Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working with Russian Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-11/kaspersky-lab-has-been-working-with-russian-intelligence <comment><USER2> The article seems a bit hyperbolic to me. Expecting a major Russian cybersecurity company not to have any business with its own government is a bit naive. Not all government business is spying and unlawful activities.

From what Bloomberg is sharing with us (I couldn't find those emails), Kaspersky is developing a software solution with defensive and offensive capabilities as well as providing consultancy services to the FSB in hunting down criminals (Bloomberg says Kaspersky is "banging down doors").

<comment><USER3> Right. Why would anybody be surprised by this knowing full well that American companies do the same?

<comment><USER4> Because the Russians are the bad guys. /s

<comment><USER5> I didn't believe this as a child in the '80s, but in the last 10 years at least, Putin's Russia has been freaking horrifying to me. So yeah, they aren't the world's only bad guys, and they're probably not the worst, but it's not for lack of trying. Putin's vision of Russia doesn't even try to avoid looking comically sinister. I honestly don't see how anyone who isn't wrapped up in self-interested religious or ethnic nationalism could see it any other way.

<comment><USER6> The problem with that viewpoint is to treat Russia as a monolithic entity. Despite military aggression and political and speech repression by the ruling _junta_ , there is still a vibrant and mostly functional economy.

Kaspersky providing services to the FSB (which is kind of like NIST, FTC, FCC, FBI, and DHS all in one) is little different to Cisco or IBM providing consulting services for the respective U.S. agencies.

Political conflict has always been this way, it's just more apparent now that trade information is widely accessible.

To compare, Japanese companies traded with the U.S. up until the 1941 invasion, despite significant political conflict between the two countries over Manchuria and the colonies in Southeast Asia.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's entirely unfair. We know that the Russian government sponsors cyber attacks. They're not the only ones, we know the USA and China and North Korea and Israel and probably every other country does too. It all has to be taken into account.

If I buy Cisco gear, what's the likelihood that it has an NSA tap in it? [1] If I buy Check Point gear, what's the likelihood that it has a Mossad tap in it? [2] If I buy Kaspersky software, what's the likelihood that it has an FSB tap in it? Who would I rather be spied on by?

Does it change the risk rating if we know we're under active attack by a particular country? As someone who works for a major tech company, I can tell you Snowden's information about the NSA cut deeply into the trust we had built up with our foreign customers.

It is entirely fair to judge a Russian security company based on the actions of their government related to cyber attacks. Especially considering the not- entirely-democratic government of Russia does not allow private sector companies to be entirely private sector.

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/21/nsa-technique-for- cisco-...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/21/nsa-technique-for-cisco- spying/)

[2] [http://greatcircle.com/firewalls/mhonarc/firewalls.199707/ms...](http://greatcircle.com/firewalls/mhonarc/firewalls.199707/msg00223.html)

<comment><USER6> Your point is undermined by your links. The first describes a _remote network exploit_ , which is not developed by coöperation or coercion. Exploits take advantage of a software vulnerability to insert additional capabilities (espionage). I think you wanted to find a link describing the process of _interdiction_ , which was implied to exist in the Snowden documents.

The second link is just a public denial by Check Point. I'm not sure why you're implying these companies coöperate with their governments. A discovered back door would destroy Kaspersky, Huawei, Cisco, Check Point, etc.; nobody would renew their contracts with that massive loss of trust.

I do think you raise an excellent point. The actual reality that these companies aren't providing back doors is not relevant when the _perception_ is that they are. The greatest risk is not coöperation, but of remote exploitation of the software. It turns out that there are a few major countries known for conducting network exploitation campaigns, unrelated to the country of origin of the target software. Just as the Stuxnet guys were almost certainly not German, yet they had a vulnerability in Siemens software, and the NotPetya authors didn't exert physical influence over ME.Doc in Ukraine, attackers have little to do with where the software was built.

As long as a government acts "scary", however, it makes companies feel less secure in the software, which affects sales. I'm not singling out software and hardware procurement officers; the "feels = reals" phenomenon is a human condition.

<comment><USER8> > A discovered back door would destroy Kaspersky, Huawei, Cisco, Check Point, > etc.; nobody would renew their contracts with that massive loss of trust.

Given that a backdoor could look like an undiscovered exploit I fail to see how the one would result in the other, besides that where will you turn? To one of the other parties... Consider this the present situation and almost nobody has moved away from their vendors. Except maybe Juniper (not in your list) I don't see any of these brands as damaged (yet).

<comment><USER6> I don't think any credible vulnerability researcher would conclude any of those companies' software vulnerabilities were back doors. If you know of one, please let me know.

All of these companies write software in languages that require the programmer to track memory management and bound their own copies. The probability that software written in languages like that will generate a memory corruption vulnerability is extremely high.

Has Juniper actually been damaged by the backdoored source code scandal (which is the only genuinely back doored American company I can think of)?

This report claims a 5% YoY net revenue increase, along with higher GAAP profit. [http://investor.juniper.net/investor-relations/press- release...](http://investor.juniper.net/investor-relations/press- releases/press-release-details/2017/Juniper-Networks-Reports-Preliminary- Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2016-Financial-Results/default.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whatever next? Have American AV companies been "Working with American Intelligence"? That would be just as shocking... ;)

<comment><USER10> Thanks to the wonders of the free market, you can choose which global intelligence service you want your software to be compromised to!

(I'm not even sure if this is a joke)

<comment><USER11> Or you can put off such decisions, and be compromised by all!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No shit. This isn't really news, as a few others point out that companies generally tend to work with their respective country's government. You won't see Kaspersky AV on a US government workstation and you won't see McAfee on any of their workstations for example.

<comment><USER13> The real news here, the part that makes the US government care, is "As many as 200 million [people] may not know [they use Kaspersky]."

