Bombardier has its own problems and is viewed as a corrupt Quebec company by much of English Canada (that is, the rest of us). So the other comments on the political appetite to bail them out again are mostly correct.
So Canadians would rather have Europe or the US take the lead (and make the profits) rather than Canada because the company is from Quebec? To me that makes no sense.
I think the parent comment is implying that college diplomas are better at helping people get a job and earn a living.
Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia. It wouldn't surprise me if community college educated people transferring to university programs needed a refresher on that stuff.
Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia.
Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace. Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum. Granted, much of high school and regional college is piss-poor, but instead of writing off all of university as useless one should demand proper performance.
Seems the experience is very different in differing work places.
> Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
This is the norm at my (very successful and large) company.
> I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum.
I'm very pro-education, but I will point out that all the people I know who write very poorly have formal education, and often graduate degrees. Culture will dictate how well you write much, much more than education. If the work culture doesn't value it, people will write poorly.
>Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace.
Proper written communication, absolutely. However, you can argue that people don't need 4 years of writing essays in order to comprise emails or PowerPoints. As for literature searching, what does that mean in a normal office environment context?
My students have to write lab protocols. In General Chemistry class they were filling in worksheets (seriously, are they paying tuition to fill in worksheets?), now they get to write 8 - 10 pages for each organic lab about the context, what they did and what is all means. The initial attempts are universally lousy, but they do improve. One hopes that the improved writing skills carry over to other kinds of written communication. It's just sad that expectations in the first semesters are set so low, it's really a tyranny of low expectation.
Footnoting means to put stuff into proper context. Of course you need literature searching skills to put stuff into proper context, and you need to know where to find documentation for your field of work.
This may be the last straw that tips politicians over into considering Twitter & co utilities - stuff that the gov has a say in running because failure is unacceptable to the public.
Not that I think the gov could do a better job, but that doesn't stop them elsewhere.
If the star is a direct hit on your planet, it would look as if a second sun was getting brighter and larger, and the heat so unbearable you’ll be dead before there’s any impact.
It could, if you're where we are now developmentally you could conceivably determine a safe place in the solar system to colonize in the thousands or more likely millions of years it would take to arrive, right? Or maybe more realistically leave or build large scale space habitats (since there might be no safe planet due to rotation of them).
Assuming you lack the capacity to leave for good, you probably want to be in the system, but in a well-stocked tin can rather than a planet. You won’t be able to maneuver a planet but your tin can might be able to stick around. Afterwards you’ll need a star and whatever planets didn’t get eaten or flung out of the system.
You definitely don’t want to be on a planet that gets flung out of both systems. Even if you somehow had millions of years of fuel, your civilization would probably never be close to any other body in space again.
Hah, amusingly I failed to consider that. I wonder how fast a sun would have to move through to have a negligible (or at least not catastrophic) effect on orbits?
The Oort cloud around the Solar system ranges halfway to the next star. That far out the Sun is probably not the only relevant influence anymore. Even though stars would have to get really close to be able to mess up orbits of the inner Solar system, a large comet can absolutely wreck the biosphere if it hits us.
Books from fifty years ago are difficult to read now, mostly due to a blatant sexism. An example from the first page of this text: “Probably she had brains...” That’s right! Men are smart, women are beautiful and wear nice clothes.
Your post comes across as needlessly biased, pejoratively modernist, and ignorant.
> Books from fifty years ago are difficult to read now, mostly due to a blatant sexism.
Fifty years ago was 1970. I don't think anyone has a problem reading Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret, Johnathan Livingston Seagull, or Ringworld due to blatant sexism.
"Finis" is a short story and was first published over 100 years ago.
> An example from the first page of this text: “Probably she had brains...”
"Probably she had brains..." is not evidence of sexism. It's not even evidence of a bias that people generally don't have brains, much less women. It's literally a character's (Eastwood's) conclusion based on observation of another character's (Mrs. Davis') behaviors and habits. Eastwood doesn't show surprise that a woman could be smart. He doesn't deny that she is smart in spite of the evidence. And even if he had done so, a character being sexist wouldn't ipso facto make the work as a whole sexist.
The space has a moat though - it takes a huge investment and long time to become competitive in this low margin space. Rackspace has shown themselves to be a market leader within this moat.
My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article.
