Unix Wars (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_unix_war.htm <comment><USER2> There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.)

"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu

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

Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:

"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt.Xinu%20BSD%20Poster.png)

[https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/](https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/)

I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

<comment><USER3> interestingly also blows out the theory that bsd/unix was just a AT&T slave by licensing as the GNU project foundational docs would have you believe

<comment><USER4> Back when the GNU project was founded, there were still lots of AT&T copyright notices in BSD headers, and it took some nasty litigation in the early 1990 to sort things out.

Incidentally, in my opinion it was this lawsuit which gave Linux a head start vs the *BSDs at a critical point in its life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The divisiveness of the Unix Wars was incredibly prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s.

One of my favourite examples of this is a quote from Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg" from 1989. When Cliff's colleague Dave notices that the hacker used the –f option to the ps command on a Berkeley UNIX system (Berkeley UNIX doesn't use the –f option, only AT&T UNIX does), he said "We're watching someone who's never used Berkeley Unix." He sucked in his breath and whispered, "A heathen."

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of a few years ago when I was admining some Solaris 10 servers at a company. Prior to that I had only ever used Linux and FreeBSD. It was interesting to me, even though I was already used to there being differences between Linux and FreeBSD, to interact with something that felt like an even more remote evolutionary branch of a species of creatures. (Though at the same time, things like ZFS and DTrace come from Solaris, so it's not like it is actually all that remote to FreeBSD. Likewise, Solaris Zones are kinda like Jails in FreeBSD.)

I came to think of this because of what you wrote. Prior to using Solaris 10 I had always used to write "ps wwwaux" always, both on Linux and FreeBSD. But on Solaris 10, in order to get roughly the same info, I had to instead type "ps -ef".

<comment><USER7> Hence why when most talk about how POSIX and C are so portable across UNIX platforms, they really don't have any idea what they are talking about.

I have coded for Xenix, DG/UX, HP-UX, Aix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux (starting with kernel 1.0.9 in Slackware 2.0), using the platform compilers of each respective OS.

To put it to modern audience, it is like doing a beautiful web app and then fixing it for every browser in existence.

<comment><USER8> My first Unix was Solaris 4.1, but we soon upgraded to Solaris 2.0. My first open source software came on a 1/4" tape I bought by mail order. It included gcc so i had to compile that first with the Sun C version, then use it to compile the rest of the software. Of course Solaris 2.0 unbundled the compiler but I cant remember how I got round that. Must have got a binary of GCC from somewhere. Fun times.

<comment><USER9> > Solaris 4.1

SunOS 4.1

<comment><USER8> Right, which was rebranded as "Solaris 1".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any mention of "unix" and "war" needs to include a reference to www.groklaw.net, a website set up as a focal point for a community defense of unix and linux. A must read. It is in reverse order, with newest articles at the front so I recommend starting with this link: [http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482](http://www.groklaw.net/index.php?page=482)

It is also a remarkable example of a website that provides value to the community, a service and a piece of history.

If you are interested in the idea of what different social platforms provide/afford (Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas) this is great example of what could be done.

[edit for typo]

<comment><USER11> The Unix Wars article mentions Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).

It is very important to realize that this is NOT the same SCO that sued IBM in 2003, which is what starts the very first Groklaw article.

A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the company.

Technically the SCO vs IBM suit is still alive. SCOXQ.PK has been in bankruptcy since 2007! (13 years!) Nothing has moved for several years except a few notices of appearance by different lawyers.

<comment><USER12> > A company named Caldera renamed itself to SCO in order to create confusion. > A few years later, during the (in)famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit, and covered by > Groklaw, SCO considered naming itself USL. I would suggest that idea was > simply to create more confusion and give an appearance of legitimacy to the > company.

Caldera paid SCO for the "rights" to the Unix IP, it's not like they just bought the name. Arguing about what the "rights" for Unix actually meant (and how much could be charged to license that IP to people who thought they had already paid for it) was the point of the braindead lawsuits that followed.

<comment><USER11> Novell owned the Unix IP. (See TFA, Unix Wars)

In the following, SCO means Caldera, who renamed itself to SCO.

Novell licensed Unix rights to SCO where SCO would send 95% of sales to Novell and SCO would keep 5%. (Who sounds like the owner here?) This is all thoroughly documented on Groklaw. The entire court dockets, all filings, motions, etc. It's all there to read, part of history.

SCO later tried to claim that the agreement somehow transferred ownership of Unix to SCO. This resulted in a separate trial from SCO vs IBM. The judge found in Novell's favor in a bench trial. SCO appealed they should have had a jury trial. The Jury also found Novell owned Unix and SCO did not somehow get it via the license agreement. SCO appealed, and again the appeal court found for Novell.

SCO got exactly what it paid for. Rights to resell its Unix derived OS. SCO could have negotiated to license more rights than it did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

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

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

[https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst- job.html](https://user.eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html)

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

</comment><comment><USER13> One of my favorate quotes ever comes from an old article about BSD development, and contributor's code in general:

> Still, 90 percent of the contributions were thrown away; the rest, as > McKusick likes to say, "were peed upon to make them smell like Berkeley.

[https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/](https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/)

<comment><USER2> Berkeley pees right back!

[https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business- tr...](https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/12/07/berkeley-business-tries-novel- way-to-stop-public-urination)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Small mistake in the article. System V code was never released publicly by SCO, just some earlier variants not too far removed from V7.

They make great code reading if anyone is interested. The early Unix variants were quite simple and concise, nothing like the complexity of a modern variant.

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/tree/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/tree/Research-V7)

For example early process swapping was really simple:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/text.c)

or scheduling was quite simple too:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/slp.c)

or that's most of a file system:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/sys/sys/iget.c)

scanner and lexer of the earlier (pre pcc) c compiler:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/c/c00.c)

and that is ls:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ls.c)

ed, the standard editor:

[https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Researc...](https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history- repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cmd/ed.c)

</comment><comment><USER15> Apollo Domain/OS could emulate both BSD and System V, as well as support its own very different shell command set.

One of the ways it did this was that filesystem symlinks could reference the environment variable that specified what OS emulation you wanted.

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

[https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/](https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/)

<comment><USER2> Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer ran OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symbolic_links)

>Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in. The universes supported were AT&T's SysV.3 and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD 4.3). For example: if the ps command was run in the att universe, then the symbolic link for the directory /bin would point to /.attbin and the program /.attbin/ps would be executed. Whereas if the ps command was run in the ucb universe, then /bin would point to /.ucbbin and /.ucbbin/ps would be executed. Similar Conditional Symbolic Links were also created for other directories such as /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/include.

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

...And the hardware wasn't all that reliable either!

[http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble- roulette.html](http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html)

At least you could run Space Invaders on the system console while it was down waiting for repairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software monocultures. So, it's a mixed bag. But I'll tell you what: I _do not miss_ HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ...

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ...

I'm curious whether this includes Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris. It _appears_ to me (as a latecomer) that Sun finally got their act together and shipped something technically superior to GNU+Linux, and that if they'd managed to stay in business that (Open)Solaris would be an extremely competitive offering. Or put differently, how much of this is that yes, the old unixen sucked, but just because they were old? I mean, if I compare Fedora 32 to Red Hat Linux 7 (RH, not RHEL), there's a world of difference there.

<comment><USER17> The big thing for me is that (Open) Solaris felt like a single solid product, the same feeling I always got from FreeBSD. Whereas the various Linux distributions always felt like a grab bag of various pieces, some of which worked well and others were still rough around the edges.

