Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://brandur.org/interfaces <comment><USER2> I really like your tone throughout and the length is perfect. It is difficult to put down something everyone uses without coming off as arrogant and rude. Even the calls to action at the end seem gentle enough to not spark flame wars. It's a fine line, someone may disagree with me on that.

I can see this becoming one of those canonical pages that is still being referenced 10 years later. Being short enough to share and simple enough to understand makes this a great resource. I have tried to convey similar feelings to people who love the applications you've used as examples. Maybe this will help.

Great use of images to demonstrate your points. Many articles lately seem to just add in unrelated images for no reason.

> HTML and CSS gave developers perfect visual control over what their > interfaces looked like, allowing them to brand them and build experiences > that were pixel-perfect according to their own ends

I'm not sure this is quite right. It takes a ton of work to get an HTML/CSS page to display properly in every browser. I think my response is specifically related to the use of the word "perfect" \-- maybe something else like "total" would be more appropriate.

All I could think of while watching the clip from Minority Report was how tired my arms would get from all that full-range motion.

I like the submitted title better than the title on the actual page. You should consider revising it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It makes me really happy to read your thoughts here. (I wrote TFA.)

Calling out Slack in particular may have been a little incendiary, but I hope that it's adequately conveyed that it's a general problem and not meant to be a particular slight to them.

> Many articles lately seem to just add in unrelated images for no reason.

Totally. This drives me nuts :)

> I'm not sure this is quite right. It takes a ton of work to get an HTML/CSS > page to display properly in every browser. I think my response is > specifically related to the use of the word "perfect" \-- maybe something > else like "total" would be more appropriate.

Yes you're right. "Total" seems more apt in this case.

> I like the submitted title better than the title on the actual page. You > should consider revising it!

+1. I've been told by a few people (including you) now that my titles could use work — and they're right. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> While you're fixing the 'pixel perfect' thing, Mark Zuckerberg probably did not 'ignite' anyone either (one hopes). Perhaps you mean 'incensed' or 'infuriated' or something like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Mark Zuckerberg probably did not 'ignite' anyone either (one hopes)._

Haha, thanks. It wasn't meant literally, but more in the form of "igniting" an emotional reaction. I tthinkkkk I'm using this one properly [1].

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignite](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/ignite)

<comment><USER3> Yeah but you're not saying ignited a reaction, you're saying ignited people. I guess it would make sense metaphorically for some profoundly moving thing but then it just seems overwrought. Zuck, Igniter!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ever since software design became a thing there's been a tug-of-war between visual design and interaction design. And it doesn't help that those skills are usually not held by the same person on a design team (even if many visual designers think of themselves as interaction designers).

I agree with the general thrust of this piece, and think we're in a bit of a dark age of interface design right now. Too much attention is paid to visual design and not enough to interaction design.

But while speed of response in a UI is certainly a factor in usability, it's not as significant as things like mode, navigation, habituation, vocabulary or consistency. So to that extent I think the article isn't really addressing the main problem, which is that time spent on visual design should be better spent on designing for usability.

I'm also not sure what to make of the idea of calling for the terminal to be revised and considered the way forward in user interfaces. Apart from speed, what problem would that solve?

And I'm intrigued when it says interfaces should be "composable by default so that good interfaces aren't just something produced by the best developer/designers in the world, but could be reasonably expected from even junior people in the industry".

I'm afraid I don't understand what that means.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading! (I wrote this.)

> _I 'm also not sure what to make of the idea of calling for the terminal to > be revised and considered the way forward in user interfaces. Apart from > speed, what problem would that solve?_

So I didn't mean to imply exactly that this is definitively the way forward. What I meant to imply is that the terminal programs we have today are flawed, but overall closer to a better model compared to other interfaces we're producing — mainly the web.

Interfaces in web browsers are decently okay, but they have some fundamental problems that are unlikely to ever be tractable. For example:

* Speed. Even the fastest websites are slow compared to native applications. The median speed of a web application (for say your bank, credit card company, or local utility) is _terrible_ because that's the default given the current framework. You need to a high level of mastery and knowledge beyond what most developers have to build something better.

* Consistency. Every web app looks and behaves differently. Instead of learning common conventions once, users learn everything afresh over and over again.

* Usability. You'll never get better at using most web applications because there's no framework for advanced usage at all; instead all of them cater to the lowest common denominator. There are a few exceptions like Gmail's keyboard shortcuts, but they're rare, and not very powerful compared to something like Vim, where the more more you learn the greater your productivity becomes.

* Composability. I try to show in my GitHub copy + paste video that even copying things out of web pages is hard. (This one addressed further below.)

