Ask HN: Why aren't you on the Fediverse? - <AUTHOR> With Twitter attempting to wipe society's collective memory once more, HN seems rightfully angered. Why leave your data to be feasted on by corporate interests when there's a great alternative?
Consider joining the Fediverse, a federated (which means that user-run servers can talk to one another) social media platform. You probably know it from all of the headlines that Mastodon's been getting, but it's a lot broader (and better) than what Mastodon's press coverage has implied it is.
If you want to self-host, a libre server with more features than Mastodon can be ran on a Raspberry Pi: https://pleroma.social/
If you have some really old hardware, a server running Honk can run on something with 30MB of RAM and an old hard drive, though it's (much) lighter on the feature end, too: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/honking-for-fun-and-profit
Want an Instagram alternative instead of/to complement a Twitter alternative? Try Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.org/
Want a YouTube alternative? It's got one of those, too! Check out PeerTube; with over 100,000 videos uploaded so far and a better interface than YouTube's, it's already a really viable contender: https://joinpeertube.org/
If you don't want to self-host, there are five thousand instances you can join, with a collective amount of users nearing 5,000,000! Proof of those numbers, and a list of instances: https://fediverse.network/
If you like the sound of this, find an instance with a moderation policy you respect (they range from "Do nothing illegal, please!" to "Don't do something we dislike or you'll be banned," so this step is important), and register! It's much comfier using smaller ones, and knowing the person who's running your instance and vice-versa makes your experience a lot better, so try using a smaller instance!
A lot of HN users are already on it. A few even volunteered their handles in the last thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741116 <comment><AUTHOR> Honorable mentions that broke HN's character limit:

Want something that's a little bit of everything, with a fantastic interface for an SNS, and the entire kitchen sink of features? Try Misskey: [https://join.misskey.page/en/](https://join.misskey.page/en/)

(Warning, Misskey is written by native Japanese speakers, and you'll find very few English speakers who know the software if you need one, for whatever reason.)

Want something like SoundCloud for your music library? FunkWhale's really cool, and similarly has a really nice interface: [https://funkwhale.audio/](https://funkwhale.audio/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I've been on the Fediverse for a while and I run the blob.cat Pleroma instance. It's a lot of fun and I'd highly recommend it - it's only a few dollars a month to host, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'laklasla is my instance admin! blob.cat is a great instance, if you're feeling indecisive.

(She found this post via my request for comment on it/fact-check request for it here:

[https://blob.cat/notice/9pNTh5UR2qQoQ3TLPM](https://blob.cat/notice/9pNTh5UR2qQoQ3TLPM)

Feel free to mention me either on HN or on blob.cat if you saw/see anything incorrect about this post, by the way, happy to take corrections!)</comment></comment>


Why yes, that is a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in my pocket - <AUTHOR> http://www.sethclifford.me/stream/2011/7/25/why-yes-that-is-a-galaxy-tab-101-in-my-pocket.html

<comment><USER2> Decent article, but I guess I'll weigh in on the counter-points:

1\. Uninformed consumers returning devices isn't unique to Android Tablets. It happens in basically every corner of the market. People buy Macs and wonder why their Windows apps don't work on them. There's really not much you can change about that, aside from trying to educate them slightly in whatever form of advertisement you have. I do think all the commercials for Android Tablets are terrible though. The iPad's wins by a landslide.

2\. 16:9 vs 4:3 is really just personal preference. There are some apps that I really enjoy the 16:9 ratio for (like movies, books, and general internet browsing). For others, yes it does feel a bit wide or tall at times. This becomes a non-issue if you decide to go for a 7-inch tablet though, which I believe 3.2 just introduced support for.

3\. There's a "Featured Tablet" application section on the market blatantly visible the first time you start the application. Unfortunately that's about where it ends, as there's no way to tell if an application is tablet-ready from its details page, and no way to filter for tablet-ready apps when doing a search. It's been said before, but the Market really needs an overhaul. I have noticed apps start to name themselves "HD" if they're tablet-ready, but that's not really consistent or a standard at this point.

4\. Honeycomb's 3.2 version that released this past month now has the "app zooming" feature the author described missing.

5\. It's been said before, but I'll repeat it here: the lack of tablet-ready apps is really just a matter of time. People tend to forget that it took iPad several months to get a decent selection of apps optimized for that screen size. This summer a good number started cropping up on the Market for Android, and now that more tablets are landing in the hands of developers (like the Transformer and Galaxy Tab), we'll no doubt see a ton of apps begin to flood us come Winter.

<comment><USER3> The iPad had 2,000 apps on launch day: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/02/best- ipad-apps-launch/>

Hell, even the HP TouchPad had 300 at launch a month ago (which may even be more than Honeycomb had then, there's no way to tell due to that Market issue).

I don't know why there's so few apps for Android tablets, but I haven't seen any signs of the numbers getting much higher. And it's not like developers haven't had both 6 months to work _and_ (for some) free Google I/O tablets to develop on.

<comment><USER4> Part of the reason for the paucity of tablet-specific apps may be that Android does a better job of scaling phone-sized apps to the tablet screen. My friend's Xoom, for example, appeared to run fantastically with the same ConnectBot SSH client as my phone right after the Xoom's release.

Edit: refute, please, instead of/in addition to downvoting. Seriously. Android does this.

<comment><USER3> Android does do this, but it only _very_ rarely has worked for me. Like, take the Dropbox app, which is even listed under "featured tablet apps": you have file listings that are 8" wide, with no more content shown on a tablet than on a phone (which is just file name and icon).

A few, rare apps are usable scaled (ConnectBot is a good example), but almost nothing is ideal — or even usable — OOTB. At least with the ones I've tried.

<comment><USER4> Would you say the Android situation is better or worse than the pixel doubling seen on the iPad for iPhone apps?

<comment><USER3> Not really relevant, since there's enough iPad apps that it doesn't matter: I use one pixel-doubled app on the iPad (Facebook) and they're coming out with a native app very soon anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > However, for the amount of marketing and push that these tablets are > getting, there should absolutely be not only a wide range of options, but a > clearly delineated path with which to reach them. Android Market has > neither. You can search for "tablet", and you hit quite a few things, and > you can search for "Honeycomb", and reach some others, but you have things > like themes and wallpapers for phones in the Honeycomb style that make their > way into your search. Apple has two sides of the App Store - iPhone and iPad > - and it's completely obvious where the tablet apps are. I'm an experienced > user, so I'm figuring things out, but I can't imagine someone who isn't > comfortable with this stuff having much fun doing the same

Yet another example of how Google's Market app is slowly catching up to iTunes. The new market app is a big improvement.

It seems like writing tablet apps for Honeycomb are more an exercise for developers and their teams (I see distinct rivalries between iOS and Android dev teams at the same company) at companies that have Android apps to pad their resume and "feel cool" (look at me, we have a tablet app) than a practical economic market. I know four people who own Honeycombs, all of them were purchased by their employers so their company could get the "Tablet" achievement. As for iPads, I was shocked the other day to see not just one but two iPads being used (the glow is mega massive from the screen) from my nosebleed level cheap seat before an orchestral concert started.

<comment><USER6> Weird. My Asus Transformer has a section in the Market that's specifically for tablets.

And the market will only show apps that work on your device... So non-tablets will never see that section.

Unless people specify the devices wrong, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I set up some new PC laptops recently for a few non-technical friends. It's been a while since I've touched a new PC laptop so it was a bit of shock to be reminded of how much clunky, ugly, slow, proprietary junkware was larded on top of Windows. It's a bad soup cooked by too many chefs.

