Steam Expands Beyond Games - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/news/8584/ <comment><USER2> Well surprise surprise.

[http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/03/re-envisioning-steam- pa...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/03/re-envisioning-steam-part-1-an- all-in-one-digital-marketplace/)

Naa. I think it was a pretty obvious move. Although my prediction was that they would tackle film and music before software. They obviously tried but after seeing what a pain in the ass it is to work with hollywood / music industry gave up for now. They renamed "My Games" into "Library" with Games, Media, & Tools subtabs and after giving up on the whole media bit just have "Library" now.

Software is a more logical step considering they're already set up to deliver software (games).

<comment><USER3> But not all software is created equal: the single-machine sign on limit is OK for games because you'd never try to play two games at once on different computers. But hell if I'm going to buy a copy of TextExpander for my laptop if quits (and needs a password to relaunch) every time I run a game on my desktop.

I'd love to have an alternative to the App Store that doesn't mandate sandboxing and have Apple's mysterious restrictions, but Steam's DRM system is too limiting for me to be comfortable buying "real software" from it.

<comment><USER4> > _I'd love to have an alternative to the App Store that doesn't mandate > sandboxing and have Apple's mysterious restrictions_

Like <http://appbodega.com> ?

<comment><USER3> Exactly like that! But with the toolbar at the top and less of the kitschy storefront skeumorphism. But interface wise, it's still nicer than anything I foresee coming from Valve in the next decade or so.

Bodega really nailed the updates system. It found all of my non-app-store software that was out of date, and handled the updating with one click and a password. It's having trouble with Calibre, but Adium, Transmission, Pixen, BetterTouchTool, and others all worked fine.

Thanks for pointing this out! The only areas I see Steam having an advantage are preexisting users, and the ability to sell cross platform (Mac+Windows+Linux) software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very smart move. Windows store will be locked to the OS and Microsoft ecosystem. Mac App Store / iTunes is locked to OSX/iOS. Valve will be cross platform and Linux and more independent. For pricing competition and developer support this is a good competitive future. It is the cross platform angle that Microsoft and Apple can't and won't match.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe Steam-for-Linux is really a stalking horse for Steam-for-Android, and Steam-for-Android has a lot more leverage if you don't have to get your apps somewhere else but can just get them through the same channel you're already getting your games through.

<comment><USER7> Steam for Android would certainly solve the current discovery problem that exists in finding quality apps.

<comment><USER8> This is the biggest issue I have with the playstore. Outside of the top 100, which are really mostly rather crap apps in my opinion, there seems to be no logical categorization. It's a huge pain to separate the wheat from the chaff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If they start stocking Mac software, I will be very grateful. An alternative (especially one as established as Steam) to the Mac App Store is sorely needed on OS X..

<comment><USER10> I can't think of a single OS X user that would even begin to consider using Steam as an app store or launcher for anything but games.

<comment><USER11> ME! Christ, I hate the app store. They don't need to do much to improve on it. Also, part of the reason that you can't imagine it is because Steam is currently a games network. Who knows how people might perceive steam in a year? Also, they may make money simply by offering the excellent software that isn't sandboxed: Alfred, Sourcetree, etc.

Plus, I will never release on the app store unless I don't plan on making any money on it. It's simply developer-unfriendly: no trials, no paid upgrades - it's as if Apple is trying to kill off using the Mac to make a living of selling software and force developers into subscription/freemium models.

<comment><USER10> That's a pretty fair decree of the App Store.

Doesn't mean even slightly that Steam is a better alternative. It's a horrible launcher and a terrible Mac OS X app. It's a great service and games store and I use it all the time, but as an OS X app it's awful.

It requires you to have "enable access for assistive devices" on just to render its interface. Valve knows absolutely nothing about the platform except what it needs to to make basic ports.

Mark my words, they will not become a viable distribution system in OS X without completely and radically overhauling Steam from the ground up. Just "adding apps" isn't going to do anything.

<comment><USER12> You only have to "Enable access for assistive devices" for the in-game interface, because it requires directly controlling the hardware. In Windows this is done by dll injection, of which even a similar process isn't possible in any *NIX operating systems.

<comment><USER13> Linux's LD_PRELOAD system lets you replace some executable's dynamically- loaded symbols with your own implementations, and the OS X "dyld" manpage mentions "DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES" which seems to be similar. Is that close enough to "DLL injection"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did I read this right? Did Steam just announce that it was becoming a cross- platform application store? Easy installing / automatic updating sounds nice, given my past experience with Steam games, while a personal Steam cloud sounds very much like an iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive competitor.

I'm a bit apprehensive about having to decide between Yet Another Storage Provider, but I'm (naively?) hopeful that the open-minded folks at Steam will consider something like Dropbox / Google Drive integration. Valve seems like an incredibly appropriate company to do so.

I hate to play the extrapolation game, but this could potentially encourage cross-platform apps, much like Valve is doing for gaming on Mac/Linux, especially if Valve releases dev tools to help support the process. (Hopefully it doesn't turn into a GTK/Swing nightmare.)

All in all, interesting times should be ahead. It'll be interesting to see how a "gaming" company like Valve adapts to a new field.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure where you're getting the Dropbox competitor bit.

Steam has had a storage system for _game content_ for a while—this would let you transfer save game files between computers, for example. I didn't see anything in the story which suggests this would be extended to general purpose content.

<comment><USER14> Well the press release says right there: "Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and _the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space_ so your files may travel with."

I'm assuming my work is more than my save game files. :)

<comment><USER15> I was assuming this was like iOS' cloud system—saving a document to the cloud, but not accessing a real Dropbox equivalent.

<comment><USER14> It might not end up being "equivalent" to Dropbox, but that would still compete with Dropbox in terms of backing up and syncing files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is a listing of the categories that might be offered..

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/15/3161651/valve-steam- softwa...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/15/3161651/valve-steam-software)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was complaining a couple weeks ago about how someone needed to open an alternative to the Mac App Store for legit apps that don't work with sandboxing, desire demos or paid upgrades, etc. Never thought of Steam as a possibility, even though I use it weekly for gaming. I have high hopes; if anyone can pull it off, it's Valve.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just a hunch and I am sure many will decry it as impossible, but I bet that microsoft buys valve in the next 2 years. It will be billed as a "hands off" type of acquisition (similar to skype) where they will simply more deeply integrate steam into other platforms like xbox and surface and keep them independent.

It just makes too much sense for microsoft to buy steam, regardless of the price. I know the steam fans would completely hate it, but it really feels like it is going to happen. Microsoft is dieing to have its own successful app store with a niche to have a advantage on the ios store and gaming/steam is exactly the type of 'we have this, they dont' which could completely make MS phones relevant again.

<comment><USER2> You don't know much about Steam or Gabe Newell then. They would NEVER sell the company. Gabe's mentioned before he's gotten big offers and rejected every single one. Valve has the highest employee retention rate and satisfaction rate in the industry. There's no managers, no titles, everyone's happy. Only a fool would sell a company like that. And Gabe's not a fool.

Don't let the silicon valley mindset warp your perception of what a company is. There isn't always an IPO or exit at the end of every company's rainbow. Sometimes, just sometimes, profitable private companies stay profitable private companies.

<comment><USER18> Its not just gabe's thoughts that matter- Many startup founders forget that as you have people who work for you. He has a responsibility to the people working for him- If he gets a offer for some ludicrous amount, does he not owe it to his staff to do whats best for them? Im sure most of the staff would be happier with a few million bucks than not.

And what if MS says "We want to buy you, we promise we wont touch you and will sign these docs to ensure you can keep doing things your way" - At that point, its not about morals, its about the fact that not doing something like that isnt fair to those people in the companies who are not yet millionaires, like Newell already is.

In short, if Newell could guarantee that the company would have no changes moving forward and could also get significant wind falls for all his staff, then yes- I expect him to sell. Anything less would be not prudent.

* Nobody knows if MS would be willing to pay as much as would be required to have a outcome like above. I just think that Valve is in the #1 or #2 spot for "Companies we want to buy" at redmond.

