Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204880404577225380456599176-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNjExNDYyWj.html <comment><USER2> Given that the Geek2English translation obscured useful detail: Safari blocks third party cookies by default. You can work around this default setting by using an iframe to submit a vestigial form, which will convince Safari that the domain doing the submitting is a first party, not a third party. After you have any cookie on the machine, broadening the scope to include e.g. cookies from your house advertising network is easy. Google says "Whoopsie, we didn't plan on that happening." Cookies are still just cookies and their newfound relevance to the WSJ is still refighting something the Internet largely settled back in 1996.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the explanation, but it's hardly "settled".

I don't use an iPhone, but I imagine if it's like other browsers, there's some setting that says:

[x] Accept cookies from sites [ ] Accept third party cookies

When I don't check the second box, it doesn't mean "Don't accept cookies, unless condition X is true", e.g. the web site implemented a popular hack. It means __really __don't accept third party cookies, and I don't give a shit if the +1 button breaks.

It doesn't sound like Safari's behavior on the hidden forms is intentional. It sounds like a bug, but it's irrelevant either way. I hope Apple patches this soon and forces people to opt in to third party cookies.

I'm glad that they actually set the default to reject them (a funny contrast to the address book policy). Firefox allows third party cookies by default because I always have to turn it off when setting up the browser on a new PC.

<comment><USER4> > I hope Apple patches this soon and forces people to opt in to third party > cookies.

The WSJ also ran a blog post about this which says (at the very end):

"An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that allows cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. The people who handled the proposed change, according to software documents: two engineers at Google."

"software documents" is linked to <http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/92142>

So it appears that Google engineers have already closed this loophole.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's amazing.

This somehow reminds me of the time when Chrome marketing ended up paying for links to their site, and then the Web search group had to punish them with a demotion.

<comment><USER5> Well, except that this change was made by Google engineers in August (well before the big deal this has become today).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lately I've been reading quite a few articles that arguably show Google not following the "Don't Be Evil" moto. But I've always found people having an explanation for the behavior where the benefit of the doubt can be given to Google. (E.g. Social results from SPYW, etc.)

I wonder if anyone can throw some light on this matter if there's a way they could be doing this "by mistake", or "unintentionally" or something else. For example could the +1 button be a cause? I don't know but I'm curious.

<comment><USER7> It's a lot more nuanced than the WSJ article made it seem. Google and other web advertisers engaged in what most would consider normal activity, but that Apple had specifically disabled in Mobile Safari. Here's a good explanation from John Battelle: [http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/02/a-sad-state-of- int...](http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/02/a-sad-state-of-internet- affairs-the-journal-on-google-apple-and-privacy.php)

<comment><USER8> The Battelle link is a horrible explanation. His position is that user tracking for ads is a normal function of the web people want and therefore it is Apple's fault for blocking it by default. Unreal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Google itself issued a statement saying the Wall Street Journal > "mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality > to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It's important > to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal > information."

Just asking: Isn't it a kind of a subtle lie to say that advertising cookies do not collect personal information? Of course, there isn't a personal information in the cookie itself, but that cookie is used to identify my profile in those third party databases, so they know who I am, and that profile already can contain anything they collected about me in the past, including personal information.

UPDATE: This article seems to confirm that the Google's spokesman statement is indeed misleading -> <http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6701>

</comment><comment><USER10> DoubleClick is owned by Google - it _is_ a first-party.

If you're on a Google property, Google has every right to serve all the DoubleClick cookies it likes. All the WSJ's witch-hunt + Safari's pain-in-the- ass non-standard defaults mean is that Google will have to do the work to serve its DoubleClick cookies off the google.com domain - which, as people switch more and more to mobile, they will inevitably do.

</comment><comment><USER11> Safari's default behavior is to Accept Cookies: 'From visited'. This prevents 3rd party iframes from saving cookies without a workaround. However, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE (with proper P3P) all allow 3rd party iframes to save cookies by DEFAULT.

This leaves us with the choice of either using the workaround, or not providing a consistent experience that users expect.

If Safari worked like every other major browser in this regard-- allowing users to OPT-IN to the stricter cookie policy--then WSJ would be right in nailing Google for working around it.

I think Google did nothing wrong. They worked around a browser's non-standard default behavior, which is something we all do multiple times a day. Only when non-standard behavior is OPT-IN is there willful disregard for the user's intent in employing a work-around.

<comment><USER3> OK, so how do I opt out of their hacky workarounds?

This is worse because I turn off third party cookies in Firefox. On an iPhone, I would have no way to turn off third party cookies (the ones that are submitted using the hack).

<comment><USER11> 1) Apple should make the default be the more permissive policy that all other major browsers have adopted. 2) They should lock down their implementation of the 'Sites I visit' policy to prevent the workaround 3) Users who opt-in for the stricter policy actually get it, but they should realize when their CHOICE breaks any features which rely on 3rd party cookies.

<comment><USER12> Ads are features?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So much bullshit in one article. I mean the technical issue of tracking is probably correct, but it is not a Google vs Apple thing. Every website you visit on the web does it's utmost to track the hell out of you. That is an issue, but Google is not doing anything else than everybody else. I still don't like it, but this article just distorts the issue into something completely different.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds to me like they have some pretty sloppy security then. But that's pretty much the iPhone all over.

<comment><USER15> Yeah you're right if Path or others transmit your AddressBook data it's Apple's fault, if Google Inc. or others track Safari's browsers it's Apple's fault.

Shame on Apple.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, pretty much, actually. If I've checked off a box that says "don't let this happen" and then it happens? Can't really say I blame anyone but the device maker.

Since you clearly can't trust app developers or websites to not try and exploit your information, you HAVE to trust your device to do what it says. The fact that this was exposed by the standard +1 button doesn't exactly mean it was difficult to do. It wasn't some 0-day exploit that they're using, it's a failure of the browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> But, Google already does the same thing on the devices using Chrome browser. Isn't it?

<comment><USER17> Safari's default policy on handling of third-party cookies in iFrames is somewhat stricter than that of most other browsers (this is frequently a problem for Facebook games); Google almost certainly didn't _need_ to do this on Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People should note that removing this "hack " removes arguably useful user functionality such as the facebook like button (or at least the social recommendations part) too.

</comment><comment><USER19> Where is the "We are Sorry" post? That's what it takes to apologize for taking advantage of platforms that accidentally allow access to more data than they should, right?

</comment><comment><USER20> A thorough hatchet job by the WSJ, "Google" mentioned 44 times in that piece.</comment>


The Linux Information Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.linfo.org/ <comment><USER2> Very, cool site. I have used it before, and it is nice to see someone posted it! As a meta note, if you are into this type of thing, I have created a couple screencasts along the same lines:

      Crash Course on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [1]
      Crash Course on Common Commands [2]
      Hard and Symbolic Links [3]

[1] [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the- fil...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the-filesystem- hierarchy-standard)

[2] [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash-course-on- common-...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash-course-on-common- commands)

[3] [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/16-hard-and-symbolic- links](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/16-hard-and-symbolic-links)

There were also many great threads on HN about UNIX commands:

      Unix Commands I Wish I'd Discovered Years Earlier [4]
      Useful Unix commands for data science [5]
      Favorite Unix Commands [6]
      Top Unix Command Line Utilities [7]

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360320)

[5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046682)

[6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022457)

[7] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985393)

Cheers

</comment><comment><USER3> Could anyone comment on how this compares to The Linux Documentation Project <[http://tldp.org/>](http://tldp.org/>)? It seems like there's a lot of overlap in objective. Why was it necessary to create a competing project (if it is competing) rather than combine effort on expanding TLDP?

<comment><USER4> I had the same thought. TLDP is how I got PPP working on my 28.8k modem when I first installed RedHat in 1999, so maybe the information on TLDP is out of date?

<comment><USER5> It'd be nice if someone gave a shot at patching rather than forking, for once. It's not like the problem with finding documentation about Linux and its ecosystem was the lack of options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.linfo.org/uptime.html](http://www.linfo.org/uptime.html)

vs

[http://linux.die.net/man/1/uptime](http://linux.die.net/man/1/uptime)

I prefer the man page! This is just an example but i feel the same for all the pages i browsed.

