Systems software research is still irrelevant - <AUTHOR> https://trmm.net/Utah2014 <comment><USER2> Ugh, this old troll. Something that took me a while to figure out: when someone says that "nothing interesting is happening any longer in [discipline]", it is virtually always code for "I feel old." Yes, things change and different periods of innovation are (of course) different, but it is wrong to cast value judgement on one era over another. Speaking as an aging technologist, I can say that it can be hard to resist this -- and in particular, it's tempting to view one's late twenties and early thirties as a Golden Age, and everything later as derivative and uninteresting. If it needs to be said: for those who are making this claim, they are often projecting their own lives onto their discipline, and may be confusing their own personal Golden Age with a broader one that may or may not have existed.

My domain -- operating systems kernel development -- has been particularly vulnerable to this (in part because it has become increasingly specialized) and this is something that I have heard for my entire career. Of course, there has been tons of innovation in the kernel over those two decades (and I've been lucky enough to be close to a bunch of it) -- and no one now would seriously go back to the systems from two decades ago. (If anyone disagrees, they should kindly put their money where their mouth is and run only systems software from 1994.)

So yes, systems software is still relevant -- and so are a lot of things that might feel "done." And if you are an aging technologist like me (protected class, baby!) and you feel tempted to tell these youngsters that there is nothing new under the sun, please check yourself: yes, you should educate the rising generation about the problems that have been solved -- but never go so far as to say that there is no room left for new ideas. Aside from the fact that it's a demoralizing thing to say to a younger technologist, history will likely prove you wrong!

<comment><USER3> Love the work you've done Bryan, but your response above does nothing to engage the salient points made in the link && elsewhere. Yes, we have better ways of getting performance metrics than truss, circa Solaris 2.5…and thank you!

But that isn't what this is about.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, what salient points am I not engaging? The author of the linked piece is decrying what they perceive as a lack of "OS research and innovation" \-- and I'm saying that OS innovation remains alive and well, if perhaps more technical and less accessible than it once was. I can of course be more concrete and rattle these things off -- but I feel safe in leaving software systems advances since 2000 as an exercise to the reader...

<comment><USER3> In the link, you can see a chart, showing the hardware capabilities of a high- end workstations, sampled at roughly ten-year intervals. In twenty-five years, hardware capability has changed dramatically, while the kind of software used to get work done remains static (mostly).

Why is that? Would you make the chart differently?

The utah2K paper referred to in the link is admittedly (by the author) a polemic, so readers must understand that the writer may be shading things in a way more subjectively negative. Of course, that doesn't make it a trolling attempt, unless you can think of a particular chip the author wanted to knock off of a particular shoulder...

You acknowledge that OS innovation "may be more technical and less accessible than it once was". Why is that? In what manner? I don't think that you and Pike are using "OS research & innovation" to refer to all of the same things at the same time.

Here (from utah2K):

 _" New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture -- and some do -- the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer.

How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable?

There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding)."_

...I can't see why that isn't as true today as when it was written fourteen years ago. You can say that our Unix systems have improved, but that's a matter of degree, and not of type. We've also made great progress in breeding lean pigs that grow to marketable size in record time...but no matter how fine they are, they are still pigs, and aren't lobsters.

<comment><USER4> This is non-sequitur, mainstream hardware has only evolved as well so why would there need to be a "forget everything you know" revolution? Conversely, is hardware research dead?

The biggest change from 2000 is prevalence of NUMA, and this was even available back then in SGI and Sequent/IBM systems. I don't understand why systems software would have to substantially change until something like memristors drastically change systems architecture.

For a while there has been less emphasis on individual systems and more effort put into distributed systems.. first with Hadoop style clusters and we're now breaking into Mesos style clusters that provide OS-like semantics and services over a network of systems.

But there's a lot of good systems research going on today. Some of it is additive, some subtractive, but it's exists and is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot depends on how "systems software" is defined. Very few people have much use for a whole new kernel. Even little pieces of new kernel _code_ are less useful than before, as various functions (e.g. storage) can be handled just as well in user space. So if "systems" == "kernel" then relevance really has been declining. On the other hand, if one considers "system" to include user-space storage and networking, distributed consensus and service discovery, package and system management, JIT and GC in language runtimes, etc. etc. etc. then we're actually in a bit of a renaissance.

The fact is that kernel/user hasn't been a very interesting boundary for a long time. There are hundreds of systems-programming problems that can be solved on either side of that boundary, except that if you try to solve them in the kernel debugging will be harder and you'll get embroiled in the constant turf wars that are the hallmark of a declining specialty. The idea that only kernel hackers do systems programming needs to die.

<comment><USER6> Does this mean we probably need a new, more minimalistic concept for a modern kernel?

<comment><USER5> We've been moving that way for quite some time, despite Linus's historic dismissal of microkernel ideas. Granular capabilities, FUSE, namespaces, cgroups, containers etc. all take us in that direction. Over the next several years, I think even the kernel grognards will start to see that the "center of gravity" for systems software has shifted to better languages and tools than are available in their sandbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure to agree; there are quite a few interesting projects in both OS and system programming language fields. To name a few:

OS

Mirage OS[1] and unikernels in general (ErlangOnXen, HalVM)

OSv [2]

Chromium OS [3]

Programming languages

Julia [4]

Rust [5]

D-Lang [6]

Nimrod [7]

[1] [http://www.openmirage.org/](http://www.openmirage.org/)

[2] [http://osv.io/](http://osv.io/)

[3] [http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os)

[4] [http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/)

[5] [http://www.rust-lang.org/](http://www.rust-lang.org/)

[6] [http://dlang.org/](http://dlang.org/)

[7] [http://nimrod-lang.org/](http://nimrod-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> "There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts."

Java has many success stories in this area, starting with the amazing reusability of POJOs (plain old Java objects). I can take Java code from 1996 and _almost always_ compile it and use it now without major refactoring and without having to really look at the internals. I can do it with the API docs only. Beyond POJOs there are many abstraction techniques like beans that have been used to build huge software systems that have stood the test of time, albeit with a bit of clunkiness. But Unix pipes are a bit clunky too.

I coded a lot with Java years ago. It's been out of vogue for quite some time -- though it's still very popular just not trendy. Lately I've been reflecting on some of the pain points of other languages and thinking "wow, Java really did have a _lot_ of things right."

I've also been thinking that the JVM is _almost_ an OS, and that it sort of wants to be. There were some efforts in that direction, but none really went anywhere. It's not quite perfect, but I feel like it's the only thing we've had in the past 30 years that looks like a step toward a post-C/Unix operating system that could really work. I also feel like in the age of many-cores we could do away with problems like GC pauses completely. I could forsee a future many-core box where 2-4 (of 32-64) cores are just almost flat out dedicated to GC, JITing, tracing, optimization, etc. When you've got that many cores you could dedicate a few to the OS and not worry much about it. The benefits would be things like forgetting about manual memory management, etc.

Also note that the JVM can run more than Java. Java would just be the "core language" of this hypothetical OS, taking the place of C on Unix.

<comment><USER9> > I also feel like in the age of many-cores we could do away with problems > like GC pauses completely.

Unfortunately its not a resources problem, or else there wouldn't be an issue with GC pauses on fast hardware.

There is a solution for that though, and Cliff Click of Azul Systems is willing to sell you the only pause-less JVM GC there is for the low low price of 7500$ per server (see [http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/whatisit](http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/whatisit)).

<comment><USER8> My guess is he's using lock-free data structures + a lot of cleverness.

<comment><USER10> Somewhat more than that: [http://www.azulsystems.com/sites/default/files/images/c4_pap...](http://www.azulsystems.com/sites/default/files/images/c4_paper_acm.pdf)

Including a read barrier variation and batch VM remapping operations (change a bunch of large pages, only invalidating the TLB once at the end).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Xen largely came from the Systems group at Cambridge I think. Seems fairly relevant to the current state of computing to me. Not sure what is being worked on now that might be relevant in a decade and a half from now [edit to add: but there is probably something].

<comment><USER12> > _Not sure what is being worked on now that might be relevant in a decade and > a half from now._

Mirage OS is one of those things - [http://openmirage.org](http://openmirage.org) \- though I expect (hope) it'll take much less than decade to be relevant. Some of the same team that worked on early Xen are working on Mirage.

<comment><USER13> And there's OSv, [http://osv.io/](http://osv.io/), from the people behind KVM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hrm. I think there are some decent xounter arguments. I will agree that pure academic systems research is being superceded by industry development or academic commercialization. As a trend I think commoditization, parallelism, and management are where effort (and sucess) has gone, as opposed to novel research. Make it cheaper, wider, and possible to manage.

Influential counterpoints: distributed systems management/configuration/orchestration, distributed datastores (CAP, CALVIN, Dynamo, etc), system languages (Go, Rust), distributed processing (tilera, niagra, larrabe, gpus), network fabrics instead of trees, &stream processing jnstead of batch (kinesis, millwheel).