Businessweek buried the lede (potentially-compromised firmware in devices you don't realize carry it) behind the blatantly-obvious (AV companies are not government-independent). Well, that and Kaspersky may have been lying about what connections they _do_ have, but frankly that's not surprising either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> He who smelt it dealt it?

Crowdstrike, FireEye ,Cobaltstrike,symantec,etc... are they CIA fronts as well?

As an american, why would I trust the CIA/NSA over the SVR/GRU? I wish I didn't have to ask that. but the fact is, and I'm sure some will agree - It is the CIA/NSA machine that can make my life here in America hell, not the SVR/GRU.

I can understand the concern when it comes to critical infrastructure and government software. However in the private sector and for individuals - "A tyrant 3000 miles away" is less of a threat than "3000 tyrants a mile a way".

<comment><USER15> > As an american, why would I trust the CIA/NSA over the SVR/GRU?

Because one is tasked - _in theory_ \- with protecting you, the other is tasked solely with protecting Russians (at your expense as necessary). It's that simple. And if you're going to claim the NSA never does anything to keep Americans safe, it would degrade your credibility toward zero.

<comment><USER14> They do plenty to protect what they consider is worthy of protection. which often leaves me out. Protection in their sense includes depriving me of basic rights and freedoms (so long as I'm "Safe").

It's not their official duties that I find dubious but their historical and ongoing ignorance of them. If they simply did their job I wouldn't even need to ask that question.

I'd probably ask the same of SVR/GRU if I lived in Russia.

If the NSA/CIA were doing their job, they wouldn't spy on their own people and they certainly wouldn't make secret deals with security companies and inflitrate their ranks to have a strategic advantage. Letting security companies independently do their job would be "protecting America" backdoors, hoarding exploits, influencing weak crypto,etc... I'm sorry but the russians don't even have the ability to do some of that even if they have the will.

GRU or NSA for both "ends justify means" , if you're on the "ends" side, pick software backdoored by your home country. if you're on the "means" side, pick the other guy.

I suppose it's time to consider what "collateral damage" in the sense of geopolitical computer security is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thank goodness we don't have to worry about the big tech companies working with intelligence services in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before we entered The Darkest Timeline, NSA used to be known for helping American companies with their encryption and cybersecurity, and preventing corporate espionage.

I'm one of the first when it comes to criticizing overreach of governments and intelligence agencies, but I do recognize that they do a lot of legitimate and positive work.

<comment> the-dude Preventing corporate espionage : priceless!

"The paper said the agency "lifted all the faxes and phone-calls between Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi Government" to gain this information."

Agency : NSA.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm)

<comment><USER17> Well, prevent espionage from other countries on US firms of course. And there is always the discrepancy between stated goals and reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As always, any implication that all closed-source software, regardless of company, suffers from similar issues, is conveniently absent. Just as it was during the VW emissions scandal - it's the _cheating_ that was problematic, not that consumers are effectively in the dark about how most of their products operate, and deliberately prevented (successfully or not) from finding out (personally, or done on their behalf by others).

<comment><USER19> Do you think because the implications of open-source software would threaten the economic model & world that the writer lives in?

Or that it's just an oversight and they just want to earn clicks? I think it's the latter, even if it's in effect the former (unintentioally).

<comment><USER18> I don't think _this_ writer omitted it intentionally. I think it's because journalists that are too at-odds with corporate (or other dominant narrative) just have a harder time in their career. No-one gets censored, except in rare cases - they just don't have their contract extended. See [https://cartoonistsrights.org/u-s-cartoonist-fired-after- cri...](https://cartoonistsrights.org/u-s-cartoonist-fired-after-criticizing- monsanto-and-dupont/) , but I imagine it's usually handled more subtly.

<comment><USER19> "In a Facebook post following his firing, Friday wrote that the incident showed "how fragile our rights to free speech and free press really are in the country.""

Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's hardly odd for a computer security company to seek government contracts. The released emails don't seem point to anything nefarious (unless merely working with the FSB is considered nefarious). The remainder is a lot of "could" and "would be possible" speculation. Conspiracy mongering clickbait. Moving on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Of course they have. They are a business based in Moscow. I would be surprised if they hadn't. They are just too attractive a target for the Kremlin not to try to co-opt. No idea how any US corporate security team could justify working with them, quite honestly.

<comment><USER22> Do you also have no idea how any non-US security team can justify working with Microsoft?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone has the Reddit thread where Kaspersky posted? I'm curious to read it.

<comment><USER24> The Kaspersky AMA thread from May of this year:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6ajstf/im_eugene_kasp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6ajstf/im_eugene_kaspersky_cybersecurity_guy_and_ceo_of/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unlike US-based security companies?

<comment><USER26> Yes, US-based security companies don't work with FSB.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pay and Specializations in Security? - <AUTHOR> I am reading a post on security here (linked below) and it identifies three specializations (also below).
My questions are: Are these really three distinct specializations? Which is considered the most fun / prestigious / well paying / has the best career prospects?
1. "offensive security" (scanner jockey -> netpen -> appsec -> vuln research / red team)
2. defensive security (secops -> seceng -> security management)
3. malware analysis (malware analysis -> malware analysis -> still more malware analysis).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18487547 <comment><USER2> They are all great career prospects. There aren't enough heads in the field to meet the demand. I don't agree with the specializations you have listed. People move around all the time. I'm currently Red Team and got here by doing appsec, netpen and vuln research.

As for the most prestigious, there is no such thing. Red Team and Blue Team operations are both vital to any organization. The Red Team verifies attacks are caught, and Blue Team catches incidents to minimize damage asap. Prestigious probably depends on the company and which one they respect more.

As for most fun, I really enjoy breaking things and being malicious. It's why I do well in the field. I'd say you have to discover what you enjoy for yourself. You don't want to get pigeonholed into just doing code reviews your whole life or reading through log files. In order to get through this level you have to show you can do more than be a checklist jockey.

Pay is pretty much the same for all of these at the larger organizations.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Which is considered the most fun / prestigious / well paying / has the best career prospects?"

