOT see a correlation between the depiction of a man who shows off wealth and women as a quiet life of desperation.

As for me, the loudest and most pompous people in the room I always question their security and happiness the most. If you are so happy, why do you need to show it off to everyone else? Do you need validation from people? That's kind of my initial reaction to men like this.

As far as hedonistic behavior. I really have no opinions on what two (or more if that floats your boat) people do as long as its consensual. The issue was not whether the fact of having a jet or flying in one is wrong, or having around multiple women in bikinis on your jet flights is wrong or shallow or hedonistic, the issue is why show it off to everyone? what are you trying to prove?

Desperation = maybe seeking self validation from other people or these things which in their own form are fine and all but not going to help with your quiet life of desperation and they certainly don't antiquate the possibility of it, which is exactly what his author seemed to not understand.

umm so that other people wouldn't waste their time. I often read comments for longer articles first and if the top rated comments all agree its not worth reading I won't.

Anyways, HN is a place where both sides should be commented on. I certainly do not read HN hoping that the only people who comment are making congratulatory remarks on everything.

We strongly encourage constructive and specific criticism on this site and it fosters some of the best conversation in both technical, sociopolitcal, eocnomic and other ways.

actually, per the first paragraph he specifically says he thinks the depiction is incongruous with the quiet life of desperation and the relationship between the two is completely lost on him. Read it again.

Wow...I mean

1. I never claimed Marissa Meyer ran yahoo into the ground. It was a mess when she started, and from what I know of her shes no a sociopath, a computer scientist from Stanford who was one of the originals at google so...I don't know even know how to respond to that, except that I would ask you calibrate the cost of her so called lavish parties to that of any other multi billion dollar or hell, a first round wannabe startup who is way into their ego.

The assumption that you assumed the fact I mentioned she was criticized means Im accusing her of running it into the ground is far from the truth. Women like her, Sheryl Sandberg and Fiorna, Ellen Pao are WOMEN, who are brought into lead companies AFTER they are falling apart, and noone else knows what to do, THEN they call in a woman to fix it. In literally every case of every woman above, those were the circumstances in which companies bring in female CEOs, when their company is falling apart, so yeh the criticism they receive is even more unfounded because they take so much personal criticism about their bodies and emotions instead of the root causes of why they were even asked to come and help save the company in the first place.

Hmmm would be interesting to see more women starting their own tech firms instead of running the the rescue of drowning ones.

And give me a break about male CEOs. Men do not go out on the internet and make degrading sexual comments about male CEOs en masse by the millions the day they step into their role. All of these women above however, had entire websites dedicated to things like that. For you to not acknowledge that is just bigotry.

As far as Sociopaths as CEOs, while that personality does seem to overlap as a fit, I know people who are CEOs and founders of multiple forbes top 30 under 30, and in fact had brunch at ones house on Sunday where we talked about the book good to great and quiet (about introverts as good leaders and some of the best CEOs, just the least self advertising) soooo I really find your comment assuming anyone who is a CEO a sociopath offensive.

My best friend founded a multimillion dollar biotech company as a senior in biomedical engineering in college to solve a problem her dying grandmother experienced in the hospital, and now her technology is used in countries all around the world including ambulances fighting wars right now. She's one of the best people I know, advocates for her employees to produce life saving products and happens to be a very great friend and good person all around.

And please, the stories I hear from her about the truly sociopathic men that fit the stereotypic you are sweeping across all CEos, including good people trying to do great things, she has stories about them too. Dear god, you are out of your mind if you think the world could not benefit from some more younger ambitious female techs with good intentions and good work ethics in the field.

There are tons of stories like these, and some of the best tech firms out there were started by "rank and file" engineers just like her so...

I just don't even know what else to say about your presumptuous attitude about all CEOs being sociopaths. I can imagine they must become disenchanted with people like you who never turn down an opportunity to judge them as a person despite not knowing them as a person at all but farther than yet, you are making absolutely baseless claims in that regard. You are just plain wrong dude.

In regards to your last point, that is the million dollar question, why the precipitous dropoff of women in computer science in the 80s? Lots of people are still trying to understand that.

To answer some questions regarding the comments about how these things are different from men to women. They may not be. The reported answers may be the same and related to issues both men and women struggle with.