Little things, like the days of LILO for a boot loader. It had to maintain a map of disk blocks that contained the kernel and initial ram disk, so if the kernel or initrd was re-written to /boot you had to re-run the lilo command to refresh its map (otherwise your system wouldn't boot). Took forever to get something that understood the filesystem. But what replaced it (Grub) I always felt was over-engineered. To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux (there were boot loaders that natively understood fat32, ext4, and other filesystems without having to have a mini OS built into the boot loader) -- just seemed to be more elegant to me.

Then there were promising technologies that just up and disappeared (at least for a while) such as userfs. We now have fuse, but there were multiple years of distribution versions that didn't have either. Also, there were patches for older kernel versions that supported containers, but they were never mainstream until we got the current mix of process isolation features which enables things like Docker.

Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yeah, I was trying to not be too aggressive about it, but OpenSolaris is literally my favorite OS of all time, and I'm a little annoyed that a decade later everything else has only managed to match it, and then poorly. ZFS is still better than any other filesystem, zones are still equal to LXC and only just eclipsed by Docker (and then, only in UX), eBPF may finally be better than DTrace, and pkg is just as good as dnf/zypper (and IMO better than apk/apt/pacman).

> To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from > isolinux

Wouldn't that just be syslinux (/isolinux/extlinux)? On systems where I pick the bootloader, I usually use that since old grub is dead and grub2 is way more complex than I like.

> Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an > OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and > snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?

Isn't that more of a ZFS+beadm thing than a zones thing? FWIW, openSUSE _can_ do that using BTRFS. It... okay, again I honestly think ZFS+pkg did it better than BTRFS+zypper, but it does work quite well. You can also add it using things like snapper on Arch Linux if you're using a snapshotting filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This has to be a new all-time low in website layout. `max-width:460px` means that it uses less that 24% of my screen space, on my _laptop_. I have to scroll through 3 pages of 12-point, 10-word wide text. I heard the arguments for 80-column code but 80-column websites?

If this is their idea of a "web book" feel, it would be a book held 4 feet from your face.

<comment><USER19> Hi and welcome back to the year 2000, where a non-trivial number of users operate at sub-800x600 resolutions and the only reliable cross-platform tool for page layout is HTML tables. You can't even reliably switch stylesheets based on viewport size, and even if you could, CSS support is laughable. Netscape can't reflow, it has to redraw the entire page.

While it's clear that the max-width was added later, it seems to be done so in order to maintain the layout that was clearly created back in those days.

Thankfully simple layouts like this are trivial to zoom, as other commenters have pointed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that GNU only gets a mention in the very last paragraph when a lot of the software described in the article was built with GNU tools (if not for other reason, because developer tools were _horrendously expensive_ back then).

Also, it's interesting people don't think of user groups DECUS and SHARE as relevant precursors (that predate both Unix and the internet)

<comment><USER21> Even late versions of Solaris (such as I was using at school circa 2005) didn't ship a GNU userspace, you'd have to install it separately. By the time GCC 1.0 came out in 1987, 4.3BSD was already out, SunOS was several versions deep, AT&T had released System V four years earlier... how precisely were these built on GNU tools, when they all got their start before GNU existed?

<comment><USER20> Early versions of Solaris, as most Unix systems, didn't come with any compilers - a C compiler was an expensive add-on option. Other development tools - other languages, debuggers, linters, code-generators, etc, were not provided in the standard distribution.

The college I graduated from, when I visited a couple years after graduating, had compilers installed in their Unix machines (mostly AIX, some HP/UX and, IIRC, one DG/UX). Usage was limited (they were licensed _by seat_ ).

The availability of GNU tools was a big thing - for the first time we could have a C compiler and other developer tools on our Unix machines without worrying about per seat licensing.

<comment><USER7> They actually did, Sun changed them into a separate product after a couple of Solaris versions, which triggered the adoption of the until then largely ignored GCC.

There is a Usenet post about it.

<comment><USER9> That C compiler unbundling was probably the largest mistake Sun ever made and very likely the reason Linux rose to relevance and later world domination.

In the early to mid 90s SunOS (prior to Solaris it was SunOS) was in the place where Linux has come to be - it was the default assumed by most software. When one ftp'd any src tarball and typed make, it was almost certain to work on SunOS and very often require extensive tweaking on other platforms. On the nascent early Linux it was a huge pain to get any open source to compile.

Unbundling the C compiler in Solaris changed this dynamic. Suddenly it was no longer a given that everything could be trivially compiled on those SPARC box everyone had.

<comment><USER7> There was no Linux when Sun took that decision.

Linux rose to relevance because BSD was stuck in a legal fight, and while Windows was starting to eat the UNIX workstation market, Microsoft did not considered worthwhile to actively pursue their POSIX support.

Had Windows NT offered POSIX standard support to the level I could do my DG/UX work assignments at home (minus traditional UNIX wars issues), and I would never cared for Linux.

I bet many would have done the same.

<comment><USER9> > There was no Linux when Sun took that decision.

True, but initially Solaris (and the compiler unbundling) had no impact on the Sun user base.

The initial release of Solaris was... not that great. I remember universities and research labs (entities which provided a lot of the open source effort) held out upgrading for a long time and stayed on SunOS for years.

So by the time most organizations finally upgraded to Solaris, Linux was established but not very strong. The timing was just right (or wrong, depending on POV) for the compiler unbundling to start pushing people (me included) to Linux.

(Although then I joined Sun and lived happily in the world of Solaris for many years.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "In the late 1990's, interest began to coalesce around Linux, the first really open Unix system released under the free software GNU license, and which might finally unify the Unix family after three decades of development."

I wonder if they ever imagined the editor wars and distro wars of today.

<comment><USER7> Vi vs Emacs vs XEmacs was already a thing back then.

<comment><USER23> I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a lot (i.e. the joke wasn't even claiming that Emacs took 8mb in memory, but that the entire system had a generous 8mb of RAM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember ca. 1990 when the big debate in Unix shops was whether SVR4 or OSF/1 would ultimately prevail. Few people probably would have predicted that both of these would be seen as essentially dead ends 20 years later.

</comment><comment><USER24> This page shows a nice chart of the GNU/Linux evolution: [http://futurist.se/gldt/wp- content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.sv...](http://futurist.se/gldt/wp- content/uploads/11.10/gldt1110.svg)

</comment><comment><USER25> I warmly remember Coherent [1], it was a nice UNIX clone.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_\(operating_system\))

</comment><comment><USER26> > The original version was developed at AT&T Bell Labs, a non-profit research > institution, so the source code was permitted to be published and shared > with others.

This is not true. Consider what occurred with "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code".

</comment><comment><USER27> It's probably just me, but from the headline I expected this: [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unixwars.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Nowadays replaced by Linux distribution wars.

<comment><AUTHOR> no those are cold ones. mostly newbees. few flavors of distros.

Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Gimme a recent released distro which got decent userbase.

Solus is 5 years old and ranks 8th on distrowatch.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm i'll take that one

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _" a full screen wysiwyg text editor called vi"_

I guess the meaning of wysiwyg has changed a bit over the years.

<comment><USER29> You've never had the "pleasure" of using ed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_\(text_editor\)) apparently. In an era of daisy wheel printers, vi (and emacs) were very much WYSIWYG and far more usable than their predecessors.

<comment><USER7> I had the pleasure of using its MS-DOS counterpart, edlin.

Yep vi was definitely an improvement.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing the Google Play artist hub - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/cq4zzfwqNLZ <comment> guard-of-terra Have you noticed the problem: there's already something like ten places every artist wants to be: google play, itunes, magnatune, etc, etc.

Then there is this problem when you want some music and you have to figure out who carries it first.

<comment><USER2> An opportunity for aggregators?

<comment><USER3> There's already a few big players in this space: cdbaby and tunecore.

There's also normally a bunch of indie aggregators. In New Zealand we have dunedinmusic.com and amplifer.co.nz to name but two.

