U.S. Is Working to Ease Wiretaps on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?_r=1&emc=na&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> There's no need to feel bad for the DoJ. They rarely encounter encryption and when they do they get around it. For instance in 2009, there were more than 2,300 criminal wiretaps that caught the communications of more than 230,000 people. The cops encountered encryption once, and still got the plaintext. <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/wiretapping/>

Moreover, we've been down this road before with the Clinton/Gore push for encryption backdoors -- the so-called Clipper chip. Congress asked the National Research Council to look into it and what did they come up with?

"It is true that the spread of encryption technologies will add to the burden of those in government who are charged with carrying out certain law enforcement and intelligence activities. But the many benefits to society of widespread commercial and private use of cryptography outweigh the disadvantages."

<http://epic.org/crypto/reports/nrc_release.html>

Simply put, this is an egregious power grab that's unnecessary. It's a technical mandate that limits secure communications and outlaws technology like PGP and OTR and possibly TOR.

Online encrypted e-mail services are already push-overs. Hushmail will rat it out its clients with a court order. <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/>

And if that doesn't work the FBI can always deploy its zero-day browser bug that installs spyware -- CIPAV. <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/07/fbi- spyware-how/>

Don't feel for the feds, fight them.

<comment><USER3> The FBI have a legitimate cause for concern: if strong cryptography ever becomes foolproof and widespread, it will make intercepting communications much, much harder -- and there are legitimate reasons for why the FBI would want to intercept communications.

Obviously, the proposed legislation is pretty crazy, but I have at least a little sympathy for the FBI here.

<comment><USER4> This didn't deserve a downvote, because it's obviously exemplary of the very sentiment that's driving the thing.

However, that sentiment is assinine. The business of this nation isn't to make the interception of communications easier, it's to facilitate _our_ affairs. The article says

 _But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers._

As if the powers of law enforcement are the overriding concern, rather than the freedom of the people.

<comment><USER3> I don't think my sentiments are "assinine", thank you :)

The FBI has legitimate reasons to want to intercept communications, e.g., to try to prevent organized crime and domestic terrorism. While most people would probably support the FBI's interest in doing that, they would also agree that infringing on privacy is bad. So we have a complicated tradeoff, and a system of checks and balances -- and that system might potentially be greatly effected by widespread crypto.

The idea that only privacy rights have any value is just naive IMHO, and it is unsurprising that most people don't believe that.

<comment><USER4> Our security is important, but nothing is _more_ important than our freedom. Thus, the powers of law enforcement must exist in the spaces between our freedoms, and not encroach, forcing us to alter our behavior for their convenience.

Surely it would be more convenient to law enforcement if they had DNA samples and fingerprints from the entire population, but that's not going to happen.

In some ways, demanding the "right" to eavesdrop is even more pernicious, because it's interfering with our freedom to speak and associate with those we choose -- one of our most cherished freedoms.

And like at least one other commenter mentioned, the government has a clear track record of abusing such powers. I'll add another to that list, their abuse of the Echelon system.

 _One of Echelon's primary roles has been to gather industrial espionage from European companies for US ones, say some intelligence experts. The French were said to have lost a $6bn contract for Airbus with the Saudi government to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, thanks to Echelon intercepts of faxes and telephone calls._

 _...The [British Parliament] report warned businesses and ordinary individuals that they are being spied on and that users should encrypt their e-mails. It said: "That a global system for intercepting communications exists ... is no longer in doubt. They do tap into private, civilian and corporate communications."_

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/secrecy- spy-s...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/secrecy-spy- satellites-and-a-conspiracy-of-silence-the-disturbing-truth-about- echelon-686389.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The authors of this bill fundamentally misunderstand how the Internet works.

They believe that all useful Internet communication is centralized: for two parties to communicate, a third party (GMail, AIM, Facebook, HN, Twitter, etc) must relay the messages. But this isn't even true for email! Most companies run their own local servers. There is no central broker to tap - it's just P2P communications. Hell, if you and I open our college number theory books, implement RSA, and share port numbers and IP addresses, the law hasn't considered us. But we don't need to do that - there are plenty of expert- reviewed P2P technologies that allow for secure communication. It gets worse: I could use a VPN, and pipe my results through TOR, and use secure proxies. People just use centralized services because they're nice.

In this case, the government is asking citizens to sacrifice their liberty (and companies to sacrifice their valuable time) for something that can only be ensured by direct access to a suspect's computer, without providing any solid evidence that our safety has been threatened. FUD at its finest.

<comment><USER4> _There is no central broker to tap - it's just P2P communications_

According to the article, the proposed regulations would cover that:

 _Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception._

Of course, that doesn't mean they'd have a prayer of enforcing it, but I don't like the idea of being forced into what would be illegal activity to preserve my own privacy.

It seems to me that this provision would be hard to make stick, what with the Clinton-era precedents that encryption code is protected under the 1st Amendment. It's probably time to pull out my old "This T-shirt is a munition" shirt [1]

[1] <http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/>

<comment><USER6> How does that cover in anyway the case where I run my own SMTP/IMAP server for me and my minions, and we are encrypting all email with GNU Privacy Guard using the GPGMail plugin to Apple's Mail.app?

<comment><USER4> As I read the article (without having seen the actual proposal, and probably not able to understand the legal-ese if I had), you just would not be allowed to do that. You'd have to use some alternative to GPG, that has a law enforcement back door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is nonsense. It's technologically impossible to enforce this. Global VPN providers will always provide a link out of the US, and peer-to-peer communications will _always_ be secure, no matter what the government wants. If they push this, it could become a big PR problem for them when it becomes apparent they can't possibly enforce it.

Be a good citizen and get wiretapped. Be a criminal and stay secure. It's like the DRM paradox, and just as resistant to litigation, criminal or otherwise.

Edit: I'm not saying that _all_ p2p is secure, only that it will _always_ be possible to have secure p2p. There are totally-overkill-for-even-normally- outrageous-circumstances encryption schemes that would be even resistant to a quantum computer. By altering the frames it's possible to make your secret traffic look like something totally different to get around filtering. Whatever filters or taps are dreamt up, new schemes will arise to circumvent them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, do the people writing bills ever bother to consult experts in the fields that a bill pertains to? I don't have the expertise to tell if it's the case for most fields other than technology, but if the bill-writing process is anything similar, are bills on things like health care, the economy, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also based on a complete lack of understanding of the facts?

<comment><USER9> You could also ask the question if the people voting on the bills actually read them. The answer is, generally no. Also, the congresspeople who propose bills sometimes don't even read their own material, because they assume their staff (who actually wrote it) got everything correct. Strange but true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Plain-text requirement is almost offensive.

However, I've been toying around with the idea to link bunch of dedicated servers with OpenVPN tunnels and let users connect to them via OpenVPN server (tls) also.

The idea is to form a closed or separate network with services and have it be privacy friendly network.

The main point I am trying to make is that we the people should be able to, and be allowed to run and manage our own network that isn't wiretapped constantly by for-profit intel contractors.

<comment><USER11> A couple quotes from Thomas Jefferson:

 _When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty._

 _I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it._

<http://jpetrie.myweb.uga.edu/TJ.html> for more

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if they have had problems with interception of terrorist transmissions, where are the new Sept 11th attacks? Fear mongering to give up another inch of your freedom.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Their argument is they are trying to better protect us:

 _But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers. ... "We're not talking expanding authority. We're talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security."_

But our intelligence services _had_ all the data necessary to discover the "Christmas day bomber" but failed to connect the dots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I read this title as them wanting less wiretaps.. doh !

<comment><USER14> I did too, initially, but I immediately realized that didn't make sense, because it's about the US government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Court order, that is the question, what they want is to be able to tap anyone, always, "just in case you are a terrorist".Read: control your political adversaries and get more power.

I'm for it if and only if there is a court order(You know they are listening you).It must be balanced.

I'm working on voice recognition software, in a few years the any government will have the option to transcribe ALL the skype messages in a very very cheap way and store them. This way you can search for patterns...and improve your industrial spying too. If they have the power to do so, they will do so.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope the rest of the world won't import that US madness.

<comment><USER17> I hope the US doesn't import the madness that already afflicts many parts of the world.

<http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/cryptolaw/cls2.htm>

<comment><USER16> Indeed. Keep everyone's madnesses at home (or even ban them from there, too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the good ol' Indiana Pi Bill

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm guessing that RFC4880 isn't being used nearly enough?

<comment><USER19> openpgp for those too lazy to google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since they new about the September 11 stuff before it happend _, but still did not prevent it, they should not be awarded more money, toys or power but rather punished for their failure.

_ Google for "bin laden determined to strike in US"

</comment><comment><USER21> The FBI has a tough problem on their hands. Probably even an impossible one.

They seem to be trying to strike a good balance here, but especially the encryption part is likely to rile people up. And in some cases it's totally impossible.