However, I think theres been some more chatter in the industry trying to get to the bottom of some issues that have come up recently with gender in tech one not so recent and more general. Here's what I mean

1. In the 1980s, for reasons everyone can quantify but noone can understand why, is why women stopped going into computer science in the 1980s: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Particularly data scientists and computer scientists and economists who are skilled at teasing out data in large and seemingly choatic data sets cannot figure this out, which is ironic considering they are the group in which this gender disparity occurred which such a dramatic and relatively sudden dropoff.

2. On top of the dramatic drop of women in computer science, 41% of the women who do go into tech leave compared to 17% of men: https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

3. A number of studies have shown that identical job applications, resumes AND VC pitches are evaluated differently based on whether they are labeled with a male or female name. https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/if-you-think-women-i...

4. High acheiving women, and particular women in tech show

   a. more negative feedback in reviews compared to men

   b. the word  abrasive is used positively with men, negatively with women in reviews

http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

5. Alot of women get into entry level tech jobs, but far fewer climb the ladder/wages stagnate

https://qz.com/645587/a-mckinsey-report-on-female-leaders-fi...

6. Female leaders: Founders, CEOs, CTOs receive far more public criticism AND HOSTILITY than male CEOs and CTOs ie.e Ellen Pao as leader of reddit, Marissa Meyer, Sheryl Sandberg * The things that have been said about these women and their bodies and how evil they are I have never ever heard with male CEOs no matter how evil, nor have I seen criticism as harsh, unrelated to the business issue, cruel and emotionally punishing as these women have faced. Dear god, how could any women aspire to be a leader when the women who aspire to are bombarded with a nonstop barage of sexual and emotional humiliation 24/7 on the internet male CEOs never face. It's ridiculous.

* I am not saying these things happen (the disparities by gender noted above) because men are sexist and evil. I don't think anyone knows why this is happening, which is why more women who are in tech are being asked to open up and speak out to get their personal perspective since all the data and studies in the world don't seem to be providing these answers

* My personal opinion for what its worth: I have to say as a woman in tech, an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science who now does graphics engineering and GPU software layer dev, I don't think it is fair that large corporations are being blamed for the gender disparity in STEM fields. The gender disparity is documented in highschool starting with the number of women in advanced STEM related classes like Calc and Physics all the way through college majors to then the workplace, and yet Microsoft and Google need to fabricate highly skilled and experienced technical women out of thin air or take on the effort to create fund and integrate their own ideas for education in highly unskilled and complexly funded school systems. I think its great they are doing these things, but I think the expectation society has suddenly placed on them since they decided to be angry about it this year is unreasonably punishing and creates more anger and blaming than it does objective awareness and productive conversations, of which I think this convo was an attempt to counteract on YCombos part so thank you

( and to go back to my mid-sentence point, as far as people being angry about big tech corps and the lack of women...ummm yeh Ive been a women in tech for almost a decade now so thanks for suddenly caring out of thin air but how about asking women in tech about it instead of just finding the biggest tech corporation around and blaming them for everything, which is why Q&As like the above listed are nice)

Lets address the gender disparity in STEM at age 8 and work our way up. Need help start with Toys R us and just do a study noting toys based on level of difficulty/problem solving/building creating and colour versus child care, clothing and social itneraction based toys...and start there. DONT start at google and blame everything on them. Start with YOU and how YOU raise, dress, spend time, talk with your own duaghters as mothers fathers sisters teachers etc before you assume everything is googles fault.

There is no "bad guy" guy we get to blame for this as much as mass media these days loves bad guys to blame for everything. This is a very complex cultural issue for which atleast in my experience my parents, teachers, school, cultural demographic of the area I grew up in, politics, media, men in college, magazines for women, AND THEN on top of all of that and all the warped ideas I had about myself and my capabilities due to that yes also there were cultural clashes between me and men at my tech university and also at work.

I have also on top of all of this faced blatant sexual harrassment cases which were quickly resolved just because, there was no debate about whether they were harrassment or not. They were. Even though these issues were resolved, they were horrrible experiences, emotionally traumatizing, and embarassing and annoying because other employees always find out, not to mention distracting me away from that thing called my job that I came to work for.

*The amount of times men have shockingly stated to me after getting to know me that they now realize I'm not in the industry to husband shop...is too damn high.....

