Danah Boyd on social networks again, but now in audio - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2007/06/26/danah-boyd-on-myfriends-myspace-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> This talk is awesome. (Yes, I'm the same person who thought Danah Boyd's paper was a little wishy-washy. But this talk is awesome, because it has a lot of interesting observations and not nearly as many doubtful conclusions. In the Q&A;, she does get into some conclusions, and it gets fuzzier again.)

</comment><comment><USER2> She has no actual evidence for ANY of her 'research.' I'd like to see some real research in this area... until then, everything coming out of her mouth could be BS.</comment>


Magic Leap One now available for $2295 - <AUTHOR> https://www.magicleap.com/magic-leap-one <comment><USER2> It's interesting reading startup literature regarding MVPs and iterating quickly and notice that almost none of it applies to the AR/VR space. Between Magic Leap and Ubiquty6 it seems like the most interesting players in AR are more notable for their funding rounds than for anything else. Magic Leap is rolling out their own hardware so it's more understandable but its really hard to justify spending $2K on a first generation AR device.

If I had to put money on it I think Magic Leap will go the way of General Magic, lots of cool tech and ideas in a product that was ultimately too expensive and too late to drive the company forward but will be looked upon as a great innovator once another company uses their inventions and packages it in a low cost, user friendly interface.

<comment><USER3> It's new tech. It's not for you to keep in your closet. It's for hotels and arcades and parties and other such rental use cases.

<comment><USER4> I'd be skeptical you get sufficient volume with just specialty uses.

<comment><USER5> Magic Leap only needs to sell (roughly) 17% as many Ones as Oculus Rifts, to have equivalent sales ($2.3k vs $400 device).

And while their current hardware is expensive, I would bet that their longterm plan isn't to sell devices that cost more than $2000.

<comment><USER6> Equivalent sales is a nonsensical metric between the two. I doubt their profit margin is 5x per device compared to the rift.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are they planning a sort of technical deep dive/developer Q&A? The page reeks of marketing and is extremely lax on any kind of substantial details that would make me want to purchase one of these things.

I've enjoyed my vive and rift since they both came out, and I'd love to try this gadget out. It doesn't appear to be worth the cost at face value though.

<comment><USER8> I'm shocked, I say shocked, that something from Magic Leap could possibly be said to reek of marketing.

You should spend the next six minutes and seventeen seconds of your life watching this amazing piece of public relations magic that transparently unveils the deep truth of what Magic Leap is really all about:

The synthesis of imagination: Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap at TEDxSarasota

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY)

<comment><USER9> I don't understand how Magic Leap thought this was worthwhile. Nor do I understand how TEDx thought it was an idea worth spreading.

Can anyone explain the logic behind it on both sides?

<comment><USER10> For the TED(x) talk part, anyone can give a TEDx talk. There are lots of local events, and the videos are published on their website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happened to Magic Leap's advanced photonic lightfield chip? I thought the thing that made Magic Leap special was their light field tech, but this just appears to be stacked wave guides, which other than having 2 focal planes seems to be the same tech as Hololens.

<comment><USER12> It never existed and was never going to exist, except as marketing and investor hype. Same with their fiber-scanning display, and everything else that doesn't add up to, "like a Hololens, but with a much dimmer view of the real world and more useless patents."

[https://www.kguttag.com/2018/08/27/palmer-luckey-founder- of-...](https://www.kguttag.com/2018/08/27/palmer-luckey-founder-of-oculus- magic-leap-is-a-tragic-heap/)

Quote from Palmer Luckey in that blog: _"The ML1 is a not a "lightfield projector" or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day."_

Downvotes aside, are there any actual counterpoints to be offered to this critique? It _is_ like a Hololens, it does have a dimmer view, it doesn't match their many promises and early patents, it is slightly cheaper and has a slightly better FOV than HL, but it's also wired to their Lightpack. All in all I'd say the investors should be carrying pitchforks and torches.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that's fair to say at this point. Everything points to it being vaporware right now, but nobody outside of their R&D is sure, and Palmer Luckey merely analyzed their current product just like everyone else (but perhaps with a bit more bias).

It (what they advertised) looks like it's vaporware, but when they release something else I'll keep an eye on it just in case it isn't.

<comment><USER12> What's unfair about it? They've spent years making claims that turned out to be patently false, and their patents tell the story of a company that pursued something better minds have failed at, and then shows them pivoting to the boring "Hololens 1.1" we see today. Other than an incredible facility with both deceptive marketing and fundraising I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. They're still blathering about "photonic lightfield chips" when they're selling run-of-the-mill waveguides.

I don't see vapor ware, there is a product, it's just technically unimpressive and at odds with years of marketing. _If_ they release something else there is no indication that they're capable of producing more than incremental modifications of existing tech. Do you see some other indication outside of their marketing and fundraising to indicate otherwise? Investors were sold on visions of something completely at odds with their actual product, how is that not a huge red flag?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Magic Leap raised boatloads of money, which game me the impression that they are really building something mass market that can be useful for most people in this world. I am not into gaming and have kids, so cannot wear AR glasses in my home and walk around. Are there use cases for Magic Leap that support non gamers ? Or is it mostly a niche product like an Oculus ?

<comment><USER15> >Are there use cases for Magic Leap that support non gamers ? Or is it mostly a niche product like an Oculus ?

AR will definitely be the way forward for all computing. This brief awkward period of 50ish years using analog inputs and physical screens which we are currently living through will be seen as a blip in the history of human- computer interaction hundreds of years from now. However the only use case for this iteration of the technology is for developers to begin working on new interaction paradigms and app ideas for AR in general. We're still years away from true consumer tech but I can admit as someone very familiar with VR/AR hardware that the Magic Leap One is a solid evolutionary step forward from what we've seen so far. I'm not impressed enough to buy one yet, but at least the company has shown they aren't total vaporware at this point and hopefully they can keep improving.

<comment><USER16> I am a big VR/AR fan, but I am interacting with this forum sitting in a chair moving my hands max 2 inches there and back. That's comfortable. That's something I can do for hours and hours. It's quite possible that VR/AR will augment, not replace.

<comment><USER17> On the timescale OP is talking about there is a decent chance users won't have to move their hands/fingers at all.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/facebook-brain- interface/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/facebook-brain-interface/)

AR would replace the display, not all input mechanisms.

<comment><USER18> What if I don't trust facebook with my brainstate? (Or google or literally _any_ other company.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have one of these and a Hololens. Basically the ML1 is incremental improvement. There are still no mainstream consumer use cases that are plausible.

<comment><USER20> Curious--how is the font rendering/text quality? Example, working with digital cards with a title, short description, maybe numbers (currency/stats etc), reading them quickly and organizing them. I'm familiar with Oculus, so maybe in general and compared to the Rift?

<comment><USER19> Hard to say. The experience is quite a bit different than VR headsets. I can imagine that with its small FoV that it ought to be a bit better but I don't have an easy way to compare them.

<comment><USER10> How about...How big does text need to be in order for you to be able to comfortably read it?

(Compare using a quarter or other common object a certain distance away from you.)

For example on the rift, text is readable when it's the size of a quarter ~3 feet away from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Really seems like a money furnace for the investors here.

<comment><USER22> Well if you are privileged to invest in Magic Leap One, they probably aren't hurting...no sympathy from me when their plans to buy a yacht is ruined :/

It is backed by Google so there is probably plans to improve the hardware which as it stands is _not impressive_ OR knowing Google they could pull the plug just as easily.

In fact, Magic Leap One, is looking to be a major major flop, shortly after somebody released a review on the limited focal view and some annoying hardware designs I knew it was fucked.

<comment><USER23> It's not all about the investors dude. Money misallocated means companies, solutions, and inventions that could have been built aren't since the money wasn't there.

We all lose when that happens.

This is a developer device. We'll see when they release the consumer one if it flops, but that'll probably be if no one makes the apps or games it needs to be successful.

<comment><USER24> These all seem a guaranteed flop at the consumer level.

Limited FOV is going to kill it for almost everyone. I think they would sell more at double the price, if they doubled the FOV.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. I'm sure they're aware of that. But they needed to get a device to developers given that they've "built a whole new operating system" (As Lucky explained, just built stuff on Android).

Also from Palmer Lucky: They need to fix the controller. Either compromise on it or make something custom that works. Commercial applications will bring a lot of funding here and a wonky controller, when others exist which are not, will hamper that.

They have the chicken, now they need developers to make eggs. Day One of a consumer Magic Leap device needs that for anyone to say "wow, I need to have one of those in my life."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cool to see tech like this moving forward. Still think we're 5-10 years off from folks really adopting this stuff heavily (especially with a higher price point like this), but man, it's going to get wild. $50 says one day Alexa will just be sitting on your couch, taking on whatever form you'd like (e.g., Bill Murray, snacking on Fig Newtons waiting for commands).

Does anyone know what would be a good way to start dabbling in developing environments/experiences for these and other AR devices?

