Ask HN: What methods and tools can I use to decrease my app churn? - <AUTHOR> About three weeks ago I launched my app as a solo dev  and without any marketing or buzz I've been able to convert paid subscribers and sell products. I know its an app with a viable market, and has potential. However I have a high churn rate (install/uninstall ratio) of about 70-80% that I know I could improve. Just to put into perspective I am getting an average of 150 installs/day and about 115 uninstalls. So I gain about 20-30 users/day and of those I am getting 3-5 free 3 day trial signups.
Currently my app has a couple of issues with a few crashes a day which I am working to resolve but I don't think that is the culprit. My design is decent, it performs decently and its not too convoluted. I use google analytics to track events but they are more of a way to report how much activity my app gets rather than reports on how people feel about my app.
I have about 500 active users and about 1,300 accounts. I used mail chimp to retrieve feedback about two weeks ago when I had about 200 active users and 400 accounts and I received only a couple of responses from people saying they really liked it, with just a few minor suggestions but nothing really enlightening. Just today I used to the new search keyword feature in the play console that allows you to see by which terms your users found the app. I have two keywords which I am targeting and have a very nice 50% conversion rate but mostly all of my installs come from keywords that are not listed and get placed in the "other" category. So I am a bit lost since I feel like the app could be optimized right now as its still very new before I try scaling out and just churn through more potential customers.
I am looking for advice in general since I work alone but more specifically are there any tools/methods that could aid me? I came across https://www.appsee.com/ which looks great to be able to see how users interact with my app but I was unable to get a response? (maybe they don't like the little guys) <comment><USER3> 1) Create the conversion funnel. EG: clicked ad -> installed app -> registered -> engaged with new user flow -> used product part a -> purchased product part b. What parts should they see and use all broken down. As they progress in the funnel they are more engaged.

2) Fill in all the stats of the conversion funnels. This will give you a baseline to answer: _Did my modifications help or make it worse_. EG: clicked ad -> installed app will be a %50 drop. installed app -> registered was a 20% drop. Amplitude works fine here.

3) Get a steady stream of users in. Ads, forums, social anything. Just a handful so you can see if you are changing things in 2).

4) Setup user testing. (UXCam <\- makes VIDEOS of mobile sessions) This will let you see videos of EVERYTHING a person did. Watch each user's behavior 10 times. Over and over. Get to the point where you know what happens next.

5) This is the hard part. Make some change. See if it changes 2). Changes made in the early part of the funnel will change how many people TRY your app. Changes made in the later portion will change how many people STAY in your app.

6) Do 5) until you give up. Over and over. Then if you can't make 2) better quit.

7) If your cost of user acquisition is less than your profit. Run to a VC as fast as possible and pour gas all over it [or not].

<comment><USER4> 5) seems scary to me. Isn't that something you would need the user to opt in to? Or does EDPR not apply to apps?

<comment><USER5> GDPR does not prohibit tracking. GDPR prohibits not disclosing that you're doing it (and naming 3rd parties that you use).

I like to look at it as a rethink moment for when you build in the mechanism to track. Do I really need this? Is there data I don't need to collect here? Do I need a user's consent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No idea what your app is, but do you know if the uninstall is happening right after the first open?

I'm asking because I usually uninstall apps either:

\- Months later after I notice I'm not using it

\- Minutes after opening it for the first time

If you just launched your app, I imagine your uninstall is happening right away.

As an app user, let me tell you what usually makes me uninstall right away.

\- App permissions that I don't want to give. If the app keeps working 100% after I decline, I may keep it. Otherwise, uninstall.

\- Prompt for account creation. If the app provides something I REALLY want, I might create an account. If I was just curios, uninstall. If the account creation is with only social accounts (SSO with Facebook or Twitter) and no option for email, uninstall. Others may vary.

\- I was looking for an app that does what your app does, and while waiting for a large download, found another app that looks to do that thing better. Either screenshots, reviews, description, something convinced me that it's better. Downloaded the other one, tried it, decided to keep it and uninstall yours.

\- It's a free app but any useful feature is behind a paid subscription or behind an in-app purchase.

<comment><USER7> If I had to guess, he might be gating the app with a login. Yes some people might be willing to sign up for a new service, but for me if the app doesn't allow me to check it out before signing up, I almost always uninstall

<comment><USER8> ^ This. You are most likely asking too much of your user and providing little value in return.

The next thing is the user installs it, but finds out how shallow and useless the content / app is for their own use case. You need something that keeps users coming back, what is it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think you are fundamentally asking the wrong question.

Instead of trying to understand why 80% of the people are leaving, try to find out why 20% are staying.

Instead of contacting the people who are uninstalling the app, contact the people who install it and stay with it. Ask them why they are buying and what they are using it for.

The people who are uninstalling are not your customers. The people who install and stay are your customers. Find out why they like the app and then use these insights to attract more customers.

<comment><USER10> >Instead of trying to understand why 80% of the people are leaving, try to find out why 20% are staying.

That's a survivorship bias. You have to analyze both groups in order to improve the ratio.

<comment><USER11> Their comment wasn't directed towards improving the ratio. They were suggesting that the focus should instead be on the current users. I imagine this is a result of everything being so new, they think it makes sense to take some time and figure out why people are actually using the app before trying to tackle more directed problems like the uninstall ratio.

In that context, it's really not a survivorship bias. If you want to know about the survivors, it's not wrong to consider the surviors only.

<comment><USER10> But the OP's question is about improving the ratio.

<comment><USER11> Right... and then they got a response that they might want to ask a different question along with a suggestion of how to answer it.

Now you are trying to treat that solution that is explicitly meant to answer the new question as if it were an answer for the original question, going so far as to apply logic issues from the old onto the new.

Discussions, particularly ones of this nature, change and shift direction. It doesn't mean that later topics inherit logical traits or something from earlier ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd select 10 random users who abandoned the app and offered them $10 in Amazon ecards for 10 minutes on the phone with me. Then, I'd ask them what they had hoped for when they signed up, and what went wrong.

<comment><USER13> I think it would help to provide a questionaire form instead. People really really really don't like talking to strangers on the phone.

<comment><USER14> Speak for yourself. I would prefer a human interaction over a list of questions. Also you'd have more of a chance to get elaboration on things you find interesting.

<comment><USER15> It depends on the audience the app is targeted at. If it's a geeky thing, phone calls might not work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So a few things jumped out at me:

1) It's going to be a grind and the fact that you increased from 200 actives to 500 actives is a good sign!

2) 10-20% trial signups conversion isn't terrible until you've found the right type of customer you're targeting. Bigger companies might be getting close to 40% but that is for a product that already has market fit.

3) second other suggestion...email and get in front of your users. Or when users file support tickets (make it super easy for them), use that as opp to get educated.