Most of these exist because apple and amazon won't let just anyone set up and sell on their stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fantastic. But I'm guessing the problem with this will be that that Google is Google and they won't give artists the extra support that they need like the labels do. Sure, the technology gets you the distribution, but you first need to have something to distribute.

Music artists need all kinds of support: Marketing help, design help, someone technical to upload and produce their stuff. If they can provide some of that support then maybe this will have a better chance.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why is that "fantastic" considering everyone could get into iTunes roughly on the same terms for years? And various independent music stores too. Where's the innovation?

And there are a lot of countries where neither iTunes or Google Play are available, and maybe aren't going to in observable future.

<comment><USER3> Because to get on iTunes you have to sign up with apple and jump through all their hoops. Given that, this is actually a big, welcome change. It means that artists can keep all of the proceeds, instead of having to cut a deal with tunecore or any of the other iTunes aggregators.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why so? There are companies who'll jump hoops for you - for a fixed one-time payment.

Exactly what Google is up to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Give everybody a website & fool them into believing their sales will increase. First it was for small businesses now music. Is that all that google tries to do? Play catch up with facebook, itunes, iphones..etc etc.. (facepalm)

<comment><USER5> & this was downvoted because I don't necessarily agree or appreciate the topic?</comment></comment>


My first course: Online Popcorn.js based Django audio-course - <AUTHOR> http://django101.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm one of the authors and maintainers of Popcorn.js and this is unbelievably cool. I think you may be the first ever commercial product built with Popcorn.js - so congrats on that and for making such a worthwile product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great product Rick, loving it; saved me a lot of work, I'd love to donate once I start making some money :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Inspiring! The way you used Popcorn.js is engaging, I could see myself using this course. One thing I noticed in your sample chapter is that when I skipped around to see a previous slide, the slides would not change relative to the time. The slide always stays on the last one presented.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ed, thanks for your feedback. I'm aware of this and I'm still looking for a solution, let's hope Rick here can help me out ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very slick, I was hooked and watched the whole first chapter and I didn't experience any issues to speak of.

As successful as the Django course might be (and it looks like it will be), I think you should also consider working on an audio-course creation application (in Django ;) and charge for that too so other people can create their own courses similar to this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Erik, Thanks for the suggestion, I was thinking of this since I really like the outcome myself. Might be one of my next projects ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks great,

Can you share some background on how you decided to create this content, in this specific method of presentation, how did you deicde on pricing, what are your expectations, etc?

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ohad,

I've already mailed you this, but for the others to read:

Some of the decisions are inspired by "The 4 hour workweek" book by Timothy Ferriss; You could see this as one of my "muses" if you're familiar with it. My price is based on the idea that it should be somewhere in between $50 and $200, too cheap and it isn't worth the hassle, too expensive and people would have to think a bit more about it or they expect extra support. I've checked out other courses as well. Real life courses are a lot more expensive, online courses are a on average a bit cheaper, but most of them are videocourses and you don't have the option to ask questions or do the self tests.

My first try was a plain text course. After creating the second chapter for 50% I knew this wasn't the way to go. Way too much text to read, people could buy a book and get the same.

Next try was a video-course, something like lynda.com is offering. It's nice, but: most of the video is just static for minutes, you listen to teacher and the only animation you will see is a powerpoint transition or someone typing in some code. Video's consume a lot of bandwidth as well and what I really missed was to option to click links or copy code snippets during a video- course.

Next try was video with popcorn.js. This worked, but still had the same video issues and I lacked the space on my screen to show the extra context.

My last try was the current one. It worked like I wanted it to work, but I couldn't get the speech right myself, so I made a written script and had a voice-over do it.

I've only created this first chapter to see if people are interested (another useful advice from the book), If I get enough potential orders I'll finish it, since it takes a huge chunk of my time to finish all 21 remaining chapters and I need to pay the voice-over as well. I don't really have any expectations, if it works out: great, if not: another nice experience, no big losses here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the idea, but the demo is hanging on me. Looks like it's choking on urls.api.twitter.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that isn't supposed to break... I'll fix that soon enough, must be the tweet button there. Thanks for checking it out though!</comment></comment>


Cyber Letters of Marque and Reprisal: "Hacking Back" (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://duckofminerva.com/2014/10/cyber-letters-of-marque-and-reprisal-hacking-back.html <comment><USER2> I honestly had this idea 5 years ago. I figured they were probably just not talking about it, or used new language in whatever document they now use.

The concept is 100% analogous. The Letter of Marque and Reprisal is precisely the kind of relationship that solves the need for 'sanction' in the private contractor doing 'investigative' government infosec work type of scenario.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this just what many of the malicious hackers have been doing already? I've seen tons of cases where a hacking group got their site compromised, then the rival's site ended up wiped out about a week afterwards in retaliation.

It's not really a good idea, because it just invites wars and personal vendettas that never end. And it's likely the damage will just go up and up each time.

</comment><comment><USER4> A world where "they hacked me first" becomes a defence and all concerned deliberately hiding / obfuscating their tracks.

And then the opportunity for getting two third parties to retaliate against each other ad nauseum.

What a recipe for disaster.</comment>


Eyes Wide Open at the Protest - <AUTHOR> http://www.dartreview.com/eyes-wide-open-at-the-protest/ <comment><AUTHOR> I share this link to neither condone nor condemn anybody, but rather to solicit thoughts from the HN community on the recent race-related protests at colleges in the US.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wish I was surprised. All I can say is that I am glad that I graduated before all of this ridiculousness gained the head of steam that it has now attained. A once-proud, respected institution is continually making an ass of itself these past few years.</comment>


Credy - A simple credit card generator/validator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TimPetricola/Credy

<comment><AUTHOR> From the author: this is my very first gem, I'm open to every comment :)</comment>


US Marshal selling forfeited 3813 Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> https://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2018/bitcoinauction/ <comment><USER2> A few weeks late :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just saw it today :D</comment></comment>


Stop Designing Fragile Web APIs - <AUTHOR> http://mathieu.fenniak.net/stop-designing-fragile-web-apis/ <comment><USER2> No, no, no. I disagree strongly that APIs should be vague about what they provide.

An API designer who deliberately leaves out documentation of important features (like pagination, sorting, etc), and fails to specify the format of what comes back any further than "this will be what you intended", hasn't designed an API at all.

APIs are well-defined interfaces that other programmers can rely on. If there is no well-specified contract, there is no API.

Defining such an interface so that it's reasonably future-proof? Yup, that's hard. And you're not an API designer until you take on that challenge. If you instead punt on all that responsibility, and provide the user few or no guarantees about how your service works, you've taken the cowardly way out.

The essence of software architecture is isolating and tackling complexity. Isolate it in the API, don't push it out to every one of your users.

I don't argue that an API needs to specify _absolutely everything_ about its operation, but obscuring and removing features from an API without changing the version number is foul play. That is fragility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Pete,

When I read your comment, I'm left with the distinct impression that we agree on 90% of what you're saying.

Of course you're going to document your API and define the format of what comes back from your requests. An API is a contract. Yeah, you isolate complexity in your API. You _design_ an API, which is a difficult job, rather than just saying to your user, "here's a mapping to my database, do whatever you want with it."

This article does not say that APIs "should be vague about what they provide." It says the opposite, they should be very specific about what they provide.

You design an API by providing specific tools for your users. You give them hammers, not chunks of metal that they can mould however they want. You don't throw "features" into your API, you provide capabilities that your users need.

Mathieu

<comment><USER3> I think it depends on why you are making the API.

If the intent is to publicize your business by letting other programmers integrate their app/website with your service then I agree with designing an "API" that way. Because you don't want people to do with your API things you didn't intend them to do.

