A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html <comment><USER2> I was recently the victim of an armed kidnapping, escaping only by jumping out of my own car from the driver seat while in gear with the gunman in the passenger seat.

By the time the police arrived, my attacker escaped in my car and the first words out of the sergeants mouth was "cut the crap, quit jerking us around, what really happened?"

Sure enough I was in a jurisdiction that only two months prior was equipped with vest cameras (due to community outrage over an execution style killing of a 21 year old black male pulled over with a phone the police thought was a gun). As an officer of the court myself I was beyond dismayed and obtained 2 different copies of police video from the scene...wouldn't you know both officers vest videos were redacted and specifically edited out the audio of the sergeant's first words to me and the sergeant's video didn't exist. The dvds even say redacted right on them, and I knew before I even watched, which is funny because I had to pay ~$100 for the video, basically paying for the time it took for the department to watch and redact the 1 part I really wanted.

How would such a system have any effect of police officer behavior?

<comment><USER3> How was the case handled? Did they find the gunman? Was he charged?

I ask because, honestly, I don't think I care what they police say when they first walk up as long as they solve the crime, catch the perpetrator.

The problem we have nowadays is that we get to see "how the (justice system) sausage is made" a lot more than we used to. And it's disturbing. But those guys out there with uniforms on are the ones trying to survive every day and bring criminals to justice. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback.

<comment><USER2> Here is what happened...

The next morning I get a call from the detective in the county to the South confirming he obtained video from the gas station where this all originated (the defendant approaching me while I'm pumping gas).

Next I get a notification from Apple my iPad has been found, which I placed in lost/stolen mode. I call the detective who doesn't answer his phone and then the police station in the county where I escaped and my iPad was located. Dispatch informed me they would not go to the address provided by Apple to look for the defendant, my car or iPad until I drove back up to that county and met with the police.

I drove back to the county and met with two police officers who drove to the address (only 1.5 miles from the police station) but they did not see my vehicle, and apparently there was no way they would get a warrant to search the domicile for my iPad and they wouldn't bother knocking to see if the suspect was there.

Unconvinced I worked up the nerve to drive by the property myself...I'll be damned if I didn't see my car driving up and down the streets of this neighborhood. I did my best to tail the car until it parked 1 house away from the address provided by Apple, and watched as the defendant got out of my car walked into the the street as I drove past. Once again I called 911 and plead they come back out to the address while I waited a few blocks away.

Once I saw a police car enter the neighborhood I followed until we arrived at my car which had already been relocated about a block away from where I saw it park and I drove past the defendant. On scene an officer was questioning 2 individuals on the front porch of the house where my car was parked and the defendant was standing on the sidewalk about 5 feet from my car. I basically yelled officer that's the man who kidnapped me with a gun and car jacked me. He was handcuffed and taken into custody.

Shortly after I was asked to appear at the police station where I ended up being questioned and accused of trying to buy "the hard stuff"...I had to ask, apparently that's crack. And this was the same detective who already obtained video of the gas station corroborating my entire story, I explained I was an attorney that I had just run 18 miles on the morning I was kidnapped (showed my run keeper app and everything) and otherwise I wasn't celebrating my 18 mile run with crack. Almost immediately I was told I can go, of course I asked if he would get a warrant to recover my iPad and more important look for the gun, and I was told "no, those kinds of resources don't exist."

The defendant was arrested on Sunday, charged with grand theft of an auto and bonded out on Monday. Not until the "State Attorney Hearing" a few weeks later where the State attoney confirmed she had 2 prior cases against this guy where with similar facts: he stole a car in the county to the South and the cars were recovered in the county to the North, did I finally feel vindicated. Then, 1 week later his bond was revoked and the real charges came including assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping with a fire arm.

As to it being easy to be a armchair quarterback, I wouldn't know but I'll take your word for it.

Edit: deleted link to the public record of the case

<comment><USER4> Damn, that's terrible. I don't even get the police's implication here-- If you're trying to buy illegal drugs, you DESERVE to be carjacked, and furthermore they shouldn't try to press charges on the carjacker until it's proven that they weren't trying to sell you illegal drugs? The mind boggles.

<comment><USER5> >> I don't even get the police's implication here-- If you're trying to buy illegal drugs, you DESERVE to be carjacked,

I dont know about "deserved" but if they can make it a drug case then they can keep the car, the ipad, and probably steal err "seize" more property from the victim under civil asset forfeiture

Further they can use that statistic to point to an increase in "drug activity" in the county opening up the dept for grants from the DEA and other federal programs under the failed War on Drugs

A simple car jacking they get no money for. Violent crime they get no money for

Drugs is where the money is

<comment><USER4> _sigh_ I wish you weren't right, but that's a good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents,_

This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked _reports_ of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. If you hypothetically have fewer incidents and simultaneously higher percentage reporting of incidents when people are able to see if there's probable evidence supporting their complaints (i.e. the visible presence of a body camera), you could end up with a similar number of reports. This would be especially true when reported incident counts are percentagewise quite low relative to total encounters.

I'm not saying that this is true or even likely. I'm saying that it sounds like they didn't actually learn what they are saying they learned, and if true then that cavalier lack of contemplation is very upsetting.

> _The primary outcomes of interest were documented uses of force and civilian > complaints_

The DC/Baltimore area has had some recent high profile falsification of evidence accidentally caught on camera cases. I notice that it's not discussed. Maybe catching when police plant evidence is a legitimately worthwhile endeavor.

Besides, we already know that gathering evidence of malpractice is irrelevant if no meaningful punishment ever results from it.

<comment><USER7> > _This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force > incidents, which is factually rather different._

This is unfair. You're complaining that they didn't do something that you admit is impossible. They measured essentially everything they could.

<comment><USER6> I'm not upset about what they measured. I'm upset about what they claim they learned from it and about the kinds of causation-related lemmata they (erroneously) assert in the report.

<comment><USER7> Firstly, you're critiquing a study based on a journalist's write-up about it. Secondly, you're essentially making an epistemological argument. You could apply your core argument to almost anything and come up with the assertion that the research is invalid.

"Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents" -> "Researchers tracked _reports_ of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different.

"Researchers observed bosons at 125GeV" -> "Researchers observed _detections_ of bosons at 125GeV, which is factually rather different."

This is merely a pedantic argument that things are not truly knowable. But whether the Higgs boson exists and whether body cameras reduce police violence are not unknowable questions. Even if we cannot directly measure, the indirect measures are meaningful to the questions.

Now, if there's something else that the researchers _should_ measure, then that would be useful criticism.

<comment><USER8> There is a pretty big difference in your two examples. Models of bosons behave in a predictable way. I can think of several likely reasons that reports of use-of-force incidents would not correlate directly with actual use-of-force.

As a result, in a study or a journalistic write-up of said study, I wouldn't jump to the shorthand of "tracked use-of-force incidents" as opposed to "reports of use-of-force incidents".

Just because something is the best way of measuring a quantity we currently have doesn't mean it is good enough to equate the measurement with the quantity in shorthand.

<comment><USER7> I think the examples track pretty well. You could say that body cameras somehow cause a rise and reporting that exactly offsets the reduction in violence, but that's not even wild conjecture. It's worse. It's inventing factors to make the data fit, factors that are by definition not measurable. Whatever we measure, it's possible to invent a factor that makes the measurement completely wrong.

Scientists could similarly argue that there is another particle that only shows up when we measure that happens to look exactly like the Higgs boson in every way we can measure. But then everyone would call bullshit.

Again, if there are better/other things to measure, that's legitimate criticism. Simply inventing factors that make the valid measurements null and declaring it impossible to actually measure isn't.

<comment><USER6> Measure what you can measure. Claim what you can claim. Don't claim what you can't claim based on what you measured. We're not talking about counting photons here. We're talking about human selective self-reporting under different circumstances. Understand the chasm between those things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Police officers are almost entirely decent people that shouldn't feel the need to change their behavior just because they're being recorded.

Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much.

I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.

Counter option: The DC cops are so brazen that they don't even care if they're being caught on film. This doesn't seem likely, since it would be such an easy payday for some hungry defense lawyer.

<comment><USER10> Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams.

That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

<comment><USER11> >Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it?

In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved.

Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.

<comment><USER12> Only millions? No problem at all.

Let's revise that estimate, though.

765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million.

At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year.

Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing officers. That's a billion dollars per year.

So I'll go with a cost estimate of 1.3 - 1.5 billion per year for cameras for all police officers.

Is that worth it? I think so.

<comment><USER9> Why is the lifetime so short? Are the batteries non-replaceable? I'd definitely be looking into replacing worn out batteries on $1000 devices.

<comment><USER12> Oh, it will probably go down over time, but remember that police departments aren't going to go out and buy $399 Go-Pros.