Sorry but had to stop reading when the author assumed without question that the idea of a man taking a picture of himself on a private jet with women he presumedly bought and thinking objectifying and showing them off as auxiliary objects along with the other items he obtained through some form of wealth was "incongruous" with a quiet life of desperation. I know men like this and they are some of the most insecure and miserable men I know.

Alot of it has to do with the fact that when you view women as objects you can buy and auxiliary items to throw into a picture for decoration on top, it can be very difficult for men like this to actually engage with an intelligent woman or have a meaningful intimate relationship. If that doesn't sound like a life of quiet desperation, I really don't know what does.

As a female engineer perpetually in male dominated environments whether at work or at a bar being served mostly by male bartenders who I have come to build a repore with. It ends up being a casual mutually beneficial way to exchange banter and discuss social life but get perspectives and experiences from people who lead very different lives, and here is what I find. I find that most lower middle class men struggling to find jobs who have a complaint about this DO NOT have an issue finding women. They have an issue with women who do not financially contribute, and trap them into paying child support for a kid they never planned on having, and women who feel entitled to men being the sole provider, stripping away their freedom, and them men are trying to get away from women and commitments, not towards them. They are looking to travel and have experiences and do things they enjoy instead of repeating the failures they saw their parents go through. Theyve seen their parents fight over money, their dads lose jobs, their parents get divorced and I don't know who is asking for that life back but I think its the older men who lost everything because I don't know any noneducated man my age that actually wants that, they are running away from it at all costs.

I not only find this with lower middle class men but men I work with as well. They are getting sick and tired of being manipulated by women and trapped into families they never planned to or agreed to and being expected to do all the work financially for the rest of their lives...

I find in male dominated environments with men of higher socioeconomic status, that they end up dating financially needy women who are incentivized to lock them into a long term financial relationship because theres not enough economically independent women to date.

Additionally, I find women like me tend to be much more attractive to them for the reason that working women doing well and climbing the socioeconomic ladder by ourselves are attractive because we have ambition, which in their socioeconomic stratus is not something they are conditioned to, so not only is it attractive because you have more in common to talk to someone about, but its also from their point of view rather exotic and rare, and thus instantly more desireable. While a comment below stating chinese stats is generally worriesome, in America, the issue is not that lower income men can't get women, its that they cant get the women that they want. While most of the comments talk about how these women need to be more openminded, I find myself as a socioeconomic 26yr old woman progressing in my technical career in engineering and software development, I find that there is not nearly enough women, and that we need many more.

IF this happens (and that happening whether its happening and causes behind it happening or not is a WHOLE different discussion) over time then the standards men have for women will raise. While these men are pining after women who in reality don't exist in great numbers, just highly highlighted, the other 95% of women are incentivized to compete on a personal and economic level if they find men on their level and above their socioeconomic level are choosing women who make their own money, and they will begin to understand they are the only ones providing for themselves and over time women will seep into previously considered male dominated environments and take on more management and leadership roles.

Over the long run, this will hopefully allow men and women to engage in short or long term relationships or whatever they choose as we all become more accepting and openminded based on the person and less on the economic benefits they can provide. Progress is painful, and as one of the few women pioneering in it, I get pressure form men i work with to date and marry, men who serve me drinks to date and marry, and I get hate and drama from all the girls who are mad at me for making more money than them (who have no problem dating men with money but lots of problems with women making money, and can't seem to solve that issue in their head)

In general, its not as glamorous as it seems if you are actually a full time, preference for low drama female with your career as your first priority. Women like us are highlighted as the pain point of the issue, but we are not the cause of it, and over time hopefully the solution.

The other complaint I have about this whole argument is if women are getting a higher socioeconomic status while men complain they don't have jobs, then there are clearly jobs, they are just stereotypically female jobs, so instead of men complaining that the universe isnt entitling and providing them to the (in the grand scheme of things incredibly fleeting and nonpermanent manufactoring jobs) they should be more open to becoming nurses, teachers, government jobs and other jobs that are clearly in a great shortage for that women are not only working full time side jobs while taking night classes to become nurses and etc but raising kids while doing it often times as a single parent.

If they can do it men can do it, they just don't want to because its an uncomfortable stereotype to break, but in WWII many women stepped into manufactoring jobs to fill the void in America, so men need to do the same thing.