Whatever you consider must fun, is the most fun.

Are these really three distinct specializations?

No, I've never heard of them being categorized into three specialisations before, and the progression tree you have listed certainly isn't true.

If you are interested in getting into security, just research and experiment with what interests you.

* If you like appsec, why not learn some programming languages and attempt some bug bounties.

* If you like netsec why not setup some labs and simulate some pentests, or sign up to HackTheBox which offeres pentest environments.

* and so on.

You will succeed in security by doing it because you love it, not because you are told it has good prospects.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is probably the most narrow and poorly organized list of security specializations I've ever seen. If you literally just google "cyber security specializations" you will see a lot more options and insights available. Fun, prestige, pay, and progression are obviously four very different things, and honestly they are pretty subjective except for maybe pay, but that could be wildly different depending upon the area/region/country. So asking for so many facets of a career with such a poorly developed list of career options is not going to net you very useful answers. Instead, focus on researching and understanding the whole of security better rather than trying to find the most fun high paying prestigious job in the lot.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd say #2 is part of #1. #2 is especially tough to get right.</comment>


Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ <comment><USER2> > _Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese > companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push > their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the > maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a > pamphlet rather than an interactive tool._

This is rich. I'm not sure who they're comparing Japan _to_ , because definitely not to modern American/mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest complaint about the latter could be written like this:

Advertising - Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people, modern web companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the _minimal_ concentration of information into the _largest_ space akin to a _billboard_ rather than an interactive tool.

> _People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions > and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are > not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The > adage of "less is more" doesn't really apply here._

That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people _are_ easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?

<comment><USER3> >That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?

Maybe because the information is useless when it's too complicated or out of context?

For example, if you look at the spec sheet of an iPhone you might think that it's less capable than a cheap Android phone unless you have very deep understanding of the technology.

In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as distraction and only the cheapest, lowest quality companies will bombard the users with that information in a bid to convince you that they offer the same thing for cheaper.

Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.

<comment><USER4> > Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.

As long as I can remember, they've _always_ under-specced their hardware and then jacked the prices up for the cost of "experience". And my memory goes back to the mid 80's. Same old game then as it is now.

<comment><USER3> What does under-specced even mean? How do you provide better experience by "under-spec" a product?

<comment><USER5> It means you provide the minimum hardware necessary to provide a quality experience now, without regard to (and in anticipation of) near-future developments that render that hardware under-powered.

<comment><USER3> I didn't knew that Apple is doing it. iPhones are used for very long time, holding 2nd hand value the most of any other smartphone.

The same goes for Macs, people tend to use these things for many years. In fact, Apple is still selling Macbook Airs like hot cakes despite the device not being significantly updated for almost a half decade now and people are happy with that product.

The claim sounds like induced anxiety of a user who just couldn't swallow the premium paid over the same Ghz laptop or same Megapixel smartphone :)

<comment><USER6> Maybe they are happy with Air because its the cheapest Apple. I know since i got one recently for development purpose. I would have liked a better spec'd once, but others were costly.

<comment><USER3> I also have an 2015 Air, it performs as advertised. I can't say that the performance degraded over time, contrary to the claim.

<comment><USER4> I'm also going as far back as their first 20 MB SCSI drive that they charged $550 for when IBM compats were charging $400. They did something goofy, unsurprisingly to the hardware to prevent users from using the cheaper SCSI drives.

And this was back in the '80 s. Its not surprising they still play their stupid games. People in tech have such short term memories - much here is on a day by day basis, or weekly. Yet, its the same actors in the Apple administration (well, minus Jobs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you do online check in with a japanese airline like ANA or JAL its kind of hilarious how many things you have to click to confirm just about everything... "Click here to go to online check in", then you are there and its like "click here to start checking in online"... then its like "type confirmation number here.." etc.. all on separate pages like we are engaging some kind of nuclear code sequence that requires multiple stages of fail-safes where you can go back at any moment.. yes the webpages in japan are hilariously over complex for a non-japanese audience all with the goal of ensuring you don't accidentally do the wrong thing.. the idea of one-click buying on amazon I have a feeling either rarely exists or is probably actually 2 clicks somehow..

<comment><USER8> Since you mention Amazon: They do have massive success in Japan, especially over the last few years. Same day delivery got to Japanese cities 1-2 years earlier than in the US I think, at least we got it in Tokyo for a while now. So I think the lack of polish in web design is actually a good chance for disruption by Western technology companies, it's just that you have to get all the _other_ stuff just right to exceed in Japan (e.g. good localization, high levels of customer service, precision in delivery).

<comment><USER7> Oh cool, so do they actually have "Buy it now with 1-click" on the amazon japan webpage? I'm super curious if they have it or if its actually used by people?

<comment><USER9> they have. Its used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My experience with Japanese websites:

* All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or using Google Translate on it

* Every URL is guaranteed to die. While link rot is pretty common in Western webdev as well, things like SEO have caused some to clamp down on it. And it's no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I'll come back a month later to find the link dead or the whole website has moved and none of the old content exists anymore.

* They still use Flash.

* Navigation is often not as efficient as it can be, with sites often throwing you on a landing page, navbars being confusing, and lack of search

* Images are often low resolution and low quality

Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts being expensive or large in size), but it's really disappointing when you compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is perfectly capable of beautiful work.

<comment><USER11> I noticed the first one when I clicked a link here in these comments to a JP site and clicked "translate" in Chrome... it translated much of the page, but quite a bit of text was in images and of course couldn't be translated.

Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess it's more common than I thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's as well a cultural factor that, IMO, affects design as well. This factor is the obsession of the Japanese to show that "they are working hard" and the culture of sacrifice. Everything in the company culture is based on that. People staying until really late at work without actually doing anything productive, meetings scheduled on Saturday just because, etc.

That makes that, when they present a design, it has to look like they worked really hard in the design. That's why there is always so much information.