Maybe it's just familiarity on my part, i know man pages so i feel more comfortable? Not sure, i just know my eyes were scanning for a synopsis section!

<comment><USER7> Different strokes for different folks; I too like man pages, but I feel that sometimes the best way to learn something is to get at it from different angles, different ways of thinking, etc, etc. As long as both (or more!) documents are well written, why not read them both?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely love this site. It's incredibly well written, informative, and on point.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Linux is a high performance, yet completely free operating system"

Of course switching to Linux is fresh if you are running Xnu or Ntoskrnl.exe, but you're gonna need an OS on top of that:)

Just to avoid confusion, e.g. about Android, which is using Linux, but is obviously not free, it could be a good idea to start calling things their proper names.

[https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux- and-gnu.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of individual projects make Linux and any other open source Unix-like system possible, I don't see why GNU deserves more credit than those other projects. I think I'll stick with Linux.

<comment><USER9> Well, yes, it's the same wonderful technology, no matter what you call it.

I was not thinking about whose credit it is, more about the logic of it. Calling it Linux could lead to some paradoxes. How would you for instance describe Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or Debian GNU/Hurd? "Linux without Linux"?

<comment><AUTHOR> What logic? What paradoxes? Debian BSD and Debian GNU would be fine with me. There is no such thing as Linux without Linux, even in android you can find the Linux goodness if you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but "easily accessible information" doesn't equal wall of text. If we want Linux to become more popular with the general population we have to make more user friendly sites. Walls of text just manage to scare non hackers away.

<comment><USER11> There are plenty of good readers who aren't hackers, who will appreciate well- written, on-point "walls of text" – as long as such text is easy to find, matched to the reader's sophistication, well-organized, quick-loading, and readable on any screen.

That's "easily accessible" enough, especially as a start!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought this is a historical site posted for some nostalgia value.

Is this actually a website from 2013? Wow.

<comment><USER13> I was not sure if this was from 2013 either, since the date at the bottom of the page shows 2007.

<comment><USER14> I am pretty sure it is from 2007. Pages are dynamically generated so http last modified date is not helpful.

But, the home page refers to the root definition as being the most recently updated page and at the bottom of that, it says "Updated October 27, 2007."

[http://www.linfo.org/root.html](http://www.linfo.org/root.html)</comment></comment></comment>


A False Dichotomy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/1494ba605b0e

<comment><USER2> Some good points made here. But also -- what an extraordinarily _readable_ page.</comment>


Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/18/18225231/emoji-emoticon-court-case-reference <comment><USER3> Emoji have really filled a gap, where words typed on the internet were missing some context of how they are supposed to be read. And nowadays, whether or not I add the eggplant emoji to the end of a whatsapp message can really change how it's interpreted, and gives me less to excuse myself should it come up in court.

But really, anything that removes doubt and clarity from a conversation has got to be a good thing. How many internet arguments have been spared because someone could attach a winky face to show that they were being impish and not to take offence? Obviously, old people hate them, but I can see emoji melding into all forms of language in the future. Or even the global language :thinking-face:

<comment><USER4> People will argue that you should be able to convey your message clearly in plain English but those people don't realise that: \- Not everyone masters English (even when it's your mother tongue, not everyone has access to the same education to be able to use it perfectly) \- Languages are complex, we don't talk with words only, we use facial expressions and gestures, emojis help mimic those when only words are available.

<comment><USER5> If you have the time to consider what you're going to say, like in written communication, then yes, you should be able to do it with just words. Take your time, figure out what you want to say.

<comment><USER6> Somehow I'm not convinced that it's better to convey my message by writing "I am flirting with you" rather than by just adding a winking or smiling emoji.

<comment><USER7> You could literally replace that emoji with the well known phrase "wink, wink." It is well understood and avoids the ambiguity of emoji.

<comment><USER8> I'm not a native English speaker, but I associate the phrase "wink, wink" with lechery more than with flirting.

That said, I also don't usually associate the wink emoji with flirting, but more with tongue-in-cheek fun. Context matters I guess.

<comment><USER9> [https://youtu.be/4Kwh3R0YjuQ](https://youtu.be/4Kwh3R0YjuQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Despite the potential for emoji to be interpreted in a wide array of ways, > emoji experts don't really exist. "Emoji usually have dialects. They draw > meaning from their context. You could absolutely talk about emoji as a > phenomenon, but as for what a particular emoji means, you probably wouldn't > go to a linguist. You would probably go to someone who's familiar with that > community, just like they did with the sex trafficking case," Goldman says.

What does Goldman think linguists do when they research the meaning of words?

<comment><USER11> emojis are not something strictly defined. They vary across messaging platforms and clients, or versions of clients. Sometimes it means that the person sending them sees a different image then the recepient, which also can lead do different interpretation

<comment><USER12> I'm reminded of the UK PM, David Cameron, who signed many emails "LOL". He though it meant 'lots of love'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _After sending an enthusiastic text confirming that they wanted the > apartment,_

Anyone who sends little yellow men as part of a business conversation deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.

Anyone who conducts a business conversation over any medium but snail mail, fax, email or the phone deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.

I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal.

<comment><USER13> > I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is > personal.

People are mixing the personal domain and business all the time. For example: in business meetings, people smile and they tell jokes; also, business people often go out for dinner together.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but we have 50,000 years of evolutionary practice understand what a smile means in real life.

And we recognize that we still don't all interpret those smiles the same way, as is evident in many legal codes not enforcing "handshake" deals, and written agreements almost always supercede oral ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It should always be taken with a grain of salt; I guess you can make sweeping statements like "positive/negative tone", but you should be careful attributing exact meanings to it. I mean to some, an eggplant is an eggplant, to others it's a penis. There will be community specific meanings attributed to certain emoji, often unspoken or even unaware.

<comment><USER15> Just like with words, or colors, or mostly any kind of element of communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I frequently use the greening teeth emoji on my iPhone as a negative. Now I know that my Android addressees interpret this as positive.

<comment><USER17> There's one very popular emoji I particularly hate: [https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/](https://emojipedia.org/face- with-tears-of-joy/).

Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - <USER2> with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.

<comment><USER18> It has a big smile. How would you interpret this as despair?

<comment><USER5> Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling.

But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.

<comment><USER17> In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.

<comment><USER5> I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair.

It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My friend went bankrupt and a bunch of us had loaned him a little money as a stop gap, and he submitted our Facebook messages as screenshots as proof of the debt he owed us.</comment>


Sh*t Entrepreneurs Say - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alZqXA4R2dI

<comment><USER2> I watched the video and chuckled. Then, when I saw it was an ad for grasshopper, I was really impressed.

Not a bad little viral video; though I have to admit, flashing back to when I used to say some of those things (or remembering times when other budding entrepreneurs say them to me now) made me cringe a little bit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought we could all take a moment, a deep breath and listen to someone say what we have all said in our own heads.</comment>


Tesla vehicles can now diagnose themselves and even pre-order parts for service - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/05/06/tesla-diagnose-pre-order-parts-service/ <comment><USER2> But I feel like the problem is that there are no parts available (thus 6mo+ wait times). AFAIK diagnosis is a very small component of the current lead time.</comment>


A Declining Trajectory - <AUTHOR> http://mattgemmell.com/a-declining-trajectory/ <comment><USER2> I take issue with "It was the very reliability of it — in user-friendly design, as well as stability of functionality — that was the basis of my choice in the first place..." With some Apple products this was true, with others, not so much. iTunes is one example. To me, iTunes has always been a mess. In the old days it would reliably update my iPod with new songs purchased from iTunes, but that was about it and the usability was always terrible.

<comment><USER3> What do we mean by "old days" here? iTunes predates the iPod. In the old days, I had very few qualms with iTunes. Currently, it's been 6 months since I launched it (or rather _intentionally_ launched it).

<comment><USER4> Don't you just love when the Mac decides it wants to launch iTunes without you asking it to, just because you plugged a device in?

<comment><USER3> Yep, iTunes or Image Capture... annoying. I have a Pavlovian reaction now, and I avoid plugging my phone into my Mac. While one can easily change the preference to prevent it, I've been caught out too many times, from reinstalling or using an alternate user account.