4) don't spend money on ads to increase traffic until you are getting more of the type of customer you want and consistently converting them

5) don't spend more time insrutmenting analytics. You already know what's up. Just talk to users more and iterate based on their feedback

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of great advice here, mixed with some sales pitches and some questionable advice.

App reviews seem to have gone unmentioned - are you getting any negative reviews?

If you are, see if they contain anything actionable or even a hint of what the problem might be.

If not, the uninstalls may or may not be a problem - for a paid app that's free to install, you could be getting a lot of window shopping. Once people realize there is no free lunch, they move on. If this is the version of events playing out, then these were never your target market to begin with - <USER2> were not willing to pay and could have been just trying to get something for free.

Only way to know for sure is, like many other comments stated, talk to them - forums, support sites/emails, even reddit could be a good source. Try to figure out who your customers are and look for the place where they communicate.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm in a similar boat with my app and we've found success by implementing the MomTest ([http://momtestbook.com/](http://momtestbook.com/)). The premise is that your users are well-intentioned and will tell you what you want to hear, just like your mom would. To work around this, you employ the MomTest- basically you avoid all questions with words like "would you", "do you", etc because they lead to red herrings and reassuring dead ends. You ask questions about their real experiences relating to the problem you're trying to solve so that you can deduce the rest. Your mileage may vary but since you have some existing users, you might consider doing this to extract some useful data about them.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a general rule, consider number of installations akin to window shopping or browsing in a shop. Most of them will be followed by an uninstallation. The same install/uninstall churn will happen to several similar applications at the same time: when I'm looking for a good app, I might install 10 and uninstall 10, not having found a good one. I just took your product in my hand, wondered about it, and put it back on the shelf. Don't worry about it. I might not be your target segment anyway.

But should you convince me that your app might be worth its while we bump into the next hindrance.

As a general rule, things that make me abort the installation or uninstall right away:

\- app crashes or has particularly custom or sluggish UI which stands out from the more modest applications on my phone

\- app wants me to sign in to something

\- app absolutely requires permissions I don't want to give

These can be born _if the application is_ truly good (useful) and unique (can't go with another app). But most of these points prevent me from figuring out if the app is worth it.

And these all come into consideration only after I have positive expectations of why should I even try your app.

Considering the 20%, it could actually be quite high (depending on the context, app, and target audience of course).

</comment><comment><USER20> > I have two keywords which I am targeting and have a very nice 50% conversion > rate but mostly all of my installs come from keywords that are not listed > and get placed in the "other" category.

Maybe your app simply did not do what the user wanted, as they found it with an irrelevant keyword? So basically they are just adding noise to your data as they aren't your target market.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Currently my app has a couple of issues with a few crashes a day which I am > working to resolve but I don't think that is the culprit.

How sure are you about this? Speaking personally, if I installed an app that was otherwise good but crashed that often, I'd likely uninstall it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it obviously has a negative effect but the reports are giving me 10 crashes per day and there are 100 more uninstalls so even if 1 crash = 1 uninstall, why are the other 90 ppl uninstalling...

<comment><USER21> Ah, I see; I was interpreting "a few crashes per day" as "a user will see a few crashes per day", which I understand now not to be the case. That being said, the sibling comment here suggesting that some crashes might not be reported is an interesting thing to think about, although I don't know nearly enough about mobile device to know how to tell if that's happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't this statement:

>I have a high churn rate (install/uninstall ratio) of about 70-80%

Contradict this statement:

>I know its an app with a viable market, and has potential.

Other suggestions:

>I am getting 3-5 free 3 day trial signups

You are giving it away for free, charge people up front, then you will know if it really solves a problem they are willing to pay for. That is when you will know you have product / market fit.

>I use google analytics to track events but they are more of a way to report how much activity my app gets rather than reports on how people feel about my app.

Use Mixpanel or something similar (idk what the Mixpanel equivalent for apps is) to get a more detailed view of what people are doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I think I have a retention/engagement problem that I don't know how to troubleshoot. Most of the users who sign up for the free trial stick around and pay. So it's not like I am not seeing any sign ups.

<comment><USER23> Why not make installation part of the free trial?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Consider using some tools like google analyticsz they actually have bindings for apps like .Net

[https://github.com/maartenba/GoogleAnalyticsTracker](https://github.com/maartenba/GoogleAnalyticsTracker)

You can also detect the uninstall event and try to launch a browser to a quick optional survey

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.configura...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/api/system.configuration.install.installer?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=netframework-4.7.2)

I'd say try to treat the desktop app as much like a We app as possible from a metrics perspective. Unlike web people have a general disdain for tracking so with all of the info above I'd consider making it opt-in only.

Finally as mentioned above. Post on LinkedIn for some honest reviews of the app, offer some money for their time. At low volume this is easy to manage manually. At scale consider something like [https://www.giftbit.com/](https://www.giftbit.com/)

Good luck!

<comment><USER25> Survey on uninstall = where theoretical ideal meets the real world.

Edit: By which I mean, in that moment you do not want to get in the user's way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Have you tried Fabric.io? It's a good tool specially for mobile apps. You should also create a Facebook page of your app and make it accessible from app, people like Facebook to communicate via calls or direct emails for feedback.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why do you think your churn rate is high? Do you know ow what is the average churn rate of other apps or similar apps? (No, your churn rate is not that bad, it is normal in apps). Another good question is the life time value of each customer and how long your users stay in your app (like since they installed it until they uninstalled it). Create an engagement metric for user use case and try to I prove it, more engage means less churn.

Focus on your target market and measure the churn rate in your target market. Forget the rest of the users, those are noise. Develop what you need for your target market.

</comment><comment><USER28> > without any marketing

Well thats not true, if people (the market) are finding (though a marketing channel) your app (the product) then you have done marketing (posting your app on the store) you just don't realise it.

If you don't plan out your marketing you are still marketing you are just usually doing it poorly by marketing to everyone and no one, you should expect to get a lot of confused non customers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Summarising what other people have said & adding my 2 cents:

a.) Adding MixPanel, Amplitude or other Analytics is must.

b.) Understand your customer - Are you getting 150 organic downloads? I believe - you are running an ad campaign. Try to make few changes to make your app do organic downloads.

c.) Hire a good UX Designer - Run your analytics & fix the Leakage.

There are agencies who provide consulting on App Growth & Churn - Speak to them. phiture.com, prolificinteractive.com are my favorite ones.

I also consult apps for organic growth & downloads.

</comment><comment><USER30> Use sentry.io to really understand where and when your crashes and other exceptions are happening.

As others mentioned, offer a giftcard for a brief phone call or chat interview.

</comment><comment><USER31> You need to check the onboarding funnel as someone has pointed out. But in addition, you also need to look at App "Vitals" like ANR, Crashes, free space, performance

We do this for a living daily. Give me a shout out at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER32> Do you demand a registration? Or users can try before giving your their email address?