For now its a bit of an awkward phase for men because they are used to being the ones that get to choose and women have always been very willing to compete in looks and otherwise to get access to that financial stability as it was the only socially acceptable way to do so for so long without permanently striating yourself into a considered deplorable condition.

Men need to realize over time women becoming more independent is a good thing for everyone. Gorwing pains will always exist in society, its how we adapt to them that makes both men and women successful and competitive candidates in the working field and in the personal relationship realm.

This ongoing complaint I keep hearing about men wanting to fall back into manufactoring jobs and women getting jobs is a more a complaint about how they wish things would never change and how they want people to accomodate them instead of steering the dicsussion to how to adapt to reality.

and I am glad you brought up this point. To me, I'm a pretty introverted person and once was put in a leadership position a bit reluctantly. I didn't feel unconfident about the technical capabilities, just exuding the charisma and extroversion people expect from leaders. I got solid feedback, but the avalanche of horrible unconstructive criticism and just pushing me to my limits for no apparent reason except to try to frustrate me really made me have to draw the line between embracing conflict and standing up for yourself. Also interestingly enough, the most criticism came from people I did not work directly over or with or under, but other people surrounding the situation, but still with alot of influence. With so much dialogue about say for example leaders in Silicon Valley, and creating a public discussion amongst the tech industry about almost every decision a well known leader makes in their company, it makes me wonder who much of the criticism is perceived and created by the outside looking in versus the the actual team working under the leader, as I experienced a microcosm of this scenario myself.

It turns out when you stand up for yourself in cases where you really feel the feedback and composed conflict is out of line and destructive, that is when people begin to respect and trust you. Still, it was frustrating. It was also a very political role with non developers, and I have made sure if I ever go into a leadership position again, it won't be with no technical people. Yes, software developers can have the same mentality, but overall there's alot more objective ability to define and measure how much time someone is putting into creating constructive things versus composing destruction for the sake of challenging leadership or protecting their own entrenched interests.

Theres a fine line between embracing everyone's feedback and being a complete pushover and letting other people steamroll you based on their own motivations. Ultimately, I believe sometimes the best leaders make controversial decisions and stick to them regardless of what other people think, and ultimately the people who work under those people are people who have observed their decisions tend to lead to good outcomes, and they acknowledge the objective positive feedback loop from working under a person like this over the masses criticism of someone who does not please everybody.

I am friends with the CEO of a successful software company thats been around for ten years with a few hundred mil in funding (not just a wannabe) and a couple hundred devs. We are friends personally and don't overlap in work at all but he told me that in his company "I have an open door policy and I listen to everyone. It's ultimately beneficial to work that way. Some people come into my office every week, some once a year, and some come in about every 4 months to give feedback. I listen to the people who come in every 4 months and ignore everyone else."

a bus in my city more than quadruples the time to get anywhere around or near my city. That means a 15minute car ride can take 1.5hours on a bus.

Most people who can afford a car will opt out of spending 3 hours a day on a bus, but for people who don't have any other option, they are burdened with this on top of working long minimum wage hours, and walking their groceries 1/2 mile home in the freezing cold with their children after a 10 hour shift, and judged for not being able to get themselves out of a bad situation.

Whatever the cost of an uber ride is, can be earned back multiple time in the amount of time people could work more, or allow them to come home and spend more time with their children instead of keeping them in after school public welfare programs which is shown to decrease crime over time.

In general, unless you are in Boston or NYC, the option of a bus is really the only option, and it is a disgraceful and absurd option for poor people working long hours at minimal pay. Ive ridden the public bus system in my city. It's a joke. I feel sad for people who have to navigate to work using it everyday, especially considering the majority of jobs that provide any hope of economic mobility are on "the other side of town" taxing their time even more to navigate further.

It is unreasonable to assume the working poor who are more statistically likely to have kids are not at an exponential disadvantage when a 15minute ride to work takes roughly 25% of their waking day, when maximizing hours worked is important with less pay, and kids are left in understaffed public daycare programs or unsupervised in areas with high crime rates at home. What do we expect?

I don't know about that. Computers and Tvs and cellphones used to be only for rich elite businessmen, now, not everyone can afford to have one, but even lower middle class people can pick up a $200 chromebook, or finance a phone and the technology they have access to for the same or very similiar prices gets better every year.