To the eyes of an executive who has no idea of design (most of them) a minimalist design would look like if the designer was lazy and didn't work hard enough.

Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot.

Source: Working as a Web Developer in Japanese companies in Japan since 5 years ago.

<comment><USER13> Hmmm...the work culture fact is undeniable, but no smart person regardless of culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work.... This is probably more related to the highly methodical and intensive approach to optimizing space. Reductionism and efficiency are concepts that the Japanese learn from very early ages. The extreme lack of space and the atomization cities are one of the reasons why the Japanese take density as a standard of life.

<comment><USER14> Having worked long-term in South Korea, which has a corporate culture very similar to Japan, I'd have to agree with 6t6t6t6. The more "information" you can fit on something, the better. This is taken to the extreme with powerpoint presentations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't this this article is very relevant in 2018. Modern Japanese websites look the same as any "hip" Western site. Take a look at Coincheck.com, for example (the exchange whose NEM just got stolen). Their landing page is the standard Bootstrap-y, scroll heavy, big icons, sparse kind of layout you would see anywhere. Every startup is like this. Even big corporations like Nintendo.co.jp manage to have modern looking websites these days. If all this cultural speculation were true, then startups would still be doing the information-dense Web 1.0 thing.

The article does make a good point about how sites were "mobile first" for Japanese feature phones. Smartphones took a while to catch on in Japan because people were already satisfied with their feature phones, but now smartphones are in full force and web design has mostly caught up with modern/trendy practices. You can see all kinds of articles about modern web stuff on Qiita.com, even translations of buzzy blogposts.

I think any speculation about cultural differences is nonsense. Overwork or trying to appear busy or neon signs or whatever doesn't make for shitty web design. Web design was bad simply because the main focus was on the feature phone (which had limited rendering capabilities) and desktop sites were an afterthought.

<comment><USER16> Now compare the popular sites like [https://www.rakuten.co.jp](https://www.rakuten.co.jp) The two you quote appear to be outliers.

<comment><USER17> Rakuten doesn't look any more crowded than say, Amazon. It seems to be a shopping website, so perhaps the amount of information is more related to the type of website than the culture in this case.

<comment><USER18> It's also a bank, a mobile phone provider, and many other things. See also [https://www.infoseek.co.jp/](https://www.infoseek.co.jp/)

Also, compare [https://yahoo.co.jp](https://yahoo.co.jp) (afaik most visited site in japan) and [https://yahoo.com](https://yahoo.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article seems to be missing what I think is the major reason why Japanese websites are how they are.

I think one of the major factor is how the IT industry works in Japan, and the process to build a website, an application or anything which involves software engineering. A good majority of Japanese websites are not built or controlled by the company, but rather by what they call "System integrators", which they refer to as SIer, and these are quite different from the software/design agency we see in the US or in Europe. The usual flow is something like

\- Company A wants to build a website \- Company A talks to the SI company B \- Company A and B spend hundreds of hours doing meetings \- Company B's "System Engineers" write tons of specifications on Excel \- Company B asks company C to actually code the specification written on Excel \- Company C may then again delegate part of the system to company D, and this can a few more levels down depending on the size of the project

As nobody actually does the "building the service" part in company A or B, they usually do not have any designers, and therefore cannot give enough design related information to the company actually implementing the software. However, the only incentive for company C being to get paid by company B, the quality of the work or the UI/UX does not really matter that much as long as it fulfills all the specifications written on Excel.

Now, some companies are starting to see that this model is quite flawed, and either recruiting engineers and designers of their own (e.g Recruit, a huge company in Japan owning many different webservices [1], has put a lot of efforts recruiting engineers and designers these past years). Some other companies start choosing companies which are closer to the software/design agency model - companies who actually do the engineering and designing part - but the SI model is still prevalent [2].

[1]: [http://www.recruit.jp/service/](http://www.recruit.jp/service/)

[2]: [https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?201602...](https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?20160205) (p14)

<comment><USER20> I don't think the giant chain of subcontractors explains the problem - I've been a part of the same process in the US and the resulting website[1] was quite pretty.

[1]: [http://www.spaceneedle.com/](http://www.spaceneedle.com/)

<comment><USER19> I'm curious to know how this is usually handled in the US. What would be the usual process for company B and C to work on the product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article is entirely focused on sites built by corporations. In my opinion, Japanese and English sites are more similar than ever today, as more of the web is dominated by blog and social media platforms, but there used to be more interesting differences.

I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies. These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was, but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms were taking design cues from 90's programmers.

In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.

Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> They remind me of the portals of yore: Excite, Yahoo!, Netscape, etc.

Likely density of meaning per char would enable this layout --even in newspapers.

Anyhows, it's functional, if not beautiful, and it works for people. No need to "refresh the look and feel" of their web properties every so often.

<comment><USER23> Funnily enough Yahoo! is still one of the top websites in Japan and still looks like it did back in 1999: [https://www.yahoo.co.jp/](https://www.yahoo.co.jp/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Korean websites have similar aspects. However, Korean websites are slowly changing to be simpler and more visually appealing. Having experienced from Korea, I would extrapolate that Japanese (or Korean) websites are cluttered not because they believe it is better than non-clutter. It's cluttered because most people there don't have expertise in designing a simple and appealing website. In addition, Asian countries tend to be more focused on following the design of their rivals, and since early design is obviously more focused on information than beauty, people follow that. However, if you give a finished product where one is cluttered with information and the other is simple and visually appealing, I highly doubt that people will prefer the clutter.

<comment><USER25> Korean websites also suffer from the early adapter phenomenon. Many were build when ActiveX controls were the new hip thing and everybody was on the same version of Windows, and same with flash. Add to that that some websites require logging in with government-issued credentials (which is probably not something that you can easily rip out and replace by a nice form) and you can see that there's a lot of early 2000s cruft floating around... I'd be interested in knowing Japanese websites have similar baggage.

