Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html?repost&m=1 <comment><USER3> What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" \-- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success.

Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area.

Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well.

I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should."

What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.

<comment><USER4> This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox.

1: on a desktop. I also regularly use FF/chrome/edge on a laptop, where FF's slowness+ power usage is possibly slightly noticeable (not very), and I also use multiple browsers on mobile, where FF clearly is behind (though it's not clear how much of that is due to FF+chrome, and how much is due to websites simply only ever testing on mobile chrome and possibly iOS - not that it does the end-user any good)

The difference between the browsers is overstated. If it weren't for vendor lock-in effects, you could use FF today and barely notice the difference.

<comment><USER5> For starters, Firefox lacks in speed, security and stability compared to Chromium and this is not a matter of opinion, but hard facts. Sandboxing is not fully implemented, there's no process/tab separation and Webkit renders most pages faster than Gecko.

The developer tools are slow, lacking in features and can reproducibly be crashed. FF is relying on broken extensions for things that should be core functionality. The "Awesome bar" is so mediocre, I wonder how it got its name.

I've been using FF for about 10 years and tried to stick with it, but there are so many quantifiable things that it's worse at that I recently switched to Chromium and it did make my life and work faster and easier.

If your statement was true, I'd still be using Firefox.

<comment><USER4> I suspect you're using many extensions. Most users do not, at least according to FF's stats.

Process sandboxing is not a user-visible feature; it's (1) a largely hypothetical security feature (hypothetical in the sense that it's not empirically obvious that complete sandboxing is better than alternatives), (2) a means to discourage locking and make the browser snappier.

Note that by now, firefox _does_ use process sandboxing, and indeed has used process sandboxing for the most critical bits (plugins-i.e. flash) for years. Benchmarks do not back up your claim that Firefox is a lot slower than chromium; nor is that my experience. For a long time, scrolling was smoother on firefox than on chrome - I often read long webpages in auto-scroll, and chrome was janky on some pages firefox was not - and the reverse was true too (although to this day, when it works, it never works as well on chrome as it does on FF, for some reason).

The FF developer tools have at times lacked some features, but there have also been features they've had before chrome, e.g. the rendered font display. I can't right now think of a devtools feature in chrome that I'm missing in FF. I certainly debug in both all the time.

For a very long time, font rendering on windows was better, and hi-dpi worked while it didn't on chrome.

Chrome's a good browser, and it's still snappier today. But the difference is really splitting hairs at this point. There are much larger differences in day-to-day usability that people put up with all the time. I don't buy that chrome's undeniable strengths are sufficient to be noticeable unless you're actively looking for them; and chrome also has bugs and issues other browsers don't; it's not a pure win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on.

That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will run you out.

<comment><USER7> Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions.

Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!

Silly Mozilla thought they were fighting hand in hand with Google for web standards when Google was fighing for ad money all along.

<comment><USER8> Firefox can cope with _hundreds_ of tabs just fine. _Way_ better than Chrome can cope with a similar workload, both in terms of memory usage and UI (Chrome winds up with tabs only a few pixels wide, with no information visible!).

Firefox's reputation is because of its history: when Chrome was new it _did_ perform really well and Firefox _did_ have serious performance issues. Chrome has been marvellous for Firefox. The sad thing about it is that these past several years Firefox has been better than Chrome in those departments than Chrome, but people aren't aware of it.

<comment><USER9> Hundreds? No way. It runs like crap with a few dozen tabs and I always have to restart it so it doesn't start slowing down and behaving badly.

<comment><USER10> I am a chronic tabber. Chrome can barely handle 20 tabs at a time on my machine (A T410 - nearly 5 years old). Firefox can chug along fine with more than a hundred tabs may be a 200. it starts to show problems only when the session restore file reaches 300mb or more. (Yes that is as far as I have pushed firefox.)

Firefox is much much better than Chrome. Only chrome can put it's foot in the door and sneak in anywhere due to Google peddling it on all its webapps as the best browser for optimal performance for google apps. Just the search and gmail page is enough to convert the unsuspecting population to think Chrome is better than Firefox.

How many of the common masses are actually aware that Firefox exists? How many of them would actually try out both browsers on their systems and evaluate and decide which is best?

There are still people who are swayed by endorsements by huge corporations as signals of quality. In their eyes, Google, which is their window/gateway to the internet, saying Chrome is good would just seal the deal.

<comment><USER11> I've pushed Firefox over to 650+ tabs before, and it has performed well enough (It has been a while since I've actually had that many tabs actually open.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who manages a 450-user IT department (academic), supporting roughly 50/50 BYOD/supplied computers, and staring at my stats, Firefox is the most reliable browser. We see %300 more problems with Chrome than Firefox.

Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or affects the academic crowd disproportionately less

<comment><USER13> I prefer Firefox over Chrome for several reasons, including usability, flexibility and freedom. Could you list down a few things that are problematic, in your experience, with Chrome but are not so in Firefox? Although it could be construed as purely anecdotal, it may provide some insight and understanding into the strengths and weaknesses of the two browsers.

<comment><USER12> Printing and PDF viewing are the most common issues we see with Chrome, doing either often crashes the whole browser. Windows 10 seems to be the most problematic OS for Chrome, we see quite a few unresolved cases where Chrome crashes before it can print on this platform. Fillable PDFs with Chrome, fuhgeddaboudit!

Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi- distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal.

For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case."

I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.

<comment><USER15> If this is your only or main issue with FF, it can't be that bad.

I tried Chrome from time to time and the endless processes eating up an immense sum of RAM (I had to add together first to realize) as well as the missing addons drove me away.

I never considered myself a participant in the ideological browser war and whenever I have to fix a computer somewhere around my friends and family (besides my parents) I left Chrome on their computers. It somehow always is there. Installed through Avast or similar. This annoying and disgusting behavior and the fact that Chrome wasn't anywhere faster or better led me to the conclusion that there is no better browser for me then FF.

<comment><USER16> I've never experienced ram issues with chrome. Is it a tangible problem that noticeably hurts experience or do you kind of have to be looking at the RAM stats to perceive that there's a problem?

I wonder if I'm missing something or am just not the exceptional case where chromes use of memory matters.

<comment><USER17> I too switched from chromium to firefox a few years ago when my system ran out of its 8GB RAM regularly.

Chromium was using about 7.5GB, it was quite noticable. I then reopened the exact same tabs in firefox, made sure they are all loaded to make a fair comparison and it came out to less than 1.5GB RAM usage. I've been a happy firefox user since then and never looked back.

<comment><USER18> Same here. Chromium with more than just a few tabs open is almost unbearable on 8GB RAM, while Firefox works well with hundreds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My neutral (?) view on firefox/chrome:

\- Firefox uses way less RAM

\- Chrome is usually faster/smoother, even if not by much. For very odd or intensive sites. And for things like dragging a tab into another window and how long it takes until inspect element loaded.

\- Firefox has Tree Style Tab, Chrome doesn't and will never have. This alone makes FF the only usable browser for me

\- I find the non-optional non-native and childish look of chrome silly

\- Some google sites like the play store and youtube just work better on chrome

For me, I use FF because of the memory, the styling and Tree Style Tabs. And I hope they keep on fighting. I understand the chrome users though.

<comment><USER20> Also using Firefox (Developer Edition) as my primary browser.

But my observations are quite different:

\- On my machine, Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome (Canary) for the same workloads and is slower

\- Chrome is way faster. As a web application developer I notice that all the time. Chrome renders faster and the JavaScript engine also processes faster. Firefox likes to crash when reloading a page that uses WebSockets.

\- I don't know your platform, but on OS X the default UI of Firefox is awful. That's the primary reason why I use the Developer Edition.

<comment><USER21> Another thing people don't seem to understand is that Chrome uses as much memory as it sanely can for the task provided. There are situations where it will use more, or less than Firefox, but I guarantee you in 99% of those situations, Chrome will be the one performing faster.

<comment><USER18> Not true in my case. Chromium often makes the system start feeling unresponsive by causing a lot of swapping, while Firefox deals well with way more tabs open and still keeps some RAM free for other apps to use. When Firefox catches some memory leak and also starts to swap, restarting it fixes the issue (but I have to say that it has become very rare nowadays), but when I restart Chromium, I have to quickly clean up unused tabs to prevent them from eating whole RAM again.