<comment><USER15> > , system languages (Go, Rust),

How is Go not another example of how "programming languages have stagnated"[0] ? You could argue that it is really practical and productive, but that is a separate point to whether it or not it is "more of the same".

Or maybe it is more of the same, just in the vein of languages that most people have forgotten about by now, so it is for all intents and purposes _new_. Certainly native compilation and some control over memory layout (I guess, with structs and such) and indirection have not been common features in recent memory (that is; those two points _and_ automatic memory management, _and_ overall simplicity compared to C/++).

[0] From the article:

> It included a chart lamenting the stagnation in [...] programming languages

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meanwhile, on the HN front page, we have:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651499): _Kill init by touching a bunch of files_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650952): _on Linux, 'less' can probably get you owned_

One can argue that the research needed to prevent those was done decades ago, but this article doesn't make that argument.

We may have hit upon a 'good enough' solution that is so hard to displace that it may never happen, but I think systems software research is very much relevant. Someone will have to polish a more robust/secure OS (may already exist in unpolished form, but possibly even must still be written) until it is shiny enough to replace the C-based (or equivalent) mess we have now.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think I _entirely_ agree - as notacoward says I think we're approaching a renaissance in certain areas.

\- Rust and Go are becoming extremely popular extremely quickly.

\- I think/hope we may soon see some sort of battle between OS container tech (Docker/LXC/cgroups, FreeBSD Jails) vs unikernels (Mirage, OSv, Linux unikernels) on paravirtualised platforms (Xen) as the full-weight-VM-running- Debian model ages.

edit: Oooh look, an exciting relevant systems software paper! [http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos- mirage.pdf](http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf)

<comment><USER13> > Rust and Go are becoming extremely popular extremely quickly.

Unfortunately, that's yet another SV bias. Rust has hardly any adoption, and Go has moderate adoption and is growing nicely, but nothing close to justifying "extremely".

<comment><USER18> To be fair, we in the rust community are telling people to wait for 1.0 unless they are okay with constantly updating their code as we clean up the language for our first release. It's fair though to speak about momentum. Comparing Go's contributor list ([https://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS](https://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS)) with ours ([https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/blob/master/AUTHORS.txt](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/blob/master/AUTHORS.txt)) has us with about 100 more than Go. I'm not saying our community is better than Go's or anything, but I'm certainly impressed a new language has been able to gain so much interest so quickly. When I first started contributing a couple years ago, we had like 15 people in our irc channel. Now we got over 500.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I didn't mean to criticize either of those languages, just to point out that SV developers are a tiny, tiny minority among the software community, and their early adopter style is not shared by the industry at large. Switching programming languages carries immense costs (probably in the billions of dollars across the industry), and companies make it only when the benefits are dramatic and incontrovertible. Most companies wouldn't even consider switching a programming language more than once in a decade, and some would only consider such a switch every 15 years or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He seems to think progress would look like "a new wave of built-from-the- ground-up operating systems sweeping away all the old ones every decade or so". Say, if Plan 9 had become dominant in the 90s, would we by now be replacing it with something else? What would everyone moving to new operating systems every 10 years gain us?

There has been mind boggling progress since the 90s, just not in the direction he expected.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think there is a revival of interest, as mass scale automation is changing the way we use servers, and security issues are finally changing the desktop/mobile. I found a lot of interest when I organized a conference [1] which is tomorrow (videos will be available), which si encouraging.

[1] [https://operatingsystems.io/](https://operatingsystems.io/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The interesting thing about the table shown in the article is that even while the author laments it, it actually illustrates a _good_ development: the table has an "hourglass" structure.

There is a stable part (fundamental technology such as the kernel, TCP/IP etc.) at the center which acts as an interface between the top part (hardware) and the bottom part (languages).

All innovation has to be anchored to some core set of stable interfaces into which the new innovations "plug in". The nature of OSs is such that they are naturally part of these core sets. That may be frustrating for OS researchers, but they'll have to learn to live with it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Overall, I agree with Pike in 2000 and this article today. Systems software research has become stagnant and significantly derivative. The point isn't that a new OS would come along and sweep everything away, the point is that _nobody seems to be developing new OSs at all_. Sort-of.

In 2000 or so, systems research had turned almost entirely into server performance measurement and tweaks. That trend seems to have changed, but things like Xen and VMware are not really new. IBM invented virtualization back in the middle ages; most of the more interesting things going on recently have involved using the idea. Likewise, moving stuff from Plan 9, etc., into Linux is cool (very, very cool), but it's not new, groundbreaking research.

That being said, there are a lot of nitpicks one can make with this article and with Pike's original talk.

The processor speed comparison in the table is not terribly valid, in my opinion. The more important number is front-side bus speed, which has not changed anywhere near as much. (Front-side bus speed dominates most of computing loads I see, and a great whopping chunk of the work in those areas where it doesn't dominate, video games and data-heavy computing, is in preventing the front-side bus from being the bottleneck.)

Pike was wrong about the language environment in 2000 and the table is wrong today. Heck, he might have been wrong about 1990. Programming language research in general and its specific applicability to systems (Hi, ATS!) has hotted up a lot since the '80s and '90s.

Pike's comment, "There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and _distributed applications_ from piece parts," bothers me a lot. A great deal of component research has been a dead-end in general (See that pile of crap with CORBA and SOAP laying on top?) Further, I believe Pike _never really understood distributed systems_. I have seen Pike complain that Nagel's algorithm has no place in TCP/IP (although I haven't been able to find the reference in years), but if you want a more recent example, see Go---everybody likes CSP, right? Everyone except someone who has tried to implement a synchronous rendezvous on a network.

Finally, Plan 9 didn't fail. But it also didn't have any chance to succeed, if by success you mean taking over the world. It was a great research project, but I'd believe making someone who didn't grow up at Bell Labs should be against the Geneva Convention. (Anyone know when Plan 9 started supporting color?) Plan 9 is my prima facie evidence that Not Invented Here syndrome was invented at Bell Labs.

<comment><USER2> There's a lot that's wrong in here, but one thing that absolutely needs to be called out:

 _...things like Xen and VMware are not really new. IBM invented virtualization back in the middle ages_

Actually and in fact, what VMware did _was_ new -- to the point that prior to this work, many reasonable people believed that x86 couldn't be virtualized without unacceptable performance penalty. Please read Keith and Ole's excellent ASPLOS paper[1] for an in-depth discussion of the novelty -- and the citation for this technology when it won the ACM Software Systems Award[2]. If you insist that VMware's binary translation work wasn't novel, please be specific about how these peer-reviewed bodies got it wrong.

[1] [https://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf](https://www.vmware.com/pdf/asplos235_adams.pdf)

[2] [http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/bugnion_3886645.cfm](http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/bugnion_3886645.cfm)

<comment><USER22> The ACM citation indicates that virtualization was first explored in the 1960s; Adams and Agesen's paper cites a 1974 paper:

" _Popek and Goldberg 's 1974 paper [19] establishes three essential characteristics for system software to be considered a VMM:[...] In 1974 a particular VMM implementation style, trap-and-emulate, was so prevalent as to be considered the only practical method for virtualization.... We review basic obstacles to [trap-and-emulate] of the x86 architecture and explain how binary translation (BT) overcomes the obstacles..._"

In other words, the contribution of that work was an implementation technique for virtualization. In fact, that particular paper exists to compare binary translation to trap-and-emulate hardware support that had recently been added to the x86 architecture. Their conclusion is that sometimes one is better, sometimes the other.

Look, I'm not saying binary translation wasn't new, or that it didn't change the face of computing as she is known---which is what the award was given for:

" _VMware Workstation 1.0 spurred a shift to virtual-machine-based architectures, allowing users to efficiently run multiple operating systems on their desktops [, and allow] large-scale data-center operators [to] increase the efficient and safe use of shared computational resources._ "

I'm not even arguing that it didn't open up cool new research areas; I'm going to go play with unikernals as soon as I get a chance. (Even though _that_ is a return to pre-timesharing systems.)

But we're still talking about using virtualization to run legacy operating systems on modern hardware. Just like VM/370.

        init cms</comment></comment></comment>


[ANN] Zeus IDE – Version 3.97u Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeusedit.com/ze397u.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The latest version of the Zeus IDE has been released

Details of this latest Zeus release can be found here:

[http://www.zeusedit.com/ze397u.html](http://www.zeusedit.com/ze397u.html)

 _NOTE:_ Zeus is shareware, runs natively on the Windows platform and runs on Linux using Wine.</comment>


SEC director calls for private markets to open up for retail investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/23556406-b462-44db-bb90-a595448e056e <comment><USER2> As they should. Not being an accredited investor is another way of saying your too stupid to know how to invest your money. But hey, I can yolo on penny stock.</comment>


Ask HN: Resource on Business Model for Web Startup - <AUTHOR>

Is there any solid and comprehensive book or article on business model for web startup?
I am particularly interested in how to generate revenue from a web service.
Info about ad revenue, case studies and interviews would be nice.
Cheers. :-) <comment><USER2> A few resources you might find useful on business/revenue models:

[http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/03/terrific- surve...](http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2009/03/terrific-survey-of- free-business-models-online.html)

<http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html>

[http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/01/three- free...](http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/01/three-freemium- strategies.html)</comment>


Big Brother is Watching: 007 Style - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2012/05/big-brother-is-watching-007-style/

<comment><USER2> They've been spying already.</comment>


Gmail Favicon Issues - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.com.au/gmail-favicon-issues

<comment><USER2> This happened to my work email tab, but not my personal email tab, so now I can finally tell them apart!