Having iTunes fire up while I'm using my Apple remote with VLC is even more annoying. And since it tends to catch me when I have company, I generally don't feel like pausing a film to fix it either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

I agree that slowing down the upgrade cycle would be one way to regain the trust, as long as the extra time was spent on quality assurance (in all its forms) rather than new features.

Killing some product lines would be another (though be prepared for howls of rage from the 20% that found the product useful).

It's tough, though, for me to give any advice to the folks running a large company without their context.

<comment><USER6> _I agree that slowing down the upgrade cycle would be one way to regain the trust,_

And at the same time people are complaining that OS X rarely has any new features. I agree that iCloud sucks. But I haven't seen a clear trend up or down since I started using Macs in 2007, except perhaps fewer hardware issues.

<comment><USER7> I have. The Mac Pro is garbage. GPU issues like I've never witnessed before. Sample size of ~30 Mac Pros, 25% of them exhibit gpu issues.

<comment><USER3> I'm hoping it's true that Apple will move their Pro machines to better support external GPUs. Being able to swap out a fried graphics card without downtime would be brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a Surface Book and a 2013 MacBook Pro. Hardware wise, both are are what I would consider to be best in class. Software wise there is absolutely no comparison in terms of reliability. I generally like Windows 10, but I'd have a really hard time depending on my Surface Book as my only computer.

<comment><USER9> FWIW my Surface Book works perfectly.

<comment><USER8> I think the Surface Book hardware is fine -- it's just dodgy drivers and Windows 10 updates that cause tons of issues.

With my MBP I can close it and throw it in my bag without a second thought. I wouldn't dare try that with the SB because nine times out of then I'll end up with a dead battery.

<comment><USER10> I'm really surprised this is still a thing. One of the first things I loved about switching to a MacBook was that the sleep/hibernate functionality 'just worked', while it almost never did on the Windows laptop I had before that.

This was __10 years ago __, and even _then_ I didn't understand why a crucial feature like this wasn't given more attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yup.

My first macbook pro lasted ~4 years, then I sold it for ~50% retail. Second macbook pro died after 2.5 years with a screen hardware issue. Third, and probably last, macbook pro is dying after 1.5 years.

If I was a conspiracy nut, I would say they don't care about declining quality because otherwise people wouldn't buy the next release as replacement.

I'm getting off the Apple bandwagon for my next laptop.

<comment><USER6> To repeat the cliche: the plural of anecdote is not data.

I am pretty sure that there are as many people with counter-examples.

E.g. I haven't had a Mac with issues since 2010. 2008: MacBook white: plastic starts discoloring, the rubber starts peeling. 2008: Mac Mini DVD drives gives the ghost after a year or so. 2009: MacBook 13" aluminium has broken DRAM SIMMs.

<comment><USER12> Yep - Still running an Early 2011 Macbook pro just fine here - had a motherboard failure but was repaired by apple under an extended warranty for that particular issue. Other than that, no issues.

<comment><USER13> I'm still running a 2008 Macbook Pro with no issues other than a battery replacement. I did upgrade the RAM and replaced the SuperDrive with a disk drive and the disk drive with an SSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I stopped buying Apple products when they stopped updating iOS on my iPad after just a couple years. It's now over six years old and is still perfect for many tasks but since it's stuck on iOS 5 and has bugs in its HTML rendering, there are an increasing number of web-sites that crash the browser. If I'm going to replace a tablet every year or two, I'm going to buy sub-$100 Android devices.

<comment><USER15> I think that's part of the learning curve. Early devices were just too underpowered. But compare with iPhone 5: released in 2012, and still running the most recent OS (albeit somewhat more slowly). And Apple usually has pretty extensive OS support for their non-handheld hardware too (I'm still rocking a 2010 MBP).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've thought that Apple has been in a rut or declining for over a decade. Their hardware designs are trite & a little ugly; their UI just is neither attractive nor easy on the eyes; their cloud services don't really deliver privacy and security (iCloud isn't end-to-end encrypted, and iMessage allows Apple to MitM).

At a certain point, one has to ask: why pay the premium? Why not just use Linux?

</comment><comment><USER17> Another day another "Apple isn't what it used to be and I hate their products now" diatribe.

If you don't like their products buy someone else's. If you don't like your Apple Watch stop using it.

I use an iMac and a MacBook Pro for work and they serve me fantastically. Sierra has a couple weird things (like it doesn't automatically load your SSH identities after reboot) but it seems fine. iOS 10 has been fine as well and my new iPhone 7 Plus is great.

If there's something actually wrong with your hardware, take it in for repairs instead of writing a blog post that will accomplish nothing.

<comment><USER18> Matt is long standing Mac citizen/Mac Developer. I rate his opinion much higher then just some blog poster. He wants Apple to change back to what made it great. How many other choices are out there especially on the desktop?

<comment><USER17> > He wants Apple to change back to what made it great.

If that's what he wants this blog post is really short on actual suggestions or details of specific problems and big on just general "Apple sucks now, it was good before." which is useless.

I'd have a lot more patience for this type of article if he actually went into detail like "My MacBook used to get 10 hours of battery life before updating to Sierra now it only gets 8." or "My wife doesn't like her iPhone 7 because she has had problems with Wifi connectivity and battery life." instead of "She's frustrated with her iPhone 7." Which, again, is useless complaining.

<comment><USER19> He does list quite a few issues:

> My Watch is misbehaving too, regularly losing its ability to track heart- > rate and thus update in-progress workout calories for ten or twenty minutes > at a time. Its battery life is vastly reduced. My iPhone's battery widget > shifts itself around on the widgets screen, and regularly vanishes > altogether. There's an unfamiliar street-address hovering in the Spotlight > screen that I don't recognise, beneath the app suggestions. It's hit-or-miss > as to whether the emoji suggestions feature works in the new on-screen > keyboard. I quickly disabled my Apple Music trial after it deleted several > of my rare live versions of Dire Straits tracks. And Apple Support finally > conceded that my immaculate, obsessively-cared-for 2015 MacBook was beyond > repair after three warranty parts-replacements

\---

Apple's not dumb. I'm sure they're already aware of these issues. It's a question of whether they care enough about quality to fix them, even if it means delaying a launch or cutting products.

In that respect, the author is doing the best he can to help Apple fix them -- by letting them know that long-time fans do care about the issues, and view it as a change in their relationship with Apple.

<comment><USER17> Yeah there's a couple examples but the article is mostly just general griping, which, like I said, I'm bored of.

I should be clear; there are plenty of things to complain about with Apple. They aren't a perfect company and their products aren't perfect. But we see articles like this one make the rounds several times a year and it's always the same "Apple's not as good as it was X years ago!"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Aha moments: overrated? - <AUTHOR>

I am the CEO of a newly formed web based startup and I just read the NY Times article "Intuition + Money = An Aha Moment." I find this sort of article frustrating for a number of reasons and was wondering what the Hacker News community thought.
There was an article on HN a while back about how aha moments are often created after the fact for the benefit of soundbytes and neat and tidy PR. (I tried to find the article on SearchYC, but had no luck, perhaps someone could point me to it? It talked about Cliff Bars.) The idea for our company was neither quick to form nor entirely intuitive. There was a lot of soul-searching, preliminary programming, market research, competitor analysis, and interpersonal luck that came together before we even decided to decide to start our venture. Reading stories about people standing back from a boiling test tube (or perhaps a computer monitor) and saying eureka! seems pretty trite from my experience. It also makes me wonder if me and my co-founders aren't missing something (maybe we all need to experience this great aha if we are to make it). The essence of starting this venture for me has been conquoring self doubt and boldly forging ahead. I guess I take issue with the idea that there are these transcendant moments that make the path ahead "clear." Reading "Founders at Work" was good because it painted some of the most highly successful startups in the way that I understand: several highly motivated dudes working hard in a garage with only an idea they think might have a chance at making some money.
Do any other readers of HN have this reaction or am I just too sensitive? <comment><USER2> If you're creating something new, whether it be filling a need, or expanding an existing service, i'd assume the "aha moment" is necessary.

if you're able to refine an existing process to make it more efficient and dethrone an incumbent company, then the Aha might not be so prominant.

i'm sure even with your own startup you've had a few good moments where you realize what you can do to get ahead and compete in your market. it may not be one major Aha, but many small ones that have shaped the way you have progressed so far</comment>


New IRS Filing Tries to Force Coinbase into Handing Over Its Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/irs-enforce-coinbase-user-data-bitcoin/ <comment><AUTHOR> PANIC SELLING!</comment>


Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-01/facebook-loses-fact-checking-group-snopes-after-two-years <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742)

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's cut the bullshit.