<comment><USER26> unity has a pretty beginner-friendly toolset for windows mixed reality, I would check that out for sure. In terms of getting an AR capable device, I think some of the screen only (not holograms but camera-based to display) MR devices are relatively cheap, somewhere in the $200-500 USD range. It's a pretty fun experience, maybe you'll have an interesting use case :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Site purchasing does not work. Leads to a page "oops" that has one button "return to magic"

<comment><USER28> Maybe a fake CTA to measure interest..

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember the first articles about this super secretive start up from not the Silicon Valley, that did some super amazing stuff, loads of VC-cash and all that.

This thing now looks really underwhelming. The pages full of marketing talk to present basically another (better, maybe) HoloLens.

<comment><USER30> What's wrong with being a better Hololens?

<comment><USER29> Nothing wrong, but given all the buzz I expected something incredible. This right now has already be done, by Microsoft, so I don't really see how they could possibly compete in this market.

<comment><USER8> And Microsoft managed to ship Hololens without settling any sexual discrimination lawsuits. (Obviously they have better lawyers!)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/14/magic- lea...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/14/magic-leap-faces- sexual-discrimination-suit)

[https://mic.com/articles/168619/the-most-damning- allegations...](https://mic.com/articles/168619/the-most-damning-allegations- from-the-sexual-discrimination-complaint-against-magic-leap)

[https://www.wired.com/2017/05/magic-leap-bias-suit-sexism- si...](https://www.wired.com/2017/05/magic-leap-bias-suit-sexism-sign- failure/)

>Thanks to Campbell's lawsuit, a whole new host of questions have arisen, as well as a sinking suspicion that the company is even more dysfunctional than previously thought. Excessive hype is one sign of a company possibly foundering due to mismanagement. Misogyny of the kind alleged by Campbell suggests dysfunction on a whole other level. As incidents of sexism in tech pile up, it's becoming clear that misogyny in the industry is both a moral travesty and a potential warning sign that a business is in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sadly not available for my area, but I was happy to see the note about prescriptions. Thats probably one of my biggest complaints about the Rift and others is that it gets pretty uncomfortable with glasses on.

<comment><USER31> You can't buy them yet, which made the system barely usable for me. It comes with an empty frame that accommodates round lenses. I popped the lenses out of an old pair of glasses and ground them to the right size and shape with a belt sander, and it works OK. You can eyeball the size accurately enough to fit snugly in the rubber frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > We created a new kind of computer so we built a whole new operating system. > One that gets the most out of our spatial computing system by working in > tandem with digital lightfields and the brain. Lumin OS is fully optimized > for environment recognition, persistent digital content and the performance > to power high-fidelity visual experiences that turns your wildest > imagination into even wilder realities.

Super curious if it's built from the ground up or a mod of an existing OS.

<comment><USER33> _" Magic Leap says they have "built a whole new operating system" called LuminOS to take advantage of their "spatial computing system". It is actually just Android with custom stuff on top, the same approach most people take when they want to claim they have built a whole operating system... I hope Magic Leap does cool stuff in the future, but the current UI is basically an Android Wear watch menu that floats in front of you."_

[http://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic- heap/](http://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic-heap/)

<comment><USER34> This is a great read. Thanks for posting!my favorite quote, "The ML1 is a not a "lightfield projector" or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Chiming in on the questions regarding use cases etc.:

Aside from letting artists and engineers paint/sculpt/model more intuitively in 3D space, I still believe that the killer app for VR on the consumer side would be virtual tourism.

Coming full circle to the View-Master [0], except this time people could practically live in their favorite fantasy or sci-fi locations.

Imagine being part of the crew on the USS Enterprise, or idling the hours away smoking the halflings' leaf in the Shire..

Right now though, VR is just a fancy display tech, but with lower [apparent] resolution than many existing 2D displays and comparatively poor, often fatigue-inducing interactivity in almost all cases, apart from the aforementioned placement of 3D objects.

Why has nobody dared to drop the pretenses yet, and actually take VR to the level it professes to be: supplanting reality?

Make it more than just a display.

Invent some kind of cabin with climate control and aromatic components, that lets your other senses and your _entire body_ feel like you're someplace else. Feel the tropical wind on your face without leaving the concrete jungle of your megacity.

Of course at first such tech would be too expense to have in most people's homes. So you might also usher in a renaissance of public arcades; VRcades? :)

People could start going there as an alternative to expensive vacations.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View- Master](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master)

<comment><USER36> I'm skeptic about virtual tourism. We already have 4K HDR screens that display gorgeous pictures, but people still go to the museum to admire paintings.

Tourism is more of a social act than a content-consumption one. People brag when they go to the museum, but never when they binge-watch paintings at 3 AM on the Internet.

<comment><USER37> Virtual tourism is like Soylent. Soylent doesn't replace good food. It replaces crappy fast food. Virtual tourism won't replace going to an art gallery for real. It replaces never going at all.

I could see it really enriching the lives of those who can't afford to travel.

I do it myself sometimes with Google street view. I'll go "visit" some random place.

<comment><USER36> I agree, I've spent way too much time on Google Earth VR !

But I still think virtual tourism will stay niche in the future because of the social reasons I stated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Any developers actively creating (and sharing) interesting stuff for the device? The examples on their website feel like stuff I've seen before. I'd be interested in hearing about the good things and the challenges of developing for their platform and for AR in general

</comment><comment><USER39> Is it just AR? Or is it something different? All the hype for so many years showed console level graphics in the ads but the real videos show low quality android level graphics.

<comment><USER40> I haven't seen anything that differentiates it from Hololens at this point. Their 'waveguide' tech apparently allows it to create graphics in focus at 0.5m and also at 5m, but having items become out of focus with the rest of the world, never seemed like a hindrance to me since if I wasn't focused on it, well, I wasn't paying attention.

They have eye-tracking tech but aren't using it yet.

The Palmer piece (Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap) breaks down that this is a Tegra X2 running an Android OS.

The console level graphics were most assuredly vaporware.

<comment><USER41> It has a slightly wider field of view and two focal planes. Also, it's cheaper.

<comment><USER12> It also has a wired headset to a belt computing device, and a dimmer view of the real world. I'm not convinced that the FOV is worth that.

<comment><USER8> When I see "belt computing" I think of Factorio.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSfVqIkVEnI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSfVqIkVEnI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Before judging the price, remember that other less useful luxury tech gadgets have similar price points. E.g. Sony's new Aibo at $2899.

<comment><USER43> And Aibo is now reasonably priced and a huge success?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Both the real world and virtual light rays initiate neural signals that pass from the retina to the visual part of the brain, creating unbelievably believable experiences."

So light?

<comment><USER45> Woah, virtual light rays travelling via neural signals! Oh wait, that's the same as looking at computer screen. I hate marketing speak..

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Any advantages over the hololens

<comment><USER47> $700 cheaper, less weight on your head, increased field-of-view, 6-DOF tracked controller, eye tracking, and support for two focal planes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Quite the name. Pretty sure that Rudolf Nureyev already cornered that market tho.

</comment><comment><USER49> Was the part at the end about the Airbender and zuko a dig at journalists?

<comment><USER50> It was a dig at Palmer Luckey, who wrote a scathing review of the MLP.

[https://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic- heap/](https://palmerluckey.com/magic-leap-is-a-tragic-heap/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Too much.

<comment><USER30> It's an engineering prototype that you can buy. Hololens was $3,000 and this is better than Hololens.

<comment><USER29> How is this better? You seem somewhat involved with them.

<comment><USER30> I'm just taking a break at work, chill.

[https://magic-leap.reality.news/news/magic-leap-one-first- ha...](https://magic-leap.reality.news/news/magic-leap-one-first-hands- impressions-for-hololens-developers-0186411/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Really, really cool. I don't any usecases in mind, but I want one. I wish someone can just port a Sublime text or A VSCode on the headset, and code from here.</comment>


Loopt update - <AUTHOR> http://tastyblogsnack.com/2008/07/15/loopt-update/

<comment><USER2> I was surprised to see Justine's first post amidst the top discussion on Techmeme. I don't think Loopt was intentially trying to trick people, but I don't understand why they weren't more prepared/careful/clear about this (especially for a YC startup). Their iPhone app launch was quite the letdown after all the WWDC hype.

Regardless, it seems like a great application with tons of potential if they can pull it together. I think it will take off once school starts again and Facebook doesn't try to butt in.</comment>


Mountain Lion seems to have addressed the memory management issues in OS X - <AUTHOR> http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/28556080639/mountain-lion-seems-to-have-partially-addressed-the <comment><USER2> It's important to get the terminology correct when discussing VM behavior. Page-outs are not identical to swap-outs. And unfortunately, due to the age and architecture of the Mach kernel, there's no way I'm aware of on OS X to measure the rate of the latter.

Page-outs refer to a file-backed page being committed to disk; these are perfectly normal and expected (program writes to a file, kernel eventually commits to disk). Every OS guarantees that file-backed pages be committed within some reasonably short period of time to reduce the risk of lost data in the event of a power outage (the sync interval).