I had to look up the results of my Korean language test the other day. This should be as easy as entering your name + test registration number to get one number of info back (your test score). I had to install so many suspicious browser plugins that I ended up downloading a VM just for this.

<comment><USER26> Hah, at least they didn't have an anti-VM plugin (yes, there's such a thing) that forces you to install a dozen "security plugins" onto your host OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This part really struck me:

"Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese)."

The concept that your native language can impact information processing speed/density is pretty interesting.

<comment><USER28> I personally think this is the main reason, coupled with the natural tendency of kanji to look like squares. Western languages deal with _lines_ , Eastern ones with _squares_. The former need significant amount of empty space to be readable, the latter not really; the former must flow horizontally, the latter not really; the former is drastically different from images, the latter not really (which is why emojis originated in Japan, among other things).

That's all stuff that directly impacts design density and so on.

<comment><USER29> Exactly. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean letters are all designed to fit in a square grid.

Movable type was invented in Korea 200 years before Gutenberg, and their version was much easier because they just had to plug letters into a square grid. When I was a kid, everyone learned to write on sheets of paper containing a 20x10 grid. Lengths of books and school essays in Korea are still frequently measured by the number of 20x10 sheets they would take up if printed on such a grid.

When your writing system is designed to fill a two-dimensional grid, whitespace is not only unnecessary but also potentially distracting. Chinese and Japanese don't even use spaces between words. (Korean does, at least in modern usage.) Leaving a large amount of space between lines would break up a block that should belong together.

Probably for the same reason, WYSIWYG editors here tend to insert
 instead of
 when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space between paragraphs is implemented using two
's instead of margins on the
 tag. In other words, people see no need for vertical space that isn't an integer multiple of the height of a 1-em square.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's not just the Japanese. Chinese websites are also similar - pages full of links, messy to the untrained eye and difficult to navigate. However, that sort of web pages suit the Chinese more. Build a traditional, Stripe-ish style landing page and you'd score lower points with them.

</comment><comment><USER31> For some reason I really appreciate the information density of these sites even if they're quite busy. I feel like one large page load allows me to do a lot of things whereas it seems the trend in the west is to download a heavy SPA JS app one time only to have it sparsely populated and take tons of clicks to get to information.

Check out the desktop version of this site for what seems to me to be an English version of Japanese design: [https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/)

<comment><USER32> Some other great Western-language examples are highlighted here: [https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/](https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/)

Funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> You see this in real-world UX in Japan too. Almost every travel guide to JR railways and/or metro says some variation of "press the button on the top left (ok, I forgot which button) and a guy will pop out of a hidden door, and help you buy a ticket"

Or, their ATMs. Amazingly confusing at times. Yet, no Japanese seems harmed in the making of this situation.

</comment><comment><USER34> HN traffic effect :

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</comment><comment><USER35> > Japanese doesn't have italics or capital letters

It does, however, have katakana -- which is sometimes used in a similar fashion.

<comment><USER36> I believe the mincho font (pretty much the de facto standard of modern kanji) does have italics. They're not used all that often or to the same effect as in English though.

Others have also pointed out the dots which are quite common in formally printed materials. In emails and such, I see people use the 「」 quotation bracings as emphasis from time to time.

<comment> crooked-v Doing a 「Dramatic Quotation」 is common in manga, similar to how US comic books put bits of text in bold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> On iOS Safari I only see a huge ad overlay, cannot scroll or read the article.

</comment><comment><USER38> This page is down but it just copied the article, here's the source link: [https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so- differe...](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/)

</comment><comment><USER39> This has been an interest of mine since seeing web designs from that part of the world. They have cool things like fixed footers with 10px font just to display quick simple site maps, and small ideas that would be considered taboo in the US / EU.

</comment><comment><USER40> The author is joking, right?

Look at the amazon and ebay websites. What, are then not as filled with information? Most of the time as much useless.

The only difference is that they use the older 2000-s fonts which are smaller, and therefore enable the newspaper-look.

</comment><comment><USER41> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067)

</comment><comment><USER42> "Some kind folks have translated the article into..."

They are not doing it out of kindness, they are probably going to add ads and PageRank-siphoning links to the translation when you're not looking.

"WebDesignGeeks" was an outfit who used to pull this scam all the time to popular programming articles, and their "translations" were just the output of Google Translate.

Don't link to unchecked translations and don't let them be hosted on someone else's site.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hmm, interesting. About the lack of web-fonts for ideographic writing, let me ask: how do people write them with a keyboard? Don't they use some sort of multiple key encoding, a sort of predictive writing, to navigate the code space and select a particular symbol? Well, at every waypoint the font can add a single fragment to the ideograph so it just needs to encode these as the font glyph? I guess it can't be too many right?

<comment><USER44> I think the Japanese font used on Android might be doing something like this! Look at this screenshot: [https://ibb.co/hUAgWw](https://ibb.co/hUAgWw)

Upper line - complex kanji, Lower line - its components.

When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated.

(It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each character that are reused)

<comment><USER43> Oh I don't know much about ideographic writing, but I wonder if one can describe the language as a big search tree where the leaf ideograph is the overlay of all intermediate nodes (say each node being a vector representation.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mirror: [https://archive.is/bboAK](https://archive.is/bboAK)

<comment><USER38> Better to link to the original source article: [https://randomwire.com/why- japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web- design-is-so-different/)

<comment><USER41> Thanks! Changed from [http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why- japanes...](http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanese-web- design-is-so-different/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's always difficult for me to trust the rest of an article when it's really confident about a meaningless detail and gets it entirely wrong. What am I supposed to think about a story that goes out of its way to define pachinko parlours as "game arcades"?

</comment><comment> d--b While this was true in the mid-2000s, I think the modern websites are much more similar to Western websites.

Perhaps the one thing that stands out is my adblocker doesn't work on japanese advertising so I get all the ads that I'm no longer used to seeing on my usual websites...