I actually feel kinda bad for them.

<comment><USER22> They are seeking the ability to tap anything they want, any time they want.

That is a balance between what and what?

<comment><USER21> Um, court order?

You really think a world with no law enforcement is a better one?

Before you misunderstand me, there is no way they will get what they want, but I can still understand their problem.

<comment><USER11> Of course law enforcement is necessary. But you've jumped and equated resisting unfettered wiretaps to a world with no law enforcement. That's the same kind of broad stroke generalization that gets our rights trampled, like they were in the illegal wiretapping of Internet traffic at Folsom St., San Francisco:

 _Mark Klein, a retired AT &T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants._

<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619>

<comment><USER21> Say what? I did no such thing.

I am talking only about the ability of the FBI to conduct court ordered wiretaps.

Right now companies can create internet based products without even thinking about the idea of wiretaps. Making a policy that companies should create procedures for dealing with ordered wiretaps from the beginning sounds like a good idea to me. (The encryption part doesn't though.)

Did you even read the article?

<comment><USER11> Your replied to "They are seeking the ability to tap anything they want, any time they want" which is unfettered wiretapping with "You really think a world with no law enforcement is a better one?"

 _I am talking only about the ability of the FBI to conduct court ordered wiretaps._

Yes, _you_ are only talking about court ordered wiretaps, but I'm wary about _actual implementation_ of wiretaps, and for good reason, as I posted about factual historic illegal wiretapping as recently as 2002.

Yes, I certainly did read the article. I take an interest in matters of politics, government vigilance, and rights infringements I wish more Americans would. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for legal law enforcement, and aiding those tasked with doing their job while not trampling civil rights and liberties. I happen to think there are wise and unwise ways to go about it. For example, suspending habeas corpus, the right to due process, as George Bush did by citing national security, and which was reversed by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, I think is unwise. I also don't think terrorists will stop and think, oh well, they've got their country wiretapped, so there is no way to carry out attacks now...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you print code? - <AUTHOR> I would really like to print out stjepang's library smol. It's just a few thousand lines of code and I have a feeling that it would be easier for me to understand on paper.
How does anyone do this? I've heard that companies sometimes do code reviews on paper, so I figured this would be a solved problem.
Still, I couldn't find a decent solution anywhere. So there's the question for Ask HN. How in the world does anyone print code in a reasonable way?
By "reasonable", I mean:
1. with line numbers,
2. with syntax highlighting,
3. and preferably some sane separation of source files.
Smol:
https://github.com/stjepang/smol <comment><USER2> I know this is not answering your question, but... I strongly recommend against printing code, why?

You lose facilities like: goto source, search/replace, modifications (I might modify/format a piece of code temporarily, to help me understand it better, might rename functions, variables, add lines to visually separate parts of code, etc) and many more.

You re-enforce your discomfort with reading/writing code on the screen. I'm trying to assume different reasons that you might have to learn a code and for all of them that I can imagine, you'll be better off as someone who feels at home with the screen. So I suggest you to resist this temptation and do what you ultimately will do.

Out of curiosity, Is your job/situation/skills in a way that being good with screen will not seriously benefit you? How?

<comment><USER3> "You can't grep dead trees." \- The Jargon File

<comment><USER4> And you can't alt-tab to HN on a sheet of paper ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was a kid in the 80's I use to print my code. It was on a dot matrix printer tractor fed paper. This option would be better, IMO, than loose leaf as the pages stay in order.

I think it is a good idea to print it out to help you understand. I consider it on occasion but don't want to pay for the ink and paper. Plus printers have some unspoken vendetta against me...they hate me and I hate them.

</comment><comment><USER6>
            $ mkdir rtfs
            $ for F in src/**.rs; do
            >     pygmentize -o rtfs/$(basename $F .rs).rtf -O linenos=1 $F
            > done

Now open the .rtf files with a word processor and print them.

To change the highlighting theme, e.g. to "pastie":

            $ pygmentize -O style=pastie,linenos=1 ....

<comment><AUTHOR> This… might actually work. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> We had a project work to submit C programs. Originally, the teacher told us to write the programs by hand. I had written ~20 C programs in my computer and was feeling lazy to write out all of them by hand onto paper. I then asked the teacher if I could submit the programs printed on paper and she said yes.

I was already using Pygments to highlight my source code and was thinking if I could print them highlighted with it.

Pygments has many formatters to format output. I used .rtf but you can also output images as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently printed some C code for studying. I used GNU Enscript to convert it to Postscript. (Enscript can also send the job directly to the printer, at least on macOS.) Very handy program. I think it can do syntax highlighting for some languages. Are you sure you need that though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! I'm pretty sure I need the highlighting. Looking at black and white code is just so much harder for me.

<comment><USER4> Try it maybe? In an editor then I agree that it is too useful to turn off. But if you print the code you will anyway have to read it many times in order to take it in. You will probably see that you will be able to navigate it even without the syntax highlighting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This will do what you want.

[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nobuhito...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nobuhito.printcode)

</comment><comment><USER8> print()

</comment><comment> non-entity By using an IDE or editor with a decent print function. On Windows I've printed I've from Visual Studio and Notepad++. Not sure of a good editor for printing on Linux or Mac.</comment>


A single days case work for a London Magistrate - <AUTHOR> http://magistratesblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/all-in-days-work.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For those not familiar with the UK, magistrates are non-lawyers, and "upstanding members of community" who sit as judge / jury in lowest levels of UK court system.

It simply "satisified my intellectual curiosity" to see what and who pass through our legal system - although the seeming prevalence of sexual offenders is a bit worrisome.

<comment><USER2> Eh? "prevalence of sexual offenders"?

I see a single "Various sexual offences" case in the list of 21...

<comment><AUTHOR> my apologies, too long on the internet you see, I was starting to hallucinate sexual offences online.</comment></comment></comment>


Where am I? - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=where+am+i <comment><USER2> It sucks that Google still has access to this information even if you've meticulously disabled any and all tracking settings on google.com and android, even if you don't use wifi.

In my case, they got my location via the IP address and I guess they had to cross reference it with other tracking data to pinpoint the IP adress down to a few square km.</comment>


Show HN: Resources for Becoming a Better 1:1 Communicator - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TsHLjadC7tTI4_YJaH4ysIlDpM6F62ia2dyxsdkzDto/edit?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> I've put together a short curriculum to become a better 1:1 communicator.

Why? My 'right' ideas are often ignored by family and colleagues. Later, those same people will put the same ideas into practice after hearing them from another source.

At first I thought it was my audiences fault: they were failing to pay attention; that my ideas were too early to be recognized as right; or even that the repetition of the idea was required to be seen as right.

Gradually, I realized I am not being persuasive when I present my ideas. I went on a search for ways I could improve my persuasiveness in 1:1 communication.</comment>


Forgo JavaScript packaging? Not so fast - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2.htm <comment><USER2> >It may not have escaped your notice that 662,754 bytes is a lot of bytes for JavaScript for a single HTML page, and 296 files is a lot of files. "What are you doing on that page?" you may well be wondering.

> We are wondering that too. The page in question is the Khan Academy homepage > for logged in users, and it's acquired a lot of, um, functionality over the > years.

> The end result of our analysis is that our page isn't going to load any > faster until we reduce the amount of JavaScript we use on the page. Tricks > like trying to load a bunch of stuff in parallel, or aggressive caching, > might seem like appealing shortcuts, but nothing replaces just auditing the > code and making it need less "stuff."

At the end of the day, de-bloating is the best way to make your pages faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> Webpack's chunking ([https://github.com/webpack/docs/wiki/optimization#multi- page...](https://github.com/webpack/docs/wiki/optimization#multi-page-app)) will help you get the "hybrid" approach easily. It lets you separate out common modules into JS files for you to load when needed.

<comment><USER4> That's what came to mind reading this. Why a whole post on this when you can literally just go look at the webpack docs and do this in 5 seconds.

<comment><USER5> I _love_ webpack and highly recommend it, but it is _not_ trivial to integrate it into an existing project and pretty much nothing about webpack can be described as "done in 5 seconds".

<comment><USER6> I did it in a big project it took a couple days, really wasn't that big a deal, and legacy JavaScript still goes through webpack and works unmodified, then a couple weeks to iron out any kinks in the CI scripts (but was still developing during this time)

<comment><USER5> A couple days sounds about right and jives with my own experiences, but I feel like "do this in 5 seconds" is pretty misleading, especially for someone who may have never used webpack before. It's absolutely worth the effort, but I wouldn't want someone to be discouraged had they expected a "5 second" solution but then realized it's not quite that simple.

<comment><USER7> This is typical programmer attitude. Standard estimates go like this:

When trying to make themselves look good on online developer forums: 1/100th real development time

When estimating time involved for co-worker: 1/10th real development time

When estimating time involved for themselves at work: 1/2 real development time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They need to use push to get the most out of http2.