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same situation, and I hope this never gets a fix from Google, as like you I like being able to tell the difference when the tabs are too small to show the email address.

<comment><USER4> Or use an extension to change the favicon, such as [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-hate-your- favico...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-hate-your- favicon/laggbmpbikikiablknnppgglelkncemk?hl=en) (change favicon on url google.com/mail/u/0/ or /1/ etc..)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That is the favicon for the Google Apps Admin Console - [https://admin.google.com/](https://admin.google.com/) . I suspect the bug only happens for Google Apps accounts (it happens on my Google Apps, not on my personal Gmail).

<comment><USER6> I thought I read that it shows up for a google app account that is also the domain administrator. But I'm not sure if this is true or not. I wouldn't say this is a "fix" as much as it's a work around for showing that other favicon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's also a Gmail Labs feature to display unread message count in the favicon ("Unread message icon by Manu C"). That is both super-useful and fixes the favicon issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what the article says no?

<comment><USER7> Dammit, I completely read the article wrong. Labs wasn't capitalized, so I didn't grok it correctly. Well, it saves you clicking on the article if you just came straight to the comments...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This occurs when I'm an admin of the Google Apps account, anyone wanna test with a non-admin account?

<comment><USER9> I've been seeing it on my non-admin account at work for a few days now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I noticed this about a week back in our business account. If you view the page source, the favicon actually points to a favicon in a your company's folder (for Google Apps). I have a feeling they will allow us to customize the icon shortly from their admin panel.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are bigger problems in the world than this

<comment><USER12> That's clearly true. But if you are like me and tend to have dozens of tabs open, the favicon change makes scanning for Gmail a lot harder which is annoying. That it is also ugly is adding insult to injury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh the ugly spanner icon turned up on my works gmail a week or two back and its been bugging me to bits!

Why was it showing a spanner? It made no sense to me. A bug in gmail perhaps? But if it affects _so_ many people, why haven't google noticed it before then?

</comment><comment><USER14> i have been facing this issue for quite a while now. Don't really know why its an issue though

</comment><comment><USER15> I stopped using the "Unread Message Icon" a while back because it would often get "stuck". How does a screw-up like this go unfixed for so long anyway? It's been at least a week. It's only a favicon!

</comment><comment><USER16> Or you can just use this awesome userscript (screenhost are dead btw ..) [http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24430](http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24430)

<comment><USER17> Seems like a lot of extra work rather than just clicking a checkbox.

<comment><USER18> You just need to click a button to install it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just noticed that Gmail has reverted that cog icon and replaced it with good old envelope image. Power of an HN thread may be?

</comment><comment><USER19> The suggested "Unread Message Icon" is even uglier than the cog. Reverting back!</comment>


Leaked Transcript Contradicts Google's Official Story on China - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/10/09/google-china-censored-search-engine/ <comment><USER2> Wow, reading this article and some of the other linked Intercept articles, in my mind the culture at Google has finally hit a tipping point, having gone full-bore over to the "evil" side.

I know most folks on HN will think "Google has been this way for years", but I think the way The Intercept articles describe the erosion of the culture at Google is a perfect template for how virtually all large profit driven companies eventually turn "evil". It's the added secrecy that can be rationalized at first, the stretched gray areas (e.g. "we're just in an exploratory phase") that eventually cross over to full-fledged lies, but you're still able to convince yourself it's just a little "spin" for the greater good.

The really hard thing about "not being evil" is that in requires conscious, continuous effort to forgo profit (sometime huge profits) to adhere to that value. The lure of the Chinese market is simply too great, so people convince themselves it's possible to get at that potential market without compromising their values, and they do lots of mental gymnastics trying to get those opposing ideals into congruence.

I've seen this pattern many times before, honestly with much lower stakes than what Google is contending with, so I applaud Google for holding out as long as they did. This is one reason I hate talking about "company values": it's easy to adhere to those values when they're not in conflict with the company making money, but the second there is a quarter to hit or a metric at risk, those values always seem to go out the window (or at least get vastly watered down) in the pursuit of profit. I think it's pretty inevitable, and I wish companies would just admit to it.

<comment><USER3> do you remember a few years ago when CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) was all the rage? thank god it's disappeared for the most part. i made it a point to not pursue or do business with companies that put forward a CSR agenda. it's such hypocratic BS, to be dropped as soon as inconvenient. it's a sign that the company is itself a lie.

anyway, back on point, the turning point for google wasn't gradual, it was sharp. yes they danced around china before -- i'd say this was required of them, you can't properly say no if you don't assess -- but they stood up to their values. it's ok that there were other factors.

no, the turning point was when they hired ruth porat. ask any insider. that's when it became all about the benjamins.

<comment><USER4> How can you say they became ruthless at the exact moment they hired Ruth? Aren't they now ruthful?

<comment><USER5> Booooo!

 _Throws tomato_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious why HN users don't seem to have a problem with Apple censoring the App Store on demand, blocking VPNs and other crypto tools which have real life consequences for some in China. Seems like they get a pass for operating in China (and earning huge yearly revenues from it, which would obviously be threatened if they didn't comply) Is this just a grandfathering in? If Google had never left China and merely obeyed censorship requests in 2010, would people be less upset because they've been acclimatized to it?

I don't support Dragonfly, and I do fear the allure of the Chinese market is influencing people to put aside ethical quandaries for revenue growth, but it seems to me that standards are different for different companies.

<comment><USER7> The censorship aspect is a red herring. Google is giving the government the infrastructure to identify candidates for "re-education" via their Google searches. Is Apple funneling dissidents to the government via their app store?

<comment><USER6> The answer is, we don't know, Apple is a much more secretive company with far fewer leaks. But Apple does tens of billions in revenue a year in China, and it's entire edifice is built on Chinese manufacturing, and so there is the potential for tremendous leverage by Chinese authorities. If China asked Apple to provide a list of accounts which downloaded VPNs in Xinjiang, are you 100% confident they wouldn't if threatened with sanctions? Perhaps it's even via a plausibly deniable mechanism, like buying keyword targeting on the Chinese app store, and phishing people to fraudulent apps in a 'sting', while you look at other way.

There's enough money involved that anyone should seriously question how strong an executive's ethics can be if they've got a $1 trillion market cap to defend. I'm not saying any company is superior to the other, I'm saying the allure of tens of billions of dollars is a powerful motivator for weakening of ethics, and I wouldn't even trust Edward Snowden's ethics if tens of billions was on the line.

<comment><USER7> I get that you are trying to sow doubt, but consider:

>The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location — and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data.

[https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses- memo-r...](https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo- revealing-plans-to-closely-track-search-users-in-china/)

When you discover a memo like that for Apple, feel free to share it with us.

<comment><USER8> Apple's ethical lapses have all been on the supply-side.

Rare-earth mining, contributing to serious environmental problems in China:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.html?pagewanted=all)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the- mines-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-where- iphones-are-born/)

(Apple stopped mining rare-earth minerals in China in 2017, 7 years after the NYTimes story broke.)

Child labor, with teenagers working 11-hour days to assemble your iPhone X:

[https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen- labo...](https://nypost.com/2017/11/21/apple-has-been-using-teen-labor-to- assemble-the-iphone-x/)

Child-labor in the mining of rare-earths:

[http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child- labor/](http://fortune.com/2017/03/03/apple-cobalt-child-labor/)

<comment><USER9> These are not _Apple's_ ethical lapses - they are the failure of an entire industry. An industry, it's worth noting, that Apple has been extremely transparent about, and has worked to fix. Also worth noting that Apple's suppliers have improved dramatically in recent years - something that can't be said about most other manufacturers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honest question:

Google working on project Dragonfly, a service that-according to the article: 'would blacklist phrases like "human rights," "student protest," and "Nobel Prize."'

People are (rightly) bothered by this.

Facebook and Twitter tell Alex Jones to pound sand.

People argue "Private corporations don't have to give anyone a platform".

I'm not here to promote the idea that the members of the first group are automatically members of the second, some overlap could probably be found...probably.

Why does the first get so much coverage and ultimately ending up in The Intercept with an inferred tone of apoplectic disappointment-and in some cases-anger towards Google, but coverage of the latter seems to be glee, jubilation and almost schadenfreude?