If the intent is to give other programmers the ability to work with your data and create their own thing using your service then the API need to be more flexible and be able to give more freedom possible to the users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author is basically advocating moving application logic inside of the API. This is counter to the entire purpose of an API.

Moving application logic inside the API will indeed protect you from having problems where the API changes in ways that make it incompatible with the Application, but that's because the API is now part of your Application and you're just going to solve those same issues within the API.

An API which provides every relevant data field is not "a programmer's API", it's an actual API.

<comment><USER5> I could be wrong, but I don't think it's that black and white. I think the intention is to advocate thinking about user intent. If the user really does want/need a flexible API method, then I think that makes sense to actually provide that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The recommendations of this document are definitely at odds with the design of the API my team is currently working on.

We are trying to build a data access API that can provide a functional and flexible view into data where we know some of the requirements and expectations of the initial users, but we don't know how it will be extended and transformed in the future.

If we don't provide things such as customization of the returned fields, desired date ranges, and ordering, then I believe we would have to rely on waiting for feedback from users/devs that we did not satisfy and attempt to build new end-points to correct that deficiency. That seems to be almost guaranteed to get us off to the wrong start for a large portion of users and they might just decide it isn't worth asking us to make changes since we didn't appear to be catering to them in the first place. I understand that we can't meet all the unknown needs, but if we can build features into the API to meet general classes of needs, that seems better than ignoring them until the specifics become known and then supplying further endpoints that answer only those specifics.

How would you extend this philosophy to a large data portal such as data.gov?

Even in the FBI example, if there is no extensibility or transform-ability in the API, how are the unmet needs of users handled? Do you have a system that gathers complaints from users about the data they suspect is possible but not available and then build new endpoints for each distinct need? Do you just ignore the potential transformative uses that aren't directly applicable to the needs of the customers to which you are paying attention?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, very interesting questions. :-) I'm not sure I have the answers for these questions, but I do have some ideas.

Most APIs don't want to provide data analysis capabilities. They want to provide data. Data analysis is a really hard problem space. For the FBI example, the FBI doesn't want to build an analytics tool for you to use; that's not their core business, and it's not something that helps them achieve their goals.

Data analysis versus data are two different problems with different classes of solutions; for example, a valid approach to delivering data might be an API to retrieve compressed, batch (nightly) downloads of events or deltas. That's not the only solution, of course, but I just mean to create an example that's a different point-of-view.

If you intend to provide data analysis from your API, I would say that is the "intent" of your API and you should design it as such, with the appropriate flexibility and user-defined behaviour that is required to answer arbitrary queries from users. This is a hard API to design, build, and scale.

When designing a data analysis API, you should address scenarios like a user making a valid API request that can't be delivered in real-time; is it your intention to make your API accessible in real-time, in which case you have to either crash horribly or tell this request to piss off? Or is it your intent to provide the analysis no matter what, in which case perhaps it would be valid to queue such queries, process them in batches with limited concurrency, and deliver the results when completed.

Regarding the unmet needs of users, you should always provide a feedback mechanism for your API. This is something that varies a lot depending upon your customer; a lot of developers work in "enterprise" software, where the feedback channel is usually pretty apparent. Public APIs with an undefined audience will have a harder time getting that feedback, but usually you can bet that the importance of an issue is proportional to the number of times you hear about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure this works once other people start building on top of your API though. I would rather bump the API version than break API compatibility by adding/removing/renaming fields.

Github (which you used in your example of good design) do change fields returned in their API responses but only between API version not inside of versions. The link you gave [1] is to Version 3 of their API which is different to Version 2 and will be different to Version 4. I don't really want to be programming against APIs where identical requests can return varying responses based on supposed intent.

1\. <http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/statuses/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Alex,

I never advocated breaking compatibility by adding, removing, or renaming fields in this article. Would you please let me know what gave you that impression so that I can clarify it?

I also did not state that having a versioned API is a bad thing. GitHub's API was a great example because it's both well-designed and versioned. Good design is going to make your API less fragile and far less prone to version changes, but I'm strongly in favour of versioning your API.

Mathieu

<comment><USER7> Hi Matthew,

You suggested that the FBI could re-write the API request to be: <http://api.fbi.gov/wanted/most>

Which would return a set of known fields. You then go on to say:

 _"After complaints that "notoriety" is a made-up number, the FBI can hide the field; the intent-driven design is unchanged."_

This suggests that the API author is free to add, remove or rename fields in the response without bumping version as it's part of the "intent-driven design".

In response to your second point, I then don't understand what the real purpose of intent-driven API design is. The only different appears to be that you given more RESTful URLs than using loads of query parameters?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thank-you for pointing that out. That's definitely a mistake in the article. I've amended point #4 with another possible approach.

Intent-driven design _reduces_ the fragility of your API, gives you a wider variety of changes that you can make to your API that are backwards compatible.

If it's done perfectly, and your software solves the same business problem tomorrow as it does today, then you will never need to increment your API version number. The reality is that it will never be designed perfectly, and requirements are never that stable, so having a versioned API is a practical and prudent choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Artificially constrained APIs are annoying as hell. It's maddening when you want to build something that doesn't fit the scenarios the API builder had in mind, and you know the data is just below the surface, but you can't because the builder didn't expose it.

It's great to include simplified APIs like "/wanted/most" but I also want the more powerful version.

<comment><USER9> i agree with this. also, one annoying nugget is what happens if the api owner changes the logic behind wanted/most and they breaks some functionality behind something i've built?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Intent-driven API gels with a talk from Netflix that came out just a few days ago: <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/API-Revolution>

His argument is that we're in the middle of a switch from RESTful resource- oriented APIs to what he calls "Experience-Driven APIs". He explains how Netflix has made this shift with its PS3 app. They effectively introduced a new facade layer inside the server and that's what the PS3 talks to.

The main thing about this talk is that this whole question constantly repeats itself with the pendulum swinging back and forth. There's really no right answer and it depends a lot on the reason for providing the API in the first place.

And that gets back to another reason we are probably seeing the trend, which is that companies like Twitter are becoming more protective of their APIs. While the OP is mostly arguing this from the perspective of technical efficiency, this commercial argument could sway companies even further towards intent-driven APIs.

I imagine we will end up in a dichotomy, where companies who provide their own UI and services will typically support intent-style APIs, while companies who specifically have a business model of charging for their API will continue to offer the more precise resource-style API.

</comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR If you remove features from an API then there will be less to break.

But the article just assumes that those features you removed weren't needed. Seems a bit dubious to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice and fresh idea about API design, thank you fenniak. You almost answered my questions as they poped in my head, especially about DRY!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I'm so glad to hear that. Thanks for your feedback. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is the simpler API more "fragile"? It may lack some virtues (e.g. a paging interface) but how could it be more robust?

Also note that it exemplifies many of the virtues cited (ease of pre- generation, ease of caching, etc.) over the more complex option. Indeed, I'd suggest many API designers would prefer to offload busywork such as sorting to the client for anything other than very large datasets (you four core 3.2GHz CPU (a) is running idle, and (b) costs me, the API designer, nothing).

Consider that the simpler API is: a) simpler to document b) simpler to implement c) simpler to consume d) scales better

Note that every time the user changes sort order the complex API gets hit. The simpler API is out getting coffee and scoring with the sexy APIs from across the street.

How is it worse?

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree webapis need to be less fragile but I definitely would n't advocate following this approach. To be honest I'm actually surprised how well the original followed good REST principles. Hateoas is a good way to make your api less fragile to change btw.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you are making a convincing argument for your point. Most likely it will be a developer interpreting the api and generally speaking they are likely to want some flexibility in how you query a resource.

I would say your proposed suggestion is much more limiting, you have basically removed the query string and changed the name.

So your proposed version returns all the data, in most notorious order, that could be tonne of data. You are going to need query strings for paging and filtering and sorting..this is perfectly good api design.