> _And I 'm intrigued when it says interfaces should be "composable by default > so that good interfaces aren't just something produced by the best > developer/designers in the world, but could be reasonably expected from even > junior people in the industry"._ > > _I 'm afraid I don't understand what > that means._

I might have mixed a couple different ideas there, but when I'm talking about composability, think like pipes in a shell. Just imagine if I could say something like: "okay Credit Card App, pipe the list of charges that I've tagged with 'corporate' into Concur and file expense reports for each one".

The closest we can hope for something like that is for someone to build a third party app that uses the APIs of both your credit card and Concur and does this for you, but even there, you're still operating along the fixed rails provided by another app. Imagine if you had flexibility on your own terms that was available to even non-power users by having your credit card and Concur provide standardized primitives that your web shell could hook into and use.

As for the comment on junior developers: what I meant is that it's possible to create a fast and good interface on the web, but the amount of knowledge that you need to do so is mind boggling. You'll need to understand at least: design, CSS, JavaScript and probably using it to build fast client-side interfaces, asset compilation, CDNs, server-side performance measurement, etc. The barrier is just too high.

I hope that helps to clarify some things!

<comment><USER5> I'm late to this thread, but quite surprised to see nobody mentioned Mozilla's Ubiquity addon [1], which I think best demonstrates the idea of "composability" in a GUI you're trying to convey. I think adding a description/screenshot of Ubiquity or explaining one of its use-cases would explain your idea more clearly and actually put someone on the right path if they accept your call to action.

Incidentally, Aza Raskin, one of the main developers of Ubiquity is the son of Jef Raskin who led the work on Apple's Macintosh.

At one point in college I was fascinated enough with Ubiquity to try to continue the work on it (since the project was shelved), but my programming skills were just not up to it. Perhaps I'll get back to it sometime soon :)

[1]: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_Tutorial)

<comment><USER4> Ubiquity (and it's related predecessor, Enso) was an excellent idea and I'd almost forgotten I'd used it for about 18 months before the project died out. Raskin took the idea from his father of course, and it's discussed in his book "The Humane Interface", one of the best books about software design ever to have been written.

<comment><USER5> Yep, The Humane Interface is already on my (apparently ever-growing) reading list! Should probably bump it up as I've seen it recommended so much. Thanks :)

I've been thinking, with all the huge advances in AI/ML in the last few years, now might be exactly the right time for an ambitious project like Ubiquity, since it relies heavily on natural-language processing. Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> My thoughts would be similar to the ones expressed by Robert Kosara (and Ben Shneiderman) on that point I think:

[https://eagereyes.org/blog/2016/the-personified-user- interfa...](https://eagereyes.org/blog/2016/the-personified-user-interface- trap)

<comment><USER5> I can see where that's coming from, but this is a one-sided view. It misses the obvious conclusion: interface agents (to use the article's terminology) are _complementary_ to direct manipulation interfaces, not a replacement.

Direct manipulation is great at discoverability, when I'm exploring the choices available to me, but it sucks if I'm looking for something specific (for software with a minimum level of complexity, like Photoshop or Excel). Interface agents have the opposite characteristics, as the article explains. So, they're complementary techniques.

To provide a simpler example, not involving AI: if the user is a domain expert (say, a graphic designer), the ability to search for and perform a specific action quickly is far more important than discoverability. For example, the user may already know that GIMP provides a feature for drawing a path but have only used Photoshop in the past and now they just can't find that action.

Aside: it is telling that established design software like Photoshop / GIMP has such a bewildering maze of menus even today. But if you take Google Chrome, for instance, it provides a stellar searchable user interface [1].

[1]: [http://vickychijwani.me/searchable-user-interfaces-are- the-f...](http://vickychijwani.me/searchable-user-interfaces-are-the-future/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most successful terminal system is the web browser, of course.

It's not a conventional terminal, in the sense of a monospaced grid of characters, but the architecture is the same: server and client are separated, all "business" logic resides or originates in the server, and the client is generic and reusable. I could offer public services over SSH, and anyone with an SSH client could connect. (Makes me think of BBSes.)

A specific application offered over SSH requires no pre-provisioning on the client; likewise web applications require no pre-provisioning. Of course, the web wasn't really intended as a terminal system, it was a hypertext system theoretically divorced from any given user interface, but it's certainly become an applications platform, and the way it's managed to inherit some benefits from terminal systems is a major reason why.

Nowadays probably most line-of-business, intranet applications are web-based, but there appear to be exceptions. I did see one business who kept its orders in some unknown application accessed via PuTTY, used quite proficiently by salespeople who AFAIK were otherwise nontechnical.

<comment><USER7> Car rental company? Afaik they're one of the big ones in that regard.