Note that I'm not making any sort of value judgments about Alex Jones' politics or statements, suggesting that I agree with his views, or that even that he may be right about gay frogs (this really shouldn't have to be said, it should be painfully obvious but I'm covering my ass out of trained habit: unless one explicitly says "I am not supporting this person", _someone_ will come out of the woodwork and make the association because it's easier to debate). I'm pointing to actions of corporations and our responses to them: between the two things here, I'm hard pressed to find a difference beyond a matter of _scale_ between what Google is doing and what Facebook and Twitter have already done.

<comment><USER11> The difference is intolerance. I don't think the problem with Alex Jone's is the subject matter or beliefs but the advocation of violence and spread of intolerance, hate, and misinformation. Freedom of speech is not without reasonable restriction. You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater without punishment.

Silencing Jones on these platforms in my opinion amounts to good housekeeping allowing others to actually express their opinions without manipulation. Part of an intellectually open and honest society is banishing those who seek to manipulate it.

<comment><USER12> You're conflating two entirely different things. Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't an issue of speech, that's an act of violence. You're attempting harm upon people. Once you step into the realm of acts of initiating violence, you've crossed out of matters of free speech, they're two different things and must be addressed differently.

If I take out a bullhorn and blast it into someone's ear, harming their eardrum, that's also not a matter of speech, it's an act of violence against that person.

Holding someone down and painting a swastika on their chest is also not a matter of speech, that too is an act of violence, for the exact same conceptual reason as the bullhorn and yelling fire are.

Disgusting speech should be protected. The absolute worst thing you can do, is try to bury that type of speech under laws. The US culture defeated the KKK - which was once large and influential at its peak - precisely because the realm of debate and ideas was firmly held open. Their speech and ideology was not outlawed, their ideas overwhelmingly lost in the public cultural debate. Extremely liberal free speech protections are why the KKK couldn't win then, and haven't managed to resuscitate themselves in the last 30 or 40 years.

<comment><USER11> There's a difference between disgusting speech and hate speech. I like that you use the KKK as an example. In your world view, do you tolerance a bunch of people marching through the streets screaming: "Kill 'em all"?

It's obviously a gray area but you should read up on the paradox of tolerance. The only logical solution for a tolerant society is to be intolerant of tolerance.

<comment><USER13> I am all for that, as long as it's the other intolerants that are not tolerating, right?

I've since come to the conclusion that it's mostly pointless to talk about "tolerance" and that it's the individual acts of intolerance that should be addressed on a case by case basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Power Corrupts. Control is Power.

They were at one point neutral and uncompromising in their principles even if it excludes them from a market, fighting for freedom of speech and being against censorship, trying to provide the best information whatever it concludes.

They now impose their biases, believe the power consumer doesn't know best and thus change the interfaces of their products removing advanced options or open standards, have biases in their search results, and are trying to make the world conform to their ideals where possible, or compromise principles and submit to illiberal societies if it means market access.

<comment><USER3> > believe the power consumer doesn't know best

to be fair, often they don't

<comment><USER15> but then neither does google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Better to be the ones censoring over a billion internet users than to miss out on that sweet sweet profit

lol if any of these employees think they will be protected from the repercussions of doing this. I would never hire or want to work with someone with such cheap morals

<comment><USER17> Realistically, profit seeking corporations would hire them. Insufficiently profit seeking corporations will be out-competed by ones that aren't.

They're also not becoming social pariahs outside of, perhaps, the vocal liberal segment of silicon valley.

I bet they'll be fine.

<comment><USER16> There are a much wider group of political views beyond "liberal" where profit- seeking censorship is a bad thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On a technical basis I'm surprised this project was / needed to be undertaken at all. What am I missing?

The reason for my confusion is that the search engine already implements various "knock out" rules, for example:

\- it inherently makes a choice as to how to respond to a query based on what it knows about the user ("Tyler" is more likely to refer to "Cowan" for me while "Swift" for the little girl next door).

\- Though Google has resisted to some degree, it has whole swaths of results which are not permitted in various jurisdictions (various definitions of "hate speech") for example

\- New "right to be forgotten" restrictions and copyright attacks

\- "Fake news" attacks and complaints -- spam

Given that there have already been implementations (of varying levels of compliance -- I believe many of the censorship demands are intractable) really how would Dragonfly be different? Couldn't a censorship request from CCP use the same API the RIAA does?

</comment><comment><USER19> > We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this.

This is how you can hurt recruitment efforts indirectly. If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement, even if it has no material impact to the actual employment market as a whole, some people will hesitate before working there in the first place. People should work on parts of the company they can brag about shamelessly or any efforts as a tech community to blackball developers of perceived immoral features will expand to developers of entire companies.

Similarly, employees of these companies will now have to realize they are judged by the company they keep so to speak. I will say Google employees, compared to other companies, seem to have taken this judgement seriously. Don't think "I didn't work in that area" will save you if "that area" comes to fruition. There is not much pity for employees with other outs/options.

<comment><USER20> > If I, as an employer, avoid Xooglers to make a statement

You mean the bank statement you have to show your top dollar lawyer to keep him on retainer for the discrimination lawsuits?

<comment><USER16> Since when is having previously worked at google a protected class?

<comment><USER21> If I'm a startup and I am looking at two equally situated candidates, and one has Google experience and one does not, then I'm going to hire the one without Google experience every time based on culture fit alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can confirm that something is definitely going on for sure.

Since 2008, google in China were: coding mules, tech support for ad doubleclick, sales for minor 3rd tier products. That was stable for 10 years, but suddenly, since around a year ago, they began to talking about whole new campuses, and rumors began circulating that country's top tier talent is being poached through shell companies by an obscure "internet search startup"

</comment><comment><USER23> During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treasonous. How times have changed, the almighty dollar sign reigns supreme.

(edit: slight change in wording)

<comment><USER24> >During the cold war, cozying up to the Russians the way Google is now sucking up to the Chinese would have been rated as treason.

I am a huge critic of China's human rights record, but "treason" has a very specific legal definition. Doing trade with a country is not "treason".

<comment><USER23> What would be a better term in your opinion?

<comment><USER25> Doing business?

How many US companies do business in China, and have at least some access/collection of Chinese users' data? Are they all traitors?

<comment><USER23> I was asking the question in the context of my comparison with the cold war era. Doing business with Russia then wouldn't have been called just "doing business" either, especially if it happened in support of practices diametrically opposed to our own professed values like Democracy and Freedom.

How much of a sellout or a cynic do you have to be to call betraying those values for money merely "doing business"?

(edit: added last sentence)

<comment><USER26> Even during the cold war, Americans did business with Russia. No large computers or munitions, but Americans still ate Russian caviar. There was this call to boycott it at the same time as the Moscow olympics, but I don't think anyone called it "treason". [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/31/boycott- caviar/a1768462-9f6a-4f3e-a334-188e7ecd82b8/)

<comment><USER27> Nobody was actively participating in oppressing the russian population during the cold war. This attempt to dance around the issue is transparent.

<comment><USER25> The post you replied to is a direct answer to claims about trade between the US and Russia during the cold war.

<comment><USER27> The post I replied to is making false equivalence comparisons. There's nothing subtle about the issue being circumvented.

<comment><USER25> The equivalence comparison wasn't made by the post you replied to, but by it's parent.

<comment><USER27> > Even during the cold war, Americans did business with Russia

ie A false equivalence.

Me selling flags to Russians is doing business. That has nothing to do with the issue of what constitutes or can be construed as Treason _which is certain kinds of business that ally against national interests_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's a summary of the current meaning of "Don't be evil":

re. the USA: No, we can't possibly bid on the US Department of Defense cloud computing contract. because the contract may not align with the company's principles.

re. China: Yes, we want to build a censored search engine for Chine because there are a billion potential users there.

To me the hypocrisy is astounding. What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. I guess they're real good at compartmentalizing.

<comment><USER29> > What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive > dissonance.

There are so many Google employees that I won't expect them to all agree on these things. There are probably enough number of Chinese employees who would want to make such a product

<comment><USER30> > There are so many Google employees that I won't expect them to all agree on > these things.

At some level there are shot callers at Google that simultaneously reject the DOD for "values" and green light Dragonfly. I'm left to wonder how many euphemisms they'll need to employ to obscure their inherently unavoidable facilitation of China's Social Credit System. Good news for Google is they'll be ahead of the curve when the stars eventually align and the establishment gets its opportunity to deal with wrongthinkers in the the US.

<comment><USER31> God help us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this is a turning point for Google's dominance in search. While they focus on reducing search quality in order to access more users, somebody out there will focus on improving search quality.

<comment><USER33> DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas at least. You also have SymbolHound which made it a point to support searching for nonalphanumeric characters.

<comment> ur-whale >DuckDuckGo is already better than Google in some areas

Mmmh. I do use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, but I'm sorry to say: I unfortunately have to fall back to Google quite often to find what I'm looking for.

I'd be curious to know where they are better than Google.