There are actually very few things in life in which the quality and amount of it that can be afforded for the same price each year increase so much annually for someone with stagnant wages and little economic mobility, as hardware and software technology, and services that optimize their efficiency and prices based on it.

In general, the expanded use of something, especially with realistic competitors such as Lyft, results in the cost goes down and becomes more affordable over time.

Most new technology and services related to it are expensive in the beginning and become more affordable and common over time. Right now, a VR headset from Oculus Rift is expensive for most people and usually only tech geeks who work in the industry can afford the toys they make, but over time, everyone who has a tv will have it at an affordable price, and everyone will laugh at how expensive it use to be for such bad graphics compared to what they have access to in 40years.

If more Ubers, Lyft and other ride sharing organizations and companies are on the road but less cars overall because they solve traffic problems: a. competition for price goes up, cost goes down b. Traffic and therefore commute times and cost of fuel goes down, which also aids in driving price down.

This is the same thing for technology hardware manufactoring, if anything, Samsung is struggling not to go out of business in certain areas because the cost of a TV is so cheap now, and they actually make ridiculously expensive and luxurious tvs now to cater to the wealthy to help keep that sector afloat.

Cellphones now are in remote places in Africa, allowing farmers to develop their own trading systems via communication they never had before and an entire internal market for crop trading and development and business is now viable for people in third world countries because they have access to affordable phones now.

That would have never happened though if the first phone had to be affordable for everyone.

The first time someone does something, theres a lot of R&D time, waste inefficiency, testing cycles and messy feedback from customers through first iterations. The first time someone learns how to sew, they may waste lots of cloth trying to make a dress that is nice enough someone will pay for, and probably sell an ok dress for a price that does not exceed the amount of time and effort they put in, but it will still only be for rich women. It was very rare back in the late 1890's that someone could afford to buy premade clothing, and everyone had to learn how to sew their own clothes because it was too expensive. But its a good thing that very expensive market was sustained and not ousted just because only rich people could afford to buy a premade dress. Looking back, its clearly inefficient and a loss of time and money for everyone to have to be educated at that skill, the same way we will look back and find it particularly wasteful for anyone who spends the majority of their life in urban areas to have their own car and have to waste time navigating their own transportation, and if they need to venture out of the city for a day or the weekend, rental hubs will abound at the outskirts as they already do in NYC and other areas, for rental for an hour, 4hours or a day or more. This is kind of the cycle of development.

It's a good thing computers arent the size of small rooms or even small houses anymore or even that a small one cost an arm and a leg, we would all feel that to be ridiculous. in my mind, I think its ridiculous that families both rich and lower middle class are obligated to maintain 1-2 cars, usually two if both parents work, and then kids who get jobs before they move out and need to navigate themselves after school, have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars. If you are poor its even worse because you will have to buy a used car, and spend more time and money fixing your car when it breaks down, but in unpredictable spurts that costs anywhere from hundreds or thousands of dollars, making it even more chaotic for poor families to navigate through life.

As far as America's bus transportation in most cities. Give me a break. Barely anyone who is not on welfare uses my cities transportation, and its a 45minute ride minimum to get to the poorest area to the closest sector that offers them jobs. That's a lot of time each way minimum for a single working mother on welfare trying to get herself out of a bad situation, struggling between spending hours on a bus for a ten minute ride in a car for a better salary and affording rent.

I find usually liberal elite trying to make arguments for the lower working class and people struggling to get out of welfare usually end up shooting not themselves but the people they claim to be speaking for in the foot. Not surprisingly, in my area people on welfare are some of the largest and loudest demographics wanting Uber, because they lost all hope in their own public transportation system years ago. It's not just bad, its disgraceful, and when I find myself trying to schedule a cab (yes in my city you have to schedule and theres usually a 45minute wait minimum but thats rarely accurate) in person, which hopefully saves you bit more than calling, its crowded with people on welfare trying to get cabs with children in tow, and being robbed blind based on arbitrary taxi prices.

This may not be the case in the city, but actually rural poor and isolated economically struggling cities like Detroit and upstate NY who don't have subways can benefit greatly from Uber, much more so than the middle class.

Is there any product or service that has ever existed involving technology that was affordable for everyone the very first release of it?