No, they'll be buying tactical harnesses and military-tough specially cased relabeled $299 Go-Pros for $999 for each complete system, from a certified minority-owned business in partnership with Halliburton.

<comment><USER13> The way you chained that together was almost musical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 1) The feedback loop is not just being filmed on the job, but the repercussions of being filmed while doing something illegal and being punished for it. It might take time for this to sink in, especially for the bad apples.

2) Having body cams on all police officers simply makes sense, regardless of the immediate effect. Knowing exactly (or more about) what happened when a citizen armed on behalf of the state interacts with regular citizens is an obvious priority. Even if enforcing body cams doesn't lead to a reduction of police crime, it will certainly lead to more legal action against police crime, which is typically stifled by police buddy tactics.

<comment><USER15> There is a decent privacy argument to be made against body cams. Not just for the officers themselves, but also for the people approached by the officers. In many cases, when police need to get involved people aren't showing their best sides. Recordings of that kind of stuff are rather sensitive.

You gotta remember that body cams can't just be used against corrupt police, they can just as easily be used against the public. Consider how a closeted gay person reacts when caught drunk with a boyfriend and how the presence of a camera effects that.

<comment><USER16> >There is a decent privacy argument to be made against body cams. Not just for the officers themselves, but also for the people approached by the officers. In many cases, when police need to get involved people aren't showing their best sides. Recordings of that kind of stuff are rather sensitive.

Why would there be any expectation of privacy for public officials?

<comment><USER15> Public officials go to the toilet. Public officials get calls about private matters during the day.

Those are just the basics where a public officials is essentially a private person. These alone should be enough.

There is a whole 'nother set of cases where it is good for a public official to not have to take into consideration they are being monitored. Most of this comes down to helping communication. There is also value in letting people make small mistakes, or even letting people slack of on occasion.

In short, there is a very large overlap between the arguments against a surveillance state and the arguments against always on body cams. Consider also the phenomenon of 'glassholes'. That is, people really disliked talking to someone wearing google glass because they were being filmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somehow I'm not surprised. Incidents are now caught on camera and spread around the news & social media. Yet, in a large portion of the cases where the cops are clearly in the wrong they get a slap on the wrist if that.

There is no real incentive to change their behavior camera or not.

<comment><USER18> Indeed not. The prosecution is on the Cops' side. The prosecution decides how vigorously they go after people in Grand Jury and open court. The Judicial system is on the Cops' side, even if during a jury trial they give words that "cops are just like everyone else" \- they aren't.

It isn't a thin blue line. It's a big fat highlighter blue bar. The people, vs the Judicial System. And they're the ones that make and enforce the rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious how the new study involved 40x more officers than the Rialto study, but only collected 5x more hours of video. Were the Washington officers using the cameras a tenth as much? The article goes on to say that in Washington they collect about 1,000 hours of footage a day, but previously they say the study involves over 2,000 officers, so this sounds like fairly low usage. It says researchers checked to make sure they were turning on the cameras "when they were supposed to" and "found a high level of compliance". Curious.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, this alone discounts the entire study IMO.

Police body cameras should be on _all the time_. They averages 30mins per day per officer: no wonder they get funky results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _"This is the most important empirical study on the impact of police body- worn cameras to date," said Harlan Yu from Upturn, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research. "The results call into question whether police departments should be adopting body-worn cameras, given their high cost."_ "

The _point_ of police body cameras is to have positive evidence of police behavior. If the presence of cameras reduces the number of reported incidents, that is a nice side effect, but otherwise completely irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER22> Run this study again and put a prominent blinking light on the camera and I bet the result is different. It's not the fact that you are being watched that changes behavior, it's being aware of the fact that you are being watched. This is why many stores show you the video of yourself as you walk in. The mere presence of cameras is not enough... people have to be reminded they are there.

</comment><comment><USER23> Before people start wildly speculating, it's worth considering the many good explanations and interpretations suggested in the article:

 _One hypothesis is that officers got used to the cameras and became desensitized to them. But the researchers saw no difference in behavior during the initial phase, when the cameras were new. (The researchers also checked the data to make sure officers were turning their cameras on when they were supposed to, and found a very high level of compliance.) Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the devices.

An equally plausible explanation has to do with fear: In Washington, police officers are instructed to turn on their cameras whenever they answer a call or encounter the public in a law-enforcement context. The kinds of situations that might lead to civilian complaints or use-of-force incidents are high- stress encounters. When frightened, humans tend to act on automatic fear responses (or, in the case of good police officers in an ideal world, training).

"It's a lot to ask, psychologically speaking, to not only remember the camera is on but to moderate your behavior," said Mr. Yokum, the head of the Lab @ DC.

Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city's police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.

"We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here," Chief Newsham said.

Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. (The Rialto Police Department had been reeling from a series of scandals when the Rialto study showed a large impact from cameras.)

Even if cameras do not reduce violent encounters, they can still offer other kinds of benefits: for training, or to hold a rogue officer accountable after the fact.

To Chief Newsham, the cameras' primary benefit is to improve relations with the community. "The transparency and trust that the community has, knowing your department is recording the interactions, I don't think you can undervalue that," he said._

<comment><USER24> Funny, I noticed an absence of a far more cynical explanation that made me immediately doubt how balanced the article was: if cops know that the footage is difficult to obtain or can be easily suppressed, deleted, or otherwise buried, or if the legal system is already heavily biased in favour of law enforcement such that body cam footage rarely changes trial outcomes, then body cams don't actually contribute to additional accountability and therefore there's no reason to change behaviours.

tl;dr I see no reason to believe body cams have actually resulted in greater transparency or accountability due to offsetting institutional factors.

<comment><USER25> Also, if you can turn off your body cam (or fail to turn it on), then you are free to behave however you want as though you weren't on camera.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article starts with this:

> "According to decades of research, the presence of other people, cameras or > even just a picture of eyes seems to nudge us toward civility"

I don't remember where exactly I've read it (I think it might have been the Slate Star Codex), anyway, I recently came across a blog posting (with sources) which highlighted these as one of the examples of "well established" psychological research results which consistently fail to reproduce (I wish I had bookmarked that posting).

</comment><comment><USER27> Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.

<comment><USER28> There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly.

It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.

<comment><USER29> I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere, then that place and the goings-on that were witnessed are a matter of public record.

If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common- law tradition.

In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.

<comment><USER30> > I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere...

if the cops bust into your house because they misread the address of the warrant (something which happens regularly), and they capture some video of you walking around eating cereal naked, do you think that should immediately and irrevocably go up on youtube?

<comment><USER29> Obviously in a decent society this is a horrific, abhorrent affront.

And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim.

How about we stop allowing police to search homes in the first place in 99.9% of cases?

<comment><USER31> "And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim."

Ok. I'm not.

<comment><USER32> If an agent of the state commits a "horrific, abhorrent affront" against you, you want it to be kept secret? That's what I'm reading here.

<comment><USER31> That would be a fair interpretation if that's all they did. However, we all know that law enforcement agents do lots of other things that the people involved would rather not be made public. A cop being a first responder to someone having a seizure, or consoling a rape victim, are things that I'm pretty sure those people would not want to be public.

<comment><USER33> Ok but in that case the state did not commit an abhorrent act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This article is kind of absurd in its assumption, I think it's irresponsible. By saying that you thought police would modify their behavior in response to being filmed, and especially (but not only) by citing a bunch of studies where CRIMINALS changed their behavior in response to being filmed, you are implying that the officers would change their behavior because THEY KNOW THEIR BEHAVIOR IS WRONG and they were doing it anyway. You're essentially saying you are surprised more officers are not actively criminals.

The actual problem is more likely that in the vast majority of incidents officers DO NOT KNOW what they're doing is wrong, that for instance they're acting with bias or unreasonably against someone of color in a way they wouldn't act against a white person. The ACTUAL purpose of the body cameras is to create a record that allows ACCOUNTABILITY for officers ("I felt threatened" with no evidence is no longer enough to justify a shooting). Only with that accountability can we start to PROVE that officers are acting unfairly whether they consciously intend to or not, and then fix the problem (with "training" as the article says but with no detail may as well have been saying nothing).

<comment><USER35> I think the article does, to some extent, address this when it says that the situations that we would most hope for modification in police behaviour are also likely to be the situations where the officer is under significant stress and has defaulted to their most primal response. So while I take your point that police don't think they are doing anything wrong when they misbehave, I think it is more correct to say that police aren't considering moderating their behaviour when they are in those particular situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I only briefly scanned the published paper [1], but I saw no mention made about whether or not the officers knew this study was happening to their teams. Does anyone know if the study was blind?