<comment><USER19> pretty sure that what's best for his staff is to not poison the well

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great. I'm looking forward to being able to purchase utilities which I can run no matter what OS I'm booting into. It is constantly frustrating to need to separate copies/licenses on core software, like 1Password, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> >Access to this site was blocked by system administrator

>The page you are trying to browse to is categorized as "Games"

>If you believe you are getting this message by mistake, try contacting your administrator or Helpdesk.

Should I contact my administrator?

</comment><comment><USER21> "The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games"

That's an odd sentence. Is he saying 40 million gamers said they want more than games in their games platform? Or was it just a portion of the 40 million? If so, why not say that number. THE 40 million gamers are interesting in more than playing games? THE 40 million said this? I feel like I stumbled into the smoke and mirrors PR world of EA or Sony, not Valve.

<comment><USER22> All 40 million gamers do things on occasion that are not video games... If, as a gamer, you already frequent Steam for your games and they also happen to sell non-games that you want.... why not buy from Steam?

<comment><USER23> I hope they sell a relational database and call it Cornerstone.

<comment><USER24> What? Why?

<comment><USER25> He's referring to Infocom's (the Zork/text adventure people) big bet on getting into the non-game space. Infocom spent all this money developing a natural language relational database - Cornerstone - that sunk the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I lost respect for valve after they slam windows 8 as garbage without merit and now we see it's because microsoft's app store is a competitor.

<comment><USER27> Gabe/Valve are also competing against the Apple/Mac OSX App Store, but they aren't speaking out against them.

I sincerely think that Valve has legitimate reasons for deriding Windows 8, particularly since their criticism seems to resonate with many early Win8 adapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you._

Anyone know how to export files from Steam Cloud?

<comment><USER22> Until now I don't think it's been terribly important. Mostly it's just game save / config files.

Although I suspect that all the steam cloud files are present locally and only put on the steam cloud as backup.

<comment><USER29> I recently switched out my primary hard drive; I was able to backup and transfer all my save data by copying save files from my user folder, eg: C:/Users/myname

<comment><USER22> Valve does the "cloud" right. Everything is local but on the cloud as backup if needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is exciting.

Seems like what Gabe is doing is what Google wanted to do with Chrome OS...without the OS.

I could definitely see Valve becoming a competitor in this sense with a cross- platform app + document experience that works smoothly on most desktop devices. The question is whether they can expand this sort of system onto tablets and phones.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it me, or is Valve gearing up to launch its own Linux distro? With Steam as primary content distribution and app catalogue and a bit of thought and focus- groupery poured in to the UI/UX the same way they design their games, they could own the desktop space in half a decade.

</comment><comment><USER32> That sounds like good news but the selection process is a bit strange. If I understand correctly, my app needs to be voted into their store by the community but how is the community going to evaluate it before it is in the store?

Does anyone know what are their current fees?

</comment><comment><USER33> I once forgot both my Steam password and the associated secret question and had no way to restore it (even though it was linked to my email account). Luckily that account contained nothing particularly valuable...

<comment><USER34> Newer versions of Steam don't require a security question for resetting your password; they instead send a confirmation code to your email address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> They'll probably start with basic cross-platform office software (e.g. OpenOffice) and tools that would be useful to game modders (graphics, sound and 3D packages).

<comment><USER36> My prediction for a starter app is a basic teleconference app. Steam already offers API for friends lists and authentication.

<comment><USER35> Maybe Teamspeak, since that's the system of choice for Steam users.

<comment><USER37> I thought Mumble was much more popular? Either way, a Steam-based/integrated voice chat app (i.e. much better than their current voice chat options) would be one of the best Steam features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> They already have done this, though. They have had PC Gamer Magazine and a making-of Portal interactive on the Steam Store for months.

</comment><comment><USER39> In my mind, this piles on the reasons why Steam should really be spun off as a separate business from the game-making mothership.

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope they start in with movies as well. That would be truly amazing. Big step in the right direction for Steam.

</comment><comment><USER41> Valve is trying to take on Microsoft head on? I hope this doesn't end up as vaporware (pun intended)

<comment><USER22> Don't forget the only thing that would really change is that there would be non-games on the Steam store.

The entire "product" already exists, they just need to bring non-game titles to Steam. (and from the sound of that announcement it seems they already have something lines up)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Before they do anything, I hope they'd get rid of the BLACK theme. Anytime I access steam, my eyes burn.

<comment><USER19> your eyes burn? from all the.... brightness..?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The page is mostly black and hurts my eyes trying to read it, was there anything interesting on it?

</comment><comment><USER44> Steam-for-Linux in the hizzouse.

</comment><comment><USER45> Extremely interesting.

1) Why so late? If this had come out a couple of years ago, they could've cemented themselves in Windows 7.

2) AFAIK the real reason for Microsoft not making an app store for native apps is that they can install spyware, browser toolbars, change browser home page, change default search provider, eat up battery, install always running services and what not because they're not sandboxed.

How will the Steam store deal with the inevitable barrage of such user hostile apps? Will the approval process be highly exclusionary or inclusionary? Where are the app store terms? What's the cut? 30%?

I think dealing with adware, spyware, malware and grayware is going to be a challenge. If they're pretty exclusionary, expect devs to get pissed off.

3) Sadly Steam Store won't be allowed to include WinRT apps but Microsoft allows _links_ to desktop apps on their app store.

If they solve the malware problem, I think they'll have a huge market and help devs immensely.

Anyone know or remember Intel AppUp Center? It completely failed to take off.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_AppUp>

<comment><USER46>
       If they're pretty exclusionary, expect devs to
       get pissed off.

I don't see any reason to. They are a 3rd-party distribution channel. This isn't Google's AppStore on Android (or Apple's on iOS or Microsoft's on WP7). Sure it might piss of _some_ people, but any decision will piss off some number of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Asking genuinely... What benefit does yet another marketplace have to offer?

I can see that by being a cross platform marketplace, If I buy something from them on my iPad, I can also use that same software on my PC (assuming both the platforms allow this) But the big question is will they?

<comment><USER48> One thing to consider is that the Windows app store will be Metro (not sure what to call it now) only. So Steam might be a pretty attractive option for filling the niche of distributing traditional desktop applications.

Being able to keep all my Windows desktop applications updated easily through Steam would be a lot better than having them all try and do it themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Great. I hope they will sell Mac apps too so I can have an alternate distribution channel for my apps.</comment>


One person's history of Twitter, from beginning to end - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@monteiro/one-persons-history-of-twitter-from-beginning-to-end-5b41abed6c20 <comment><USER2> As an outsider looking in, Twitter is a harsh place that feels unwelcoming to say the least.

I've had an account for years, but every time I try to engage in something on Twitter it just falls flat. The main criticism I have about the platform itself are:

\- hashtags too limited to meaningfully reach people, thereby making the platform all about knowing people _already_ and then staying in your own circles. I'd appreciate ~5 tags to reference my posts independently of the 140 limit, and to better find others' posts.

\- too much spam, marketing BS and whatnot. I'm all for GaryVee's take on marketing and media etc., I really am, but Twitter seems to me like an ill- suited platform for that. When something's popular you don't interact, you just add your 'voice' to a long list of spammy comments. The place is impersonal and cold. Even Reddit is much better for 1 liners with its voting system.

\- bad engineering. Seriously, so many flaws. The mobile app is a buggy mess that crashes too often (on Android 8 it doesn't even work with 2FA, I had to deactivate it to re-log in, and why doesn't it work with usual authenticators?). Statistics pages are AWOL. I appreciate they made a night mode, I really really do, but it works worse than browser add-ons. I don't know how they manage to be both so popular and so bad.

Overall Twitter feels very lonely and kind of useless, at least for everything that isn't already much better covered by Facebook (ie real contacts/circles). And I don't like Facebook much, but they do a much better job at their mission.

<comment><USER3> > The mobile app is a buggy mess

I use Tweetbot. It's a long way from perfect but it's orders of magnitude less shit than the Twitter app.

> and why doesn't it work with usual authenticators?