From what I've seen of recent Android UI's, vendors seem to be following the same MO, with the same poor, inconsistent results. If Google doesn't start pushing hard for stock Android on tablets they're going to lose this race.

<comment><USER8> The problem with Android being open source is that Google hasn't really got much control over what happens with it. Everyone can tweak it for the better or worse, and lately its mostly been for the worse.

However, if you don't want to root or get a nexus, I've found that simply installing one of the many launchers available for free mostly does the trick of cleaning up your phone (touchwiz, blur etc get removed and you can hide apps completely if you like). Also, this seems worst in the US, where the carrier situation is -forgive me- completely fucked up. I haven't had issues anywhere similar with bloatware here in europe.

I can only hope, but if capitalism works and people don't like scins and crapware on their phone, the cunts in charge right now will eventually realize it's smarter to leave Android as it is because more people will buy it. I'm still waiting though.

<comment><USER7> Contrary to much received wisdom on the subject, I don't think that stock Android is significantly less user-friendly than iOS. But requiring users to be savvy enough to strip off carrier crapware is asking too much.

Consensus is powerful. Consistency is powerful. Google has to walk a fine line here but if they don't rein in the carriers soon I worry that Apple's discipline in design & execution is going to overwhelm them. I'm a little suspicious of recent claims that Android return rates are as high as 40% but I don't doubt that they're too high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google need to take a page out of the video-game emulation world and introduce filters and anti-aliasing at higher magnifications.

For example you can play a Gameboy Advance game at native resolution (ie tiny!) on the emulator Visualboy Advance or scale the video output 2 or 3 times and after enabling all the above settings, the output is _much_ nicer than the originals.

It doesn't take all that much processing power to do either (the difference in power between phones and tablets more than makes up for it - many times over I suspect)

Anyone care to chime in? (and possibly destroy my argument)

<comment><USER10> 2xSaI would be amazing on both Android and iPad. If it can breathe new life into SNES games, it would probably work nicely on apps.

<comment><USER11> If you've got a jailbroken iPad, there's a better option than 2xSaI. The iPad loads the low-resolution iPhone application nibs, presumably to make iPhone apps look worse on the iPad, but with RetinaPad off of Cydia you get the iPhone 4, high-resolution display of those applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have played with my friends iPad 2's and just got the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. I think it's fine and now I prefer it over the iPad.

It's so much lighter which means I can be "that guy" who takes movies and pictures with it. It uploads to Google+ automatically and then I can choose to share or not. One of the big barriers to me sharing meda with friends is my laziness in taking the time to upload each file. This takes one step out of that process: I just leave a note and choose to share it or not.

The 16:9 form factor can be awkward for reading eBooks. I actually prefer that form factor overall because when I type in portrait mode I don't have to move my thumbs as far to type letters.

As for the apps one thing that I found is that due to the way Android apps manage layout instead of doing a simple pixel multiplication the applications scale fairly well. While there aren't a lot of pretty tablet-specific apps in the Android Marketplace at leas the apps are usable on the full-screen. I really appreciate the information density as opposed to running in an a small emulator.

<comment><USER13> I have no issue with people's personal preferences on screen ratio or social networking functionality but "so much lighter"?

It's 601g vs. 565g? That's 36g (the weight of 6 quarters), about 5%. Are you serious that that's a big deal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure why everyone keeps saying that Honeycomb tablets aren't there yet. Where are they supposed to be? I've owned a Xoom WiFi for a while now and it has quickly replaced my laptop as my "just surfing the net" tool. I still switch to type out e-mails, but my Xoom is always what I reach for when I'm sitting on the sofa and want to google something real quick.

<comment><USER15> I think that when they say they "aren't there" they mean in relation to the iPad. Having played around with both, I agree- the iPad is just a more put- together product. However, like like it did on phones, I fully expect Android to make quick strides to catch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are apps really that important? I figure main use would be web browsing. I hardly ever use apps on my Android phone, except for the built in ones (maps, contacts).

I even consider to go web only on my future tablet to avoid privacy issues with apps.

<comment><USER13> Depends on the user. DHH wrote an interesting piece on it saying that almost everything he did on iOS using the 10 basic apps and that everything else was pretty irrelevant.

For me that's not true. Of the dozen or so apps I use most often about half are standard, about half downloaded/purchased, so for me it would be a big deal but if what you want to do is surf the web, read e-mail and use a basic media player for photos and video then apps probably aren't a selling point and there's a big enough market of people like that out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The stretch scale is fixed in the next version of Honeycomb.</comment>


Creative shares hit decade high - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnp.sg/news/business/creative-shares-jump-after-glowing-reports-new-product <comment><AUTHOR> I'm personally curious about how the Super X-Fi work, under all that marketing. Seems like it's their take on AI-generated HRTFs?

[http://pro.3dsoundlabs.com/category/personal- hrtfs/](http://pro.3dsoundlabs.com/category/personal-hrtfs/)</comment>


Micro-documentary on "A cool tiny home tour: living in 96 square feet" - <AUTHOR> http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/a-tiny-home-tour-living-in-96-square-feet/ Homes are shrinking in America. After doubling in size since 1960, the national average dropped for the first time in nearly 15 years (by 9%, the size of an average room). But far from this new average of 2,000 plus square feet are the so-called tiny houses. Also called wee homes, mini dwellings, or microhomes, their definition is not exact, but they run as small as 65 square feet.<p>The video is worth watching. <comment><USER2> Ok if you like toy houses, but the points made are moot. This is just feel- good hippy shit that distracts from real progress.

Already been done- called mobile home, trailer parks, etc. Next time you dry past a mobile home park in a relatively affluent region of the country, the cars parked there are not rusting and up on blocks, they can be pretty nice, the people there are not poor. People are often living there because its cheap and efficient, or a second home for work reasons.

Cost - its the land that costs. As they say, a house is a wooden box that sits out in the rain and rots.

If you want efficient housing a medium sized earth sheltered house is simply the best you can get. But you'll never get a loan for it. You can actually heat one of those in the winter with a few people and a few candles. Its because the 'outside' is always a constant temperature, about 50 degrees F.

Theres no reason to think that one of those toy homes would be much less efficient than, say, if you scaled it 2x. The the shape and construction that would really matter.

<comment><USER3> Why would you never get a loan for it?

<comment><USER4> If your construction cost is significantly greater than your resale value, and you intend to borrow a large portion of this cost, then there is not enough collateral for the lender to recover their investment.

A house which you will treasure, but is considered undesirable by the masses will be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I mentioned him in a comment before, but I think the way that the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company has handled PR is a model for any startup. The guy built a fancy trailer and landed on Oprah. I don't say that to put him or his company down. I think his houses are really neat. He found (or made) a niche and put together a campaign that makes him the iPhone of small houses.

</comment><comment><USER6> My nearest IKEA has a number of "tiny houses" all set up that you can walk through. (I'm in Australia)

</comment><comment><USER7> A complementary movement is co-housing (<http://www.cohousing.org/>). Co- housing is about intentional community--a group of people get together and deliberately choose to live in smaller houses with a shared common space. This space might include a library, playroom, media center, kitchen / dining room (although each house has its own, and you aren't obligated to cook or eat with the community), or whatever else the community decides. Every co-housing group does something a bit different. One specific example is <http://www.mosaic- commons.org/> (Full disclosure: I was involved in Mosaic for a couple of years until my divorce.)

It's a pretty cool concept and tends to attract the kind of people that hackers like (smart, interesting, iconoclastic).

