Web Code is a solved Problem – how about fixing Web UI next? - <AUTHOR> https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2018/May/31/Web-Code-is-a-solved-Problem-How-about-fixing-Web-UI-next <comment><USER2> So his central thesis is that JS has been getting all of the love while HTML and CSS have been marginalized. I want to empathize with him because he's a seasoned vet in programming and has been at it longer than I have. But, I've been doing web development since i was 12 on pet projects, and we totally have been making great strides in web UI.

If you made a website in the 90s or early noughts, everything was tables. Do you remember how to make a button with a bevel in 2005? You made a 3x3 table, and had to splice an image into _9_ different sub images, and then stitch them all together. Now you have background:linear-gradient and border-radius. I mean, maybe you take this for granted now, but seriously, that was _game changing_ for me when those things came out.

Now add on UI frameworks like Bootstrap and Zurb. Before everything was a JPG photoshop mockup. Every design was treated in isolation. There were entire _businesses_ revolved around taking a PSD and turning it into HTML/CSS. Now everything is a component. It's reusable... _and useable_. Sure, we may have watered down design to the point where largely every SaaS landing page is the same, but the speed with which we can get developers to convey trust via design is vastly improved over the old days.

Sure, JS frameworks are all the rage right now. But we have made _serious_ strides in web UIs as well.

<comment><USER3> Has ui improved? Yes. But is ui a good experience? No.

Simple tasks like centering or multiple equal height columns are now possible (yay!) but aren't actually simple.

A large majority of css techniques are trying to get around how css tries to work.

Flexbox is great compared to what came before...but have you tried teaching it to someone new? Zindex and stack context? Style a container based on what it contains?

Compared to the improvements in js, and compared to the ease of use of non web ui building, there is a lot of room for progress.

<comment><USER4> I want to say, as a guy who is not much of a web developer but is trying to make a web site, css is f'ing frustrating.

For example I found a CSS-only stylized dropdown list, which is great. Why should I have to use Javascript to stylize a dropdown list?

Anyway I take the component and css from codepen and put it in my site and it doesnt work, at all. Works perfectly on codepen, doesn't work on my site. As far as I can tell there really isn't a way of figuring out _why_ it isn't working either. There aren't any errors or anything, no real means of debugging it. I'm basically going through line-by-line the computed CSS for all the different parts and trying to see what's different and why that is impacting the look of the thing. Very frustrating.

<comment><USER5> Have you had more positive experiences with any native alternative? My experience with em has generally been that they work well until you want to customize things.

I think people tend to seriously underestimate the complexity involved in dealing with layout and styles. CSS has some poor defaults and plenty of quirks, but it's also incredibly powerful and not that difficult if you bother taking the time to learn it properly. You are struggling because you have not learned to use the tool correctly.

Try implementing a few basic layout algorithms as a weekend project. I believe it'll change your view of CSS.

<comment><USER6> So true. I looked at implementing some layout algorithms in PDF pages for a project I was working on; eventually realized I should just use the standard elements in the library I was using and forget about anything custom because otherwise I'd be making a separate product...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With an app-centric view of the Web like that, you can only come to the conclusion that the Web is broken. When in reality your premise is false: the Web is a document-centric self-publishing mechanism. That you're hell-bent to using it at as application delivery platform doesn't make it any more reasonable to judge the Web for something it simply isn't designed for. It's not a question of immaturity either: the Web has been in the making for almost 25 years; yet the newest mainstream Web frameworks (eg. React) still build on a DOM rather than a more appropriate scene graph model such as the one Flash had 15 years ago.

The problem isn't the Web, but people wanting to sell Web apps, yet still wanting to free-ride on the popularity and one-time-success of the Web. Why not address this at WHATWG (as in "Web Hypertext Application Working Group")? It would be easier for both camps because the document-oriented Web doesn't have to look after the incidental complexity introduced with overreaching Web standards and CSS.

Edit: see also "The Cult of the Complex" at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214045)

<comment><USER8> > The problem isn't the Web, but people wanting to sell Web apps

That is backwards, I think. People want to _use_ web to get their applications (for mostly good reasons). Of course developers will make them.

> yet still wanting to free-ride on the popularity

"Free riding" concept sounds misused here.

> Why not address this at WHATWG (as in "Web Hypertext Application Working > Group")

How would that work? I want to make a SaaS app to solve some problem, but instead I write letters to WHATWG to do... what?

<comment><USER7> My comment wasn't addressed at practitioners developing web apps so much as a response to principled criticism of the Web architecture _as application development platform_. As the author of TFA says he's coming from a Windows desktop app development background, praising early-90s RAD environments such as FoxPro for their superior workflow and adequateness for the job of creating business apps.

Then why not use those tools rather than the Web? But the author insists

> _The last thing I want to see is us going back to native development as the > first line for development. The Web has always been the future for > application development and I believe it will go all the way in the end. I > believe in the Web as a platform and I want it to stay as the dominant > platform._

Why does the Web have to be everything to everybody, gaining incredible complexity to the point that it's useless as a standard because we're never going to see new independent implementations from scratch?

Re WHATWG: I don't think HTML5 is bad, but it must be said that it was the late 2000s "HTML5 rocks" propaganda making plugins (Flash and Java) unfashionable for better or worse. Turned out the offered overlapping and partially implemented alternatives (Canvas API, declarative CSS animations and shapes, SVG) were lacking, and didn't address the principal use cases. Those being describing highly interactive apps, controlled piercing of Web sandboxes for integration with native file systems and devices, etc.

<comment><USER8> > Then why not use those tools rather than the Web?

I think the author of the article writes from the app developer perspective - his users are on the web and due to it's reach he's stuck there. He does appear to be cheering on the web as the application platform, but that might be the most reasonable way forward just because of it's momentum. And it is somewhat decent app development platform.

All of this comes at the cost of large amount of complexity, there I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to agree with @rado on this one. The article presents this as a "code" vs "UI" debate when really it's a "web" vs "app" debate.

Although we use the web as an application platform, it was designed for information interchange, and evolved to support "an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system." Those are often two quite different things. An application platform focuses on "component semantics" whereas the concept of an "Internet- scale" application focuses on "connector semantics".

"Not only is the set of input controls really small, but these controls have almost no functionality associated with them." \- yes and that's a useful attribute if you are architecting "internet-scale" applications (think hypermedia, rest, hateoas et al.) because the intent is that each component is dumb enough to be seamlessly switched out with another. In this mindset, a page in a web application does one thing and does it well. It doesn't coincidentally provide retina scanning and 3d imagery (yes, i know...)

Neither the code nor the UI of the web are "solved" problems if you are trying to use it as a traditional application programming platform. You need frameworks and tooling to accomplish that.

I'm not arguing here that it should be this way (although I happen to love the web concept), but the real debate here is about "web" vs "app" \- not "code" vs "UI". HTML is designed to facilitate web applications and that will continue to evolve very slowly and deliberately. The alternative is to reimagine web technologies as a traditional application platform from the ground up.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Web Code is a solved Problem"

honestly whenever I see this said about _anything_ , I'm pretty sure it's not a solved problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> Unpopular opinion: Please not another builtin high-level UI for the web, none of the native platforms got their 'system UI' right either, and there will never be a single UI solution for all problems.

Radical, overly optimistic suggestion: Reduce the browser to 2D+3D canvas, audio (not WebAudio please, too over-engineered), input, networking (...) and implement everything higher level on top of those thin platform abstraction APIs in JS+wasm modules that are loaded ond demand. Put the current HTML APIs into such modules as well for backward compatibility.

<comment><USER12> That's a terrible suggestion. We need markup. We need _standard_ markup. We need accesibility. We need semantic tags. We need interoperability. We need developer tools.

We don't need N+1 "standards". We don't need N*2 developer tools. We don't need N^2 teams working on subpar competing "platforms".

We need HTML.

<comment><USER11> The HTML standard would be implemented in a module, which could even be bundled with browsers so it doesn't need to be downloaded on first use. Nothing would change for HTML usage except that it wouldn't be baked into the browser executable, and alternatives to HTML could be explored without bloating the browser even more.

The devil is in the details of course, that's why I wrote "overly optimistic" :)

<comment><USER13> I mean, Canvas is there. You're more than welcome to draw your own UIs in it, as plenty have done/tried before. Flipboard had a render-react-to-canvas project they used for mobile (which was completely inaccessible to _any_ sort of assistive technologies), but I believe they abandoned it.

<comment><USER11> I kind of did and it works quite well. Fair point about accessibility though. Another problem is that there's no way to access system font data from WebGL. Also the way I'm currently doing rendering (continuous frame rendering even if the UI doesn't change) isn't mobile-friendly. But these are all solvable with a few more resources thrown at it (Dear ImGui is a single-developer-project, and the cross-platform rendering library (sokol-gfx) too.