</comment><comment><USER46> The simplest answer to anything anachronistic can generally be explained by the population's composition. The older the population is, the more resistant to change, and perceived problems by OP is a matter of change. In really popular websites, the population's composition largely reflects your customer's demographics. In newer websites targeting younger demographics, you are allowed to be more "hip" and "trendy". I also think the devices used to look at these websites also played a huge role. Lo-res images and text-heavy simply load faster.

</comment><comment><USER9> FUnny to see Apple being so popular in Japan while all their ads here and websites are minimalist bY design.

</comment><comment><USER47> How well does this translate to mobile since the majority of Internet browsing is mobile?

</comment><comment><USER48> [https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/) says it all really.

<comment><USER49> Supposedly cities like New York looked similar into the 70s, but then came a backlash because much of the ads were for "burlesque" entertainment and similar.

Japan, and perhaps also the rest of Asia, has not had such a backlash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Site unavailable now.... HackerNews effect?

</comment><comment><USER51> (2014)</comment>


Impossible Figures Library - <AUTHOR> https://im-possible.info/english/library/index.html <comment><USER2> I like these. Some of them are even non-obviously impossible. They may pass at first glance, but then one sees why it shouldn't work.

I recently posted my figures [0] here. It's also a kind of impossible figures, however they are actually printable in real life but still tricks the mind.

[0]: [https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible- objects](https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible-objects)

</comment><comment><USER3> It cracks me up that I'm getting tons of ads for 3D printing on a website for impossible objects.

<comment><USER4> Then I'll suggest [https://www.kleinbottle.com](https://www.kleinbottle.com)

"Glass Klein Bottles for sale - inquire within"

<comment><USER5> You could be the future of advertising..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm struggling to understand why the illustration at the bottom left of [https://im-possible.info/english/library/grey/grey4.html](https://im- possible.info/english/library/grey/grey4.html) is impossible. If you don't assume the two horizontal bars are parallel, and the top one is farther back than the bottom one, it make seems to make sense.

Eg it has a side profile of;

                    ----
            </comment><comment></comment><comment>----
                ----

<comment><USER7> I guess it's because the bottom and top bar look like their edges are actually touching which should be impossible with the middle bar going between them without it being squished.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what the text equivalent would be.

Are there sentences which are locally consistent[1] but globally impossible?

(the question is on my mind because earlier on HN I'd had a nice convo about a folk song embedded in a protest song in which the quoted verse worked nearly as well as polish under a functor as in the original ukrainian.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696) )

[1] on a longer scale than "colourless green ideas sleep furiously", of course.

<comment><USER8> Garden-path sentences. Or comparative illusions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden- path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion)

<comment><USER4> ขอบคุณ! The garden-path admits of a consistent, yet initially unpredicted reading, while the comparative illusion is exactly what I'd been groping for: locally cromulent but globally uffish.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Geo Developers Blog: Interactive Data Layers in the JavaScript Maps API - <AUTHOR> http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2015/04/interactive-data-layers-in-javascript.html <comment><USER2> Excellent!

How about implementing the ability to delete a vertex in an editable polygon or polyline?

[https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api- issues/issues/detail?id=...](https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api- issues/issues/detail?id=3760&q=delete%20vertex&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Introduced%20Fixed%20Summary%20Stars%20ApiType%20Internal)</comment>


The Joy of Haxe - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fontstruct/the-joy-of-haxe-84f933f4b859 <comment><USER2> Like the author, I too have the same opinion after having used Haxe for over 5 years.

      Five years on from starting with Haxe at FontStruct, I'm genuinely surprised to find that I feel no regret whatsoever regarding our decision to go with the technology.

I absolutely adore the language. Not only is it awesome at transpiling/compiling to native across this whole spectrum of targets, the language itself keeps surprising me with how versatile it is; with great type inferencing, compile time macros, platform-conditional compilation, and more.

I've launched iOS, Android, Web, Windows and Mac apps that all shared the same code base. I can't see myself ever wanting to go back to using a single-target language again. I highly recommend trying it if you're on the fence. [0]

 _Note: I am not affiliated with Haxe, just a huge fan._

[0] [https://try.haxe.org/](https://try.haxe.org/)

<comment><USER3> I've only had the opposite experience. I worked on a team that inherited a large Haxe codebase for an online education tool, and we found Haxe to be exceedingly bad, even apart fron the nature of the code we inherited. We spent a lot of time porting most of it to a mix of Scala and Javascript. I still remember the daily emotional stress of working in Haxe.

... _shudders_

<comment><USER2> What was bad specifically? This comment reads more of a 'the codebase we inherited sucked to rewrite' than anything else.

<comment><USER3> Some things are generic critiques of haxe: standard library has poor documentation and big feature gaps, often important third party tools are basically abandoned, no support, generated code is extremely hard to debug or understand (both C++ and Javascript outputs for us).

Conditional compilation is a horrible, horrible idea period, and is particularly easy to turn into an indecipherable brittle mess in haxe. This was made worse by the previous authors of the code we inherited, but is really a case where it's the tool's (haxe's) fault for implementing the feature in a way that makes it an intrinsic foot gun.

Lastly, it was a big turn off to our candidates, and many people we interviewed expressed lack of interest in working with it.

<comment><USER2> I'd love to hear more. What's missing from the std features? Where are the docs lacking?

I will agree to your point about abandoned third party tools but that happens with any language? It's just more pronounced on a less popular one. I will also agree about the code it produces: the point of a transpiled language isn't for its output to necessarily be readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to produce understandable assembly in all cases, would you? Plus it maps all lines to your Haxe source so you shouldn't even have to debug large blocks of native code anyway.

What necessarily does Haxe do that makes for conditional compilation to be so bad? AFAIK it works in the exact same way other cross platform frameworks have it (eg, Unity)- it's probably the cleanest way to do it; I certainly wouldn't say it promotes brittle code practices at all, but ofc, like anything, can be misused.