</comment><comment><USER8> I have to say I really like all the wood.

But did I hear him right that he just dumps the water from the shower? That's not good. If you put the water in the sewer it gets recycled.

It's basically impossible to waste water from a shower if you are on a public sewer, since the next city downriver uses it. Also, never use a septic system, those are bad for the environment since they waste water.

Very cool house though.

<comment><USER9> Where does the water go if it doesn't go in the sewer? Is it somehow destroyed, never to enter the environment again?

<comment><USER8> It seemed that he just dumps it on the ground.

<comment><USER10> How is that significantly different from any other method of disposing mostly- clean water? Either it goes through another use cycle downstream (if the sewer system drains into a river), evaporates, and is recovered as precipitation, or it just evaporates and is recovered as precipitation. The water is still part of the water cycle.

<comment><USER8> The water cycle sure. But that's of no help to places with water shortages. If you return it to the sewer then other cities down the line can reuse the water.

If you remember a while back when atlanta had severe water shortages. Part of the problem is that something like 40% of houses had septic systems, so cities downriver from atlanta did not get enough water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the books on his shelf is Suburban Nation ([http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline- America...](http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline- American/dp/0865476063)) - worth a read. It's interesting because that book is to Urban Planning what tiny houses are to Architecture.

<comment><USER12> I loved it when they zoomed in on the book case (watch it on Youtube in HD). Instant ideas for further reading!

<comment><USER13> In this video there is an even better close up of his books at 1:09

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaE4EvM- UF4&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaE4EvM- UF4&feature=player_embedded)

<comment><AUTHOR> More close shots of his books in the photogallery of the visit: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/faircompanies/sets/721576226806...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/faircompanies/sets/72157622680688384/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even people in Venice have larger apartments than that...

</comment><comment><USER15> Sometimes I think it would be really, really nice to live small - maybe whenI retire and the kids are gone.

<comment><USER7> Depending on the age of the kids, you can try it out pretty simply--while the kids are off at college / summer camp / whatever, rent an apartment for a few months.

On the "paying for it" side, it's a balance between your financial situation / tolerance for risk; you can either pay the extra fee, or you can rent out the house (check out AirBnB, Craigslist, etc).

On the "logistics" side, you will have a bunch of furniture, clothes, etc which don't fit in the apartment. You can either leave those in the house or put them in storage, whichever works better for you.

Try to not go back to the house while you're living in the apartment, though-- have your mail forwarded, etc. And if you find there is a box of clothes / books / kitchen gadgets / whatever that you haven't unpacked at the end of your apartment time, consider getting rid of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A tiny house, a few books, and a big bottle of Smirnoff. Could be paradise.</comment>


Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal-googles-intellectual-property <comment><USER2> "One day in 2011, a Google executive named Isaac Taylor learned that, while he was on paternity leave, Levandowski had modified the cars' software so that he could take them on otherwise forbidden routes. A Google executive recalls witnessing Taylor and Levandowski shouting at each other. Levandowski told Taylor that the only way to show him why his approach was necessary was to take a ride together. The men, both still furious, jumped into a self-driving Prius and headed off.

The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google's software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry's driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries."

These things sound like they require way more oversight before they should be allowed on the road if a single engineer can override protections like these.

<comment><USER3> That was 7 years ago. 7 years before that video ipods just came out, blogging became a thing, and the best phone out was a razor. That was a whole technological epoc ago.

<comment><USER4> And yet, 7 years after there are still similar problems with self-driving cars. Don't get too hang up on dates.

<comment><USER5> And several people died in _human_ -caused wrecks while you were typing that sentence. Nobody seems too hung up on that. Not scary enough, I guess, and you can't blame one or two large monolithic corporations for it.

Self-driving cars are one of those instances where painstaking adherence to the precautionary principle is going to get a lot of people killed due to poor risk modeling. This article is a great example, where the reporter has engaged in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics to paint an incident arising from a human driver's poor judgement as the fault of a "rogue engineer."

<comment><USER6> > And several people died in human-caused wrecks while you were typing that > sentence.

According to [0] 1.24 million people die in automobile related accidents annually. This works out to 0.04 per second. Unless parent is a very slow typist your number overstates the real toll several times.

[0] [http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic- accid...](http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic-accidents- kill-1-24-million-people-a-year-worldwide-wars-and-murders-0-44-million/)

Seems to be a mix of 2010 and 2014 data, but broadly speaking close enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Most of the race's competitors had built automated cars, but Levandowski had constructed a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider—in part, he later admitted, because he hoped that its novelty would draw attention. Although Ghostrider performed rather pitifully in its début, breaking down a few feet from the starting line, in almost every other respect it was a success: the audacity of Levandowski's creation, coupled with his talent for charming journalists, made him the competition's star. The National Museum of American History acquired Ghostrider for its permanent collection, and in 2007 Levandowski—then twenty-seven years old, with only a master's degree in engineering from U.C. Berkeley—was offered a job at Google worth millions of dollars."

Silicon valley in a nut shell folks. Completely disregard ethics and hey presto a few years down the line the total fraudster you hired turns out to have been unethical! Whodathunk!

<comment><USER8> This article made me feel nauseated. All these big name hotshots and Google execs so full of BS they can't even manage to fire this guy.

This is what a lot of Silicon Valley has become, but it has not always been this way and there are still some legitimate companies that that do in fact wear clothes - mostly semiconductor companies though.

<comment><USER9> How are sociopathic tendencies of higher echelons of corporate management news to anyone? The only "newsworthy" part of it is it relates to google (which isn't really news to anyone who's been on the inside). If it was abouy some finance firm nobody would bat an eye

<comment><USER10> It's not news in general but many people liked to pretend it wasn't true of Silicon Valley or at least favorite companies like Google: sure, there are sharks in most places but we're a strict meritocracy where only results matter!

That's been cracking over time as e.g. people noticed that all of the cool stuff Google does is a sideline for selling ads, Uber is a gypsy cab company which would fail the instant they had to comply with the law or pay for externalities, etc. Rather than letting SV redesign the world we're hope the world will rein it in enough before more people are hurt.

Given how strong that self-image has been in tech culture for decades, a lot of people are going to have strong emotions when it's no longer possible to maintain cognitive dissonance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So basically, according to The Newyorker, a Google self-driving car was at least partially at fault for a hit-and-run causing serious injury and property damage.

Everyone knew about it, everyone watched the video, but no one saw fit to report the incident or take responsibility.

So all the claims about 10 million miles without any serious incident are, effectively, false.

What else are they hiding? How safe these cars really are?

<comment><USER12> I thought I was having intense deja vu but google has this archived form two days ago.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO6...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ca1CO631OSsJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D18223066+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-ab)

Does hackernews move posts around and change their timestamps?

<comment><USER13> I can't remember if there's a specific term for it, but I believe HN has some way of giving a story a "second chance", which must have been used here and seems to involve resetting the timestamps.

I don't know if this link will continue working, but if you look at it through this view, the comment that you're replying to shows as "2 days ago": [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=...](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oldgradstudent&next=18223066)

But if you link to it directly, it shows as (currently) "4 hours ago": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223066)

I can understand the second-chance idea, but lying about when comments were posted is very strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Buried at the bottom, Levandowski's controversial world wisdom -

"The only thing that matters is the future," [Levandowski] told me after the civil trial was settled. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

To what extent does this attitude represent Silicon Valley? More usefully, could we avoid some ill-bred start-up ideas and venture capital wasted if the attitude of Silicon Valley was changed to include just a little more care about history?