<comment><USER34> Anything non-localised has been pretty good on DDG recently, much better than a few years ago. I tend to only pull up google for searches like 'XXXXX Opening Hours' and maps related queries nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> looks like the main contradictions are in terms of the scope of the google project (300 employees, full time), the amount the project has been developed already (a very substantial amount), and the awareness of political issues as demonstrated by the leading google employees on the project (more than enough to know they're doing the wrong thing).

it also appears as though they are fully conscious of the prospect of social censure:

>We are working with you to make sure your careers are not affected by this.

so, they know they're clandestinely doing immoral things. but google corporate is determined to protect the minions from the consequences of being identified as an aid to totalitarianism.

given that we don't have a list of the google employees working on dragonfly, i think he's just succeeded in tainting the reputation of 100% of googlers and former googlers.

any one of them could have been working to keep the chinese oppressed via censorship by knowingly joining a new project designed explicitly to do so.

<comment><USER36> I agree holeheartedly that Google management should be taking major flak for this and turn back from this plan, but I won't paint the engineers working on this as evil.

I know the people working as full time engineers aren't living on Ramen noodles and sleeping in boxes, but it's real hard to fight something when your and your family's livelyhood depend on not fighting it.

We should champion those willing to take the extraordinary step of walking away, leaking or pushing back on this; while recognizing such actions _are_ extraordinary, and should not be expected of everyone.

It would be nice to live in a world where anyone can stand up and fight in this manor, but I just imagine an engineer who really, really can't lose his health insurance and the inner turmoil they go through.

<comment><USER16> This is pretty funny. If you have a job as a SWE at google, you have the opportunity to start working at probably 80+% of _good_ software companies that are currently hiring. It is pretty cowardly to do something you know is bad just because you'll go from $300k/year at Google to $200k/year somewhere else

<comment><USER37> Other view on this: if you have a job as a SWE at Google, you might have had to relocate to a different country where you are not super well integrated (for example, only basic knowledge of the official language). Leaving your job might make you lose your visa, having to relocate and lose a large part of your social circle. Make that even more fun if you have a partner or kids or whatever.

Of course it's usually going to be somewhere in the middle. But not everyone lives in the Bay Area where you can hop between jobs and change employer every week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale The Google execs who had big enough balls to walk away from the mountain of cash that the Chinese market represents are all long gone or retired.

Larry and Sergei in particular are nowhere to be seen in these discussions.

The people left in charge are nowhere near having the kind of backbone and ethics-driven decision making style the top management team had 8-10 years ago.

What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil faceless corporation.

<comment><USER38> > What Google has become in the last 10 years just another boring evil > faceless corporation.

Has there ever been a company that made it big, big enough to be in the Apple/Microsoft/IBM/Google class, that didn't become evil? To me, it seems inevitable once a corporation reaches a certain level of success in the market.

<comment><USER39> Is Apple terribly evil? IMHO they have always had a strong focus on privacy, even in China, and haven't exactly resorted to 'evil' tactics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does Google seriously believe the Chinese government will let them threaten Chinese companies? Are they just planning to use it as a window into a more technologically-integrated society to gain an advantage in the West?

<comment><USER41> I'm not very educated on this aspect, but could the US gov potentially be pushing Google to get more involved in China for this reason? More data on their lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If we're worried about one country using a tech corporation's hardware to spy on another, there is in some sense where we're denying the potentially neutral or amoral nature of what it means to be a multinational corporation that needs to consider the costs of operation in many different business environments. We might be unwarranted in our complaints in this regard.

At the other extreme, there is the possibility of legitimizing the company that operates in international markets to be aligned with a particular nation's values, and that this alignment is baked into the core of its business operations.

This option will probably leave a bad taste in the mouths of some hackers here who resent a consolidation of government power over companies, given that this smells a lot like some other rulerships in history that we frown upon.

But I'm unsure if there is a middle ground here. That's my fault if I'm missing it. Can we really hold a global company accountable to our ethical standards, which would not allow them to engage in the moral relativism necessary to access all markets?

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how people would react to the following situation:

There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are currently blocked by China. If the Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites apply a government filter to the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions:

1\. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be difficult since they could just use a different IP address.

2\. Do nothing. A censored Google is available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites.

3\. Work with the mirror sites (for example, require them to display Google ads along with search results).

</comment><comment><USER44> _When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was "not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that project."_

I'm not sure what is more intellectually offensive: that an executive would say this, or say it and actually believe it would fly. A senior manager? Okay, sure. You might not know what project outside of your division is working on. An executive really shouldn't be this oblivious to their organization working with a foreign government.

<comment><USER39> The intent _is_ to be intellectually offensive. He said it and knew it wouldn't fly. The attitude is "this is none of your business, deny deny deny, what are you gonna do about it?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't like the secrecy, but I don't mind Google being in China. Just like with Apple, Chinese people would be better off with censored Google than without it at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is insane - for all the folks out there saying that Apple and Amazon's recent statements have been vague, here's your first lesson in Dodging 101:

> When pressed to give specific details, Enright refused, saying that he was > "not clear on the contours of what is in scope or out of scope for that > project."

Bravo - you've managed to make the parodies of Valley-speak look tame!

</comment><comment><USER46> who believes that some version of Dragonfly hasn't been deployed in the US?

<comment><USER47> What search terms do you think are being censored?

<comment><USER48> any word that starts with a minus sign, for one!

<comment><USER49> 'fsck "-v"' and "fsck -v" return significantly different results for me.

<comment><USER48> We should probably tell the EFF that there's a great way to circumvent Google's censorship!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> >Gomes referenced the sheer size of the Chinese market, saying "we are talking about the next billion users" for Google.

In one word: "profitsssss"

<comment><USER51> I am not defending Google. But, come on, what are they supposed to do? America is all about shareholder value and quarter after quarter after quarter gains. We created this beast. We share in some of the blame.

<comment><USER52> They're supposed to do the right thing even when it costs them, just like the rest of us. They don't get excused just because they're incentivized to do the wrong thing. Most of us manage to keep our morals even when it would be to our advantage not to.

<comment><USER53> Also worth remembering that complaining about this is a very important action. The market is amoral by definition, and values morality only as much as participants demand it to.

<comment><USER52> Yes indeed! The answer to "What are they supposed to do?" could be "Realize it will cost them too much due to the backlash."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> [deleted]

<comment><USER16> I think this is a pretty good argument in favor of any large enough corporation having its mission become corrupted over time. It is impossible to maintain a certain employee culture over decades of employee turnover and growth, doubly so if you have public shareholders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Google employees' outrage is derailing profits and opportunities at this point.

If the protesting employees think they're winning, they're patently wrong. One hiccup in the market, one quarter of slow growth is all it takes for Google to remove obstacles to it's goal.

As for shareholders & wall street, if Google continues to display impotence at capturing obvious opportunities, money will move elsewhere, & said slow growth of stock will happen

<comment><USER56> Well it's good to see. The transition from the "endless growth" and scale story to a sustainablity story is going to cause major tension given much more than just the financial stakes involved.

There is no point talking about controlling the world's temperature if every exec in a corporation is programmed by the stock market to robotically keep things mindlessly scaling.

But from experience I also know the exec class when under attack are well trained to just get defensive/batton down the hatches and do nothing. They will change their minds only when everyone is on the same page solution wise.

So rather than just be satisfied with the Us Vs them narratives, focus has to shift to solutions. The Chinese have to be pushed to have these discussions in the open about what they want and why it's good.

<comment><USER55> The Chinese aren't the ones pleading for a Google search solution. They won't talk about squat.

Google will, however, need to talk to curious investors on missing billion dollar opportunities while Bing goes about serving search without a fuss in China

<comment><USER56> You need to use some imagination here.

They are clearly giving Google a list or a process to follow. Make them own it. Publish the rules and regulations and let the world and Chinese people see it. Let people also see what Microsoft or whoever else is happy to accept.

They aren't pulling these censored words and processes out of their ass. They have methods to decide what causes "social instability" or whatever. Just as pressure is mounting on Facebook Twitter and YouTube framing similar rules in an ivory tower, the pressure has mount on the Chinese too. Their own people will increasingly have things to say about it.

Everyone benefits if the process is pushed to be transparent esp now since the unintended consequences of big tech on society are becoming more and more clearer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cinematography of "The Incredibles" Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://floobynooby.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-cinematography-of-incredibles-part-2.html <comment><USER2> Is there any proof that the «Rule of Third's»* especially it's power/focal points is more than just a self-referential myth?

As I understands it prevents beginners from falling for the symmetric layout / static center composition trap, but other than that I think it's just not any good indicator for a good picture.

* also applies to golden ratio and fibonacci spirals see:

[http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm](http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3118007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3118007)

<comment><USER3> What are you on about? No one made any such claims, neither here nor in the linked article.

The rule of thirds is just a certain way of composition and some people like its aesthetics.

<comment><USER4> In contrast to that is like Fantastic Mr. Fox. Wes Anderson composes a lot of shots with the focus dead center.

Unconventional, but interesting.