If they prebuild a manifest they can add X-Associated-Content to the response headers and App Engine will take care of the rest. They of course need to make sure that their static file handling has very little overhead, since doing push this way does get each resource via a request.

<comment><USER8> Someone deleted a reply, that I was trying to respond to, about App Engine and http/2 push. My reply:

App Engine has supported the X-Associated-Content header for a little while now, and also supports the Link header, with rel=preload, like:

        Link: <https://example.com/other/styles.css>; rel=preload; as=style

See [http://w3c.github.io/preload/](http://w3c.github.io/preload/)

<comment><USER9> Haha, sorry, that was me. I was eating my words, because it looks like there is support!

The experiments described in this post were conducted early this year, and it looks like those developments are fairly new?

I just discovered this too: [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/http2push- gae](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/http2push-gae)

Is this new-ish capability documented somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's understandable that individual files would be slightly larger in aggregate than a single combined file, due to the compression issue that was mentioned. However, since there is no more head-of-line blocking the overhead of an extra few bytes should be negligible compared to elimination of round- trip delays. Also, if you are expecting to serve HTTP1 clients for a while it's a good idea to use a hybrid approach where you combine files, just less aggressively than you may have in the past.

</comment><comment><USER11> > The traditional advice for web developers is to bundle the JavaScript files > used by their webpages into one or (at most) a few "packages."

They're called bundles. Not 'packages', which already has a very distinct meaning (eg, [https://www.npmjs.com/](https://www.npmjs.com/) or similar systems) in the JavaScript community.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading this article didn't inspire much hope for a bundle-free JS environment - but if you want to play around with one, we've been working on such an environment that provides 2 applications: 1\. A Koa + HTTP2 static asset (primarily JavaScript) server 2\. A rendering application that loads a route- based JavaScript dependency tree using JSPM + react-router in order to isomorphically render a web-page.

[https://github.com/nfl/react-wildcat](https://github.com/nfl/react-wildcat)

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this whole article completely specific to the Google App Engine use case? Google App Engine loads all of your static files onto shared servers in use by many other users and builds up some kind of lookup table to access requests. It's not entirely clear how they've architected this, but it's obviously unlikely that they store everything in RAM.

So the most likely cause for the random slowdowns are when javascript files are loaded from disk to ram or some similar process.

For most cases, you'd have your javascript files sitting in-ram on a dedicated static file server cache such as apache or nginx and would not experience this kind of random slowdown. So more than likely this article does not apply to anybody not using google app engine.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems weird to me that the first byte for index.htm i the many-files test arrives at 0.175s

while for the packaged-files test it arrives at 0.092s

Since it's the first request, there're no concurrent requests in the view.

Maybe they run their test while benchmarking it? Still, if the environment is different, I'm not sure if their timing numbers are truly significant

</comment><comment><USER15> Since we are on the topic of effectively distributing JS code to clients...why is there no push for delta updates on the web? There was a proposal for delta caching back in 2002: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3229](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3229)

<comment><USER8> Service Workers can help here:

      1. Load the cached resource
      2. Fire off a background request for any delta updates
      3. Apply delta and update cache
      4. Next load use the new resource

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ClojureScript can do this along with dead-code elimination / cross module code motion: [http://swannodette.github.io/2015/02/23/hello-google- closure...](http://swannodette.github.io/2015/02/23/hello-google-closure- modules/)

<comment><USER17> You mean the closure compiler can do this.</comment></comment>


Schrödinger's cat caught on quantum film - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26111-schrodingers-cat-caught-on-quantum-film.html#.U_7H3MWSySo <comment><USER2> Obligatory link to epic Schrödinger's Cat poem from The Straight Dope, for those who haven't seen it before.

[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of- sc...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of- schroedingers-cat-an-epic-poem)</comment>


Tsukiji, Japan's iconic fish market, is still booming—for now - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-08/how-to-visit-tsukiji-fish-market-in-tokyo-before-it-closes <comment><USER2> I've been to Tsukiji a number of times, including the morning after Fukushima. Most recently I was there in September. They're glossing over the recent rules that tourists aren't allowed in the inner market before 10am, largely after business is done for the day.

Sushi Dai is good but not worth standing in line for an hour. There are dozens of restaurants along Shin Ohashi Dori with local specialities and no tourists. For my money, I'd rather get a lunch reservation at Kyubey or Sushi Iwa than stand in line forever to get squeezed (literally) into Sushi Dai or Daiwa Sushi. There's a great coffee place a couple blocks away called Turret Coffee, ironically tucked behind a Starbucks.

And please, don't bring a suitcase. I honestly cannot believe the throngs of tourists I saw last time bringing in full-size roller suitcases. The market was not built as a tourist attraction—watch where you're going, accept that your shoes will get dirty and don't bring bags. Or touch the fish.

The market is worth visiting, especially if you're coming from the US, meaning the jet lag will have you wide awake at 3am your first morning. Embrace it and head on over.

<comment><USER3> I've been to several of the joints on that small alley housing both Sushi Dai and Daiwa over the years. The experience is very different from what you get at a very formal and oldschool place like Sushi Iwa [1], especially if you can chat up the chefs (which imo is an essential part of going to a sushi joint).

Personally I'd be okay with waiting 1 hour for Sushi Dai, but that's way below average wait time. The standard wait time is about 4 hours these days. Daiwa is about 45 minutes iirc. Regardless, it's 90% foreign tourists these days anyways, and it's a win-win scenario for the tourists and the restaurants imo. It's like a Velben good -- the longer the wait the more memorable the experience? :P

Agreed that there are plenty of great random places to eat in the outer market. Might be hard for the average visitor to glean which one to visit though.

[1] do they still charge a flat 20,000 JPY for dinner regardless of how much or little you eat?

<comment><USER2> I haven't been to Iwa for dinner, only lunch. That runs about 7000 yen. FWIW I've found the chef fairly talkative the three times I've been there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just visited Tsukiji inner market a few weeks ago. They use a huge amount of ice and styrofoam to keep the fish cold. What really blew my mind is the on- site styrofoam recycling center. Not only are they using high-value land for recycling, but also saving energy and pollution by not transporting material away. Very progressive and forward thinking.

On the other hand, the whale jerky in the outer market just made me sad.

</comment><comment><USER5> These are shots of my then 1yo (now 10yo) son and I visiting in 2007. Presumably, they don't let you get this close to the tuna anymore.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/vjcxk2ajokxxcbd/IMG_1307.jpg](https://www.dropbox.com/s/vjcxk2ajokxxcbd/IMG_1307.jpg) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/7wctwf46bekam60/IMG_1310.JPG](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7wctwf46bekam60/IMG_1310.JPG)

<comment><USER6> You can still get this close, but not in the auction. The shops who purchased some tuna then have them sitting out in their stalls sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although perhaps it won't close after all, the article says.

<comment><USER8> Good point. We changed the title above to the article's subtitle.

The submitted title was "How to Visit Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo Before It Closes". Submitters: please don't rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Rewriting to be _more_ misleading is particularly bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope they shut down Tsukiji and settle this as soon as possible. Most people here are sickened by this endless political drama, which has very little to do with their daily life yet took so much news coverage and debating.

<comment><USER10> Necessary context for the above: Tsukiji is old, decrepit, and absurdly located in the middle of central Tokyo -- it's easy walking distance to Ginza. For _decades_ now, they've been planning a move to a larger site on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, which is otherwise great but happens to be contaminated with dioxin. They've spent years cleaning it up, and the move was supposed to happen for realz last year, but was scuttled at the last minute because Tokyo got a new governor who realised that a) the cleanup hadn't actually been done and b) they had just forged the test results proclaiming it clean.

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I'd also point out that Tsukiji as a market is somewhat dysfunctional now and the majority of fish in Japan is already traded without using the central markets. Actually, they started a tourism campaign because of their slumping sales. It somehow worked, which I guess mainly due to the snobbery and pomposity surrounding the pricey sushi among some domestic/foreign tourists. But I'd like to see a real working market, efficient and representative of the needs of real people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had assumed this article was going to be about how depletion of fish stocks and irresponsible fishing in general was going to change the Japanese diet. However, all we got was local political drama.

</comment><comment><USER12> To see the tuna auction, try to have someone who's seen it guide you. You have to get there ridiculously early, maybe 3am or even earlier...just so you know.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is where they sell dolphins, right?</comment>


Jean-Louis Gassée (ex-Apple, ex-Be): Apple's Next Macintosh OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/10/31/apple%E2%80%99s-next-macintosh-os/

<comment><USER2> OS X is a solved problem.

I think all of Apple's R&D efforts are now focused squarely on iOS and mobile. So when Apple reached into their bag of tricks for the next version of OS X and the next Mac hardware, all they had was iOS stuff. That's the new MacBook Air, that's OS X Lion.

It's convergence, but only on a purely superficial level. A Mac is still Mac, OS X is still OS X. I don't see Apple wasting engineering resources on changing the Mac into something it's not.