I would recommend odata.org for a read. I would also recommend apigee.com white paper on good api design.

Also with versioning in mind, you may wish too include api/v1.x/mostwanted

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who was really disappointed that there isn't actually an FBI API?

<comment><USER17> All I could find on data.gov was this widget <https://explore.data.gov/widgets/hwp2-9a2f>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> well, vague on details is a bit tricky - what happens when the data set becomes huge and they need to include pagenation? sometimes the intent-based api will start to include payloads in the body of the request to specify things like page number etc. Is this less fragile? Or have we just moved the complexity into a different place?

</comment><comment><USER19> After building out dozen of API's I have came to conclusion that in order to design a great API you have to start with writing a client for it first.

<comment><USER20> I feel as though that idea is related to test-driven development</comment></comment>


"That speaks volumes about Adobe's current culture" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=24116953#p24116953

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if this is where things like Creative Cloud comes from.</comment>


Instagram's Christmas Crackdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/instagrams-christmas-crackdown-meme-accounts/579055/ <comment><USER2> Good. A lot of meme accounts are just spam, reposting the same crap over and over again with no attribution or credit to the original author.

I also can't feel bad for the people that lost their main source of income from this. If your main source of income is reposting shit (that you haven't even created yourself) on the internet then that's the main problem right there and this is a good wake-up call.

Nothing wrong with memes per se and there is a place for them (subreddits, Imgur, 9Gag, etc) but I feel like they are just noise as far as social media is concerned. I was definitely annoyed by the constant stream of them and other "funny" (but not really) content back when I had a Facebook account.

I wish social media platforms make an actual set of rules they enforce about only posting your own, original content instead of reposting shit. This is what I miss about forums - there's always been a list of rules and a moderation team that dictates what's appropriate and not and deletes inappropriate content. I was in fact surprised when I realised modern social media has none of that and you can pretty much get away with anything (even if it gets reported) as long as it doesn't blow up in popularity</comment>


People just received text messages originally sent on Valentine's Day - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/tech/text-messages-delayed-valentines-day/index.html <comment><USER2> Is anyone familiar enough with the internals of SMS, and particularly how messages are exchanged between carriers, to explain where a fault could occur that could affect messages sent by customers on all carriers? Do they all push messages sent by their customers to a single party who sends them back out to the recipient's carrier?

<comment><USER3> The third party service was Syniverse [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7661833/Cell...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7661833/Cell- phone-users-receive-old-Valentines-Day-texts-exes-dead-loved-ones-glitch.html)</comment></comment>


On Quitting Academia - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/malcolm-gaskill/diary <comment><USER2> The UK university sector is the victim partly of its own short-term thinking and partly of successive governments blind to its strategic importance. The UK still has arguably the second best university system in the world, together with the huge advantage of being an English-speaking country. It therefore ought to be investing massively in its university and research sector. This is one of the few areas where the country can really punch above its weight globally (just think of the soft power implications of educating some of China's future elite). But in meek submission to bumbling, penny-pinching government oversight, UK universities have made a series of devil's bargains.

The end result? On the research side, UK academics expend almost as much effort documenting and evaluating each other's research output as they do on actual research. They work on topics that have 'impact' according to an official definition rather than topics that they are interested in. And when it comes to education, all but the most elite institutions compete for students simply by giving them everything they want. Slowly but surely, the universities are cannibalising their own credibility. In their efforts to please students, they are devaluing the very qualifications that those students are paying a lot of money to obtain.

It's not all bad. Good research still gets done. There are occasional brilliant and/or enthusiastic students who make teaching feel worthwhile. I'm sure that bitter academics and ex academics have been predicting the imminent implosion of the university system for decades or even centuries. But I do think that education in the UK has been radically reconceptualized in a way that's quite harmful. Classically, education is the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student. Humans being more than just passive epistemic vessels, the results of education can range from the mundane (Jane can now solve linear equations), to the efficacious (Bill gets a well paying job) or the profound (Tom is inspired to produce a great literary work). If you are really committed to education you respect the autonomy of your students and don't try to bring about any particular outcome directly. This approach is, of course, totally antithetical to the metrics-driven approach that has now taken over UK universities. The transfer of knowledge is regarded merely a means to an end, and is considered really important only if it increases student satisfaction and success on the job market. This makes the relation between teacher and student fundamentally manipulative and unhealthy.</comment>


I created groups for news and discussions about Y Combinator and X-Google startups - <AUTHOR> http://friendfeed.com/paul/9a4a817b/i-created-groups-for-news-and-discussions-about

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you have a YC startup and I missed your blog - <http://friendfeed.com/yc-startups></comment>


Ask HN: Best Java programming book for the Beginner - <AUTHOR>

I am going to school in the fall and my intro to CS class will be teaching us Java. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good beginners book, but not one of those "for dummies" books as I find them useless. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I got the most value from Effective Java by Joshua Bloch when learning Java. It's not specifically for beginners, but teaches best practice that would encourage a beginner in the right direction from the start. I suspect there are many instructional Java books that would teach coding practices that would not be considered best practice today.

<http://java.sun.com/docs/books/effective/>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's unfortunate that colleges and universities collude with textbook publishers to ensure that they use a different textbook/edition each year that can only be bought at the university bookstore. Really you should be able to find out exactly which textbook your course will be using and obtain a copy beforehand.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just checked the book store and they recommend:

JAVA PROGRAMMING:FROM PROB.ANAL... By MALIK Edition 5TH 12 Publisher: CENGAGE L ISBN: 9781111530532

I appreciate everyone's recommendations, I am still willing to try out everyone's suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your CS class will likely recommend a book for you, but my wife used Lewis and Loftus when she took an intro to CS course to get a better handle on what the hell I did with my life. She found it relatively easy to learn from.

</comment><comment><USER5> Savitch's Absolute Java is reasonable, if a bit expensive.

I found it a tad verbose and slow, but there's many worse. There's a joke in there somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> Check out thenewboston's java tutorials on youtube or go to his site at thenewboston.com

You can also try out Head First Java book.

</comment><comment><USER7> I started with "Java:Complete reference" but it's definitely not for beginners. It covers a wide array of stuff though

</comment><comment><USER8> Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Java from the Ground-up</comment>


Python 3.9 Alpha 1 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/python/cpython/releases/tag/v3.9.0a1 <comment><USER2> [https://docs.python.org/3.9/whatsnew/3.9.html](https://docs.python.org/3.9/whatsnew/3.9.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a planned date - full schedule for the final 3.9 release is almost a year away.

[https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0596/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0596/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I know; this the first alpha.</comment></comment>


Uber's Leather Boys - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/ubers-leather-boys-fcdcf8dbac70#.f9zb35sr1 <comment><AUTHOR> She also commented on Twitter today that someone was contacting all her acquiantances looking for dirt on her. Uber is denying it's them but they've done similar stuff when they've gotten into trouble in the past.

Great transformative product but they've certainly failed on building a healthy culture.

</comment><comment><USER2> Just posted a few minutes ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13730271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13730271)

<comment><USER3> Major discussion from earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725529).

(We changed the baity title in accordance with the HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))</comment></comment>


Getting Rid of Comments on Vice.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/were-getting-rid-of-comments-on-vice?utm_source=vicetwitterus <comment><USER2> I think there actually might be a market here for Reddit...

Create a subreddit for a news site, and each new article on the news site automatically gets a new post on the subreddit. Embed the relevant post on the news site.

Since "karma" is transitive across Reddit and across news sites, users are slightly less likely to troll. You could also do this with some sort of reputation system across websites (Disqus could add in something like that).