<comment><USER5> As someone who's seen a lot of animated features, Fantastic Mr. Fox was _fascinating_. It made me realize just how much dogma I'd picked up about what animated features are "supposed" to be, pretty much entirely inherited from the choices Disney made in the 50s, which have been relentlessly copied by pretty much every animated feature ever since. FMF was from a very different place, and I found it incredibly strong because of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, the best part of this article is how concrete it makes "this is challenging". I knew intellectually that making a film couldn't be easy, but seeing just this small bit of it broken down really drives the point home and makes it real.

That looks _really hard to do_.

<comment><USER7> Not detracting from the feeling that it looks really hard to do, but I think some people are just wired to think about this kind of stuff naturally — for them, it's more of a sense of how things should be framed than a second-by- second analytical breakdown.

<comment><USER8> Having studied drawing and painting in the last few years, composition is one of these things that I just didn't get. Then it suddenly clicked, mostly by switching to photography to experiment quickly with framing (crop it in photoshop), interesting leading lines and such.

It now feels totally natural, but the road to it was totally obscure for me until I just started taking tons of pictures. Interestingly, I now usually focus on composition / shape / focal points "consciously", planning it out, doing designs, while the more "technical" side of painting (mixing colors, brushstrokes, dark/light) is totally muscle memory.

I have made a lot of music, until it felt "part of myself", then tried out painting/drawing, which is now an integral part of my life and way of seeing the world. But my primary background and ultimately my "self-identity" is software. It is funny how art is pretty much the opposite in terms of process: I will consciously and "technically" work on the part that will affect the viewer/listener the most (composition, buildups/breakdowns in music, tension/relaxation, color/shape/form), and once a good "solution" is found the technical part of it kind of solves itself.

In software, I prefer working on system level things, threading designs, database / scaling, embedded systems. The architectural part of the system is very intuitive, I usually have an idea pop up in my head or while showering. They are often wrong, but I take care of that by doing a lot of miniature systems in their own branches and discard them when not good. However, the technical side of implementing that idea of a design is extremely demanding, and needs iterations and thinking and just plain focused work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Almost as wonderful as the level of appreciation for detail from the team that made the film is the level of work and detail that went into these two posts. I love the amount of evidence and the discussion of core concepts for cinematography -- this is the kind of stuff that I would wish to see if I were being taught in school.

</comment><comment><USER10> Discussion for part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920151)

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice attention to details! interesting post

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting note: Wes Anderson seems to get away with pretty much every established rule in the book of cinematography, and yet his films are generally beautiful to watch. Discuss.

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr: pixar combines good cinematography with good animations (and writing and characters and voice talent and storyline), really exploiting the freedom from constraints they have as animators.

<comment><USER14> the devil really is in the details, though, and it's worth seeing what these details are!</comment></comment>


Big Omaha Video Series: Dennis Crowley of foursquare - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2010/10/big-omaha-video-series-dennis-crowley-of-foursquare

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of my favorite videos from Big Omaha 2010. Hearing everything that lead up to Foursquare is amazing. Who quits Google btw??

<comment><USER2> Not my favorite personally, but its being compared to Scott Harrison of Charity Water, Gary V, and Tony Hseih of Zappos, so that's not really a negative.

Still a great video.</comment></comment>


Egison: A Lisp Written in Haskell with Advanced Pattern Matching - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/egison/egison <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but the mass of `cons` in the pattern matching really turns me off. Would it be possible to introduce some syntactic sugar on this?

For example, in Haskell (as you know, but readers may not), `1:2:3:4:5:[]` can be written as `[1,2,3,4,5]` which is much prettier than a lot of cons cells (even if we use the infix (:) for cons).

<comment><USER3> The moment you add syntactic sugar to it, you lose the power of sexpressions. You no longer have lists that are easily manipulateable, or can easily be generated via macros or easily worked with a code walker. That's why the L in lisp really means List. Shift away from Lists and you can't even call it lisp at all.

<comment><USER4> Well, I'd rather lose the "power of sexpressions" if I'm to get a nicer syntax.

It's not like people have been building more programs in Lisp than in languages without sexpressions.

<comment><USER5> Lisp was originally planned to have more syntactic sugar (see M-expressions and MLISP,) but as far as I'm aware it never took off.

"The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised." \- John McCarthy, History of Lisp

If you're going to market something as an X then it may not be a good call to remove something that many of the people who use X seem to regard as a desirable attribute of it.

<comment><USER4> On the other, couldn't a LISP have a dual syntax?

So, you could use the "sugared" syntax, and revert to the isomorphic (that's the world?) sexpression syntax when you want to do s-expressy stuff like macros etc.

Of course you'd have to keep in your head the mapping between the sugary and sexpressions version, but it's not that difficult, and you'd only need to do that if you wanted to use sexpressions, not all the time when you don't really need them.

<comment><USER5> It's possible that you could create another syntax. But there are some challenges to deal with:

1) The presence of macros. I can extend the language with new syntax however I please. If you just write a parser, the minute I do so, it's going to be very difficult for that parser to determine the order of operations. It has to have some general solution to the problem of precedence.

2) It... I suspect... has to be homoiconic. That is the underlying datastructure that the code corresponds to has to be immediately visible to the human coding. When you write programs that manipulate programs, the lack of this ability cripples you.

If new programmers learn ... what I suppose you _might_ call a cleaner syntax ... and then have to switch into sexpressions to see what's going on, I don't much rate their chances of learning Macros - they'd essentially be learning a new language when they got to the point where they'd want to do that.

3) It has to be mappable - and preferably in a reverse compatible way - to, if not all, the vast majority of existing Lisp code, (otherwise people who are already comfortable with Lisp code won't have much incentive to use it.)

#

I'm not going to say that's not possible. What I will say is that a fair number of people, who I don't think are idiots, have tried to update Lisp syntax in the past. Among others attempts RLisp, Dylan, and IACL2. I'm not aware of any project that's managed to maintain the ability of Lisp to clearly manipulate programs as data and to swap back and forth between interpreted and non-interpreted code.

But it's possible they just couldn't see the problem as clearly as we could because they couldn't see that the approaches they tried were going to fail. If you can think of a syntax that solves things, I'd read up on past attempts to see if someone's tried it before and then give it a go. Writing your own reader can be a bit of a pain, but it's probably more doable in Lisp than any other language I can think of. :)

Edit: You might find this worth a read - site that goes into considerably more depth on this: [http://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Problem/](http://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Problem/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> wes-exp I'm baffled why the creators of Egison seem to think pattern matching is so significant for a Lisp. Common Lisp has a variety of pattern matching libraries. Clojure has a pattern matcher as well. Is there something radically better about Egison that I am missing?

<comment><USER6> I'm curious too. From the website[0] it looks like Egison was designed to do pattern matching. The whole language is built around it. This way Egison can do more complicated kinds of pattern matching such as matching patterns against graphs or other complicated data structures. I don't see why any of these features could not be added to an existing Lisp. OTOH, it might not be about adding more features, it might be about doing it efficiently. If that is the case creating a new language is almost a requirement.

[0] [http://www.egison.org/faq.html](http://www.egison.org/faq.html)

<comment><USER7> You could probably extend Racket's pattern matching to do the same stuff. It can already match against structurs you define yourself, but I don't think it can do things like "match anything with this pattern in this recursive data structure" unless "recursive data structure" is a list, and even then I don't think it will do any kind of complete search of the list other than the top- level elements (not sure though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For Clojure there is core.match [1].

[1] [https://github.com/clojure/core.match](https://github.com/clojure/core.match)

</comment><comment><USER9> Or there is Racket's wonderful pattern matching library: [http://docs.racket- lang.org/reference/match.html](http://docs.racket- lang.org/reference/match.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> From their homepage:

> We aim intuitive representation of algorithms and formalization of human > recognitions. We believe this is the shortest way to the artificial > intelligence.

I find it interesting that improved programming languages, especially Lisps, are suggested as the shortest way to AI. This approach has already given well- known failures both in Japan (5th generation computer project) and overseas (Lisp machines).

A few years ago I happened to take a class in AI in Japan which was entirely taught in Common Lisp. One of the projects was an environment where boxes have some properties and relationships with other boxes, for example you could query "what is above blue box?" and get back "green box". The professor teaching the course published only AI papers in Japanese journals, never in English. Most were about games like Shogi (Japanese chess).

It feels strange, like part of the Japanese research community is still trying to apply the 70's approach to AI.

<comment><USER11> That's not a Japanese speciality. The recent _semantic web_ is not that different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While Egison has some powerful matching I fear it risks becoming a 'read only' language which is really hard to maintain. I would have to disagree with the authors that Elegance == Simplicity as they state in the presentation (Prolog comes to mind...). I wouldn't mind some extra lines of code that are easier to maintain unless there are clear performance benefits.

When used as a query language I would like to understand how Egison compares to past efforts such as Datalog or F-Logic which attempted to bring formal semantics and unification to queries. These were even more expressive than some of the Egison examples.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's awesome! Is pattern matching commonly used in Haskell? It's something I am implementing "by hand" for a project in Python, so I am really tempted to give a shot to Egison - my project requires to do lots of things similar to the example with the poker hand, and I find it painful.