A high page-out rate doesn't necessarily imply memory pressure; it may simply mean some program running on the system is writing to files frequently. However, memory pressure may temporarily increase the page-out rate if the sync interval hasn't yet kicked in.

Swap-outs, on the other hand, relate to anonymous memory pages (i.e. the heap). Swap-outs, in contrast to page-outs, are generally bad and indicate severe memory pressure.

<comment><USER3> > _Every OS guarantees that file-backed pages be committed within some > reasonably short period of time_

Just curious: is that "short period of time" usually in order of seconds or minutes? (I know different OSes have different defaults; I just want to know a ballpark figure!)

<comment><USER4> It's there to keep disk from trashing the head around, so I believe it's not more than a few spins of the platters.

<comment><USER3> :) Actually, I wanted to ask whether it's in order of milliseconds or seconds! Don't know how the "minute" found its way into my comment. A minute is reaaaly long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still ended up with an 8 GB page file after a few days of regular usage (nothing too hard like VMs or anything - just your typical Xcode dev workflow, including opening up Photoshop once or twice to export graphics).

This is on a MBP with 8 GB RAM.

I never had any memory-related performance issues in Lion, (maybe because I have an SSD), but I always end up with a big pagefile of stale data.

<comment><USER6> Most modern operating systems try write the contents of the physical memory to the page file at the first good opportunity (well before it's needed) in order to save time when the page is actually paged out, so it's perfectly normal to have a page file that is at least as large as your physical memory.

<comment><USER7> AFAIK VMS and NT behave that way but Linux is much lazier. Especially if your swap is dynamically allocated (as in OS X) you don't want to swap out unless there is actual memory pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems as though a lot of people are noticing some speed enhancements. I haven't quantified any of it, so my experience is all anecdotal, but I definitely notice the boost as well.

The changes in Mountain Lion have been subtle, but I really love the upgrade. I performed a full disk backup which took the longest amount of time. The actual install (2012 MacBook Air) took like 15-20 minutes. If anyone is in doubt, definitely do yourself the favor and upgrade. Typically I am hesitant to do major OS upgrades due to things like python or ruby breaking most of my local websites ... everything works great!

I had to modify some apache2 settings (I use the built-in webserver for PHP development) but that was about it. Oh also, apache is still there. A lot of people think that it's gone because the preferences pane is missing, but it's still hiding within the belly of the beast.

I feel like I can throw anything at this. I've never multitasked like this before.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the things I've noticed is that the new Xcode 4.4 (released the same time as Mountain Lion) seems to be an awful lot snappier to me. My theory is that this is happening because they might have switched Xcode from being garbage collected to ARC (since it used to be GC ever since Snow Leopard came out but GC is now deprecated).

<comment><USER9> Does anyone know if there is a way to monitor xcode and find out if it's GC or ARC?

<comment><USER10> You can just use otool to dump the Objective-C information out of the MachO executable:

         otool -o /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
         .....
         Contents of (__DATA,__objc_imageinfo) section
           version 0
             flags 0x6 OBJC_IMAGE_SUPPORTS_GC

That's for Xcode 4.4. So yes, it's still being built for Garbage Collection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've been hearing this for a long time:

"free memory is wasted memory" vs "inactive memory is never released"

"Purge is the worst thing you could do" vs "Purge solves the issue"

We have the kernels's source[1] and DTrace. Let's get some real data?

[1]<http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2050.7.9/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Haven't seen the paging issues Adam was noticing, but I'm still gobsmacked by the amount of memory some applications seem to take. The OS (kernel_task, mds, WindowServer, and friends) regularly eat up .75 of a gig, and Firefox consumes .5 - 1 gig without much effort (other browsers seem to have a similar profile).

Quick poll, what are you running, and what's your memory consumption? Here's me:

Currently running: Firefox, Spotify, Mail, Calendar, Terminal, Mongo (mongo using 100mb).

Memory Used: 3.75 GB

<comment><USER13> It is definitely better overall with ML in that it is no longer ridiculously slow but memory consumption for typical set of tasks still is way higher than either of Linux and Windows.

For instance I have KDE4 running on Linux with Firefox, Amarok, Kopete, Konsole and all other default services (ssh etc). Used memory is 1.1GB.

I've ML running with Firefox, Terminal.app, Activity Monitor in addition to the defaults. Any my used memory is 3.92GB. Wired is 1.75GB and Swap used is 11MB!

My experience with Windows 7 is also lot better than ML - it tends to be bit more than Linux but in the same ballpark.

Edit: To put this in perspective - I just realized that my work laptop (that I RDP into and never reboot) with all possible bloatware loaded and running - Word, Outlook, RDP, Lync 2010, Java Backup process, Enterprisey stuff, Firefox with couple tabs etc. is taking up only 2.83 GB! Apple really has a memory usage problem with OS X.

<comment><USER14> Unused memory is wasted. You should be complaining about the system that _doesn't_ use all available memory.

<comment><USER13> Windows and Linux don't leave unused memory around - both use it heavily for page cache. However what we have a problem here with is active/resident memory use and/or VM subsystem making no so smart decisions(this part seems to have gotten better with ML).

So the end result is that when Windows and Linux can be quite usable with 2GB RAM with a rotational disk, for similar workload OS X slows down quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can concur with OP. My MacBook Pro suffered severe paging issues under Lion, but seems to be (mostly) gone in Mountain Lion. Running Eclipse, Photoshop, Chrome, and Parallels at the same time is possible once again without major slow down on my machine. As always, YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER16> Odd. I had this problem in 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and it went away when I upgraded to 10.7 (Lion). The most obvious symptom is the machine does not seem to be able to make use of the inactive memory (the blue slice of the pie in Activity Monitor). I did not notice the problem at all when I first started using 10.6. When I hunted around on the help forums a few months ago I found lots of users with the symptoms, but nobody acknowledging the "validity" of the problem. In fact a lot of deniers out there. I wonder if it was quietly fixed or will recur after the system gets used for a while.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't suppose anyone can comment on whether Mountain Lion has done anything for the mouse lag issue[1]?

I can't upgrade yet because I disabled HFS+ journaling and nothing seems to be able to re-enable it (the installer requires journaling to be enabled).

[1] [http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x- mous...](http://d43.me/blog/1205/the-cause-for-all-your-mac-os-x-mouse- annoyances/)

<comment><USER18> I'm sure someone will be along to correct me quick enough if I'm wrong, but last year when I was upgrading to Lion I had the same issue (journaling turned off) and was able to turn it back on with minimal pain by doing it from the Snow Leopard boot disc (Disk Utility, of course).

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately that just gets me a helpful "Journaling could not be enabled". I guess something got messed up when I was writing to the volume from Linux.

<comment><USER19> What about:

        $ diskutil enableJournal /dev/diskXsY

ML's diskutil(8) says:

         enableJournal device
                    Enable journaling on an HFS+ volume.  This works whether or not
                    the volume is currently mounted (the volume is temporarily
                    mounted if necessary).  Ownership of the affected disk is
                    required.

         disableJournal [force] device
                    Disable journaling on an HFS+ volume.  This normally works
                    whether or not the volume is currently mounted (the volume is
                    temporarily mounted if necessary).  If the force option is speci-
                    fied, then journaling is disabled directly on disk; in this case,
                    the volume must not be mounted.  Ownership of the affected disk
                    is required.

         moveJournal external | internal [journalDevice] device
                    external will create a 512MB Apple_Journal partition out of
                    journalDevice and an HFS+ partition will be created out of the
                    remaining space if available; journalDevice must be a partition,
                    not a whole-disk. The journal for device will then be moved
                    externally onto the newly created Apple_Journal partition.

                    internal will move the journal for device back locally.

I don't know if it can work on the mounted root filesystem so you may want to try that from the recovery partition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since the GM, I also noticed this on my production machine. Previously I had custom settings for the dynamic pager, but it seems that is not longer necessary.

Subtle changes and I'm happy with them. Probably the next year, we'll see some subtle improvements on the backend.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is the reason I installed Mountain Lion. I've only used it a bit in the last few days, but I haven't seen crazy amounts of mds RAM usage since installing either.

</comment><comment><USER22> Only thing holding me back from upgrading is the complete lack of wanting to hex edit my ATI kext again.. heck it might not even be compatbile with ML.

Hackintoshes :/

<comment><USER23> What kind of card do you have? Hackintoshing has gotten a lot friendlier in the last few years. I upgraded a hackintosh I built for a friend from 10.6 to 10.8 and was pleasantly surprised by how everything "just worked" with minimal kext juggling.

<comment><USER22> Gigabyte Radeon 6850. What'll happen is, you have to choose a specific framebuffer configuration to even boot. 2 of these work with my card, only one of which allows hardware acceleration to work right _and_ allows both DVI ports to work.

The one that allows hardware accel on a single screen is actually the right one for the card. The hex editing is to change the display outputs to enable the second head.

<comment><USER24> I'm using an XFX 6870, two-headed, on my Hackintosh, and didn't have to edit anything. I'm pretty sure hardware acceleration is working, too.