<comment><USER15> Sadly 100%. Most startups try to "disrupt" things they do not understand. Often with predictable results.

<comment><USER16> But occasionally with unpredictable results, which topples incumbent corporations who refuse to innovate or reduce costs, which is why startups succeed. In that respect maybe the startup's attitude isn't so bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The best thing about this article:

> Levandowski refused to discuss the case with reporters but attracted > headlines with a curveball revelation: he had founded a church, called the > Way of the Future, that was devoted to "the realization, acceptance, and > worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence." Machines would > eventually become more powerful than humans, he proclaimed, and the members > of his church would prepare themselves, intellectually and spiritually, for > that momentous transition. Some people wondered if the church, as a > nonprofit organization, was a scheme to protect Levandowski's fortune, but > he assured reporters that he was sincere. "I don't believe in God," he told > me. "But I do believe that we are creating something that basically, as far > as we're concerned, will be like God to us."

<comment><USER18> AI can never be God, and won't ever be 'like God to us'. Not in a billion years.

It's funny how so many of the 'unfaithful' seem to lack the capacity for metaphysical thought.

This guy also seems a little bit crazy, and not in the good way.

<comment><USER18> Replying to my own comment as an edit: I used 'unfaithful' in jest almost academic sarcasm, not seriously in any way.

I am always amazed at both the narrow materialism, and hyper grandiosity of these people.

'Starting his own religion' (especially based around technology!) is a massive red flag ... extreme and also misplaced egoism.

This guy is a 'jump the shark' moment for the Valley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of Waymo's alleged trade secrets was that they used a fiber laser. This is well known LIDAR technology.

They also apparently think diode alingment pins are a trade secret.

In the trial they also made it seem like Waymo invented the concept of monostatic LIDAR.

My guess as to what happened is that Waymo has nothing _solid_ on Levandowski but he acted extremely supiciously and they hoped to find anything he had stolen in the process of the lawsuitl

</comment><comment><USER20> Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? Probably not, if it's in the LIDAR area. Google's LIDAR is still an expensive spinning unit for experimental vehicles. The production solution is going to be some other technology - flash, MEMS, or something else that's more solid state. Continental and Luminar have both demoed reasonably good automotive flash LIDARs.

Google/Waymo may have some proprietary technology in LIDAR data reduction. There are hints of that in Urmson's 2016 SXSW talk. Lots of people are trying to apply machine learning to camera images, but applying it to LIDAR is probably more likely to work. Less ambiguous data. But there's no indication of that being an area of litigation.

I met Levandowski briefly when he was preparing for the DARPA Grand Challenge. He was still a student at UC Berkley then. His real achievement was that, after the DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2008, he built a self-driving car able to cross the Bay Bridge for the Discovery Channel.[1] That's where Google got their start in self-driving. There was not a rush, after the Grand Challenge, to throw money at the problem.

[1] [https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/t...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial- intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article dedicates a good deal of page space to adding fresh verse to the Ballad of Anthony Levandowski before it gets into addressing the question asked in the headline, but it's all very good reading.

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought Google had fired Levandowski but it seems he quit. Quite interesting recently to get insights on how/when things go bad at Google and then they arent holding folks accountable, possibly even hiding information.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is anybody naive enough to think that these companies would give up on creating self-driving cars if they were not able to patent some of their technology? I don't think you can really even make the argument that patents, in this case, _encourage_ innovation (across the industry - they do incentivize grabbing potentially useful patents as fast as possible for individual companies), nor that they benefit consumers.

</comment><comment><USER23> Curious if the invalidated patents[1] make this harder to prove. I suppose trade secrets don't have to be patents.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks- wa...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/lone-engineer-spanks-waymo-in- lidar-patent-battle/)

<comment><USER24> Patents, by definition, are not trade secrets, since they are made public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [http://archive.is/GVage](http://archive.is/GVage)

</comment><comment><USER26> > _he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to > launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the > world._

> _"If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 > concern," Levandowski told me._

> _Levandowski and Taylor didn't know how badly damaged the Camry was. They > didn't go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had > been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the > authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had > contributed to the accident. Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the > incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity > to learn how to avoid similar mistakes. He sent colleagues an e-mail with > video of the near-collision. Its subject line was "Prius vs. Camry."_

God save us all from engineers with a Messiah complex who think a few boring little lives are a small price to pay for progress.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how much Sebastian Thrun was involved during this time frame. Isn't he also a key player behind Google self-driving car project? I don't even remember whether he was on the witness stand during the trial between Google and Uber.

</comment><comment><USER28> The absolute hatred that this author for Silicon Valley is a little disconcerting to be honest. It's make it difficult to take the person seriously.

</comment><comment><USER19> Also interestingly enough, Uber's uncompleted "Spider" LIDAR used 1550nm, which I find to be interesting. Why pivot back to 905nm?

</comment><comment><USER29> > One juror, clearly a gamer, whispered to his neighbor and, as if holding a > controller, mimed the start of a classic Nintendo cheat code: "up," "up," > "down," "down."

This isn't the entire code, and it's normally referred to as the "Konami code" since it appears across platforms in Konami games.</comment>


Pros and Cons in Using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rahulgolwalkar/pros-and-cons-in-using-jwt-json-web-tokens-196ac6d41fb4 <comment><USER2> This article describes using JWT in a web-server environment where session cookies are likely a better solution.

JWT and Stored Sessions have their place.

If you are running a single web server and your client is connecting via a webpage (or possibly an app), then storing session data in a key-value store is probably a better solution.

If you've got multiple (micro) services being accessed via an API, I say JWT all the way.

JWT's can be expired (which the author does not address), expiring does not mean the user needs to login again. The app logic can request a new JWT based on some internal logic, maybe the user needs to login, or maybe they just get issued a new JWT.

If your JWT key is compromised, you've likely compromised something else on your system as well. You are no longer secure and need to do something about it. JWT is the least of your worries at this point.

The "cannot push messages" doesn't make any sense to me. If you're polling the server, you poll with the JWT, the server unpacks it and sees which user made the query. You can put anything you want into a JWT. Which leads to the next point.

Data overhead... really? I just checked our JWT, which has some data about user, expiration, permissions and it's 200 bytes. You can add much more data and you still won't likely hit the 1kb data. Even if you did. 1kb it's 1kb, I'd suggest that is if you are being irresponsible and putting way too much into the JWT itself.

I'm not saying JWT is perfect, as I said, a simple website, use sessions, but the way Rahul has picked apart JWT is like a chef trying to cut a cake with a spatula. It works, but you're better off using a knife.</comment>


Building a startup in education? Sign-up for this resource - <AUTHOR> http://signup.flippedclassroomblog.com/

<comment><USER2> Do they plan on letting anyone know what the benefits of signing up are, or what they do with our email address?</comment>


Startup Culture - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-culture <comment><USER2> > _It's not with showing off office pictures of employees playing around with > nerf guns. Those are gimmicks. Culture is not defined by a fancy workplace. > It's all about the people._

I wish more people understood this. For me personally, seeing offices full of nerf guns and foosball tables turns me _off_ , because I worry they're focusing on that instead of _real_ culture -- managers that don't micromanage, a sense of vision that's being communicated well, employees being listened to in a real way, etc.

It's easy to buy nerf guns. It's hard to create a company culture that thrives. I'm sure you can have both, but the nerf guns don't mean anything.