On the other hand the language is quite new and I have lots of code in python already for that project...

<comment><USER14> As far as I'm aware pattern matching is commonly used in most functional languages (including haskell). Here is the page on pattern matching in haskell from the haskell wikibook: [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Pattern_matching](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Pattern_matching)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the pattern matcher pg wrote in 18.4 of _On Lisp_ [0].

[0] [http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf](http://ep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> The syntax looks less than advanced.

Lisp has a lot pattern matching libraries and extension languages which are much more compact.</comment>


Nobody Wants Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattprd/nobody-wants-bitcoin-ae86f9677dd#.bsbfrmib0 <comment><AUTHOR> "Not everyone wants bitcoin yet, but that's ok. Not everybody wanted the internet in the beginning either."

Basically, the author argues that bitcoin is a low-demand currency.

</comment><comment><USER2> > If my sister wants to buy her new phone with bitcoin she should be able to > do so.

She doesn't, so give her real money.</comment>


My sister absolutely refuses to learn math - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/416226/my-sister-absolutely-refuses-to-learn-math/ <comment><USER2> partly because she has no reason to find the diameter circumference or area of a circle except to answer the test questions?</comment>


Wearable tech can spot coronavirus symptoms before you even realize you're sick - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/28/wearable-coronavirus-detect/ <comment><USER2> [http://archive.today/YEUpS](http://archive.today/YEUpS)</comment>


The Internet is running in debug mode - <AUTHOR> http://java-is-the-new-c.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-protocols-are-messy-concept.html

<comment><USER2> Yeah, the author calls to re-invent ASN.1, BSON and MessagePack. Something one could expect from a guy that mainly knows Java: lack of experience and knowledge about what is already there. Also lack of understanding why the heck all the protocols are text-based.

<comment><USER3> You did not get the point. Ofc there are many binary protocols available. However in the RFC's and standards one chooses to couple behaviour and textual protocol. BTW, do you really think a 20+ year software engineer has not heard of BSON, MSGPACK, SBE, .. ? Always consider you might be the person with lack of experience and understanding before allegating this to other people :P .

My point is coupling of encoding and behavior, not the absence of suitable encodings

<comment><USER2> Judging from the article alone? I really think so. The article being published under Java umbrella, which is not exactly known for gathering good engineers, does not help here either.

<comment><USER3> It still looks to me as if you did not understand the issue being addressed. Its not about absence of binary encodings. Regarding "Java umbrella, which is not exactly known for gathering good engineers", I won't comment on this quality of statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to point out that REST is not something built on top of the Web, it's actually the architectural style on which the Web is based (even though this style has been defined years after the Web was invented). You can have a resource model for your domain and build your own custom RESTful protocol on top of raw TCP/UDP and pick a binary encoding for data transfer.

<comment><USER3> True, however its commonly used as a synonym for webservices. I should be more precise here ..</comment></comment>


History of Apache Storm and lessons learned - <AUTHOR> http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8416455)</comment>


Ask HN: If startups are good gamble, why isn't seed capital easily available? - <AUTHOR> Background:

  * Seed is a gamble, but the return on one unicorn makes the losses on others vanish
  * People with money are always looking for bets to invest on, same with companies with extra cash
  * As a failed entrepreneur and software engineer it is easy for me to get a good job
 Problem:

  * I can not sell just an idea well enough, I am not a good salesman
  * Moonlighting is hard
  * I can not finish an MVP along with day job
  * Without a seed, I am really finding it hard to work full time on my idea
 Companies are happy to hire me (usually with 6 months probation) and see if they get ROI on their money (my salary). It would be a lot more motivating for myself if I could work on something I want to solve. Sure just software does not sell itself, but we all have to start somewhere.
So if I am worth someone else's money to try on their company and perhaps be not worth it, then it should be easier for me to just apply and get a 6 months paycheck to work on something I am intrinsically motivated about, right? <comment><USER2> I think it's not always a good gamble. Sometimes what they initially gamble on transforms into something they would not expect or consider as an investment. For the few success stories we hear, we never hear of the countless failures. The idea of most startups achieving some successful status is a faulty generalization. You are cherry picking the successful startups and generalizing based on survivorship bias.

This happens to all of us and it is hard to truly reflect on what makes a successful startup. If there was a recipe we would hear of many successes, frankly investments would stop elsewhere and just concentrate on startups, if that was the case.

Whenever I hear of crazy returns, I try to reflect on the fact that if it was common, why wouldn't those who make such crazy returns not just borrow more money and wash, rinse, repeat. I think there is a point were those making such returns realize the success was due to mere chance or some other combination of timing, investment, people that could not exist again. There is also a point where you have to wonder why those making such great returns do not keep trying to do the same. There must be a level where crazy profits/returns would allow some self sustaining regenerative business. I think that level does not exist. When investors do think such a level exists, they are usually being swindled.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there are several connotations to 'startup' in play here. One connotation is that a 'startup' is the sort of company that is attractive to angel/venture capital another connotation is a 'startup' is more or less any new company.

The first connotation is a bit circular, but it has the feature that startups are companies that _might_ have some plausible avenue to becoming a unicorn. Some sort of new software as a service (SSSAAS) might be a startup under this connotation but a new Chartered Accountancy firm most likely not (even if people in Topeka, Kansas will refer to the new Chartered Accountancy firm as a 'startup').

Angel/Seed/Venture capital doesn't make money by funding SSSAAS startups (in the second connotation) at random. It bets on the SSSAAS's that seem most likely to become unicorns. Angel/Seed/Venture capital looks at staff and track record and the business model: the one that is easiest to change is business model and another name for business model is idea because from the point of view of capital, a SSSAAS isn't a technology it is a business.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your assumption is 1) You currently return an ROI to a company plus 2) motivation/interest makes you a good bet. 3) You alone make a complete business.

These dont have to combine in that way. Points;

1) there can be significant dead weight in larger salaried roles. Salary existing doesn't always equate positive ROI. And someone one can be very good employee in a structured enviroment and not in a more open startup enviroment.

2) motivation doesn't equate success, sometimes the opposite as people pursue the interesting vs the economically realistic.

3) As a salaried person you come as a team. You alone are likely to be missing required parts for a functioning business, kinda like buying tires and wondering why the car doesn't run.

</comment><comment><USER5> it doest matter if you can make water into gold. investors are more picky then that. yet only 1/10 of their investment give returns.</comment>


Grand Theft Auto 5 is Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.techiespider.com/2011/10/25/grand-theft-auto-5-coming/

<comment><USER2> With the innovation related to GTA I am expecting the game to be the following:

There are only three buttons: up, down, x. up = walk forward, down = turn around, x = shoot. Same thing in the car. The game will look beautiful though, so in the first three minutes you will have already jumped from a bridge into an airplane, caught an atomic bomb on the car's underbelly and thrown it at some mob boss in jersey. It was awesome and it looks like Avatar should have looked had it had good graphics.

This goes on for 60+ hrs. With 120+ hrs of bonus games. Like dumb'd down DDR.

Also in this game you can't die. You just walk forward for 60 hrs and get achievements for having walked forward for 10 minutes straight without a break.

It will also be compatible with kinect to ensure that you can get the "played for 8 hrs straight without a food break" achievement.

There will be 4 DLCs.</comment>


Kindle Fire seems to have a poor user experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/technology/personaltech/amazons-fire-some-say-may-become-the-edsel-of-tablets.html

<comment><USER2> No editorializing in the title, please; that's an HN guideline.

Actual title on the NYT site: "As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised".

</comment><comment><USER3> I really don't understand the UI/UX reviews. Yes, elements of the interface are bulky and there are certain things that aren't perfect, but I didn't buy the Fire to spend much time using the UI/UX - I bought it to read books and papers on. If I'd wanted a fully fledged tablet computer I would have bought an iPad, but I find it a fantastic form factor to read from and watch the occasional show on. It's compact, a perfect weight to just sit and read, and the video playback works well.

I don't know, maybe I'm expecting too little, but I loved it when I bought it and I still love it. I will probably still buy an iPad at some point, but it has revolutionized my mobile reading experience and I'm one very happy customer because of it (especially with the readability integration, which is awesome).

</comment><comment><USER4> Every review I've seen has said it has poor user experience. In my 10 minutes holding one, it was janky, clunky, heavy and hot. ("I trust Amazon to fix it!" was the rallying cry of my friend.)

The interesting thing isn't that the UI/UX sucks, it's that this article in the New York Times.

<comment><USER5> _it was janky, clunky, heavy and hot._

Really? I've never felt it get hot. It feels lighter than my iPad2 (although it may be heavier -- but I really don't think so). The UX is almost strictly worse than the iPad2, but at less than 50% the price, its a better deal (given they both have serious deficiencies today -- but $199 for a seriously deficient device feels much better than $499).

<comment><USER6> What are some serious deficiencies you've found with your iPad?

<comment><USER5> As someone else noted, weight is a huge one. In fact the first iPad I bought I returned because it was too heavy. Later got an iPad2, but weight is still an issue.