<comment><USER22> Those are sufficiently different that you likely don't have the problem. The 6870 uses a different framebuffer personality than the 6850, and likely the fact that it's a different manufacturer might ameliorate the problem altogether.

<comment><USER24> Which hackintosh tools did you use? I used Unibeast/Multibeast.

<comment><USER22> Multibeast from CD. I don't think this is an install problem though, there's an absurdly large thread about this on insanelymac: <http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=273937>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My battery life seems to last as long as it did on Snow Leopard, too.

<comment><USER26> I'm seeing the exact opposite, but for a different reason. On Lion I could put my MBP to sleep and only lose about 5-10% of the battery over 8 hours. Now on ML I lose ~40%, with nothing running. I turned off location services today to see if that's the culprit.

As for actual on-battery use - yes, the battery life is noticeably improved over Lion.

<comment><USER27> Are you running Power Nap on battery? Also are you leaving USB items plugged in?

On Lion at least I noticed that if I left my USB HD in, and closed the lid on battery it killed it, every time. There was an Apple Support thread confirming that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, having an external disk mounted prevents the system from going into some sleep modes, which will kill the battery:

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1776>

<comment><USER26> That could quite possibly be it, as I don't always unmount my fileservers when I leave home. I'll make sure to do that from now on, and might just write a script to handle it. Thanks.

I wonder if this same issue would crop up with the Amazon Cloud Drive.... It's not much more than a CIFS/NFS mount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yup, memory management seemed to be fixed as of 10.7.4 even.

I've found new bug in ML, whenever I switch users, Mountain Lion seems to think I've a desktop much smaller than what I actually have. And sometimes the "virtual" desktop isn't even positioned at 0,0 on my actual desktop. :-/

</comment><comment><USER29> OK, that's enough reason to do the upgrade.

Parallels gets abysmally slow for me when TimeMachine starts up.

<comment><USER30> This is slightly off topic, but make sure you are on the latest version of Parallels before doing the upgrade. For some reason, Parallels 6, which is less than 2 years old, does not support Mountain Lion. Personally, I do not care about the new features in Parallels 7, but was a bit annoyed when forced to upgrade.

<comment><USER31> I got bit by the same thing with VMware. You must be on Fusion 4 for Mountain Lion. Sucks because I had no plans on upgrading.

<comment><USER32> There's a free Technology Preview of Fusion 5 that's time-limited, but probably not so much that it wouldn't work until Fusion 5 ships. Mountain Lion is officially supported as a host and guest. I've been using it daily for a couple months to run Windows (7 and Server 2008 R2, plus the various previews of 8 and Server 2012), FreeBSD, and OS X (Lion, Snow Leopard Server, and Leopard Server), and it seems stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I would not describe this as "the memory management issues in OS X". It should be obvious to anyone how much of an oversimplification that is.

<comment><USER34> I'm not so sure. When someone says "the memory management issues in OS X", I feel pretty confident in assuming specifically which problem they are referring to.

There are some memory models which appear to behave in a way which is relatively psychologically pleasing, and some which do not.

When users are using a program, there are certain times when they have a reasonable expectation that the machine is going to need some time to complete a task ("click and wait"). There are other times when they have no such expectation, and if the machine makes them wait, they get annoyed.

It isn't about the total time they have to wait, its about whether that waiting occurs when they expect it to or not.

Further, when they start to experience these unexpected, annoying pauses, they have a certain expectation that adding more RAM to the system should solve the problem, and when it doesn't, their annoyance only intensifies.

Having used both Linux and OS X as a desktop, I'm going to claim that the Linux VM behavior is pleasing in the ways described above, and the OS X behavior is not.

My understanding is that this is due to just one underlying behavior of the VM: When experiencing memory pressure, Linux (generally) favors evicting filesystem cache over swapping out stack/heap memory to disk, and OS X does not.

<comment><USER35> It's pretty hilarious that this is in one area in which Linux put the user first, while OS X has been plagued by the engineers saying "there is no problem" over and over again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Question: (2009 15" MBP, 8GB 1333MHz RAM, 7200rpm HDD, Mountain Lion)

I have zillions of apps open.

        1GB wired, 3.25GB active, 1GB inactive, 2.55 free

        757,197 Page Ins

        0 Page Outs

It's confusing... If I haven't "swapped out" (page out) anything to disk, then how come I've "swapped in" (page in) 750,000 pages _from_ the disk?

<comment><USER36> If you mmap a file, and then access the mmap'ed region, pulling in the pages of the file from disk is considered paging the file in. Watch the output of fs_usage to see examples of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's much, much worse for me. Things go into Inactive memory, which is fine, but then it doesn't get freed when it's needed, or else it does so very slowly. So I have 20 MB of Free memory and 4 GB of Inactive and everything slows to an unusable crawl and I have to run `purge` to get my computer to start behaving properly again.

</comment><comment><USER38> Does anyone still have a 4gb MBP? I'm still on SL and wondering if I should switch.

<comment><USER39> I had 4gb up until I upgraded to ML. After 2-3 days on ML I noticed my free memory was around 300mb. I upgraded to 16gb for $65(cheap Komputerbay ram from amazon.com). An 8gb upgrade is ~45 for crucial 1.35V ram. I think its worth it.

<comment><USER38> Cool, thanks for the advice. I didn't even realize upgrading memory was so easy. I have a 2010 unibody, and Apple claims the maximum memory it supports is 8gb. Is that not really "true?"

<comment><USER40> Dig around - the 16 gig aftermarket upgrade may have been confined to some early 2011 mbp's - the 13" for sure (mine's on the way)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am running Mountain Lion on a 24 GB ExpressCard (about 3 GB free) with 4 GB of RAM. After upgrading to Mountain Lion I am getting a "Hard disk is nearly full" message much more frequently. Almost never seen that on Lion. Could this memory management change be the culprit?

</comment><comment><USER42> Anyone did the upgrade from SL? Is a clean install always recommended?

<comment><USER43> Clean install is always recommended no matter which OS you're coming from.

<comment><USER44> Recommended by who? The mac pundits that I listen to, Gruber, Siracusa, certainly don't seem to have a problem with upgrading in place on OS X.

And, "no matter which OS" is definitely incorrect. I've done an in-place upgrade of an OpenBSD system for the better part of six years (twelve upgrades, twice a year). The _recommended_ approach on that platform is to do _in place_ - not clean install. It's how you maintain library compatibility with all your legacy apps.

<comment><USER32> I've had no more problems with the Lion machine I upgraded to Mountain Lion than I have with the two machines I did clean (USB stick, NetInstall) installs on, and the same was true when I moved from Snow Leopard to Lion.

With that said, there are fewer things that can _automatically_ go wrong in any clean install (as opposed to the things that can go wrong _manually_ with a clean install, like forgetting to deactivate Adobe CS, or that scripts accustomed to sshing in to your server don't take kindly to unannounced host key changes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > addressed the memory pun intended?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but that's funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This guys initial advice was terrible and should never have been paraded around as a solution

<comment><USER34> Really? Because it solved my problem completely. I have to reboot when my system runs out of RAM, but I'd much rather do that once every two weeks than be constantly bombarded with beach balls.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are you still on Facebook? - <AUTHOR> What are the reasons why you are still using Facebook? <comment><USER2> Three reasons:

\- Self promotion (Hey check out this thing I just wrote/made)

\- Facebook market. It's nice to have what is essentially a Craigeslist with a built in messenger (don't have to give my phone number/ email), that I can stalk who I'm buying from, and is easy enough to use that it gets high traffic. I've been doing this since before the market place when Facebook selling groups were everywhere.

\- Event discovery/notification. A lot of smaller events don't seem to have email lists, or are bad at updating their website. The facebook event is normally up to date.

Beyond that I don't really pay attention to my feed, I don't actively add people, and I've only really talk to one person via it's messenger (he won't switch to something else).

</comment><comment><USER3> Forums seem to have fallen out of style in favor of groups on FB. That's really the only reason why I use it. I follow certain niche groups and use their classifieds section heavily. Discord hasn't picked up for stuff I follow, so it's really my only option.

As far as actual FB usage is concerned, I use it maybe once a year to post something - if that. I rarely even use Messenger outside of the aforementioned groups aspect (communication for buying/selling, mainly). If friends or family need to contact me for anything meaningful, I have other mediums I use.

</comment><comment><USER4> I post nothing to it anymore, and I keep every privacy setting locked down sharing nothing with anyone.

I use it to passively see what old school friends are up to around the world and occasionally use it connect with them to meet up when we are in the same neck of the woods.

</comment><comment><USER5> Only one actually, to connect (if necessary in the future) with my old friends / classmates. I don't have most of their phone numbers or anything.

<comment><USER6> It acts like an always up to date addressbook</comment></comment>


Ask HN: For remote company, what tools do you use to manage teams and projects? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2>
      * IM: we use IRC. Yes, we know it's old. But we can and do run our own IRC server.
      * Video: Zoom
      * Source control: Github + github issues/pull requests
      * Project management: Github
      * Email: they're all kind of the same, as long as you can manage an org (all *@example.com addresses), it's good.
      * Time tracking: custom OS X menubar application
      * Fun stuff: some native apps/bots/etc. for sharing jokes/memes/screenshots/reaction gifs that we wrote to help build more a sense of camaraderie since we all live so far apart and in vastly different timezones.