Don't know if this applies to every platform but last time I was angrily waiting for a Twitter 2FA SMS to arrive, I decided to see if the number Authy gave me worked instead and ... it did. Which was a bit of a shock since the page didn't give _any_ indication that it would. But might be worth a try for you...

(Obviously you need to have set up your other 2FA number generator first and that's a faffy faff mcfaff o'faff.)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely check these out.</comment></comment></comment>


A Brief History of ClarisWorks  - <AUTHOR> http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/bob/clarisworks.php

<comment><USER2> Cool read. I used to run ClarisWorks on my very first computer, a Powerbook 100 that I bought in September of 1992. I really liked it.</comment>


BPG Image format - <AUTHOR> http://bellard.org/bpg/ <comment><USER2> The big story here is this introduces a new image file format _without requiring you to upgrade a browser or download a plugin_. Those aren't PNGs of representative images you're looking at - that's BPG decoding happening in your browser.

So we don't like HVEC due to patent worries? Fine, we can swap in another format and use the same technique.

We don't have an I-frame format for Daala that's finalized yet? Fine, we can use work-in-progress. The format _does not need to be finalized_. If you update it, you rebuild your images and bundle a new JavaScript decoder.

The ability to ship media along with a sandboxed, runnable decoder is awesome, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on until now. I remember Google a while back implemented their own "video" codec in JavaScript using JPEGs and primitive inter-frame processing, exactly because there wasn't a universal video codec format they could use.

<comment><USER3> If you want Designers to start using this, then we need a photoshop plugin, an illustrator plugin, a Sketch plugin, a pixelmator plugin. Make it easier for us to export images as a .BGP. If the images are truly smaller without affecting the current user experience of users using mostly modern web browsers, then we're more likely to pick up on using this.

<comment><USER4> This can all be handled by Gulp or Grunt and designers won't have to worry about it if someone on the team can code.

<comment><USER3> What if I use this: [http://getbootstrap.com/examples/starter- template/](http://getbootstrap.com/examples/starter-template/) and add an img tag with a src to a .bgp? Will it render when I refresh the browser? I see that the BPG images are decoded in your browser with a small Javascript decoder. So a JS file is referenced in the HTML, and everything will run ok when I refresh? That's the promise?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from: Fabrice Bellard. He's no doubt an absolute freakin' genius. And if anybody knows about image conversion, it's him.

Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? [http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

<comment><USER6> >I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from

Would this have been less interesting or valuable if it hadn't been made by a hacker celebrity?

<comment> mark-r New file format proposals generally aren't news, unless they're already implemented in some popular product. Finding out the latest amazing thing that Fabrice Bellard has been working on, that's news. And that it's already implemented in your browser via Javascript? Priceless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> EDIT: I didn't expect this comment to be so popular and feel like I've hijacked the thread a little - sorry. Feel free to continue at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850)

I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It's very expensive to encode, but that's nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It's very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resolution independent: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression)

I was blown away when I encountered it at PC Magazine in the 90s and it seems like it would be very responsive to the needs of today's web.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.verrando.com/pulcini/gp- uw1.html](http://www.verrando.com/pulcini/gp-uw1.html)

They have a 6-minute figure on their page. I wonder what modern hardware could do with it? Anybody care to give it a whirl?

<comment><USER9> I wonder how much that figure would drop if one could optimize the process for modern CPUs...

<comment><USER10> Even without optimizations. That page is from 1997. They probably ran this on a 200MHz machine at best. Modern CPUs are 30-50x faster just in terms of instructions per second. Then once you factor in multiple cores, we have desktop machines that are easily 100x faster.

In terms of optimizations we have SIMD and GPGPUs to make it even faster. Not unrealistic to think we could bring that 6 minute figure down to one second... And then, of course, there might be algorithmic tweaks that help us even more. Get 100 people looking at that code, and for sure they'd find ways to speed it up.

<comment><USER11> In the same magazine there is an ad for a $3795 Gateway 2000 workstation. 486DX2 66MHz, 8MB RAM, 500MB SCSI HDD, SVGA graphics with 1MB RAM, 14" CRT.

I remember looking at systems like that and drooling. Now the latest CPUs have 8MB L3 cache.

<comment><USER10> Theres 8-core i7s with 20MB L3 cache now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After making a few needed tweaks to get libbpg to compile on Mac OS X, I used the compiled bpgenc binary to convert a test PNG to BPG format. I also converted the PNG to a JPEG for comparison purposes. You can see the results here:

[http://justinmayer.com/bpg-test/](http://justinmayer.com/bpg-test/)

Size of PNG before conversion: 186K

Size after conversion to JPEG: 52K

Size after conversion to BPG: 9K

I took the liberty of submitting a Homebrew formula, so hopefully this will soon be a quick "brew install libbpg" away. (^_^)

[https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/34722](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/34722)

<comment><USER13> I think your page has a bug - the "original png" seems to be encoded in jpg! (The usual jpg artifacts are very visible around the edges.) Thanks for posting the extra example, the bgp looks very good indeed.

<comment><USER12> I believe that's because PageSpeed is automatically converting the PNG to JPEG on-the-fly before serving the image to the browser, ostensibly for speed reasons. How ironic. ;^)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking at the Lena pictures demo, the extremely low file size comparison at the top shows just how good .bpg is in that use case. That could make for some much lighter websites when used for less important items like image thumbnails on shopping sites, for example.

When the file size gets larger at the end, it looks like there might be a little loss of detail. Ideally I'd like to compare them by switching back and forth using the original image and the .bpg as Photoshop layers...

<comment><USER14> PrintScreen should let you do it, I suppose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I notice the container has no ICC profile support. Trivial do add as an extension tag, but should definitely be in the first spec IMO. And if I read this correctly, extension tags are hardcoded as numbers, rather than using a tag name. I don't think that's a good idea.

<comment><USER16> Is there a situation where 14-bit sRGB isn't enough? There are a lot of weird color matching issues on the web caused by inconsistent application of ICC profiles to PNG images by different browsers / platforms.

<comment><USER17> Storing HDR images, where the brightest parts are greater than 1.0. That way, when you later edit the image and adjust the levels, new detail comes into view. OpenEXR is the best we have for this now. It uses half-precision 16-bit floating point color components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No doubt Fabrice is very smart. I read about his 4G base station the other day. I'd love to be a fly on the wall while he codes and thinks out these projects.

His accomplishments are impressive: QEMU, FFMPEG, TCC, JSLinux, the list goes on

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there anything this guy can't do? Seriously.

I have been wishing there was a JPEG equivalent with an alpha channel for like forever. That allows better compositing to arbitrary background images or patterns. Now the question is how long before browsers _might_ support it natively.

<comment><USER20> Webp is has lossless and lossy support, and alpha channel. It's also much smaller than JPG and much better looking for small JPGs (like this one).

It's also supported natively on all newish (4.0+) Android devices and Chrome.

<comment><USER21> Unfortunately given the relationship between Google and Apple and also between Web* and H.26* there is little chance of it going anywhere since without iOS you have nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There was an interesting article about Fabrice: [http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard- portrait-o...](http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of- a-super-productive-programmer/)

Does anyone know if he has a day job or does he just lock himself away and work on these interesting projects?

<comment><USER22> As far as I know : [http://www.amarisoft.com/?p=about](http://www.amarisoft.com/?p=about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue._

 _Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries_

There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don't think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it's technically superior in some ways.

<comment><USER24> "Most devices already include or will include hardware HEVC support, so we suggest to use it if patents are an issue."

I don't know if that suggestion makes much sense, but you missed it in your quote.

<comment><USER25> What kinds of devices have hardware HEVC acceleration? Phones, PC graphics cards, Blu-ray players?

<comment><USER26> One of Samsung's cameras, iPhone 6 uses it for FaceTime, various 4k TV's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why not use Daala to start from? The overlapping transform probably help especially for still images, and the patent situation is probably at least better.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure that Daala has finalized it's I-frame format yet.

<comment> TD-Linux There's no reason to wait until the I-frame format is finalized - a still image format would probably be a separate codec anyway, so compatibility isn't important.