And me personally, I'd rather _not_ have the nerf guns, because it's clear they _are_ just gimmicks, and I trust a workplace more if they can attract good employees without gimmicks.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you on this one.I also don't like to play with people I work with, Its that simple... People at work should judge me on the value I bring to the company, not on whether I like techno or their preferred brand of alcohol (see original post)

<comment><USER4> While I agree with the parent, it is still worthwhile to distinguish places that _judge_ you based on those preferences or activities and those that simply encourage you to have them. Sometimes a small part of your value is getting others to be more relaxed, social, or just half-engaged until the idea they've been searching for all week comes tumbling out mid-pingpong swat. Granted, there are environments and people who function better with a clear boundary between work and play, but I bet that a large number of people who decry the mix would have second thoughts if play meant a game of chess, word association (pictionary? more UX departments could probably benefit...), cards, or whatever. I don't mean to say that tossing a football and playing chess are the same thing, but when not explicitly working they can still have positive effects. And hey, while the techno-blast-developer floor may be an annoying fad, I don't see anything wrong from a management perspective to find people who, in general, appreciate similar things. If you look closely you can see this very clearly in design studios (though I believe it applies to virtually anything creative, programming included)– people collaborating on a project while one listens to delta blues and the other Vivaldi will may have very altered perspectives, however fleeting, than two others who share a love of Phillip Glass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "How do you attract those Jobsian A-players?" and "let the culture naturally build itself."

I think this is one of the biggest fallacies of "startup culture" and possibly of business strategy in general.

This idea that you can hire the right people and culture magically comes out of it is ludicrous. Yes, a lot of your culture is based on personalities and people you can't control, and hiring is still important. But it is incredible to me how people will rise to the culture they're a part of, and how culture and the systems surrounding people will enable them to become better.

Define your company culture well. Know what kind of company you want, and create _that kind of culture._ Hire based on that as best you can, with people you believe will fit with your culture. But when you invariably end up with people who aren't those perfect rockstar A-listers you think you need, don't throw them away. Stick to your culture and be emphatic about it. Teach them, allow them to learn. Have a culture of positive personal development, not static employee hiring or firing decisions.

Do you think Stripe hires 100% perfect employees? Do you really think that's why their culture works?

I think it's the exact opposite. Their employees work because they've figured out a great culture, and they value it highly, and hold it as sacred. That's a _company_ value, not an employee value. It's shared, and it comes from the whole group, glued together by the resolve of a leadership that knows it.

Figure that out, and you can achieve what Stripe has. If you think it's just a hiring strategy; sorry, try again.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming>

<comment><AUTHOR> " culture magically comes out of it is ludicrous"

What I was trying to say is that it's well nigh impossible to force a culture to go in a certain way. Most you can do is have a certain type of work process, don't micromanage, have a flat structure, small teams and let people be independent and/or support employees working remotely if they wish (if you want that kind of culture that is).

"Hire based on that as best you can, with people you believe will fit with your culture"

I was also saying that you can't really determine culture fit in the course of a regular interview process. You can somewhat determine their work ethic from asking them about past experiences and projects.

Otherwise, I think we are pretty much saying the same thing.

<comment><USER5> Awesome. I guess my addition to what you said is basically that you can lead your company culture to a degree, by doing the kinds of things you mention and creating a structure that supports a good culture. Also culture really does affect people once you reach a certain size. I think you're mainly talking about smaller companies, basically how to "bootstrap culture", but it's important to keep it going as you grow and realize not only how your employees affect your culture, but how your culture affects your employees.

Thanks, & apologies if I came off harshly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paul, your ability to refrain from micromanaging is probably the #1 thing towards trust and building a great culture. You need to hire the right people so you don't have to micromanage, but that's a given.

</comment><comment><USER7> Glad to see you guys growing and kicking ass Stammy. Keep it up :)

</comment><comment><USER8> this is why you hire all your friends

<comment><USER9> Do you want a job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am really getting sick of this word, "Startup". It seems like every other article I read is an article about a "Startup". Let's call them what they are, a small business. No more hipster talk :(

<comment><USER11> Startup has a very specific definition. It refers to a company that aims to solve a problem and/or create something new in a particular industry. This means that it is a subset of the small business category; the corner deli that just opened up last week is a small business, but not a startup. On the other hand, a new tech firm that is trying to figure out an innovative alternative to email is both a small business and a startup.

I'd say the biggest thing that distinguishes startups from other small businesses is the risk factor. When your goal is to solve challenging problems in your field, then by definition your chances of success are low. After all, the problems are categorized as "challenging for a reason: nobody has been able to find a simple and elegant solution to them yet. Whereas a typical small business operates on relatively safe territory - they are most likely providing identical products and services as other players in their industry. So their risk is a lot lower.

<comment><USER12> I've generally worked in "startup" environments, and I actually do mentally translate that word into "small business." I consider it to have more realistic connotations. YMMV of course.</comment></comment></comment>


The State of MySQL: The Elephant in the Room - <AUTHOR> http://www.zetetic.net/blog/2009/02/10/the-state-of-mysql-the-elephant-in-the-room

<comment><USER2> When FreeBSD was released, at 27 Feb 2008, Kris Kennaway posted a nice slideshow that includes some PostgreSQL and MySQL benchmarks:

<http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20Preview.pdf>

Database-wise, they should be still considered recent. PostgreSQL features impressive scaling there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just launched a Windows-Apache-Postgres-Python/Django stack on EC2 using Elastic block for the postgres database storage. That install worked like a charm, and I'm running www.cuuute.com on it right now.

I had an urge to try MySQL as a database, and I found an installer bug that broke the installation and messed up my server. The installer died giving me a "MySQL can't install as a service" error, and then not allowing me to go forward. So, I did that a couple of times. I then realized that the installer had installed MySQL each time I ran the installer, but didn't complete it.

I Googled for an hour and couldn't find a resolution to the issue, just a bunch of forums= threads asking for help on the same problem for the past 9 months.

Postgres for the win. BTW EC2 + Elastic block rocks like Dokken for a WAPP setup.

<comment><USER4> Why do you want to use Windows if you're not using SQLServer, .NET, or other nice stuff that doesn't run elsewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always used Postgres, but don't think the copyright assignment thing is _that_ big a problem. The FSF does that, and it seems to work out ok.

<comment><USER6> I think there is a big difference between the two.

The FSF uses copyright assignment to ensure that open source code is not legally encumbered.

MySQL uses the copyright assignment so they can sell code contributed by open source developers in their commercial platform without compensating the authors.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's a good point. Well, like I said, I am firmly in the Postgres camp in any case. I've never enjoyed discovering things about Mysql like the fact that even InnoDB doesn't allow you to modify the DB transactionally.

<comment><USER7> Wait... what?

Looks like InnoDB supports transactions, no? [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-transaction- mo...](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-transaction-model.html)

<comment><USER5> <http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2008/9/3/ddl_transactions/>

"MySQL doesn't support DDL transactions;"

Meaning you can't change the schema transactionally. InnoDB handles data transactions ok, but I hadn't realized that it doesn't handle schema changes. It seems like I'm always discovering some little nasty about Mysql when I am forced to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It feels good when your higher-quality, smaller bandwagon starts to overtake the giant, rickety one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wait, was there supposed to be some content in there? That post was basically flamebait. You can sum up everything useful in there with news that's already made the rounds, "MySQL founders left Sun."

</comment><comment><USER10> My beef about MySQL used to be technical but in the last 3 - 4 years that has evaporated, and now it is purely about the license. I cannot understand why anybody uses a database for which the only official client side drivers are GPL, rather than (at least) LGPL. Unless you really truly intend that your own app will be licensed GPL and so will every other application / piece / component/ that ever needs to interact with your database in any way, it is a ball and chain around your neck which seems crazy to place there when there are other equally good alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER11> At the moment, it's not even possible to download and install MySQL anymore.