Do you have a mini tutorial (3~5 'swipes') for the first time users?

Did you try sending a personalized email to users that created an account and then stopped using?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes I have a registration page prior to the main content page. No tutorial animation but I have a button inside the menu. and the emails were not really personalized since I don't have much other than their emails

<comment><USER33> Maybe try sample content that leads them into registration? You can also try to get them to register after they've tried to engage with the content. Users are moser likely to register after they've engaged.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good suggestion thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Surprised nobody seems to have mentioned it yet, but what about expiring credit cards? Do you send those users an email about updating their cards?

</comment><comment><USER35> Are you required to put in a credit card for the free trial?

If you can detect a first time install you may want to put a little sales/tutorial in.

</comment><comment><USER36> I highly recommend checking out useronboard.com to see lots of examples of good and bad onboarding experiences.

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://lesschurn.io/](https://lesschurn.io/)

<comment><USER38> Something's wrong with this site. I used Firefox Focus and tapped on the Pricing link at the bottom, but it kept going back to the homepage. I finally typed "/pricing" after the domain in the URL to get to the pricing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How are you getting the installs in the first place? Were they accidental?

Is the performance of the app bad?

</comment><comment><USER40> support is a huge factor in reducing churn. can they reach out and is your team/you responsive? if they complain about crashes can they get a credit for the month while you fix, etc? good support will cut churn

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://meetings.hubspot.com/brett38](https://meetings.hubspot.com/brett38)

Sign up for a meeting, happy to chat about retention/growth/whatever! Let me know if you need a different +/\- time zone and will be happy to accommodate you.

</comment><comment><USER42> May I ask what your app is?

</comment><comment><USER43> During uninstall take them to a page where you very simply and sincerely ask them for feedback. Promise that you will read it and respond to it. Don't require an email on that form though so they can answer anonymously if they want to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion but from what I've read there really isn't a way to detect uninstall events on Android.

<comment><USER44> Can you infer uninstalls from heuristics? If you're collecting activity metrics for app interactions and you get a complete dropoff for a given user, could you assume they have uninstalled? Even if they havent, checking in on decreased engagement might be an opportunity to get them before they uninstall.

Not sure what the timeframe is between a user trying it out and subsequently uninstalling, but if there is a bit of a time gap, the decreased interaction analytics could be a used as a leading indicator of pending uninstallation and used to trigger a win-back attempt?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So much free advice here. Pay a UX consultant to help you.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is your app, appsee.com?

</comment><comment><USER46> In addition to GA and/or Mixpanel, I recommend fullstory.com for web based apps to see individual user sessions in very high fidelity.

<comment><USER47> Don't be creepy. Users don't expect you to be able to watch how they interact with your app (and what data they enter in it) so don't.</comment></comment>


A Man May Be Big Tech's Biggest Threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/technology/David-Cicilline-antitrust-tech.html <comment><USER2> I truly hope that this results in _meaningful_ , and quite possibly _painful_ change.</comment>


The Windows App Store Is Full of Pirate Streaming Apps - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/the-windows-app-store-is-full-of-pirate-streaming-apps-170820/ <comment><USER2> An interesting aspect of this is "How can you tell if a streaming site/app is legitimate?"

There are so many weird, on demand, maybe you need a cable package, maybe it's just all you can eat, maybe it's just a 2 month free promo, services out there that it's really hard for the average person to know what is legitimate.

The shrinking release windows and ongoing push for day and date digital releases just makes it even harder.

Case in point: TubiTV just randomly showed up on my Roku recently - It's available on XBox and streams a bunch of different stuff. Should/do I need to verify that they've correctly licensed their movies before watching?

<comment><USER3> > do I need to verify that they've correctly licensed their movies before > watching?

I don't think that's your responsibility. If it is brought to your attention that the app is infringing copyright, maybe it's your responsibility to stop using it.

But it's not your responsibility to verify that every service you use has the rights to all the content it uses. How could you possibly do that?

<comment><USER4> Copyright law would likely disagree, I believe the MPAA would also likely disagree and put to responsibility on the person consuming the content to only consume content from "Authorized" sources, and of course they have no responsibility to report who the authorized sources are.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure the MPAA would like to disagree, but what is your source on copyright law?

Copyright law prohibits those who have copy of something from making and distributing unauthorized copies. But if you receive one of these copies, I don't see what law that would break or why the receiver would be responsible.

<comment><USER4> So then if were to download a copy of a movie off bittorrent or some other place and I prevent uploading then you would say I am not in violation of Copyright law. You believe it is UPLOADING, not the DOWNLOADING that is illegal

Interesting position, Most of the lawsuits however have sued over DOWNLOADING and uploading, not just uploading or "distributing" infact in some cases it has been shown the copyright owners themselves were distributing the content to catch people "illegally downloading" the content.

That would also mean downloading from Usenet would be completely legal...

<comment><USER6> I would like to see some cases quoted here. It's been my long time understanding that bittorrent services come under fire precisely because of their distribution model. Catching users in the act of _uploading_ copyrighted content is the signal to press charges. I was under the impression that even the honeypot torrents were seeking actively sharing IPs for this reason, and would ignore users with uploads disabled because they wouldn't have as strong of a court case. Maybe I'm wrong! I have not actually studied the cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft's success is closely related to piracy. Piracy helped Windows to become the majority. This is no different and IMO Microsoft intentionally don't fight against those apps very strongly to help their store to succeed.

<comment><USER8> Why do you think that? Was piracy not possible on other platforms? How did it give Windows a competitive edge?

<comment><USER9> Well for starters, you could pirate any version of windows for free and load it up on practically any hardware. Can't say the same about mac os unless you want to take the painful route of making a hackintosh

<comment><USER10> And they made a number of legitimate attempts to clamp down on that. First with CD keys, then with online activation, then Windows Genuine Advantage. Of course, they didn't succeed, because the phrase "successful DRM" is an oxymoron.

<comment><USER11> Their attempt to clamp down on that only really started with Windows XP, when they already had a near-monopoly. Earlier version technically had a CD Key, but I don't think those actually did anything as long as you passed the key along together with the CD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every app store is full of crap. App stores are a centralized service, so there is no way to avoid crap ending up in them because there's nowhere else for the crap to go!

Besides there are actually very few apps that are regularly useful to me on my limited-OS (non-desktop) devices and those are: Camera/Photos, SMS/Messaging, Web Browser, Phone Dialer, Contacts, Google Maps, Calculator, Email, KeePass and Clock/Calendar.

Beyond that, every other app under the sun could disappear and I wouldn't miss them.