[http://floooh.github.io/oryol-sticky-tests/imgui-highdpi- sap...](http://floooh.github.io/oryol-sticky-tests/imgui-highdpi-sapp.html)

This is 460 KByte wasm, 260 KByte of this is embedded TTF font data.

<comment><USER14> Wow. Your library is simply _amazing_. Especially considering it's a single- developer project.

<comment><USER11> Ah sorry I was unclear, Dear ImGui isn't _my_ library. Credit goes to @ocornut: [https://github.com/ocornut](https://github.com/ocornut)

The sokol_gfx graphics wrapper is my stuff, but that's much smaller :)

<comment><USER14> Still amazing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm still super gung-ho about web components. The progressive browsers are committed to making it happen.

The picture is not so bleak for custom elements: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom- elementsv1](https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1)

Firefox also just announced that Shadow DOM arrived in a nightly:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460069](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460069)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17172613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17172613)

Contrary to popular belief, you can start using web components WITH just custom elements and WITHOUT shadow DOM! [https://twitter.com/rob_dodson/status/961780022628331520](https://twitter.com/rob_dodson/status/961780022628331520)

I jumped onto this bandwagon early and struggled with Polymer 2 and HTML imports (ugh!). Now they have made the same realizations and moving forward LitElement will lead the charge toward usable and lightweight web components:

[https://www.polymer-project.org/blog/2018-05-02-roadmap- upda...](https://www.polymer-project.org/blog/2018-05-02-roadmap-update.html)

[https://github.com/Polymer/lit-element](https://github.com/Polymer/lit- element)

Here's how you can get started: [https://github.com/Polymer/pwa-starter- kit/wiki](https://github.com/Polymer/pwa-starter-kit/wiki)

It's not paradise, there are kinks to work out, but ultimately one can make production worthy apps with web components TODAY (polyfills available). You can sleep at night not worrying that your library will become the new jQuery someday: [https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/999645120155746304](https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/999645120155746304)

<comment><USER16> This is one of the reasons I'm such a fan of Vue.js. Using the vue-loader, you write single-file 'components' which all their included templating, logic, and style. While not EXACTLY what the promise of "Web Components"/"Custom Components" offers, it is definitely a good step forward in thinking on how to modularize all the pieces of the front-end.

[https://vuejs.org/](https://vuejs.org/)

[https://github.com/vuejs/vue-loader](https://github.com/vuejs/vue-loader)

<comment><USER17> yep that and vue-cli and you have all the framework you need including a dev server and a test framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _CSS Grid works with all major evergreen browsers, but Internet Explorer - > which sadly still has significant browser share - is not supported by CSS > Grid._

Well, it _does_ support Grid, just an older, prefixed version of the spec, with plenty of bugs. With autoprefixer (which I use via postcss-cssnext), you have to deliberately enable IE grid support (config option `grid: true`), and then it will block you from doing things in Grid that IE _definitely_ doesn't cope with, and you will still sometimes have to make adjustments to get it to work (e.g. IE has no qualms about stacking content in the same cell, so you may need to specify locations rather than using auto layout), but it hasn't been too bad for most stuff I've done so far.

IE's share steadily shrinks, and what remains consolidates around IE11. These days I'd say that the vast majority of developers should care a little about IE11 (my rule of thumb is to ensure everything _works_ , but some ugliness or deviation from design is acceptable), possibly a bit about IE9, and definitely not at all about any other version of IE.

Just wait another two years and then you can forget about IE for good, or something. ;-)

<comment><USER19> > Just wait another two years and then you can forget about IE for good

Because most developers will target chrome with a current market share of about 60%.

I bet google will stop to innovate and compete as soon as they ate most of the cake, hopefully without forcing "standards" on other browser.

But some of their products is already crippled on other browsers, so that ship might have sailed already.

In another two years, or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So the author claims that the JS ecosystem is excellent and HTML&CSS are broken? Yet it is my never-ending experience with the web that a website's usability is inversely proportional to the extent it uses fancy JS frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER21> Think back to the inspiration for modern UI. It's a flight engineer in the back of the cockpit, or an astronaut on his way to the moon. He has some buttons and switches, a lot of gauges and maybe a couple of digital displays. Then think about documents. The written word. Information graphics. What the web has been trying to do is make an astronaut's control panel the same kind of thing as a Guttenberg bible. That is a very tall order, and it's not surprising that it's taking some iteration.

</comment><comment><USER22> > I got my start in FoxPro, worked some in VB6 and MFC/C++ and then worked in > .NET WinForms and WPF which I still use on occasion to this day for things > that simply work better on the desktop - mostly tools or applications that > need to interface with hardware.

> When I think back on those days one thing that stands out to me is how easy > and fast it was to develop functional UIs for these applications due to a > plethora of pre-made components, easy to use visual tools that allow easy > placement and visualization of content. And maybe more importantly a well > defined underlying UI API that supported creation of common controls that > addressed the most common use cases.

The sheer ugliness that is produced by .Net developers is astounding. The simplest most ridiculous thing is the sizing of buttons. The great simple thing of using something like bootstrap is that buttons are padded in nice proportions. The only options are text, S/M/L and some colour styles. But if you hand a developer a form designer tool they generate buttons 10x bigger dumped somewhere in the middle of the form.

The other WPF form that's been around wehre I work for 8 years has a peach coloured background... because the company logo is kind of orange.

Sticking to the rules that boostrap / material design give you produces quite nice looking and usable interfaces. But sticking to the rules of Windows UIs gives you at best usable but almost never nice looking.

Then of course there's the unholy curse of Java UIs...

<comment><USER23> Niche enterprise UIs never even got the benefit of one designed, let alone a team. The devs could be handed the most amazing and the result would still look "undesigned".

Bootstrap provides cookie cutter design solutions, but it is well known that you'll benefit from a designer if you need something more custom (and your UI will look bad if you don't invest much in its design).

<comment><USER24> I think bootstrap is great for all the sysadmins etc that need to create a tool but don't want to spend days tunning css.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The fact that there is no standardized date picker for the web in 2018 is impressive.

<comment><USER26> Yes this. That to get cracking functionality you have to include React, in order to include AirBnB's superb one [1].

1\. [http://airbnb.io/react-dates/](http://airbnb.io/react-dates/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe we need the web to be a way to publish basic documents, and then use docker-like thing where people publish apps and you can immediately access them by downloading the upper layers. What's happening now is the reverse, expanding the Web APIs to become an OS when we already have so many of those. HyperKit, Hyper-V, and Linux containers (or whatever docker) use are already there!

</comment><comment><USER28> Web Components solve most of the problems he describes here, yet he claims they only work in Chrome so it'll be another two years. That's false. We've built the next version of Ionic controls 100% as web components, specifically targeting mobile, and we've been incredibly happy with how ready they are.

Sure, building web components really benefits from some sugar (much like jQuery back then), but once you have that sugar they work great (we built a helper WC tool called Stencil: [http://stenciljs.com/](http://stenciljs.com/)).

Now that web components are ready, we just need to educate people on how they can start using custom components through normal HTML tags. We're on to phase two.

</comment><comment><USER14> All of current HTML and CSS standards still assume that web pages are just that: static paper-like pages.

Vast majority of JS code and frameworks treat web pages as parts of applications, where static paper-like pages may happen, but only as a view within a larger app.

I usually bring Sencha as an example. It's as impossible to build anything remotely close to Sencha's components today as it was 15 years ago when it was called just ExtJS[1].

[1] [http://examples.sencha.com/extjs/6.2.0/examples/kitchensink/...](http://examples.sencha.com/extjs/6.2.0/examples/kitchensink/#all)

</comment><comment><USER29> Here's the CSS fix not enough people are paying attention to: [http://gss.github.io/](http://gss.github.io/)

<comment><USER30> My understanding is that this approach was rejected because of path-dependence of the layout, i.e. deterministic only if you include the full interaction history. Path-dependence in a layout engine would be a debugging nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A simple step forward would be to standardize SCSS and start moving to native browser support rather than compilers. That doesn't seem hard to do.

</comment><comment><USER32> Code is solved because you use a JS framework. UI is unsolved, because you don't use a UI framework. What a strange article.

</comment><comment><USER33> >You step away from the Web world for a month and you come back and there are 20 new things you need to look at

Generally a problem is not solved when people keep trying to come up with new solutions for it every month

</comment><comment><USER34> > Ask most Web developers about the biggest pain point in Web applications > today, and they will likely tell you that Web UI is their biggest time sink.

I would say this is equally true for most native app developers.

</comment><comment><USER35> The problem is with the average UI designers, the average frontend developers, the average backend developers and the average micro-managers as well as the slice 'n' dice let's-pretend-it's-agile way of working. I am guilty of being one of these average team players but after doing some frontend work the average agency way I now know a little bit about how stupid the problem is.

Your average website looks pretty but lurking behind it is 10000 lines of CSS, none of it maintainable and put together by some silly build tools that hide rather than solve the problem.