I was setting up a Wordpress install a week ago, so I headed over to MySQL.org and hit the download link. They won't let you even download it without having your company "Reviewed" these days. So I filled out my info and was told I'd hear back when they were ready.

That was a week ago. No word back. I still can't even download it.

I could never understand anybody would use MySQL for anything business critical. Now it seems that nobody is allowed to use it for anything at all.

<comment><USER12> The article presents the problem as mostly organizational and not with the actual software. Maybe the parent comment was a little off topic, but it also serves to further illustrate the problem.

The parent commenter was familiar enough with the product to know he wanted to use it, but the project and its strategy is so disorganized that he walked away empty handed. Now he's unknowingly spreading misinformation to other people who may be deciding whether or not to use the product.

This is really a perfect example of what the article discussed. MySQL tries to present itself as an open source organization but does not function as such, resulting in confusion and frustration among contributors. The fact that consumers are also confused over what they can and can't do only goes to show that these mixed messages have permeated the entire organization.

<comment><USER13> This is an ooold problem, and I don't mean organizational, but people confusing the download link. I think I did it first at least 5 years ago. Still, the GP should be downmodded at least to a pale gray, maybe -2, and stay there. An honest mistake is still a mistake, and it's our job to mark it clearly as such.

As far as the project being disorganized, I'd much rather think this comes from the old days when men were men, documentations came in man pages and people were ashamed of not RTFM. I know I held my head down for at least a week after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have tried to search for MySQL vs. PostgreSQL benchmarks and most of them date to 2007. Are there any recent benchmarks that compare these databases?

I personally use MySQL and I think it's an OK database (performance and installation wise) and I think it's a bit risky to jump on PostgreSQL when most others use MySQL (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo, Google just to name a few).

<comment><USER15> Benchmarks between DBs are pretty rare because they are so difficult to control for. The configurations make a big difference. One set of benchmarks is here: <http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6> but thats in 2006. Also, MySQL has known fatal bugs in the production release so mysql isn't exactly a safe choice.

<comment><USER16> > _Also, MySQL has known fatal bugs in the production release so mysql isn't > exactly a safe choice._

Outright FUD.

<comment><USER15> Not quite:

MySQL GA release with known crashing bugs: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380092>

Comparison of MySQL and PostgreSQL releases: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381899>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Postgres doesn't have native replication AFAIK - what are the state of the plugin projects that provide this functionality, and how do they rate against the MySQL clustering?

<comment><USER6> Feature wise, I don't think there are many things that MySQL can do that PostgreSQL can't given a proper configuration. The main difference is that PostgreSQL doesn't include things like clustering as part of the core distribution like MySQL. They are often released and maintained as third-party add-ons to the core platform.

For instance, PostgreSQL has a number of projects that facilitate clustering. Slony-I is a stable open source replication framework (<http://www.slony.info/>). PGCluster provides a multi-master replication facility (think Oracle RAC). PGpool allows front end load balancing of connections.

<comment><USER18> AFAIK, none of the add-on replication mechanisms you mentioned can guarantee total consistency across multiple database backends: OIDs are not replicated, and there are no hard guarantees against external modifications taking your databases out of sync.

As an alternative, you can use Point-In-Time-Recovery (PITR), also known as "log shipping", to transfer copies of your write-ahead log files from a master server to a warm standby. PITR allows you to have an exact replica of your master database, modulo whatever delay you incur in the log transfer itself.

For those who haven't aren't familiar with write-ahead logs, they function much like the logging in modern filesystems: changes are written there before being flushed to disk, so any incomplete transactions can be replayed from the logs if the server goes down unexpectedly.

Of course, the log-shipping method doesn't allow your secondary server to serve as a read-only replica as MySQL's built-in replication does. Largely for that reason, (depending on your workload and requirements, of course) MySQL may be a better choice. However, I've found Postgres PITR to be an excellent option for low to medium-traffic databases in those cases where I'm willing to trade the possibility of the loss of a few seconds' updates for guarantees that my DDL, object identities, and constraints will be maintained consistently between my replicas.

For those who are curious, the PostgreSQL docs online have a decent introduction into the use of write-ahead logs for replication and backups:

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/wal.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Relational databases are so overrated.</comment>


CSS3 Ping Pong, with scoring - <AUTHOR> http://cssdeck.com/labs/css3-pong-with-scoring

<comment><USER2> I hate to be the inevitable nitpicking HN commenter, but this doesn't work in Firefox.

<comment><USER3> I think these comments are relevant - can be kind of frustrating to try something and wonder if you're just doing something wrong vs. if it is broken.

Unrelatedly, thought it was a pretty well-done and clever game, I'm impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey guys.

Thanks for the feedback. It's very much a work-in-progress and I was surprised to find it here.

It's certainly 'Chrome-centric' at the moment -- but I don't think there's any reason it shouldn't _eventually_ work in most modern browsers.

Taking the bat off the cursor when it's outside the court area is probably a smart move. Will do.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just a note: you cannot defeat the AI and your score always stays 0. Nice hack though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nicely written SASS! :)

I like the trick of using radiobutton/hover interacting to create the scoring systems, very cool.

One improvement suggestion would be to change the player paddle image to be default when you move out of the court? Then it would feel like you could click on the Alex Walker name and see who this person is. Because atm it does not work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very nifty. Why does the ball pass through the paddle though?

<comment><USER8> You need to keep the paddle more to the left, by the end of the table. I don't know if this is a feature or a bug.

<comment><USER9> You actually cannot hit the all more than once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if it would be possible to make it so the player could win...

      <!-- Player 1 score (tip: um... it never changes) -->

Changing the speed to 0.2 and watching the CPU player keep up was fun, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> 0.1, and he turned into Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very, very cool. We'll be able to use some of these concepts in the real world in about 8 or so years, but someone needs to be sitting on the bleeding edge and abusing CSS like this.

</comment><comment><USER12> A writeup for this would be awesome. Just when I think I've seen the limits of CSS, something like this comes along.

<comment><USER4> I actually have a write-up 80% written.

I showed the demo to a work buddy yesterday and a few hours later it popped up on HN. The genie got out of the bottle a little early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> CPU seems to be playing at 'undefeatable' skill level. Is there a way to decrease her skill level?

<comment><USER4> At the moment, no.

Right now, the truth is, the millisecond you serve, you've already lost. The only question is how how long it will take.

I originally built the thing just as an interesting animation, and one of the guys at work said 'Hey wouldn't it be cool if you could play it?' I laughed off the idea at the time, but later started to wonder if it was maybe possible. It's ended up more playable than I ever imagined -- that's not great play, but I doubted it would have any game play value.

I do have the inkling of a method I _might_ be able to make the robot player defeatable. I'll mull it over for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool, has a few glitches though.

Such as if you just click the ball and never move your paddle you can never be scored on unless you move your paddle

<comment><USER4> I don't _think_ there's anything I can do about that -- short of using JavaScript, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Basically, every time you move the cursor, the browser checks to see if you triggered a new hover state. If you keep still it assumes nothing has changed.

In this demo it's the thing being 'hovered over' that's doing a lot of the moving -- but the browser doesn't ever check for that.

Maybe there's a better alternative to :hover? CSS is obviously a limited toolset when it comes to this kind of thing.