Their former university classmates (who also immigrated to Canada) are likely part of the 20 people that jumped ship to Huawei and implicitly may have leaked data before then.
I'm glad this article got through to them, that it isn't just politics and Huawei & the CCP really did go offside.
I interned at Nortel in early 2000's right before it all went down. I can tell you the engineering culture was rotten within. No-one was doing anything useful for years. Many orgs were built around milking the ancient layer 2 passport switch. The layer 3 router meant to compete with Cisco was 3 years late and only sold a few dozen units. There was accounting fraud going on at the highest level - delivery trucks circles around to pad the books.
I'm sure the hack happened. I just don't think it would had made any material impact - there was simply not much to steal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was also there as an intern around the same time.
It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.
I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).
We killed our own telecommunications industry by first throwing it into a massive bubble and then starving the shit out of it.
It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.
Sounds like it was badly miss managmed. Better companies outsold it, causing it to file bankruptcy.
This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.
I'm sure it looks like that inside many big companies. There's a reason that FAANG+ companies fought over Nortel's patent trove. Nortel tech is still in a lot of today's most valuable products, covering things from BGA routing techniques to wireless communications. The area still supports an ecosystem of small manufacturers of world-leading optics and photonics components. That says something, at least.
Someone I worked with in 1006 who I think was at Bay Networks and jumped ship to Cisco had similar feelings about Nortel. Nothing about China, but it was already a sinking ship.
Chinese nationalism is potent. ...and it's somewhat understandable to internalize some of the pride of being part of a global power that is on the rise.
For those of us of Mediterranean decent, it would be as if the Roman Empire has been rebuilt and were expanding its influence globally. It would be hard for most people not to feel some element of subconscious or conscious pride.
The same feelings helped prop up the new Caliphate in the middle east recently (until it became obvious how brutal ISIS was).
Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves.
I work with a ton of ex-Nortel engineers in town. All of them agree that the company was grossly mismanaged. The CxOs fudge the accounting, ignored warnings about their systems, and the burden of Nortel's fall should be mainly shouldered by management.
Huawei hacks are the sideshow, the burning tire fire of management is the main act.
Your parents aren't the only ones burnt by Nortel. Lots of Nortel employees indulged with the paper gains of their stock, only for it to crater and created lots of financial strain.
But like most articles with a question as the title, the answer is typically no. This article, frankly, is trying so hard to rewrite history, to divert attention from the main act to the side show.
Nortel was not killed by Huawei or a hack. It was killed by bad management.
The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space.
Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it.
There's always the temptation to find an external scapegoat but the buck does stop with Nortel's management.
The same happened to Nokia. People usually say that Microsoft killed it, but it was already pretty much behind everything when Microsoft took it.
Too much bureaucracy, everything outsourced, management out of touch with anything, meetings after meetings... Hell, I remember two/three weeks of meetings to replace apache proxy with nginx. Actual replacement and configuration update would take a couple of minutes.
I find it hard to believe that the company was so incredibly fragile that it, uniquely among its competitors was killed by Huawei stealing some of its IP.
Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.
I'll take this with a grain of salt. To this day Bloomberg still stands by its "The Big Hack" article (Supermicro, Amazon, and Apple being hacked with the tiny Chinese chip), containing claims that have been thoroughly refuted (and ridiculed) since then, and about which even their own sources were very incredulous. The CEO of Apple called it "100 percent a lie", which is a very harsh word in this context. Those were lower standards than the ones we're held to when commenting here on HN.
I don't know how that article came to be but such precedent puts their tech articles into serious question. Obviously such articles about major Chinese interference and hacks are great with the readers and get a lot of attention. But while the premise may be true (the Chinese hack most likely happened), the implications and the interpretation of the reporter are on shaky ground.
I don't have any further evidence but I'd say that Bloomberg may be pandering to the readers and giving them what they want to hear during these times. And if I were Bloomberg reporters Jordan Robertson or Michael Riley I'd say that even if my sources denied it.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't necessarily know if Nortel is truly unique amongst it's competitors.
I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt like we were visiting a retirement home, it was like there was no one under 50 in the building (this was mid 2010's). Beers with other vendors, and they'd be talking about how there's an entire floor for like 5 employees and more layoffs coming down.
Because the company survived... doesn't mean it's alive and well.