<comment><USER13> I don't even use the maps apps. I never understood how they improve over maps.google.com. I guess there's turn by turn navigation but it _never_ reads ahead and so it's really safer to memorize the route than to rely on that.

<comment><USER14> On Android at least, the Google maps app lets you download large map areas for offline use, including turn by turn directions. I use this for when I head up into the mountains to explore a new area where the cell service is spotty and it's really convenient. It's a nice complement to a topo map and it means you don't have to carry a separate GPS receiver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a problem with any app store to some extent, even Apple's.

The difference here is that Microsoft seems to be encouraging low quality apps to boost its "app count" numbers to make its store seem more attractive. Also, many legitimate services do not have an app for Windows so users get tricked into installing fake apps or end up resorting to privacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Safari or Chrome could be a 'pirate streaming app', right? Would app stores allow a web browser with pirate sites bookmarked by default?

<comment><USER17> The apps on the Windows store are not even remotely plausibly useful for anything else. Not only that but they are intentionally misleading. Netflix had to deal with Microsoft at least three times in order to get Microsoft remove fake Netflix apps. Many of these apps don't even have a valid website link or contact info. Some are just a video player wrapped around an HTTP server that has 10 or 20 video files.

Microsoft has zero quality controls and their store is full of shit, which is one of the reasons their platform failed so hard. They were literally paying people per app published regardless of the content of it. It turns out just advertising that you have a billion apps doesn't help if they're all just junk.

<comment><USER18> Do you think Apple's store for MacOS failed for the same reasons?

<comment><USER19> The macOS app store didn't gain much traction but you're underestimating just how much of a cease pool the Windows app store is. Microsoft must have the resources to moderate that better. But based on my last test search of "Firefox" coming up with dozens of fake Firefox apps or "apps" that are "Firefox Guides" basically PDFs wrapped as an "app" etc... My only guess is Microsoft knows there's a truly abysmal number of legit apps so they just choose not to moderate it

<comment><USER20> The Mac App Store has some junk but I actually find it quite useful and do buy stuff on there because I know I'll be able to install it if/when I switch computers in the future. Same thing with Steam. I also expense most of my Mac App Store purchases, so that probably makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> dunno about app store, but in my country responsibility lies on uploader, not on me as user streaming video or music content for my private non-commercial use, it makes sense since it's not in my ability to verify every service

</comment><comment><USER22> Noticed this yesterday when looking at the store on my xbox one. Tons of variations of "free movies" almost like Microsoft doesn't even bother to spot check whats submitted.</comment>


A Landing Page for a Potato - <AUTHOR> https://dribbble.com/shots/2042501-Potato-landing-page/attachments/363345

<comment><USER2> The free potato link is a scam, it doesn't work! No potato make kagaime a sad(der) lifeform :(

Seriously though, if making a template mockup like this and not making an actual page for it, submitted to the useless web .com, you need to rethink your life choices.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think its quite a clean template</comment>


Ask HN:  Are there such things as IT Apprenticeships? - <AUTHOR>

With the high cost of higher education and the amount of MOOC's available for learning, is there such a thing as an IT apprenticeship or something like a developer or SA apprenticeship?<p>Skills for machinists, welders, etc. all have apprenticeships.  Would it not make sense to have them for IT as well.  Where you could learn under a "master" for a period of time equivalent to a 4 year degree.  Does this exist? <comment><USER2> I'm apprenticing a junior sys admin right now. He's been with me for 2 years now. It's not a formal apprenticeship, but I took him out of the help desk (where he worked on Windows) and now he is a solid junior Linux sys admin. This was on an Ops team of two (and now three).

May sys admins I know have juniors they are apprenticing in a similar fashion. This is a fairly traditional way to make a sysadmin (on the job training).

</comment><comment><USER3> If there isn't, there really should be. Traditional University education does a really poor job of preparing people for IT as well, further exaggerating the need for it. I think some of the trade school programs have OK curriculum, but I can't say for certain either way.

The shop I work at was actually talking about it, but we don't have the time to train someone.</comment>


Fracking: The Music Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/fracking-music-video <comment><USER2> I haven't looked at the video, but with respect to "music video" and popular culture, New York City should realize that, depending upon the effectiveness -- or lack thereof -- of local and state regulators, fracking -- of the Marcellus Shale underlying part of its extensive drinking water watershed -- constitutes a major threat to its water supply. (This is from memory, but I think I'm remembering the correct name for the geological feature.)</comment>


Show HN: Linux Webcam Automation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thegrims/video_research <comment><USER2> This looks nice, and especially attractive because it only uses bash and ffmpeg, avoiding unnecessary dependencies. I have to wonder about this though:

> When Ctrl+C is pressed, the operating system sends a SIGINT signal to the > control script, which transfers to a signal handler function. The signal > handler script makes a new directory with the days time and date, moves all > video files to that location, and uploads the new directory and it's > contents to Google Drive.

So the script is run manually, and also interrupted manually? It seems strange because I would expect something like this to happen via cron.</comment>


A new state-of-the-art open source chatbot - <AUTHOR> https://ai.facebook.com/blog/state-of-the-art-open-source-chatbot <comment><USER2> According to the "Get the code" link [1], it looks like these models need pretty huge GPUs to even interact with the pre-trained models. Is that abnormal? I was under the impression that training the model is generally what takes the beefy GPU, and then using that model requires more consumer-adjacent hardware. A P100 GPU is $3000 [2].

[1] [https://parl.ai/projects/blender/](https://parl.ai/projects/blender/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WV7HFWV/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WV7HFWV/)

<comment><USER3> These are very big models, like 100x to 300x the # parameters of resnet-50.

2.7bn parameters (for the smaller model) means you have to do 2.7bn calculations for a single step of the model. You could fit the model in main memory, but how long is it going to take you to run all those calculations on a CPU? And the full model will need to run multiple times to output a single sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Boiling it all down, when prompted, these models just regurgitate a similar sentence to what is observed in the training data for loosely that same input, using some glorified curve fitting. This does not necessarily imply the model understands the meaning of what it is spitting out. So the uninitiated will be really impressed with this kind of toy.

The researchers here appear to have placed particular emphasis on cleaning up what the model is spitting out, but I think it's lipstick on a pig. The area begging for more research is parsing out the meaning of anything but the most simple sentence.

<comment><USER5> >Boiling it all down, when prompted, these models just regurgitate a similar sentence to what is observed in the training data for loosely that same input, using some glorified curve fitting

This is not that much different than what you do.

What criteria would you use to determine if something understands the meaning of a word/phrase/concept that isn't a string of definitions and metaphors? And at what level is sufficient?

Attempting to prove that something "understands the meaning" is a fruitless task with no quantifiable criteria - much like proving something is "conscious."