This CSS is like Jenga, take one line out and it falls apart. The only thing the average frontend developer can do is add more cruft to it. They don't have the bravado to chuck it all out, to start over with CSS Grid and forget every bit of margin and padding they have 'learned' over the past years. Plus they would have to do all that in their spare time, their sliced 'n' diced 'agile' workflow just would not allow for it.

So we still have this charade of average 'web designers' making up drawings in some artworker program of what the thing should look like. They add their own flair - let's put the search box on the left, shall we? None of what they do is needed as the way to lay out content on a page is pretty much worked out. Plus these average designers work with placeholder copy and never real content. Plus they never ask the devs what can and cannot be done, with every client there are special things needed bespoke just for that client and their market niche. Dev's can do that stuff but they don't get to talk to the client and don't understand what the client is trying to do.

The average web 'designer' then gets the designs signed off with the client and the whole thing is then bundled off to the team who do code things. By now it is too late for the dev team to say 'we could have done that whole thing in CSS Grid by tea time', it is all nailed down and has to be delivered the old fashioned way to exactly match the PDFs or whatever the designs came in on.

So the same base templates from the same package get rolled out and those templates pull in antiquated cruft such as 'moderniser' or 'jquery'. The carousel goes on the home page, again needing a library of more JS and CSS that gets churned together with one of these 'build tools'.

To make the site 'faster' a CDN gets used, a bigger AWS box gets used, third party plugins do things to mangle the images so everyone gets to see the same cruddy images whatever platform they are on.

Even worse is what happens to content. It is arranged to work with the 'divs' and 'floats' and 'position absolute' gubbins, often with the layout different on mobile/desktop because the same content is repeated twice and hidden accordingly.

Regarding the javascripts, there is no need for 99% of it. Input boxes don't need it, image viewers don't need it but the average website delays for ten seconds or so on mobile because none of the average experts thought outside the box and bothered to RTFM and KISS in a DRY way.

Thank goodness for Google and Mozilla, there is innovation aplenty and the real challenge is how average web developers work in average agencies. It reminds me of being at university and how people did assignments by essentially copying what everyone else did and not going first principles it, to actually understand what is going on.

I am personally grateful of this situation as I can see possibilities to make lots of money rescuing small businesses from the burden of average clock- watching frontend web developers and average designers.

Of course, none of this applies to the HN reading crowd and those people doing fantastic work, just those people still churning out Jenga CSS.

</comment><comment><USER36> It seems unfair to compare a proprietary and closed system api to a standards based one. Where there are many companies with different and conflicting goals setting the standards.

</comment><comment><USER37> We're trying to solve exactly this problem with Pagedraw! Check out [https://pagedraw.io/](https://pagedraw.io/)

<comment><USER38> Yikes!

"Sorry, our editor is optimized for Chrome"

<comment><USER39> That is an _amazing_ characteristic in a project for building websites. What in the what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Detail question:

Why does he talk about HTML5 being 8 years old? Wasn't the first release in 2013 (or something)? Help me out here...

<comment><USER41> timeline differs if the standards work is taken into account, not the widespread implementation by browser vendors. See here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> \+ a standard to close session (logout)

</comment><comment><USER43> He's upset he can't send text messages or interact with Bluetooth from html? Wtf. How is this even an article. I'm angry my toaster isn't batting 0.500 for the Nats. Seriously, nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER44> Web code is clearly unsolved:

1\. The elephant in the room, Apple, is highly non compliant with web standards (iOS Safari lacks js web workers, webgl 2, WebRTC data channel, and many many others)

2\. The roadmap of webassembly is merely the start of glaring unsolved problems

3\. GPU compute will play an increasingly important role in the future, given the advent of AI, complex cryptography, video, image,... The web and browser have outdated and insufficient support for the same

4\. Access to sensors and peripherals is abysmal. WebUsb is a step in the right direction, but much needs to happen there

<comment><USER45> > iOS Safari lacks js web workers, webgl 2, WebRTC data channel, and many many > others

Are you referring to service workers? I've been using web workers on iOS for years.

<comment><USER44> Mozilla [1] lists webworker support on iOS to be basic, clearly lagging in compliance.

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers)

<comment><USER46> > clearly lagging in compliance

What is missing is _shared workers_ support (and producing output from _console.log_ in web workers). Of the two, shared workers would be a particularly useful feature, as it would in theory enable different browser tabs to utilize a shared, potentially resource hungry script, as per the Mozilla description at [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SharedWorke...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/SharedWorker)

The devs at Apple claims that this use case is not relevant and/or better served by Service Workers (which is even less supported). Not sure I understand their reasoning. [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116359](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116359)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I work On UI/UX for B2B software businesses and the reason Isee for the problem is that the web is built by engineers. There has been a big focus on code quality, best practices, frameworks etc. But the majority of these engineers didn't spend time on UI. This is definitely changing. 95% of our customers are great engineers that are seeing the value good UI/UX can add to their product and help deliver a better experience to their user. We're in the early stages of this shift, but forward thinking engineers are already paving the way.

[http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)

<comment><USER36> winform and win32 were built by engineers. Wpf had much more thought put in place for design aspects. The problem s we try to write applications in a system designed for documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Web Code is definitely not a solved problem. I am working on a project in Angular right now and it has advantages and major trade offs over writing it in plain JS. I'm at this point not sure it was worth it.

As far as Web UI goes, Angular has the Material Library, Bootstrap was all the rage a few years ago and there would have been this same article in reverse.

But the reality is these things are never solved. You may just feel happy with the current state of something but it won't stay that way for long. These massive JS frameworks are probably a fad.</comment>


Ask PG:  What's the highest rated HN article ever? - <AUTHOR>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128
I don't recall seeing an article get this many votes.  Is this the post on HN with the most votes?
Also, I'd like to propose adding a new list:  highest rated articles of all time.  It might be interesting to see what the articles that had the most impact in HN's history. <comment><USER2> Would be awesome to see a list taking into account community size too. To see if there were super popular articles years ago that only had a few hundred votes because the community was so small.

<comment><USER3> I think Digg is on the other side of that ramp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=1000>

<comment><USER5> Does that show all articles? <http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=400> doesn't show <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227770>, oddly.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349> does not show up on the over=1000 either, but has 1770 points as of now.

<comment><USER4> Last time somebody posted this the same issue was raised. I'm not sure why it only halfway works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure it is.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about this pre-existing view?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/best></comment>


Unlabeled Object Recognition in Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://byronknoll.blogspot.com/2013/05/unlabeled-object-recognition-in-google.html <comment><USER3> My guess is this is the background research for a future product something like google glass for blind people. Leveraging 1980s text adventures, fed thru a speech synth.

"You are facing north in the center of the sidewalk, toward the intersection of main and 1st streets. Standing 40 feet in front of you is a brown dog and 72 feet in front of you there is a woman standing on the other side of the road. Twenty seven feet ahead is the front door of mcdonalds. Would you like to hear the latest google locations reviews of that restaurant? Your apartment building entrance is 157 feet ahead. 34 feet ahead and to your left a graffiti artist has tagged a brick wall with the QR code pointing to the goatse website and there is a billboard with an advertisement for the latest star trek movie to your right and 50 feet upward. Also it is dark and you are likely to be eaten by a grue."

<comment><USER4> More likely it's just Hinton having fun with all the computational power he now has access to.

<comment><USER5> You're probably right. I believe that this is using a the system described in this paper:

<http://books.nips.cc/papers/files/nips25/NIPS2012_0534.pdf>

Google 'acquired' Professor Hinton along with the two co-authors of this paper earlier this year.

<comment><USER6> They've been working on deep learning for vision longer than that:

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/unsupervised_icml2012.pdf)

This is the paper that did unsupervised training of a deep net on frames from YouTube videos, and found it had autonomously developed detectors for, among other things, human faces and cats. Jeff Dean is a coauthor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did my own tests with Google+. Some results:

\- Google+ queues images for recognition. Results improved steadily over 72 hours.

\- Google+ does not use OCR of text in the images. That surprised me. But perhaps it's a privacy issue.

\- Google+ does use information gleaned from elsewhere on the web. Words that were associated with the same images on Flickr would turn up those very pictures on Google+.

\- Oddly, Google+ does not use information associated with those images on Twitter.

\- Google probably uses EXIF data married to a database of location names.

\- The much-vaunted feature recognition is impressive, better than any other system, but for me did not achieve creepy levels of intuition.

<http://neilk.net/blog/2013/05/23/testing-google-photos-ai/>

<comment><USER8> And it also doesn't seem to stem words. [flower] and [flowers] give different results (actually flowers gives no results). But I am impressed by the number of classes they have: who labels pineapples in an image corpus?

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Image_Labeler>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The unlabeled object recognition test is a standard test of machine learning algorithms.