On my 8GB RAM machines, Chromium performs faster when there are up to 10 tabs open, but otherwise Firefox easily beats it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Chromium is actually a good browser. Until Servo picks up the technical slack, Mozilla will not have a browser I can afford to waste my time running. Firefox is completely unusable for me. The UI is slow, ugly, clunky, and complex. The rendering performance is abysmal. The extensions ecosystem has collapsed from a decade of API breakage, and now total deprecation. The organization is hostile and political because Mozilla lets people push their personal ideological agendas on foundation dollar.

Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things (like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general inadequacy of the product.

No amount of pleading will change any of this.

<comment><USER23> Yep, Firefox cannot play the moral superiority card when it pushes good people like Brendan Eich out for political reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

<comment><USER25> What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

<comment><USER26> Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture that they're ramping up.

<comment><USER25> Firefox has sandboxing for tabs as well, and has had it before e10s.

<comment><USER27> What sandbox are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love the Firefox extensions! (I hope they will stay for a while, using tons of quite old extensions)

Extensions that have no even chrome extension:

\- tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen

\- Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over

\- FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)

\- grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun)

\- All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar

\- tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have a chrome equivalent)

\- Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or image (might have a chrome equivalent)

\- Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/

<comment><USER29> What vi-mode extension would you recommend? Vimperator always seemed worse than Vimium (on Chrome), mainly because the scrolling is jittery.

<comment><USER28> I scroll full pages or with the mouse. But I'd really like to have a scroll marker. My not quite working attempt at one: [https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read- line](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line)

With that in working I wouldn't need smoothing much anymore and could scroll half pages without confusion.

I'm currently stuck to pentadactyl, would try vimperator again, but don't want to set it up. Would have to see how to port my pocket script and such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Keeping choices open for the future is one good reason to use Firefox. My main reason to use Firefox on all my devices is because it is much better than Chrome. It has more predictable behavior, it does not require to be connected to a major cloud, I can tweak it to my liking and I do, I can backup the configuration, and I can do advanced but necessary things such as "text reflow" on my phone.

I have switched back to Firefox one year ago, and never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER31> The only reason chromium is my primary browser is the developer tools (it's a pain to use Firefox for normal browsing, but Chromium for debugging.)

I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is close but slow).

<comment><USER25> For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tools equally, you just have to learn to use them.

<comment><USER6> No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type of thinking is often why. _Firefox makes a product and therefore should improve that product so that more people want to use it._

Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offering.

I for one also think that Chrome's dev tools are better and am 100% in the camp of wanting to see Firefox gain market share.

<comment><USER32> I think you missed the point. I for one can't stand the chrome dev tools. I use Firefox largely because i prefer the dev tools there.

So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the commenter's point which you didn't address.

<comment><USER6> You could say the same about Coke vs Pepsi, but that doesn't stop either one from trying to maximize their market share.

I think the dev tools in Firefox and Chrome are much more distinct from each other than Coke vs Pepsi, though. The last time I used the FF dev tools (which was admittedly over a year ago) they were much slower and their support for changing attributes on HTML tags inline was more limited. I think the Net tab had fewer features too but this is going back a while so my memory is fuzzy.

Even if the only difference is personal preference, what's wrong with Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences?

<comment><USER33> _Even if the only difference is personal preference, what 's wrong with Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences?_

Neither of the comments you replied to said anything about 'Firefox trying to accommodate more users' preferences'. So I don't think they had anything against Firefox accommodating more users preferences. They were just saying what people prefer is different, some people like Chrome's web developer tools more, some people like the web developer tools in Firefox more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You might want to point out this is from 2014.

<comment><USER35> This shows that the story behind is still even more relevant today. Looking at what rubber-stamping is happening with "web standards" ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Android is winning but the percentage that still use Apple is significant. Thank "the sheep" I guess...

The winners mentioned are the ones that require the most resources, so I guess they'll keep being that even with Bing, etc

I do use Firefox, sometimes it seems Chrome has more issues, sometimes it's FF, but I'd say they're pretty comparable (though FF has better dev tools builtin and it is easier to configure a proxy, because Chrome depends on a system config, which is not what I want to change usually)

<comment><USER37> Not offended, but I don't consider myself a sheep. While some see no difference between mega-corps, there are a few key things that I value Apple for over Google.

1\. The seamlessness of the ecosystem.

2\. The low rate at which products are introduced only to be unceremoniously knifed when you least expect it.

3\. The fact that I'm the customer not the product.

4\. The public stance they've taken on their customers' security & privacy, backed by concrete design decisions.

I still remember switching to Google from Altavista. I'm currently midway through disentangling my online presence from Google.

<comment><USER38> That's a false dichotomy. You can use Android together with any degree of Google integration that you find comfortable, with one extreme being the stock Nexus ROM, and the other being AOSP or derivative ROM, with no Google apps (such as Play Store / Gmail / Maps). There are open-source / self-hosted alternatives to many of those.

<comment><USER39> Great point. You can also engineer your own cell phone if you want.

But I've got enough to do. Apple phones just work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind.

They have a lot of income.

I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects.

But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.

<comment><USER41> > But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years.

Can we please stop fueling this myth?

Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something _you_ actually _need_.

For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc).

So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is _better_ isn't even true except for very specific cases.

Edit: clarify _need_

<comment><USER42> Once accustomed to browsers with more comprehensive customization it does feels rather limiting using anything else. It's the customization aspect that keeps me with Firefox coming from Opera Presto, in addition to a host of other functionality that thanks to its far more moddable nature is possible.

One of the things I love about Chromium though is the responsive and device modes of the web inspector. Top quality.

<comment><USER41> I don't responsive or mobile at the moment but I guess there is some kind of extension for that.

Remember FF extensions can be quite a bit more powerful than other extensions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Chromium is free software too, but that does not justify any usage of Chrome. If you use Chrome, you can't justify it on Chromium being open source. As for Chromium itself, it is very obvious that it is not actually meant to be used by anyone: it has no stable releases, no binary downloads (except the nightlies published by the build system), and its website is hosted on nothing else than… Google Sites.

<comment><USER43> Chromium _does_ have stable releases, they are the same as for chrome. And about every linux distribution out there ships chromium binaries, so what's your point?

<comment><USER44> His point is that nobady uses chromium, google never promotes it, and on windows you can't install a chromium binary. His point is that if chromium is that good why google is pushing chrome down peoples throat? (hint: its the ads-game).

The only reason chromium is "open-source" is that google attracts lots of talent, saying users have a choice between chromium and chrome, when in reality this isn't true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think the most effective way to get people to change browser habits, is through something compelling over a period of time. So far I don't find Firefox compelling enough nor this post. (Keep trying please, we really do need competition here)

</comment><comment><USER46> As much as I like Firefox, it's not usable on my "eco" PC (Celeron N3150, 8 GB RAM). Chrome is.

It's really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is another example.

</comment><comment> blubb-fish I absolutely believe that there is no way around the described future of Alphabet dominating the web sooner or later.

But I also believe that this is not going to be the end but instead will make it desirable again to create something new - there will be a new breed of hackers and power users creating new and alternative web based on P2P- and blockchain-technologies, meshed-networks ... I think it's going to be cool :)

(Though I'd be in favor of simply reducing Google's power - but that is simply not going to happen - no matter what browser I use and how many people I convince to use FireFox.)

</comment><comment><USER47> I will switch back when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in development for who knows how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER48> This thread on reddit captures many of the reasons why I stopped using firefox - [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_of_developing_firefox_addons/) . Extensions are what made firefox great for me, with the constantly evolving story for extensions over the years the community around building extensions appears to have dissipated.

<comment><USER49> They're implementing WebExtensions though, which is 99% compatible with FF! There's a solution coming in that regard :)

<comment><USER48> To quote Linus - "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The only thing I miss after switching Safari->FF (moved away from OSX) for regular browsing is that all 'incognito' tabs in safari are completely isolated from each other and share no cache, cookies, bla. This seems like a small thing and I barely noticed it at the time I switched _TO_ safari for all non-devtools related tasks (battery and perf was better on my lappy) but now, I do miss it.

Otherwise, I've no probs with FF these days. 49 seems solid on BSD, at least.