<comment><USER4> Representing meaning as a number, or more specifically a point or set in some vector space is fine. I'm not suggesting a more sophisticated concept of understanding than the status quo here, basically text in, a number/numbers out, which as I understand it is how most intent analysis works currently.

So meaning in this sense is very much quantifiable, yet how far along are we in parsing out even the most basic meanings? Can we build something which discriminates between "I'm moving in to <address>" and "I'm moving in on <date>", using the latest and greatest word embeddings? Not without some extra layers of external rules imposed on top. So the model does not 'understand', even in this limited scope of understanding.

Don't be fooled by the sentence recycling is all.

<comment><USER6> I wish someone fused Cyc with a modern chatbot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't this basically nixos?</comment>


Student Claims to Release Replication of OpenAI's GPT2–1.5B Model on July First - <AUTHOR> https://ainews.spxbot.com/2019/06/06/gpt2-counting-consciousness-and-the-curious-hacker/ <comment><USER2> I suppose nobody believes him, zero reactions around this. Should've just released it right away.</comment>


The Odds of Winning Solitaire - <AUTHOR> http://www.roziturnbull.com/bill/Solitaire/solitaire.htm <comment><USER2> > When checking for possible moves I found that there is an advantage in > starting on the right and moving to the left.

Well, the big piles are hardest to clear, so that's where you should start.

I was very surprised, however, that one should prioritize deck->table over table->table.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a consequence of 3 cards, 3 times around the deck. You have to prioritize getting to all the cards in the deck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> it's missing: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=The+Odds+of+Winning+Sol...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=The+Odds+of+Winning+Solitaire)

<comment><USER5> It's hand-curated data. No kidding it's missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please learn the difference between LOOSE and LOSE.

<comment><USER7> Lose is loose that's lost an O, loose has to be looser than lose to have space for the extra O.</comment></comment>


Rimino - A Human Touch on Mobile Experience - <AUTHOR> http://rimino.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice video and all, but I don't see the differentiator in this product or 'experience'.

Sure, it is a different UI, but I don't see how this UI is any more integrated into my life than my WP7, or any other mobile OS.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, whats more human about this than any of the other UIs ?</comment></comment>


Two Pi R – redundant filesystem set-up on Raspberry Pis - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/two-pi-r?page=0,1

<comment><AUTHOR> Just found the follow-up article for those who are interested: [http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/two-pi-r-2-web- servers](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/two-pi-r-2-web-servers)</comment>


Show HN: Bic – a C interpreter and API explorer - hexagonal-sun https://github.com/hexagonal-sun/bic <comment><AUTHOR> Interactive C environments were popular for a while. I have collected information on several at the Computer History Museum. I actually have even more stuff that I never got around to uploading.

You unfortunately need to make an account to see the pages. It was heavily attacked at one time and that was the admin's solution.

Interactive C Environments [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c)

</comment><comment><USER2> Reminds me of CERN's ROOT which has C/C++ interpreter [https://root.cern.ch/](https://root.cern.ch/)

<comment><USER3> One of the biggest problem with these repl for complied languages is that they panic as soon as you rerun a command. `cling` integrates with Jupyter notebook too but as soon as you rerun a declaration of a variable, everything collapse and you have to reset the kernel. Maybe I didn't dig deep enough and there is a way around this but if not, this is quite painful to deal with and a deal breaker.

<comment><USER4> So repeating something like 'int i = 42;' causes problems?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One cool trick for C REPLs is to grep the man page directory to automate those pesky #include lines, e.g. [https://gist.github.com/jart/5d0934d26b52f38cad36](https://gist.github.com/jart/5d0934d26b52f38cad36) Another trick is to build with STABS and use objdump -g.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really cool, nice work. I especially like the bit about putting a REPL statement in a source file to have it drop into bic. Seems like a quick and dirty way to debug without having to fire up gdb and such. Somewhere in between print statements and full on debugging.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I often looked for this and failed to find something that I could easily use. So I'm delighted to see this as a on/off C amateur and learner.

<comment> hexagonal-sun Thanks! It's still a work in progress but should hopefully help people to get to grips with C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the late 80s there was a product called C-Terp, which I loved!

Here's a link to a brief description:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=fHghpJa3va4C&lpg=PA167&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=fHghpJa3va4C&lpg=PA167&ots=Tq9xCXDt76&dq=C-Terp%20c%20interpreter&pg=PA167#v=onepage&q=C-Terp%20c%20interpreter&f=false)

And, yes, I paid the $295 for it.

</comment><comment><USER9> It lacks the syntax highlight. They could have used tree-sitter[1] for parsing, then the online highlight would be easier to implement.

[1] [https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter](https://github.com/tree- sitter/tree-sitter)

<comment><USER10> > Dependency-free so that the runtime library (which is written in pure C) can > be embedded in any application

What does dependency-free mean? I mean, it does depend on 128 crates. Do we typically not count those?

By the way, I did `cargo build` and it failed at `#include "utf8proc.c"`. I have `libutf8proc` installed. Changing `.c` to `.h` solved it. It went past that part, only to get:

\- error: couldn't read cli/src/../../lib/binding_web/tree-sitter.js: No such file or directory (os error 2)

\- error: couldn't read cli/src/../../lib/binding_web/tree-sitter.wasm: No such file or directory (os error 2)

<comment><USER11> The generator isn't dependency free, the parser it generates is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love that you have to #include how to exit :)

<comment><USER13> Technically, you should be able to just call exit(1) because of the C's support for "implicit function declarations".

With no prior exit() declaration, the C compiler would assume that "exit" is "int exit()", spit out the code to push whatever arguments are passed to it down the stack and then just call the damn thing. So, magically, it will all just work. Requires an older compiler though, C89 the latest.

<comment><USER5> Modern GCC and Clang still support implicit functions. They just complain about it by default. (Mostly for reasons that shouldn't be entirely relevant to modern x86.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is fputs returning 1?

<comment><USER15> 1 is a non-negative number. fputs() return nonnegative numbers on success...

<comment><USER14> Ah yeah true, looked at the wrong part of a man page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> an integration with jupyter would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER17> One of the biggest problem with these repl for complied languages is that they panic as soon as you rerun a command. `cling` integrates with Jupyter notebook too but as soon as you rerun a declaration of a variable, everything collapse and you have to reset the kernel. Maybe I didn't dig deep enough and there is a way around this but if not, this is quite painful to deal with and a deal breaker.</comment>


Giving source/website/URL for ClassyTracker.com to a good home - <AUTHOR>

About a year ago I built a simple proof-of-concept website for a drop dead simple Craigslist ad tracking tool (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2542446). It was kinda neat and worked reasonably well.
Now I find myself in a position where I'm cleaning house and I just need to let things move on. ClassyTracker is one of them. Is anyone out there interested in inheriting the site? The code isn't particularly elegant (PHP and MySQL), but as best as I can tell, there's not really any competition for something like this, and it might be a good starting point for someone else. The code is quite simple, too.
I'm willing to transfer the domain, code and all the files to a willing party. I just didn't want to see everything get deleted if possible.
You can email me if interested, or post here. <comment><USER2> This looks pretty useful. I hope someone saves it from the recycle bin.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> link:

<http://classytracker.com/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found a taker! Thanks.</comment>


Simple & Not Social Bookmarking Service - <AUTHOR> http://bookmarks2.com/online_bookmarks.php

<comment><USER2> Doesn't look that different from <http://www.google.com/bookmarks/>

<comment><USER3> Except your personal data isn't being shared with some giant ad corp. that will undoubtedly be using it for profit down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would someone prefer this bookmarking service over Delicious.com ??