<comment><USER6> Nope, a kitchen appliance retailer in the UK, a small business. The application was basically a CRM for storing records of customers and orders with a DOS or IBM-esque console UI. Blue background, context-sensitive function key legends printed at the bottom of the screen. Modal dialogs were overlaid and didn't fill the whole terminal.

Since it was entirely keyboard driven it seemed pretty productive, probably moreso than the average webapp where even if you use Tab a lot there are cases where you're switching between keyboard and mouse a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lately I've been thinking about this exact thing, so it's interesting that someone has actually written an article about it. (With much better supporting details than I could come up with.)

I find it frustrating that in 2017 I still spend plenty of time waiting for the computer to do something. Occasionally even typing into a text field in a web browser is laggy on my high-end late-model iMac. For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up.

The terminal is not for everyone, but lately I've found it's the one environment where things can be instantaneous enough that my flow is not thrown off. For kicks, I installed XUbuntu on a $150 ARM Chromebook with the idea of mostly just using the terminal (and having a throwaway laptop that I'm not scared to use on the bus/train). I expected to mostly be using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into servers, but amazingly, most local tasks are still pretty instantaneous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading!

> _I find it frustrating that in 2017 I still spend plenty of time waiting for > the computer to do something. Occasionally even typing into a text field in > a web browser is laggy on my high-end late-model iMac. For every extra cycle > the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to > soak it up._

I totally agree. In a very subjective sense, it feels like despite our massive advancements in hardware, computers aren't getting any faster.

I have vivid memories using web browsers around 2000 or WinAmp 3 back in the mid 90s and they felt like about the same speed as what I get today. Obviously the complexity of our apps have increased by an order of magnitude or two, but the things we're doing with them are _not_ an order of magnitude more complex. In a very real sense it's like you say: we're soaking up all the advances that new hardware is providing, and mostly just because we can.

<comment><USER9> > computers aren't getting any faster.

Wirth's Law: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. And the hardware is getting faster slower than it used to, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Animations don't have to mean waiting! In particular, you can freely interact with tabs in iOS Safari (an example the article mentions) while switching between them, even during the animation. Good animations reinforce the relationships between UI elements. They help you remember where you are, how you got there, and how to get back when you're done. We shouldn't throw them out -- we just need to make them work properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right, but I also think that there's very few examples out there of animations that I'd consider within the bounds of making acceptable trade-offs between the usefulness of their visual hinting and their effect on productivity.

For one example, Apple designers are considered amongst the best in the world, but every animation on the iPhone could stand to be 10x faster. It's frustrating for me even just waiting for it to move from an app to the home screen after I hit the "home" button. Even though the animation is relatively short, there's a non-negligible effect on my workflow, and that adds up as I do it a thousand times a week and thousands of times a year.

I'd personally rather see all animations disabled rather than what we have today (or even just an option available to us to do that).

<comment><USER10> My point is that the animation speed wouldn't matter as much if the transition were implemented properly. Tapping on an app icon during the animation should start switching to that app right away. There's no reason you should be forced to wait at all!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The root problem is that no one sells software anymore. The vast majority of software is an interface to a service, where the goal is achieving minimal results in minimal time. Only software used by professionals gets the attention required to make quality, mature interfaces.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, very true, but I'm not sure that this necessarily precludes good/fast/usable interfaces.

Imagine if instead of building apps inside a browser, you instead have a good OS framework that allows you to build a native app for which you can ship updates easily and which simply talks to your backend's API. It would be a very similar model to what most of us use today in our browsers, but would open a lot of doors around what we're currently getting wrong with interfaces on the web.

It also already exists in a few limited forms: apps on iOS or Android for example.

<comment><USER12> Needing to ship updates frequently is the root of the problem, in my mind. If people would just build something they could stand behind, and not rely on any environmental flux corrections to stay useful, software would go back to being quick and minimal.

 _cough_ https _cough_

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think there's some truth to this.

When I look at games in particular, I'm amazed that you can have AAA titles that get hotfixes for bad bugs on pretty much the day they're released. This is made possible by sophisticated content distribution networks like Playstation's.

Twenty years ago your pressed a master disk, crossed your fingers, and tossed it to the wolves. If there was ever a serious problem discovered after release, it would be a huge hit to your bottom line to ever have to try and recall everything that went out.

Testing must have been much more comprehensive before to make the old system workable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMHO good animations are good design. Apple does a great job here. They display the minimum animation necessary for you to understand. You open an app and you see it opening.

Text terminals are terrible for something I need to do every single day: Showing others what I am doing on the computer.

Without animations you are like a person with autism disorder: It works for you but nobody that is watching you can understand what you are doing, you are in your world. You do a key combination you know(but others do not) and the screen changes instantly.

Repeat this a few times and you have a lot of confused people in your audience.

I agree that we need everything: something extremely fast, intuitive while beautiful and useful and extremely easy(and cheap and fast) to program.