Real convergence will come from iOS working its way up, not OS X slimming its way down.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the Mac app store is demonstrating Apple slimming OS X down. The OS X had had a ton of compromises in it's design including the Mac-like UI (rather than a NeXT-like UI), the Carbon API, and a Java API. These are being stripped away.

<comment><USER2> I don't understand how the deprecation of some old, unpopular, unused APIs has anything to do with the Mac App Store.

<comment><USER3> Deprecation of old APIs doesn't have anything to do with the app store -- but you can't get your app in the store if you use a deprecated API.

There are plenty of apps that exist and run right now (Minecraft, for example) that can't go into the app store. So you can think of the app store as sort of a platform "ideal" for Apple even while they leave the old APIs around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some things mentioned here concern me greatly.

I do welcome the UI possibilities. UI innovation was languishing for a decade, as companies essentially spent their time tweaking the 1984 Mac and 1993 Mozaic UIs. And then Apple changed all that. Good for them. Bring some of that to the Mac; I'm all for it.

On the other hand, the trend toward the computer being something that some company controls, and I am allowed to use as they see fit, is not something I want to be a part of.

I recently bought a home computer. I run Linux on my office desktops & laptop, but, after much reflection, I decided I could not inflict even the relative friendliness of Ubuntu on my family. So we got an iMac. Great machine. We love it.

But now it's looking like, in a few years, there might be _no computer at all_ that my family would enjoy using, and that I would allow in the house. Not a pleasant thought.

<comment><USER5> Two things:

a) there's a lot of supposition in the whole "Apple is going to lock the Mac down" line of thought.

Personally I think it's unlikely they will simply because I think it would be a bad decision commercially. I can see an OS that is more restricted by default but software developers, designers and corporates simply won't accept heavy restrictions and will look elsewhere if the changes impact them.

Regardless though, it seems odd to me how worked up people are getting about something which is, at best, a prediction about something which might happen two or three years (at the earliest) down the line.

b) I love the idea that you might not allow a more locked down Mac into the house despite the implication that your family would enjoy and benefit from it.

Surely you judge each device on it's merits? Personally I'll accept the restrictions of the iPad because I have no need for it to be more open than it is but I won't accept those same restrictions on a computer.

You shouldn't impose your needs for a compute on your family and more than it would be reasonable for a professional chef to insist that their son or daughter had a professional standard cooker or knives when they're completely excessive for what they do?

<comment><USER4> > there's a lot of supposition in the whole "Apple is going to lock the Mac > down" line of thought.

True. Actually, I doubt they will lock it down.

However: Apple's online stores, beginning with iTunes, and heading into the various app stores, have been a huge success, and, from a business standpoint, they would be foolish not to do something almost identical for the Mac. (I know they're going to do it; it's the "almost identical" part that I'm pointing out.)

And then, of course, from developers' point of view, Apple has created something wonderful. It is now possible to sell a file for $1/copy, never deal directly with end users, and make decent money at it. So given a Mac app store, developers signing on is obvious.

The result is that, even if the OS itself is not locked down (which, as I said, I consider unlikely), we end up with a situation in which getting quality software requires giving Apple control of your machine.

That is what I consider unacceptable. Quality software is why I bought a Mac. Linux's opennness, scriptability, etc., is great, but there is nothing on Linux with anywhere near the polish and usability of iMovie, GarageBand, etc. Nor will there be for some time, I think. And when that kind of thing moves over to the we-run-your-computer world, then I don't see any options left for a home computer I'd be willing to buy.

<comment><USER5> In what way are you giving Apple control of your machine?

It's an install and download mechanism which you can use or not use.

<comment><USER4> If that's all it is, then I'm happy.

But I doubt it will be. For example, Apple's current app store is not merely an installation mechanism; it also allows them, to disable apps they don't want running on your machine. And after 30 years of flailing around, Apple has finally found a business model that works for them. I expect them, therefore, to copy as much of it as they can on the Mac.

<comment><USER5> Every time I run an install from a bit of software I've bought whether it be on CD or download, it could do pretty much anything it wants given (many of them demand root access). Apple or Microsoft could already use software updates to disable anything they don't like if they wished (and could probably do it far more subtly by introducing a minor incompatibility in the OS). How is this any different?

The reason they don't completely screw people's machine isn't technical, it's commercial, it would be utter suicide. That applies to Apple as much as anyone else and the app store doesn't change that (the kill switch for iOS has never been used in the three years it's been there).

<comment><USER4> The difference is a contractual one. If I bought some program, and an Apple software update deleted it, I might sue them. And I might win. But if Apple uses the iOS kill switch, then they are within their rights.

The difference is similar to that between a plumber I call in now & then to fix some pipes, and a plumber who gets a key to my house, and my written permission to do anything he wants, whenever he wants. Both of them have the capability to rearrange my plumbing in any way they want. But the latter is scarier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This perfectly explains why the Mac App Store is going to be a huge success:

"A few days ago, I downloaded a neat little utility to silence the startup sound on my new 11" MacBook Air. How much did the developer make? Zero, it's freeware; the programmer didn't want to spend the time and money to set up a commercial site. How much would I have paid for it from a Mac App Store? Less than $5, more than 99 cents."

<comment><USER7> But would Apple allow such a utility on the Mac App Store?

It seems to me that silencing the startup sound is essentially tampering with the Apple-designed user experience, which may not be looked kindly upon. (Also, it seems like the kind of thing that may require private API access, which is explicitly forbidden on the Mac App Store.)

<comment><USER8> I think tzs was talking about small programs worth between one dollar and five. Not that specific utility.

<comment><USER7> Well, sure. But I think it's telling that the only mentioned example of a Mac app that would benefit from this "iOSization" is one that so clearly breaks the iOS walled garden model.

<comment><USER2> That kind of utility usually works by simply muting the volume on shutdown. It's not a nasty hack, and I think it's presumptuous to assume that it would be excluded from the App Store.

<comment><USER7> The Mac App Store has the following rule:

"Apps must be self-contained, single application installation bundles, and cannot install code or resources in shared locations."

I don't see how the utility in question could be a single app bundle (no daemon, no startup script, etc.) and still perform its job of muting the volume on startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The burden of the past isn't really as big as he makes it out to be.

Apple made Rosetta to run older apps and Windows 7 includes Windows XP in a virtual machine in business SKUs.

Also, Intel chips haven't really implemented x86 instructions for a very long time. Most of the chip runs micro-instructions that are derived for a x86 to micro-instruction translation layer.

<comment><USER10> Apple hasn't just done Rosetta, they have a consistent pattern for "the burden of the past". A new technology bridges back to the old architecture or API, and then cuts it off after a transition period:

      Universal Intel & PowerPC binaries
      Carbon & "Classic mode" on OS X
      Fat Binaries (68k & PowerPC)

AFAIK Microsoft only really adopted this approach more recently, in the Windows 7 tech you mention. Prior to Windows 7 you had the backwards- compatibility burden sometimes running all the way back to Windows 95, maybe even Windows 3.1+Win32s.

<comment><USER3> The Windows XP for Windows 7 isn't even really required -- Windows 7 will still happily run most Windows 95 applications and even 3.1 apps (if not running 64bit).

I think if Microsoft mostly targeted consumers, rather than businesses, they would take the same approach to compatibility as Apple. But a large amount of Windows sales results from selling to corporations that have hundreds of critical legacy applications. They simply won't upgrade if their apps won't run. However, on my desktop, I doubt I'm running a single application that's more than 3 years old.

<comment><USER10> I see, thanks. It always seemed odd to me that they took that approach to solve the problem. Simply because so many minor tweaks to APIs do cause problems with old apps, or cause massive headaches when various quirks have to be maintained for decades.

Whereas a "Classic mode", "WINE", or "Virtual Machine" style mode would seem to solve the backwards compatibility thing in a much more containable way - apps still run, the old APIs stay frozen in the custom environment but deprecated/removed outside, new developments can use new APIs without being saddled with the old.

Even though the compatibility environments have to be kept around forever, now you've only got a few API interfaces to renovate (connecting the classic environments to whatever new Windows APIs exist), instead of thousands.

I guess it's not as simple as that, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like the way they're trying to blend everything together with Mission Control. There are certain types of apps that would work better if they were more iOS-ish but I definitely don't want to give up my traditional desktop apps either. If they can offer the best of both worlds it's going to really change the way we use desktop operating systems I think.</comment>


Samsung drifts away from Android; will Motorola rise to replace it? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/samsung-drifts-away-from-android-will-motorola-rise-to-replace-it/

<comment><USER2> "Speculation suggests the company is moving away from Google as a result of Google's acquisition of Motorola in 2011"

This "speculation" is what the whole article is based on. Where does it come from?