<comment><USER5> Because sometimes, you just want to put bookmarks on the web for yourself. Delicious leaves something to be desired as a bookmark organizer. For organizing things for myself, I'd rather have folders than tags.

<comment><USER6> I've traditionally used Foxmarks (now called Xmarks) for organization (it allows me to access my bookmarks when I'm in the computer lab at school, for example), and recently created a Delicious account because my.foxmarks is awful. I've found about 100 great links in the past few days just by checking out the collections of folks who share lots of my bookmarks. I hate that you can't view popular tag combinations (only recent or personal ones), but perhaps this will come.

I'd kill to have something that syncs my bookmarks, passwords and history, and also analyzes the data somehow. Mozilla Weave is on the right track as far as syncing history, but buggy for me. A Foxmarks/Weave/Google Web History/RescueTime combo, perhaps. With an Awesome Bar-like search UI and interesting analytics. And web-based so I can access this stuff from afar. I think an FF extension would be necessary to sync the data, but it'd be great if it could comb data even when I'm using IE in a computer lab [security issues abound, I know].

<comment><USER6> Note: I would bend over backwards to pay for something like this. Somebody make this something that I want.

To those that are about to tell me to make it myself, I'm not quite there yet. Soon though ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like del.icio.us because I can pull RSS feeds for various tags, and place them on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Can I do this with bookmarks2?

This way I don't save any 'local' Firefox bookmarks. The sharing aspect isn't even an issue unless you don't want anyone to know your favorite sites.

BTW <http://delicious.com/popular/> is a gold mine everyday for designers/developers and all around geeks.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a fan of ReadItLater, as it also comes with a "text only" function. Furthermore, the best articles eventually go to GiveMeSomethingToRead.com, which has a nice article selection (sadly only one or two) every day.

Full disclosure: I am actually not affiliated in any way.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like the design and clean interface. One minor comment: you may want to change that green button to read: "Register for free" instead of "Registration for free"

</comment><comment><USER9> yes the world is getting more simple than social.

i'm using delicious from the beginning, mostly for bookmarking. to get more news / for discovery today there are plenty new ways than the delicious network.

keep up guys!</comment>


OpenTSDB 1.0.0 has been released - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/opentsdb/bG6ARrNjEcs

<comment><AUTHOR> _"OpenTSDB is a distributed, scalable Time Series Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase. OpenTSDB was written to address a common need: store, index and serve metrics collected from computer systems (network gear, operating systems, applications) at a large scale, and make this data easily accessible and graphable."_

<http://opentsdb.net/></comment>


Mozilla Executive: We're Not Interested In Enterprise Level Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387514,00.asp?f=2

<comment><USER2> To my mind, this is mostly a culture clash. In no way is it "Enterprise Users" that FF is worried about; it's Enterprise IT guys.

Spoken as a startup executive who also wears the IT hat at times -- those guys can be fascist bastards. I don't really want to help them either. Well, I guess I'll erase this post when I do my next Group Policy-based startup. Until then, I stand by my statement.

Long ago, IT was there to help users work with something they couldn't understand. Now IT has sort of turned into that abusive controlling parent who too often says "you can't do this, because I don't like it."

Standard disclaimers apply: you are not like this, you are a great IT person.

That said, I think there is absolutely no chance that the Firefox team will, after significant internal effort to speed up and become more agile, slow down to please IT groups.

Organizations that are also learning to speed up will get benefits from FF or Chrome, others won't.

I do agree that plugin development issues are a serious pain point. I anticipate that they'll work out some better system (maybe a version API contract that tells a plugin what they can consume?).

<comment><USER3> _That said, I think there is absolutely no chance that the Firefox team will, after significant internal effort to speed up and become more agile, slow down to please IT groups._

It's not the speed of development that's the problem; it's the speed of obsolescence. If they supported older versions for longer there wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><USER2> I think this is functionally why the Chrome team hides the version number. They wanted it to be more like a utility, or web app. What version is your version of Hacker News running?

In order to get that kind of instant deployment for a distributable executable, you have to really solve distribution down the chain to (especially) the windows desktop. The Chrome guys did that, it rocks, and it works.

Versions probably originally existed to allow marketing teams to sell more. I wouldn't be surprised if FF eventually drops the version number thing and just has a 'stable' and 'exciting' branch type system for their users.

<comment><USER4> True, I'm vaguely aware that I run Chrome 13 (Stable) and Chrome 14 (Canary) for testing -- but I'm surprisingly vague on that awareness -- in fact I got it wrong (I thought it was 12 that was stable)

<comment><USER2> Ooh, now I'm jealous. I'm on 12 for Mac. Boo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The exec is right. Why should mozilla "slow down" to accommodate enterprises who churn out absurdly brittle applications and who change them literally only when a crisis forces them to do so.

It is the internal enterprise apps that need to "get with the program."

</comment><comment><USER6> Enterprises don't have time to be modern or forward thinking, they're too busy wrapped up in management process and business bullshit to concern themselves with upgrading the software on their corporate network.

I know this because I work as an enterprise developer in a large enterprise company. I can't wait until I die :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I sympathize with both sides of the argument. Large organizations really do need a longer support and deployment cycle. If they adopt version ___ of a product, they need some assurance that it will be supported for a certain window of time. On the other hand, if you let "The Enterprise" dictate your development strategy, you will find yourself making faster horses rather than electric roadsters.

This might be a good opportunity for a business to sell support contracts with guaranteed life cycles for EOL'd versions of Firefox. That way, an enterprise shop could pick a version knowing that it will be supported for a year or two years or whatever they negotiate.

<comment><USER8> It isn't just large organizations that may be inconvenienced by rapid releases of major versions -- when I adopted FF5, a bunch of plugins stopped working. If that happens every 3-6 months, I'll probably stop using FF for daily work (Chrome is arguably better anyway). Of course, I'd still have to test in FF -- but that's a minor issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Part of the problem is how enterprise-y companies do things. Taking 3 months to roll out a new browser is ridiculous. But then, so is designing your website to only work on the most popular browser, and they do that, too.