Facebook never really had a real interest in removing fake news from their site. Being a repository for fake news drives a lot of traffic. Eliminating fake news would cost money in both the costs for finding and removing it _and_ the lost revenue from traffic.

<comment><USER4> OK, fine. Let's _really_ cut the bullshit, instead of pretending to read other people's minds. Let's see if we can have the discussion that seems to have been skipped in all of this.

 __* Is Facebook responsible for content published on its site? __ __

Legally, the answer is clearly no. Like everything from phone companies to bulletin boards, Facebook is legally considered a medium rather than an agent. But we all know (I hope) that legal != moral. So, morally, is Verizon responsible for what is said in phone conversations? Is Comcast responsible for what is said in conversations over the low-level internet? _Can_ they be, in any meaningful or useful sense? Again, generally no. For them to act in that capacity would make them censors, or agents in some other more significant sense. That's exactly why many people objected to these fact- checking efforts in the first place. Blamed for doing nothing, blamed for doing anything. We as a society have defined a "common carrier" role for these situations. Why does Verizon get this status and Facebook not?

What makes Facebook any different? Sure, there are obvious differences in terms of the connections are made, but how _exactly_ does that justify different treatment? I'm not talking about Cambridge Analytica kinds of private-information stuff here. That's a whole different matter. I'm just talking about the stuff that people _meant_ to share. Data comes in, data goes out, according to the senders' and recipients' own expressed preference for who they should be connected to. How is that _really_ different than what a phone company does? If you can't answer that question with any level of coherency, all you're doing is hating.

Personally, I am well aware of how badly these globe-spanning groups spreading fake news SUCK. But how do we distinguish them from other groups? I see plenty of groups that consist of real people who know each other in real life, deriving benefit from communicating and coordinating through Facebook. I see others that spread humor or support, even though they have many thousands of members who don't really know each other. Maybe it's not a great idea for every random idiot to have that big a megaphone, but how do we eliminate the bad without also eliminating the good? It's all too easy to say "kill them all" from a distance, when you're not among those who benefit from such connections, but being easy doesn't make anything right.

The free-speech common-carrier answer to that central question is a valid one. I'm not convinced it's the best one, but it's _valid_. Just the medium, the messages are someone else's. There's a mental and legal model for that. If you think that's the wrong model, _propose another_. One that actually has some hope of working. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News and other social media are part of how people interact. Not every malady is best solved by picking an organ to remove. Killing the medium is the lazy way out. Maybe we should try addressing the reasons or mechanisms by which that medium is being abused. If you succeeded in killing Facebook and the exact same thing happened on the next social network, and the next, and the next - as it surely would - what _else_ might you try?

<comment><USER3> The primary difference between social media and a telephone service is ease of communication and the broadcasting nature of social media.

Without social media, you normally have to go out of your way to consume news. With social media, it's consolidated with your cousin's vacation photos. There's a massive difference in the work required to call up all your friends to tell them that you heard there's a pizza place running a child sex trafficking ring in its basement versus just quickly hitting a Share button.

Comcast/Verizon don't have a moral obligation to censor fake news because to do so, they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and Twitter? I'm not sure. It still presents a major feasibility problem with fake news sites just easily creating new pages.

But back to my original comment...

If Facebook was _really_ interested in curbing the spread of fake news on their platform, certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000. That's pennies to a company that has well over $15B in quarterly revenue.

<comment><USER4> > they'd have to listen in on your private conversations. Facebook and > Twitter? I'm not sure.

So what does "private" mean? If I'm in a group restricted to only people in my RL ski club (which I am), are our posts there not private as far as FB is concerned? Is there a numeric cutoff? A lot of groups spreading fake news on Facebook are nominally private in the exact same way, even though they have thousands of members and do almost nothing to vet new ones. Even humor groups are often private, which I just don't get.

I agree that the "broadcast" nature of Facebook posts is probably significant, but I'm still not sure how to draw a useful line that would distinguish it from the thousands of forums that came before which weren't assigned this kind of moral responsibility. The Prison Planet forums on InfoWars still exist. Stormfront still exists. They do nothing _but_ spew misinformation and hate. Any Facebook-specific accountability standard would be like endless Christmas for them.

> certainly they would have budgeted more than a measly $100,000

They most certainly did. Orders of magnitude. That's only the amount for the external-fact-checker program, which is a tiny (and IMO not all that effective) slice of what they're doing. It doesn't count the thousands of people working on the problem internally, or the billions of machine-hours spent dismantling these "inauthentic content" networks. There are successes on that front almost every day, but everybody would rather focus of the fifth editorial about the third re-post of whatever the last bad news was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The contract was only for $100k? I know they got a ton of revenue out of it on the ad side, but that's still shocking to me given how much work they were doing for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good. And I hope that Facebook abandons attempts to be the arbiters of truth and "facts". These initiatives to saddle social media public forums with automatic "fact-checking" are laying the groundwork for an Orwellian future. It's disappointing that more people don't see the dangers in allowing a small number of individuals to decide what is true or false for the rest of us.

<comment><USER7> I spent a stupid number of hours fighting disinformation on FB during the 2016 election -- responding to batshit crazy links from FB friends who were getting fed their batshit crazy from what we now know were 100% trolling-for-bucks fake news sites, or straight-up foreign disinformation efforts.

I don't have a catchy derogative name for a future where truth is determined by the number of upvotes, but it's clearly not less dangerous than an "Orwellian" future where truth is established by elites.

Also -- Snopes is hardly Big Brother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> (because the website has acc issues)

Bloomberg

Facebook Loses Fact-Checking Group Snopes After Two Years

By Sarah Frier February 1, 2019, 3:36 PM EST Updated on February 1, 2019, 4:29 PM EST

Snopes Media Group Inc., one of Facebook Inc.'s first fact-checking partners, said it's ending the relationship after two years, even though the decision may cause financial distress.

"We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff," the company said.

Snopes' contract with Facebook was worth $100,000 in 2017, but was far more valuable than that for Facebook, which frequently touted its fact-checking partners as helping combat the fake news problem on its site. Snopes said it hasn't ruled out working with Facebook, or any other platforms, in the future.

Facebook has been working since the 2016 U.S. election to rein in misinformation across its platform, though its results have been spotty. External fact-checking partners have criticized Facebook's attempts as only scratching the surface of false content on the social network.

The fact-checking efforts are often understaffed and have only recently begun to address the explosion of misleading photo and video content. Repeat offenders have also found workarounds. One site that was frequently flagged by fact-checkers simply changed the name of its site, Poynter reported this week.

"We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business," Facebook said, noting that it has 34 other fact- checking partners.

Fact-checking initiatives may not be as important for the site's misinformation problems as other technological improvements, like detecting fake accounts trying to spread the content, Alex Stamos, Facebook's former head of security, said on Twitter.

"The fact checking partnerships were always PR, because it's the kind of well- understood, visible intervention that journalists can see and cover," Stamos tweeted. "The really effective product changes are often invisible."

(Updates with Facebook comment in the sixth paragraph.)

</comment><comment><USER9> No loss for Facebook.

I've had vigorous discussions about Snopes with friends. I'm mostly conservative, I feel Snopes has a liberal bias. My liberal friends feel otherwise.

After much back-and-forth, what we found is this: \- Snopes seems to be careful about printing only true things \- But Snopes controls the narrative and decides which issues to fact-check. They seem to publish a lot more material that validates left-leaning opinions than right-leaning ones

At the time of last checking, Snopes had a single political fact-checker, she was a staunch Democrat.

<comment><USER10> It's like the BBC in the UK - half the population think it's left biased and the other half think it's right biased.

<comment><USER11> I'm Indian, I think the BBC has an anti-India bias, and is heavily politically conservative, but socially liberal. The one thing I do give the BBC credit for, is that they did not resort to overt mud-slinging against Jeremy Corbyn, as opposed to the Guardian.