We've been doing this for ~7 years now, so we're probably doing a few things right :)

[Edit: formatting]

<comment><USER3> i would love to know more about this "custom OS X menubar application". Is it on github ?

<comment><USER2> It is not - we develop a lot of our own internal tools that better suit our workflows and varied tasks, since we don't fit a traditional mold of "agency" or "startup".

In reality it's just a little window that pops up at a time you can set and has some smart defaults, and makes the resulting compiled data available at another internal web application for further analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At a Fortune500 company, I work for the Global IT departament, developing tools, providing top tier IT support, reporting, access management, change control and management, network management, contacting with vendors, doing market research etc. - we have a simple setup:

For daily work - Everything Google - Hangouts/Meet for instant chat and calling, Callendar for coordinating meeting times, Google Drive for sharing files and working together on documents. It's really not optimal, I know, I know, but we still use Spreadsheets for tracking issues (yes, we are not idiots, but we are not integrated with our vendors and we keep spreadsheets to keep track of open tickets, and projects for our little team of <10people), and GMail.

For internal tickets and problem management - ServiceNow.

For intranet - Jive.

There are two problems with these tools: e-mail is the most counterproductive tool ever. I get 100 emails daily, and they are not relevant. I would love to work on "action items" rather than mail + chat for instant messaging, and I would really like to opt out from conversation threads that I don't need to be on. With spreadsheets - of course you'd rather want to keep track of issues and messages without having to manually copy information (!), but yes, we still do it, and it's not going to change any time soon.

* I went to the office 3 times last year, and I live far away from my office desk (hundreds of miles away). From what I see most people I work with work remotely (also partners form other firms), and I cannot, I simply cannot imaginge going back. It is simply a wonderful, cost-optimal and eco-friendly solution for the 21st century. Not to mention we are much more productive as we spend virtually no time on idle chatter.

* I would be afraid of employing remotely freshmen with no previous experience, but maybe I'm wrong. I believe that 2 years in the office teaches you self discipline - getting up every morning, finishing before sunset etc. The tasks we have are measurable and simply put - if I don't do my work, it will be noticed right away by my manager. It's a perfect self-balancing mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER5> Saw this catalog of tools somewhere on HN just yesterday: [https://remotehabits.com/tools/](https://remotehabits.com/tools/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug: Carrot was built to help leaders in remote teams keep everyone on the same page. [https://carrot.io/](https://carrot.io/)

</comment><comment><USER7> We use Asana, Slack, Harvest and Wiki, with this four and some key principles of work we got it all covered.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share your key principles? Any book recommendation would be great too.

<comment><USER7> Sure, soon we will publish are internal company handbook for the public too so I will share it here! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're using:

* Trello for project management

* Notion for note taking and for internal documentation

* Standups.io for daily async video standups (we're a distributed team and use our own product for this)

* Google Drive for shared docs

* Github for source control

* Slack for team communication

</comment><comment><USER9> Zenkit with some of its integrations works well for us.

</comment><comment><USER10> Slack, jira</comment>


Computer latency: 1977-2017 - <AUTHOR> https://danluu.com/input-lag/ <comment><USER3> I'm working on a fast text renderer for xi-editor, and am similarly quite concerned about end-to-end latency. I've also experimented with the high speed camera, but my main testing rig is an Arduino that injects USB HID events and then measures light from the screen. I expect to publish results soon. One difference from Dan's results is that it doesn't take the keyboard's latency into account, as that's synthesized.

The good news is that we can get to even better results than Apple 2 by choosing pieces carefully. This is not my final result, but I'm seeing about 19ms from USB to light on a 2017 Macbook Pro 13" connected to a 144Hz monitor.

Given the unexpectedly large contribution of the keyboard, I think there is a _tremendous_ business opportunity in empirically validated actual low latency keyboards. Gamers will eat these up, but I would buy one in an instant for coding.

<comment><USER4> There are gaming keyboards with 1000hz poll rates.

<comment><USER5> Those claimed polling rates don't necessarily translate into low latency. An article that showed up here a while ago touched on that. [https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/](https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/)

<comment><USER6> It appears that the main source of latency in these tests are from key travel time, which does not accurately represent the speed of the keyboard. Gaming keyboards often has a lot of key travel before the key is triggered. This is on purpose to give better control of the key and allow for "floating" where the key is half way pressed and quickly switched between actuated and non- actuated state.

For a better test, in my opinion, the key actuation point should be determined and the timer started at that point. Of course this depends on what you want to test. But to say that a gaming keyboard is slow, just because there is more key travel, is inaccurate.

<comment><USER7> The test mentions the floating and comes to the same conclusion as i: it takes time to get to the floating position and that adds to the latency.

<comment><USER8> but this probably wouldn't feel laggy, right? because your brain is going to expect full-key-down to be the point at which text appears. especially if that point is well-expressed mechanically (eg, a click).

this would be like saying a physical kick drum or high hat is laggy, because theres a delay between when your foot starts moving and when the sound happens. (which would be silly!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least in a virtual terminal window, I'm fine with any of the reported latencies as long as the input stream is handled deterministically.

What I can't stand is typing "f" then pressing "<Enter>" in the url area of a browser, and the browser interpreting the url as "f" because "f" won the race against autocomplete's return value of "[https://foo.com"](https://foo.com"). Just hand "f" off to autocomplete and navigate to whatever the return value happened to be.

Of course it's a browser, so I'm sure someone could exploit my desired behavior to somehow mine cryptocurrencies in a hidden iframe.

<comment><USER10> Also when you type into a search field and the thing you want comes up as a succession, you go to click/tap and exactly at that moment, a different suggestion takes its place as the remote site catches up. Twitter is very bad for this.

<comment><USER11> One of the reasons i go hunt for the "search suggestions" toggle the moment i use a newly installed browser.

UI determinism to me is vital, no matter how ugly it may look to designers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a cool blog post by the JetBrains guy about text editor latency: [https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing- with-pleasure/)

He implemented a zero latency mode which bypasses many layers in the rendering stack, which apparently makes IntelliJ one of the fastest text editors.

<comment><USER13> Having used IntelliJ -- well, it's faster than a lot of other IDEs, but "one of the fastest text editors"? Maybe vim is spoiling me but everything that runs outside of a terminal feels _glacial_ to me.

<comment><USER12> Yes, as stated in the blog article, the optimizations they made put it in the same ballpark than Vim.

It's probably faster than Vim if you're using a slow terminal emulator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently imperceptible differences in latency can be felt vividly through break of habit.

A couple of years back, I didn't have any experience with online games and was introduced to a popular one by one of my friends. As we were playing some introductory matches, 400ms latency connection felt very instantaneous to me, while he felt super annoyed and advised me to change my ISP. Some months after changing my ISP and regularly playing the game, I could instinctively feel the difference between a 60ms connection and a 120ms connection.

<comment><USER15> I invented a few terms for it, Latency Sensitive or Hyper Sensitivity. I thought I was having this weird latency intolerances that not many ones has, turns out I am not alone.

Most test and site you play seems to show our maximum response rate to click at somewhere between 200ms to 300ms, with most scoring 250ms+ range. And yet we can still feel the difference. And this latency problem sometimes causes me breathing and heart beat problems when things dont align with what I expected to in response time. Sometimes doing things too quickly isn't always the best option either.

It is the same with Apple's Retina Display, 20/20 eyesight, viewing distance etc, but given those condition you can still feel the difference between a 300ppi and 400ppi.

And the iPad ProMotion is really buttery smooth, it still isn't perfect though, I am not sure what frame rate do we need to a point where we cant tell the difference.

I wish latency are taken more seriously in UX and design. Hopefully Apple will lead the pack again.

<comment><USER16> > Most test and site you play seems to show our maximum response rate to click > at somewhere between 200ms to 300ms, with most scoring 250ms+ range. And yet > we can still feel the difference.

I think when you interact with a UI (or a physical object, for that matter), you're projecting an expectation into the future _relative to your sense perception of the action_. So the ~250ms delay applies to both the action and reaction, thereby effectively canceling out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm happy to see someone thinking about latency about like I do. This Microsoft study ([https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4](https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4)) keeps lingering in the back of my mind.

The most annoying latencies I've seen so far are scrolling on Android and Trackpad mouse moving on Linux (x11).

<comment><USER18> Outlook 2016 is the pits. Microsoft should pay attention to their own research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So it's not just my imagination. My 2014 MBP feels reasonable, but my 2017 XPS 15 (top spec) Linux machine feels way, way slower. I've wondered if I somehow made poor choices in my Ubuntu config (maybe so), but now I realize it could just be in the hardware.