[1] [http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary- material...](http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary- materials.pdf)

<comment><USER21> Were the officers who were not filming also not wearing cameras?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Besides the overall result, another fact that surprised me:

 _The devices vary in price, but the biggest expense is the data-storage cost. In Washington, M.P.D. officers collect about a thousand hours of footage a day. About 40 percent of it is deleted within 90 days, while the rest is to be kept for months, years or decades, depending on the statute of limitations for the charges connected to the footage._

<comment><USER37> This sounds like a good use case for cold storage like AWS glacier. If you assume 1000 hours of footage would be ~600GB, 1 day of footage would cost ~2.4 cents per month on glacier until you go to retrieve it. Or, 75 cents per month for each month of footage. Most footage would never be watched and eventually purged.

I'm not sure how chain of custody would work...perhaps digitally signing the uploads and keeping those signature records locally at the station. But the USG uses AWS, so I'm sure some solution could be found.

<comment><USER38> It does sound like a good use case for that, and it is, but you're thinking like a Silicon Valley engineer type, not like a company that sells products to the government: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser- is-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-charging- stunning-fees-to-handle-police-video)

Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is obscene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers > were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers > tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and > other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, > the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with > cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as > officers without cameras.

...

> Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like > officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the > devices.

Or it also causes organisational changes. You can imagine the kind of things high-ranking officers will be telling their reports if they know things are going to be recorded.

Is the problem a few bad apples? Or is the problem training and discipline? If it's the later, then cameras can probably do a lot more, by scaring the Inspectors into doing their jobs properly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Rossi's Metallic Laws of social program evaluation ( [https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi](https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi) ):

\- The _Iron Law of Evaluation_ : "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero."

\- The _Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation_ : "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero."

\- The _Brass Law of Evaluation_ : "The more social programs are designed to change individuals, the more likely the net impact of the program will be zero."

\- The _Zinc Law of Evaluation_ : "Only those programs that are likely to fail are evaluated."

</comment><comment><USER41> See the difference is cops - get away with anything/almost anything. So without a 'penalty' or fear factor for doing wrong, what's the point if they do, other than possible public humiliation?

</comment><comment><USER42> To me, the important potential of police body cameras is not in the middle of the Bell Curve. The important effects are in the tails. The routine traffic stop that is a routine traffic stop isn't where a camera matters as much as the routine traffic stop that turns non-routine.

The important cases are where it's some civilian's word against one or several officers. It is when the police make a mistake that future training might avoid. And it is when the optics of police behavior turn out to be worse than actual police behavior.

</comment><comment><USER43> So my mind has two explanations:

1\. Police officers rarely abuse.

2\. Police officers abuse and do not care if they are recorded.

It is not clear which one is which. 1 makes you think we are in a really good shape. 2 makes you think that it is a very bad situation. If it is either 1 or 2, then it can't be something in between, right?

</comment><comment><USER44> Is the Washington DC police district known to be relatively free of the corruption that plagues e.g. Oakland and Chicago? It's possible they measured a district that's already "constantly under observation", and thus detected no significant behavioral shifts.

<comment><USER45> If you read the article you would find that very issue addressed:

 _" After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city's police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.

"We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here," Chief Newsham said.

Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. "_

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's almost like the fact that police face zero consequences for their violence might play a role.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think for police cameras, and the idea of being watched as a catalyst for better behavior, the focus of behavior modification is misplaced. IMO police in America have become separated from the rest of society, through hubris, militarization, or some perceived "us versus them" thinking. They appear to see their behavior, regardless of what that behavior is, as protecting the public, and stopping others from breaking the law. The police as an institution have placed themselves in a sphere of superiority, not beholden to others. We must work to bring the idea of police officer closer to that of citizen, stop the militarization, stop the us versus them thinking, and teach officers that they are to peaceful officers that serve and protect, not an authoritarian paramilitary force, immune from society's laws and norms.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't see the link to the Github repo with statistical code. Did anyone see it? Is this open science?

</comment><comment><USER49> Convincing the criminal to repent would be nice. But catching the criminal is enough.

</comment><comment><USER50> TL;DR: Previous sociology research had suggested that filming people makes them more civil. New research on fails to replicate this result in the context of police body cameras.

Doesn't seem like a very interesting result to me; I hadn't previously heard of the "calming effect" as a reason to use body cameras.

The primary reason to use cameras is to increase accountability, so that police officers are less able to get away with murder, planting evidence, being overtly racist, etc.

<comment><USER51> Also less false allegations against them</comment></comment>


Why results from the next generation of climate models matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-results-from-the-next-generation-of-climate-models-matter <comment><AUTHOR> "Early results suggest ECS values from some of the new CMIP6 climate models are higher than previous estimates, with early numbers being reported between 2.8C (pdf) and 5.8C. This compares with the previous coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP5), which reported values between 2.1C to 4.7C. The IPCC's fifth assessment report(AR5) assessed ECS to be "likely" in the range 1.5C to 4.5C and "very unlikely" greater than 6C. (These terms are defined using the IPCC methodology.)"

Yikes.</comment>


Signs that you're a good programmer - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-programmer <comment><USER3> This list reads like a cringe-worthy case study in myopia.

Why is an active Wikipedia account better than an active MDN or StackOverflow account?

Why does it matter if someone knows what Arduino is?

What if "eager to fix what isn't broken" means you get caught up in hip and new technologies that cripple your businesses utility?

ThinkGeek toys? Obscure books and songs?

> Has a habit of boring people to tears explaining something tangentially > related to the news, such as the cockpit layout of the Airbus 330

No. Just no, please stop.

I'd take "Good interpersonal skills and a disinclination towards generalizing people" over this list any day.

<comment><USER4> These are just rhetorical devices. An active Wikipedia account is just standing in for active participation in sharing knowledge online. S.O. obviously counts, and MDN probably does too (I know nothing about it).

Arduino is standing in for, knowledge of things that aren't directly applicable day-to-day. Hobbyist stuff.

I think it's acceptable to define a good programmer in terms of qualities that aren't beneficial to business. In the real world this is one reason why we have and need management. A big part of management's job is to convey to the rest of staff what the business goals are and how they are to be achieved. It would be nice if all programmers synthesized this without having to be told, but I don't see why that should be considered a necessary prerequisite for being a good programmer.

ThinkGeek toys, obscure stuff are just specific examples of a general pattern of curiosity and playfulness.

<comment> grey-area This is Metonymy:

"Today _The White House_ issued a statement..."

This is not:

"Has an active Wikipedia account"

Metonymy is the use of a name (usually something specific like a building, or a part) to stand for something else (usually more general, like a government or organisation, or the whole thing), not the use of one example website with lots of others implied (I don't see where they are implied anyway, this is quite explicitly listing having a wikipedia account as an attribute of a good programmer - what a curious idea).

Most of the symptoms are just trivia entirely unrelated to whether someone might be talented at programming like owning a certain brand of toys, and this undermines anything serious the writer might want to say.

<comment><USER4> I misremembered, but I can't seem to recall the name of the device where you show a specific example from a class to stand in for the whole class. This is remarkably hard to search for. Please be useful and remind me what the proper name of the device is.

I think everybody is taking this article both too seriously and too literally. Sadly there is no known cure.

<comment><USER5> I believe that's _synecdoche_.

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sign that you will have a successful career and will get things done: you didn't listen or care what the list was.

Seriously, these lists mean nothing. This list is some guy sitting behind a computer who may or may not even be a good developer (I didn't check though), and telling you how you know if you are a good developer based on some arbitrary lists that are his own opinion. Listen to yourself, constantly improve and have a thirst for knowledge and you will be a good anything, not just developer. And if you are not a great developer, there are tons of developers that make huge amounts of cash that are probably not that great at actually designing and writing code, but they can get the job done. Who cares if some list says you are a good/bad/terrible develop, you do you and you'll be just fine.

<comment><USER7> The irony being that you've just provided another alternate list!

I think your comment makes good points though. The OP makes a lot of good pints as well. The bits of humor make it clear to me that it's not supposed to be taken literally. This is just a list of indicators.

<comment><USER8> "Listen to yourself, constantly improve and have a thirst for knowledge..." is pretty general advice. He explicitly says it's not specific to being a developer. I don't think, "constantly try and better yourself" as an over- arching life motto is any way equivalent to "buying plushies at ThinkGeek."

Side note, I'm pretty sure the author stole half of his various bullet-points from the DSM's diagnostic criteria for autistic spectrum disorder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The tone of the article was so tongue-in-cheek, that I am surprised by the seriousness and vitriol in the comments.

Obviously, to me and the author at least, this isn't like an actual guide to being a good programmer - this is a semi-autobiographical, kidding essay about the subject.

That's how I read it at least - I expected to agree with some points and not with others, and empathize with a fellow soldier. It tweaks a lot of whiskers because he invariably badmouths something you like or props up something you hate. For me, I was scoffing when he said tabs vs. spaces wasn't important.