Embedded hardware companies are skewed to an older demographic because you can't hire significant numbers of younger engineers with the necessary knowledge.
As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).
I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)
PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.
I don't know a lot of this sounds like reverse ageism. Facebook was built entirely on young, talented engineers who could perhaps scale out software better than "experienced" developers. Same goes for a lot of Google products. The barrier of entry for software development is much lower and you can pretty much hit the ground running with a few good math and algorithms courses and good internships. You can become a good software architect with a few years of experience -- even the best are barely 50 years of age (Jeff Dean, for example).
I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.
No rational person that has lived through age discrimination would engage in any kind of ageism and again, my career spans over 40 years. (How many people my age in the Fortune 500 company 40 years ago? ZERO! Maybe down in mailroom or something, but they weren't even allowed in the tech areas so I would have to assume.) I also strongly disagree with your assertion that Google has "young" engineers developing "a lot of Google products", at least in the sense that they are doing so without guidance from experienced engineers. As far as Facebook, I don't find their stuff very interesting (though I thank them for helping to all but destroy HP with their open hardware) --it's a website with a big power bill and a non-ACID database, right?
I don't know if I agree with that statement, engineers can be invested in, university programs etc. If a company is growing and expanding, they're going to need to draw on a lot of engineering and R&D talent.
And in my case it doesn't apply, the equipment we're evaluating was all software, running on a common x86 telecom platform. While I'm sure the office did have some embedded R&D, alot of what telecom vendors do just requires software developers.
My hero! Bro who is going to be the voice of reason in this crazy mixed up world? If I were an archaeologist in the future I'd start by reading all the most downvoted comments for sure!
Be sure to explain to your parents that this particular news outlet (Bloomberg) has a history of playing fast and loose with reality, particularly in regard to supposed Chinese industrial espionage activities. [1]
Also you might point out that the company pays bonuses to its "journalists" for successfully affecting financial markets. [2]
It's funny because all in all Bloomberg has a vested interest in staying on the good side of the Chinese government given their terminal business. You can see it in their editorial line which is rather neutral on most China issues compared to other publications like WSJ.
The article itself suggests that it's a possibility. There's no evidence connecting the hack to Nortel's flagging fortunes, and there's no evidence connecting Huawei's success to the information in the hack.
The article makes a much stronger argument that effective Chinese government support of Huawei and the failure of the Canadian government to support Nortel, as well as Huawei's ability to hire away many of Nortel's top researchers, led to their success.
getting downvoted for pointing out facts and reiterating the authors own words. The anti-Chinese hysteria on this website really is a sight to behold at this point.
Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?
For an actual science based look at Nortel there was a good study done by a team at the Tefler School of Business years ago.[1] Taking an extensive look at the corporate culture and the state of the business which was despite dotcom evaluations in a pretty sorry state already. Tracing the decay back to the 80s and 90s and a whole row of disastrous decisions.
> Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?
As a US citizen, reading HN for a year has downgraded me from being extremely patriotic, to considering my options if I get expelled from the country in the next 20 years on the basis of my ethnicity. These folks would cheer that on, and they're my neighbors.
As someone who is neither Chinese nor American and has no horse in this race, I find it amusing how strong the bias against China is on this site. TikTok accesses clipboard, it must be an intelligence operation; LinkedIn and AirBnB do the same, I guess the devs were lazy and didn't do enough testing. Someone find a security hole in a Huawei device, that must be a communist backdoor; a Cisco device has the same security issue, they are just moving fast and breaking things.
You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.
The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.
Wrong or right, many Americans see China as an enemy. News is filtered through that light. And some news, like convictions about IP theft by Chinese (Xu at IBM, 3 individuals at Sinovel, etc, etc, etc), leave little room for debate. These stories color the ones which may or may not be nefarious like TikTok. Guilt by association.
But they are very selective in doing that. Even when the same actions are done in the same context they will use different measures for different people based on their sentiment toward them. And that just adds to the bias and fuels the cycle. As explained by this simple but accurate picture [0]. They see China and and their hackers as enemies. Do you think they see the NSA and by extension their own country as an enemy? Discarding (unwittingly) half of the context makes it a lot easier to assume they have the moral high ground.
Propaganda doesn't mean it's a lie, just that you take the same truth and shape it into an opinion for the people, depending on what you want to achieve. And it's a tool used by every superpower.
