I remember reading about an experiment where they had servers behave (at random) either happy and cheerful, or abrupt, rushed and unfirendly. In both cases they performed their job the same. The result was that the "friendly and cheerful" staff were tipped less on average. The theory was that people perceived the cheerful and friendly staff as being less deserving of a tip because they were clearly enjoying their job, or were having to work less hard.

It is akin to the locksmith paradox. If you have a newly trained guy turn up and take an hour to get into your house/car, you feel like he's worked hard and deserves his $100. If he has 10 years experience and does the job in 5 minutes because he knows exactly what to do, many will feel cheated when they hand over the same fee, despite getting an objectively better service, because they perceive that he didn't work so hard.

Something that I've seen happen time and again with a lot of companies is the gutting and outsourcing of anything they don't regard as their "core competency". This reduces their corporate risk (easy to squeeze or drop a supplier in hard times) but it is insidious, and consumes the company from the inside. Eventually they are left with no competencies in anything except outsourcing and financial engineering.

So many of the individuals I work with are from the big outsourcing and management consultancy firms. It's everything from technical specialists, hr personnel, project managers and right up to fairly senior management. Some firms are little more than procurement and accounting departments with a brand, they don't actually have the skills/knowledge to do anything any more.

Amazon goes the other way. It is constantly insourcing things, and building up it's own skills in any field where it thinks it can do better than the existing suppliers. It treats things like the web store and the video service as it's first customer to get things started and drive development, and then spins round and makes it open. AWS is the obvious and most visible one, but their warehouse and logistics arm (certainly here in the UK) and even the web store are increasingly just a service that other people use to sell their stuff. I'd say about half the things I buy on amazon are sold by a third party but shipped from an Amazon warehouse by an Amazon Logistics delivery person.

This is why buying Wholefoods should terrify the entire food industry, and not just their direct retail competitors. Wholefoods is their new "first customer" for the supply chain management and sourcing of perishable goods and groceries, something they've struggled with scaling in the past. Once they turn all the back end systems (tech and people) into a service provided to Wholefoods retail, they will probably once again make it a service that other smaller retailers can tap into, and also use it to juice up other services like Amazon Pantry and Subscribe and Save.

They are prepared to take on almost anything and have a go, even if it ultimately fails (see the Fire Phone). Meanwhile much of the rest of the corporate world is taking the low risk, slow growth route powered by financial engineering where execs are more concerned with pointless mergers and restructuring than about actually doing anything concrete.

Likewise. Pretty certain this is offered in most IKEAs in the UK.

Not sure this is a new service, more that they are going to use TaskRabbit to either expand it or replace the existing system in the US.

The mods' sarcasm detectors appear to be faulty today.

Every time Twitter comes up on Slashdot someone goes on a rant about how its decline is all the fault of SJWs, safe-spaces or some other perceived PCness.

The fact that Twitter has never had a viable business model is apparently of no importance.

Yeah, not impressed by this study. With this sort of approach it's hard to disentangle the various possible causes and effects. For example, people who spend longer on line may have more stuff going through their minds or are people who find it difficult to switch off, which affects their sleep pattern. I know that was one of the causes of my life long insomnia.

There have been much better studies demonstrating the effect of artificial light on sleep patterns. We know that blue light in particular seems to affect our circadian rhythm, so using screens, especially close up in the evening, can send things out of whack.

I've been a life long insomniac, and one of the things that *seemed* to help was to use software like F.Lux on my laptops and similar apps on my phone. They adjust the colour temperature of your screen towards the red later on in the evening. Obviously that's an anecdote, but there does seem to be some pretty reliable basic science behind in.

Personally, I found that the thing that helped the most was a strong routine. The moment I start slipping out of that for more than a couple of days I know I'm going to struggle to sleep. One of the things that will do that is aimless browsing.

What do you use BitCoin for? Genuinly not being sarcastic or anything, I'm interested to know how easy it is to actually use tor "real world" uses these days. I'd always been put off bothering with it as it didn't seem very useful, but it's been around for a long time now so clearly there are uses.

It'll be interesting to see how Trump and the rest of the GOP get along.

Obviously they now have all the levers of power, but there is a heck of a lot of bad blood there at the moment. I would love to be a fly on the wall when Trump and Paul Ryan meet for the first time after this.

Donald Trump does not seem like the kind of person to let bygones be bygones. Frankly if I were him I'd be pretty pissed off with a lot of Republicans. He'll (rightly) be able to say that he got where he did largely without them, and in many ways in spite of them. I can see some hard bargaining going on over the next four years.

And when he talks about "draining the swamp" in Washington, he and his supporters are talking as much about the GOP establishment as anyone else. There will be a lot of entrenched interests in the GOP who are going to be getting nervous about whether he's going to follow through on what he's promised his supporters.