Historically, error rates of around 20-25% won competitions and set records. A year or two ago, though some researchers and professors from the University of Toronto absolutely smashed those records, getting around a 16% error rate. They went and made a startup out of their tech, and got acquired by Google a few months ago.

I think that this is going to be the first of a long line of Google products integrating this sort of deep neural network technology. I wouldn't be shocked if Google in 10 years was known for something besides search, at this rate.

<comment><USER10> At the end of the day though, object recognition is also search, in a sense.

If I'm flipping through my album of dog photos, or looking especially closely at dogs via google glass, maybe Google will show me an ad for dog food?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, that's awesome. Imagine your photo collection of 1000s of photos, and you remember "the one with that cat" but how do you dig through the photos to actually find it? This can go a long way to a much more meaningful photo library management experience.

<comment><USER12> Am I the only one scared by the thought of uploading my whole photo collection to Google's servers? What about creating an offline database of object fingerprints that can classify my pictures without privacy violations?

<comment><USER11> Anyone's free to build that product. Of course, not anyone is capable of this - surely Google leverages immense computing power, complex software and its knowledge graph to do this analysis? You'd need to replicate all that in competition.

But seriously, how paranoid can people be? If anyone really wants to get your data, do you really think it's safe on your server or on your local machine?

<comment><USER13> By the same token a really determined burglar can get into my house - <USER2> doesn't mean I should leave the doors unlocked.

No-one is suggesting that Google are going to hack into your machine to get your data, nor that what they want to do is out and out unpleasant, but what it is in in their interest either instead of or as well as yours.

Until we work out that instead of / as well as, I think a healthy questioning of what might be happening is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google has been building her knowledge graph for a couple of years. The goal is for computer to truly understand real world concepts rather than keywords and text. I didn't fully understand the application of it rather than some fancy cards on the search results page until yesterday when I asked Google "where did Golden retriever originate?", and Google answered "England". Google might not really understand the concept originated or golden retriever, but Google understands that "where" is asking for a place and she found a lot of mention of "England" in all the page results of "golden retrieve origin", she also understand that England is a place. So Google guessed the answer.

The Google computer has been reading about these concepts for years, now we know it can see them in pictures (and maybe even in live videos). That excites me to a degree that it becomes a little bit scary. When will that computer learn the concept of "self"?

Update: actually Google seems to understand the concept of "golden retriever", I search my photos with the word and yes, at least Google knows how golden retrievers look like.

<comment><USER15> Completely OT, but when did Google become female? And also why?

<comment><USER16> Anything good is feminine.

<comment><USER17> Be careful, you might start a debate about whether or not Google is good.

<comment><USER15> I sort of want to see that just because it would be the single most surreal debate about gender identity ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I type in "handsome", it consistently shows pictures of myself. Just goes to show that image recognition has a long way to go.

<comment><USER19> Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder...

<comment><USER20> Are you suggesting that Google is capable of aesthetic judgment?

<comment><USER19> I was just trying to cheer the OP up :)

<comment><USER18> It was appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is related to last year's article about Google's neural network being able to recognize cats, right?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big- networ...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of- computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1)

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. The neural network in Google+ was trained on labeled images and now finds similar objects in unlabeled images.

The technology discussed in that article is about deducing the existence of a common feature, in this instance a cat, from a large collection of unlabelled images.

<comment><USER22> It may be the same tech (roughly). Use the same approach for all but the last layer, then use traditional backprop to learn the last layer and fine tune the connections in the lower layers.

Mostly unlabelled then, which means you can learn to generalise over a huge number of images but learn labels on a smaller set.

<comment><USER23> Yep. I don't know if that's what is actually being used here, but that is pretty much how they did it with the same system:

 _"We applied the feature learning method to the task of recognizing objects in the ImageNet dataset (Deng et al., 2009). After unsupervised training on YouTube and ImageNet images, we added one-versus-all logistic classifiers on top of the highest layer. We first trained the logistic classifiers and then fine-tuned the network. Regularization was not employed in the logistic classifiers. The entire training was carried out on 2,000 machines for one week."_ [1]

Basically you learn features in unlabeled data, then identify the features your trained net is recognizing with labeled data. When you run over g+ images, you then only tag with features you're sure of past some threshold of certainty.

[1] <http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38115.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just tried it on my photo collection and it's incredible. It even works for famous places, e.g. I searched for "western wall" and "dome of the rock" and it found them. I can't imagine how that works

<comment><USER25> For places, could it be cheating and peeking at GPS positions in the EXIf tags?

<comment><USER26> I took a half dozen or so pictures of the sagrada familia, all have gps data in exif. Only one of my pictures contained the famous spirals, the rest were closeups of exterior detail. Only the picture of the spirals showed up in the query.

It's very impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the greater achievement came with Google image search, someone had to tag all those photos.

They wrote an algorithm that takes that data and recognises new images with it. As long as there is a way for us to tag inaccurate matches then it should be able to continue to learn. I imagine any flagged matches are being reviewed carefully.

<comment><USER28> I always thought that was done using keywords on the page the image was taken from (and image captions, alt text, titles and filenames). This is reinforced by what you see when you go many pages ahead in images and see things that don't seem related to what you searched, but the keyword is there somewhere on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is seriously fun! You can actually search for "blue car" and it works. Searching for "picture" results in an error however. Same for "image". "photo" seems to return more or less everything.

</comment><comment><USER30> Object recognition also works on videos, judging from the fact that a recording of my cat came up in search results for "dog". (Could be that it only looks at the first frame, though.)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is really a quite cool feature. For me, it was able to do a good job on searches for things like snow, road, dog, sunset, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> Would be a fantastic feature in desktop photo management software like Aperture or Lightroom.

<comment><USER25> Or even google picasa!

<comment><USER10> yeah, god forbid google products actually work together -- and that seemingly abandoned products are revitalized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a software developer, very few things blow my mind - but this just did.

How did they do that?

</comment><comment><USER34> google should advertise the sheer technical depth of the stuff they do

make search sound like scotty explaining a warp core on star trek

<comment><USER35> I am fine them not advertising it much. They seem to be confident about their technical superiority over hype created purely by marketing.

(In other words, I consider Google technology company, Apple a marketing one.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's these sort of things that make technology feel like magic.

</comment><comment><USER37> Google Drive does that as well.</comment>


CrowdPost - Share and see what people are saying around you - <AUTHOR> http://www.crowdpostapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.crowdpostapp.com](http://www.crowdpostapp.com) \- iOS App. Feel free to ask any questions :)</comment>


Unidentified Object Flies Beside at the Time of Falcon 9 Rocket Explosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.anonews.co/falcon-9-explosion/ <comment><USER2> I went back to check the original video I saw when this happened from USLaunchReport and it's on there too, the (above) link does say that the object flew by, like after the initial explosion it shows the object on the other side of the rocket. I don't believe this part to be true, I think that was debris, which would mean that something was "flung" into the rocket making it explode.

Not quite as juicy as aliens, but still possible sabotage.</comment>


The Dark Side of the British Seaside - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170626-the-dark-side-of-the-british-seaside <comment><USER2> During the industrial revolution a lot of the big mills and factories had fixed shutdown times during the year and all the workers would holiday at the same time, usually travelling to the big seaside resorts mentioned here. These were their boom days and really ever since has been a gradual decline as that way of live and it's cultural imprint has washed way down the generations. See Also: EasyJet.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Brit living in Japan, I'm struck that the connection between organised crime and seaside towns seems, unsurprisingly really, to be a universal phenomenom.

For example, in Japan the seaside town of Atami in Shizuoka is where the Inagawa-kai (3rd largest yakuza group) was founded in 1949. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inagawa- kai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inagawa-kai)

</comment><comment><USER4> Edgar Wright's new film "Baby Driver" makes virtuosic use of Queen's "Brighton Rock" in it's grand finale. Don't think I've ever witnessed that level of per- frame synchrony with every beat!

</comment><comment><USER5> This phenomena applies to a number of beach towns, especially Santa Cruz which does its best to take California informality well past eccentricity. It's awesome and definitely a defining aspect of Santa Cruz culture.</comment>


Hackers break Kindle DRM - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/23/amazon_kindle_hacked/

<comment><USER2> This was posted as a comment on the original article. No idea if it's true or not, but it's an interesting insight:

 _As one of the engineers who worked on Kindle, I'd like to point out that most people at Amazon are pretty anti-DRM themselves - it's the PUBLISHERS who insisted on it, and we put in DRM so as to keep THEM happy, because without publishers, there are no books to sell. We knew full well that the device and DRM would be hacked eventually - the hope was that we could just stay ahead of them for long enough to prove the feasibility of selling books in this way to publishers._

<comment><USER3> In a similar vain The Register states:

"Once upon a time, Apple laced its iTunes-purchased offerings with similar DRM restrictions that evoked major headaches when trying to do something as simple as transferring songs to a new PC."