The challenge is there for anyone who wants to fork it ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had a good laugh trying with these settings: $speed: 0.1; /* 1=fast 10=slow _/ $updown-speed:(0.1s_ $speed);</comment>


The Most Powerful Feature of Go Is The Least Sexy - grey-area http://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/07/23/the-most-powerful-feature-of-go-is-the-least-sexy/

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be marked (2013) but otherwise, yes, it's a good article about a part of Go that isn't much hyped.</comment>


Why are Russian coronavirus doctors mysteriously falling out of windows? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21248553/coronavirus-russia-doctors-windows-death <comment><USER2> wait. it was not fakenews?</comment>


Responsive Tables in Pure CSS - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.livingsocial.com/blog/2015/04/06/responsive-tables-in-pure-css/ <comment><USER2> Changing the table format from rows to "cards" is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE solution. I don't understand why people do this. It's not a table anymore. You can't easily compare the figures in the columns against each other.

The optimal solution, in my opinion, would be if you could specify a viewport width within a section of the site. The browser would then shrink that portion down and the user would see the full table, shrunk down to the width of the browser. The user can then magnify that area to see the data better.

Not sure if I'm making sense here. Also, I don't think this is technically possible right now.

<comment><USER3> If you are using a phone you are probably not doing some heavy math with row comparisons.

<comment><USER4> It's not about "heavy math." On a small-screened device like a phone, information density is _more_ important, not less. This change dramatically reduces the density, so you have to do much more scrolling to see the same amount of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article doesn't explain all tricks they use. A media query is used to apply the stylesheet selectively to small window sizes. That stylesheet splits the table into multiple ones.

The original table's border is removed, and every tr is styled to look like a table by giving it a border. tds are turned into rows by setting display:block. The td rows are given row headers using pseudo elements, which pulls their content from an attribute on the corresponding td.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I wanted to focus on using pseudo elements to pull content in from data- attrs but obviously I could/should have gone into more detail on the other bits and pieces. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like an impressive approach for data that uses a table for grouping but remains understandable when grouped linearly with duplicated labels.

However, for tables showing genuinely tabular data, I'd almost always prefer to just see the original table and scroll horizontally, perhaps with appropriate heading columns or rows fixed so that they always display.

Does anyone have appropriate CSS that produces an effect similar to "position: fixed" but _only_ for horizontal scrolling, not for vertical scrolling? Or only for vertical scrolling, with it scrolling off the screen when scrolling away the last row of the table?

Imagine the following as a large table:

             | col1 | col2 | col3
        row1 |  d11 |  d12 |  d13
        row2 |  d21 |  d22 |  d23
        row3 |  d31 |  d32 |  d33

Scrolling horizontally should keep the row labels visible, and scrolling vertically should leave the column labels visible until the last data row is scrolled off the screen. And ideally that should not require _any_ JavaScript.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it can be easily done with a combination of divs, fixed width and overflow-x: scroll.

But I doubt one can do that with a table only, which is a shame, because it would lose markup semantic.

Edit: Little PoC [http://codepen.io/anon/pen/LEoyrK](http://codepen.io/anon/pen/LEoyrK)

<comment><USER9> Nearly every solution for this I have seen or implemented uses a combination of 2 divs with tables inside to work the scrolling. Tables just aren't built to do that well in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> _Nearly every solution for this I have seen or implemented uses a combination of 2 divs with tables inside to work the scrolling._

Yes, we use a variation of that theme as well.

It works to a useful degree, as long as you have enough control over the dimensions that you don't wind up with the row heights differing between the row headers table and the data rows table.

Of course the mark-up is semantically poor, but then HTML's enforced columns- inside-rows nesting for tables is already horrible to work with if you want to show a data record per column and use the row labels for the fields rather than vice versa, making any sort of templating system fragile as well. Rather like floats, this is one of those areas where no amount of CSS tweaks can now make up for underlying weaknesses in the spec of HTML itself.

 _Tables just aren 't built to do that well in my opinion._

We could do better than what we have, though. Hopefully we will before too long, if position:sticky becomes standardised, complete with the notes about making it work properly in a tabular context where some other positioning explicitly isn't required to.

I'm not sure how effectively we'll be able to write a comprehensive polyfill without resorting to JS, so maybe we'll have to settle for gracefully degrading to having the entire table scroll without locking the row headers in place. At least the table mark-up will be more sensible than having two completely separate table elements with some sort of wrapper(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do this in my SharePoint responsive design classes. Students are taught how to make a custom table for a list view to include the data-attributes necessary to render field names at different breakpoints as well as data- attributes to set which breakpoints the fields should be visible. It's only one possible solution, as you've found (and others have mentioned), and I do show others (like overflow-x: scroll and such).

Data tables are hard in a corporate setting when mobile access is thrown in. It takes a lot of planning to determine the actual needs of users whose usage context puts them on a mobile phone or a tablet. Mobile <> in motion, and tablet <> on a couch. Oil rig operators may use a tablet to access production data, and so their tables would need larger targets for scrolling or toggling columns, and a larger/heavier font with higher contrast colors to be visible in harsh lighting conditions. Field sales reps may be using their phone while in the lobby before a sales meeting, and don't necessarily need just a subset of data.

Content may be king, but context is its queen.

<comment><USER12> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Our users never seem to like this approach. It does not work very well at all with complex tables (colspans, rowspans), sorting and filtering feels funky if you don't know it's a table from the start and it's insanely repetitive. Most of the time we end up wrapping the `table` in a div with `overflow: auto` and then they can scroll around the table. The only issue is when a column ends at the edge of the screen so a user doesn't know to scroll. What we did to help with this is put a shadow on the edges in the directions you can scroll.

<comment><USER6> It's definitely not for every scenario. It will depend on your data, whether or not you need sorting as you mentioned, and how many total rows there are in the table (card effect becomes too much after 20 or so). However for this simple use case, we thought it the best way to go.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely agreed. It works great for this situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands Chris Coyier - 4 years ago.

He did this and added some reader submissions on other approaches.

[https://css-tricks.com/responsive-data-tables/](https://css- tricks.com/responsive-data-tables/)

<comment><USER6> I linked to that post in the in the article and mentioned the reasons it was slightly different but built upon that idea. He throws his content in the stylesheets.

<comment><USER14> Yup, though the different way to do it with data- attributes and no content in the stylesheet was also written about here [1] in 2012, and demo'd here [2] at the bottom of the page in the "No more tables" example.

We've been using this same technique in several projects where it seemed appropriate for the past few years and have been loving it.

[1] [https://css-tricks.com/responsive-data-table-roundup/](https://css- tricks.com/responsive-data-table-roundup/)

[2] [http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/#no-more- tables](http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/#no-more-tables)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I presumed I wasn't the first under the sun to do it; just thought it would be interesting to write about since some of my fellow front-enders hadn't seen the technique and google didn't turn up either of those links :)

<comment><USER14> And those links weren't very descriptive and didn't fully explain the technique, so definitely helps to add to the ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used this technique on a project recently and in the end, we collectively determined that we didnt really even need the labels if the column info was thoughtout enough. So my advice is, make sure you need the labels before you automatically take this route. Order #, Item, Price type stuff can be pretty self-explanatory.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is similar to the solution I came up with for a Fantasy Sports web app that needed responsive tables, check out the table class demo page: [http://ballr.com/new_design/tables](http://ballr.com/new_design/tables)

The problem was that there is no way to reliably have the responsive styles kick in with CSS alone. You need to know how wide that table is on the page to know when it needs to respond. At his shortfall of CSS (and others) has driven me to create a CSS polyfill to add Element Query support to CSS so I finally can build tables that are responsive wherever they display. My plugin is available at [http://elementqueries.com](http://elementqueries.com) but I haven't had a chance to apply it to tables yet

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting! The author should consider using the ISO 8601 recommended date format though (`%F` in `date`). It doesn't completely remove the ambiguity, but the standardization helps to avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER18> First a disclaimer: I am a programmer, not a designer or UX specialist.