The big problem with news sites is that the communities aren't big enough that there are any negative correlations associated with being a dick. Even facebook runs into this problem because there isn't any way to "punish" someone for a rude comment. Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue (at least in my very non-expert opinion). Reddit helps, with comment karma and post karma... but it obviously isn't perfect.

<comment><USER3> > Transitive, persistent reputation is key to solving this issue

Reddit/HN/etc make the username behind each comment as small and discreet as possible. As much as I dislike the low content/cruft ratio of BBForum, its design emphasizes each commenter's login, and registration date. This helps at least a bit, as even visitors can readily notice the correlation between certain avatars and the quality of their posts.

Whereas on Reddit and here, I even sometimes miss that the same account is just replying to a reply--i.e. just continuing the conversation. I think the aim is to judge comments by their content rather than the character who posts them, but context is always extremely relevant. It matters whether the poster is a Senator, a thought leader, or a habitual troll. And I often get too wrapped up in the content to dig for the source.

<comment> wav-part This has much simpler solution: user tagging. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite has it. I am working on a C Reddit/HN client (basically RES on steroids) that would implement these user remebering features such as usertags, usersets, bad/good users, total_upvote/downvotes_given_to_a_user etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think many people have realized that the costs (filtering & moderation) vs. benefits (community engagement) of comment sections just don't make sense for most websites.

I suspect that for comment sections to be _good_ the users need to actually be invested in the 'forum' they're posting in. Without any skin in the game (reputation or fear of moderation) there is little incentive for most users to add value and the system becomes dominated by 'low value' posts (like trolls, flamewars, spambots, etc.).

<comment><USER5> This actually a good argument toward shifting commenting into a paid subscription offering. Give access to the site free of ads and allow you to comment on articles.

<comment><USER6> I disagree, if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and less likely to self-moderate.

It would make more sense to grant commenting privileges to individuals who have engaged with the site previously and are in good standing. Much like the Product Hunt.

<comment><USER7> > if people pay for the privilege of commenting, they will feel entitled and > less likely to self-moderate

Not if getting banned means they have to buy a new account to post again.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, this is the something awful forums model. It's not perfect but better than most places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality).

A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I've always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to reach Reddit's size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.

<comment><USER10> Would Ycombinator be willing to start a separate product with its ranking/reputation system to allow other sites to host comments section?

Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is built on.

<comment><USER11> I'd guess that a big part of the quality control here comes from efforts of the moderators, so I don't think that replicating the ranking system would replicate the quality of discourse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think if you're getting mostly garbage comments, it should give you pause for thought. Yes, the format of the internet doesn't encourage thoughtful, polite comments. But equally there might be a problem with what you're writing if you're attracting trolls. This is certainly true of Vice.

<comment><USER13> I think that assertion looks good on paper but isn't fair in practice. Other than communities that have significant friction to get in -- e.g. $5 for a Metafilter membership -- comments are going to fall prey to the dynamic that afflicts online reviews: people who are pissed are often more motivated to make it known, compared to those who are merely satisfied [0].

Whatever one might think of Vice overall, the model is that good journalism in general pisses people off. This attracts not only substantive critical comments, but trolls who want to deface the article. It takes real effort through moderation to create a constructive community, as I'm sure the folks who run HN can strongly attest to.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online- revie...](https://www.quora.com/Is-there-negative-bias-in-online-reviews)

<comment><USER14> Metafilter also has pretty significant manual moderation. It's not uncommon to see moderator comments telling users to stop talking about some aspect of a post or tell someone who's going against the grain to pipe down. There is also a significant number of comment deletions, many of which are polite but have the potential to annoy privileged users.

The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite controversial and caused many long time users to leave.

Basically, the comment culture is the result of a lot more than just a $5 cover, and it might not be the success a lot of people think it is.

<comment><USER15> > The end result is a sort of artificial consensus, which has been quite > controversial and caused many long time users to leave.

As a long-time user of the site and an occasional commenter (I seem to be sitting at around 1500 comments after 8 years of having an account, which marks me as a bit of a noob), this feels to me like a true but perhaps misleading statement.

MetaFilter demonstrates that intensive, situationally attuned, full-time moderation can be very effective at maintaining a functional community. It also demonstrates that this process can (and almost certainly will) create its own style of drama and discord. Whatever else it is, MetaFilter commenting is a game system with rich, subtle, and frequently unsettling dynamics. It's somewhat driven by what I think of as a correctness ratchet, where locally established positions and norms are both ruthlessly enforced and endlessly subject to critique or reversal (except for certain positions which have attained the status of axiom or common-law moderation practice). As far as I can tell, as many people leave the site because they are on the _leading_ edge of this process (and view the overall state of things as regressive) as because they trail the consensus.

This can all be pretty frustrating. At its worst, it devolves into hyperbolic groupthink, and occasionally edges into the kind of emergent self-satire that you see so much of on, say, tumblrs produced entirely by socially isolated teenagers. I'm currently disinclined to participate in a lot of MeFi threads for the simple reason that I don't see any real gain for anyone in litigating positions contrary to the current mefite correctness state machine.

I don't think any of that serves to undermine the basic point, or demonstrate that the MetaFilter comment culture is a failure. (Participating in MetaFilter, and engaging in good faith with the really difficult aspects of MetaFilter-style discourse, has probably done more for me as a thinker than any other single thing I can point to.)

It rather serves to highlight that no discourse is _without_ its significant problems, or statically assured to remain productive & humane. Humans fail. Systems fail. There are very definitely other kinds of community you might want to build than MetaFilter, but we would be doing a lot better if we built more systems that fail as well as MetaFilter does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many sites have been closing their comments section. It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control the message. Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation, these sites just shut the community out and become a broadcast medium once again.

A notable removal of a comments section was NPR's shutdown right around the time of the Democratic National Convention. The comments were overwhelmingly anti-Hillary, but they were for the most part civil. It looked really bad because these were progressives and liberals going after her rather than rabid right-wingers. Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.

<comment><USER17> > It seems to me that the purpose is to further constrict dissent and control > the message.

Insofar as "control the message" means "we are tired of anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."

> Since NPR clearly had a pro-Hillary agenda, the comments section had to go.

There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.

<comment><USER16> > anonymous people in our comments section doxxing our authors and other > people, and vile, racist attacks on our authors and groups of people", then > yes, this is an attempt to "control the message."

That is a cop-out and not true for all comment sections.

> There's no evidence for this, and it's unrelated to the topic.

That's a huge cop-out statement to shutdown conversation, and this is about as on-topic as possible. Who are you to decide what is on-topic?

<comment><USER17> Sorry - did you read the article? It was true for Vice:

> Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the > loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and > the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise... we had to ban > countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and > subjects, doxxing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against > pretty much every group imaginable.

> We don't have the time or desire to continue monitoring that crap moving > forward.

<comment><USER18> They deliberately neglected to mention how often the top comment pointed out factual inaccuracies in their stories though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't buy the "troll" argument. Every site has low-value comments and people either ignore them or down-vote them. They're not an issue. Take YouTube for example - they are known to have a cancerous comment section with little-to-no moderation, yet people don't avoid YouTube, they just avoid reading the comments on most channels.

The real problem for VICE is when comments aren't from trolls - when they're debunking the article and pointing out flaws in real-time.

That being said, I'm happy to see them disable comments. This will open up an opportunity for someone else to take over managing comments on their content... Hopefully someone who cares more about open discussion.

<comment><USER20> > they just avoid reading the comments

This. But usually when the content is good and thoughtful ,(AKA void of controversy or outrage), the comment can be useful. But otherwise frankly Youtube comment is a worst place than reddit itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It has been a long time since I actually dove into a comments section on any news site and found anything other than inflammatory arguments. It seems like people target out these news sites intentionally to start these arguments with no intent of listening to the other side. I would much rather come somewhere like here, and actually seem to have mostly civil discussions even when people disagree.