However a Trump presidency turns out, I don't think this will be like George W Bush, where everyone around him was a GOP old-timer.

This. It felt like Hilary was running against herself most of the time.

As much as I'd rather not have Trump as president of the US, I don't envy the choice American's had to make. It seemed like almost any Democrat without a dodgy history would have stood a better chance. Of course we'll never actually know that, all we can do is talk shit and throw about half baked theories.

This really did feel like that early Southpark episode where they had to vote between the giant douchebag and the turd sandwich.

I don't think it's that there is more of the crap, it's that there's less of the good.

Trolls and trash have been a part of /. since the early days. I have a low 6 figure UID and I can't remember a time when the GNAA and their ilk were not active here. The difference is that then the quality discussions would be numerous enough to make it appear very different. Once upon a time an article like this might gather a couple of hundred comments, many of them from practicing physicists discussing/criticising/explaining the work. Meanwhile the trolls and shitposters would be downvoted. Anyone reading at 3 and up would probably see some good discussion. Now news like this seems unlikely to get even 100 comments, few are from knowledgable people.

It's like the water-level falling on a river and suddenly you can see all the crap that's been dumped there for years. With so few comments on most articles (there are only 3 articles on my front page with more than 100 comments), you end up reading at a lower level, so you see more of the crap beneath the water.

I wish the new owners of /. well, and I hope they somehow manage to revive it, but I honestly think it's too late, discussion has moved to Reddit or more specialised websites with more active moderation systems. Reddit might be full of trash (including whole subreddits), but the volume is so high, that it's submerged underneath the vast mass and only visible if you choose to go and look for it most of the time.

I was pretty sceptical about the Micro bit when it was announced. It seemed under-specced compared to all the other small board computers out there.

I was wrong. Talking to people who actually use them to teach, they (teachers and kids) love them. The combination of the on-board screen, accelerometer etc, and the toolchain all combine to make it really quick to get going and build something simple but fun. Like the old 8-bit micros, you can get going almost instantly.

Obviously they have limits, and something like an Arduino or Pi is going to be more use for bigger projects, but for teaching kids the basics and letting them have fun with them the Bit is great. These are designed as a first step, and that's what they are good at.

...before you get the idea that you need to start doing things properly?

Theranos really don't seem to be getting the hint that if they want to be taken seriously now they need to be utterly scrupulous about everything they do.

Likewise. I'm hopefully sceptical :)

At worst there is an interesting effect going on that is worth further study and might provide some new insights into some aspects of physics, or simply improvements to experimental techniques. At best it has the possibility to revolutionise some aspects of space exploration.

I am sceptical that this will live up to the best case, but I really hope that my scepticism turns out to be wrong.

This is what science is all about. There's an odd effect, people are doing experiments, whatever happens we will have learnt something which may one day be useful. This is an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary proof, which we will hopefully get.

This is for civil small claims cases, in which lawyers are rarely involved and which are largely set up to support people litigating in person.

They tend to be more about arbitration of unpaid invoices or failure to provide a service that's been paid for etc. I have a couple of friends who have used the small claims courts either against non-paying customers or companies that have stiffed them. In all cases they attended in person and were supported by the court staff rather than lawyers, and they all had good things to say about the staff and the system in principal.

These are very much not cases where high paid lawyers square up against each other and slog it out in a dramatic battle of rhetoric. In fact I've heard from a number of people that the judges who preside tend to take a dim view of trained lawyers trying to steamroller or confuse non-lawyers on the other side. These are not cases involving complex points of law. If the case gets more complex then it may be referred to a higher court.

This proposal makes a lot of sense to me for those sorts of cases. While the cost of using the small claims court can put people off using it, the time and disruption, especially if they are running a business, can be more of an impediment. The ability to handle much of the case without having to attend in person would make the whole system much better, and if it reduced the costs it would make the small claims court more accessible to many people to seek redress from companies. There's also lots of potential to design the online system in such a way as to provide lots of help and advice to non-legal people to they can make their case batter, which should also make the whole process more effective and fair.

All good stuff, but just to point out Peaky Blinders isn't a Netflix original, it's a show produced for the BBC.

It's also amazing.

Cilian Murphey is just brilliant in everything he's in

This is an intersting idea, and it would be fun to see it developed further, but this line really stuck out.

"Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"

Bullshit. I'm not saying some improvement in air crash survivability isn't a good thing, but the idea that people are regularly dying because their aeroplane can't disassemble in midair and parachute them to the ground it frankly offensive to all the engineers who have worked over the years to make large scale commercial flying unbelievably safe.

Total number of air craft fatalities worldwide in commercial flight has been significantly less than 1000 per year for the last couple of decades. Something like 3.6 billion passenger journeys will be completed in 2016 (IATA estimate).

Safety is the single worst reason to throw away a tried and tested basic design that is fantastically safe and replace it with a much more complicated and new system.