<comment><USER25> Especially if you're shipping the decoder in JS alongside the encoded file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This definitely looks like it compares favourably against both JPEG and PNG. The test doesn't directly compare against JPEG-2000, JPEG XR or WebP, but the results are more convincing than any examples I've seen for any other formats, and the Mozilla study showed HEVC's format did best on quality metrics.

I hope browser vendors take note. The patent issues are concerning, but if that can be worked around and a new spec designed, then we might just actually have a new image format for the web which really is better than what we've already got.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not qualified to comment on BPG, but this is the first I've heard of Mr. Bellard. I enjoy reading works from minds of this caliber. He seems to be a model citizen for the programming community. Are there others I should know about like Fabrice?

</comment><comment><USER31> So can anyone talk about the patent issues? I hear there are multiple holders of HVEC patents and they are willing to use them. So if you use this library, wouldn't you be liable?

I'd really like to know that. Because I'd _really_ like to use this.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've tried it with a picture of mine. The encoding process was painfully slow, but I guess that does not concern the end-user much. The file size went from 1.2M in jepg to 164K in bpg, and the decoding was fairly fast. After turning the image back into PNG the quality seemed OK but that's tough to assess objectively.

The coolest thing is this javascript program that can decode and display the pictures on-the-fly.

Definitely an image format that could save storage space and bandwith, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, I didn't even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I'm off to re-encode my bluray collection!

<comment> TD-Linux There are still patent issues, and you still need to obtain a license to use the software. You will never see this image format integrated into any other open source projects, like Firefox, for this reason.

<comment><USER33> Like how you'll never see H.264, DRM, or WebKit in Firefox?

<comment><USER25> WebKit in Firefox?

<comment><USER34> He is referring to <[https://github.com/mozilla/firefox- ios>](https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios>).

But you will note that none of those things are "in" Firefox. H.264 support in the <video> tag is implemented via platform-specific APIs (which, for example _still_ don't work on OS X). DRM requires a CDM binary blob, which is again platform specific. You do not have the open-source freedom to port these features to some other platform that does not support them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Few questions and thoughts on top of my head.

1\. Why a Subset of HEVC Still Picture Profile? Why not just a use HEVC Picture instead?

2\. Since JS sources are readable and being interpreted by VM ( Free Speech ), patents issues should not be a problem?

3\. I am assuming the quality of BGP still has Lots and Lots improvement to be made? Since all H.265 encoder hasn't had the time to be tuned. ( Compared to x264 )

</comment><comment><USER36> I guess the JS is just for proof of concept until support is shipped with browsers etc, but it isn't rendering properly in the stock Android browser (4.2.2).

It gets to Lena's head in the first image, then becomes brigtly multi- coloured, though it looks like the difference between colours right... as if maybe an int overflow in the browser's JS implementation?

</comment><comment><USER37> holy crap, check this out: [http://img1.buyersbestfriend.com/mkg/snackspage/images/bpg.h...](http://img1.buyersbestfriend.com/mkg/snackspage/images/bpg.html)

186,967 ==> 29,872 and indistinguishable, 6.25:1

(and pls tell me if it breaks on your browser - I want to push this live!!!)

adam

<comment><USER9> That's far from indistinguishable to me. It's actually _quite_ obvious that the BPG is blurring detail at that compression ratio.

Edit: it's particularly noticeable in the wood grain patterns. Also, there's a soft grey dot to the left of the top of the lamp, 100px or so, that's entirely missing in the BPG. There are loads more examples...

Edit again: the color saturation of the rug is pretty washed-out as well.

<comment><USER37> oops, I wasn't clear... it's meant as a giant background image, and the quality competes with really nasty jaggies that start appearing below ~100KB in size. Nobody will notice wood grain, a few missing details, etc.

<comment><USER38> > a giant background image

why would you do this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would guess, that decoding speed can become an issue for websites, where many images are already in the cache but are re-displayed rather often...

I write this, because I am building such an application and for now it has many PNGs ... and yes, using a format like BPG would be fine, because I use the PNGs only because of transparency ... but when redisplay is done via a Java Script, I doubt that I could have the same speed. Loading is not so much a limiting factor, since after some time, all relevant PNGs are already in the browser cache.

Can anybody say something to this topic?

Of course, it would be great to have this integrated into the mayor browsers soon ...

</comment><comment><USER40> Don't we already have WebP?

<comment><USER26> Yes but webp hasn't taken off as much as some would like as a defacto standard.

BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif.

Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a software update for devices that already have HEVC capability.

<comment><USER41> Not to mention it has a JavaScript port that means it can work it browsers _today_.

<comment><USER42> Doesn't a JavaScript implementation offset most of the performance benefits? Today we have browsers that are smart about when to cache the decoded image and when not, etc; does that have to be reimplemented in javascript?

<comment><USER43> I have tried a dart webp decoder. it was so slow. decoding a small image (400*300) takes 300msecs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is the guy behind Tiny C Compiler, jslinux.org (running Linux in JavaScript in the browser) and Qemu. (And several other interesting projects). This alone makes me have great faith in BPG.

</comment><comment><USER45> Impressive! Right now it requires a .js decoder, of 75kb.

Assuming a fast C++ decoder instead,(possibly GPU accelerated if the decoding algorithm is well suited for it) and not using JS but what would be the rendering times?

PNG are 4x bigger in his experiments, but interlaced PNG makes it more pleasant to users since it can be rendered progressively, can BPG benefit from such a thing?

edit: Interlacing is also used in JPEG, isn't it ?

It's a tradeoff, as a user, it's obvisouly a win situation when we have a low bandwidth, and as a server it's obviously a win.

<comment> TD-Linux Progressive rendering of HEVC is not possible in the same way as it is done for JPEG or PNG. It is also not very suited to GPU rendering.

A C++ decoder with assembly optimizations could easily run four times as fast as the Javascript version. Unfortunately distributing it would not be possible due to patents.

<comment><USER46> Why would a C++ version have to worry about patents but the JS one does not?

<comment> TD-Linux They both have to worry, just a different person. For JS, it is the page author / publisher. For C++, it would be the browser vendor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think we crashed the site. Coral Cache has the front page, at least: [http://bellard.org.nyud.net/bpg/](http://bellard.org.nyud.net/bpg/)

<comment><USER48> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fbellard.org%2Fbpg%2F)

<comment><USER18> bellard.org seems to be back up now..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Unfortunately, a lot of what I do with images is constrained by what can be losslessly embedded in a PDF. Even if no influential organisation is opposed to BPG it will take at least 3 years, I would guess, for BPG to become part of the PDF standard, and then another year or so for it to become reasonable to expect people to have PDF readers that can handle it. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see BPG being widely used in 2020.

</comment><comment><USER50> How does it compare to WebP? Also, how you measures lossy image quality? What are the metrics? I hope it's not just by looking at result and judging.

<comment> TD-Linux Looking at the result and judging is actually the best and most important metric. There are numerical metrics, like SSIM, but they are always worse than human comparison trials. You're optimizing for what looks best to a human in the end, after all.

<comment><USER51> It's very hard to create a fair test.

The problem with human judgement that it's very imprecise. You're unlikely to notice difference between JPEG at Q=90 and Q=95, but you can't say it doesn't matter, because that can cause 40% difference in file size. OTOH objective metrics can easily spot that.

"Looks the same to me" leaves a lot of room for error and you could be unfairly telling one format to save much more detail than the other. And almost by definition these are the details you're least likely to be able to see.

There's also a pitfall of choosing image that looks subjectively "nicer" rather than closer to the original. Codecs that are better (e.g. faithfully preserve noise) may be judged as worse than another codec that's an accidental Instagram filter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know what percentage of traffic is JPG/PNG? My curiosity wants to try to put a dollar-value on the potential global bandwidth savings.

<comment><USER53> [http://httparchive.org/interesting.php](http://httparchive.org/interesting.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Pronounced 'bee-peg'?

<comment><USER55> Kinda curious about this as well. I wonder if the alternate would be "bee-pee- gee" which feels way too long to say :)

<comment><USER56> I naturally started saying in my head "bee-pee-gee", but since the P stands for portable, maybe even "bee-porg" instead of "bee-peg"? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How many "better JPEGs" have been created now, without significantly displacing JPEG's market share?