</comment><comment><USER51> If money can help Firefox, I think the community needs to rethink crowdfunding. A crowdfunding system should be implemented and taken to a new level. I imagine a system where features/issues are organized and funded case by case in a way a _simple_ person can "vote with the wallet" for the desired FireFox.

This is an idea for open source in generally. I know BountySource try to do it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Interesting that this blog post is hosted on googles 'blogger' domain. Not that it means much, just that it's slightly ironic.

</comment><comment> j-pb Firefox lost me when they conspired to kill WebSQL. They were the ones used the vast marked share they had to push the trendy thing of the day, namely nosql and IndexeDB, a technology which is bemoaned by web developers today.

I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that. But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of building cloud castles.

As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with.

I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is compatible.

<comment><USER53> WebSQL was never a spec. It was literally implemented as 'be bug compatible with this specific version of SQLite'. There was no way that that was going to be accepted by Mozilla and Microsoft.

<comment> j-pb There was actually an offer to turn SQlite3 into a spec under the condition that Firefox agreed to implement it. Firefox declined since they didn't want to "confuse" developers with too many options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again. It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant.

Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.

<comment> ryan-allen My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.

<comment><USER55> He stepped down himself...

<comment><USER56> At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or get fired.

<comment><USER57> Having had some (albeit very few) actual interactions with both Brendan Eich and a few members of the board, I do not think that the board was considering firing him, and I think that Brendan decided to resign entirely of his own volition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet?

Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts.

So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

<comment><USER59> did you report it?

for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.

<comment><USER60> For Firefox, that's really not sufficient. I've reported FF bugs in the past that sit unfixed in the queue for 13 years. It has disincentivized me from bothering to continue reporting them.

Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha, because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply doesn't have the bug.

Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to Firefox.

<comment><USER59> and when you trip on that chrome bug you will move to what? IE?

btw, try to disable referrer on chrome ;) ... or even set it to only send to the same domain

<comment><USER60> As I said, it'd be incentive to switch to Firefox (or actually set up that Mozilla devel dependency stack and fix the 13-yaer-old bug).

For referrer in Chromium, I think there's a flag?

[https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/c...](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/content_switches.cc?q=no- referrer+flag&sq=package:chromium&l=660&dr=C)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Surprised to see this on HN again.

BTW, Rob left in early March:

[http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving- mozilla.html](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html)

</comment><comment><USER62> Firefox was all about extensions and user control. But Mozilla has essentially decided to destroy their extensions eco system, and as a consequence lost me as their user and supporter.

I really loved and used Pentadactyl, but it's now gone and dead and so is Firefox as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER63> Can you elaborate? I've used Firefox for well over a decade, and while I'm not a heavy extension user, I haven't noticed any change in extension support for the handful I use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> My primary browser is Brave with in-built ad-blocker because Mozilla does not want to ship ad-blocker with Firefox. As ads is the most likely vector of malware distribution channel, that means that safety of users stopped to be a priority for Mozilla unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent project.

The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.

<comment><USER66> You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

<comment><USER65> I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now).

You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?

<comment><USER67> You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787)

<comment><USER65> Odd... That's _not_ on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be different for each person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I remember I used to be a huge fan of Firefox until a large sum of the plug- ins I had installed stopped working becuase the browser upgraded, this was several year ago and it was then I first decided to use chrome.

I used chrome for a long time, and I am now starting to slowly move back to firefox. One complain I now have about FF is it feels a bit sluggish compared to chrome when rendering web pages. The nightly build is however a lot better. (I am using ubuntu btw).

\</comment><comment>---edit</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Another thing I wish ff works on is screen real-estate.

[http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo](http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo)

</comment><comment><USER69> Am I the only one who doesn't seem to care about how much Google knows about my life? I am personally okay with the idea of giving away some information about my life in exchange for using some of their products (Search, Gmail, Chrome, etc) without paying anything.

Besides that, the more they know about me, the better their products get. I am personally thrilled when I open Google maps and it magically whos where I live, where I work, etc. It just makes my life easier.

I think this might be a cultural thing though, people from some third-world countries (like me) may not take privacy and freedom for granted.

</comment><comment><USER70> Chrome has a tab activated search feature for websites and custom search engines. This is super convenient and must for me. I honestly tried firefox for a month, but it wasn't as stable and I missed this feature.

</comment><comment><USER71> Even if I'm in web development I use Firefox on a day to day basis. When it comes to debug a large SPA Chrome has nicer features, but companies are not working for the commun benefit and Google is no exception.

</comment><comment><USER72> I was a long time user of Firefox, mostly because I despise how Chrome is so inflexible and has terrible interface design. Unfortunately, Firefox has continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I was tired of the browser slowing down over time, and extensions constantly breaking for no other reason but the fast release cycle.

I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough (but not as good as Firefox).

</comment><comment><USER73> I keep Gmail and a couple other permanent logins open in Chrome and do 99% of my other browsing in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER74> The article is from 2014. Though I understand the sentiment, most of the facts are false now

IIRC, Chrome was using the FileSystem API which was supported only in Chrome - hence the partial support for offline functionality in Google docs..Only recently have the specs behind Persistent Storage API and Service workers have matured. I would love to see Google docs to make use of these APIs to make the functionality available across browsers.

Also, PNacl -> Web Assembly which Google has supported.

Of course Android OSes are going to ship with Chrome as a default browser - <USER2> least you have the choice of installing a different browser if you want to. Unlike Apple, where all browsers are forced to use the same JS engine provided by Apple.

Google has been pushing web standards for a long time now - instead of platform specific APIs and saying that the internet is going to be only accessible from Chrome is stretching it quite a bit..

</comment><comment><USER75> Gnome Web works great on Linux+Wayland now, apart from lack of 1080p on youtube. Meanwhile Firefox still does not work on Wayland and is generally slow on Linux and one has to enable multi-process flags to speed it up. And even then its speed barely compares to speed of Chromium or Gnome Web.

Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit. Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2 support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.

</comment><comment><USER76> China will become the last shelter against Google's evil domination.

</comment><comment><USER77> What does Chrome offer that FF cannot match currently? What kind of convenience improvements would you need to start using FF? Developer tools not withstanding.

<comment><USER78> I find the design of Chrome to be nicer in general. Feels like there's less going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I'd use FF a lot more if it has multiple users as Chrome does. Without the ability to easily switch personas (read: projects) FF is a no go.

<comment><USER80> FF calls them "profiles" and they actually work better than Chrome's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> After years of trying, it still looks very bad on KDE, and even worse with a custom color scheme. Fix that, and I'll switch immediately.

<comment><USER55> How does it look bad for you? Or rather to say how does it look worse than Chrome, as both browsers do differ completely from the native toolkit...

Well, unless you're using something like QupZilla or Konqueror, but then this blog post doesn't really apply to you anyways.

What I personally do to make Firefox fit in more into KDE is to use the Developer Edition Theme [0], which has a Light and Dark variant, so looks reasonably not-out-of-place for Breeze and Breeze Dark.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition- th...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-theme- enabler/)

There's also this user-style to fix theming issues, which is what I guess you're saying when you refer to a custom color scheme making it look even worse: [https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming- issues](https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's too bad Firefox becomes more terrible each year. Just today I was struggling with the god awful history sidebar.

</comment><comment><USER82> I stop use Firefox due to Brendan Eich story.

<comment><USER83> Did you stop using javascript as well?

<comment><USER82> I started using FF since 0.7 version guy, I switch to chrome after the internal Mozilla stupid polemics for Brendan marriage position. Open web? please, do me the favour..

<comment><USER83> So even though Eich stepped down over the issue, and gay developers said that the work culture at Mozilla did not represent Eich's position at all, you switched browsers?

The LGBT folks won that battle. If you don't switch back, then you've hurt their cause. OkCupid did this - they made a big song and dance about boycotting FireFox, intruding their political message into all their users' lives... and when the LGBT side won, not a peep out of OkCupid to repair the damage they'd done. Some others did similar things - appearing righteous was more important to them than actually being mature. If you don't stop the boycott _after you 've won_, then the problem is with you.

(note: I am actually very pro-gay rights, but the actions of some around the Eich debacle were as deplorable as he was)

<comment><USER61> Are you seriously contending that collective punishment (I mean punishing a group based on judgments against one of its members; and the corollary collective reward) is moral, efficacious, or both?