<comment><USER12> I'll add most Western media to that list of publications with anti India bias, such as NYTimes and Washington Post to name a few.

<comment><USER13> And The Economist

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wonder if the trolls from the last thread about this will be back? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057742)</comment>


AJAX with Acrobat - <AUTHOR> http://dev.day.com/content/ddc/blog/2010/07/crx_gems_doing_ajax.html

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a terrible idea. I don't know why people decided to start deploying "PDF Applications" but it's a terrible idea. Go look at UPS's api documentation. It's a pdf "app" that requires you to install the most recent version of adobe reader to "run," and then it is slow and much harder to use than just a regular pdf or heaven forbid, html.

If anyone can tell me why anyone would ever use this technology over html, please, I'd love to hear it.</comment>


Most men in the US and Europe could be infertile by 2060 - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1040302/most-men-in-the-us-and-europe-could-be-infertile-by-2060-according-to-a-new-study/ <comment><USER2> > In fact, if the data on sperm counts is _extrapolated_ to its logical > conclusion, men will have little or no reproductive capacity from 2060 > onwards.

Emphasis mine. This is where I stopped reading. The absolute most you can conclude from this study is that sperm counts _have_ dropped, not that they _will_ drop.</comment>


Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf

<comment><USER2> Just to put this paper in an appropriate historical context, I wrote it back when I was trying to convince NASA that flying Lisp on a spacecraft would not be a completely insane thing to do. The Powers That Be had already mostly accepted that it would be OK to fly Java, but they thought Lisp was too big and slow. This study and paper were designed specifically to address those concerns.

<comment><USER3> Do you still work for NASA, and did your paper succeed?

<comment><USER4> No and no.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, what e40 said. :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet to this day, I still find people claiming that Lisp is an interpreted language and that the garbage collector introduces disastrous pauses in runtime. As if it was still the same Lisp people were using back in the 1980's.

<comment><USER6> The 1980's state of the art was a lot better, depending on how long a pause you could afford for incremental GC (fractions of a second, OK for humans, but not a variety of applications. OK for piloting bulldozers, as one company did.)

Interpreted only ... that's a narrow, 4 year window, the first was developed in 19 _62_.

Probably the key thing in this is that most any good programmer could hack out a Lisp implementation in a week or two. Making one preform as well as contemporary languages, strangely enough, took a similar amount of effort, and most Lisps back then didn't.

<comment><USER5> Well I was born in '84 so it's all history to me ;) I've only ever known compiled, high performing Lisps with unnoticable GC. So it's weird when I still hear people trotting out the old "bloated, interpreted, slow" line.

I sometimes think that the AI winter really took computing in a weird turn, not just Lisp, but computing in general. It feels like we stopped trying to make computers do all the work for _us_ and decided that humans should be doing the work for the _computer_. So we ended up heading down the path of manual memory management in the C style languages, verbose constrained programming in Java and static typing instead of the easier dynamic. Whilst I agree that at one point, hardware performance was a serious consideration and we needed to squeeze everything we could out of computers - that is no longer the case. We're overwhelmed by hardware performance in most cases. Perhaps that's why we're seeing a resurgence in Lispy languages nowadays?

<comment><USER6> Ah, some more history:

In the '80s, a common startup setup that was more powerful than a PC (for a while) and ASCII terminals to a UNIX(TM) box was 3 or so el-cheapo Sun workstations sharing one disk over an Ethernet (or so I've read, I might well prefer the ASCII terminal to a UNIX box, which is what I tended to use).

Although also think about the PC starting with ones using the 386 (true 32 bits, the 286 was misbegotten and all but useless except as a fast 8086): both these configurations were cheap, but not _all_ that capable, memory was at a premium as well as virtual memory in the workstation case.

So using machine but not programmer efficient C and the like was the zeitgeist. Then about or a bit before the time engineering workstations based on more capable microprocessors were also capable of running Lisp quickly, although without hardly as much error checking, the expert system bubble collapsed. And those promoting it had to find something to blame, and Lisp became it. Or so goes one narrative of it.

There was certainly a ... Slough of Despond in programming languages we mortals could use to earn a living about the time you would have started programming seriously (before college, I assume). For Lisper and programming language guy like myself it was very depressing; I think what got us out of that, besides Moore's Law, was the dot com bust, it upset a lot of the conventional wisdom, coupled with a paucity of resources for development. No longer could you, at the extreme, do a wild IPO with an idea and a plan to hire a bunch of blub programmers using a consensus language running on expensive Sun or whatever hardware. You probably get the idea of what lost favor (ask if not).

Also, as Paul Graham pointed out, in essays who's influence I can't judge, the above will at best get you average results, and the average result of a startup is failure. He also noted that technical failure was a frequent cause of corporate failure. To take one stark example, compare Facebook competitor Friendster. Whatever promise it had, that the company's board used to wheel and deal, didn't matter when it was just too slow to use. Of course (if I remember correctly), its technical founder was purged by that board.

Which also leads into issues of control. We technical people don't need so much money, and the all too common downside of losing control is awful for us, the company, and of course the people we hired for it.

So all in all we more tend to call the shots technically, and are able to pull it off. And wild successes like Facebook with PHP and Twitter with Ruby on Rails didn't hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now that the dominant languages seem to be dynamic languages like Python, Ruby & JavaScript, I wonder if Lisp's edge in development speed is as pronounced; OTOH, I wonder if it has an increased edge in stability and/or security.

<comment><USER7> It seems that python development speed means well rounded libraries. And IIRC lisp is still not on par with that (quicklisp users feel free to correct me). Other than that I still think that linguistically, lisps still have an edge (and a sharp one).

<comment><USER8> But Ruby is an acceptable Lisp[0], and has also a lot of libraries. ;)

So, how will Lisp compete ?

Maybe if we look at it pragmatically, the solution is not in the performance nor in the time to develop, but in the ease of maintaining the software in the long term. A field where Lisp is not particularly brilliant.

[0]: [http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an- accepta...](http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-acceptable- lisp/)

<comment><USER7> I forgot to mention that the main lisp implementations (SBCL) are fast. Compared to languages like these it's a done deal.

Good point about long term maintenance. Ruby and Python aren't that great either, people say static typing is the way to go. Lisps are weird because they allow to hot swap most of the things which makes changing a system easy, but at the same time it leads to spaghetti images.

<comment><USER9> My experience is that long-term image-based development isn't really that common in Lisp, maybe outside of some specialized use-cases. You _can_ develop by mutating/saving/reloading an image over an extended period of time, but in practice people mostly develop the "usual" way, with source code that's loaded into a fresh image periodically. The use of image-oriented development then gets limited to prototyping and debugging. Being able to redefine functions/etc. on the fly (even during restarts and the like) is useful while experimenting and debugging. But then the "real" code gets written into a source file, which is reloaded into a fresh image to make sure it works. For modern muti-developer Lisp this is pretty much the only way things are done, since the expectation is that you check Lisp source into svn or git, not images.

<comment><USER5> That's pretty much exactly how I develop. I rarely type anything directly into the REPL, instead typing into the source file in emacs and then C-c C-c it over to the REPL for me. The advantage is that I get a canonical copy of the entire source code, whilst still having the ability to inspect and hotfix things through the REPL. If I then need to reboot the image or deploy to a new server, the entire source base should be completely stable and consistent.

I often connect to production servers using Slime and fix little things like typos this way - then check the source into Github and have it permanently saved. It removes a lot of the stress of doing a full deployment each time you need to patch something!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even for 2000, this paper is hilariously biased, starting with the observation that Lisp wins over Java in every single respect. If I order an evaluation paper and the paper comes back with 100% for choice B and 0% for choice A, I'm going to disregard it completely because the author is obviously too biased.

One of the strengths that Java has over Lisp is that it's statically typed. At the time, the direction of the industry wasn't too clear cut but this is clearly the trend today.

Another example of the bias is that the benchmarks compare development times (and Lisp wins, surprise surprise) but not maintenance time, which is admittedly harder to measure but a big liability that dynamically typed languages have.

<comment><USER11> > One of the strengths that Java has over Lisp is that it's statically typed.