When I make a responsive table I feel like turning every column into a distinct row makes it _more_ difficult to navigate; instead I prefer to split the columns into groups and wrap them with alternate coloring. So if there are 5 columns maybe 3 go in the top of the row and 2 go in the bottom of the row (top and bottom sharing the same background color).

Is this kind of cols-to-rows substitution more user-friendly?

<comment><USER19> An example would help answer definitively, but based on that description I don't think most people would find it intuitive. At a glance, it probably has a janky feel too. But I could be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I know it's not _cool_ to use tables, but this is a table of numbers. Tables were designed for this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nothing shows on IE11 on Win7. Also the header image has a horizontal scroll bar.

[http://postimg.org/image/qxyl332ef/](http://postimg.org/image/qxyl332ef/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of a project I stumbled upon while researching responsive table patterns a few months ago: [https://github.com/filamentgroup/tablesaw](https://github.com/filamentgroup/tablesaw)

Demo: [http://filamentgroup.github.io/tablesaw/demo/stack.html](http://filamentgroup.github.io/tablesaw/demo/stack.html)

We didn't have the time to implement this in our app, but it looked great. I'd like to see how easy it is to integrate to use Bootstrap styles.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very similar to jQuery Mobile reflow table (uses some JS)

[https://api.jquerymobile.com/table- reflow/](https://api.jquerymobile.com/table-reflow/)

A while ago, I css-ed a table into a list for small displays, because lists seem "natural" to me on mobile than any crammed table. Not perfect but been using it ever since:

[http://jsbin.com/wisaxawozaqa/1/watch?html,output](http://jsbin.com/wisaxawozaqa/1/watch?html,output)

</comment><comment><USER24> This indeed transforms information about a group of records from a tabular spreadsheet into individual card representations.

The people who are pointing out that this solution isn't "a more powerful responsive label scrolling spreadsheet" are right, but they're likely only after a faster horse.

As an aside, a table can have multiple tbodies according to HTML specs, so there's no need to use CSS generated elements to achieve the card styling in the demo. Just wrap each record into a tbody and style that.

<comment><USER25> So if you have say 100+ records in a table you will end up with 100+ extra <tbody> and </tbody> tags? Just to style it for mobile? I don't think its a good solution

<comment><USER26> The same can be said about adding anything to repeated items.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This solution is pure love! Any idea about the license? It doesn't appear to say anywhere and I would love to add it to Picnic CSS as a plugin (developer here).

<comment><USER14> They didn't publish any code that is non-trivial to implement (and all but 1 line of code is specific to their actual data and styling), so there wouldn't be any license to worry about. This technique has also been published before ([http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/#no-more- tables](http://elvery.net/demo/responsive-tables/#no-more-tables)), so you're allowed to use the technique just as much as they are ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a great approach for when you have complete control over your markup. If it's user-generated (like a table in the body of a post in a CMS, for example), it gets trickier.

I have a tiny jQuery plugin to stick a span inside a cell to form the heading at small sizes, but I like the data-attribute approach better. I think I'll change my plugin to do it this way now.

Related: Hey Travis and Will, nice work on this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hiya! What's your jQuery plugin?

<comment><USER28> Right here. Like I said, it's super basic. [https://github.com/freshyill/Responsive-Table- Helper](https://github.com/freshyill/Responsive-Table-Helper)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's an excellent plugin for WordPress called FooTable that works in conjunction with TablePress that does something similar.

<comment><USER30> FooTable has my favorite implementation of this idea. It still looks like a table, but with fewer columns. Each row gets a big [+] to expand down to show the "hidden" values with their column headers as key-value pairs.

The best part is that I can choose which columns "hide" in whatever order I want, for however many breakpoints I want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We've been using a similar technique over at untapt for a small table that display's past job applications:

Small version: [http://i.imgur.com/sJOxCQw.png](http://i.imgur.com/sJOxCQw.png)

Large version: [http://i.imgur.com/xrJ4sBt.png](http://i.imgur.com/xrJ4sBt.png)

</comment><comment><USER32> The CSS Values and Units Module Level 3 details that the `attr()` function is at risk of being dropped during the CR period: [http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css- values-3/#funcdef-attr](http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-values-3/#funcdef-attr).

<comment><USER33> Is that `attr()` at all or just the expanded version which allows different units and fallbacks?

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/attr#Browse...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/attr#Browser_compatibility) goes back far enough that I'd be surprised if they'd drop a feature which has been around for such a long period of time or that the browsers vendors would do anything other than ignore the spec until it was corrected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting read, but why no JS? Don't all mobile devices play well with JS? Is it a file size issue?

<comment><USER28> Why add JS if it isn't necessary?

<comment><USER35> That's a pretty trite response. I can think of a few reasons:

1) Maintainability. JS is probably easier to grok in some circumstances, ie. you don't have to send new devs to a blog post to explain the CSS on your project.

2) Cost/benefit analysis of dev time, ie. you could do X (where X is some minor display that 1% of your users see) in pure CSS in 12 hours, or do the same in 30 min of JS.

3) Cost/benefit analysis of page size, ie. you can do in 4 lines of JS what would take 400 lines of CSS. Sometimes a few lines of jQuery obviates several hundred lines of CSS (between the media queries, browser-specific overrides, and so forth).

The interesting question the article should address was why the CSS solution was a better choice than the JS solution. I have a gut feeling the answer is way better than "we just wanted CSS only for purity's sake", and personally I'm interested in knowing what that answer is!

<comment><USER36> Well the thing is, none of your reasons are applicable here. He has a valid question as to why you would need JS as this is purely a styling between mobile and desktop. The only thing you could potentially do with JS would be to strip the content and rerender it which would be very strongly tied to the HTML structure. Once again, your points are valid, mostly, but for this particular problem, you wouldn't need or even want to do it via JS. I think that's the solution to the original question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> You'd think an article about responsive CSS would be readable on a mobile screen.

</comment><comment><USER38> I like the first table better.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's not "pure CSS" if it's using data-attributes. It's CSS _and HTML_. With an access to both of these it's a trivial job. It would be sensational if someone would find a solution for that without using the latter (or JS, or server side processing) - for example: for the user generated content.

My joke-solution (working only for fixed amount of rows, with fixed dimensions): multiplying the headers for each row with _text-shadow_.

</comment><comment><USER40> We ended up prepending column labels to each row in order to get the Bitnami pricing page [1] to work on mobile. Similar to this case it works for a small dataset, but I don't creating a 'card' for each row in a >10 row table is ever going to produce a good experience.

[1] [https://bitnami.com/cloud/pricing](https://bitnami.com/cloud/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER41> I hate it when web developers do things like this. The normal version of things is almost always better it seems.

<comment><USER42> The normal method lacks the responsive features in this implementation.

<comment><USER41> That's exactly what I don't like about it.

<comment><USER42> You don't want your websites to be responsive? OK, well I'm hoping IE6 still runs on your computer/phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A media query? Dang Living Social tearing up the engineering scene over here.

<comment><USER44> You missed the points.

He is using attr(data-label); to pull the titles from the data attributes and then uses Pseudo Elements to add the title to each td while displaying them in blocks. The end effect is very nice and requires no JS.</comment></comment>