This reminds me of the current state of the web. There's been such a push to add more and more to pages, largely without regard for performance, that many sites take 10+ seconds to load the first time on 4G or wifi on a new, top spec Android phone. This is one area where Apple still has one of Steve Jobs's best contributions - an attention to user feel and perception. As much as I prefer an Android, iPhone just _feels_ faster.

<comment><USER20> Try the tty (ctrl+alt+f1) and see how quickly your inputs respond, its amazing how X11 and wayland (especially) add so much latency

<comment><USER19> Apparently this is it. tty is very fast, although since I have a 4k screen the drawing/scrolling rate is very slow.

I recently switched from whatever Ubuntu 17.10 is using (Gnome on Wayland?) to i3 on X.org, and there was no real performance increase that I could see.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can get a tty level experience (with the occasional ability to use a web browser), but with low latency? I obviously can't use tty when the screen is native resolution (and the text is miniscule in size).

<comment><USER21> > although since I have a 4k screen the drawing/scrolling rate is very slow.

Add "vga=normal nomodeset" to your kernel parameters, and revel in the speed (and blockiness of the font). :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have posted this in the recent latency thread too, but let me repeat it here: I have measured 44 ms on Linux WITH compositing, from mechanical input to screen output. I have a PS/2 keyboard but that doesn't actually matter too much - the keyboard model might matter.

Hardware and software info: Measurement at 90 fps (Moto G 5 slow motion camera) so it could have been up to 55 fps due to granularity. Filmed keyboard and screen together. Ubuntu 16.10 with self compiled KDE stack on master branch. Fujitsu KBPC-PX keyboard with PS/2 connection (it can also do USB). AMD R9 280x GPU with AMDGPU kernel driver and mesa master / llvm trunk. kwin (X11) window manager with compositing enabled. Editor kwrite (kate should be the same, it's a more featureful UI around the same internals). AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPU. 16 GB RAM.

Possibly one of the reasons why I like fat Linux desktop machines with AMD graphics so much is the great latency results.

<comment><USER23> Another interesting sorta-related thing I've noticed is that good applications only refresh the necessary part of the screen. The Weston compositor has a debug mode that shows colorful rectangles over repainted areas. When typing in gnome-terminal, the repaints only happen on affected characters.

<comment><USER22> AFAIU this doesn't do a whole lot in practice: OpenGL does not support partial repaints - or maybe it does with obscure extensions. What it may do is avoid updating the screen at all when a window updates only a part that is hidden behind something else.

A quite valuable and IME underused Wayland feature is clients sending an opaque region and the compositor using it to draw windows ("surfaces") without alpha blending where it isn't necessary. Alpha blending uses significantly more fill rate than plain overdrawing. Opaque regions can also be used to determine that a whole window or a region of it doesn't need to be drawn at all. I had implemented that as an experimental optimization in a customer project once. In the end it didn't work out because the 2D acceleration in Vivante GC2000 is broken garbage - they even pulled the documentation of it, but still advertise the feature in marketing material.

<comment><USER24> It isn't an obscure feature. You can implement partial redraws in OpenGL in the obvious manner, by selecting a single-buffered visual.

This of course has all the expected downsides, like tearing, and modern GPUs are fast enough that there's rarely any point--but it's certainly possible.

<comment><USER22> I had this one in mind: [https://www.khronos.org/registry/EGL/extensions/EXT/EGL_EXT_...](https://www.khronos.org/registry/EGL/extensions/EXT/EGL_EXT_buffer_age.txt)

Note that Kristian Høgsberg, for years the main developer of Wayland, is among the authors. So I guess it is actually not so obscure in the Wayland context. It tells you how many frames old the current back buffer is, so you can repaint as necessary to take it from the state n frames ago to the state now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The appendix "why latency matters" is interesting but a more current example is VR headsets where latency in adjusting the display to track head motion is directly proportional to sea sickness symptoms.

The dreaded standard HN automobile analogy is latency is like turbo boost lag where you stomp on the gas pedal on my wife's Prius and it spins the tires instantly (well, anti-spin kicks in instantly anyway), whereas my uncle had a turbo Firebird in the mid 80s, stomp the gas pedal and like 3 seconds later the turbo spins up like a sci fi warp drive and kicks you in the butt, but for the first 3 seconds it almost feels like the car stalled, kinda weird. Obviously its been over three decades so possibly the latency on a turbo Firebird was 2 seconds or 5 seconds, it doesn't really matter beyond the point that it dramatically affects drivability.

<comment><USER26> Modern turbo engines are much better but there's nothing like an electric drive train for responsiveness. The difference is that the users actually fell in love with some of the quirks unlike with latency. Petrol heads like to master things like double clutching and heel and toe downshifting and have fun doing them even though they're just ways to get smoothness despite the limitations of the drive train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is really interesting but you have to wonder whether it's measuring equal things. The measurement is

 _These are tests of the latency between a keypress and the display of a character in a terminal_

What about a mouse pointer move on a current laptop or desktop, a scroll gesture on a trackpad or a current touch device? Those feel absolutely instant to me - it seems like the optimization for latency has just moved to the more common modes of interaction. To do anything at all on an Apple //e, you had to type. To do most things with a current computer, you point.

<comment><USER28> In most systems the mouse cursor is rendered with a hardware sprite like in old games consoles. In some GUIs it's actually switched to software rendering when you resize windows so it stays synchronized with the laggier redraws.

<comment><USER27> Right, I get that, my point is increases in 'keypress to character in terminal' latency don't warrant conclusions like "Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s." Low-latency interaction is still there, it's just not in typing because typing is a less important mode of interaction.

<comment><USER29> On those old 8 bit machines, a mouse would trigger an interrupt, which would then draw the screen / move the sprite. Latency is likely to be one frame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I'm back at my PC I'll have to test this for myself. I saw a great GDC talk (my favorite one actually) about measuring "real" latency for debugging lag complaints of for Call of Duty. [https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023220/Fighting-Latency-on- Ca...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023220/Fighting-Latency-on-Call-of) \- this link shouldn't need GDC Vault access.

<comment><USER31> I agree, this is one of my top 5 GDC talks.

For measuring, if you have an iPhone, there's an app "very snappy" that works well for it, you can scrub frame by frame and mark the events to get the difference (no affiliation, just a happy user).

<comment><USER32> You're probably referring to the app 'Is It Snappy?'.

<comment><USER31> I was, yes. Good spot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One thing the article doesn't mention is that modern devices push two orders of magnitude more pixels with one order of magnitude more color bits per pixel. That requires much higher throughput, which causes much of the added latency on the display end.

<comment><USER34> while that's true, for the use case "terminal" it doesn't matter, since the information transmitted from CPU to brain doesn't change.

<comment><USER35> Well, ssh sometimes certainly feels sluggish to me. If you have your aliases configured and are typing at a high speed, you should be basically limited by your fingers.

Terminal use at this level of focus, is inseperable from thinking. You do not think to compose a command nor contemplate to move your fingers to type and execute, it just happens.

Therefore I think latency is also severely important at the terminal level.

<comment><USER36> This is not an apology for high latency, although, on the other hand, typing at the speed of thought is the main cause for rm -rf / and other similar mishaps.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Or a sign that you need more scripts/aliases

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Linux would be faster with a PS/2 keyboard, non-compositing WM, and plain ASCII Athena Xterm with a bitmap font.

<comment><USER38> Why will Linux be faster with PS/2 keyboard rather than USB keyboard?

<comment><USER39> Because PS/2 is interrupt driven whereas USB relies on the CPU polling for events.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port#Legacy_port_status_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port#Legacy_port_status_and_USB)

<comment><USER22> It's mostly irrelevant. USB uses polling internally, but the polling frequency is high and an interrupt is generated on the bus side when something has happened. I have taken latency measurements on PC hardware for a serial communication situation, and USB latency was a very small part of the problem. 1-2 milliseconds typically.

<comment><USER40> There is no separate interrupt line that devices can use to interrupt the host. All USB traffic is started by the host.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but with sufficiently high polling frequency it doesn't matter very much. (It is true that each hub may add latency, as your sibling comment noted.) Regarding the "interrupt on the bus side", I may have expressed myself badly - I meant PCI(e) bus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > 16187 mi from NYC to Tokyo to London back to NYC

This seems wrong. [https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/) has ~30,000 mi (48,000 km) from NYC -> London -> Japan -> Seattle.

<comment><USER42> > than sending a packet around the world (16187 mi from NYC to Tokyo to London > back to NYC, maybe 30% more due to the cost of running the shortest possible > length of fiber).

The author gave "as the crow flies" numbers - you might want to contact them to point out their 30% is an underestimate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The difference between Android and iOS is pretty huge and it's the reason why I'm using an iPhone instead of my previous Android device. I feel like scrolling on Android is way too delayed.

</comment><comment><USER44> Would love to see someone do this on an Amiga running Cygnus Editor. That was the fastest code editor I've ever used.

<comment><USER45> Yeah - i too wonder how an Amiga, Atari ST, or even early Mac would fare.

<comment><USER46> Would be cool for someone to reproduce these results over at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. They have heaps of old systems that you can play with.