With the caveat that Java's type system can be subverted and isn't expressive enough to catch any more than the most trivial kinds of errors a type system can catch.

<comment><USER10> That's a straw man, we're comparing Java to Lisp, not to another statically typed language.

Because Java is statically typed, it catches a lot more errors at compile time than Lisp can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lisp is optionally statically-typed. I am not aware of any type error Java can catch at compile time which Lisp cannot catch at compile time.

Now, whether or not a particular implementation _does_ catch it is an entirely different affair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's unfortunate that languages can't gain much traction in the mainstream. Rust, Haskell, Julia, Go, Clojure, Scheme... I remember the fight that it took before Python and Ruby were accepted. There's the big catch-22, of course, in order to obtain critical mass.

Maybe if we all adopted a language for our weekend projects, we'd contribute enough back through blogging and StackOverFlow questions that we'll add enough knowledge, etc to the net, that it'll become increasingly easier for the next person.

Btw, I'm using Go for my weekend web site project: [http://thespanishsite.com](http://thespanishsite.com)

<comment><USER3> I'd say Go is becoming mainstream pretty quickly. I think Clojure isn't far away and Rust is showing big promise. I doubt based on probably under-informed personal observation that Haskell, Scheme or Julia will ever become widely adopted.

<comment><USER13> The thing with niche languages such as Haskell is that not everybody has to use them, but we ideally would get to enough critical mass that the ecosystem is sustainable, new and better tools are continuously being developed, and it's pretty beginner friendly. Clojure is probably at that stage right about now, Haskell doesn't quite feel that way, but it's getting better (more docs, guides, books, services like Stackage etc)

Basically it's very nice when a language gets enough traction that the lack of users is no longer a concern for its long term prospects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The run time seems to be outdated... Hasn't the JVM been updated and optimized since 2000?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. I'd really like to see the same comparison done today.

<comment><USER15> Ditto. If JVM is good enough for, say, Twitter, it's sure that performance of Java programs got better and that "Run time" and "Final image size" from Figure 1 in OP pdf would look different. OTOH I'm not in the Lisp land but I guess there was probably some improvement there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That thing is fucking old.

The JVM has been improving a lot since then.

In order for that content to be taken seriously, the tests should be re-run with modern runtimes for both C/C++, Java and Lisp.

<comment><USER17> Has the JVM got a smaller memory footprint since 2000 ? Lisp runtimes have not got bigger.

<comment><USER18> Standard JVM, slightly smaller, much faster. This is comparing to Java 1.2 before JIT/Hotspot and a decade of performance work. (Also I doubt anyone had 7.7 years of experience with Java in 2000, so that would be general)

If we consider JavaCard or Java ME a java dialect then yes, it has gotten a lot smaller! I think neither of these where available in 2000.

Running Java also does not need a JVM. There are AOT compilers for JAVA. Like Lisp there are a lot of different implementations with lots of differing trade offs.

In any case a very flawed comparison, like all programming languages comparison of this kind as it is so hard/expensive to do it correct.

But an interesting read anyway.

I think of languages as equivalent (they are all turing complete right) so something buildable in one must be buildable in the other. The question is what tradeoffs do the languages make for the humans in the loop.

Lisp and Java make different tradeoffs there, and C makes yet another set of tradeoffs. And which languages we use is more often dependant on historical accidents than technical excellence (like most human languages) see JS as an example.

I believe dynamic languages are better for small teams and short project life times. I believe automatic memory management by default languages are better for the vast majority of projects than manual memory management options. I think a written language like Traditional Chinese (Java) is better for running an empire than one like Latin (Lisp). But a more modern idea like Hangul (Clojure?) might do even better.

In the end to get the best CPU performance one needs to know the CPU and architecture as well as an ability to think in bits. And like in human language one can write poetry in all of them, its just a bit more difficult than the office memo's we tend to write and read in our jobs ;)</comment></comment></comment>


"How many of you use Google as your default?" Ballmer asked... - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/04/microsoft_ceo_steve_ballmer_spoke.html

<comment><USER2> It's kind of sad, really. Ballmer knows that something is happening, and that it's bad news for Microsoft, but has absolutely no idea what to do about it. Of course, they'll be around for a long time, much like IBM, and be profitable for many eons to come, but they aren't a source of innovation or inspiration anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> gigablast.com ftw.</comment>


Google's Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-workers.html <comment><USER3> The article itself acknowledges that the ratio of contractors to employees at Google isn't out of the ordinary for SV companies and my personal experience is that it isn't unusual for large companies outside of SV. Even in the unfortunate case sited in the article of the contract employee that was sexually harassed once a complaint was filed Google fired the FTE responsible for the harassment and negotiated a settlement with the contract employee.

So my question is why was the article written? If it were to highlight the use of contract employees vs FTEs, why write it just about Google when it is an issue affecting the workforce across industries? Why throw out the case of the harassed employee but leave the information that Google fired the harasser when a complaint was filed until much further in the article when many readers will have stopped reading? This article strikes me as a Google hit piece.

<comment><USER4> Ever since the Damore thing blew up, any article that portrays google in a negative light gets a lot of play..

<comment><USER5> It started many years before Damore's tantrum. I think it mostly goes back to the image Google enjoyed for years as this amazing place with crazy benefits, and then reality caught up that it's a big company and will do things like most other big companies such as aggressively cost-optimizing its workforce or canceling beloved products (Reader was very popular with journalists).

Companies which never had that kind of image don't get dispelling stories.

<comment><USER6> Can you tell me how Damore's memo was a tantrum, and quote passages that reflect your opinion?

<comment><USER5> This is getting off-topic but it's basically two parts: the first being the he attended an optional "Diversity and Inclusion Summit" and had a strong emotional reaction, which he made an effort to circulate around the company for several months. It's loaded with emotional language ("an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed") and claims of authoritarian oppression. That inflammatory rhetoric is what cost him his job because it clearly wasn't just a scientific discussion and left quite plausible grounds for anyone working with (or especially, had he been successful in making it into a leadership role, supervised by) to claim a hostile working environment — which is why he dropped the NLRB claim after it was looking like it'd be unfavorable[1]. Even if you think they're wrong, publicly putting your management in a position like that is unlikely to end favorably.

The second part is the painful irony of his positioning himself as a Man of Science Protecting The Enlightment Against Dogma!!! but what he wrote was a poorly-edited (and don't forget, what finally leaked was presumably better _after_ the several rounds of editing prior to it being published) rehash of traditional reactionary arguments for biological determinism with only a few references to peer-reviewed literature, with little discussion or signs of familiarity with their fields, and instead relying mostly on links to broad Wikipedia pages and conservative blogs. Note how much work it was simply to summarize his claims clearly enough to evaluate them in [https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its- boot...](https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on- what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9/#ba47) — that's the most point-by-point examination I've seen and it's considerably longer than the original.

On its own failing to perform at the level of a good student essay would be embarrassing but given the topic and how quick he was to cast this as political oppression while taking as little responsibility as possible for his own actions, I think it warrants the use of "tantrum".

1\. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/federal-labor- bo...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/federal-labor-board-google- was-justified-in-firing-engineer-behind-gender-memo/)

<comment><USER7> This may not be totally relevant but it's always bothered me that he lied about being a chess Fide Master (FM) and then doubled down on his lie in a reddit ama

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was a contractor at Google and I thought they treated me VERY well, with most of the perks that come with the office (food, activities, music room, gym, etc). They even let me work on a 20% project during office hours.

Then I got a new manager, new policies were enacted, they canned my project, and they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.

Anyway, Google had good reason to use contractors. Their hiring standards and policies makes it extremely difficult and costly to hire people, and many jobs there typically only have a retention rate of about 9-12 months, or just isn't "involved" enough to demand a FTE position, or needs to be scaled up more quickly than they can hire for. It just isn't worth it to go through the full Google process for jobs like that.

<comment><USER9> > they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.

Like many things about the way Google was run, I really didn't appreciate Memegen enough until I left.

<comment><USER8> Tell me about it. I can see now the rest of my career is going to be "how, in any way, can I make this place just one tiny step closer to what I experienced at Google?"