So all the lemmings who dropped (or just said they would drop) Firefox while I was CEO were obligated to rush back on board once I left? What about the various right-wingers who #nozilla'ed and otherwise boycotted after I left?

How about using the best browser in the market, built by people of diverse opinions and high ability who come together to do excellent work?

There's a good idea that seems to appeal to many people, of whatever various and diverse beliefs.

Try [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/).

<comment><USER83> Don't put words into my mouth - I made zero comment on the morality of the initial action, only on the morality of people who don't clean up after themselves.

I think that your position that gave rise to the debacle was indeed deplorable, but at the same time, boycotting Mozilla was the wrong thing to do. I didn't support the boycott, because it was striking at people unrelated to the issue at hand.

Finally, if you're conducting a specific action _on the basis of a moral position_ , then yes, you are _morally_ obligated to reverse yourself when you win. It's the point of taking a moral position in the first place.

<comment><USER61> I didn't put words in your mouth. Your words were "If you don't switch back, then you've hurt their cause." Or now, a negative judgment on "the morality of people who don't clean up after themselves."

Thanks for writing more about your position. I appreciate that you don't endorse collective punishment. However, I still do not agree with your collective judgment of those who may have boycotted Firefox on account of me for not returning after I left. They could have found other reasons not to switch back, having tried another browser. I heard directly from some people who had exactly that experience.

It seems to me we disagree on obligations based on reactions. That's ok, peace. I suggest that cause and effect, action and reaction, are not as simple and Newtonian as you seem to say. Not only might people who left Firefox while I was CEO have found the grass greener -- some might have changed their minds and then become appalled by post-me Mozilla, and not come back on that basis.

As with the grass-is-greener cohort, I know a few folks in this category. One example: [https://twitter.com/theHirad/status/547588240895528960](https://twitter.com/theHirad/status/547588240895528960). Here is another point of view, but I'm not sure whether a change of mind preceded it: [http://jeremiahlee.tumblr.com/post/81652982229/9-quick- thoug...](http://jeremiahlee.tumblr.com/post/81652982229/9-quick-thoughts-on- equality).

I think such thoughtfulness over time, rather than hurting "their cause", does it individual/piece-wise credit.

People are not simple machines, ya know! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Anybody know if there is an Electron or NW.js for Firefox.

Also, when is Firefox going to let me style scrollbars?

</comment><comment><USER85> Firefox Reader View feature with audio narration is the best! And no other browser has it!

</comment><comment><USER86> Most people I know that use iOS stay with Safari itself. They dont even install chrome.

</comment><comment><USER87> I think it's an extreme pov; Since Chrome is Open source we need not worry :)

<comment><USER53> Technically, Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Switched to FF back some time ago (from Chrome).

Still a CPU and power hog on Windows 10.

But still love Tab Tree.

</comment><comment><USER89> But Firefox is soo slow on Linux...

</comment><comment><USER90> but i like Chrome

</comment><comment><USER91> Question: In this future without Firefox, what becomes the default browser in Linux distributions? I won't claim that I know what every distro uses, but every one I've ever installed has had Firefox or some derivative of it included.

<comment><USER28> Konqueror or something. But in Linux there is no shortage in sweet little browser projects. Interesting would be which engine and if it can profit from a big enough audience for a variety of extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I use Safari on Mac because it's good enough and I use Chrome anywhere else because I am used to it and it's also good enough.

I need simple,stable and fast. I do not really care about features or security at this point.

</comment><comment><USER93> To all the Firefox apologists.

I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make Firefox better.

</comment><comment><USER94> We don't have a choice anyways - FireFox is now Chrome. Even if you don't have Chrome installed on your computer, the second you open FireFox, you'll see plenty of chrome processes spawning.

</comment><comment><USER95> I can't take anyone serious who rants about google's marketplace dominion but can't seem to migrate from blogger to wordpress self-hosted. Sorry, it's just overly ironic, and it's also hard for me to take bloggers on blogger serious as there's a lot of crap blogs on there. Every dominant player eventually falls, Microsoft owned the browser, search, email, docs, and os back in 2000 -- now they're practically irrelevant.</comment>


Tim's watch is broken - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=54028

<comment><USER2> Hehe, nice to see the google chaps having a laugh</comment>


My Christmas gift to OOP aficionados - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/smalltalk-talk/make-smalltalk-great-again-images-7cb21cd10623 <comment><USER2> Saving you a click, it's just a bunch of pictures of hot air balloons with 'Make Smalltalk Great Again' written on them (often barely readable due to color and font choices)

<comment><USER3> I think those pictures are rather cool. Some of them blow me away!

Yes, it's just "a bunch of pictures." That's his gift to us.

The backstory about how hot-air balloons came to be Smalltalk's logo is interesting.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startups' wishlist? - <AUTHOR>

Inspired by #30 on YC's "Ideas We'd Like to Fund": What service(s) do startup founders wish existed and were done in a startupy fashion? Equivalently, what needs do most startups have in common that could be abstracted and simplified by single startup? <comment><USER2> Administrative help. Necessary HR functions, an affordable group health plan. Legal advice/framework. Recruiting. Doing it right is a huge hassle (I've been there) and it takes away from getting the product out the door. A couple of things that I've seen friends get bitten by are lack of a formal agreement between partners and lack of formal work-for-hire agreement for contractors.</comment>


How Do Startups Identify the Competition? - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2012/09/25/how-do-startups-identify-the-competition/ <comment><USER2> Good perspective by Mark on keeping your friends close and your competition closer.

"By having a good understanding of how rivals are operating, startups can get a better handle on the opportunities by offering a better, different or less expensive product."</comment>


The Single Particle Double Slit Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/double-slit-empzeal/

<comment><USER2> Why not call everything parwaves? Or waveticles?</comment>


Researchers discuss the challenges posed by science's embrace of English - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01797-0 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I believe this paragraph:

> I've worked on many multinational collaborations, and I notice that European > researchers often speak to each other in their native languages. However, > it's relatively uncommon to see Chinese or South Korean scientists talking > to each other in their own language in an academic setting away from their > home country. They just don't feel comfortable.

In my experience, Chinese are one of the most likely to form little cliques with their compatriots when abroad (and speak their own language while at it). They're not the only ones to do so, but they definitely seem to do it more than average.

<comment><USER3> I hear equal amounts of Mandarin, Hindi, and Portugese around my current lab. Honestly, the people least likely to speak their native tongue are the few Germans floating around. So my personal experience is closer to yours than that expressed in the original article.

<comment><USER4> Germans (stereotypically) prefer to speak English poorly over speaking German if there is the possibility that a non-German listener might be interested, the other's German is not 100% perfect or the other is a german wanting to learn english.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article brings some pain points that many people might recognize, I know at least one brilliant chemist that had professorship delayed by about a decade or two. The thing is - that actually might be fair because if you need to teach your students in English you should learn it and be good at it, but how good speaker one has to be to tech chemistry, huh. Maybe the faculty was too hard there, who knows, but sometimes your country of origin might also play a role and not just the language proficiency. I think that some discrimination happens even at that high level of academia.

</comment><comment><USER6> If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific translation seems to have declined significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. I wrote a Stack Exchange post about locating translations of scientific articles and few of the sources I mention are currently active:

[https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143)

The rise of English as the lingua franca of science certainly would lead to less translations being produced, but I don't think it should reduce to near zero as it seems to have. Today there's still valuable research that's not published in English.

During my PhD I published several translations (all produced via Google Translate and manual editing) and consistently people thought this was some weird quirk of mine. But I enjoyed it and learned quite a few things I would not have known otherwise.

<comment><USER7> It used to be required that PhD students (even in the sciences, and in the US) had to demonstrate written understanding of at least one foreign language. When I got my doctorate in microbiology in the 1990s that rule was still officially on the books, but not enforced. But certainly before WWII and even into the 1960s there was a lot of research being published in Russian, French and German besides English. Even today, China still publishes many Chinese- language journals which go mostly untranslated.

<comment><USER8> They had this requirement at KU in the 90's, but a computer "language" satisfied the requirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those > gates closed, we're missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good > research.

I'm always baffled with how disjointed and chaotic the global science community seems. Why there isn't something like Facebook for science? Are there grants for solving meta problems like this?