Web browsing kind of sucks. Like the YouTube experience is crazy buggy.

I find the keyboard hard to use for anything, but the smallest notes.

Getting content on the device, e.g., movies I've transcoded, is an exercise in pulling out my hair. Tedious and time consuming.

And this is just me doing stuff on it that people say I should be able to do well on the device. I don't even include the deficiencies for things everyone knows that it doesn't do well -- so it gets a free pass on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The old conventional wisdom with Microsoft products was: "Wait until version 3" and I wonder if something similar is now in effect for Amazon's physical devices.

It is a testament to Amazon's ability to react and adapt that turned the version 1 Kindle (with the awkwardly placed buttons and the weird profile - shaped like half of an open book) into the sleek, inexpensive and generally well reviewed Kindle line of today.

<comment><USER8> Actually, the kindle 1 was great as a reader, at least if you were right handed.

The kindle fire is horrible; I've owned several of each model for myself, to loan, etc, and the fire (I have 2) is the first I returned.

The DX remains my favorite, with iPad kindle app as number 2.

<comment><USER9> Forgive me for asking, but if you dislike the Kindle Fire so, why did you buy two (especially when you have multiple Kindles and an iPad/2)?

<comment><USER8> I preordered two, planning to give one away or jailbreak it, and use e other. Once I got them, I opened one, used it for about an hour, realized it sucked, and let a few other people try it to get their feedback (also entirely negative).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds."

Journalism at its finest. I have a Fire and have no other tablet experience with which to compare this. I am pleased by the price point and plan to root it once the warranty expires. I am also annoyed by the clutter that appears as I do more and more with it. This has nothing to do with being concerned that my wife will see what I've been doing. I encourage her checking on things in our relationship that may affect her security in it. It's really just annoying to scroll through the carousel of EVERYTHING just to get to the one thing that I need/want.

<comment><USER11> > I am pleased by the price point and plan to root it once the warranty > expires.

I'm not sure what to make of these reviews either. No external volume control/power switch is something I can live with, but it seems the rest is something that would be irrelevant with a custom ROM. I'm toying with the idea of getting one and flashing it once Cyanogen (inevitably) releases ICS for the Fire.

<comment><USER12> Reviewers are reviewing the complete package, since most people don't even know what a ROM is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy."

The $79 Kindle is subsidized by advertisements, although I'm not what % are Amazon ads and what % are 3rd parties. Ad-free costs another $40.

</comment><comment><USER14> _"In less than two weeks, we're rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire," said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman._

So...everyone that unwraps one on Christmas morning and turns it on will suddenly have to endure an OTA update before using it?

Granted, I've never seen a Fire go through an update, but god help Amazon if that's how they plan to roll this out.

<comment><USER5> Curious, how would you prefer they do an update? Go to Amazon HQ and have someone replace the internals of the device?

OTA updates are probably the most seamless update experience that exists today. I wish the iPad2 had it in the past -- as I still have one that I haven't plugged in to get iOS5 yet.

<comment><USER10> I think his point was the idea of everyone hitting it all at once on Christmas morning.

<comment><USER5> It's just one static set of files. CDNs make this almost brainlessly easy. If Amazon can't handle that then they have no business building Silk at all, much less one of the world's most popular retail sites.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, and Amazon has a rather...robust...CDN-equivalent. :-)

Also, they're probably going to have plenty of spare capacity on Christmas morning. I'd guess there's a substantial lull in sales then, at least until the post-Christmas markdowns begin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The OS is a bit laggy, but games that run on it native and with OpenGL ES are really fast. Game development on it, once you get to your OpenGL ES render, things are moving swiftly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Product launches like this make you wonder why removing UI stutter isn't the number one priority for device manufacturers.

<comment><USER18> Because people will use the product anyway. If you ask someone, "would you prefer a slow UI over a fast one", of course they'll choose the fast one. But that doesn't mean they won't use a device that has choppy animations. Remember, lots of people still use Windows XP and are perfectly happy.</comment></comment>


Docker GDPR? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/GAFQLDr <comment><USER2> What are we supposed to glean from that screenshot?

<comment><AUTHOR> they purged all the data, but they can restore the account?

<comment><USER2> Does "reactivate" (not "restore") mean all the data is back, or just that you can use the username again?

<comment><AUTHOR> at least the username and email are reactivated (which I think all the data that they have on accounts)... but I think that the public images are still there available for anyone to download

so my question is any of these complied with GDPR? specifically:

\- The right to rectification

\- The right to erasure

\- The right to restrict processing

\- The right to be informed

<comment><USER2> I don't see why it doesn't. You don't appear to have tried to invoke any of those rights, so who knows if they comply or not. If you want to know how they comply with GDPR, how about requesting the details about that instead of speculating randomly?

<comment><AUTHOR> I hid the post and contacted them asking for clarifications</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Neat trick for CSS object-fit fallback on Edge (and other browsers) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@primozcigler/neat-trick-for-css-object-fit-fallback-on-edge-and-other-browsers-afbc53bbb2c3 <comment><AUTHOR> This is my first post here in HN, though I am regular visitor. So first of all - hello everyone! :)

Let me know if you have any questions related to the linked article.</comment>


A proposal for error handling - <AUTHOR> http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/a_proposal_for_error_handling <comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't believe he didn't conclude the article talking about Google's Go

It's remarkably close to what he wants. You can currently ignore a return value by assigning it to _ -- all that is needed for his proposal is another token that causes the program to halt if it is assigned non-zero. If they ever allow overloading assignment you could do it yourself!

I don't think they'd spring for the semantics change of allowing assignment to fewer return values.

And backslash as a destructuring operator? Seriously? That's a syntax hair- shirt even beyond PHP's use of it as the namespace operator.</comment>


How not to do customer retention - <AUTHOR> http://www.zagat.com/Discuss/ForumPosts.aspx?TID=2853

<comment><USER2> I've had the same experience with Audible, who make it easy to sign up but not easy to stop auto-renewal. To cancel, I had to email and they replied asking for my billing address 'for security'. They then proceeded to argue with me, telling me that their policy existed because they "like the interaction with the customers". I on the other hand did not enjoy the interaction with them.

To me it looks like the companies are getting an extra payment in before a customer manages to cancel (weekends, out of hours, remembering to), and increasing the costs of their customer support.

<comment><USER3> This is what credit card chargebacks are for. The punishment for failing to honour cancellations (which DO NOT have to be via the approved route, provided there is evidence that the company should have seen it - the reply from the CSR drone in the Zagat thread would be enough) is pretty high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They (and similar companies) should read [http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2008/02/big- company-s-...](http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2008/02/big- company-s-1.html) (and similar) and learn?

</comment><comment><USER5> There are reasons for this.. the biggest one I can think of if someone wants to cancel for some reason that can be fixed. Maybe they can't figure out how to use a feature, or they've run into a bug with a fairly easy fix. If you've got automated cancellations, they are gone. However if they have to talk to someone, and they mention it's because of this, then you just kept a customer. This happens very frequently where I work.

That being said, the fact that you have to call them is really unacceptable to me, since email is nicer for pretty much everyone involved.

<comment><USER6> Then say so. Have an online cancellation option that says "We find that many of our customers who are canceling stay with us, if we get a chance to try to fix it. If you're canceling because of a problem with the service, check here to have someone contact you to attempt to resolve it. What time would you like us to call?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe someone from Zagat isn't all over this issue, responding on the forum, their blogs, and going out of their way to apologize to those unhappy customers. This is 2008. Word spreads like wildfire online. The flipside is that doing something unexpectedly nice to your customers also spreads.</comment>


Why Oink Failed - <AUTHOR> http://untether.tv/2012/why-oink-failed// <comment><USER2> Failed? They got acquired by Google for 30million odd dollars</comment>


Trolling with a fraud seller ($600 new macbook pro) - <AUTHOR>

I was looking for a second hand mac book pro and came to this listing http://kochi.quikr.com/2013-Apple-MacBook-Pro-ME665LL-A-15.4-Inch-W0QQAdIdZ168390406 which sells mac book pro for Rs 30000, which he claims to be brand new, that means new mac book pro with warranty for less than $600.
Here is my current list of email exchanges
http://pastebin.com/795HtUha
he asked me to sent half of the payment to his bank account, but i refused asked him to sent me one piece by payment at the time of delivery to courier guy. And I claimed I will book 100 of them by paying in half if I get the first one perfect. So this is where we are at the moment. Let me see what he responds :D <comment><USER2> What happened?</comment>


Ask HN: Databases have indexes. Then why have partitions? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Because you are keeping 13 months of phone call data and want to easily drop the oldest month every 1st.

Because your queries need to be fast, and you can chop up your data into 1000 pieces (by some column or combination) without adding complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can easily drop the oldest month every 1st using a delete statement.

Queries can be fast with indexes without adding complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Uh, what?

<comment><USER4> I think this is a legitimate question. I always wondered the same thing.</comment></comment>