How about the input latency of Parc Alto? PDP-7? :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> When I had my old CRT-connected Linux box -- I would kill the X server process from the text console, and it seemed that the monitor went blank even before I pressed the Enter key.

<comment><USER48> I had forgotten about that, but I've totally had this experience too. A sufficiently low-latency response feels like it has negative latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> While the high speed camera rig sounds fantastic, we actually got great results using the Mark 1 eyeball and good electronic stopwatches.

I was highly skeptical at first, to put it mildly, but won over by the accuracy and consistency of the results. Caveats: it's manual effort and you probably should have the same person measuring specific areas for repeatability.

The reason I thought it couldn't work was that I knew about human reaction times, or at least thought I knew. The thing is: most of those reported times are for unanticipated events. If you are prepared, you can get much more precision than you'd think at high levels of accuracy.

Another trick: side by side comparisons (though that requires two identical machines, so not always feasible).

<comment><USER50> I don't understand what you're proposing here. How can you measure 30-100 ms latencies with a stopwatch? My guess is that the standard deviation of human reaction time variability is at least 40 ms

<comment><USER51> My experience is that a skilled clocker can have 10ms precision if you take away the reaction times. Now a bad clocker we are talking 100-400ms off. Try for example stopping a stop-watch at exactly 10.00 seconds.

<comment><USER52> Four trials on an iPhone:

      9.85
      9.91
      10.03
      10.00 (on the dot)

I'll have to see if it can measure and display milliseconds.

<comment><USER53> Some stats for this series:

mean: 9.9475

std: 0.0826

stderror: 0.0584

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'd be curious as to what game the Gameboy Color was tested on, because that 80ms figure seems off to me. I don't know much about the joypad hardware so I'm not sure how long it would take from pressing the button to delivering the updated joypad state to the CPU, but I can tell you how long it should take once it hits the CPU:

In most games, the joypad input is scanned once per game loop, which is generally the same thing as a graphical refresh, which is set by the hardware at 60Hz. So depending on at what point in the cycle you press the button, the worst case latency for the software to detect the change is ~16ms.

Supposing this button press resulted in some in-game action, it would then take visible effect at the next screen refresh.

Now, it's common that a game loop looks like this:

        Update graphics from current game state
        Check inputs
        Update game state
        Wait for next frame

This is because the graphics ram (VRAM) can only be updated during a ~1ms window after the start of a frame. An interrupt tells you when this period begins. So the most common way to code it is to rush to do all your graphics work quickly, then spend the rest of the frame on other things while you wait for the next one.

As a result, it wouldn't be surprising if our input was delayed an extra 16ms while we wait for the frame AFTER the one where our input is detected.

So I would have expected a latency around 16-32ms - to get 80ms, either the button hardware would have to have added 50ms of latency, or the game they were using was very strangely coded, or the action the game took simply did not have any visible change on screen despite internal state changing - <USER2> example, an animation whose first few frames are the same as the standing still animation.

As an interesting additional note: If they were testing the Gameboy the same way as other mobile devices - scrolling the screen - it would be even faster. In the Gameboy scrolling is implemented in hardware - you draw tiles to a 32x32 tile memory region, but the screen is only 18x20 tiles. You can update a scroll X and Y register to pan the visible screen over the 32x32 area (this is how everything from sidescrollers to Pokemon do smooth scrolling, since tiles can only be placed on an 8x8 pixel grid). This register, if updated immediately after detecting the scroll input, would take effect immediately, even if it was midway through drawing a frame (resulting in a tearing effect which in most cases wouldn't be noticed but could be abused to produce interesting special effects). So the latency then would be 0-16ms + whatever the hardware adds.

Of course, you could pare this down further by writing specialised code that checks the joypad input rapidly instead of once per frame, or use the joypad interrupt to be immediately notified upon a button press (note this interrupt suffered from significant limitations, so no-one used it, and as far as I can tell the Gameboy Color doesn't have it at all, much to my chagrin since I'd figured out how to use it in a good way). That would likely violate the spirit of the comparison though, since you could equally program any of the other contenders to be a dedicated "fast scroll" machine.

<comment><USER54> Very late reply, just for posterity: I was mistaken about the GBC not having a Joypad interrupt. Turns out I just had a bug, and apparently misread or misunderstood something somewhere along the line that made me think that was the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've switched back to Terminal from iterm on the mac because of latency. I hate even small lag.

<comment><USER56> Try alacritty. It's primitive, written in rust, though it super quick (to be fair I have never done any measurements). At least I can use vim within it, without any noticeable lag.

<comment><USER55> Thanks but ..

        $ brew search alacritty
         ....
        Closed pull requests:
        alacritty HEAD (new formula) (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/8727)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Would be interesting to do this on a modern system running MSDOS.

</comment><comment><USER58> I especially love input latency caused by javascript event listeners triggering on every character entered into input boxes, like currently on YouTube :/

</comment><comment><USER59> Interesting. Someone should start selling a special Linux gaming distribution coupled with the right hardware. I wonder how Alienware and the likes compare.

</comment><comment><USER60> From a big systems perspective, circa 2002: [http://bitmasons.com.s3-website- us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...](http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs/latency.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER61> On seeing the date range in the title, I was hoping that latency had been pronounced dead. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case, but at least we're back down to latencies we saw in the 1970s.

</comment><comment><USER62> I wish he'd checked some BSDs while at it. They do feel so much more responsive. Do not know whether there's any factual basis to it.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is the same guy who did the keyboard latency test:

[https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/](https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/)

thay was on the frontpage of HN.

IIRC there was some critism there. He didn't include the mechanical switch type and it's actuation point and IIRC the text was very unprofessional (capitalization errors).

</comment><comment><USER64> John Carmack said years ago, "I can send a packet across the world in less time than it takes to put a pixel on the screen."

<comment><USER65> Other weird things, like it's faster to send stuff around a data center than it is to write to local disk (not just latency either, but sometimes throughput too). Actually depending on how good the network is, it's probably faster to send stuff to a _different_ data center than it is to write to local disk.

<comment><USER66> It gets really crazy when you realise that it is faster to distribute localized data in a compute cluster over multiple nodes over the network for IO than to just dump them to the local disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This article rules. And it led me to the website of the Recurse Center, which I'm going to apply to.

Where can I find more articles, such as this, with objective and practical perspectives on computing fundamentals?

<comment><USER3> Yes, Recurse Center is awesome. I did a "batch" there this fall and enjoyed the experience a lot. I got a chance to meet Dan there and we had some great conversations about latency, among other things. I recommend it, if you can get the chance.

<comment><USER67> Awesome. I don't live in New York and that part might be challenging to pull off without taking a job there, due to cost of living, but it sounds like exactly the kind of opportunity I'm looking for and ready for so I'm going to apply and feel it out. If you have any tips, I could use them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> 80ms latency on a Gameboy? That's 10fps. I call shenanigans.

<comment><USER69> Review the difference between latency and throughput. If you think of the machine as producing a sequence of pictures, and your input as affecting those pictures, it takes time for that input to show up. If you have a hypothetical machine that produces 1000 pictures per second then you can count the pictures between input and change and get the latency in ms.

<comment><USER68> GBA ran at 59.97fps with input applied next-frame. That's 16.6ms latency - much less than what OP "measured"

<comment><USER69> Well, that is a mystery. It's possible Dan is in error. If so, I'm sure he'd like to correct it.

I speculate that it's possible to measure a different value. First, it may include key travel. Second, a given program may choose to sit on an input for more than one frame (perhaps he picked a "bad" game for this test). Anyway, I highly suggest reaching out to him, because I agree this is an interesting discrepancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Missing rows in the tables are human reaction time (~250 ms) and human perceived-as-instantaneous time (~100ms).

Beyond a lot of wasteful programming, we also understand better today what we are engineering for than we did in 1977.

<comment><USER71> I don't believe these metrics, because I can certainly tell the difference between a 10ms ping and a 60ms ping in an online game. Yet there is this cat in my neighborhood that makes me think I'm deluding myself, and that I'm actually a quarter-second behind the real world.

It is a long-haired black cat. It doesn't like us. But it does like taking a shortcut through our front yard. If it sees us, it freezes. It waits, mid- stride. Then when it's satisfied we're not a threat, it starts moving again. If I move my arm or shift my body, it freezes again, sizing me up, sure that this is the day -- after all these years -- that I'm finally going in for the kill.

What's weird is _I am convinced that this cat knows when I 'm going to start moving_. It halts _before_ I move. By the time my head is moving or my arm is waving, it is _already_ frozen and on high alert.

My working theory is not that this cat is telepathic or that it has defocused temporal perception. Rather, I think that because the cat is smaller than I am, its eyes are closer to its brain, its nerve impulses don't have to travel as far, and it really and truly knows before I do that I'm moving. Otherwise I can't explain this cat's superhuman reflexes or its blatant disregard of general relativity.

<comment><USER72> It seems likely to me you're just experiencing the stopped clock illusion, especially since you mention moving your head.