<comment><USER9> Indeed. Without out-of-the-box support in the major image editors like Photoshop and all the popular web browsers, I don't think we'll see JPEG overtaken any time soon.

<comment><USER56> Honestly, just last night I was looking and editing photos of a recent trip, and I uploaded them to tumblr to share on a small photo blog I just recently started. After spending some time trying to get the colors right, I realized that tumblr's image compression is god awfully horrendous. I felt so bad looking at my source JPEGs next to the tumblr post that I created a new flickr account right then.

I don't necessarily think JPEG is bad, or that it's even Tumblr's fault that I first thought to share photos there, but if any service/software started using BPG I think I would excitedly try it out.

[e.g. [http://www.huddug.com/](http://www.huddug.com/) vs [https://www.flickr.com/photos/127341162@N03/15762469070/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/127341162@N03/15762469070/)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This worked awesome on my MacBook and my PC, but I am getting some massive rendering errors in Safari on my iPad 3: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18855215/bpg.PNG](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18855215/bpg.PNG)

</comment><comment><USER58> I really dig it, but I'm not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the "performance" section, decoding speed was not mentioned.

<comment><USER25> Yes, it's slower and takes more RAM than JPG. I can see a delay of about a second in my browser. (Edit: I assume my browser is caching the data, but if not, some of that time could be re-downloading the data.)

<comment><USER59> [Edit] I had misunderstood the quoted Mozilla performance claims[0] to be related to processing speed, whereas they refer to performance being a measurement of quality. Thanks sp332 for the correction.

[0] [http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...](http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study_july_2014/)

<comment><USER25> Compression performance does not mean speed. It just means how well it compressed the images. None of the tests on that page even mention speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Looks like the JS decoder is compiled using emscripten, very nice.

</comment><comment><USER61> Very out of topic but, is lena.jpg still acceptable? I mean, tech industry is getting better at inclusion but come on, are we still using that crop from Playboy?

<comment><USER62> Considering that Lenna herself is fine with it, I'd say so. (Unless you want to deny a woman the right to permit the use of her own body for aesthetic, erotic, or academic purposes, which is the logical if ironic outcome of some schools of feminism.)

The problem with the Lenna imagery isn't political correctness, it's the fact that it's a crappy scan from a magazine that always had crappy photography to begin with.

<comment><USER63> The "fine" thing would be to let Lena use photographs of herself in her own work.

The problem is that women in science cannot read a paper on image processing without being reminded that it's a boy's club.

<comment><USER62> _The problem is that women in science cannot read a paper on image processing without being reminded that it 's a boy's club._

I find this attitude far more patronizing than any conceivable choice of test imagery in a graphics research project.

Suggest reading this before posting anything else about the delicate sensibilities of "women in science": [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/my-great-great- au...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/my-great-great-aunt- discovered-francium-and-it-killed-her.html?_r=0)

Do you think any of those women would have spared a half-second's thought about this issue? Somehow, I don't think so. I think they were too busy doing science.

<comment><USER63> I'm sure they do, because I can point to them speaking up about it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy)

I'm not saying all women are crippled by it, because they have to deal with such nonsense while walking down the street every day. But can't we as scientists strive to improve the status quo?

<comment><USER62> (Shrug) I can point to outraged people "speaking up" about everything from global warming to Jar-Jar Binks. It doesn't prove much, except that some people enjoy a good bout of outrage.

The scientists in the article I linked, on the other hand, aren't speaking up about anything, because they're all dead.

<comment><USER63> You're implying that because the women you picked didn't speak up and just did their work, that somehow that is the model all women should follow (because Science, apparently). Yet you provide no evidence that they were not affected by attitudes toward women. Just because they did not speak up does not imply there were no negative effects of contemporary attitudes toward women. On the other hand, I have evidence that researchers _are_ affected by it.

<comment><USER62> _Yet you provide no evidence that they were not affected by attitudes toward women._

The New York Times Magazine article is pretty long, it'll take you a few minutes to read it. I'll wait.

Short version: they suffered _real_ discrimination, which you've diminished by comparing it to the use of Lenna.jpg in a graphics project.

<comment><USER63> Fine, I didn't read it. What is your point? That just because something is worse for one person that we should ignore problems affecting another? That someone else has suffered in the past is not a reason to give up improving the status quo today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The best coders seem to have the simplest websites.

</comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone installed the bpg encoder bpg-0.9.2-win32 on a windows 7 machine, and if so how did you do it?

</comment><comment><USER66> Looks like his site is down, too much HN traffic.

</comment><comment><USER67> I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set.

Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.

<comment><USER68> People are too sensitive. I'm a hetero male, and I don't find the image 'fun' at all... it's just an image. It doesn't send a message to anyone. If anything, I don't really care for it for image algorithm tests because the palette is fairly flat.

No matter how you feel about the image itself, though, there is value in continuing to use it... people are familiar with it, to the point of it becoming almost cliché. This takes the focus off of the image and subject and puts it squarely on the image algorithm.

<comment><USER25> The smallish downside of continuing with it may outweigh the very small upside. The image by itself might not be a big deal, but we're trying to disrupt the pattern of women being used only as objects, not perpetuate it.

<comment><USER69> If we used a male model as a photographic test subject here, is that not the sexist objectification of males? Should we use an unattractive person or an animal instead? Are you going to attack the very notion of beauty or the fact that women are the "fairer sex"?

<comment><USER25> Sure, it could be objectification. It's pretty cut and dried in this case since the image was scanned from a magazine almost at random. The woman had no agency in the decision at all.

Of course I'm going to attack that. Women are required to be beautiful or they are deemed worthless, or failures. So they put a lot of work into it from a fear of failure. Men can be beautiful too, especially to a woman's eye which you've never seen through. If men were made to worry about their appearance as much as women, we'd be "fair" too.

<comment><USER70> >Women are required to be beautiful or they are deemed worthless, or failures.

I am truly sad for you if that is the case in your enviroment, but please, please do not generalise like that.

<comment><USER25> Fortunately, it is not the case in my environment. But it is a dominant message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Bellard is a genius.

</comment><comment><USER72> Fabrice Bellard strikes again!

</comment><comment><USER73> > Supported by most Web browsers with a small Javascript decoder

Well, so much for that. Executing code in order to view an image is just begging to be exploited…

</comment><comment><USER74> The results only show marginal improvement.

What's needed is a compression method that doesn't introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG. Then we wouldn't need to do some things in JPEG and others in PNG, and we'd be spared the pain of JPEG screenshots. Much better results on the Tecnick image set (which is mostly hard edges) would indicate one had been found. The results only indicate modest improvement in that area.

<comment><USER75> _The results only show marginal improvement._

The improvement is far from marginal. In particular:

... I just tried to link you to a BPG image, and discovered that I can't.

Well, I'm going to ignore that little flaw for the moment, because that's just a browser feature. If BPG catches on, that's sure to change.

Anyway, the improvement is far from marginal: [http://a.pomf.se/cdywsc.png](http://a.pomf.se/cdywsc.png)

In particular, look around her face, eyes, and the background. The JPG is not just worse, but in fact very worse.

A more serious flaw is that it doesn't support animation. It doesn't need to be a video format. It just needs to be able to play a sequence of frames in succession. This is as easy as including a header that specifies how many frames are in the animation and the duration of each frame, followed by the image data itself. The fact that PNG doesn't have this has plagued the format since the internet became popular.

That may seem like "a video format," but it's not. Video decoders optimize for inter-frame compression, not intra-frame compression, so it's a different problem altogether. BPG doesn't need to do everything, but it should probably have basic animation.

<comment><USER76> That depends on what you mean by "worse" and "very". I think for most use- cases, those differences are not something likely to be noticed by the majority of users.

<comment><USER75> The purpose of a test like this is to measure visual performance, and the JPG result is performing very badly.