One interesting fact about using a foreign language: There is a research saying that lying in a foreign language is easier. English is not my mother tongue so don't take this for granted :D

<comment><USER10> Given the number of speakers of English in the world there really is no alternative to English - maybe Chinese, but I doubt anyone in the world outside of China thinks that it is easier to read Chinese than English.

Of all the problems Science faces the language used is the least of our problems. Little things like funding, insecure tenure, and the immense publish or perish pressure are what we need to be looking at.

<comment><USER11> English has additional advantage of being painfully simple logical, grammar- wise. There's only a handfull of grammar rules to learn, and they are pretty consistent, exceptions are quite rare. This helps to write clear and concise text, unlike languages like, say, Polish, which evolved when Poland was under foreign rule for over a century, and for that reason it is deliberately cryptic and ambigous :)

<comment><USER12> English painfully simple, grammar wise? Wait until you tried constructed language like Esperanto or Ido.

<comment><USER13> Eh the hard parts of English arise because it likes to mug languages in dark alleys and pick their pockets for spare grammar and vocabulary.

This makes it difficult to form a unified theory of the language. The more elegant your rules, the more exceptions there are.

But it's also a super power. It makes the language feel more familiar to just about anyone who speaks an Indo-European language. There's something homely and welcoming in english for anyone.

And the readiness with which english adopts foreign vocabulary when practical is simply inspiring. You can introduce basically any word from any language and make it stick.

And then there's Slavic languages where at least in mine, every verb or pronoun can come in one of 20 or so different forms. Nouns have 20+ different forms too.

Not expecting Slovenian to become lingua franca of anything any time soon. It's just too hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've written various things in English (papers, thesis, abstracts, etc.) and I loathed using that language every step along the way. English is such a clunky language for communication, especially in science.

-It has loads and loads of words, many of them overlapping with subtle differences that go over the head of many non-native speakers yet still carry some kind of difference between intended and perceived meaning. Some of them are just synonymous, such as Latin/Germanic cognate couples (godly vs. divine, tiredness vs. fatigue, etc.), and you just sort of have to learn them all if you want to understand everything you read or hear. So you apply yourself and it turns out that you're still not understood because the vast majority of the community doesn't speak English as a first language either and also has trouble understanding one or the other form you're using.

-Its pronunciation and spelling is completely wild and inconsistent. You can't guess how to pronounce a word you first encounter. And in scientific and technical presentations there are a lot of such words! This doesn't even take into account the various accents within native English speakers (I'm somehow supposed to be able to understand both the Californian and Australian accents no matter how nerve-rattling they sound) and non-native speakers (who also have the same trouble pronouncing new words as I do, except they'll mis-pronounce it differently than I would).

-The way sentence structure is designed favors the apposition of many different words without any preposition, leading to ambiguities. This is of course exacerbated in papers with absurd word count constraints that must somehow fill the needs of print journals despite the fact that 99% of people read them online. It also makes for very terse, opaque and generally tedious reading. The only thing more annoying than reading a paper is writing one, because you're also going to have to write in the same opaque style in order to squeeze as much information as you can in order to fit your 3 year project's worth of discoveries into a 1500 word Nature letter.

-It's unfair that non-native speakers be discriminated on peer-review based on the quality of their English. Reviewers and editors like to pretend they're unbiased but they're not. The quality of the work is independent on the author's ability to write in a foreign language. I'll readily admit that judging someone based on their mastery of a language is not unique to English speakers but this particular situation is especially egregious since most native English speakers do not, in fact, speak any foreign language.

-It's generally a constant reminder of the cultural hegemony held by the US and Anglo-Saxon countries in general. Native speakers are advantaged since they have to learn less and are still less discriminated; scientists flock to Anglo-Saxon universities despite other ones being as competent if not more, but less well-known; the top journals such as Nature or Science are either British or American, reinforcing this bias. Univerisities ratings are often based on publications in these Anglo-Saxon journals, further deepening the bias. And lastly, Anglo-Saxons in general (and Americans in particular) have a very strong Not Invented Here syndrome whereby anything that was discovered outside the anglosphere is disregarded or met with much more skepticism than usual. Every so often an American paper comes out touting a new innovative "amazing" method that will completely revolutionize a field despite the principles having been discovered years before but outside the land of the free. It's frankly annoying.

<comment><USER15> What is your first language?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any benefit to having competitive languages?

It seems it would only make communicating ideas harder.

Culture? At what expense?

<comment><USER5> Competitive languages would hugely hinder the progress. Consider this: Mendel discovered the field of genetics but Darwin wasn't even aware of his work mostly because it was published in German, so we should be glad that the lingua franca of today is a relatively simple language as English, although I might had preferred Anglish if that was available - [https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf](https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf)

<comment><USER17> Whatever the problems of having a lingua franca for science are, the problems of _not_ having one are much worse. Weird that Gordin is the only respondent to even mention this.

<comment><USER18> That is the obvious advantage that everyone knows, only tangentially related to the issue at hand: the _challenges_ of being forced to work in a non-native language.

<comment><USER17> It's not at all tangential. It is the core of the problem. Any 'solution' or 'improvement' needs to understand and acknowledge the benefits of monolingualism. Look at Dharwadkar, who is calling for breaking up monolingualism without any consideration of the costs, or Sheridan, who advocates for more handholding by professors (because they have so much free time as it is?), or her example of an Indian professor: if the paper is so badly written that it cannot be understood despite many revisions, then how is it supposed to add to scientific knowledge? (It's not like scientific journals have very high standards for prose as it is, so that paper must have been gibberish at the start.) Consider this quote:

> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those > gates closed, we're missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good > research.

OK, so let's say we switch to having everyone publish in their own native language because gosh we wouldn't want to be _gatekeepers_. Now instead of one 'gate', we have... hundreds, because everyone has to learn every language or else they are being 'gatekept'. Oops.

This pervasive error, this nirvana fallacy, of praising only the benefits of multi-lingualism, renders the entire discussion moot. It's a tissue of complaints and buzzwords.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The major advancements in Deep Learning in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://tryolabs.com/blog/2016/12/06/major-advancements-deep-learning-2016/ <comment><AUTHOR> In a nutshell: \- Unsupervised Learning (GANs) \- NLP (JMT, DCN and GNMT) \- Community (OpenAI, Partnership on AI, Open Source tools)</comment>


Nick Damiano Wins Long Bet That the Large Hadron Collider Wouldn't Destroy Earth - <AUTHOR> http://blog.longnow.org/02018/08/03/nick-damiano-wins-10-year-long-bet-that-the-large-hadron-collider-wouldnt-destroy-earth/ <comment><USER2> So how was Damiano supposed to pay the other guy when the earth got destroyed?</comment>


On Hiring Haskell People - <AUTHOR> http://www.well-typed.com/blog/43 <comment><USER3> This is an interesting read. One part jumped out at me (sorry for the long quote)

 _The purpose of the technical problem was to assess more directly candidates ability to write Haskell programs that can be used to solve real world problems, where memory usage and performance are important. The problem was all about evaluation order and memory behaviour. We started by asking candidates to look at a short program and say what shape they would expect the heap profile to be. That would then lead on to a discussion of what things are evaluated at what stage and how much memory they are taking in the meantime. For the final step we asked candidates to rewrite the program to run in constant space. We felt overall that the technical problem was quite useful and we allowed it to become a significant factor in our final decision making process._

 _The choice of problem is based on our belief that a good understanding of evaluation order is very important for writing practical Haskell programs. People learning Haskell often have the idea that evaluation order is not important because it does not affect the calculated result. It is no coincidence that beginners end up floundering around with space leaks that they do not understand._

I've written a lot of C++ and a fair amount of Haskell, and this kind reasoning about the evaluation order and space usage of Haskell a program is no less of a black art than pointer arithmetic or manual memory management in C++. In both cases, it's too steep of a learning curve to just be able to write practical programs, which is why garbage collected languages have displaced C++ in many domains.

It's particularly damning to say that "good understanding of evaluation order is very important for writing practical Haskell programs" because the easiest evaluation order to understand is strict evaluation order. In that sense, lazy evaluation is to strict evaluation as manual memory management is to garbage collection, except that the latter is supposed to be an improvement on the former.