When your eyes focus on something new, your brain deletes the blur from your memory and fills it in with what you start looking at. The cat could notice and stop during your refocus, and because you can't see it during that period, all you see is it already stopped and perceive it as having been stopped the whole time.

<comment><USER71> Stopped cat illusion. That might be it. I will experiment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mark Twain's Friendship with Hellen Keller - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mark-twain-helen-kellers-special-friendship.html

<comment><USER2> (Quoted from the very end of the piece, split in two because I have very important comments to make ;-)

 _Keller's praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. "I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King," she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, "I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before."_

Interesting that such a firebrand would feel that way about a king. Certainly not the standard prevalent republican view ...

 _The last words in Twain's autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller's; "You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons," he quotes her as saying, "but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist."_

If Mr. Clemens were an optimist, he'd be bitter and disappointed that a piece about him could not go to print with his name spelled correctly. As a pessimist, he'd expect it and laugh it off.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we stop linking to paywalls? - <AUTHOR> Frequently finding upvoted links to paywalled news sites, which usually ends up in a search for a similar article from a free news source. How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls? <comment><USER2> If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20paywall)

If you're seeing paywalled articles where there was _no_ workaround, please let us know (email@example.com is best). But if you're seeing paywalled articles with workarounds, that's normal. Please don't post about it, since it's off-topic and has been discussed many times. We all know the paywalls suck. It's just that HN would suck worse without NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc., articles.

<comment><USER3> Please allow a paywall tag of some kind then, and a listing of common workarounds somewhere. Then I'm sure the amount of threads about this would decrease by a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should look up the many comments about this topic by HN moderator Dang:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20paywall%20workaround&sort=byPopularity&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20paywall%20workaround&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

The decision (and community consensus) is that paywalled sites are OK if there is a known workaround.

Usually someone will post a workaround in the comments.

Usually the workaround involves [https://archive.is](https://archive.is).

If none exists, the article shouldn't be on HN and you should flag it.

Longtime HN users accept that this is the least-worst resolution to the issue.

The more-worst version would be that nothing with a paywall is ever allowed, meaning that content from some of the world's leading publications (NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, WSJ) would never be seen here.

HN could never claim to be a place for discussing the most important topics if those publications were excluded.

</comment><comment><USER5> Community discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro- payments.

Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid HN cookie with >X internet points? Or just a single subscription with the agreement that it would be scraped and self-hosted by the community?

<comment><USER6> I like this. Would be cool to start a HN News fund

<comment><USER6> Thinking more about implementation - although users could use micro- transactions among themselves, providers might be more inclined to opt-in if we offered to pay by block. For example, if a paywall article starts ranking up, we could let the provider know to remove the paywall for certain duration. Kind of like a scheduled spot instance on a Cloud VM.

I bet there's a flag that toggles paywalls on articles and is easier for providers to implement than restrictive access.

Using our fund - we could then pay the provider. Assuming that an average top HN post gets 10K views - and each user pays $.05 per viewing. That makes a total of $500. We would give the provider an upfront payment of say $500 dollars based on estimations. A $20 contribution to the fund means almost 400 articles [enough for more than a year] on front-page paywalled subscriptions for a user.

So the spiel to providers are - we'll pay you $500 for 6 hours of free article read time. That's all they need to know. We handle collecting funds on our side from actual readers.

It's actually genius because content providers can write and support articles catered to a particular community and are incentivized because they don't have to worry about conversion of users to paid subscribers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A lot of comments point to the fact that companies need to make money on the articles they publish.

However, a lot of interesting and cool stuff is posted outside of the realms of professional journalism. I mostly come here for the cool new product, an interesting blog article, or a research paper.

In my opinion, corporate journalism is more noise than good content here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why don't we, as HN community, find a solution to pay for content _before_ we take away the only legitimate, non-intrusive way to make a living from journalism. Remember Jamal khashoggi could have decided to become a software engineer and could have been drinking the SF koolaid instead of sacrificing his life.

</comment><comment><USER9> Absolutely agree. I don't begrudge news sites for charging to keep the lights on, but IMO HN as a community shouldn't be driving traffic to paid sites, especially since there will always be quite a few people who can't read any given article... who is going to have a subscription to 3, 4, 5, 6 or more news sites? That gets expensive quickly.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree with you but maybe the poster of the link sometimes forgets to be posting a paywalled page. In any case, how about making the HN submit page check the URL against a list of well known paywalls and warn the poster? There is a short list at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_utilizing_pa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Websites_utilizing_paywalls) and a longer one at [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

</comment><comment><USER11> Another option would be a convention to add a tag that the article is paywalled.

<comment><USER12> I think this is a great idea. It'd stop me from constantly clicking on items that I can't read, without affecting the discourse on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we? I'm sure it's possible.

Will we? Probably not.

FYI: F12 > application > clear all site data works like 80% of time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sooo... not to rag on HN or anything, but this seems like the kinda thing that ought to be implemented as a user profile preference (e.g. a pay-wall boolean or perhaps even a whitelist). Because without getting into a philosophical debate, whether or not a user is interested in seeing submissions that are behind a paywall is most definitely a user preference.

</comment><comment><USER15> So what if media outlets charge money for good journalism? Move on.

</comment><comment><USER16> Outline.com - however, it does not work on some sites, e.g. WSJ...

</comment><comment><USER17> Why should we stop linking paywalled articles and not books or software or other non free things?

<comment><USER18> An article is a few minutes, and we get way more out of those other non-free things. If there was a way to pay e.g. 10c to read just that article, I would do it without much thought if the opening paragraphs told me it was worth my time, but I'm not subscribing and paying every month for 0-2 articles per week that I might care about. I just move on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How dare people ask for money.

</comment><comment><USER20> Personally, I agree. I have no problem with paywalls, and actually subscribe to one paid site and wouldn't mind subscribing to more. But it can be pretty irritating for an aggregator. I go to paid sites individually, not from an aggregator.

</comment><comment><USER21> I believed that if the news outlet breaks the news that should be the link, even if paywalled. Free news outlets just paraphrase after it.

There could be a correlation of it being a pivotal article and having a paid business model.

</comment><comment><USER22> Companies need to make money somehow. If not with paywalls, it's harder for them to avoid monetizing by tracking and advertising

<comment><USER23> I assume that the companies with paywalls still advertise and track on top of that (one reason I refuse to pay for them).

<comment><USER22> Yes, that is very unfortunate. Ars Technica at least will disable trackers on paying members

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is anyone experimenting with other models than personalized advertising or paywalls?

<comment><USER25> Many countries have state funded news organisations, BBC, A(ustralia)BC, DW, etc. It's a tried and proven model but many will here will be ideologically opposed to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Absolutely. They are perfectly entitled to put their content behind a paywall but they want to freeload off the open web driving traffic to their sites as well, they're parasites.

Might also lift discussions standards (pot meet kettle) if everyone could RTFA.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think it's worth paying for good quality journalism. It's nice to support the institutions that serve a vital role to the checks and balances of our democracy.

Also, some of you may not know it but you can access the news for free through your local library. For example, I get the NY Times online via the Santa Clara County Library.

<comment><USER27> I did not know this! I would totally do this instead of going around them! Do you have more info on this?

(I do pay for those I really like, but for those in which I only read an occasional article or two, I don't particularly feel like subscribing)

<comment><USER26> Here are the details for Santa Clara County Library

[https://sccld.org/emagazines- news/?_ga=2.59104363.719460146....](https://sccld.org/emagazines- news/?_ga=2.59104363.719460146.1581470184-1919441446.1580196296)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > How much time could we save each other by not linking to paywalls?

Not very much? How much time do you really spend clicking "Back" after hitting a paywall?

Most have very simple workarounds and/or someone will post an archive or outline link in the comments.

<comment><USER9> It's not just about wasting time. Often a headline will interest me, click, oops, nope, can't read it. Some stories certainly are genuinely unique to a particular news site, but often most of the NYT/WSJ/etc. articles posted aren't exactly high-quality and something very similar can be found on CNN, AP, etc.

<comment><USER23> This is where the aforementioned workarounds come in.

<comment><USER9> Many workarounds have stopped working, due to incognito mode detection or other means. Regardless, I shouldn't have to waste my time digging around to find a working workaround when the submitter could have taken a few minutes to see if there's a similar-quality article covering the same topic on a free site.

While I'll occasionally click on an archive.is link, ethically (and legally) it's not great to mirror someone else's paid content for free.

<comment><USER23> I don't think any of us are sitting around reading articles on HN because we're optimally using our time. I'd rather know an article exists and see if there's a means to read it than never hear about it. Unless it's a piece of breaking news, there's probably not another equivalent source. It's unlikely some other source performed the exact same in-depth investigation with the same quality into whatever the paywalled piece is about.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How working remotely helped me better understand the codebase - <AUTHOR> http://smotko.si/how-working-remotely-helped-me-better-understand-the-codebase/

<comment><USER2> I can second your findings. Working remotely has its benefits as I too have found out :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Another thing that I really enjoy about working remotely is not having to deal with people as much... Talking to computers is so much easier than talking to people :)</comment></comment>