Open these two images in a separate browser tab, then switch back and forth between them:

[http://a.pomf.se/fsnfxz.png](http://a.pomf.se/fsnfxz.png)

[http://a.pomf.se/lfzyrh.png](http://a.pomf.se/lfzyrh.png)

Those are the upper images of the test. Also try these, the lower images:

[http://a.pomf.se/bgqcag.png](http://a.pomf.se/bgqcag.png)

[http://a.pomf.se/hxlwcm.png](http://a.pomf.se/hxlwcm.png)

Again, JPG is not merely worse, but very worse. In fact, JPG makes it look like she's wearing a hat that's made of crosshatch material at the top, when in fact the top is composed of rings of fiber, not crosshatch.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twinfluence - Twitter Influence Analyzer - <AUTHOR> http://twinfluence.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Twinfluence measures the influence of a Twitter user based on their tweets and respective influence of their followers. The tool uses a mix of social analytics and academic theory by that "ranks" each user by their individual influence.

This blog post looks at the Top Twitterers: [http://innovationinsight.com/blog/the-top-twitterers- network...](http://innovationinsight.com/blog/the-top-twitterers-network/)

First I've seen of this.</comment>


Questions about work visa and founders unable to relocate to SF for YC - <AUTHOR>

My co-founders and I are interested in applying to YC. However, one of them is unsure of his ability to be in the Bay Area during the semester. He is willing to work remotely in his spare time during the YC process but would be unable to make the full-time 3 month commitment with us.
Another one of his concerns is that he is in the US on a temporary work permit while he is in the process of applying for H1B. He is afraid leaving his current job would jeopardize his H1B application.
So my questions are:
1. Is it counted against us if one of the founders is not able to relocate during the YC process? Are we better to apply with him listed as a founder not able to relocate or not include him at all in the application? 2. Has anyone else dealt with work visa issues during YC or any startup? Seems like this would be a common issue as many founders are not residents of the US. <comment><USER2> Yes it would be counted against you to have a founder not present (I have not done YC though)

I wouldn't include him.</comment>


Tesla is copying Apple's business model - <AUTHOR> http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/12/tesla-is-copying-apples-business-model.html#.VmGBZHo8KrV <comment><USER2> There is some value in this article, but the author is super careless with his terms and comparisons, and his point suffers for it.

He wants Costco (low cost, low price, high volume, slim overall profit) and Apple (low cost, high price, medium-to-small volume, large overall profit) and Tesla (currently I believe high cost, high price, low volume, negative overall profit) to be the same, and so he constantly elides the differences. I think that overall his point is that Costco and Apple are fundamentally about having low costs that allow them to make a different volume/price tradeoff than their competitors, but he constantly confuses price and cost, and contradicts himself about Apple's volume.

<comment><USER3> Yea I have been noticing people really trying to make the Apple and Tesla comparison lately. It just feels so forced.

-edit random thought- Seems like a whole lot of wealthy tech writers/bloggers want to sell themselves on getting a Tesla because somehow its similar to buying an early mac. There should be a specific term for the tech version of Keeping Up With The Joneses. I wonder how many of them drink soylent and order their quarters off of quarterly. I realize I am on a 'startup centric' site but god damn man some introspection is good people.

<comment><USER4> > Seems like a whole lot of wealthy tech writers/bloggers want to sell > themselves on getting a Tesla because somehow its similar to buying an early > mac.

Surely if you think Apple/Tesla is going to be great, the smart move is to buy early _shares_ , not early products? The products will still be good/relatively cheap in future - the shares won't.

<comment><USER5> Indeed - anyone who bought a Model S in late 2012-early 2013 would have made $500k+ had they bought stock instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > doesn't have somebody like a Steve Jobs, or even a John Ivy, who obsesses > over every small detail to make everything perfect.

Ah, irony.

</comment><comment><USER7> ,,Car innovation is continuing beyond the electric model and self-driving features -- Tesla needs to be up near the front on all of them.'' The author hasn't even read the Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan.

[https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors- master-...](https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan- just-between-you-and-me)

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is full of a lot of crap. There is a good parallel to be made between Apple and Tesla, but this article spends a lot of time babbling about nonsense (whining about overpriced bottled tap water when that's found at every single grocery store on earth in 2015?)

As far as Tesla trying to make a cool brand; every brand tries to do that. That's not what makes Tesla like Apple.

What makes Tesla like Apple is that it is willing to compromise in ways that most of their competitors aren't; they are willing to have higher price tags, deliver products late and risk a lot of money by investing in something that could fail. Apple exmpales; the iPhone, the Apple Watch. Tesla examples; the Supercharger network and the Gigafactoy. They are not willing to compromise on quality. They may fuck up and make a quality mistake (inevitably they do), but they will not deliberately compromise on quality the way competitors will in order to meet a target price point.

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems grossly oversimplified, and Im not really even sure its correct. Tesla is trying to (mostly) bootstrap themselves, so the obvious path here is to build expensive, higher margin products vs commodity products. I also think you are giving Apple way too much credit for calling it their business model. Apple follows a similar business model to the fashion industry, or the jewelry industry. There is no new secret sauce here. Market goods to "discerning" users for more money than commodity purchasers. Is the only point of this blog to get "Apple" and "Tesla" in the same heading?

<comment><USER10> I think the OP's point is that Apple is not like the fashion industry. Fashion items like Ferrari cars (pointed out by the OP), look nice but actually don't work that well. Whereas Apple products look nice and work well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It really isn't comparable.

In the areas that Apple competes there are a handful of serious competitors and they deliberately place themselves in markets where they know they can offer a superior experience. In the automative industry there are dozens of competitors. And most of them over at least some cars that are higher in quality than Tesla. And of course none of them have the problem of electric cars namely range and worrying about recharge locations. Which is a concern for the mainstream masses.

For me Tesla is more like the Windows Phone. A great product but with quite a lot of uncertainty around it's longterm future.

<comment><USER12> > namely range and worrying about recharge locations. Which is a concern for > the mainstream masses.

I don't think the masses drive 200 miles a day on the regular. That's $500+ a month in gas.

<comment><USER13> Daily isn't the problem, it's the weekend excursions.

<comment><USER14> In America. Much of the rest of the developed world considers 400 miles of driving over a weekend to be crazy talk.

<comment><USER15> In Europe a weekend, or even a daily trip if you happen to live close enough, to the mountain in winter for skiing is considered common and acceptable.

The distance is well inside the range of Tesla's battery if it wasn't for the altitude and the cold weather. If you don't have a charging station at your destination, better start walking...

<comment><USER14> In the part of Europe I'm from, we have trains for this eventuality...

<comment><USER13> I'm glad we've zeroed in on "in the part of a continent that I live in" from your initial pan-Europe generalization.

<comment><USER14> I'm glad we've uncovered the fact that you consider "the developed world" to be the continent you're from... O_o

It would also be worth adding that the part of Europe with good train coverage is "much of it".

<comment><USER3> Lucky. "America", ie the US, is pretty huge and empty. When I was in college, my friends would often drive about 350 miles one way to go home for the weekend/holidays. Public transportation is so much shittier here than many other "developed" countries I've lived in. Sucks because I've never owned a car lol.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if subsidised petrol also adds to it. It'd be a rare Australian (in my experience) who attempted to regularly drive between major cities (excluding Canberra) - they'd just fly.

I also get the impression that air transport in most of the rest of the world is much much more reasonable. AirAsia has made most of Asia pretty accessible, there are a gazillion competing low-cost airlines in Europe, and Australian air travel seems to be cheap enough that I have friends who city hop at weekends without much effort.

Of the four continents I've lived for more than a year on, North America and Africa see people taking heroic car journeys, Europe and (South East) Asia much less so.

Finally there seems to be a real class divide on public transport. Middle- class Europeans and Asians will jump on a coach, where I don't think any of the Americans I know have every been on a Greyhound bus...

<comment><USER3> I have ridden my share of Greyhound's man. They are always very long and if you have a bad driver they are quite scary.

Where I went to college, flights were often canceled and cost around 300$ one way. Between cities in the US we do have pretty competitive prices for flights. Cars were definitely the preferred means of transportation and if you car pooled the cheapest.