<comment><USER4> I see one major difference: a Haskell program with optimization mistakes will run slowly and waste memory, its performance will improve as you fix them, and eventually you can stop because it's sufficient. A C++ program with any memory mistakes whatsoever will blow up randomly, and will continue doing so after you give up trying to make it perfect (which is hardly ever feasible) and ship unstable crap like the rest of the industry.

<comment><USER5> That's not entirely true. A haskell program can also fail in unpredictable ways thanks to lazy evaluation and memory exhaustion. It's probably still easier to pinpoint the source of the problem than it is to track down memory corruption in C++.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's true that performance can be so poor that the Haskell program can't get any useful work done. I was trying to express the spectrum from "perfect" to "tolerable" to "pretty bad" (and "unusable" does belong at the far end), where all the old unchecked languages only offer a cliff between "perfect" and SIGSEGV (or "random output" if you're really unlucky).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The next Haskell will be strict_

-Simon Peyton Jones

[http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/appsem- slides/peytonjones.pp...](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/appsem- slides/peytonjones.ppt)

The latest research fads in CS aren't always beneficial.

<comment><USER7> "The next Haskell will be strict

-Simon Peyton Jones"

True, he does say that but the slides you reference show a more nuanced position than implied by that isolated quote.

Insisting on laziness forced the Haskell designers not to add side effects, eventually resulting in monads (slides 22 and 23), which ended up with Haskell programs having a "thin imperative shell over a fat pure core" internal structure. (slide 32).

SPJ _then_ concludes that (1)purity is more important than laziness, (2)the next ML will be pure with effectful programming only via monads and (3) the next Haskell will be strict, but still pure (slides 39 , 40). (the differences between "the next ML" and the "next Haskell" are worth pondering)

It is _through_ insisting on laziness as default and solving some of the problems encountered (via monads for e.g) that he arrived at the position that "the next Haskell will be strict". He also notes some open problems with adding laziness into a statically typed strict language (slide 40 "Still unclear exactly how to add laziness to a strict language. For example, do we want a type distinction between (say) a lazy Int and a strict Int?").

So yes, you are right that "The latest research fads in CS aren't always beneficial." but in this case it seems to have been (beneficial).

As someone maintaining a 20 k+ line Haskell codebase on my "day job" ("20,000 lines of Haskell is enough to bootstrap SkyNet" - OH on Twitter), I would appreciate a "strict-by-default-Haskell" (with an ML like module system too, while you are at it, thanks in advance!), but really Haskell is certainly more "beneficial" than any other language I've seen to date for certain types of programs .

Not contradicting your position,just qualifying it a bit.

<comment><USER8> _Haskell is certainly more "beneficial" than any other language I've seen to date for certain types of programs_

Could you unpack that? I'd love to hear what types of programs Haskell phenomenal at, in comparison to others.

<comment><USER7> This (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909331>) is what I am doing - <USER2> "type of program" suited to Haskell, very algorithmic, lots of data munging, distribution, parts with proofs of correctness, compiler like pieces and so on.Can't be more specific in public - sorry about that .

As for Haskell the language vs others in general, I personally like the combination of high abstraction, static typing and raw speed. Besides (like lisp?) it seems to be a productivity amplifier for very small teams of very sharp people, which is my situation.

<comment><USER8> No worries, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They were looking for someone with experience in a client-facing role, but conducted the interview over IRC. This means they couldn't assess that person's body language etc. An odd decision IMO.

<comment><USER10> If Well Typed is like other consulting shops I know of, "client-facing" means "email and IRC".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised that such quality control would be required with Haskell developers. I would have thought that people with such a skillset would clearly be sufficiently motivated and capable such that filtering based on fairly rigorous criteria would seem to be unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it would be usefull to gather this kind of commented experience about evaluation order and memory behaviour in a little book of case studies (or several blog posts). There are some slides by dons and book chapters in RWH, but it is still something difficult.</comment>


Ravelry, the Facebook of knitting, has banned pro-Trump posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/24/ravelry-facebook-knitting-has-banned-pro-trump-posts-over-open-white-supremacy/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20259012)

</comment><comment><USER3> I, for one, am really glad to see people acknowledging the moral responsibility they have as operators of a public† speech platform and social community. Technology has no morals except for those of its owners.

† By "public" i mean "accessible to" not "paid for by".

<comment><USER4> Presumably you'd have been equally OK if they banned any other political speech too? Under the same guise of moral responsibility of course.

<comment><USER5> If Obama had been a racist, promoting regressive policies... Definitely ! Did you just make a false equivalency?

<comment><USER6> I understand the angles, but it's a fair question. A fair question to which you gave a fair answer. I don't see any false equivalence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This white genocide stuff he seems have more than a passing interest in is really disturbing to me. Yet somehow we just gloss over and ignore it as if it never happened.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps they should ban all political discussion. It's a knitting forum, after all.</comment>


You Could Be Kicked Offline for Piracy If This Music Industry Lawsuit Succeeds - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywk9wm/you-could-be-kicked-offline-for-piracy-if-this-music-industry-lawsuit-succeeds <comment><USER2> To get in trouble for piracy, you need to:

A) live in a country where surveillance is huge (America, UK). This simply wouldn't happen in a 3rd world country.

B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who litigators / law enforcement go after the most.

C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.

D) Actually be worth the cost of a legal trial, meaning you have to respond to the email/notice, have the money to pay them, and be downloading so much they're somehow losing money.

If you don't tick 100% of these boxes you will almost never be caught. Piracy isn't a big deal on an individual basis because people who do it were never going to buy the content even if they got forced to. If anything, they're doing your product a favour by checking it out and probably buying it in the future. Or it's a warning sign that you need to get your shit off of HBO and onto a more accessible platform. So nah, this lawsuit will change nothing. All it does is take away point C of the above list.

Now, can you be kicked off the internet for this new law? I don't know the ins and outs but the reason i see that not happening is because ISPs would lose a huge amount of customers and would lobby against that hard, among reasons stated in the article. Anyway don't panic, the internet is still a wild west and nothing is going to change that anytime soon.

<comment><USER3> I liked the pragmatic response in NZ to robo lawsuits. Requesting an ISP lookup of someone's details cost $20 (some years ago, not sure of current price).

In practice although rights holders might claim that damages were $lots, except in the most egregious cases no-one found it worth $20/user to initiate "legal action".

<comment><USER2> That's interesting, thank you. If i torrent 1 movie from netflix, that's only worth about $12 (or whatever monthly subscription). Ignoring all other factors that would make it not worth it to litigate (not a legal court case but just send a letter to an ISP), this is still not worth $20.

<comment><USER3> I just looked it up as my memory of the process was from an ISP friend over beers several years ago.

It seems the enforcement fee is currently $200 from the rightsholder: [https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and- fe...](https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-fees/)

Damages are capped at $15k and awarded by the tribunal as per: [https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing- in...](https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing- infringement/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This already exist since years in france: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law)

In practice less than 20 peoples have been disconnected because of this law in 9 years

</comment><comment><USER5> "So far, the music industry has yet to challenge bigger players with deeper pockets like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon, though these giants are likely watching the case with great interest for liability reasons."

In a better world those larger ISPs would pony up, band together and help out the little guys, in their own enlightened self-interest, a la Newegg.

But they probably see it in their thuggish self-interest to let the little guys be sued out of existence, and take over those customers. And then they may start fighting this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't see why this method in particular would be a problem with regards to achieving the goal. Enforcing copyright laws through traditional lawsuits and criminal law enforcement has been, by and large, a failure. We do need a change in the enforcement methods, as it's very clear the laws will not be adjusted to match the reality of rampant piracy.

In the end, changing the method of enforcement it's just another method to make law and reality match up (as opposed to changing the laws to reflect reality).

<comment><USER7> What? Rightsholders aren't going to respond to reality, so in order to let them continue to ignore it we should ramp up enforcement methods, further isolating rightsholders from being forced to deal with it?

How does this make any sense?

<comment><USER6> There's no realistic way to combat the heavy lobbying that's going on around intellectual property questions, copyright in particular. Thus, to make reality and laws match, enforcement must be adjusted instead.

<comment><USER8> You say you "don't see the problem" because you see no way to fix things. The problem does not cease to be a problem because of that.