<comment><USER9> I can trace a lot of the mistakes I've made (and continue to make) in my career to the fact that I started at Google, setting my baseline assumption of organizational competence and personal intelligence way, way, way too high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this newsworthy? Genuine question. The article (I did read it!) doesn't seem to articulate why exactly this is a problem.

I _think_ (happy to be convinced otherwise) it is ok for a company to have more temps than employees or vice versa. What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?

<comment><USER11> Lower paychecks (75-80% of hourly rate of full-time workers), little to no benefits (like healthcare coverage), harder to keep track of for taxation purposes, harder to object to inhumane conditions like exploitative working hours or sexual harassment (since you're seen as a "guest" instead of an employee, complaining to the HR will usually result in you simply being discarded and replaced by someone else who won't complain) etc.

Note: I wrote this as a general trend, which does not mean this applies to Google specifically.

<comment><USER12> Is this like for like? your not going to pay a security guard the same as a SRE are you.

If I went as a contactor in the UK id expect 2x to 3x when compared to a FTE at a similar grade.

<comment><USER11> Just because we're in a position to say no doesn't mean that we shouldn't feel compassion for the others that are not in an opportunity to do so. A tech office without a janitor will be dysfunctional, same as the one without a senior engineer. But unlike a senior engineering position, a janitor will not be a full-time position.

I'd personally even take it one step further: those who are payed the least need benefits the most. By relegating this work to temporary workers you're doing exactly the opposite: cutting away the privileges that the full-time employees have. Not to just one employee, but anyone who's ever going to fill out that position.

A trip to the doctor would not make a dent in a senior engineer's pocket (regardless of the insurance), but a janitor could not afford a trip to the doctor in the first place. This could work in a country with good social programs to fall back on, but it has catastrophic consequences in the US.

<comment><USER13> I agree in general terms, but the solution would be to pass stricter laws requiring more benefits to full-time workers. These contractors _are_ full- time workers, they're just full-time workers of staffing firms that contract with Google and that themselves don't have benefits that are nearly as good. So either require them to offer better benefits, or preferably, decouple benefits from employment entirely. Everyone should get healthcare, retirement accounts, etc.; it shouldn't be tied to your employer.

It's unreasonable to expect one company to make big strides in this area when all it does it put them at a competitive disadvantage to their peers. Google is already mandating a $15/hour minimum wage on all contracted-out workers, plus some minimums for sick days, which is much better than most other companies (which tend not to have requirements on contracted out employees in their contracts with staffing firms at all).

<comment><USER11> This is precisely why I added that note in my first comment. I'm talking about general trends as a response to this:

> What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?

I'm not familiar enough with Google's specific practices to reach a conclusion about that.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough. My view is that Google is better than most, in that they have better requirements on their staffing firms: [https://phys.org/news/2019-04-google-require-benefits- minimu...](https://phys.org/news/2019-04-google-require-benefits-minimum- wage.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another anecdote: Local friend works for Google in Asia. She is basically forced to relocate to SF for 1-3 years and work at a rather low salary (for SF standards) there on something unrelated to her current job.

I would suspect that part of the reason for such a "program" is to save on wages, which would be much higher for locally-hired staff. Her field is admin/marketing. Should be easy enough to find local talent for that. At a higher price.

I'm sure there are upsides to this exchange program, but having no real choice (except quitting) and working at a lower salary don't leave the best impression.

<comment><USER15> Is your friend a Googler or a contractor? Can you expand on how she was "forced"?

<comment><USER14> Hired directly by Google and works in their office. Forced means it's compulsory if she wants to keep her job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a natural and expected consequence of tax law - <USER2> provisions in ERISA, which sets out the rules for 401(k) plans.

Google wants their 401(k) to be as efficient and useful as possible for their employees, which tend toward being highly-paid engineers and other professionals. ERISA has some fairness provisions, which means that all employees must be subject to the same plan rules, and the plan must pass certain tests of "highly-compensated" employee participation limits compared to non-highly-compensated ones.

So if you have a bunch of engineers and some janitors, and you offer a large 401(k) match that engineers use and value and janitors don't, you wind up having to unwind some of the engineer contribution and matching in order to keep things "fair".

But, crucially, ERISA doesn't have say anything about who has to be an "employee" versus hired on as a contractor. So all the janitors and cafeteria workers become contractors, and now your 401(k) plan counts junior developers as the "non highly-compensated" comparison class, and your 401(k) plan passes muster again.

This affects Google a lot because their retirement plan is highly optimized for allowing highly-paid employees to save a ton of money in a tax efficient manner. It'd be difficult to craft a better plan, and from what I've heard they've even automated using a niche tax loophole as well ("mega-backdoor Roth" \- after-tax 401(k) contribution followed by immediate Roth conversion, basically allows an extra $20k/yr or so in Roth contribution room).

</comment><comment><USER17> To be fair to Google every company in every industry is doing this more and more. It's one of the first things that happens when a merger or private equity takeover happens- aggressively purge full time and move to temp workers for all non-core services to save some money.

Of course the companies that pay more attention to data do this more extensively and aggressively, why wouldn't they?

The army of temp workers/janitors/contractors/uber drivers convene and sleep in the same parking lots at night. It's a whole community of a semi-permanent underclass drifting around, saving the spreadsheets a few points here and there.

In related news, I'm not sure I want to be an American anymore. This is not the country I grew up in.

<comment><USER18> The big company I work for isn't doing what you said. They acquired a big company last year. They also have multiple business units which are being merged. Still not aggressively changing full time employees, nor changing roles into temp ones. They have recently starting to insource some of the IT again (less IBM).

<comment><USER19> Google doesn't do this either. As discussed elsewhere in the thread, most of the vendors at Google are in nontech roles like food service, security, and maintenance/facilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the induction process like for a temp at Google? I'm curious as I've heard stories of temps becoming subject matter experts on teams and carrying projects across the line. If said individuals couldn't get into Google as a full-time employee what would that then say about the way Google interviews?

<comment><USER21> I worked as a contractor on a Google backed company on the Google campus. My interview consisted of a short meeting at the gentleman who ran the agency's house. I found the opportunity through an online consulting marketplace. I then and showed up to the Google site the next week and began working. I also applied directly, but have never heard back from them. My most striking memory was the complete lack of connection to the outdoors. Every single window and skylight was covered with light blocking coverings, you never knew if it was night, day, sunny or stormy outside. Other than that it was fascinating work with great people.

<comment><USER13> What does Google-backed company mean? Is that a bet (under Alphabet)? Something outside that even?

Did you contract directly with the company or were you working for the agency, who contracted you out?

I was a contractor for four years as my first job and I was a full-time employee of that contracting firm for the entire time. They paid a decent salary, gave me healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, etc. It was actually my best offer compared to some other SWE positions. Some company like Google could have been one of my clients at some point (and indeed was at my next job), but instead it was mostly banks and insurance companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems really similar to an article from March of 1998 about Microsoft: [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/30/business/equal-work- less-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/30/business/equal-work-less-equal- perks-microsoft-leads-way-filling-jobs-with-permatemps.html)

<comment><USER23> The issue with that at the time was that Microsoft was using temps to avoid paying payroll taxes. Ironically the IRS wised up to this tactic because of _just how good_ Microsoft was treating their temps, i.e. the same as regular employees.

Now the issue is a company is using temps to hold down the market rate for salary. Less about tax avoidance, and more about wage suppression. Of course it's also a valid argument to say the Supreme Court decision at the time made it more likely for companies to choose this route.

<comment><USER22> True in that sense.

Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.

<comment><USER24> Most large tech companies- think FB, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco are similar. Amazon surprisingly has a low ratio of contractors (they say under 10%)- probably because their fulltime benefits are so cheap it doesn't make a difference or maybe they don't count warehouse workers in that ratio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Given the whole problem with platform economies (e.g. Uber drivers), perhaps it's better if the distinction between contractor and employee becomes smaller. E.g. healthcare benefits, separate them from the employer and make them the same for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER26> Am I the only one who is shocked that Google has 223,000 people working for them? What are all of these people doing?

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like they're taking a page from the Federal Governments books. Staffing firms had better wise up and start jacking up prices.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it possible for a temporary employee to be promoted to full time status, or is that impossible? What is the average length of employment for a temporary employee vs that of a full timer? Just asking.