…as if Apple came up with the the idea to begin with. I think most people reading know the parties that insisted on having DRM in the iTunes Music Store, but it is still misleading, lazy reporting.

As someone who has worked in media, I can state with authority that the majority of engineers know DRM is merely a futile speed bump. Sometimes a speed bump is just fine with the lawyers. They'll take it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Exploit code is here - <http://pastie.org/753699>

<comment><USER4> It looks like the hard work is done by a different script, mobidedrm by Darkreverser, and this script just pulls the file path out of a running instance of the Kindle PC app. I presume the Kindle app is creating a temporary file on disk which mobidedrm is then able to reverse, rather than decrypting the original file, otherwise there'd be no point in writing a Win32 debugger in Python. (It's also pulling out a couple of more bits of info.)

The technique is very sensitive to the version of the Kindle app. It's currently using the hash of the executable to choose which breakpoint locations to set and hook, which are hard-coded virtual addresses.

<comment><USER5> I believe what the script is actually doing is extracting the Mobipocket PID - K4PC uses a different PID for each book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OK, but it's been broken for ages. There is a simple python script floating around that you can run on Kindle books to turn them into .html files. The decryption key is just your Kindle's serial number (which I believe is available via USB, so typing it in is not strictly necessary).

If you don't have a Kindle, that might be a problem though. But I think Amazon lets you "register" a Kindle, so you can just make up a serial number, buy books, and decrypt them.

Basically, the DRM scheme is just a joke to keep publishers happy. If your eyes can see something, it can be copied.

<comment><USER5> Actually, K4PC uses a different scheme - the book key is not encrypted in the same way as for normal kindle books. I believe each book uses a different Mobipocket PID, and what this new script does is extract the PID for a particular book and then invoke the original script using that PID.

Also, the PID is not the kindle serial number, but can be calculated from it. There's another script around to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's ironic, if there were a reliable way to break the DRM, I'd be incented to buy lots of Kindle books at even above the paperback price.

right now I just can't stand the idea of paying almost as much as a real book for something that I can't share and will die with my kindle in a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER8> Many Kindle books, especially technical ones, are in the so-called Topaz format with embedded fonts which nobody has been able to reverse-engineer or break DRM for. I don't know if this breakthrough changes that---doesn't seem like it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Still waiting for an e-book torrent site.

<comment><USER10> I don't think ebooks make a strong case for torrents mainly because of their small size and the sheer number. Emule or IRC have been traditionally strong channels for ebook sharing.

<comment><USER11> You've ignored Rapidshare (and other clones)

<comment><USER12> Last time I used Rapidshare the free account had a restriction of something like 1 file per day. I wonder if it's still the case.

<comment><USER13> I am definitely unable to read more than one book per day so that would be plenty for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Biggest Data Leak in Sweden's History Punished with Half a Month's Paycheck - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/biggest-data-leak-in-swedens-history-punished-with-half-a-months-paycheck/ <comment><USER2> This so called "scandal" was an incident that was milked to it's maximum potential by the political opposition as an attempt to discredit the government with the aim to provoke a vote of no confidence in the parliament. The attempt failed, not because the government made any serious attempt at defending itself, like tracing the mishap back to the previous government, but because the government ceded defeat and sacrificed a few of it's ministers rather than go on the counteroffensive.

It did however reveal a pattern of "siloed" decision making with the Swedish government under the present prime minister, a leadership style that puts emphasis on strict division of responsibilities and where the prime ministers office is kept unaware of everything except the really major events in the various ministries (in part in order to maintain credible deniability no doubt, but in part also because this is a long standing Swedish tradition and in part enshrined in law).

The same pattern reveals itself under the present pandemic, where the government (and the opposition initially) argued for letting the public health agency (FHM) take the full responsibility of the Swedish strategy, with no interference from the politicians, in spite the soon glaring fact that the strategy was hijacked by a minority position within the scientific community (the "herd immunity" believers), and that the strategy has put Sweden in an (for the Swedes) unfamiliar pariah state position visavis neighboring countries.

Admitting failure is still a long way off, in spite of the virus still running rampant in the society. In part because of the above mentioned long standing Swedish tradition which has close to full support across all party-lines. But also because of the almost endearing trust that Swedes put in their authorities. The people that are protesting are almost always foreigners or from communities with some distance from Swedish traditions for other reasons, like Sweden's Jewish intellectuals who have (with close to one voice) criticized the strategy from day one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see why we would want a public official to be financially ruined for a mistake in which she did not benefit financially. Vengeance is a fool's game, and it's not like she's going to repeat that mistake.

<comment><USER4> I think such gross negligence should lead to much more severe consequences for the person in charge. Either way this case sets an example. The current sentence says that gross negligence in handling sensitive data and loss of state secrets doesn't really matter much.

At least here in Norway we have the concept of conditional imprisonment, which is not entirely unlike being on probation. I'm pretty sure our Swedish neighbors have something similar.

For a case such as this, a conditional jail sentence of a year or two would not be inappropriate. After all, the data included highly sensitive state secrets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And a couple of weeks ago I was wondering why on earth anyone would want fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)?

So I am wondering if it is possible to do an operation like "add this new address to the record"?

<comment><USER5> Of course if I don't trust you with the original record i don't trust you with the new address.

But I am going round to the idea there is something real opening up with FHE. Wish I knew what :-)

</comment></comment><comment> T-A (2017)</comment>


A reality check on Tesla  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/opinion/harley-tesla-best/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7 <comment><USER2> I'm not too concerned about the current lack of charging stations. More will come. I am sure Wyoming was one of the last states to get cell coverage too.</comment>


Trump Received Intelligence Briefings on Coronavirus Twice in January - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/02/849619486/trump-received-intelligence-briefings-on-coronavirus-twice-in-january <comment><USER2> You'd hope so; the virus was international news in January. I found an old newspaper just yesterday from January with an article titled something like "Mysterious Lung Disease in Wuhan".

SARS, MERS, Ebola and others had already been dealt with successfully so presumably the real surprise was the asymptomatic infections. COVID-19 outbreaks don't look so scary until the body bags start to run out and it becomes apparent that the situation is out of control.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wuhan is a major city very well integrated into the world at large. It is a transport and industrial hub with many major Western companies, Western expats, and Western diplomatic representations, including a US consulate.

This makes it pretty clear that Western intelligence knew what was going on in real time at least as well as the local people and perhaps as well as the Chinese central government.

But, both because the Western struggle against China and political games to deflect criticism the facts are distorted and spun, if not ignored, on all sides.</comment>


NPR downgrades and disables its ombudsman - <AUTHOR> http://pressthink.org/2014/07/npr-downgrades-and-disables-its-ombudsman/

<comment><USER2> For those interested in what is happening in and to journalism, I strongly recommend Jay Rosen's blog [1] and Twitter feed. In particular, his work on The View From Nowhere [3] and the Church of Savvy [4] was very helpful to me in understanding how mainstream news, which is theoretically a vital guardian of our democracy, has become dangerously weak.

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

[2] [https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu](https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu)

[3] [http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere- question...](http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions- and-answers/)

[4] [http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is- brok...](http://pressthink.org/2011/08/why-political-coverage-is-broken/)

</comment><comment><USER3> NPR seems to want to be more mainstream - their coverage of copyright and patent issues is pretty much MPAA-received wisdom, and their coverage of Snowden and NSA dragnet surveillance seems really unenthusiastic.

What's going on with NPR?</comment>


Cisco adopts smear campaign against Juniper as new marketing tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.overpromisesunderdelivers.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this actually a victory for Juniper as Cisco acknowledges Juniper as a threat? Or will this FUD campaign have a real impact on Juniper sales?</comment>


Guy Debord's Situationist Board Game - <AUTHOR> http://dangerousminds.net/comments/class_warfare_radical_french_philosopher_guy_debords_situationist_board_gam <comment><USER2> Looks like an interesting article but was unable to navigate it on my iPad. Seems like some touch events were hijacked but I lost patience trying to figure out what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER3> A computerized version, with online play, would be excellent. The weakness I see is that the presence of a terrain is assumed (i.e. the board) when, I think, it needs to be determined first. This seems crucial, following the social, historical, premises of the theory behind the game, because such determination is already a move in the war that is to ensue.

<comment><USER4> A computerized version was indeed developed but ran into legal trouble. The web site still exists [1]. Perhaps someday they'll be allowed to host the game again.

[1] [http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php](http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. Will watch.

<comment><USER5> and if you go to archive.org and look at their version of [http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/](http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/) on e.g. January 2014, you might find an old downloadable beta...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmmmm. Clausewitz and Situationism is not a connection I would have imagined.

The article's first paragraph is poorly written. A game known as Kriegspiel has a much older heritage: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_\(wargame\)) and it appears that Debord's game was either a reinvention or merely a variant of it.

<comment><USER7> While Clausewitz and Situationism might be disconnected, Debord himself often called on Clausewitz.