I can see it being a potential turnoff to candidates given it's relatively unknown status... but the language itself reads and writes like a C-style OOP language: there's nothing that should necessarily turn people off besides that it's an unknown, especially anyone coming from a C or Java background.

<comment><USER4> > the point of a transpiled language isn't for its output to necessarily be > readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to produce > understandable assembly in all cases, would you?

I would like to argue about this philosophy. When your target output is not readable, then you restrict the developer to work inside your upper-level language. This is fine if your upper layer is robust and transparent enough to reason about. In C's case, there is rarely a case one needs to work at the assembly level to reason/debug. Is this the case for Haxe? Now if you even imply that developer need work in your output layer even one percent of the time, then it is responsible to make sure the output is readable. Otherwise, it is a gun shooting the foot -- even only 1% of the time.

The background is that I love C. I find C very straightforward to reason about and very simplistic to allow more logic to be spelled out in a clean way (than C++ for example). Now the above passage -- putting assembly as an analogy to C -- sounds prickly.

<comment><USER2> The idea is that yes, you do 99.9% of your work in Haxe and it is robust enough to handle things. Only times you might drop down to your native compiled language is if you want to interface with a native library/component for which there is no 3rd party extension to Haxe yet. Even then there are Haxe based methods to fit most of those cases too.

I think the analogy is accurate: Haxe is not meant to be used to compile to native and then modified in native further. It can be... but the general usecase is to write everything in Haxe and not have to then modify the transpiled result. Similar to typescript in a way... you can add JavaScript after the fact, but most likely you'd directly add native untyped JavaScript within your Typescript code, not directly to your transpiled result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I first learned about Haxe through Lucas Pope's dev log for "Papers, Please". Sounded interesting and fun, though Pope (who developed PP on a Mac) said he also had written custom tooling for his work — maybe that situation had changed since 2014: [https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209905/Road_to_the_IGF_L...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/209905/Road_to_the_IGF_Lucas_Popes_Papers_Please.php)

For his new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, he went with Unity because of its 3D capability:

[https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.0)

> _I 'm gonna use Unity for this one. I fell in love with Haxe/OpenFL on my > last project but unfortunately the 3D situation is not that great there yet. > Also, it's time to finally see why 90% of the indie scene is using Unity. I > have a good amount of experience with 3D games and the few days I've played > around with Unity so far have been pretty productive. The animated title > screen scene up there (with post-processing shaders and all) was created in > one day. I now have unrealistically high hopes._

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't be surprised if he does a mix of Haxe and Unity; Haxe compiles to C# too and works very nicely with Unity.

In my current project I ultimately switched off of Unity for 3D due to its less than stellar WebGL support (and I wanted to target web), but with Haxe I simply changed my target to JS and got to reuse most of my code. The ability to switch/add targets at any point of your product's lifecycle is incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps.

It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community.

It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty painful to use in its early days; it shows the importance of positioning and marketing.

<comment><USER7> Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.

<comment><USER8> Counter-example: Dart.

If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these that drive spread of language, not "huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists." Dart had no short of those and still not much accepted.

<comment><USER9> Dart suffered from corporate politics, Chrome team wasn't really into it, got rescued by Ad Words team, and now are trying to become relevant outside Google with help Flutter.

If Chrome team actually cared about Dart and went ahead with Dartium's integration, Dart's future would have been much different.

Then the Angular team decided to dump Dart and go with Typescript.

So politics as usual.

<comment><USER10> Dart also suffered from external politics: a chrome-first Dartium VM stank of ActiveX to most people. IIRC Microsoft had discontonued its silverlight plugin for lack of interest/support. The general attitude began to shift towards just JS/HTML5 tooling in the webdev community.

And in addition to not having full support from Google, there was not and probably would never have been buy-in from Mozilla or Microsoft. Also the language IMHO didn't offer much more than JavaScript, and 6to5 -> Babel was gaining traction at the same time. It wasn't a good recipe for success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used haxe a lot in the past, but with the newer enhancements to JavaScript I found that I ended up using JavaScript. Destructuring assignment arrow functions and more concise object literals, ... operator enable much more concise and readable code.

Haxe seems to be much more conservative in development. Haze is aquiring arrow functions but I think there was quite a degree of initial resistance to the notion. I proposed a change to allow the new Javascript style consice object literals (simply allowing {fish,cheese} instead of {fish:fish,cheese:cheese} but was shut down with a 'we don't like it'

I would prefer to use a independent language over one developed by a megacorp, but I fear Haxe will fall behind TypeScript due to their resistance to change.

My own personal experience has motivate me to move to something else. The proposal I mentioned above left somewhat of a bad taste. The process went contrary to the processes listed. Notably The proposer is supposed to call a vote after discussion had concluded. Instead it was just shut down with a "we had a meeting and decided against it". I could give no counterargument because there was no argument to counter. I'm not against languages having a dictatorial model for development, but having a facade of an open process that carries no weight seems wrong.

<comment><USER2> Sucks to hear about your experience. Like you said yes arrow functions are slated for the next major release.

As for the process, I think it has become a little more stringent for sure. To submit a request for consideration you'd need to submit a proposal on GitHub with attention paid to impact to existing code and impact on future Haxe features- perhaps your feature request wasn't deemed to be thought out enough? It also looks like you'd get more explicit consideration if you are a sponsor of the language ([https://haxe.org/foundation/support- plans.html](https://haxe.org/foundation/support-plans.html))

So yes, while it isn't a completely open vote, I also think most languages' directions are decided by committee in a similar way. I'm sure the Haxe community would love to see examples of other communities with better practices to learn from.

<comment><USER12> > perhaps your feature request wasn't deemed to be thought out enough?

In which case surely it should be discussed, rather than shut down with "no"?

This thread had me interested in Haxe, but reading these comments about the unfriendly, negative responses to proposals has put me right off.