Does anyone find the comment section of any news site informative and useful? If so, where?

<comment><USER22> De Correspondent, a Dutch publication, their comments section is only accessible to paying members. They treat their subscribers as a community and usually an article ends with a question to the reader to discuss.

Their publisher has a typical Medium post about their strategy. As a subscriber I would say it works, unless the topic is already really controversial.

[https://medium.com/@ejpfauth/lets-give-reader-comments- anoth...](https://medium.com/@ejpfauth/lets-give-reader-comments-another- chance-and-for-real-this-time-77506d29856b#.o3beuoqbe)

<comment><USER23> I think it's great giving their subscribers a voice, however I don't agree that it's good to only be open to paying members. It's better to have something like subscriber accounts with unlimited comments and regular user accounts with limited number of comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hopefully the biker bar analogy* is correct. Every year it feels more and more like the bikers are actually _the majority_.

*[https://chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/](https://chuqui.com/2015/07/the-death-of-reddit/)

<comment><USER25> Interesting to look back on this. Reddit seems to be doing fine now - it's put the line in a clear and simple place, and while there are occasional paranoid grumblings that certain subreddits are getting away with brigading it's mostly working out. Whereas Twitter - which seemed to follow a line closer to the one being advocated there - is a disaster area.

<comment><USER15> > Reddit seems to be doing fine now

Hrm. I resisted this view for quite a while, but as far as I can tell in 2016 reddit is a pathological and destructive ocean of trash fire lunacy which incidentally hosts a few islands of relative sanity.

Of course it's hard to generalize about any cultural venue at the scale of reddit. But it really seems to a lot of observers that the pathology has by far outstripped its prosocial functions.

<comment><USER26> The problem with generalizing about Reddit is not its size, it's that Reddit is made up of a bunch of separate forums with separate mods and rules and users and so forth. It's just a place where discussion boards live. Reddit : forums :: Blogspot : blogs.

<comment><USER15> I used to make more or less this same argument, by analogy to Usenet, phpBB forums, etc.

My take now is that this falls apart in that the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system, moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture. While it's true that userbase and culture are differentiated between subreddits, they aren't really isolated enough, and maybe more importantly, things like GamerGate and /r/The_Donald keep happening.

It doesn't work to assume that every space or interaction on reddit is terrible, but at this point in history it works pretty well for me to treat reddit itself as a terrible meta-space: It routinely and actively produces systems that damage society, out of all proportion to its positive effects.

(Edit: I should add that I was on reddit pretty early in its lifecycle, probably owe my career to proggit in some very important sense, and sincerely feel for the people who have to _run_ the damn thing. It's been a pretty amazing platform in many ways, and it still feels kind of bad to write it off.)

<comment><USER26> > the pathologies of reddit are down to a shared platform (the voting system, > moderation tools, etc.), userbase, and site culture.

I don't buy this, not a whit. I think /r/the_donald and /r/woodworking are as different as any two phpbb messageboards on the pre-reddit internet ever were. What is the same between them (the voting, mod tools, etc) are not opinionated enough to affect the culture, they are the bare minimum necessary to make the site work.

I don't think Reddit has changed as much as you think it has. It had its share of racists and trolls back in the halcyon days you remember, and it dealt with them (or didn't) pretty much the same way back then as it does now. If anything it is doing better on that score. But I do agree that something has changed, and I have a theory on what that is, which I will now share with you (and the one or two people who ever read HN comment threads more than a day old):

I think that what's changed is the, shall we say, meta-conversation _about_ Reddit in the larger media. For the past 2-3 years or so, the question, "Is Reddit racist/sexist/etc?" has been a newsworthy one. Like any newsworthy topic, it has generated commentary: pro- and con- essays, nuanced opinions and dumb ones, insightful well-researched articles and misleading clickbait journalism, blog posts, FB comments, etc, etc. It spawned numerous sub- controversies (Did Ellen Pao make things better or worse? Was banning /r/whatever censorship or not?), each of which was a new opportunity for all of the bloggers and journalists and randos to weigh in again and argue some more.

Point is, if you follow this meta-conversation, by reading articles about Gamergate and Ellen Pao and so forth, you are exposed to _much more_ of the worst Reddit has to offer than you would've been simply by using Reddit as a discussion forum to talk about fly-fishing or programming or whatever it is you went there to chat about. From the sounds of it, you did follow this stuff, at least casually. And it seems plausible to me that that changed your opinion more than any real change in the underlying "character" of Reddit (to the extent that such a thing even exists).

<comment><USER15> Eh. I see your point. I'll grant that it's more or less true, from a certain angle: My thoughts on reddit are influenced as much, these days, by its effect on the wider world as by experience on the site itself. My direct participation trailed off some 3 or 4 years ago, judging by my comment history there. On the other hand, my participation tailed off in part because being on the site was becoming actively unpleasant, and I think that the direct experience of phenomena like GG is a reasonable basis for judging a community that fosters them.

(To be clear, I think a lot of the delta here is a question of scale as much as anything. I'm well aware that there were always virulent racists and ideological misogynists present in the userbase.)

Anyway, we disagree and that is that. Thanks for a reasonable interaction.

<comment><USER26> Likewise!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In my humble opinion perhaps websites might benefit simply from more sorting filters on comments.

Reddit allows sorting by most upvoted and most controversial which is cool. However I wonder if sorting by the reading age of the comment for example might work. Perhaps creating a set of words which are inflammatory and sorting by most negative comments to most positive comments. Perhaps combining filters could be constructive.

Of course there are performance concerns here but nevertheless I'm sure there are better alternatives to banning comments in general.

<comment><USER28> The problem with the internet is it allows people to wall themselves off from information and people who contradict their view. Even if they're in need of said contradiction.

What you're describing is part of the problem, not the solution.

<comment><USER27> I think that's a fair point. I've seen reddit change over the years into a place where people no longer debate in the comments section, they just find the thread they agree with and comment on that. It's part of why I'm looking for somewhere else.

<comment><USER28> Can you find it though? Or, like a string of trees in a rainstorm, will it too become saturated?

I'm no longer looking for an alternative. Wishing for the good old days of dial-up BBS like Totse is useless as well. However, there's still hope this will all turn out to be a narcissism fad which will eventually give way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Part of the problem is that Vice promotes their posts all over facebook to (I presume) a bipartisan demographic based on target age range.

Because these are 'sponsored posts' not ads, people who do not agree with Vice's often highly partisan slant are constantly served their relatively provocative headlines with a really easy opportunity to leave a comment (both on fb and by clicking the link and heading to the comments section).

edit: changed 'broad demographic' to 'bipartisan demographic'

</comment><comment><USER30> A healthy comment section needs active moderation. Consider getting your readership involved. You could, for example, follow the Stack Exchange model by giving frequent contributors more editorial powers in the comments section.

</comment><comment><USER31> Comments are one of the only time effective ways to challenge news stories. Indeed editorials in newspapers used to be a mode of public discourse. If we consider VICE a legitimate news outlet, then this a sad day.

<comment><USER32> Write a letter and sign your name.

<comment><USER18> Nobody except Vice gets to see that, and since nobody sees them Vice won't feel pressured into correcting their article.

<comment><USER32> Oh so trolls are helpful correctors lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's something to the idea that comments are "letters to the editor", as I believe that the biggest incentive for people to comment is when they feel that they have something to contribute. The problem, of course, is that hateful reasoning is usually something to 'novel' to contribute. It is especially easy to contribute something novel when you skim an article and you don't see any indication that the article is going to where your thinking.