I think it makes sense that Samsung would like to expand their influence on the market by leading customers into their own ecosystem. But Android is not stopping Samsung from doing this: In fact, Samsungs Touchwiz OS already comes with plenty of Samsung Services installed: You log into a Samsung account, you get a Samsung app store in addition to the Google store, a music store etc.

What gives Google power in the Android ecosystem are its "Google apps for Android" services. Most people expect these to be part of every Android based operating system.

If Samsung thinks it can do without these services in the future, it will try. That its operating system is currently based on Android does not grant Google much influence over Samsung IMHO.

And that Samsung is also supporting other operating systems is no change from the current or past state. Was there ever a time when Samsung did only support a single software stack? I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER3> At best, this article is overwrought analysis. At worst, it's fabricating unlikely scenarios.

Samsung has been diffident regarding Tizen, and quite unwilling to commit a level of resources that might draw Google's attention.

NTT Docomo was the most high-walled walled garden, with a Docomo-specific app runtime and other tightly bound ecosystem-technology links. More recently, docomo has had to accomodate Android smartphones. It's likely that Docomo sees Tizen as a platform for defending their garden walls.

This is not to take away from the accomplishment. Getting Tizen to market with a top OEM and a top carrier ain't chopped liver. But neither is it a strong indicator of continued success beyond that Samsung will support Tizen as long as Docomo orders handsets. It says nothing about whether US or European carriers will pick up Tizen, or whether any of Intel's plans for a Tizen ecosystem will come to fruition.

On top of all that, the question "Will Motorola rise..." is an appendage, without a single link to reality, least of all any indication that Samsung is less committed to growing their Android products.</comment>


CLI tool and guide to write MARKDOWN content and cross post to various platforms - <AUTHOR> https://fullstack.coach/post/how-to-write-and-cross-post-your-markdown-content <comment><USER2> Looks neat. No license in repo, sadly.</comment>


The future of phones looks like Yo - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ive-seen-future-phones-looks-lot-like-yo/

<comment><USER2> This looks to me like yet another attempt at repackaging _Push_ , which was widely touted to be the Next Big Thing some 15 or 20 years ago, and then promptly died a quiet death when the users wholeheartedly ignored it.

Companies love the Push concept, since, when a UI is built on top of it, what the user sees & does is driven by the company, not by the user. But, strangely, users wanna do what users wanna do.

Now, ordinary people have been getting Push notifications on their devices since the first phones appeared in homes over a century ago. It _works_ , in certain very limited contexts, because doing _one thing_ that a friend wants you to do (answer the phone, read an e-mail, swipe a Yo, ...) is great. People like it. Getting a continuous stream of things to act on, when you want to use your phone for something else, is a different matter.

Or might I be missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> The entire Yo platform is opt-in. Therefore, the user, not the company, is in the driving seat.

Yo never pushes notifications from the company side. Only users can decide which services they wish to subscribe to from the Yo Store (yostore.co). In addition, unsubscribing is just as easy.

So ultimately, the platform allows 'users do what they wanna do'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it comes down to multitasking. The notification systems of phones enable it, while the primitive launchscreen/app switching system gets in the way. Homescreen widgets can have the same function, but they're much less discoverable to users. Aside from Firefox I interact with most apps on my phone through Android's notification pulldown these days.</comment>


Reduce stress - with science - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/stress/ This link is to an excerpt of a full article in the last issue of Wired magazine out now. Interestingly training doesn't necessarily reduce stress, while meditation often does. The article contains some interesting observations on stressed baboons. <comment><USER2> Not sure why you've put "reduce" in the title. It's an excerpt of an article about Robert Sapolsky and stress entitled "stress", and mentions nothing about reducing it, other than it's bad for a number of reason - and hence you probably should decrease it...

</comment><comment><USER3> with Science!</comment>


Apple's iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios-14-features-changes-testing-after-ios-13-bugs <comment><USER2> There have been glaring bugs/issues lasting ages in both MacOS and iOS.

For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail" for gmail.

On my iPhone 11 pro (and the 6S i had before it) the camera app will sometimes only show a black screen and a freaking _reboot_ is needed to get it working again. I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.

Multi-monitor support was _so good_ on MacOS up until maybe 5 years ago. You could easily PIN apps to certain monitors and virtual desktops on specific monitors. If you started an app on a laptop and then connected to external monitors apps would automagically go where they were supposed to. Now it's a complete mess.

MacOS's UI seems more jerky in the last two major releases.

Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that other people have submitted and for _years_ they just sit there...open.

<comment><USER3> > I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that

You just missed taking pictures. You were still there to live them :)

<comment><USER4> So true. My parents didn't miss out not having a camera phone and neither did my grandparents. It's amazing how dependant we've become on capturing moments. Sometimes even to the detriment of actually experiencing them.

<comment><USER5> Might be related to the "Terror Management" theory. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470)

We probably feel the need to preserve/hoard everything in a subconscious desire for immortality.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting that individuals have this desire- the goal should be survival of the species not of an individual

<comment><USER5> Like insects? No, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm one of the most staunch Apple supporters but even I must admit that since WWDC 2019, I have spent more time fighting Apple's bugs than actually using any of the new features...or the old features that _used to_ work flawlessly (like iTunes/Music.)

Not just on the user side, but the developer end as well.

Perfectly valid code which used to work up till Xcode 11.1 throws errors inside the Swift runtime or toolchain on Xcode 11.2 (and 11.2.1). Even the Swift engineers on the official forums don't seem to know what you can or can't do with the new language features.

And after seeing bugs I reported eons ago still not fixed, it feels futile to even bother reporting them anymore.

It's _still_ not quite bad enough to make me want to flee back to Windows or switch to Android, but it does make me depressed, like there's nothing left in the world that "just works", except maybe my Nintendo Switch.

<comment><USER7> Why be a "staunch <Company X> supporter" at all?

It's one thing to admire the work/output of a company, but once you identify as a "Company X" supporter you are just closing yourself off to being critical of "Company X".

I cringe at every WWDC session when people applaud for minor features (new themes in Xcode!) and long overdue bug fixes.

I am embarrassed whenever someone online talks about a problem they have with Apple hardware or software, and they are met with passive-aggressive replies along the lines of "I've never seen that problem, what are you doing wrong..."

I develop for and use Apple platforms. I really like some things they have done, but I'd never consider myself an "Apple supporter".

I'm the customer, they are the vendor. They are here to support me.

If they don't do a good job at that, I'll try to find another company to take their place.

Also companies change, as do their priorities. There was once a period in when MS were making the best internet browser (really)...

<comment><USER5> > _Why be a "staunch <Company X> supporter" at all?_

Because they consistently make what I want to see. For example SwiftUI, which I had been waiting for my entire life.

Call it the lesser evil, compared to my experience with other companies, if that's more acceptable for you.

Here's a funny observation: I have 20+ upvotes on my previous comment criticizing Apple, but a negative score for the supportive statements on this one.

So you see, some people will staunchly attempt to bury anything remotely positive about something they begrudge, so others feel they have to balance that out. :)

<comment><USER8> Likely because you can like a company, or _portions of their output_ , without being a "staunch supporter", depending on your interpretation of what that even means. I think most people are interpreting being a staunch supporter with ignoring their shortcomings. You may not mean it that way, and may correctly criticize them for their missteps (it sounds like you do, since you reference criticism), but if people interpret this comment as defense of defending Apple in all circumstances, then they're likely to down vote.

I think this is less a case of people being too for or against a company, and more people interpreting the same statement differently depending on their own context.

<comment><USER5> > _a "staunch supporter", depending on your interpretation of what that even > means._

I just figured it was a nicer word to use than fanboy/fangirl.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I think it mostly is, but by the same token it might bring some of the baggage of those terms with it, such as support consideration of the facts, or refusal to accept any negative assertion, which is also sometimes associated with fanboy/fangirl. It's more to do with whether you use the term in a positive or negative context, as that will likely control what attributes it brings to mind. If you aren't careful to define that context, you're allowing others to define it themselves (even if it makes little sense in most cases for people to be using it in a way most would consider negative but applied to themselves. Exceptions do exist though...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time.

Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two.

When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there were periodic relatively stable releases. If something wasn't ready and there were still sprints left, you could push it back.

But it sounds like there has been milestone creep causing those sprints to either become more heavy or less missable. And I'm guessing the consequences for missing a sprint are more career limiting than they were when the methodology was still new.

It's like Rich Hickey said, we're smarter than runners, we just fire a new starting pistol every 100 yards and call it a new sprint: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT- DuG0UjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT-DuG0UjU)

<comment><USER10> I hate that Rich Hickey quote.

Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.

<comment><USER11> The problem with divide and conquer is that the finished product has to be back in one piece that makes sense. Often times the act of `divide` also reduces context for what conquer actually is.

Plus `divide and conquer` is used like a task you need to do with the goal of finishing, but Sprints never quite get to the end of the conquer phase, generally it's divide, and conquer...some tasks, and then divide in some more... and more... and more. You end up losing all sight of what you are actually trying to do or make.