<comment><USER2> To play devils advocate: if every feature request had to be thoroughly discussed you'd never get anywhere.. the onus should be on the proposer.

That said, you can always file an issue in github and have a discussion there. For Haxe it's a very active location for discussion there.

<comment><USER13> >the onus should be on the proposer

I'll bite: what should @Lerc have done differently in his proposal ([https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe- evolution/pull/51](https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution/pull/51))?

<comment><USER2> It seems like there's some leeway in 'After reaching general consensus or voting takes place, the PR is merged by someone from the Haxe developer team, and the proposal becomes "active". When merged, the proposal will receive its number from the corresponding pull request. If the proposal is rejected, the PR is closed with a comment explaining the reasons.'

I think general consensus was reached without a formal vote. Discussion was limited but explanation was given: language clarity would be impacted. A few main contributors agreed. @lerc didn't provide much of a counterargument.

That said, what would you have wanted to see done differently? A formal vote held? This proposal seemed to be a matter of preference, with no real consensus on clarity. Workarounds were even proposed. What would be your ideal resolution? Not shutting down the discussion as haphazardly? How much further should it have gone?

<comment><USER11> I didn't give much of a counterargument because there was hardly any argument to counter. If the issue had not have been closed so quickly I would have pressed people for specifics of what they thought were wrong. At the time I believed I was the person responsible for calling the vote so I was prepared to give them time to provide a coherent argument.

<comment><USER2> I think at the end of the day there was simply no interest in the proposal. Nadako was "not opposed to it" but that was about it. Personally, I would have liked to not have seen the conversation ended with a "that's what we decided elsewhere" message.

That being said, this particular proposal seems like a matter of opinion (on the level of tabs vs spaces) to which no amount of argument would have really swayed people. Definitely something to learn from here. Thank you for sharing your story!

<comment><USER11> I feel like you are missing the point here. Project maintainers can behave like absolute arbitors if they want to. Many projects successfully work by this mechanism. The issue as stake here isn't how they decided on the proposal but rather that the way that they decided on the proposal is different to the processes that they specified.

They are soliciting contributions by promising an open process ( see [https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution#voting- proc...](https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution#voting-process) ) but disregarding those processes when they feel like it.

Ironically, the discussion we are having here is much closer to the level of engagement that should have happened there.

As a sidenote, I'm just curious, what do you personally think of the proposal? Would you like to have the concise object literal notation in Haxe?

<comment><USER2> I think I posted in a parent comment that I think they did follow the (somewhat arbitrarily defined process) if you give leeway to the phrase "After reaching general consensus or voting takes place"; whereas it seemed like a general consensus was reached in that situation. I think a clearer process that's a little more transparent would definitely be beneficial, including clearing up that phrasing.

On the sidenote, I personally don't run into many (if any) situations where I would use concise object literal notation. I'm on the fence as to the issue of clarity and whether it would help/detract/be neutral for Haxe.

The style of concise object literals is fairly inconsistent with the rest of the language at the current time, and I could see how it could lead to clarity/confusion issues. Because I believe it's more of a syntactic sugar than anything else I am leaning to agree that macros may be the way to go for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was talking with some friends a bit ago and was surprised to learn that Haxe is used a lot in game dev and embedded a lot. Apparently a lot of set top boxes like Tivo or car infotainment systems use it, and there's a lot of very good game engine infrastructure in it - [https://armory3d.org/](https://armory3d.org/) was specifically mentioned as being surprisingly high quality, and all the people that wrote games on Kongregate apparently switched to Haxe.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to use Haxe for anything except gamedev and keep the crossplatform aspect? For example for backend webdev, it seems like you can compile to nodeJS and use express, but then you can't really compile to any other platform. You can compile to PHP, but you're also stuck with PHP frameworks.

Basically what I'm saying is that for Haxe to be truly crossplatform, it requires Haxe-native frameworks in the target domain. But that doesn't really seem to be the case outside of games, so that advantage is lost.

<comment><USER16> Does it realistically make sense to have a web meta-framework that compiles to different backend frameworks such as Node.js or PHP?

<comment><USER15> Maybe, maybe not. It just feels to me like Haxe only really makes sense for gamedev, and even then only barely, because of huge, crossplatform game engines like Unity.

I really like the language (after reading the tutorial at least), but I'm not sure where would using it make sense. For backend stuff it just seems completely inferior to Typescript (considering library support especially).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am glad Haxe is still going strong. I remember when it was an alternate language for the Flash virtual machine- everyone thought it was very cool at the time. Now Flash is dead, long live Haxe!

<comment><USER18> you're comparing apples and oranges

Flash (a browser plugin) being dead does not make ActionScript (a programming language) dead

you can use ActionScript to publish with Adobe AIR and Haxe AFAIK can do that too

<comment><USER19> No he's right. Haxe was developed by a French game company to target the Flash runtime instead of using Adobe's compiler. It can also compile to other languages: it was uses to code the full stack in the same language will using popular runtimes at the time (PHP, Javascript, Flash).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Best way to learn it?

<comment><USER21> The manual on haxe.org is a good place to start [https://haxe.org/manual/introduction-what-is- haxe.html](https://haxe.org/manual/introduction-what-is-haxe.html)

Then explore the code cookbook for more advance usage and patterns [https://code.haxe.org/](https://code.haxe.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want to love Haxe but tooling outside of Windows seems limited, although I havent looked at how good VS Code is with it yet, so maybe I'll look into that. Otherwise I am going to stick to D and Python.

<comment><USER23> I never used Haxe in windows. I agree that ten years ago tooling wasn't all that great (on linux at least), but now with the focus on VS Code we have a language server following Microsoft's LSP [0] that we can even use on other editors (sublime text, neovim, etc.).

[0]: [https://langserver.org/](https://langserver.org/)

<comment><USER22> Good to know, and yeah, at least someone knows what I meant.</comment></comment></comment>