Oddly enough we had an ok bus system, it was pricy but the fare was included in your tuition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a really good way of looking at the two companies though I would argue "copying" is a bit strong. I think the author just found a common approach among the two namely that Tesla & Apple both are attempting to operate as a luxury brand pushing high volumes of "cheap" products.

It briefly touches upon objective vs subjective quality and does so in a way that it brings back memories of _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_. What _is_ quality anyway? The author makes the case that Apple is an inherently quality brand through and through, and to do so, must invest into its own supply chain in order to get quality parts at a cheap cost. He then naturally draws the comparison to the Gigafactory Tesla is building. His conclusion is that the Tesla Model S (which he owns) will be how Tesla is ultimately perceived as a "quality" product. When it cheapens all the parts and sells a 35k car, presumably this will be like Apple selling iPhones. I think it's a worthwhile comparison.

It's also something to just generally keep in mind about branding. Many engineers might have snarky things to say about a marketing or executive moves, but customer perception is a huge deal. Android has generally stayed ahead of Apple in terms of releasing mobile features, but the higher-income earners still prefer Apple to Android. Why is that? These are the really interesting discussions, but no of course Tesla is not copying per se.. it's just trying to make a lot of money and well, selling cheap products at high costs because of perceived quality is a hell of a way to do that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple was founded on bringing usable computers to the middle class.

Tesla targets a high end niche market.

My middle class parents, would never dream of buying a Tesla but they have purchased Mac computers for as long as I have known them.

Honestly I don't see a huge amount of parallels other than they share a common fanbase, tech nerds and these fans want to lump them together, and they are... both businesses competing in the modern economy.

<comment><USER13> [Tesla] was founded on bringing [electric cars] to the middle class.

Seriously, it seems like commenters either aren't reading this article and/or have a bias against Tesla.

<comment><USER3> I did read the article. Tesla sells sport/luxury cars. They plan on expanding in the future to 30k+ cars, when it happens then they will be a company that sells mid~high end/sport/luxury cars.

I am bias because I label Tesla as a company that sells the products that it sells? I don't get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is interesting but very naïve in is approach. First of all what he describes it is not a business model but part of the value proposition, and more specifically the value discipline. Yes, I'm using the Treacy Wiersema model[1].

So for instance saying that the low cost competitor couldn't afford to spend a little more on quality is dead wrong. If the customer you select values cost over quality (I'm not even looking into customer intimacy, the third discipline he misses) the are willing to pay a premium upfront for a product that is affordable over the lifetime (Total Cost of Ownership). That's why even in the volume market it is not always the one with the lower price to win. And different company could compete carving out a little different market.

Apple is for sure in the quality area. Tesla? My guess is that Tesla is in the Total Cost of Ownership, so totally different business model. Look how much they stress on the lower maintenance cost. Look at the direct distribution model that cut the costs down. Look at the free recharge at their supercharger network. Look at the calculator on how much you save buying a Tesla. Want more details? Their new battery factory will produce battery also for competitors to get to a scale big enough to reduce price. They open sourced their patents so other company will use their technology de facto increasing the consumption of component they need (lowering the price) and doing R&D with them.

Another aspect, Tesla is pretty much a vertically integrated company, even in a market where sourcing component and sharing platform is common, they produce a lot in house (e.g: the batteries). This is common when you look for the lower Total Cost of Ownership (it's in contrast with management mantra, all people that read just the first chapter of Traecy Wiersema book and not the next 19). On the opposite Apple outsource a lot even in a market where outsourcing is common. They do this to get the best component from the producer that happens to be able to provide it.

I know my analysis seems to be counter-intuitive, but if understanding and replicating Apple's business model (or Amazon, Tesla, Southwest, Nordstrom) was easy and intuitive I guess there will be no more Apple. I'm not even saying that I'm 100% right, to be fair...

[1][https://hbr.org/1993/01/customer-intimacy-and-other-value- di...](https://hbr.org/1993/01/customer-intimacy-and-other-value-disciplines)

</comment><comment><USER17> So according to his analysis, the things that keep Apple/Tesla in their market dominant position is (1) their brand communicates "quality" and (2) they have enough capital that they can make cheap quality products with a one-time investment.

If those are the key advantages, Tesla might be in trouble when Apple releases their own electric car. Apple already has the "quality" brand, and has much more capital.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why did he have to use an Apple power supply as an example. Why? Everything was going so well. FYI Apples power supplies are the first i've ever seen to break by single loop tangle and they cost so much. Like WTF, it makes me rage a bit. I've never had another power supply wire break on me but I've had about 5 apple wires break so far and that's with me being super careful.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree, although I think Musk is thinking much more fundamentally than cars with Tesla... we as a civilization need an efficient way to produce, store, and consume energy from the sun. The car is a logical near-term path/product to advance the 'store' and 'consume' technologies while having a near-term positive environmental impact and a sustainable business model.

<comment><USER11> I also suspect that Tesla is a battery company that happens to sell cars.

But there's a problem. There is just so much R&D being done in energy storage devices and battery technology that Tesla will need to do quite a bit of M&A in order to stay relevant. That's a weird thing to do whilst you are still selling cars.

<comment><USER19> Yes. I would associate Tesla with Samsung as much as with Apple. Samsung LCD/OLED technology is in many high-end mobile device for example, even though they have flagship products that directly compete.. they are selling the more fundamental technologies. In the same way, Tesla (Elon) would much rather be selling batteries to many other car manufacturers and home battery storage manufacturers (the patent release makes a lot of sense within this line of thinking).

The challenge with energy storage is not only in the R&D, but also in the manufacturing at scale, cars are a great avenue to approach this challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fifa is copying Apple's design. Look at this thing called football, round corners everywhere.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you get introduced to HN? - <AUTHOR> I came to know about hackernews through one of my colleagues. He was giving a presentation and HN was the first thing that popped up when he switched to his browser. Out of curiosity, I immediately googled it and that was my first introduction to HN. <comment><USER2> In searching about an obscure fact concerning languages I found Paul Graham's essay "Beating the Averages"[0] I found it interesting, and started to read some of the other essays. As a quick hack I then drew a diagram of the obvious connections between them[1]. Similarly, I then used a PageRank-style ranking of the essays[2].

I sent the results to Paul Graham, who said I should submit them to HN, of which I'd never heard. I did so, and they pretty much sunk without trace, as do so many of my submissions. Even so, I read some more, and stayed for a while.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[1] [https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06)

[2] [https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?...](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?HNrj06)

</comment><comment><USER3> My best friend in high school introduced me. We would both read it on the way to school and then discuss our favorite articles from that morning over lunch.

One of my fondest memomries of him was all the days when he would be so excited about something that he'd read that he'd dash up to me and give me a rushed synopsis before class started.

<comment><USER4> This makes me feel old.

If you change high school to college and hacker news to slashdot this story is familiar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As member of a support group, I was visiting the workshop of Copenhagen Suborbitals sometime in 2010. Had a long and wide-ranging conversation with a fellow rocket enthusiast. Two things he said, I remember very clearly:

The first about a place called Hacker News. Poul Graham, if I knew who that was. Oh yes I did. "Startups and Lisp, startups and lisp, but he's written interesting stuff too". Well, I'm still here.

The second about the principal rocket builder: "Peter is such a dynamic and forceful character. He's bound to have some dark side we don't know about". And well, Peter isn't really still here. He's serving a lifetime prison sentence for having murdered and dismembered a female journalist onboard his private submarine last year.

</comment><comment><USER6> It was a comment by someone on some forum. Someone looking for similar sites as reddit (so was I) and another user who had replied had mentioned about HN a forum which is almost as good or as bad as reddit just that people on HN like to believe they are inherently better than reddit. I am not sure which forum it was - maybe reddit itself.

MeFi [0] and OneThingWell [1] are the gems I found in the same thread. Sadly OneThingWell's author took a long break due to RSI. Other forums/communities I found in that thread are/were SA [2], SDF, Barbelith [3] etc.

I guess it was just when I had got access to readily available Internet (before that it was weekly an hour or so in cyber cafes). I had immediately signed up everywhere (there were dozens) and SA is the only I never really got used to, never really stayed there.