<comment><USER6> I've made a clarifying edit. Maybe this helps capture what I'm trying to say.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Activision Blizzard Begins Massive Layoffs - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/activision-blizzard-begins-massive-layoffs-1832571288 <comment><USER2> A strong example of corporate double-speak:

> Meanwhile, in a press release to investors this afternoon, Activision CEO > Bobby Kotick wrote: "While our financial results for 2018 were the best in > our history, we didn't realize our full potential. To help us reach our full > potential, we have made a number of important leadership changes. These > changes should enable us to achieve the many opportunities our industry > affords us, especially with our powerful owned franchises, our strong > commercial capabilities, our direct digital connections to hundreds of > millions of players, and our extraordinarily talented employees."

We did great! But we can do better with the help of our "extraordinarily talented employees"! Many of whom we are laying off!

<comment><USER3> Pure speculation: Given their doubling down in the Asian market by partnering with NetEase, I imagine that a lot of jobs (or that money) is going off shore to fund development, marketing, and sales there.

<comment><USER4> Expansion of contract employees as well I'm sure. Which is pretty common in the gaming industry as far as I can tell.

TBF that makes sense for a lot of gaming projects. Its tough to keep an FTE artist when all the art for a project is completed, but it doesn't really make for a great environment for talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In an time where Activision/Blizzard is making billions (with a "B") of dollars of profits annually, layoffs seem a bit out of place.

<comment><USER5> In every large company there are always excess personnel, or departments or individuals who are not performing. I'm sure there are other large companies that semi-regularly fire a single digit % of their workforce, but because they are not games companies it doesn't hit the news.

The redundancies are mostly in 'publishing and esports', by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember being in middle school when Blizzard mentioned they were being bought by Activision on the Warcraft III strategy website ([http://classic.battle.net/war3/](http://classic.battle.net/war3/)). There was some mention of Vivendi, and I had no idea what it meant; I was an idiot and knew no economics, but it was clear from the wording of this announcement that WCIII and other RTS games would not be their focus. Then WoW staganation came, and blizzard pretty much gave up on SCII (see 2012) and on Diablo III (various things).

It has been interesting seeing Blizzard slowly become a shell of its former self.

<comment><USER7> It's unfortunate, as Blizzard used to be one of my most respected companies as some of the core attributes to their games was their high degree of polish unseen in many other developers.

Now it's increasingly being eaten by micro-transactions and riding popular franchises.

<comment><USER4> Looking back though, they might have made the right choice. So many respected PC gaming shops either closed or were consumed, chewed up and spit out. To name a few off the top of my head: Westwood Studios, Black Isle Studios, Looking Glass Studios, Rare. Making games is just excruciatingly hard and really tough to make into a consistent business model. Blizzard positioned themselves pretty well all things considered, but one can't help thinking the quality of their games might be at another level if they stayed away from Activision. But on the other hand Activision might have kept them alive. Let's not forget Blizzard put a lot of time into some big IPs that never even saw the light of day (Starcraft: Ghost and Titan).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135559).

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it just my imagination or has there been a major uptick in layoffs lately?

<comment><USER10> The next recession is on its way.

<comment><USER11> While the warning signs are definitely there for a new recession (especially Brexit, the whole Trump vs China fiasco and China's own economical problems), the recent layoff wave that GP alludes to was rather certain "new media" outlets discovering that their business model was not as profitable as thought.

The Activision Blizzard case here is just short-sighted corporate greed. "Best financial results in history" but the bonus coffers of the C-level executives are not filled enough it seems.

<comment><USER12> GM had some big layoffs recently as well.

<comment><USER11> I definitely count this one as Trump-caused and not by natural economic causes, though.

<comment><USER4> Steel tariffs will probably have some pretty wide-ranging effects that I don't think we've totally seen yet.

<comment><USER11> Sure but they're the first thing I expect a Democrat-led government overturning in 2020.

The only thing saving us from an all-out (trade) war is that international leaders are wise enough to see Trump as a temporary disturbance which has to be endured for only one and a half more years until sanity takes place in the US government again.

<comment><USER4> I would put money on that bet as well, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't speak up about the long-term ramifications of these tariffs still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They lost the battle to create a successful Battle Royale!

Epic is making more money with Fortnite alone!

And the new game (Apex Legendary) had a successful start as well which is created by people behind the old Call Of Duty series!

</comment><comment><USER14> Feels like Activision is keeping Blizzard from making content. Content that players would gladly pay for.

Hope they atleast get to keep their phones... shame really I assume they don't fire the management first...

<comment><USER15> Only esports and "publishing" is going to be cut from Blizzard, supposedly. I'm not sure what publishing means precisely. Game development isn't being cut, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How often is this occurring? I feel like we've been seeing lots of massive game companies releasing big titles, reaping huge profits, and then they fizzle and start laying people off.</comment>


Why You Shouldn't Send your Brand New 27" iMac to MacSales.com/OWC For Upgrades - <AUTHOR> http://benradler.com/macsales-com-27-imac-ssd-esata-upgrade-nightmare-owc-other-world-computing/

<comment><USER2> Won't comment on OWC but sending anything off to anyone with "many projects" due in eight days sounds a little risky.</comment>


I made a site that lets you visualise sorting algorithms with sound - <AUTHOR> https://caspervonb.github.io/toneofsorting/ <comment><USER2> Oh wow this is really cool!

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice XD</comment>


Writing a Unix Shell – Part II - <AUTHOR> https://indradhanush.github.io/blog/writing-a-unix-shell-part-2/ <comment><USER2> If you want to learn more about writing a shell from an undergraduate coursework perspective (and far closer to how bash does things), this is a chapter entirely on writing your own shell: [https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/grr/SystemsProgrammingBook/B...](https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/grr/SystemsProgrammingBook/Book/Chapter5-WritingYourOwnShell.pdf)

That PDF covers the basics of making your own shell (i.e. splitting input into tokens aka using a lexer, parsing the resulting tokens aka using yacc [a token parser], I/O redirection, piping, executing commands, wildcarding, interrupts, environmental variables, history, subshell, revising what you've typed without having to retype it, etc.).

Every undergraduate CS major at Purdue University is required to do the infamous shell lab (essentially, recreate csh). This project really taught me how shells work. Before doing this project, I could do the minimum in shells, but now I'm fairly competent at it.

<comment><USER3> I would not recommend using a lexer/parser generator for writing a shell, especially if you want to support things like backquote substitution and here- docs, since parsing and evaluating are interleaved. A recursive-descent parser is more flexible and suitable to the task.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this great article is all about how the maintainer of Bash regrets that it uses a parser generator (yacc):

[http://www.aosabook.org/en/bash.html](http://www.aosabook.org/en/bash.html)

I've mentioned this here before, but I was able to parse bash almost entirely up front, without interleaving parsing and execution. The first half of my blog [1] is about this.

To make a long story short, I use four interleaved parsers, and they ask the lexer to change state at the appropriate points. It's three separate recursive descent parsers, and then a Pratt parser for C-style arithmetic expressions.

It works very nicely, and surprisingly the algorithm is efficient, requiring only two tokens of lookahead: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/17.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/17.html)

Aside from lookahead, the lexer reads the text exactly once, not 2, 3, or 4 times.

There are two things you can't parse up front that I know of:

\- Associative array syntax, but this is bash 4.0-specific: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/20.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/20.html)

\- A crazy instance of runtime parsing of arithmetic expressions inside strings, AFTER variable substitution: [https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/3](https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/3) (all shells I tested implement this, not just bash)

Also there is one issue that would require arbitrary lookahead:

\- Bash does arbitrary lookahead to distinguish $((1+2)) and $((echo hi)), the former being arithmetic, and the latter being a subshell inside a command sub, but it's not required by POSIX: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/18.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/18.html)

In bash, Brace substitution is really metaprogramming which can be done at parse time. You can manipulate program fragments, e.g. a{b,$((i++)),c,d}e, and it doesn't rely on any program input.

In ksh, brace substitution is done AFTER variable substitution, so it's another level of runtime parsing.

Globbing is done AFTER variable substitution in all shells.

But yes, lex and yacc are totally unsuitable for parsing shell. It's unbelievably awkward to express, and results in more code, because the parser has to be used for interactive input (the $PS2 problem), and it also should be used for command completion, e.g completing something like 'echo $(ls /b<TAB>...' .