Here Clausewitz is mentioned in the opening paragraph of Debord's autobiography 'Panegyric':

[http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm](http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm)

and:

"The world of war presents at least the advantage of not leaving room for the silly chapter of optimism".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "Terrain is transmuted into psychogeography"

While I understand what the above sentence is saying, I would like to explore and interrogate the geopsychology of its author in order to understand what led her to formulate her spatial epistemology using this odiously unnecessary verbiage.

<comment><USER9> Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

From the Wiki page

>defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

>"a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

The essential tool here being overlaid maps of say San Francisco & [http://xkcd.com/256/](http://xkcd.com/256/) or a topographic map such as [1]

[1] [https://theblackbox.ca/project/mapping/DSC02355.jpg.html](https://theblackbox.ca/project/mapping/DSC02355.jpg.html)

<comment><USER8> > Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

True, but a more subtle observer might point out that the jargon can serve more than one function simultaneously. In fields like organic chemistry which is famous for its compound names that sometimes extend beyond the page limit, the jargon is unavoidable, well defined and categorized, and serves a narrow and specific role (though true, learning that jargon would signal your competence within the field, so perhaps it's a dual one, where the secondary function is to serve as a barrier). In a number of other fields, specifically the social sciences (and even more specifically, the social sciences after they inhaled a large dose of Frankfurtian critical theory), the jargon serves a far more complex role of (1) naming a concept, (2) signaling to peers from other disciplines the "scienciness" of what could (sometimes justly) be criticized as a non-empirical field, and (3) signaling to peers from the same discipline the "political in-groupness" of the author, that is that the author shares their political beliefs.

One could even argue there is a 4th role, where you subtly signal (to potential recruits from the student body): "See how much non-empiricism we can get away with? Join us, and you can get away with it too! Free degree, if only you agree!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if it's at all similar to go, which is considered by philosophers like Gilles deleuze to be the "war game" part excellence. Go, at least, closely resembles che Guevara's recipe for winning a guerrilla war: to encircle and to not be encircled. Definitely going to look deeper into this!

</comment><comment><USER11> Debord's Kreigspiel isn't very interesting as a game (clearly derived from chess & less involved) or as a conflict simulation. It's an incredible artifact!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a fan of military history, but the video at the end of the article is awful. It doesn't clearly explain the game because it gets lost in historical pretentiousness.

<comment><USER4> The video is only superficially about the game and more about the political philosophy of Debord. It is hosted by the Class Wargames website[1], with a subtitle of"Ludic subversion in the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption". Personally, i"m not clear as to whether they are trying to make a political point or if it is just a tongue-in-cheek website about a few board games.

[1] [http://www.classwargames.net/](http://www.classwargames.net/)</comment></comment>


Bower is alive, looking for contributors - <AUTHOR> http://bower.io/blog/2015/bower-alive-looking-contributors/ <comment><USER2> What problems bower solves that aren't solved by npm?

<comment><USER3> They accomplish the same thing with different dependency structures, as well as catering to different types of dependencies. Front-end components vs backend components.

<comment><USER4> FWIW the latest versions of NPM now flatten the dependency tree as much as possible, so the resulting structure is now much closer to Bower's. Also, I use NPM to manage all of my front-end dependencies, with great success, and it seems like most new OSS front-end JS projects these days do also.</comment></comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds Guided Tour of His Home Office [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSgUPqygAww

<comment><USER2> It's watching one of those hoarder shows on TLC.</comment>


Ask HN: Did you ever work on a large project not exceeding budget or deadline? - 0-o <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, all the time. Being pessimistic helps, but you also need good - and more importantly, self-aware - engineers, and a senior management structure that's willing to work with you.

The keys, basically, are realistic estimates and a willingness to de-scope. If you're willing to launch something with a few bugs and some small features missing, and to improve them in subsequent releases, you can hit any reasonably realistic launch target.

In the days of shrink-wrapped software, those bugs and missing features might have been unacceptable, but in a world of web apps and of app stores with automatic updates, iterative follow up releases for polish and improvements and even to incorporate user feedback should be a routine part of any software process.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had a startup that was focused on fixing project failure through better requirements management. Page four of our slide deck was the fact that approximately 84% of IT projects fail (where "fail" is over budget, late, or failed to meet the requirements). The newest version of the report has actually improved a bit on those numbers (~30% success now) but it's still terrible.

There's quite a decent blog post about it here [https://speedandfunction.com/look-25-years-software- projects...](https://speedandfunction.com/look-25-years-software-projects-can- learn/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been on 3 - 4 "large" projects. My definition of large = $100+M budget with 400+ ppl working.

3 of the 4 projects failed altogether and were cancelled after about a year for blowing both budget and timeline.

The large project that did not "fail" was deemed too strategic and the business simply decided to invest more and keep going until done. Once management came to terms with the 3+ year timeline, things got a lot more sane.

</comment><comment><USER4> There was one project which I had worked on , the project plan was around 6 months and it was executed on schedule till the very last day. It was not a complex project though.

Migration of a whole bunch of sites to new server , OS + some new developments etc,with a whole lot of users across several countries. It was the first time I actually saw someone prepare a plan for ~ 6 months and made it happen too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Often.

Agile true works. Identify the core, build it quick. No more than one month. Release and deploy to production. Sprint! Release every 1 week or 2 weeks on production.

This is my approach to delivering software.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you define large project? 100 people over 3 years?

</comment><comment><USER7> 3-4 Projects, 10-20M budget, 5-10 developers. Yes, we were on a budget all time, never exceeded the deadline.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, but that's because I'm very pessimistic about these things (on purpose).

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes! On a project led by jv22222. (can you link to another HN users?)

<comment><USER6> Yes you can [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=willmacdonald](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=willmacdonald)</comment></comment>


A rust podcast - <AUTHOR> http://rustyrad.io/

<comment><USER2> I am quite optimistic about Rust. It combines an area that needs PL theory badly - systems programming. But does so in a very practical way. Instead of attempting to control side effects, it promotes immutable data as a default (yay!) and uses type checking to enforce data lifetime and memory safety.

As anyone who has been studying high profile bugs knows, memory flaws are a huge problem.

Mozilla is well on the way to having the most secure browser with Rust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems about right. I feel like it's where people want c++ to go anyway. Let's just do it today.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry it took so long [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398015)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> First episode so please cut me some slack.</comment>


Why I'm all in on Circle for online community building - <AUTHOR> https://jayclouse.com/how-to-build-an-online-community/ <comment><USER2> Wow. This is great.

I've been on the waitlist to get into Circle for a while now. Excited that they fully launched for the public earlier this week. Already onboarding my current "workshop" to the platform so we can begin monetizing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to help with any questions along the way – there's a learning curve but only because it's flexible and can work for a LOT of use cases.</comment></comment>


What Major Ethical Challenges Will We Face in the next 100 Years Because of Tech? - <AUTHOR>

Disclosure: This is mostly for my own intellectual curiosity, but I also intend to write a series of essays on the subject.<p>I personally am worried about privacy and security in the cloud.  What do you feel will be a major issue we will have in face in the future because of changing technology? <comment><USER2> "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

-1984

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's some stuff that would cause a problem is they happened, but that I don't think will happen:

      Mind body transfer
      People living forever
      Artificial wombs

Here's some that might happen:

      Prenatal genetic selection, or alteration
      Human cloning
      Very expensive treatments that can not be afforded by many
      Having children very late in life (i.e. within
      a decade or two of expected death)

I don't know if it's possible to get it, but try to watch the show Century City, or at least read episode synopses. Your question is the premise of the show.

<comment><USER4> People living for a very long time could happen, but I doubt that the technology would be released to anyone who could not afford a few millions. No matter how cheap, whoever owns the tech can charge what they want for it, and people will pay tens of millions for it. It's better to concentrate on the high end market, than to go for the low end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since I first watched "ghost in the shell" years ago I've been a bit scared of a time when we will be able to plug our brain into a computer network... with the risk of getting it hacked.

I mean, you could always refuse to jack yourself in but I doubt I could.

</comment><comment><USER6> The basic rule of thumb on predicting future tech progress: figure out a conservative estimate of how long until the tech comes about/matures and then triple that number.

I think two major issues will be genetic discrimination, which seems like it's on the verge of being an active issue, and whether we should begin restricting access to some scientific information such as sequences or viral patterns in the interest of security over freedom.

</comment><comment><USER7> We can take some stabs at it now - privacy, genetic engineering - but I submit we have no idea what the real problems will be. It's the revolutionary technologies that matter, and by definition, you can't predict those.

Look at it from 1908. Think of what someone back then would have had to predict in order to guess what technology related ethical dilemmas we face now.

</comment><comment><USER8> 100 years?

redefinition of intelligence and potentially life.