The only way to fix sprints in a small to medium size company that exists and is shipping products is to realize that they should be tied to a set series of tasks and that every now and then you really need a stop point where you can take a week or two, define what your goals, needs, and issues are for the next 6 weeks or so, and then start anew with a clean backlog and roadmap with full buy in from the developers of what they are making. Otherwise you just turn developers into ticket pushers for tickets that they themselves do not understand, or have any context to understand why they are doing them. It's depressing and causes burnout and bad products. It's a symptom of the hustle culture bleeding into development and a lack of understanding that having long term end goals and sustainable pace is healthy to good products rather than `move fast and break things`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I first worked at Apple 30 years ago it was widely acknowledged that R&D had a two-tier system for software development. The rockstar engineers got to work on new stuff and the less productive/creative engineers cleaned up their mess. Bringing new features to maturity was a low-prestige activity and was not rewarded as well. The top engineers joined the hot new projects, shipped the first version, and then moved on to the next big thing. That pattern changed somewhat after Steve Jobs returned, but it still seems to be the case that testing and maintenance are not a very high priority.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like just about every software job I've had over the last 7 years. It sounds like a mgmt problem to me. Either they can't tamp down the devs who move too fast and break things, or they are driving the devs to do so.

<comment><USER14> It's a lot harder to demonstrate how the value added by improving stability. Like, what's the difference between 99.93% availability and 99.95% availability? How do you show that increasing test coverage by 5% helps users and brings value to the company?

"Hey, so you know how our application is pretty much always working, but will error out once every other blue moon? It does that less now," doesn't sound as flashy as "Look at this thing our app does that it didn't do before!"

<comment><USER15> > what's the difference between 99.93% availability and 99.95% availability?

Quite literally a 40% reduction in crashes

<comment><USER16> As so many people have pointed out in this thread, though, crashes are far from the only thing that can keep a user from being able to take advantage of a given feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting to me how widely followed the "Snow Leopard" myth is. It was a total disaster of a release. There were egregious issues in libdispatch which led to the entire API being re-written at least once. There were also random hangs due to major kernel scheduler changes for the first several point releases. Snow Leopard also introduced OpenCL, which has basically never worked. The Finder re-write added no features but made it slower. The 64-bit kernel couldn't be turned on by default for years. Many of the perf gains came from dropping PowerPC support by default with only a couple years of warning, which I'm sure today would cause an uproar.

It got marketed as a "no features" release and that's how it seems to be remembered. But in fact it probably was probably the highest-risk Mac OS release ever. It rewrote a huge amount of code for almost no direct user benefit, at time when testing was quite limited.

<comment><USER18> Snow Leopard was marketed as a stability release, but what they didn't tell us was that the stability would come at the end of the dev cycle, not at launch. :-)

In the end, Snow Leopard did end up very stable. I'm stilling running it today on an old Mac Mini hooked up to some old peripherals I want to keep around. But it definitely did not start that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In iOS 13, there is an absolutely bizarre bug when typing your passcode into the lock-screen: it will randomly delete one of the characters! You can actually watch it happen, you for example type 4 characters, and then on typing the 5th, it drops down to 3. It's absolutely infuriating, especially if you have failed-unlocking behaviors turned on where you then locked out of your phone after a minute if you fail X times.

The worst part is with all these bugs, you kind of feel that Apple will probably never get to them, given there are just so many (and on top of that Apple may just not care about non Face-ID modes of entry anymore, probably how this bug appeared in the first place). It is especially maddening since it feels like a cruel joke to have both the physical keyboard on the laptop mess up entry AND the virtual one on the phone.

<comment><USER20> You should feel lucky you can even type to have it delete one of your characters. On both (different) models of iPads I tried, the digit entry for screen time password was stretched out upon wake up so that there was no physical way to hit the "0" digit. You have to change the orientation for it to get back into a good state so you can press "0". This one has survived all the updates so far! Pretty wild...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 13 was the worst iOS release I can remember. Photos would crash from scrolling too fast. Mail wouldn't check for new messages for a whole day. Safari blank screens. Replying to messages in Mail was a 50/50 proposition. The phone would freeze for 5-10 seconds more than it ever did before. All kinds of visual artifacts like text appearing where it shouldn't, UI elements getting orphaned and just floating around, effects that didn't finish all the way...

<comment><USER22> I'm still holding off on updating my iPad, even though I really want to use sidecar. Has iOS 13 stabilized now?

<comment><USER23> I'm on 13.2.3 and a lot of the worst things seem to be fixed. That said, I still find some of the design changes odd and unintuitive (e.g. new editing gestures, new Music/Mail layouts). Mail is still infuriatingly slow at almost everything. I think you could probably call it stable (for my usage).

Note that there were also some... "interesting" iCloud sync design choices. You need to upgrade all devices (including macOS) to be sure of proper syncing in some cases, with odd behaviour ensuing if you don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test > versions, known as "daily builds," of future software updates disable > unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option > to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and > settings menu dubbed Flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each > individual addition on the system.

Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people will be using and evaluating beta components?

> Apple privately considered iOS 13.1 the "actual public release" with a > quality level matching iOS 12.

It certainly didn't reach that quality level…

<comment><USER25> > Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people > will be using and evaluating beta components?

Probably. But the benefit gained by doing this is that every issue discovered should be directly attributable.

If everything is broken, it's very easy to normalise broken behaviours, or to deflect responsibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe it's easy to say but it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical/procedural one.

Why the fuck did they let this happen in the first place?

Where is this mentality that even the backside of a cabinet should be build well?

<comment><USER27> Because it's inevitable at a certain scale.

The brand has a momentum, even if things start getting worse for customers there isn't an immediate response on a large scale.

A certain quality is important for the "true" advocates, but we're a small minority. Growth is driven by at scale customers who don't notice these issues because they're buying the products for different reasons.

In this context, improving quality to keep the hardcore fans happy costs money, but doesn't impact the bottom line significantly in the short term.

Growth is the only goal at this scale and that's driven by other strategies and not hardcore fans.

I guess long story short is corporations are cash machines and product quality does not play an important part at this scale.

<comment><USER28> That's not how it works.

How it works is that your brand suffers, and sales drift downwards.

When you attempt new projects outside of your skill envelope - a Maps application, a self-driving car, VR/AR hardware, a move to ARM - you either don't finish on schedule, don't finish at all and are forced to cancel, or you unleash a shit storm of bugs and negativity that costs far more than any nominal savings you might persuade yourself you've made by not doing QA properly.

It's a cultural problem. Not only is skimping on QA and customer support cheap, it _looks and feels_ cheap. And that's not a good look when you're trying to sell yourself as a premium brand.

To be fair, customer abuse is not unusual among premium brands. Prestige cars are notoriously crap for reliability and build quality.

But Apple is a prestige _consumer_ brand, and the brand experience is the most important asset.

If customers stop believing in the brand, all Apple has left is Dell or HP but with nicer packaging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.

<comment><USER24> They just did that with iOS 12/macOS Mojave. I guess they need another one?

<comment><USER30> iOS 12 and Mojave are fine. Just stay there, fix bugs, and add support for new hardware.

<comment><USER31> iOS 12 is fine for phones maybe, but iOS 13 (or iPadOS if you prefer) is a pretty big change for iPads in terms of power-user features.

USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps, multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari.

I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12.

EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this year as well. I think iPhones with 3D touch hardware had similar actions available in some places, but it's a big addition for iPads and the fact that it's supported across all devices now means that 3rd party devs will bother to implement it.

<comment><USER30> Storage support is a sensible addition to the OS for sure. It should also be in iOS.

I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating system.

Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application and not part of the operating system.

<comment><USER31> Multiple windows is easy to ignore if you don't want it, but especially with the side-by-side multitasking view it's very nice to be able to group app instances together as they relate to things you're working on, and not sweating the fact that there can only be one web browser window.

For instance, if I'm doing research on something, I might have Notes or MindNode running with a copy of Safari paired alongside it. Those research related tabs are kept in their own world, not mixed with my main Safari instance and it's accumulated tabs.

And then let's say I'm writing an email about my travel plans and want to pull up the airline's website to look at my reservation. I can do that in a separate Safari instance instead of taking away the research sidebar from next to my MindNode document.

And the new Mail message can be its own window while I write it. If I need to refer to another message in my inbox, I don't have to close the draft I'm writing to get back to my inbox, and then go fetch it out of the drafts folder when I want to get back to it. Just swipe over to the main Mail window and swipe back when I'm done.

Or take an app like GoodNotes, where I have several notebooks on different subjects. I can open two of them at once instead of having to close notebook A, open notebook B, make a note, close notebook B, reopen notebook A every time I want to jot a quick note down in a different topic.