Fix the latter and you can probably fix the former at the same time.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, in an ideal world.... This is a really ignorant statement, though. Just one of my teams has a tracking spreadsheet for >100 web apps they support. A fair number of those are "legacy" -- created by folks who are no longer with the company, or which are no longer the standard way of performing a task -- but are unkillable for one reason or another. Besides homegrown stuff, certain versions of expensive commercial software only support specific browsers and versions of browsers. If you have to test, AND you have to setup GPOs for users at the app-level because of browser incompatibilities, it is completely understandable why the internal upgrade cycle can take longer than the vendor's upgrade cycle.

You should spend some time in enterprise IT and see what it's like on the other side of the fence.

<comment><USER11> That problem could be easily solved by having multiple browsers installed so that a user could chose one that works with a broken, legacy web app. IT departments could roll out two different browsers in a tick-tock manner.

<comment><USER12> If you think it's easy to teach users to intelligently choose among several different browsers for each of several web apps you've never worked in corporate IT before.

<comment><USER13> Users have already been taught to choose among different _desktop_ apps. How? By clicking on installed shortcut links on their desktop. The same can be done with internal web apps.

Treat these legacy web apps just like desktop apps in that launching them requires clicking an icon specifically for that web app somewhere on their machine that opens the web app in the appropriate browser. Those browsers (like IE6) could be locked down to only work for certain URLs. For everything else, the user would then just need to use a more modern web browser such as Firefox 5.0.

An ambitious startup could find many other (and probably better) ways to solve this problem. The issue with legacy web apps that run only on IE6 always struck me as a potential business opportunity for any startup interested in targeting the enterprise space. With Firefox's recent shift to an accelerated release cycle, it has made this problem even more pronounce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw an interesting point in a scientific paper recently which I, admittedly, only got to read the abstract of (scientific journals are littered with paywalls). It basically stated that the corporation is a form of social technology which has failed society. When looking at the reality of the situation, in particular, how slowly they move and how much they tend to halt progress, I tend to agree with the sentiment. Just look at IE6 - the web would be a very different place if certain people weren't so obsessed with making money (by always taking the path of least risk) and making everyone else pay for the fact.

EDIT: This paper - <http://sts.sagepub.com/content/15/1/1.abstract>

</comment><comment><USER15> The entire notion of 'certifying' a browser is ridiculous anyway. This is how IT organization get 'stuck' still having IE 6 as the approved browser.

With all of the work going into web standards, agile processes, and automated testing, why is certification such a huge labor-intensive ordeal anymore?

<comment><USER16> Because every organization has a "web app" that they bought and installed years ago that simply doesn't work in newer browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Glad to see this. If Mozilla started chasing corporate then it would be necessary for me to switch browser. I've stuck with them through the misconceptions about memory from people who don't understand how memory management works. I've put up with slightly worse performance and standards support for enabling features I actually use like ad block.

However I would never tolerate kowtowing to the mishmash of nonsense that is corporate IT. I don't use IE for exactly this reason.

The simple truth is that if corporations need consistent behaviour they should not be using web apps to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone more knowledgeable describe why each new FF version breaks existing extensions? Can't FF have a more stable extension architecture?

Edit: though the idea that enterprise is useless may be dangerous. Each new FF user is worth maybe pennies or nothing at all in revenue to Mozilla, while enterprise 'seats' can get a nice premium.

<comment><USER19> The issue is usually the extension creator's fault. It's left up the developer to say what versions your extension is compatible with - and usually that's left to just the current version.

<comment><USER20> For add-ons hosted by Mozilla, this is no longer left up to the developer. Mozilla will automatically scan add-ons for compatibility with new versions and update their metadata:

[http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on- compatibili...](http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on- compatibility-rapid-releases/)

<comment><USER19> Oh that's so cool. It's been a while since I've worked on themes and extensions, so this is awesome news :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The consumerization of IT goes both ways: people get the latest & greatest at home and want to bring it to work, but they often are trained to use interesting tech at work -- and become comfortable with it -- so they tend to use the same at home. If Mozilla doesn't change their tune, Google & Apple will eat their lunch.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why should Mozilla be held responsible for whether an enterprise business cannot update their own applications? This is not a Mozilla problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article made me realize that to enterprises, what SaaS really sells is not the ease of (or lack of) deployment, but the disability for IT departments like these to _control_ deployment at all.

</comment><comment><USER23> The question is not whether Mozilla should cater to enterprise users. The question is should Mozilla cater to internal enterprise applications which don't get updated very often and are easy to break.

</comment><comment><USER24> The real problem here isn't the release cycle, it's the support cycle. Many open source apps that are used in enterprise settings (servers, mostly) get this right, and mark dedicated supported versions, for customers who can't or won't yet upgrade.

Mozilla could start doing this, and all of a sudden they'd be both accessible, but still able to do their release cycle as planned.

</comment><comment><USER25> So I work for an "enterprise company", and if you install Firefox on your computer, it will be automatically removed within an hour, and an email will be sent to your manager. (Unfortunately, the same thing happens if you try to install IE 7 or later).

I'm not sure this is a market that they want to be in.

<comment><USER26> So they give you enough admin rights to install an app? Security theatre i think.

<comment><USER27> Or some legacy app requires admin rights just to work, so instead of locking down they scan for badness every hour. Of course, that won't help against something _really_ bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One the one hand, you can't really blame FF. Chrome is killing them with their quick release cycles, so they felt they needed to respond.

On the other hand, what options do enterprises have? Assuming they're currently using FF, they probably don't want to go back to IE. Chrome is out of the question for the same reason we're having this discussion, frequent releases. So, what's left? Safari on Windows? And too much is broken on Opera. So, I don't really think FF has much to fear in terms of losing existing enterprise customers.

It may stall adoption on the enterprise market, but if it brings them back in the consumer market, and it's a net gain, then it was a good move. After all, Mozilla's customers like Google are buying eyeballs wholesale, irrespective of them being enterprise or consumer users.

<comment><USER29>
         what options do enterprises have?

Change their policies?

Just let Firefox freaking update itself, after all, Mozilla is more trustworthy than an IT department of debatable competency.

And what on earth are they doing in those internal apps that makes them incompatible between Firefox 3 and Firefox 5 ?

I do have an intranet app of reasonable complexity that was created using IExplorer 6 and the original Mozilla browser. It still works today, the same as it was working when I made it. That's what standards are for.

<comment><USER30> what though, if by total accident, that one webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that borwser version?

That one webapp that some guy once created to make his life easier, that's not documented anywhere any more and that's now being used to do all accounting over even though nobody knows about it.

Now imagine you as the IT guy update Firefox from 3.6 to 4 and now that app breaks and with it the accounting department stops working.