<comment><USER10> I think you'll find that HN, and our profession in general, has a disproportionate amount of people with a strong tendency to take things very literally and overlook the intended humor.

Especially when it comes to matters they take very seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > A destructive pursuit of perfection

> * Preference for dismissal over compromise

> * Contempt for delivery dates

This one is so completely backwards it makes me wonder if it is somehow tongue-in-cheek. The best programmers are masters of compromise. In the real world, nothing is perfect.

> * Substantial refactoring on the eve of a deadline

If a team member did this regularly I'd have to recommend their termination.

<comment><USER12> It is true that we shall not be able to reach perfection, but in our struggle toward it we shall strengthen our characters and give stability to our ideas, so that, whilst ever advancing calmly in the same direction, we shall b e rendered capable of applying the faculties with which we have been gifted to the best possible account - <USER2>

<comment><USER13> lol, and at the end of your life you will have made the perfect app?

<comment> qu4z-2 Of course not. That's the nature of perfection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are two kinds of good programmers. The first kind are good programmers to hire; they get the job done and ship a working product on time and budget. The second kind are programmers producing outstanding awe-inspiring code in their spare time after working on it for eons and rewriting it from scratch every time they had an insight how something could be generalized to unify different aspects.

There are almost no men that are good programmers and good programmers.

<comment><USER11> Amen, a thousand times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "How to hire people exactly like yourself"

There are many different kinds of programmers.

<comment><USER16> Totally. A disturbing number of things on the list are cultural or tribal signifiers rather than things that have anything to do with being someone who can get stuff done, get it done well, and get it done in a reasonable amount of time (which is a big part of my own definition of "a good programmer"...maybe that's part of my disconnect with this).

When interviewing people a common pitfall is to subconsciously look for stuff like this, which is really bad because that means you're interviewing for friends rather than coworkers. It also means you're unfairly discriminating against people you can't immediately relate to on a personal level.

For an extreme example of this, look no further than ESR's version of the Jargon File. He basically extends his idea of being a good programmer to political beliefs and all sorts of unrelated things.

<comment> qu4z-2 In fairness, having similar culture within a company may not be a bad thing. Windows programmers and Unix programmers can both get things done, but put them on a team together, and ... well, I'm skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Doesn't become defensive when the boss mentions that they're looking for an off-the-shelf alternative to what they've been writing for the past few years"

Hits so close to home, I might have a bruise. My whole department went through the five/seven stages when we mentioned changing our main platform to another company's product.

After countless presentations of superior software, they went through the stages again. Finally, putting the idea on the shelf for a year, they went through the stages again.

It is truly the "can't see the forest for the trees" sentiment. Cost center programming is a job of fear for most. New hires, new software, new terminology, etc leads to blame and fear to the point of malice. Job security is their biggest fear; but their attitude towards 'new' prevents the business from moving forward and decreases their job security.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really enjoyed this article. And I will admit that it is because I identified very much. That being said, I am 53 years old, and pretty much in demand as an embedded programmer. I don't have an ardinio, but I have multiple microchip demo boards. The kicker is , I just bought a bottle of silicone oil to attempt making my own silly putty. A few weeks ago I tried a few variations of corn starch modeling clay and wanted to step up my game.

</comment><comment><USER19> _A cubicle or desk populated with toys that came from ThinkGeek_

I realize that it's a joke (or is it?), but I disagree with this. In fact, I have hard time to trust people that show any strong sings of group-belonging.

<comment><USER20> Very thoughtful and provocative comment. My initial reaction was agreement, but then don't we enjoy belonging to this group of hackers? Although you might argue there are no strong signs shown to the outside world.

(That said, trusting a developer with a bunch of ThinkGeek toys? Hell no.)

<comment><USER21> > That said, trusting a developer with a bunch of ThinkGeek toys? Hell no.

Why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "At least 10% or more of their commits reduce the line-count of the project without adding new functionality"

It would be great if there was a git command to check that. Now _that_ would be HN worthy. I skimmed the rest of the article and it seems to be typical link bait list

<comment><USER23> This may not always be indicative of positive quality.

I could reduce the line count on many files and increase complexity and reduce maintainability.

<comment> qu4z-2 It's the problem with optimising on metrics.

It seems unlikely that you would encounter someone who naturally reduced line counts while making code worse, but once it's being checked whether you're reducing line counts...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Eager to fix what isn't broken

I've depressingly found, in recent years, that most programmers I've encountered can't be bothered to fix things that _are_ broken, never mind stuff that isn't. I don't see a lot of people who are taking pride in their work anymore. It's a damn shame.

</comment><comment><USER25> I knew the comments on this post would all be shallowly dismissive.

Wait, does that make me meta-dismissive? How far does this rabbit hole go?

<comment><USER26> You should've poisoned the well too. Then once someone dismissed your comment, we would have an infinite loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why are people constantly writing silly stuff like this. We need to stop this relentless back patting.

<comment> qu4z-2 Exactly! Get your humour off my porch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Signs that you're a good programmer:

You have a habit of building things that people find useful or valuable (including other coders).

END OF LIST

</comment><comment><USER29> i'd like to see this list after about 10 years more experience. some of these traits are dangerous in a production environment :)

</comment><comment><USER13> This list is highly speculative containing dangerous and self serving advice. I think the author lacks both the sources, data, and experience to make such blanket statements.

 _C. Lawrence Wenham was the lead architect, developer and Director of IT at FragranceNet.com and is currently developing a new personal finance app for the iPhone._

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure there is much actionable advice to be taken from this list (and I'm not sure it was the goal anyway), but that was entertaining to read.

There's a few obscure references that I got, a ton others that I didn't get, and even more points where I'm not actually sure there was a reference to get.

</comment><comment><USER31> You mean "Signs that you're the world's greatest programmer but don't have a life".

</comment><comment><USER32> I have an opinion on this list!

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't think this list is what makes a good programmer. Maybe I've grown to look at programming as "problem solving" and "solution providing" to real world problems, and take the actual process of writing code for granted.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Signs that you're a good programmer

I would have said "have a job as a programmer".

</comment><comment><USER35> Ignore the examples. many things are said right.

</comment><comment><USER36> 1: You are just like me!

</comment><comment><USER37> Lots of recruiter spam.</comment>


Ryzen 3000 specs and prices leaked - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-3000-specs-prices-leaked-upto-16-cores-5-1ghz-on-am4/ <comment><AUTHOR> If somebody made a motherboard with a BMC for this, it could really give Xeon-D a run for its money in the server space. For the same core count as the D-2183IT, the Ryzen 9 3800X costs 1/3 as much, likely supports 2x the PCIe lanes, supports higher speed memory, and likely also supports ECC.</comment>


Track Amazon.com price drops with Firefox and Chrome addon - <AUTHOR> http://buylatr.com Adds a button to Amazon.com that allows you to track items and receive an email when the price drops or when the item comes back in stock. <comment><USER2> Been using camelcamelcamel.com for this. They have great FF and Chrome plugins that can display graphs of the price over time of products on amazon pages. Also can email alert you when price drops.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't work for Chromium 10 on Linux unfortunately

<comment><USER4> I'll look into this, maybe I can fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this difference than <http://www.pricepinx.com>? I currently use this site and it tracks more stores than just Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just an FYI: <http://www.gazaro.com/> does something similar to this, and gives users scores on how good the deal is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah cool, I didn't know about gazaro before.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm a huge fan of HN and with the constant reminders here of people successfully doing something, I've (re)launched an app that tracks amazon price drops. Thanks hackers! Also special thank you to Joshua McKenty of <http://www.piston.cc> who built the first version of this.

</comment><comment><USER7> How often do you track changes? What software are you using to get the changes? Custom built?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're aiming for 5 minute updates on items, and we are using the Amazon API.

<comment><USER7> I installed it, but it isn't coming up after the restart. I'm using Firefox 4.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... I just tried fresh FF4 and the settings window came up right away for me. Do you see "Buylater settings" in the Tools menu? If not can you email me your "Troubleshooting information" (under Help -> Troubleshooting information) to firstname.lastname@example.com? Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does it apply to amazon.ca?

edit: just read the FAQ. Hope to see support soon.

</comment><comment><USER8> do you run a cron job on your server scanning each price periodically for changes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Scanning frequently for changes. We are aiming for 5 minute updates, but it depends on how many items are being tracked and if we saturate our Amazon API access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> sweeeet!</comment>


The Covid-19 impact on children - <AUTHOR> https://www.unicef.ie/stories/impact-covid-19-children/ <comment><AUTHOR> While we wait for a covid vaccine, unicef estimates up to 80 million children will not receive life saving vaccines that we already have.</comment>


RSocket a reactive streams library with poly-gloy RPC - <AUTHOR> http://rsocket.io/docs/Motivations <comment><AUTHOR> Was shopping for a multi-language RPC, with a schema and reactive semantics.