There's an adjustment period if you want to get in the habit of thinking about the iPad this way. But being able to operate it in terms of different tasks and projects, leaving their workspaces intact and unpolluted to come back to later, is a much more productive setup than having to play "How can I best allocate my single instance of the text editor?"

<comment><USER30> It's hard to ignore it when the introduction of the features destabilizes the rest of the operating system.

I get how multiple windows is great for productivity, but I'd rather seem Apple push macOS for those use cases and keep the iPad as simple as possible.

<comment><USER31> I've not seen any OS stability issues, my main issue has been the Mail rewrite not listing messages reliably. Pretty frequently messages show up as a blank white box. But it hasn't been crashing.

13.2 had an issue with apps terminating and having to be relaunched every time you backgrounded them, but that hit the iPhone too so it wasn't an iPad multi- window problem. Speculation I saw was blaming iPhone 11 camera RAM requirements for more aggressive memory management, but who knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A long time bug that drives me insane: the dock forgets how to hide itself on full screen apps. Here's someone talking about it in March of 2012: [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3797657](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3797657)

Same exact issue exists today.

<comment> mh- this one drives me nuts. it's frequent enough that I have a shortcut to trigger `killall Dock`

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's almost like Apple iOS/macOS and Microsoft Windows 10 are competing with each other, to see how fast they can push out buggy software upgrades and skimp on quality assurance. The grass is greener on neither side.

<comment><USER24> How about other pastures, like Android or Linux?

<comment><USER34> Android is crap but if you stay away from "desktop environments" and a lot of the GUI software Linux OSes aren't bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone have more detailed information as to _why_ the degradation?

Has the balance of push push push for features just passed a tipping point of what developers could mostly keep up with?

Is it a process thing (eg the review process changed or testing practices changed)?

Or a developer skill level thing? Are seasoned coders being replaced by less seasoned ones?

Or is there a finger to be pointed at some piece of technology (for example, I've been pretty pro on swift for the last couple years, but recently have become aware of what a nightmare the marriage of closures and ARC are and how easy it is to make mistakes around them)?

<comment><USER24> This year's releases had a lot of new things in it, and a number of projects saw significant rewrites. Presumably engineers had a hard time keeping up with bugs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Idk what other errors are, for me it's the input system that degraded with years of ios releases down to what it is now. For one, this hn comment entry field is now a minefield that jumps around if you're not careful enough to drag the cursor beyond the input borders. Moving cursor and selecting text (both in input and in div) became so much difficult. Sometimes I also cannot get rid of selection in url bar to be able to scroll it right to see what /path is. While writing this message I missed spacebar around 10 times. My first iphone was 4 (ios 5). Idk how they did it, but I barely missed a single letter. On ios 7 keyboards changed and typing errors became a thing. I remember every single release that broke some of my basic functions: 7, 9, 10, 12, now 13.

I'm not talking about "complex" things here, it is what worked and then someone broke it step by step. Whoever is responsible for that, please get an early retirement. You did enough to me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm a bit worried about macOS releases since it's never something that really excites me anymore, apart from the new file system. I just need a robust system to work with.

iOS 13 was jam packed with new features, but released too early because of hardware release schedule. I waited it out until 13.2. Still some weird bugs here and there like adding a phone number as a name from new contacts from incoming calls.

</comment><comment><USER38> Safari, at least on the iPad, is so incredibly buggy in iOS 13 that it's practically unusable. Not to mention the ridiculous system where it opens new Safari windows, not tabs, and then doesn't give me any option to close them. And when Safari bugs out, and I have to force close it, it loses every single one of the tabs I have open, and it didn't do any of this garbage before iOS 13.

<comment><USER39> Arghh, those floating Safari windows. How do you get rid of them?

<comment><USER40> When you already have Safari running (or any other app), pull up the dock from the bottom edge of the screen.

Then press the Safari icon (or alternatively, press and hold on the Safari icon and choose "Show All Windows").

Now, all of those floating Safari windows are shown, and you can "toss them away" and close them.

Yes, it's not a very intuitive discovery process :(

<comment><USER41> I definitely appreciate the need to have multiple windows of the same app on an iPad, but the way Apple went about it is...bizarre, clunky and not exactly intuitive.

Considering Exposé and its default gestures exist on MacOS, you'd think maybe they'd take cues from that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm genuinely curious, does anyone here know if there's an underlying framework issue behind so many iOS bugs?

Because in my experience _so many_ bugs seem to have something to do with some kind of underlying data or sync model (not even remote sync, just on the device itself).

E.g. half the time I delete a voice memo, it re-appears 10 seconds later. Or maybe a quarter of the time I send an e-mail from the "Share" button in an app, it shows up as an unsent draft when I switch to my Mail app (despite the fact the e-mail was actually sent). Or sidebar shortcuts to folders I create in the Files app gradually and randomly disappear over the course of days/weeks.

It's like there's some funky async stuff going on behind the scenes, where either a common library has flaws or race conditions that seem to pop up everywhere, or it's so hard to use the library correctly that even the internal teams which program the apps are making mistakes with it.

<comment><USER43> I can't speak to the specifics, but after working on a significant third-party SDK for iOS I can say that libdispatch isn't hard to use correctly, but it is easy to use incorrectly. Worse still, once you get yourself into a libdispatch mess it is hard to escape without a total rewrite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Feature flags are not a panacea for software quality. They actually make your test matrix much larger, as on any given system a different set of flags might be enabled.

</comment><comment><USER45> My iPhone's battery has been discharging like crazy after I updated to iOS 13.2.2. Without any active usage of the phone the entire battery discharges in about 4 - 5 hours, due to apps' background activity. I'm having to charge the phone 2 - 3 times a day.

According to [https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/11/19/apple- io...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/11/19/apple- ios-1323-ios13-release-should-you-upgrade-iphone-update/), the battery discharge issue has apparently not been fixed, so I'm not planning to update my phone yet. Hopefully it gets fixed in the next iOS release.

</comment><comment><USER46> Dear Apple,

1\. Return text selection back to 12.x functionality - it is now _literally_ impossible to e.g., select a single word from a link's anchor text without first selecting some random portion of text (half the page at times), and then walking back the blue knobs for 45 minutes. The ideal UX is to offer to select a word if I click next to it, and if I press down and hold, give me a movable cursor every single time, and never automatically start selecting whole chunks of text just because I hold my finger down. The current iteration of this functionality randomly switches between both of those modes.

2\. allow me to use dictation in offline-only mode so that it actually works AND so that I don't get 400 words into a message and then watch my phone magically backspace the entire thing and then type it out again, incorrectly, in slow-motion

3\. Stop putting my cursor in capitalization mode every time I backspace a word when I'm typing

4\. After I dictate a block of text, please do not make it look like you have highlighted the entire block of text for me, when in actuality it's not highlighted at all, and if I tried to do some kind of operation with the assumption that it's highlighted (like delete), I will be disappointed by instead performing an accidental operation

5\. If I start typing a URL into Safari, let me backspace the characters at the same rate that I have typed them (currently, if I open Safari and click into the URL bar and start typing "new" like I'm going to go to "news.ycombinator.com", but then decide I first want to go to "google.com", I have typed 3 chars ("new") so I should be able to hit backspace 3 times and then start typing "google". Instead, I must first hit backspace one time to get rid of the auto suggestion because hacker news is in my favorites list. Then I can hit backspace three more times, then start typing "google". This is an idiotic bug.

6\. If I am using dictation and then I click somewhere in the text to prepare to fix the inevitable incorrect word that dictation will put in my text, but I click there before I end dictation, and then I end dictation, please do not insert everything that I said twice, once originally where the cursor was, and then a second time where I clicked to make that correction. I don't think there is much value in having two copies of the same paragraph, one inserted into the middle of the other...

7\. If I try to share a photo while in the Camera app by selecting Share > Messages, and then I turn my phone vertical while I'm typing the message (to make typing easier), please don't make it so that I can no longer see the keyboard, the text input field, or the photo that I'm sending, and I have no way of getting out of the situation besides losing the message, by closing the app and starting over

8\. If I click in the Camera app to start recording a video, start recording immediately instead of waiting a variable amount of time between half of one second and two whole seconds, causing me to A) miss whatever I was trying to record or B) click a second time, resulting in me stopping recording... and missing whatever I was trying to record

9\. If I open the Camera app, I am, at that moment, more interested in seeing the Camera app open then I am seeing a black screen with no functionality. Can we make the default such that the Camera app is what I see instead of a black screen that doesn't go away until I restart my phone? I like that camera feature better than the black screen.

... please add to this list in replies

<comment><USER47> Anyone else have it where the keyboard animates up in super slowmo?

I occasionally have it happen when pulling down to do a search and aside from it bring completely uncanny valley creepy it never quite finishes it's animation so I can't use the keyboard to type anything

Unfortunately I've not found any rhyme or reason to it to report the bug aside from what I've typed above "sometimes iOS is weird" would probably not get a response

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's not so much how you screw up - the sheer complexity of all this makes errors practically inevitable -, it's how you live up to it and act the day after. So let's see; these are good indications, but let's see how they deliver next.