Nobody will appreciate your "but... I didn't know that app was there" which is totally not the correct answer to "why the hell did you just break the accounting department?"

I have seen this happen. Maybe not at this scale, but it definitely did happen. No wonder IT people are scared of updating: If you don't do anything, everything will keep working, but you might piss off some web developers who you don't know. If you DO update, you may risk breaking some home-grown solution you didn't know about and you will be held responsible for all the damage caused.

Yes. That app shouldn't exist. Yes, it should be documented, yes it should not have bugs.

But it might exist, it might not be documented and it might have bugs. You. Just. Don't. Know.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not one of these guys, mainly because I have not been burnt by this yet (and probably never will - 10 people company and I still know about everything that's going on), but I can certainly understand them.

<comment><USER29>
        what though, if by total accident, that one
        webapp worked on FF 3.6 due to a bug in that
        borwser version?

It's not the browser's fault, it's the fault of the people who made that app.

Mozilla's responsibility is indeed to provide reasonable backwards compatibility, but as long as that behavior is specified in the standard or as long as it benefits lots and lots of people.

But it is also Mozilla's responsibility to advance the state of the art, to implement new emerging standards and to fix their broken implementation, if needed of course. And let me tell you - Mozilla almost lost me to Chrome.

I also think your argument doesn't hold water as I've never seen Firefox behave badly on upgrades, ever since version 2. Sure, there might have been an incompatibility here and there, but I never ran into one and if it was, it was easily detectable if you just executed your app in Opera, or Chrome, or Safari, or another non-Gecko browser.

However, I suspect that this fear-mongering is from "consultants" and IT staff that are paid for support contracts and testing new versions of Firefox was part of their billable hours. And now they'll have to do more work supposedly testing Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> These corporations aren't paying for Firefox so why should they expect understanding or support?

<comment><USER32> These corporations aren't paying for IE either (comes for free with Windows), but IE has some form of support with security patches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The faster release cycles didn't bother me until I realized that with Google's new support announcement [1], that Firefox versions would officially only get about _six months_ of support on Google Apps. And that I have no idea how Ubuntu's handling quicker releases.

[1] [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to- su...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support- modern-browsers.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> It'd be nice for Firefox to adopt a LTS version. That way security updates can be guaranteed and IT guys can work on making sure LTS versions work.

</comment><comment><USER35> now is the time for a third party organisation to step up and support designated firefox 3.6 or 4.0 releases. it might not be feasible for a company to do just this, but someone already in the business of supporting open source software could conceivably add firefox on to their product list.

<comment><USER27> And rather than pay for FF 3.6, enterprises will keep using IE 6 for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I prefer Firefox to Chrome for my own personal usage, I think businesses would be better served by Chrome.

<comment><USER37> So they could be left with the exact same rapid release cycle? I fail to understand your point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You know, enterprise software is a funny thing. Every time a new version of say Firefox comes out, I get a bunch of emails at work saying that whatever version of SAP doesn't support it so please don't upgrade or face great peril.

Then there are older legacy products like Lotus Notes Domino web access that is the biggest pile of garbage when run outside of IE that I've ever seen. Heck, inside of IE it's still terrible.

Web software was supposed to make large scale software updates better, but thanks to "enterprise software" the whole thing is actually worse inside of enterprises. Go figure.</comment>


AT&T DSL blocks Linux Configuration - <AUTHOR> http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2010/12/at-blocks-linux-configuration.html

<comment><USER2> The author says:

        As a matter of course, I have established the habit of
        carrying around a small laptop with Windows XP installed
        in order to do this.  Doing so is absolutely ridiculous
        and should be unnecessary,

After stating this, he goes on to hint that he may have to start pirating Windows just to do the install. I'm sorry, but what?

The financial condition of his clients are irrelevant in this case. As the technician doing the install, it is his responsibility to bring the right tools for the job. In this case, that includes a laptop running Windows.

Is he going to get all bent out of shape because one of his other tasks is going to require a Torx bit and he thinks he only needs to bring a Phillips?

Aside from that, it is no secret at all that no Tier 1 support person at any large, commercial ISP anywhere is going to talk to anyone about Linux. I went through this same problem back in 2001-ish with @home when I made the mistake of mentioning the letters "BSD" (I had the opposite problem, I could say connected on FreeBSD for days but any Windows PC would routinely disconnect and reset all TCP connections).

The basic reality is that we (the non-mainstream OS users) are not AT&T, et al's cash cow. These are capitalist enterprises designed to make a buck and, as such, aren't going to spend a single green dollar on supporting Linux until they see a clear ROI for doing so.

Finally, hinting to AT&T that their customers are going to start pirating Microsoft software is absolutely ridiculous. AT&T does not care. AT&T != Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if AT&T has ulterior motives for this. It's not that they are being asked to go out of their way to support Linux. Quite the opposite in fact! They have taken significant steps to actively prohibit non-Windows/OSX machines from properly setting up the connections. Maybe they're concerned that by even allowing Linux to set up modems, they would be opening up an entire side to tech support that they don't want to address.</comment>


Dear Apple: Go big with Siri and Nuance in iOS 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/06/04/dear-apple-go-big-with-siri-and-nuance-in-ios-5/

<comment><USER2> I had always envisioned it would be easy for Apple, even given current iOS4 voice recognition to play well with apps. An "Open $app, do $command" would be amazing. The simple "return call" or "redial" phone related functions would address some of the AT&T frustration I have today.

But going the extra step and doing actual NLP on top of the voice recognition would be incredible.

<comment><USER3> If it was seamless I agree it would be a big step forward. If it was as flaky and unreliable as the other voice rec implementations I've tried I'd be disabling it as fast as possible. Voice recognition is one of those things that has to be 99% right to be usable at all, IMO.

<comment><USER2> My experience with the (limited) voice capabilities in iOS3+ were quite solid... when I was wearing decent headphones or using the built-in. With bluetooth headphones (which I love) in a strong wind, voice recognition was impossible.

This is part and parcel of why Apple often eschews the component-based model (preferring integrated): bad components can make the whole experience miserable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit late to be giving Apple advice on iOS 5, considering it's going to be announced in 2 days.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to talk to my phone, if anything I want my phone to talk more to me

e.g. Text to speech, who's calling me, some notifications</comment>


"Revenge porn" and Search - <AUTHOR> http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html <comment><USER2> What a complex issue for google, it's like breaking or amending their constitution. Does this open the door to banning other types of searches, like how to make explosives?

<comment><USER3> I believe Google already did something similar with mugshots[0].

[0] [http://www.cnet.com/news/google-works-to-demote-mug-shot- sit...](http://www.cnet.com/news/google-works-to-demote-mug-shot-sites-in- search-results/)</comment></comment>