RSockets fits best so far, does anyone know other such projects? gRPC is out since its tied so strongly to HTTP/2 and a Google project (meaning 7 years from now it will become what GWT is today).</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do with this project (HandyFind)? - <AUTHOR>

I developed some software that improves on how you find text in documents, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950. It's a major usability improvement and I expected someone like Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, or Google to have done something similar by now. (I released the first version 5 years ago. Apple did it to some extent when they started animating the display of found text, but that's only a small piece of it.)
1) Is there any way I could make money off this?
2) If not, is there any easy way I could get a big player to "steal" the idea to benefit users (with very little work on my part)?
I started the project for fun but now I want to create a viable startup and I've stopped working on it. But it would be nice if I could do something with it. <comment><USER2> It looks like a nicely implemented and useful utility.

But there's nothing really new in incremental searching (emacs has had it for years and years, firefox search works in a similar fashion). I suppose the main thing is the cross-application support.

I don't personally think you could make much money out of it.

I'm not sure who would "steal" it either. This kind of searching (as opposed to indexing) is per-application really. An OS-level "search any text interactively" feature might confuse users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps you could repurpose it as a library that app developers can incorporate into their products.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could make money off of this shareware, at least some.

Personally, I see the video and I think it's useful enough that I would pay $4.99 provided a trial worked well and that I knew it worked with Vista/Windows7/etc.

Perhaps I'm not alone?

 _Edit:_ I'd love if you made a Firefox extension for this. I like your approach better than most approaches.

On Vista, I had to run HandyFind as an admin to get it to see Notepad properly, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems like it might have an accessibility audience; easy navigation for people without a mouse.

Simple question to frame the inquiry: What's the advantage of your technology over control/command F and control/command G? The answer to that probably has hints as to a possible audience.

\--

I've been hacking on a basic javascript-based regex highlighter (MIT license) that could be incorporated into a similar web technology, if you were so inclined. Check out [http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.h...](http://www.jacobrothstein.com/highlightRegex/demonstration.html) for a demo and <http://github.com/jbr/jQuery.highlightRegex> for the code. Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER6> Firefox and Safari and some text editors already have incremental search which is most of what you have here. I do like like the way you change color to indicate already-seen text. I wish I had that in FF and Emacs.

</comment><comment><USER7> clickable link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zizoaped950>

<comment><USER8> <http://handykeys.com> is the web site.

The video needs to be redone with better enunciation and a presentation volume as if speaking to room not a pillow mate. I am somewhat hard of hearing in one ear and it took me three tries to get the above URL.

It looks to be worth investigating as a site search tool.

Edit: URL corrected

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the green bubbles incredibly distracting in the demo video. My eye was drawn to a bright green bubble that contained what you were typing, and less drawn to the part of the text which matched your search. It was really hard for me to tell if this would be useful to me... perhaps just going a little slower could help that.

</comment><comment><USER10> C-s and C-r on emacs does pretty much the same thing. It is cross-application, but maybe not quite in the same way.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is fairly close to how find already works in Firefox and Safari... instant, progressive advance-to-next-match and highlighting of all matches. I would expect that style to gradually migrate to other apps without any promotional effort.

Besides the fact that the keys/gestures for 'next/prev' and 'repeat' are a little different, what part of HandyFind isn't matched in these browsers?

<comment><AUTHOR> My biggest complaint with current search in all the browsers is that if you don't find what you're looking for, it takes a while to realize what has happened since there is no obvious feedback (though FF is pretty good). Also, it isn't obvious if you have wrapped around or it is hard to find the text if the font is small.

<comment><USER11> Safari does this better, darkening the whole page except for the matches. (I'm looking at Safari 4 in Windows.)

That makes the matches about as prominent as your colorful pop-up bubble display.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that's really nice... but what happens when the text isn't found? The feedback is that the page brightens. Even if I know to shift my eyes to the entry field, it feels odd to me that the feedback for something going wrong is that the page lightens up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An unusual winner in the note-taking apps category - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jumbld/i-found-an-unusual-winner-in-the-note-taking-apps-category-cc98f78260ef <comment><USER2> TLDR: use trello</comment>


Predicting employee retention with deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-build-a-deep-learning-model-to-predict-employee-retention-using-keras-and-tensorflow <comment><USER2> i'll save you lots of work... don't treat them like trash..</comment>


A brand new Foursquare, with a brand new logo and look - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foursquare.com/post/92636287198/a-brand-new-foursquare-with-a-brand-new-logo-and-look <comment><USER2> I was so puzzled why a company like Foursquare, which if they didn't invent the check-in, brought it to our lives, and associated their brand with it, completely removed it from their flagship eponymous app and put in a new one called Swarm (which also has its own major annoyances). Shouldn't have this been the other way around? Foursquare is associated with checkins. Now you're trying to transform "Foursquare" into a smarter Yelp? I'm sure it can be a competitive service, but confusing your 100MM strong user base with these changes isn't going to help.

<comment><USER3> _> I was so puzzled why a company like Foursquare, which if they didn't invent the check-in, brought it to our lives, and associated their brand with it, completely removed it from their flagship eponymous app_

It's because check-ins don't work. After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.

So if you're a company whose entire product identity was based on check-ins, you have two choices:

1) Come up with something, anything else that can be plausibly jammed into your app, and run with that; or

2) Go out of business.

Unsurprisingly they went with #1, even if from the perspective of retaining some shred of dignity #2 would have been the better choice.

<comment><USER4> I know a ton of people in the Bay Area that actively check-in. Please speak for your own experience.

<comment><USER3> You may not be aware of this, but the Bay Area is not exactly a representative sample of Mass Market Behavior.

But that doesn't really matter, because we can resolve the dispute with a simple question: if check-ins were a mass-market thing, would Foursquare (and everyone else who tried them, like Facebook) be running away from them?

The answer is no, obviously. If they worked, companies would be piling in, not checking out. But they don't, so they are.

<comment><USER5> > the Bay Area is not exactly a representative sample of Mass Market Behavior.

No, it's not. But neither is

> After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those > stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly > and is now completely, 100% over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm quite surprised to see the amount of negative feedback here.

I find the new logo quite good looking and communicative, and this "new" Foursquare app is finally something I can see myself using. I have absolutely no interest in the whole check-in thing, but I'm not against good recommendations, so there's a good chance I'll be in the target market for this app, and I suspect I'm not alone in this case.

</comment><comment><USER7> The problem with Foursquare is that it was clearly designed by New Yorkers. In other cities where the distance and density of businesses/restaurants/etc. are much lower, the results aren't as good. The only times where I've had a good Foursquare recommendation experience is when I was in Manhattan or in North Beach of San Francisco. Other places, the results just plain suck. In suburbs or midtowns, it isn't good because the "local recommendations" are a little too small and give me results of places I have no intention of ever going to. Other times, it increases the range to a radius that is far too big.

<comment><USER8> I've had the opposite experience.

I was in Zagreb, Croatia for the very first time last year and wanted to eat dinner somewhere other than my hotel. I tried Google Maps and it was worthless. I pulled out Foursquare and found a restaurant a few streets away that turned out to be _incredible_! (So much so that when I went back a few months later I went back to the same place instead of exploring.)

And now that I mention it, same thing happened to me in Tallinn, Estonia, too. Found a great brew-pub-ish restaurant that I would have never found on my own. And again, went back a few months later on my next trip.

<comment><USER9> I was in Costa Rica looking for somewhere to go for dinner and drinks. Yelp had NOTHING. Foursquare found me an awesome new restaurant/bar a few minutes away that we loved.

I kind of assumed from this experience that Foursquare has better adoption in some areas of the world, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER10> I don't think Yelp is even a thing here.

You want to look at the websites for newspapers and the like. Rio Show, Veja Rio, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure they have data that says otherwise, but unbundling seems like a mistake. You've got a brand that's still not terribly well-known, and you're fragmenting it further. Demote check-ins if it's not the primary-use for most users ... but keep it as one app. I like their recommendations, and I hope they prove me wrong because it's great data that I'd hate to see lost or simply acquired and absorbed by a 3rd party.

<comment><USER11> After looking at this post, I kinda want to try out Foursquare as a Yelp alternative. I've never signed up for Foursquare before. So that seems significant.

But two apps? Why? Granted I don't check-in on Yelp very often. But if I feel like it, and it wasn't integrated, I'd _never_ do it. It's a missing but seemingly trivial feature for the main Foursquare app and puts me off a bit.

Enough that I probably won't bother with it.

The whole idea feels incredibly poorly thought out if they were looking for conquest usershare from Yelp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to say, splitting things up makes me think of the whole Netflix- Qwikster thing - pointless brand splitting that does little more than confuse and frustrate consumers.