</comment><comment><USER49> The most infuriating bug for me is on OS X where I'm randomly asked to enter my iCloud password continuously. This bug has existed for years. Absolutely bewildering when it happens and there's nothing you can do to suppress the system pop-up.

</comment><comment><USER50> My biggest gripe with Apple is they keep pushing out "features" that I don't want, and I end up with a net negative because of all the new bugs.

I never had crashes on my iPhone, ever, period, until the recent iOS 13 update. Photos crashes on me. The text messaging app crashes on me. Safari crashes just about every other day. Apple Maps, which had gotten so much better over the years, is now crashing too. Screw the new iPhones. Apple, you crapped on my relationship with you by screwing up what I've already paid you for. How do you expect me to trust you and give you even more of my money?

</comment><comment><USER51> [http://archive.is/eZ2He](http://archive.is/eZ2He)

[https://outline.com/xFAH3J](https://outline.com/xFAH3J)

</comment><comment><USER52> I am wondering it this is because of Swift.

And after 5 years I am also wondering if Swift was the wrong bet.

Especially on the Mac, no one buy a new machine every year, and hence the Mac as a platform are more for new comers and replacement cycle. So as long as the hardware were kept up to date, they will come. Why not just stop making new features on macOS and start fixing bugs and paying down those technical debt, all the way down from the Kernel to application layers.

I cant even name 5 features that were must have in the last few macOS release.

<comment><USER24> > I am wondering it this is because of Swift.

It is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm just glad my phone is still on iOS 12. I'll hope for the best and wait for iOS 14 to ship. And not updating at all is still an option.

It has been this way with macOS for several years now, and iOS has gotten just as bad: You cannot, under any circumstances, update a device that you depend upon to the newest OS version available. It will take at least 6 months to iron out the worst bugs, and sometimes you need to skip the whole release and hope that the next one will be bearable.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really like the "we finally fixed text editing" thing.

Try editing something in a text area with more text than fits in it without scrolling to see how "fixed" it is.

</comment><comment><USER54> It is unfathomable to me how the iOS ecosystem has so many features that don't work well eve after years of being in the wild and being available on millions of devices. Things like handoff, continuity, personal hotspot, etc. still do not "just work". I honestly wish they would remove the features if they have no intention or ability to make it work 100% of the time.

<comment><USER55> I believe it is a rumor that there are many new features. Just check the the documentation - not much moved 8-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Feature flags can't work for everything; a more complete testing methodology is required, and I hope there is more planned than we see here.

One issue with feature flags is identifying what a "feature" even _is_. A single flag is insufficient to enable target features in systems of interconnected frameworks. There will be an entire _graph_ of dependencies! Testers will need to understand the _series_ of flags that need to be enabled for a target feature to work.

And of course, there is a risk that this will make disabled features seem like bugs themselves! I am imagining Apple colleagues having to waste time reminding their testers _how_ to enable a feature, after receiving a "bug" report about something not working.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder if some day they will come up with another Snow Leopard. Or if the size of teams and the complexity of the product line is an inescapable doom pit.

</comment><comment><USER58> Apple parrots their OS update metrics as a leading indicator of customer engagement / satisfaction with the platform & how sympathetic they are to the difficulty for developers of putting out software for new hardware every year. I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases vs. fortnightly or monthly. It seems like they could burn a lot of goodwill with casual users.

<comment><USER24> > I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases > vs. fortnightly or monthly.

Apple doesn't push out weekly releases to the public. Are you suggesting that they should?

<comment><USER58> In the last 11 days we have had two public releases of iOS.

That's MORE than one per week.

<comment><USER59> That's due to necessity, not due to choice.

<comment><USER58> My entire point is: what determines that it's necessity?

None of the updates included fixes to critical bugs or security flaws AFAIK; they were incremental improvements in stability.

Who is determining that patch 1 needs to go out rather than being rolled into patch 2? On what basis?

<comment><USER59> I think they were critical fixes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I don't use iOS much as I only have it on an iPad Pro, but Safari has this annoying thing where you tap a button or a link and nothing happens. The CSS changes so you know the tap event has occurred, but nothing happens. You have to tap again to navigate or submit a form.

Of course this happens on all iOS browsers since all are running on Safari web views.

<comment><USER24> > Safari has this annoying thing where you tap a button or a link and nothing > happens

This might be the new heuristics to make desktop-class browsing work.

<comment><USER61> it's most likely 'onHover' behavior since ipad now identifies as a mac, so probably most css/js is assuming you have a mouse most likely...

it was like this in the early ios days before css media queries

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test > versions, known as "daily builds," of future software updates disable > unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option > to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and > settings menu dubbed Flags

<comment><USER62> That's nice and all, but I don't really understand how that helps.

Ah, from the article:

> some "testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn't really > have a handle on what's working and not working," the person said. This > defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled > to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features, > leading to some of iOS 13's problems.

<comment><USER24> So one of the issues is that Apple lives on their own tools, so when critical system components are broken nobody can get work done. But ideally they'd actually fix the bugs and try to keep the daily builds livable rather than trying to sweep the issues under the rug…

<comment><USER63> The problem seems to be there are so many bugs it becomes impossible to tell what caused what. Also, mixing unfinished features with known bugs in there might be a waste of time.

<comment><USER64> This reads like "our entire development process is borked. We should just hire 1000 cats because we can't control ourselves any better."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I remember the GOOD OLD DAYS(TM) where I had to pay to upgrade Mac OSX, iOS, and paid monthly for MobileMe. You know what? That ____just worked.

Now it is all free and 99% Jankytown. Apple, take my damned money and give me my productivity and happiness back!

</comment><comment><USER66> The rollout of iOS 12 was amazing, it made my iPads faster... do that again, every time! :)

</comment><comment><USER67> Can they do this with Catalina. I get a kernel panic twice a day and forced to reboot.

</comment><comment><USER68> I was at the all-hands I think this is referring to, and I'm not familiar with the flags. There are profiles, but most new features we're creating are going in the build.

</comment><comment><USER69> im sorry but its hilarious to me that feature flagging is "new" to their development process

</comment><comment><USER70> Been using iOS 13 since early betas. Working great for me</comment>


Study: Android is least open of open source mobile platforms - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/08/study-android-is-least-open-of-open-source-mobile-platforms.ars# <comment><USER2> I think Android should be even "slightly" more closed. Extreme openess doesn't work for consumer products, as Linux has proven before it. I wouldn't want Android to become another Linux in the mobile world. I'm not saying Linux hasn't done wonders since it existed, but it did mostly for technology companies. It's been a failure in the consumer market, and that's because of its "too" open model. Openess is a scale, it's not an either/or thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is only one other Mobile OS in the study, and that is Symbian considered before it was closed again...

</comment><comment><USER4> Considering that there are pretty much no other open source mobile platforms, that is trivially true.</comment>


SUSE acquires Kubernetes management platform Rancher Labs - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-kubernetes-management-platform-rancher-labs/ <comment><USER2> Pretty amazing and unexpected news. Here's the reaction from their community on Slack and a Twitter thread if anyone wants to comment there -> [https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1280854524148752385?s...](https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1280854524148752385?s=20)

I've worked a fair amount with Rancher's OSS tooling like remotedialer and k3s - a big fan of it and went on to produce [https://k3sup.dev/](https://k3sup.dev/)

Hoping that k3s will continue to exist and be invested in after the SuSE acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER3> With no disrespect to SUSE, it's great to see them doing something to stay relevant. Subjectively, it feels like majority of their strategy was to stay somewhat compatible with Red Hat and benefit from a lot of their work.

That's perfectly fine, but doesn't win you a lot of customers. I really want to see SUSE thrive, and this seems like a great move.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great. I've always felt that Rancher was underappreciated in the DevOps world probably because it's deceptively simple and easy to use and we tend to gravitate to complexity. I know a number of companies that have switched to it after trying to roll their own Kube management unsuccessfully.

<comment><USER5> Rancher has been a strong up-and-comer. I'd fully expected them to be snapped up by one of the hyperscalers. SUSE were smart to grab them before they became overpriced.

Disclosure: I work for VMware, which competes with Rancher in some areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another version of this story already top of front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769563)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this could mean a RancherOS revival. It's a really interesting distribution.

It could be SUSE's CoreOS, but that's probably wishful thinking...

<comment><USER3> I think SUSE's CoreOS might be close enough.

What do you think CoreOS did for Red Hat? Is there a writeup on that I could read?

<comment><USER8> Redhat more or less tossed their Atomic distribution in the bin and replaced it with Redhat CoreOS, which is all of the tech from CoreOS but built ontop of the redhat package repository. The upstream is Fedora CoreOS:

[https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable](https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable)</comment></comment></comment>