/yep, optimistic

</comment><comment><USER9> We likely can't predict tech for 100 years with any kind of detail. I think tech will be pretty okay, but ideologies will give us major problems, as always.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Genetic engineering!!!!!!!!!!!!_

<comment><USER11> this is scary... does this mean that (given that technology) the rich and powerful will control the laws and essentially reap the benefits in uncontrolled ways?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will we see next 100 years? I doubt that. Probably we would have erased ourselves by then.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think that? Even a full scale nuclear war would not erase all of humanity, and compared of the past right now is the least likely of all time periods for major disasters like that to happen.

I can't think of anything that could happen right now that would wipe out all of humanity. Even a massive asteroid wouldn't.

(Note: I mean _all_, lots of disasters could of course affect many people in various places.)

<comment><USER13> What makes you so certain that humanity won't be wiped out by a full nuclear war or a massive asteroid impact?

<comment><USER3> I don't think you realize just how big the earth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Privacy: leaks of logs, archived Facebook profiles etc.</comment>


Mruby and MobiRuby - <AUTHOR> http://matt.aimonetti.net/posts/2012/04/20/mruby-and-mobiruby/

<comment><USER3> If you want to learn how to develop iOS apps, then you should learn Objective C. I'm a Ruby developer and as much as I love the language, when I decided I also wanted to write iOS apps I bit the bullet and started learning Objective C. In the process I've found that learning Objective C is actually pretty easy - as the author of this post points out, it's CocoaTouch and the overall Xcode and iOS ecosystem and environment that takes time to learn.

This is fairly analogous to learning Ruby on Rails if you know neither Ruby nor Rails, although because I had experience with curly-brace/semicolon languages and pointers (a bit of C, plus PHP and Javascript) I found that learning Objective C was easier for me than learning Ruby. But just like Rails is a steep mountain to climb, so is CocoaTouch.

However, learning Objective C and CocoaTouch has been fun, enjoyable, enlightening, and well worth it. As the old saying goes, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. If you believe developing iOS apps is worth doing, then do it right with Objective C. You won't regret it, and by adding another language, framework, and way of doing things to your toolbelt, you'll become a better Ruby programmer too.

</comment><comment><USER4> A quick look at the MobiRuby example code worries me. It looks like Objective-C, but awkwardly written using Ruby syntax. In other words, it looks more like an Objective-C wrapper, than a Ruby DSL for writing iPhone apps.

However, with plans to port the system to Android, perhaps a unified DSL could be built to target both platforms.

<comment><USER5> If you look at MacRuby, it actually takes a very similar approach. You need something like HotCocoa on top to make it more Ruby like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a larger point in this post about using frameworks with the language they were designed for. Using another language to wrap a language you don't like to use a framework is often extremely limiting and awkward.

As a developer trying to get things done, I'm far more productive if I bite the bullet and learn the language the framework was designed for rather than bend the framework to fit my favorite language. I've found this to be true across mobile, web and pure backend server technologies.

<comment><USER7> What is the language that you write in that doesn't "wrap another language"? I always find it amazing that it's possible to get programmers to argue against not just some specific abstraction, but abstraction as a general principle. What do you think programming is exactly, if not layers and layers of abstractions?

[edit: that's not to say I think the MobiRuby syntax is looking very good at the moment, but don't toss the baby with the bathwater]

<comment><USER6> It's not the wrapping of the language that is the issue. Unless you're writing bytecode by hand, every programer deals with some abstraction.

The issue is wrapping a language with a higher level abstraction, but then proceeding to use your abstraction with a framework designed for the lower language. In the case of the post, the author mentions using MacRuby/mRuby to Objective-C, but then proceeding to use it with Cocoa, which is really designed specifically for Objective-C. Using it with Ruby just ends up being awkward and unwieldy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As long as you can still reach the APIs you need 100% of the time, there's nothing wrong with the abstraction. Ruby is a huge timesaver over Objective-C... this is obvious in the syntax. The ability to create apps that run on anything but are 100% written in Ruby will be a huge step forward for the language. So that's why I think it is Matz working on this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see a great future for this - hopefully will get more users hacking on embedded devices with Ruby codes (ruby + Arduinio or even Routers - e.g. OpenWRT).

Quick glance in the Make file, sees runtime libraries for Win/gcc/iOS - <USER2> be able to build an arm exe easily.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting post. It hints are some serious architectural differences between MacRuby and MobiRuby. It'll be interesting to see if these differences limit the ability of MobiRuby to create a usable way to work with Cocoa in ruby.

</comment><comment><USER11> All fair points that I agree with. Mruby is promising but it's still in its infancy. Whereas MobiRuby is interesting on its own, but lacking advantages over Obj-C for real development.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd be very interested to see what this "incremental garbage collection" Matz talks about does to battery life.

Also, what's up with all the underscore methods in MobiRuby?

</comment><comment><USER13> I want to see redis with mruby scripting instead of or also with Lua scripting, one day.</comment>


Check Out PC Classic, a $99 Adorable Tiny DOS Games Console - <AUTHOR> https://hothardware.com/news/check-out-pc-classic-99-tiny-dos-games-console <comment><USER2> PC games of that era rarely used a controller, they were all mouse and keyboard based. Beyond that, the form factor leads me to believe it's just an RPi-like device running DOSbox, with a UI slapped on top. Not entirely out of step with the console makers that started this trend, but still a bit of a head-scratcher.

<comment><USER3> It's not the form factor but the official FAQ page that really makes me think this is a RPi+UI, especially when the last question/answer pair is:

> Can't I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, > 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for > ARM or install/configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu > system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?

> No.

With no other explanation or expansion on that answer, it reads to me like "That was our idea, now go away". OTOH, if they manage to license a number of classic games which aren't legally available elsewhere (like the original Sid Meier Civilization, or Lemmings) this might be worth the surcharge.

<comment><USER4> I feel like that's too self-aware to not be tongue-in-cheek. I think that question is hinting at the fact that real value of the product comes in the effort and work into designing the thing, not necessarily the novelty of it.

Basically: sure, you could totally make something like this. But how much is your time worth?

<comment><USER5> I agree; it reminds me of the Dropbox comment from 2007 [1]:

> I have a few qualms with this app: > 1\. For a Linux user, you can already > build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, > mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted > filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through > built-in software.

1 - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "From a design standpoint, I think Unit-E missed an opportunity to built a vertical tower reminiscent of older PCs"

Am I the only one who remembers _most_ home computers from the 80s/early 90s being 'pizza box' desktops?

<comment><USER7> "Pizzabox" is a bit generous, many desktops would have at least 3x 5.25" vertical bays -- they were limited by the height of a PCI card.

<comment><USER8> I always thought "pizzabox" was a Mac term - you had machines like Centris/Quadra series where if you wanted expansion card you had to get a riser card where you mounted the cards horizontally

<comment><USER9> I always thought it came from the Sun SparcStations, along with SGI etc. There were the pizzaboxes that were as deep as wide. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SPARCstation20_front_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SPARCstation20_front_and_rear.jpg)

Then there were the lunchbox IPX and IPC that were about half the width and depth but twice the height. [http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ipx/ipx_portrait.jpg](http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ipx/ipx_portrait.jpg)

<comment><USER8> You're probably right, I didn't come into contact with Sparc machines until uni.

edit:

Actually I just followed the wikipedia link and there's even a page on the pizza box form factor [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_box_form_factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_box_form_factor)

> _The Data General Aviion Unix server was advertised in 1991 with the tagline > "Who just fit mainframe power in a pizza box?",[1] but most computers > generally referred to as pizza box systems were high-end desktop systems > such as Sun Microsystems workstations sold in the 1990s, most notably the > SPARCstation 1 and SPARCstation 5. Other notable examples have been among > the highest-performing desktop computers of their generations, including the > SGI Indy, the NeXTstation, and the Amiga 1000, but the form factor was also > seen in budget and lower-end lines such as the Macintosh LC family.[2]_

The Jargon File also specifically refers to Sun machines [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/pizza- box.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/pizza-box.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure if the functionality is worth the price tag, but I do love the perfectly yellowed/beige plastic.

It almost looks like they made the form-factor fit in a 3.5" floppy drive bay, which would be even cooler.

</comment><comment><USER11> They reacted to YT comments on their FAQ page :)

 _Can't I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for ARM or install /configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?

No._

[https://unitetechno.com/dt_catalog/pc- classic/#pi](https://unitetechno.com/dt_catalog/pc-classic/#pi)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll buy it if it runs BASIC, and supports keyboard. It can be a great tool to teach intro to programming with least distraction.