I do like the new logo though.

<comment><USER13> The intention was to branch off Qwikster and have it slowly die. I actually think it wasn't an awful idea, but that they did it too early. With a terrible name.

I suspect Foursquare want to slowly kill off checkins in a similar way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think they've really alienated a lot of their users with the app move look at the reviews of Swarm [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foursquare...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foursquare.robin&hl=en)

Do the app stores need to get better at transferring users between apps for situations like this?

<comment><USER15> A lot of startups make the mistake of doing nothing that will anger their current base of users, but that is not how you grow a company. Facebook is a good example. Almost every move they have made has angered their current users but ended up growing the company (opening up the site to everyone, adding the news feed, etc.).

<comment><USER16> Nice perspective.

Personally, I don't want to feel like I'm part of a "userbase", to be "transferred between apps" when convenient.

I guess all that anger and disappointment users express (no matter if they stay like with FB or leave) is due to the fact that they expect someone on the other end who built the app out of passion and maintains it as a service to the community.

How am I supposed to become a loyal user/customer, invite my friends to that service and provide all that data if it's all subject to some corporate strategy, if any middle manager can shut it down if the metrics aren't going up?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Though I don't use it often, I feel an uncannily strong sense of good will toward Foursquare and the company. Probably because they pioneered this stuff. And because of their other company before Foursquare, Dodgeball, which Google bought and lame-ified. I met the team once for two seconds at a conference and they were really sweet happy people.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's kind of amazing that this company is still around. They got way more money than they knew what to do with at a way too high of a valuation, the result being this highly polished zombie vestige of a previous era that is too expensive to buy, has too much money to die, and whimpers along with some kind of undefined shrinking user base. It's like a smaller, never IPO'ed version of Yahoo. I don't know how this story is going to end, but I doubt it will involve more people having any of their apps on their phone tomorrow than today, at least willingly. I could see some kind of carrier deal that extends the pain until finally they fall into the arms of a remnant brand hoarding corporation like IAC for pennies.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Foursquare had been bought by FB, Google, Yahoo a few years ago when it had peaked, and then a few years later numbers were down, and engagement became sparse, the parent company would have either de-invested or shut it down.

And then there would have been a slew of articles and criticism about how once again a big company has squandered an opportunity.

Instead we get to see what really happens when the founding team executes a pivot on what is already a pretty successful product and service that has not yet fulfilled the Yelp sized aspirations of its founders, investors and employees.

</comment><comment><USER20> Foursquare had great usage all over the world. I've traveled widely (more than ninety countries) and all over Latin America and Eastern Europe Foursquare is regularly used. For some reason, it got a lot of hate from the Bay Area tech crowd who felt its heyday passed -- despite the fact that SF airport was always swarming.

The pressure to keep on growing and have viral growth and turn into a destination app means that app like Foursquare with less mainstream gamifications sadly don't get the respect they maybe deserve, and are forced to try to go viral, etc. which is not a natural path for every app, and there should be a way to fund and let these apps achieve their natural success.

Foursquare location data was great (used by Uber) and it's sad they're alienating the users who provided them this value.

</comment><comment><USER21> So if I've never used Foursquare before, which do I install? I'm not interested in having any friends on the app I just think the reviews, and customised recommendations could be quite useful.

<comment><USER22> Foursquare is the one you want then. Swarm is where the check-ins, friend- finder, and plan-making functionality is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Foursquare has been promising this since the beginning, it's why I keep using it and checking in. Hoping this lives up to the promise, since their current recommendations are pretty static.

</comment><comment><USER24> What I don't understand, is that they say they use the super-data from these 50 Million people to give personal recommendations in the new Foursquare app.

Now I presume they want to broaden the appeal of Foursquare beyond those people that like check-ins, but does that now mean that the check-ins from Swarm continue to power the recommendations in Foursquare? Is it relevant to use the data from early-adopter-types for an app that is meant to have mass appeal?

<comment><USER25> They'll almost certainly use the Swarm data to generate recommendations, but there are other non-check-in features to consider (likes, reviews, review sentiment come to mind).

EDIT: Looks like location data as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I kind of liked Foursquare. I don't like the looks of Swarm. And I'm kind of pissed they bug me constantly to install it. I guess they want to kick out the old Foursquare users and make it into a Yelp competitor or something. Haven't really decided what to do. They are taking away my check in functionality so maybe I'll just uninstall it. Why should I go install some new app for what I've always been using.

</comment><comment><USER27> If it can get very smart about the recommendations it makes, when it makes them, and how frequently, it will become a big part of peoples social lives.

I envision an experience where it knows my friends and I are in a new city together, and because it's early evening, we're probably trying to figure out where to go out for the night.

Bam, notification letting me know the best nightlife spots based on my preferences and those of my friends.

</comment><comment><USER28> I first heard of foursquare from Fred Wilson, who described getting a recommendation on a specific dish off the menu via a friend through Foursquare.

That was so COOL! Much cooler than "personalized local search". Maybe they could go back to that? I can get recommendations for just a _restaurant_ from lots of apps, but "go to this restaurant and order this dish" is currently underserved, and more useful.

<comment><USER29> Doesn't Yelp do a reasonably good job of this? I've certainly gotten recommendations from both tips and its "frequently talked about" algorithm (i.e., "carnitas" shows up a lot in reviews of this taqueria).

<comment><USER28> Sounds like it does! I haven't used the Yelp app in a long time. Glad they added tips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hate the new logo with a passion. Why keep the place icon in the bottom on of the F and have the swirl behind it if the whole point of this was to take check-in's out of the app? It's saying you're doing one thing and then doing the opposite of that thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> And, of course, no love for BlackBerry OS 10. Foursquare had a great native integration and now just dumps all BB-Users. Why do companies do that?

</comment><comment><USER32> This seems like something akin to a desperation move by a company that's floundering, er, pivoting, er, failing?

</comment><comment><USER33> Team FourSquare (if you're reading this), please ask yourself this question:

If "x" is how much better Facebook was than MySpace, or how much better Google was than Yahoo search, then "x" is how much better you need to be than Yelp to beat Yelp.

Right now, it is debatable if you are even just better than Yelp.

<comment><USER34> Foursquare doesn't hold a candle to Yelp. I can order food, make a reservation and figure out what's going on in my neighborhood with Yelp. Foursquare has a new logo.

<comment><USER25> I disagree. Yelp's reviews are needlessly verbose and possibly gamed or filtered according to the store's affiliation with Yelp. I don't have the same concerns re: 4sq reviews.

<comment><USER34> Then why does Yelp itself only have 2 1/2 stars on _Yelp_? Couldn't they just game their own name?

[1][http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco](http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp- san-francisco)

<comment><USER25> If we're getting into conspiracy theories, wouldn't gaming Yelp's reviews simply provide more evidence of gamed Yelp reviews?!?!

I've spoken to numerous business owners in NYC who, after having turned down Yelp's super deluxe premier service^, begin to receive negative reviews that make no sense ("terrible service!" during a night the business was closed) or reference nonexistent items ("terrible apple pie!" for a bakery that doesn't offer apple pie).

^ Not the name, but they offer analytics and other services to businesses.

<comment><USER34> So they purposely gamed their _own_ reviews to be negative in order to put off the notion they don't game reviews?

<comment><USER25> I derisively referred to my own suggestion as a "conspiracy theory" because I think this conversation is kind of bogus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How are Foursquare still going? Most useless app ever.

<comment><USER36> I couldn't agree more, but I also at one point thought "facebook, but ONLY status updates? That's dumb."

These "pay attention to me" type apps all seem to do well.

<comment><USER22> This really isn't what Foursquare is anymore. It's become a rather good location database & discovery platform.

I never used it when it was "hot" (~2012), but in the past few months I've really come to like it for finding places (restaurants, etc.) & making lists. Also, their tools for making edits to the DB are quite impressive, and they do a great job of leveraging superusers to moderate those changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> All I see is the Famous Stars logo. Very similar.</comment>


Brain's Visual Circuits do Error Correction on the Fly - <AUTHOR> http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2010/12/egner_vision.html <comment><USER2> PhysOrg article submitted a day ago seems identical:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982068></comment>


Show HN: Interactive Aviation Koch Chart - <AUTHOR> http://www.takeofflanding.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously this is another "limited audience" type of thing. I expect it to only be of interest to pilots.

Known issue: the text can overlap on smaller devices (phones). Seems ok on tablet. Haven't tried on Apple devices.

I made this because (as a flatlander) density altitude has always been a difficult concept for me to internalize. I saw a Koch chart and liked it a lot. I figured I could make it interactive (you can drag the indicators up and down). I also realized that I knew a lot about how the airplanes performs at sea level on a 2000, 3000, or 4000 foot runway; maybe density altitude could be adjusted to show "runway equivalent length"? That's kind of my main experimental idea. So instead of focusing on how much longer the takeoff roll is, I present it as how much "virtually shorter" the runway is.