<comment><USER29> I was a contract worker for a similar scale web company and I was offered a full time role after 12 months of working there. I declined it because the day rate that I was on was more than the full time salary. The perks (stock, parental leave and other benefits) were significant but I didn't want them as they didn't apply to me. I preferred to keep my own autonomy and didn't think the future was going to work out well for the team I was in. The team had constant squabbles and moral was low. If you're willing to accept risk like that you can make good money as a senior contracting engineer. Full timers heads exploded when I declined the offer but I hated the self created heirarchy that the contractor/FTE relationship posed. It seemed like there were two set of rules, one for ftes and one for contractors. I think it's a really toxic way to run your company.

<comment><USER30> From what I've been told, you cannot treat contractors/temps the same way that you treat your employees, otherwise they can claim that they were in fact employees the whole time (which usually comes with an expensive lawsuit and a visit from the IRS). In order to ensure that contractors/temps can't claim to be employees, it's not enough to not offer benefits. You have to effectively create a two tier system with FTEs at the top and contractors/temps at the bottom.

Not arguing whether it's good/bad, but it comes with the territory in the current landscape. You gain in flexibility/autonomy but loose in benefits/treatment.

<comment><USER31> I've definitely seen the tiered system you're describing. For example, contractors aren't given the same training or professional development opportunities as FTEs. But do you know if there are actually legal reasons for this, or is it just pragmatic to give fewer opportunities or privileges to employees you know won't be around long?

<comment><USER13> There is legal precedent for it. The most famous and precedent-setting case in this area occurred with Microsoft in 1996: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft)

That set the framework for all contracting that has followed since.

<comment><USER31> Interesting, thanks for the reference. In the Microsoft case it looks like the decision hinged on the definition of a common law employee. Wikipedia notes that benefits eligibility can be formally defined. Employers don't have to treat their contractors badly just to imply a tiered system, in other words, as the parent comment suggests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm going through this process right now, I have a contract for a SWE role at Google through a contracting company. Interestingly enough I was offered no benefits.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's remarkable that such a fine institution as the New York Times would publish unsubstantiated allegations that could ruin someones career.

</comment><comment><USER34> It would be interesting to know the ratio of employee/contractors working as FTE (very common somewhere else) among software engineers.

<comment><USER35> I guess it would depend quite heavily on location - particularly re. tax and employment regulation. For example, in London, a lot of the good people historically went the contracting route due to much higher rates and lower taxes. Big banks were (and are) staffed with a lot of contractors who were very happy not to be on payroll.

<comment><USER36> It was the same thing in Fintech in Paris when I was working there a few years ago.

<comment><USER36> I was working as an intern in a team developing a tool for the traders, there was two FTE, the boss and one senior dev; the rest (5 devs) were all consultants, all independents

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lots of companies do this (SV and others), if it makes good business sense for them to do so why do we care?

</comment><comment><USER38> Good. In the future everyone should be a contractor anyway.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was always wondering about similar thing with interns

<comment><USER40> What are you wondering?

Interns usually work for small periods of time between school cycles. They get interesting projects, because internships are effectively a recruiting tool for new grads.

With the amount of prep work and oversight/mentorship that goes into an internship, it's not obvious that they benefit the company outside of recruiting.

If the argument is "TVCs tolerate more because they fear retribution/loss of access to a full-time role," that might happen for interns too. (I haven't studied either group, so I'm not qualified to say.) If the argument is that "TVCs are being exploited to minimize the number of full-time roles," that definitely doesn't apply to interns.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Savedreplies.io – start using canned response everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://savedreplies.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, How much time do you spend offering customer support? Answering the same question over and over again? We may have a solution for you, you can test it for free, and we only expect some feedback in exchange, it's a desktop app(right now working only on windows, we have plans to release it for macOS after some validation)

Value proposition: "Offering support or doing marketing/sales on social media/forums/skype can be a very repetitive task or if you work in a big company offering support it may be hard to remember the canned responses that were set by someone else, this is why we come up with SavedReplies, using it you can start using the same canned responses everywhere on your computer."

This is mostly intended for people who support or do marketing/sales on social media/forums and other types of sites like the one mentioned, anyway, if you are interested I can provide more info

<comment><USER2> Maybe you can write a comparison against already established products? TextExpander comes to mind.

Some spelling and grammar errs is are present, eg "did you encountered".

I also think the logo itself is kinda "tacky", it doesn't look professional which you seem to target. The name is alright which focuses it more than (again) eg TextExpander.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good idea about comparing the 2 of them, some of things that we do better is offering a lifetime license and also the design is so much more intuitive.

About the grammar errors, I should probably ask a native English speaker to check them.

This is what I thought about the name too, but a lot of people don't know what the app does even after checking the website, personally I think I would get it directly from the name. About the logo, which part do you think doesn't looks professional? The color/font? Or the ways the letters are put together? Or maybe everything?

I really appreciate your feedback, if you would like to try the app 30 days for free let me know.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn to Love Your Database [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/groups/waza2012/videos/49484558 <comment><AUTHOR> Slides are at: <http://love-your-database.herokuapp.com/>

<comment><USER2> Thank you, good sir.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is adding money to FOSS contributions toxic? - <AUTHOR> Dear HN,
I run a commercial FOSS project and I've been wanting for some time to financially reward contributions from external contributors.
My idea was to set a "bounty pool" and add some money to it (based on the previous month's revenue and what we feel comfortable investing on).
Each contributor would be able to make a "contribution claim". On this claim, the contributor tells what he/she did that month, linking to PRs or screenshots that corroborate such claim.
Then, a maintainer assigns a number of "tickets" to the claim. The number of tickets depends on 1) the relative effort of the contribution(s) and 2) the impact that contribution had to the project.
(The relative effort would be calculated as "if one of our team members were to do it, how many hours would it take?").
After the month has ended, we run a small "lottery". Random tickets are selected, and each selected ticket is worth, say, $50 that the contributor can later cash-out using Bitcoin (or wire transfer with fees deducted).
We could also add other rewards like t-shirts, mugs etc.
This idea is well-intended, but my biggest fear is that it could make my community toxic. Contributors could possibly get overly competitive, or maybe upset because a claim did not reward as many tickets as one expected.
I do not know any open source project that does something like this. Things like Bountysource do not apply because they are centered around specific issues. Within our project, a contributor may help in different ways that do not necessarily translate to issues.
I have several questions regarding this "experiment", but maybe the most important ones are:
1 - Do you know any project that implements such reward system? Or maybe failed attempts?
2 - Do you believe adding money to open source contributions could demotivate contributors or create a toxic community?
I feel that's an interesting subject and I'd love to have HN's take on it. Cheers! <comment><AUTHOR> Let me add some insights when discussing this with a friend.

He told me that possibly contributors could get demotivated if a specific contributor manages to get a high stake of the bounty (because he/she contributed a lot). However I believe the opposite would happen: if anything, contributors would be motivated to contribute more, and thus have more tickets.

My friend also told me that one of the reasons people contribute to FOSS is because they are passionate about whatever the project does, not because of any financial reward (I totally agree with her). The way I see it, people would still be contributing for passion/hobby, and possibly get some reward on top of that. Not necessarily a bad thing.

I also believe that a key to make this happen is to advertise the reward system as a secondary/complementary motivation. If the possibility of a reward becomes the main reason people are there, it may have a negative result (which one?). Also, it's inevitable that some people will have the reward as their sole motivation. Again, I fail to see why this could be bad.</comment>


Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity - <AUTHOR> http://evonomics.com/insanely-concentrated-wealth-strangling-prosperity/ <comment><USER2> This article makes a rookie mistake of conflating wealth with current income. There are times when certain assets - like land, real estate, tulips or equities - are over-valued, so people who own a lot of land, real estate, tulips or equities are over-valued.

If Satoshi Nakamoto and Jeff Bezos visited a town for a few days, that town would experience extreme wealth inequality the day the duo arrived and revert to a rather normal-looking graph the day Nakamoto and Bezos left. Looking at the data, the residents of that town had been subject to the cruelest wealth inequality in the history of the Universe, but looking at the town, nothing really changed week in and week out.</comment>