I'm suggesting that I don't know if Nortel was hacked by the Chinese, and that I don't know if any such hack was responsible for the company's eventual downfall, and that reading a Bloomberg article will be of little or no help with either condition.
Bloomberg's last China hack article was completely discredited, and still no retraction/explaination. They have the appearances of Trump's propaganda machine. Considering the timing of this relative to the election and GOP's sole strategy of China scapegoating we can all take this latest as more of the same
It's possible for two people of different political parties to agree on something. Bloomberg's brief candidacy was characterized by being to the right of the entire rest of the Democratic field.
Co-opting universities to teach using Esri tools is a big part of Esri's marketing. They provide those tools to schools below cost, encourage (bribe) profs to incorporate their toolset heavily into their curriculum with free seminars in nice places, and it's often a revolving door between academia and Esri research posts.
SAS, matlab, ersi they all have the same business model. Subsidize students so they don’t know a competing tech and also capitalize and nurture corporate lock in.
I could rant about sas for ages. Its like it was purpose built to encourage anti patterns and Its own docs show code style is a foreign concept to the company.
A cause or symptom (I'm not sure about causality here) is that the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) directly funds most private Canadian VCs. VCs now have public money as part of their LP base, with some strings attached. Most of these strings (eg. don't waste taxpayer money doing anything unethical or overly negligent) will nudge VCs to be more conservative. Plus, the VCs are guaranteed 20%+ of their 2% carry from BDC taking up that much of every fund and don't need to swing for the fences to make a good income.
I live in Montreal and intend to do a consumer oriented software startup. I would like to better understand what I would be getting into starting up here, vs. applying to YC. Can you suggest resources for understanding Canadian startup landscape, funding etc.?
Perceived Pros:
- Many STEM grads
- Gaming and AI industry, 2+ top AI schools
- Relatively little competition for engineering talent compared to SV
- Many engineers who are barred entry to US based on country of origin
- Easier work visas (to be confirmed)
- Free healthcare and other social services, and less violence
Perceived Cons:
- Cultural lack of ambition, entrepreneurial dreaming.
- Excessive reliance on government subsidy (the government is the customer)
- Risk averse VC
- Shallow bench of experienced operators to mentor, invest,
and manage
Remember in the SV costs are astronomical, so there's a kind of buy-in threshold necessary which won't make sense for most companies.
Shopify is a perfect company for Canada - they are not making 'tech for other techies' and don't require all the best devs in the world. It took a while to get going, so costs needed to be lower. They can make some income early on, thus 'proving the model'.
There is a reason that the nations top social network started at Harvard, which has an elite status among young people. There's a reason that Snap was started by an attractive young man from Cali, from a the top school in Cali. Glossier, a 'makeup company' is actually, truly a 'social network', and there's a reason it was founded by an ex-model/reality TV star with deep connections in LA/NYC.
On the technical side, there's a reason that certain companies really need to be in the Valley as well.
So if your business needs to be in the Valley, it might make sense to do that, but if it's a 2cnd-tier kind of thing, not something the FAANGS would ever look at, and doesn't require the best technical talent in the world, than you can do it other places.
Montreal a tier 2 cities, Ottawa/Vancouver, not really tier 2, Toronto is probably a solid tier 2. FYI that is actually not bad considering tons of American cities are not tier 2 either. Chicago, Toronto's 'twin' really might not even be Tier 2, there is a weird lack of entrepreneurial activity there for its relative size and power.
Montreal has cheap prices, decent AI grads, stable economy, supportive government, weak VC but the top could of firms are fine places to go for smaller up to round A, and if your business fits well into Quebec's strategy, following rounds can be supported by Desjardins and nationalist players.
Canuck here who spends a lot of time in the States (or used to). SLC also has some of the most underrated and inexpensive skiing just 30 minutes out from the airport.
Underrated it is not, just search for Cottonwood Canyon traffic jams to see what skiing really is like here when the snow flies. 30 minutes no traffic, can easily be 3+ hours now.
Exactly, a normal drive from my apartment to Brighton or Snowbird is about 45-50 minutes, I've had several times where it was just short of 3 hours one way, this past season.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-world-bank-... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/3354398/bombardier-trudeau-hammer... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bombardier-what-happ...