For example, if I load up Aspen, it tells me that today (a cooler day), the 8000 foot long runway is like a 2800 foot long runway at sea level. For me,that's a real eye opener for what density altitude means!</comment>


'Knitting Is Coding' and Yarn Is Programmable in This Physics Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/science/math-physics-knitting-matsumoto.html <comment><USER2> Sometimes outside of that physics lab. fbz over at knit yak ([https://knityak.com](https://knityak.com)) has been making very impressive computational "knitwear" for 4+ years.

<comment><USER3> > The yarn used is a 100% machine washable acrylic in black and white. Ships > with source code, namely the command line one-liner that generated the image > that is knit into the scarf.

I never expected to read this for any of the clothing I wear!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's more like interpreting machine code. Looks like this:

... Row 20: sl 1, k9, ssk, k1, turn. Row 21: sl 1, p3, p2tog, p1, turn. Row 22: sl 1, k4, ssk, k1, turn. Row 23: sl 1, p5, p2tog, p1, turn. Row 24: sl 1, k6, ssk, k1, turn. Row 25: sl 1, p7, p2tog, p1, turn. Row 26: sl 1, k9, ssk, turn. Row 27: sl 1, p8, p2tog.

That's part of the code to make a sock.

<comment><USER5> Yes! I once had to translate this from english to swedish for my mother and wow. I was struck by how much it seemed like I was reciting assembler code.

<comment><USER6> Is 'uff da' really what the knitting error prints out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ted Nelson pointed out that knitting (or was it weaving?) is one of the most popular programming languages back in 1979.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI)

Edit to add: I wouldn't be surprised if there are more knitting programmers today than all computer programming languages combined. Just the size and pervasive presence of Walmart or Joann's yarn and fabric sections makes me almost certain.

<comment><USER8> The really nice yarn is not found at either of those places. You want to see serious knitters, find a dedicated yarn store, or check out a yarn convention. It's like an xmas movie where the shoppers are fighting over the last skein of yarn from a well known dyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This talk about programmable knitting machines is worth a watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02h74L1PmaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02h74L1PmaU) \-- it goes into more depth about the details of their operation, including an absolutely wild and apparently official graphical programming language called "KnitPaint" that reminds me of the esoteric language Piet.

</comment><comment><USER10> Old domestic knitting machines had "software" in cards that were interpreted mechanically by the machine. Mom sill has an old Elgin in her house.

<comment><USER11> Computers and looms have always had a close-knit history (sorry I had to do it). During the industrial revolution there was a ton of innovation in looms, because producing fabric was very labor intensive. These early industrial looms are just sophisticated mechanical computers.

<comment><USER12> I believe that the reason early computers used punched cards, was because it was a technology already widely used for looms. Babbage just looked for what was already available for his Difference Engine.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The professor which lectured the algorithms course at my university (and some others) published a paper some time ago which seems relevant: [http://pages.di.unipi.it/bodei/publ-40/Fun07.pdf](http://pages.di.unipi.it/bodei/publ-40/Fun07.pdf) "Knitting for fun: a recursive sweater"

</comment><comment><USER14> Ralph Griswold, designer of the Icon programming language, was very interested in weaving and maintained an "On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics": [https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/webdocs.html](https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/webdocs.html)

Weaving-related topics were often discussed in The Icon Analyst newsletter, for instance (see earlier issues for more on T-sequences): [https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/analyst/backiss/IA66.pdf](https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/analyst/backiss/IA66.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> Knitting isn't coding anymore than manually executing a C program with pencil and paper is. Designing or modifying a knitting pattern on the other hand is.

</comment><comment><USER16> To browse NyTimes with iOS when you have no articles left:

1\. Settings

2\. Safari

3\. Advanced

4\. Browser cache

5\. Search for 'nytime' and delete

(Hope you pay if you often read their articles)

<comment><USER17> a private tab works just as well on iOS

<comment><USER16> Not for me. Get a message that they don't support private tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I was a coding instructor, one of my students showed a knitting pattern. I immediately understood why she was one of the best students I have ever had.

</comment><comment><USER19> My partner is into knitting and what has struck me about it is the highly variable semantics and syntax of knitting patterns. Seems to be few standards as to how to describe how something should be knitted.

</comment><comment><USER20> Something isn't "coding" just because it involves following a set of instructions... you could argue that a knitting pattern is an algorithm of sorts, but that doesn't make it coding.

</comment><comment><USER21> conceptually yes, but not so if your fine motor skills are poor. also dont understimate the manual labour involved in repetition, the computer makes it easier.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yarn is ok but I prefer npm

</comment><comment><USER23> Is leaving a piece of metal out in the rain coding? Is having coffee coding? Are snakes coding? Is a bad grade on a test coding? Is a musical note coding? Is a red gemstone coding? Is an even worse grade on a test coding? Is something found in an oyster shell coding?

Any other fun ones I missed?

<comment><USER23> > Is leaving a piece of metal out in the rain coding? Is having coffee coding? > Are snakes coding? Is a bad grade on a test coding? Is a musical note > coding? Is a red gemstone coding? Is an even worse grade on a test coding? > Is something found in an oyster shell coding?

Rust, Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby, C, Perl. God you guys totally missed it.

dang: now who had the shallow dismissal

<comment><USER24> Look, good jokes don't need to be explained but more importantly it's "Perl" and it has something to do with onions and camels.

<comment><USER25> There's also the connection between knitting and perling...

<comment><USER26> Pretty sure it's purling.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


BrainfuckJS – Hide JavaScript behind <|> characters - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixmaier/BrainfuckJS

<comment><USER2> The name is confusing, one would assume it's a Brainfuck interpreter in JS but it's not.

</comment><comment><USER3> fun! wrote something similar a few years ago.</comment>


An open letter to Kevin Rose from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian - <AUTHOR> http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose

<comment><USER2> Uhh...what? These are features that seem kindof obvious to me...I think they're awesome. In fact, this is really similar to something that I used to do on _my_ website over a year ago (we stopped doing it because there weren't enough users to make it feasible at that time...some of the ideas still exist though).

Alexis, one of the problems with reddit, at least right now, is that there are just _too many freaking people_. I don't care about the majority of the users on the site. If there was a way to see reddit as it was 5 years ago when it was you and 10 other people, that would be great, and I think that is what the move digg has made here is trying to accomplish.

(Shameless plug for my site, which is embarrassing when compared to places like here, reddit, or digg, but still just as addictive to me: <http://newslily.com> \- the part I'm talking about [show me what my friends are doing] is here: <http://newslily.com/lilypad> ])

<comment><USER3> Reddit comments are excellent, and I think that while having a buzzing community creates a lot more noise, there is also a lot more great content. Initiatives like $180,000 for Haiti, or the secret santa wouldn't have been the same 5 years ago.

<comment><USER4> Not sure what tilts me more, reading reddit comments or reading that reddit comments are supposed to be excellent.

That place has been a sewer for years and I hate that it was ruined.

<comment><USER5> > That place has been a sewer for years and I hate that it was ruined.

That's a bit like saying Usenet is a waste of space or IRC is full of trolls. Reddit, like Usenet and IRC, is more of an enabling technology than a single community.

In each case, there are some really great communities where you can find a good signal to noise ratio. There are also some fairly pointless ones that are just rants or FUD or whatever. Fortunately, no-one makes you read every sub- reddit, any more than you are forced to read every Usenet group or follow every IRC channel. Just sign up to the ones that have discussions you find interesting and ignore the rest.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing you weren't there the first few years.

<comment><USER5> Where? I've been on Usenet for well over a decade, and I was lurking on Reddit within months of its birth. The main reddit has always been overrun with a whole bunch of stuff of varying quality, and the best material and most interesting discussions have been in the specialist subreddits for several years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Digg has already shopped itself around to all the big buyers and they passed (explicitly or not). This move is an attempt by Digg to position themselves as a potential rival to Twitter and/or Facebook. Now all they need is one big dumb company that buys into that illusion.

<comment><USER7> I wish them luck in getting bought out. Seems like Digg would be a good fit for Yahoo, considering their new content-only direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Digg's front page hasn't been controlled by the users in a long time. The new changes hand control over from an anonymous group of moderators to your friends and people you follow, which seems like an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has he spent any time with Kevin? Because frankly this version reeks of Kevin - it's just endless twiddling with design and a fear of doing anything to actually change the way the site works.