I've been playing with this on a small side project (a literary journal, so the worst medium to try it out with), but it would be my dream to see a major publication try this out: Making commenting only available after correctly answering a quiz question that demonstrates that the reader has read the article. Initial questions have the ability to frame discussions, clarify controversial details, and discourage lines of thought - and on the other side, it requires little effort for an editor to implement.

<comment><USER34> >There's something to the idea that comments are "letters to the editor", as I believe that the biggest incentive for people to comment is when they feel that they have something to contribute.

I don't think that analogy holds up, though. People are free to sit down and write a well thought out email to the author of an article if they have a specific point of disagreement. The problem with comment sections is that people often times aren't even reading the story or providing constructive commentary on it. The page just becomes a platform for them to go off on whatever nonsensical theories they have and troll people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've wished that there was some kind of HTTP header I could have my UA send that told the server not to bother sending me the comments section, as I consider them to generally be a waste of resources. I even thought a little about how I'd go about formalizing it. After realizing that such a system would require an RFC, my brain broke from the irony.

</comment><comment><USER36> Considering all the events that occurred in 2016 from the brexit to trump that came as huge surprises to the media, maybe media elites should be paying MORE attention to the comments.

<comment><USER37> This is a good point. The sentiment of "deplorables" is largely being removed and modeled-out from the mainstream internet/media and helps create a filter bubble. However, I don't think those comments give any value to the users of the site.

</comment></comment><comment> vic-traill I can't comment on what might be the best technique(s) for retaining a high level commentary on news sites - I don't have the expertise.

But I do know where I stand on my own digital interactions; if there appears to be the possibility of having a critical, constructive dialogue, I'll try it out.

Everything else just encourages the mob. Walk away, don't let my ego or emotion convince me to reply to non-constructive comments.

Non-constructive comments are, as the old chestnut goes, like love. Tough to define but you know them when you see them.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks like a good opportunity for a startup to provide efficient comment moderation.

I've seen big youtube channels switch to human moderation and that made the comment section a real place for discussion.

</comment><comment><USER39> anonymity without oversight that actively kills toxic individuals is going to revert to the lowest possible quality.

there should be some rule: The lower the friction for anonymous commentators the greater the affinity towards resembling a low quality and toxic communities.

</comment><comment><USER40> >Besides, there are plenty of other ways for you to publicly discuss our work and the personal worth of our staff. We'll still be reading your thoughts on Twitter and Facebook,

This may be the real reason. Or at least a big reason.

I have seen some other sites push comments to social media in order to bolster themselves on those platforms.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I don't get the infatuation people have with comment sections. Most of the time they're full of spam or really bad trolls. If you want to share your ideas maybe you should host a blog or a vlog (on YouTube) where people are willing to engage you. I know people like to socialize but not every site needs a comment section. Go on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Slack, or whatever. That site you think needs a comment section doesn't owe anyone a space to share ideas.

</comment><comment><USER41> Since the comments section of a news website is a major source of engagement, why not charge to make comments? Wouldn't this discourage the worst of the them?

</comment><comment><USER42> Translation: Like ever other MSM outlet we want to control the narrative, even on our sub-par and typically worthless articles.

There is a reason why Gavin McInnes left.

</comment><comment><USER12> One possible solution to this problem is to use a crowdworking platform like Mechanical Turk to delete low quality comments. This is a lot cheaper than employing dedicated moderation teams, but there is a trade-off in that more low quality comments will slip through the net.

</comment><comment><USER43> When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it again, just forget about it. However when a youtube video on 10 ways to keep me from being productive" has its comments disabled I can live with that. In the case of Vice it is a whole new dimension. Guys, you are journalists. The comment section often is a direct indicator on the quality of your stuff. These days there are so many BS-articles written even by you guys that I can't keep up and I really like how someone in the comment section can just point out wrong statements for everyone. I can read through the BS of trolls, just give the people a choice! If you want your comment section to be clean just implement a HN-like upvote system.

<comment><USER44> >When I see comment sections, on YouTube or elsewhere, disabled it makes me really sad because in my opinion people should have the ability to share their opinion on stuff. The argument that those comments turn ugly is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like a comment just don't bother reading it again, just forget about it.

The argument that disabling comments is censorship is really nonsense (to me). If you don't like the way a website works, just don't bother visiting it again, just forget about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I feel its about time we have thumbs up, thumbs down and a troll marker on comment section.

<comment><USER46> Full circle back to Slashdot's moderation? :)

<comment><USER47> I'm always surprised Slashdot-style tagged voting isn't more widespread, and curious what would happen if more communities tried it.

One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> In a similar vein, CNBC quietly turned their comments off in the last couple of weeks.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think that it's simply too easy to comment. If there were a cost or some kind of difficulty in doing it that slowed down the process and made people think twice it would be completely different.

</comment><comment><USER50> no comments = fake news

<comment><USER51> Not literally, there are thousands of counter examples, but it does seem that you seldom see fake news sites with a comment section. More and more authors are getting tired of being called out for shoddy reporting on the same page as their article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It looks like a move to control dissent as people comment their disagreements with a refute, to articles they disagree with.

</comment><comment><USER53> This seems like the ideal project for a ML experiment. Offer an integrated comments section, attach the ability for humans to moderate it, and then feed the moderated items into your favorite classifier for training and see if it can learn how to mute the louder nuisances without blocking more civil discussion.

Hand-moderating comments is a miserable job, it'd be a mercy if nobody had to do very much of it.

</comment><comment><USER54> The great thing about anonymous comments is you can use them to justify any behaviour you want.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've always wondered at how few comments they get, maybe that makes them sad...

</comment><comment><USER56> Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you.

Now you know why no one you knew voted for Trump.

If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results.

Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers.

I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s.

<comment> norea-armozel "Did the pixels offend you? Block everyone who disagrees with you."

It's called freedom of association. No one is owed a hearing by there mere presence online or even offline from private organizations and private citizens.

"If the left is obsessed with turning their entire belief system into a remake of the 1930s radio model (One story teller allowed, millions of listeners), then we will get 1930s results."

That's exactly what the web is. It's a pull model. They post pages, you send a GET request to see the content. Don't like the content then don't send the GET request.

"Meanwhile, I'll be using the internet the way Jesus 2.0 intended and engaging in robust anonymous communication networks to inoculate myself from feinting pearl-clutchers and other paid government emotion hackers."

It's intended for individuals and private organizations to freely choose how to disseminate/consume their content. If that offends you then maybe you're the pearl-clutcher here perhaps?

"I'll give you one guess which ecosystem will survive when the powers that be realized their precious fourth estate no longer works like it did in the 1930s."

Sure and magically cable tv and talk radio will disappear from the Earth. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wish it didn't fall on me to point this out, but bigotry is a political position, and trolling is a personality flaw.

Honestly, I've never read VICE comments. But if it follows the pattern I've been seeing elsewhere on the Internet, when VICE's comment section was a liberal trollfest, it was okay, but when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down. Then of course the editors blame trolling, which was always pervasive.

The problem is that we, the elite; we, the establishment; we, the _intelligentsia_ , have got to maintain credibility with people who dislike us. What we haven't got available to us that the Silvio Berlusconi's of the world can use is clientelism, the ability to make people like you by offering them things you can't actually give them. I can't tell you how many times I've criticized liberals who respond "But conservatives [...]!".

We're supposed to be better than them. That's the whole point.

<comment><USER17> > when the conservatives started winning, it had to be shut down.

There's zero evidence for this. Please read the article.

<comment><USER57> I read the whole article.

I don't believe you for a second, though.

<comment><USER17> The main complaint listed by Vice in the article was that the comments section inevitably led to low quality debate, and commenters frequently had to be banned for posting racist, sexist comments, and/or releasing private information about Vice's writers or other people in the comment section. Those seem like perfectly valid reasons to shut it down, and seem orthogonal to "conservatives started winning," however you want to define that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>