<comment><USER13> You should write your own BASIC interpreter! I'm still in the middle of mine, but it is a lot of fun :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18315292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18315292)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only way I'd buy this is if it will let me install my own DOS software (mostly old C, C++ compilers, Pascal ...). It would be great if it come with something like FreeDOS.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I have a bunch of games and utilities I'd love on something fast and portable like this. The fact they will have games available for sale post- launch seems to indicate a walled garden, though, but hopefully that's just a convenience option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "From a design standpoint, I think Unit-E missed an opportunity to built a vertical tower reminiscent of older PCs, though the beige color scheme is certainly a throwback, and the faux floppy drive is cool..." Nah. IMHO the 1980's PC-XT look is much much cooler than the 90's towers

<comment><AUTHOR> An XT would require two colors of plastic and a higher manufacture cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is exactly what I've envisioned, with BASIC, for teaching programming.

</comment><comment><USER18> What, no Turbo button??

</comment><comment> cde-v Or you can play everything on [https://classicreload.com/](https://classicreload.com/)

Also, why Commander Keen 4, so much worse than the first 3.

</comment><comment><USER19> If this doesn't come with a mechanical keyboard and a ball mouse I ain't interested. ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> Nostalgia is king.

</comment><comment><USER21> Complete with that aged yellow plastic tinge!</comment>


University of Waterloo Systems Design Engineering 2017 Class Profile - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@joeyloi/systems-design-engineering-2017-class-profile-8bbe8847e8c7 <comment><USER2> I sometimes wonder if Canada's tech industry would be more ahead if there was no TN visa.

<comment><USER3> Workers in the industry are significantly underpaid relative to the US. With no easy way to work in the US, I suspect fewer Canadians would choose to study computer science.

For example, from Google just now, the average software engineering salary in Vancouver BC is about $73k CAD (about $57k USD), and the average software engineering salary in Seattle is about $96k USD. That's about a 68% increase over the Canadian salary, and the cost of living is similar in both cities.

Incidentally, my company has had a number of Waterloo interns over the years and they have all been excellent. Many of them have moved back to the US after graduating.

<comment><USER4> Relative to other prograns, computer science graduates still probably come out near the top in terms of job opportunities and income, even if they're underpaid relative to the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about straight male vs female in the class? I don't see that graph.

In the 1980s I was accepted into Computer Engineering at Waterloo (undergrad coop program) but decided against it, partly, because at that time it was like 90% male 10% female, and that mattered to me.

I wonder what it is now?

<comment><USER6> I think somewhere in the PDF they said it's like 70/30

<comment><USER7> This is for System Design engineering, OP is asking for CompEng

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 36% cheated huh.

Administration is going to love seeing that one released.

<comment><USER9> Looks like they took that line out...?

EDIT: never mind, it was in the PDF

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What fraction of jobs are programming jobs versus non programming jobs for this class of systems design ?

<comment><USER11> The more detailed report in pdf menions 70% of men and 38% of women are into software.

</comment></comment><comment> root-z "Water! Water! Water! Loo! Loo! Loo!" I need to use the loo every time I remember this.

</comment><comment><USER12> [deleted]

<comment><USER13> It's not the school that's gathering and releasing these statistics, it's just a graduating student. It's not hard to imagine why he'd be interested in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was hoping for some lecture notes/videos.

EDIT: Gee, downvotes.. instead of lecture video links... too many reddit users came to HN apparently.

<comment><USER15> Please don't violate the guidelines by complaining about downvotes.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


World's Top Arms Exporters and Importers (D3.js Visualization) - <AUTHOR> http://insightfulinteraction.com/armstransfer.html <comment><USER2> And the export winners are: The five permanent members of the UN Security Council.</comment>


The Pentagon invites you to play its red balloon game  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18235-the-pentagon-invites-you-to-play-its-red-balloon-game.html

<comment><USER2> Also discussed here : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911119>

and here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970088>

Link to challenge site: <https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool. Another part of my experiment complete with this publication: how to get press without really trying. (but I should probably save that for another post)</comment>


Show HN: Advanced email analytics with data privacy by design - <AUTHOR> https://mailspice.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. I am a developer at mailspice analytics and we've created a new newsletter analytics solution.

Before we began developing mailspice analytics, we were asked by smaller as well as larger enterprises about delivering additional insights and reports for their email solutions. You need to know that over here in Europe, you have to consider stricter laws and regulations that apply to all kinds of personal data processing, including email analytics. All already existing solutions like Litmus or Email on Acid were based in the U.S.; and they simply wouldn't comply with stricter German or EU data privacy laws.</comment>


Zuckerberg's Snapchat Envy Isn't Disappearing - T-A http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-14/zuckerberg-s-snapchat-envy-isn-t-disappearing.html <comment><AUTHOR> So can someone explain to me the long term value of Snapchat? I've been on Facebook since 2005 and recently tried snapchat after a lot of nagging from someone. It lasted few minutes before we were back on iMessage.

For me it boils down to this: if I lose my Facebook account, I feel like I'm losing a 10 year record of my life; if I lose my snapchat account, what do I lose?

In my view, until snapchat succeeds at getting people to share things with permanency, it's just another chat app with a ton of traction until folks disappear to the next IM app. Snapchat seems like less fb and more ICQ, AIM Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger etc.

<comment><USER2> I use to have a active facebook account with hundreds of friends but when I discovered there was a way to permanently delete it, I took the option.

I haven't looked back since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Serious question: It's just kids who use this stuff right? I assume most people over the age of 25 are pretty much completely bored with / have no use for this kind of thing. Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> I'm 25+ (25 and 7 months) and I just started using snap chat with some people I know.

The biggest selling point is that nothing is permanent, or at least it has the illusion that nothing is permanent, you don't have to think too much about sending an embarrassing picture because it's gone in 1-10 seconds, which is great for just having fun with someone. I'm not even talking about sexting, just random chats.

It's completely against anything I have done so far (any picture I take is stored in at least 5 different locations) that it is almost scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I believe I will start a new VC fund.

The sole organising principle is to invest in companies which scare or annoy Mark Zuckerberg.

<comment><USER2> Even better is if it ends up transfering Facebook billions of dollars over to your account when your startup gets acquired!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paranoia. Otherwise I can't explain paying $19,000,000,000 for a messaging app either.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wonder how these hard to measure metrics really translate into more sales, more cash flow, especially when majority of Snapchat users are creditcard less adolescents and starving undergraduates.

Maybe as Google is attempting to cover all aspects of search, Facebook is doing the same when it comes to social networking, but unlike search which has a very narrow definition of expected outcome and objective that translates into shifting the user's attention to relevant ads (I google to get specific information, might be interested in relevant ads that provide more of it), social networking is a lot more uncertain, lot of more elusive goals (I chat on fb or look up someone on FB for laying, friendship) that is resistant to anything that will take the attention away from the social engagement...in large the giant user base is useless while the cost of maintaining such large infrastructure behind it outgrows the actual revenues....it makes very little sense as to why FB would go out of their way to support social networks that serves no other purpose than use up their resources but shareholders seem to think that "there's no way they will screw up monetization, it will happen eventually and match Google to justify the inflated valuation one day" with little analysis on cash. Unless the rules of business have changed that they can purely live on investors hopes of a rosy future rather than net positive cash flow indicate a bubble.</comment>


Google, Motorola trying to ban Microsoft's products - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetechblock.com/articles/2012/google-occasional-champion-of-internet-rights-is-currently-stomping-all-over-them/

<comment><USER2> This headline is a bit aggressive and misleading. Google isn't doing this, as they just got clearance. (Though one could argue Google could at least make a statement)

Ars Technica had a better headline and article:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/microsoft- to...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/microsoft-to-ec- motorola-hamstringing-xbox-pc-with-huge-patent-royalties.ars)

</comment><comment><USER3> What Google is doing is no different than what Microsoft ([http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/this-title-is-patented- pay-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/this-title-is-patented-pay-me/)) or Apple ([http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/technology/apple-wins- part...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/technology/apple-wins-partial- victory-on-patent-claim-over-android-features.html?pagewanted=all)) are doing. I don't know when the patent war started in earnest, but let's not pretend Google is the only tech company leveraging their patents. I'm also not suggesting any of these companies are paragons, but Google is just responding in kind. I'm sure this is why they acquired Motorola Mobility in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER4> Makes you wonder how much longer a $150 Android phone will have $5 paid to Microsoft.

Obvious brinksmanship is obvious.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently Google took Microsoft's advice to "wake up". [http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/microsoft- coll...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/microsoft-collects- license-fees-on-50-of-android-devices-tells-google-to-wake-up.ars)

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like a pretty clear message to stop doing something similar to android device manufacturers. The (my perception) growing use of patents in this manner is really distasteful but what's a company to do? Not fire back on principal?

</comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't have anything to do with this would it? [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/29/microsoft_extract_44...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/29/microsoft_extract_444m_android_payments/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this has more to do with Google's push for WebM/VP8 as the defacto standard for HTML5's new video tag? Surely they don't think that Microsoft will pay these fees and will be forced to remove support for H.264

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see the problem, Google is just fighting back, Microsoft earns more money from Android vendors trough patents than it's Windows Phone product.

</comment><comment><USER10> Do no evil, eh?</comment>