<comment><USER10> You certainly know him better than me, Owen. I don't profess to know Kevin at all. In fact, I'd be interested to read your "open letter to alexis: stfu, here's the real explanation for digg4"

<comment><USER9> Perhaps. But I've really moved beyond it, and anything I say is probably not going to be constructive (and I guess my comment fits that criticiscm). At least until I get a green card and get to be something other than an employee in this country. Because I'd really like to do rather than say.

As someone who used to work at a newspaper and harangue the business editor about how corrupt the editorial process was, long before digg, I occasionally get angry. Probably for similar reasons to your post.

Cmon green card...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is such obvious linkbait that it even admits "this title is linkbait" at the bottom. He means give the power back to Kevin Rose, which is exactly what appears to have happened recently. So... non-story.

<comment><USER12> What? I don't understand what the big problem with some HN users and 'linkbait'.

Who cares? It's called journalism. In order to catch attention, the headline has to be attention grabbing.

This post was soo timely for HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1384994>

If the article was garbage, then yes I would agree with you. But who cares if he manipulates the headline to get attention.

The next time you write a blog post, or anything, that doesn't have an attention grabbing headline and gets a ton of traffic...please let us know.

<comment><USER13> Indulge me a Simpsons quote:

      Baby-Proofer: Your baby is dead!
      Homer and Marge: [horrified scream]
      Baby-Proofer: That's what you'd hear if your baby
      fell victim to one of the thousands of deathtraps
      lurking in the average American home!

I would like to think that HN follows some of PG's taste for things, and none of his essays have "Your Baby Is Dead" style titles, even when the ideas inside are provocative. I think there's a line to draw, even though nobody is ever going to agree, but that's the way social norms are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a blogger, the fact of the matter is, all I ever use Digg for is skimming to see if they have any cool videos to post. I don't even use Reddit for that anymore. I feel like their communities aren't super-welcoming like HN is, and have avoided them.

I think that Kevin realizes that to reach a broader audience the site needs to have value for people who don't choose to be active members of the community (or want their own little niches). Facebook does some of this, but it's too closed-off (unless you're on a fan page). Twitter does some of this, but it's too broad in some ways. If anything, it kinda takes the best elements from each.

Digg has a lot of problems with the way its audience has grown, and as a result, it's become overly-influenced by one core group of people: Young guys. Jezebel actually called them out on this recently:

[http://jezebel.com/5531991/boys-will-be-boys-the-problem- wit...](http://jezebel.com/5531991/boys-will-be-boys-the-problem-with-digg)

If you want to win the influence game, you have to have more than just guys and more than just Justin Bieber fans. And the fact of the matter is, you can still have a huge audience on Twitter even without ever touching the trending topics. The current Digg, you have to roll the dice the right way. Reddit, you have to also keep your fingers crossed.

And to win the publishers over, you have to a) not treat them as if they're jerks for wanting to build traffic b) not waste their time. This design does both.

I'm going to use this once it goes up, because it doesn't feel like the deck is stacked against my little blog ( <http://shortformblog.com/> for the curious).

</comment><comment><USER15> what does he care? if you think they are making a mistake, great, they are your competitor... why bother writing an open letter?

I also don't get what he is ranting about..I think the new Digg looks great, just when I was starting to get sick of the top news stories not being relevant to me, now I will be able to follow people with similar interests, just like twitter, but I don't have to read through what they had for breakfast to get the links I want.

<comment><USER16> They're not his competitor, he left Reddit months ago.

<comment><USER10> Exactly the reason why I felt OK publishing it. I'm still a redditor of course, but breadpig is my only ... uhh.. horse in this race.

<comment><USER16> By the way, thanks for Reddit. I still enjoy it immensely, even if it has gone downhill lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "back when "social media gurus" were simply called "tools.""

Did we stop calling them tools?

<comment><USER7> ..back when we were able to game Digg (algorithms were very predictable) for fun and profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Digg still crushes reddit in traffic. I'm not saying traffic is an indicator of profitablity, but it's apparent they are either marketing it better, or more people prefer it. Either way, it's tough to argue "with the people" based on the author's indication of importance.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/>

<comment><USER19> This may have to do with the fact that Kevin Rose was a mini-celebrity in the tech world when Digg was launched.

<comment><USER20> But what about PG ?

(for the record, reddit is my #1 site)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't have a dog in this race and I actually agree with Alexis (I don't like the new product direction - it does seem very derivative as opposed to innovative)

But if you look at where Pownce was going it looks like Kevin has liked some of these ideas for some time now.

</comment><comment><USER22> I do agree that these features are 'inspired' by other apps. Had they launched these in 2006 it'd be a copycat move. At this point, these are features that I think many users expect in something like digg. Facebook features have also been 'inspired' by other apps (i.e. twitter) and you can't argue with their growth. Digg has looked more like a forum and less like a startup for a long time, and this may be a catching up on lost ground, and a prelude to hopefully more innovative days.

</comment><comment><USER23> Reddit's quality has gone down in flames; it's 6 months away from being Digg with a shitty (if lovable) interface. I still visit Reddit, but less than ever. So to talk down to Digg, which Reddit shamelessly copied, and while Digg is at least trying to innovate is odd. What has reddit done lately? Subreddits? Narwhals? I still have love for Reddit, but this post seems obnoxious.

<comment><USER24> Two minutes tweaking your subreddits will give you a much better experience. I found that just removing main Reddit made my first page an order of magnitude better.

<comment><USER25> I concur 100% with this. The 'main' reddit isn't all that great and more of a distraction than anything. The strong use of subreddits has increased my interest in Reddit strongly over the past few months. Otherwise yes, what is on the front page is just a precursor to what will be on Digg the next day.

That being said, these things just funnel around in a hierarchy. HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc all suffer a bit from this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hi think Alexis is biased by the fact that in some way Reddit was lucky in not having the social dynamics leading to a monopolization of the whole site.

This is instead what happened to Digg, and to many other social news sites, and the only fix is probably to switch to a hierarchical model. This also happened to OKNOtizie, that is the "Italian Digg", that I happen to run currently.

So I'm looking forward to the Digg changes, and in general to the idea of binding users to real identities of other social network sites, like twitter or facebook. We implemented a great deal of filters, but this does not work when a great percentage of your users are not playing the game correctly.

<comment><USER25> Subreddits (by design) somewhat prevent this monopolization of the front.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> can it be confirmed that KR isn't making the calls anymore at digg?

<comment><USER10> Let me only confirm that I'm entirely speculating.

<comment><USER28> You don't like the direction Digg is going. If you were the one making the decisions what would you do?

<comment><USER10> Hmm... User-created diggs (like we have on reddit, but better articulated & designed - I say this as the closest thing reddit had to a designer, I'm no designer). I have no idea about headcount, so I won't speculate there, only to say that reddit's ratio of 1 non tech for every 5 technical worked well for us.

And i'd make that digg mascot more prominent, maybe change it around for holidays, too.

<comment><USER29> Basically reddit with a different skin?

Is digg a site you frequent? Why so interested in its fate? Wouldn't you rather see reddit leave it in the dust?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My response: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388142>

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a Reddit fan but come on Alexis. Let Kevin be. Digg v4 hasn't even been released to the public yet. You left Reddit a long time ago. If you were still at Reddit then I'd chalk this down as a little trash talk from a competitor. You're no longer in the game. Give him time to prove himself.

<comment><USER10> My intention was quite the opposite from trash talking. As a commenter articulated, this feels more like something forced on him by acquisition hungry VCs than of his own design.

Digg was in a way one of the best external things that could've happened to reddit: it did all the work of educating people to the concept of "social news" and provided a Goliath to our community's David.

<comment><USER31> The VC is a huge assumption for one thing, and it sort of comes off as concern trolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I assume the April 1st 2011 reddit site redesign has been decided then.

</comment><comment><USER33> This link crashes the browser on iPad.

</comment><comment><USER34> an open letter to Alexis Ohanian

fix search, it's been broken for a couple of weeks now.

<comment><USER35> Reddit search? Was there _ever_ one?

<comment><USER34> sort of, before you'd get "crap" results, now you get no results. All you get is:

Our search machines are under too much load to handle your request right now. :( Sorry for the inconvenience. Try again in a little bit -- but please don't mash reload; that only makes the problem worse.</comment></comment></comment>


Growth = Engagement - <AUTHOR> http://platformed.info/growth-engagement-product-design-thinking/ Article about not blind pumping virality, cause it doesn't cumulate traffic without retention of users. <comment><AUTHOR> The battle for the so-called Viral Coefficient has become the habit of many startup companies. It's no holds barred as long as the users share their accomplishments and content. It doesn't actually matter if the user wants to share. Is there a point in that?

I invite you to discussion :)</comment>


Video: $200 Chrome OS Tablet by Freescale - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/video-200-chrome-os-tablet-by-freescale/ <comment><USER2> Title should be changed to Chromium OS.</comment>