[0] [https://www.metafilter.com](https://www.metafilter.com)

[1] [http://onethingwell.org](http://onethingwell.org)

[2] [https://www.somethingawful.com](https://www.somethingawful.com)

[3] [https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbel...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbelith.com/)

<comment><USER7> You just reminded me that I came here through OneThingWell.

Does anyone here know if the author is all right? That site is/was lovely.

<comment><USER6> No idea. I had mailed ~2 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be funny, but I learned about HN on slashdot I believe, and found it was similar but with a much better signal-to-noise ratio in the comments and actually did a better job of living up to the reputation that slashdot had.

<comment><USER9> I don't remember how I first heard about HN, but I came here from SlashDot, too. At some point, I realized that /. was too many fluff posts (I can't say now exactly what the "fluff" was, but the perception was very strong for me), too few posts that I was interested in, and that I had just grown tired of trying to dig any gems out of comments that had become increasingly toxic, boring, or irrelevant.

I remember when I first visited HN, after an initial bit of confusion, I realized two important things. First, there was no stream to follow...no need to feel like I had to "catch up". Second, I could scan 30 posts in the same time it took me to scan maybe 6 /. posts. The presentation was just so much more clean and efficient.

After about a week, I noticed a third really important thing. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge. I was spending the same time/effort on HN that I had on /. (and mostly just staying in the top 60 posts), but getting much more for it.

That having been said, HN ain't perfect. Probably my biggest annoyance is the prevalence of links to paywalled and/or adblocker-hostile sites. But as far as news selection, I dumped /. just days after coming here and I've never looked back.

<comment><USER10> >or the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge.

That's exactly why I migrated here from slashdot. I read both for a few months and was finding I'd see something on HN and then see the same exact thing on slashdot days or weeks later.

What eventually made me switch completely was the way comments work here don't encourage the inane, offtopic, uninventive, dead-horse-beating karma-farming injokes and references that slashdot and reddit seem to be inundated with[1]. Not to mention I find it utterly charming how often someone else will post something and the author/creator pops into the comments section to chime in "Hey that's me, would love to answer any questions you guys have". Nowhere else like it on the internet I've ever seen.

[1]Not to say I don't occasionally enjoy the occasionally silly comment, but I find the ones on HN to be a lot more tasteful and actually witty as opposed to the rout cookie cutter memes and references that are found on every single tangentially related reddit or slashdot thread that people can think to post them to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was having dinner with Jason Kottke (or Kottke blog fame) and he recommended the site to me.

I was travelling solo through South/North America back in 2009 and the last leg of my journey was in NYC. I wanted to eat at Momofuko and managed to snag a booking for two. I emailed Jason and asked if he wanted to join me for dinner (I had never met or spoken to Jason prior to this) and he agreed. We naturally chatted about technology, the Internet etc and Hacker News ended up in our conversation.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was introduced by a coder in my previous role. He forwarded this link [1] to me to tell me that it is justified that he was taking time. I was pushing for him to complete 80% of the task so that we can push it in production, see the response and then complete it with testing. (I was heading growth at that time, and he was in product team.) I told him that the cases he was considering might not be encountered by 99% of users, so better launch something quickly, then we would know if we need to spend more time on it based on response. He gave me a timeline of four days, and I ended up doing it myself and making it live on a test branch in a day or so. Coming back, the argument did not go well, but I liked HN, and started reading it as a knowledge source.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410661)

</comment><comment><USER13> I had seen a few HN articles posted on reddit. Discussions seemed more interesting and educated.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had this cool new tech around 2011(?), a sony dash.

It was like a tablet before tablets were a big thing, and a web browser and alarm clock and photo frame - that had some apps and a small app store kind of thing.

Whoever made the hacker news app that was supported on the chumby / sony dash - I owe you so much.

I started reading about things I would never have. Started hearing excellent view points and facts and so many things. I read it on the dash almost every night till it got unplugged the last time and I found an HN app in the android thing for a tablet.

</comment><comment><USER15> The founder of a startup I was doing work for introduced me to Paul's essays. From there I found out about ycombinator. I was reading every word on every page. Somewhere that lead me to hacker news. I remember seeing a link shared on how to cut a bagel into two linked halves at one point and I've been coming back ever since.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249)

</comment><comment><USER16> Random google searches. This is how I find out about a lot of things actually

I was really interested in learning more about ML and math. I normally run queries like "Best way to Learn X vs ____". Normally, I get a lot of reddit articles. Sometimes quora or stackexchange. But hackernews came up a few times. Was curious and the rest was history

</comment><comment><USER17> Digg died, or went bad or something. The exact process is hazy at this point, but I'm pretty sure there was a direct switch.

<comment><USER18> Yup

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was in the middle of transitioning to CS from Molecular Biology. My brother in law, who was a professional dev for several years already, asked me something like "you are on HN, right?". As in, there's no way to be a dev and not read HN.

</comment><comment><USER20> I read an article called "Breaking the Silk Road's Captcha" about 4 years ago which led me to Hacker News. I spend about 1-2 hours per day reading the articles. Is it a terrible waste of time? Who knows?

</comment><comment><USER21> My father. He found it via digg or his old work intranet/wiki where they shared all the good gossip most managers were either quietly in on or unaware of how juicy the old sybasedocs.workname.com had gotten, at least so he tells me.

</comment><comment><USER22> Found Scripting.com (1999) searching for a scripting language -> JoS (Joel on software forums) -> pg essays ~> ycombinator a thing ~> Reddit -> news.ycombinator.com (was not called hacker news then)

</comment><comment><USER23> I was looking for y combinator, of the lambda calculus, and google showed me a link to this site and I clicked. In google's defense, I hadn't used the words "lambda" or "calculus".

</comment><comment><USER24> I was looking for some news aggregator for tech industry (having RSS feed) and found this on one of the "top 10" websites.

</comment><comment><USER25> Probably while doing a Google search on "opinion/editorials".

An article came up by George Will about the opioid epidemic. He comes across as highly judgemental, and commenters didn't fail to notice.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think there must have been a link, or at least a sufficiently-intriguing mention, in one of Paul Graham's essays. I'd been reading those because they showed up in LISP blog aggregators.

</comment><comment><USER27> A lady at DjangoCon (2011?) was giving a talk about how she brought her site/app to market and made a comment about getting feedback. She mentioned HN, which I'd never heard of.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reading about some random startup on Tech Crunch during the "new social local native app a week" craze. Found ycombinator. And clicked around and found HN.

</comment><comment><USER29> There was an article along the lines of '100 top developer tips'.

One of them was something like 'don't under estimate the value of wasting time on hacker news'.

Held true!

</comment><comment><USER30> I was following some people on twitter that I found extremely interesting... to later realize that all the articles they were posting were from HN.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to read Spacerogue's Hacker News Network. Googled it one day after it had been offline for a couple years and ended up here

</comment><comment><USER32> HN came up when I was searching for venues where you can announce the existence of a new programming language.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think a Mixergy interview of Drew Houston? Lurked several months then made an account.

</comment><comment><USER34> From people complaining about it on other platforms.

Enjoyed the range of topics though, so I stuck around.

</comment><comment><USER35> From interview of Taylor Otwell (Creator of Laravel Framework) published on a blog.

</comment><comment><USER36> It was introduced to me by CTO at my previous company.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, I was considering becoming a capitalist to potentially leverage some of my advances, probably related to computer work or some other form of science, like experimentation & discovery.

Somehow ran across a blog post from Sam Altman who seemed like a pretty smart fellow, and soon found he was assocated with YCombinator, both of whom I had never heard of.

HN turned out to be a good compliment to my other efforts at keeping more up- to-date with things outside my area of leadership.

Next thing you know, Sam became President and it looks like YCombinator has indulged in a little experimentation itself.

</comment><comment><USER38> through digg.com or ... valleywag ( which pg banned, shortly after it was renamed from Startup News )

</comment><comment><USER39> i don't remember.

<comment><USER40> ...and I can quit anytime I feel like it. I just don't feel like it just yet.</comment></comment>