It also forces you into parsing at runtime, as far as I can tell. The yylex() interface involves a lot of globals and the generated parsers probably don't compose as I would like.

[1] [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for continuing your series.

This is a great illustration of how non-trivial a production quality shell is.

Parsing input is "tricky"

Each builtin needs comprehensive error handling

<comment><USER2> IRL, shells don't do string manipulation (well, technically everything becomes string manipulation at some point, but in this context not in the normal sense of the term). Shells generally use a lexer to split inputs up into tokens (generally using regex) [0] and then make sense of the inputs using a parser (the most famous of which is called yacc [1]).

[0]: I was going to link to Bash's lex file here, but they appear to do something funky which would require a non-trivial amount of time to find, understand, and write here. So, you'll just have to take my word on this. I give you wikipedia as a substitute: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis)

[1]: [https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/parse.y](https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/parse.y)

<comment><USER4> The lexer for bash is inside that file, parse.y -- see yylex(), which calls read_token(). It doesn't use lex; it's written by hand.

I'm not sure what you mean that shells don't do string manipulation. Almost ALL they do is string manipulation.

That's true for the shell interpreter, which has to make sense of the input program, and for user programs, which are processing argv strings like file system paths, and stdin.

There are actually a handful of different parsers inside bash, which I mention here: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/26.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/26.html)

Brace substitution is another little parser as well. And globbing, and regex, both of which need their own parsers. (bash has its own glob parser, but some shells use libc's glob implementation). bash is really at 4-7 sublanguages in one.

The annoying thing about shell is that it makes it impossible NOT to do string manipulation in your program, because there is all this implicit stuff like word splitting.

<comment><USER5> One of my takeaways from TFA was along the lines of…

"Hmmm… he's using strtok, that's not how a real shell would work. What would a minimal shell, without scripting, pipes, redirects etc. do? Just correctly parsing legal file paths (which TFA needs to correctly implement 'cd') is well out of scope of a small article like this."

<comment><USER4> Right, a real shell obviously can't use strtok. If you're leaving out pipes, redirects, and any control flow, then separating a shell string into words for the argv[] array is fairly similar to lexing a C-escaped string (e.g. in C, Java, Python, JavaScript).

You have backslashes, single quotes, and double quotes basically. Traditionally this is done with switch statement in a loop in C.

But that is not a good approach for a real shell. Even inside double quotes you can have a fully recursive program, like:

        $ echo "hi ${v1:-A${v2:-X${v3}Y}B}"
        hi AXYB

Once you have recursion then you need some kind of parser, not just a lexer.

<comment><USER6> I've been mocked on HN for saying this before but Bash and other shells of it's ilk are programming languages in their own right. I mean sure you're dependant on the suite of tools in $PATH to do anything useful, but that's not that much different to the standard libraries that make modern languages so powerful.

<comment><USER7> I have have a hard time seeing what there is to mock about your opinion of shells. I absolutely consider them languages - better at some things, worse at others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Still missing the check for fork returning -1, which would make your waitpid() hang forever, as -1 waits on all p̶i̶d̶s̶,̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶i̶t̶.̶ children.

Edit: less problematic than my original wrong guess, but still bad for a shell, which eventually supports multiple concurrent children.

<comment><USER9> Wrong, waitpid(-1, ...) waits on all _child_ processes of the current process, and would return -1 with errno set to ECHLD if there is no children.

The point about missing error checking still stands though!

<comment><USER8> Ah, yes, any child...thanks for the catch.</comment></comment></comment>


The Woman Behind the New York Times' High-Risk, High-Reward Business Strategy - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woman-behind-the-new-york-times-high-risk-high-reward-business-strategy-1534325400 <comment><AUTHOR> _"Months later, the compa-nies sealed a deal: the $14 million, 15-month commit-ment included Samsung "360" cameras distributed to hundreds of Times reporters, as well as heaps of ad space. The resulting 360 videos got prominent placement, some on the home page, and they carried a credit for Sam-sung."_

Fascinating look at NYT as a follow up to the recent thread on HN about their quarterly earnings.</comment>


A MIT Crash Course on Hacker Tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/12668-a-mit-crash-course-on-hacker-tools.html <comment><USER2> There's also a thread on Hacker News by the creators of this MIT series here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281)</comment>


The Golden Age of Basic - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/the-golden-age-of-basic#.U2Jd2jtc4tM.hackernews <comment><USER2> "... general purpose home computers were replaced in the late 1980s by game consoles for those interested only in entertainment, or by PCs and Macs for those looking for more serious applications. None of these replacements were easily programmable. And while cheap and easy ways to code would eventually become generally available again for children and teens, learning how to program would never regain the place in popular culture it held in the 1980s. The Golden Age of Basic was over."

I'm not sure about Macs, but PC-DOS/MS-DOS came with BASIC/BASICA[1] or GWBASIC[2] (or QBASIC[3] in the 90s with MS-DOS 5.0). I wrote a bunch of little fun programs when I was 12-13 in the BASIC that came with DOS.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASICA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASICA) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW- BASIC) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic)

<comment><USER3> In the late 1980's the Commodore 64 in the home was probably not being replaced by a Mac, but because of price by some version of the Apple II. This was the GOTO product for home and education into the early 1990's.

In the late 1980's Apple was selling Mac SE's at close to $3000 list price and Mac II's at $5500 list. These were targeted at business customers with prices comparable to the bottom end 8088 IBM PS/2 and top 80286 PS/2 respectively.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_II_Family](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_II_Family)

[https://archive.org/stream/byte- magazine-1987-06/1987_06_BYT...](https://archive.org/stream/byte- magazine-1987-06/1987_06_BYTE_12-06_CAD_Mice_12-MHz_ATs_IBM_PS2_Family#page/n133/mode/2up)

<comment><USER4> Not to disagree, but Apple had very steep educational discounts. My example: Mac SE with harddisk, ImageWriter II, Microsoft Word, and some other software for $2500. Macs were everywhere in higher education (except the business school).

My impression is most of the home computing scene largely moved over to Amigas and Atari STs.

<comment><USER5> The Amiga had several good BASICs, particularly AMOS and Blitz Basic. Blitz was very powerful and fun to program. You could easily drop beneath the provided commands and access the OS and hardware beneath. It had well- integrated inline assembly. I ended up using it as an assembler with the BASIC facilities for support.

The first game in Team 17's long running Worms franchise was written in Blitz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to walk up to the computer kiosks in RadioShack mall storefronts, write a quick loop saying "Joe was here", hit Return and run away. It was glorious.

<comment><USER7> I used to make program loops that were appropriately obscene for a 12 yr old, snigger at the clerk trying to cope with what I did (I was _12_ ), then run off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Woohoo - that was me, except it was the Atari 600xl that a really nice uncle shipped to me :). Far too much time spent pounding out basic programs on that crap keyboard and learning about the intricacies of the hardware (GTIA chip!)

</comment><comment><USER9> Syntax Era</comment>


Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft-apocalypse-proofs-open-source-code-in-an-arctic-cave <comment><USER2> Obviously</comment>


The State of UX in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://trends.uxdesign.cc/ <comment><USER2> I have to assume the absolute dog shit UX of the site is an ironic meta- commentary on its nominal content.

Oh, it's another TDS victim, not surprised.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle inter-team dependencies? - <AUTHOR> Our company isn't very good at prioritizing inter-team dependencies.  For example, team A depends on team B to deliver a new API, but team B fails to deliver.  The API is the most important thing for the company, but often Team B is prioritizing their own projects.  Team A ends up repeatedly pinging and negotiating with team B, but then ultimately implements their own hacky workaround, degrading the product and introducing technical debt.<p>I have a few ideas for how to fix things, for example by having each team maintain a backlog for their dependent teams, or instituting some sort of story point "currency" that the requesting team can spend.  But I first wanted to ask people here how they solve this problem.  Ad hoc conversations?  Constant pinging and negotiation?  Something more formal?  Maybe this can't be solved with process and must be solved culturally instead. <comment><USER2> I'm assuming that both teams are technical. If so, I don't see any reason as to why your own team can't build the API that they need.

Become an autonomous team, break down all dependencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is sometimes what happens, but it's far less efficient than the ideal. Specialization means that our engineers don't have to spend such a big chunk of their time learning different code bases and build systems.</comment></comment>