But nobody has done it because it is hard as playing violin to be able to design a simple design alone, let alone make it fast. In the real world you need to pick your priorities, to constantly triage and make decisions.

<comment><USER14> Having animations 100% of the time to help with 1% use case of having an audience (if it even helps, I seriously doubt it) is horrible design. I also doubt that's the reason Apple had for putting them in, designers need to do something to prove they're useful so they add useless little bits of eye candy that really just slow everyone down.

<comment><USER15> Animations aren't just useful for when you have an audience. They convey a sense of space that's important to help the user orient themselves within the operating system. Things instantly appearing and disappearing is jarring, and you can easily lose your place unless you maintain an internal model of how everything works. Remember, Apple is laser-focused on user experience, and subtle animations are a part of that. Users have a hundred other things to do and the applications they use should be as low of a cognitive burden as possible.

<comment><USER16> If only they were subtle. Sure. We can compromise between hardcore austere tech-nerd interface and Fisher Price my-first-GUI.

<comment><USER15> That's Windows, isn't it? :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the spirit of this article. We don't really have a successful paradigm for how to design ambitious user interfaces for power user tools.

But I'm not sure I agree with most of the examples.

For example, Slack isn't really a power user tool. It's a tool that does its job best if everyone in the organization can understand and use it, and making it more like a terminal isn't going to help with that. Speeding it up would still be beneficial, of course. (Also, it looks like there are plenty of terminal clients for Slack if you're in to that.)

Things like animations can actually be very helpful in giving you an almost visceral understanding of the spatial logic of the UI. Without animations it becomes very abstract. It's about balance obviously, using repeated slow animations for branding purposes is not a good idea in a tool like a password manager that you unlock 20 times per day.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's frustrating to be shoved animations, with no intentionality, purpose.

As a designer, it's concerning that so much of ux design right now is focused on facade. Even among teams that care holistically, the surface level things still take priority.

Nielsen's usability heuristics from 1995 is still, extremely relevant today.

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability- heuristics/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure terminal-like interfaces are the way forward, but I have to say that I love the design of this site.

As an aside, you can actually turn off the sliding animation in MacOS spaces. There's a "reduce motion" setting in the accessibility preferences. Although, reducing motion replaces sliding with a glitchy fade animation, so it's swings and roundabouts.

<comment><USER20> I actually like the sliding animation, it's pretty fast and it shows what's going on. I often use it with the three finger swipe, so it'd be pretty weird to suddenly jump to a different space, but even with Cmd-1/2/3 it helps to orient oneself.

Although when reading ebooks I have page animation disabled, I guess because you mostly proceed to the next page, and there's no context switch it's all reading.

But I also prefer having two monitors for multiple contexts, no amount of virtual desktops with or without animation will beat that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s we made the decision to jump ship > from desktop apps and start writing the lion's share of new software for the > web.

I would argue that this started much earlier and was because of the problems with distributing, installing, and updating desktop apps. We even had names like "fat client" (it was meant to be pejorative) to refer to traditional desktop apps and "client-less" (it was meant to sound magical) to refer to web apps. There wasn't a problem with desktop development frameworks. There was only one, Windows, and those people who used it enjoyed it.

> HTML and CSS gave developers total visual control over what their interfaces > looked like, allowing them to brand them and build experiences that were > pixel-perfect according to their own ends. This seemed like a big > improvement over more limiting desktop development,

This isn't how I remember it. Developers didn't want total control, but publishers did. Browsers let you select background colors, font colors, sizes, and types. A website was never meant to render exactly the same. But then the publishers entered the picture and they expected a website to behave like a magazine. That's why we had whole websites that were made up of images only. CSS was invented to put a stop to this madness. However, it institutionalized the publishers mindset that websites should render the same everywhere.

Overall a lot of this article can be summed up as "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." As an industry, we do self-restraint very poorly.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some very interesting thoughts; I've been thinking them myself for some time. With regard to the limitations of terminals (rich media, typography, whitespace), these are limitations of current terminal emulators but are not an intrinsic limitation.

I've often wondered about the history of the terminal emulators we use. From xterm and onward, they have all emulated a basic DEC VT-100. A historical accident, or inertia? The VT-100 wasn't very sophisticated, and most emulators don't even emulate it fully. There were much more featureful terminals succeeding it, with colour and graphics, yet we didn't add support for them. What caused this whole aspect of computing to become stuck in the late 1970s? There are also specifications like ECMA-48 which standardise control for font and size/spacing/justification and a number of layout features, colour selection and much more. It also defines separate data and presentation layers. Mostly unimplemented except for a minimal number implemented by xterm. Some emulators have also implemented rudimentary graphics, wider colour selection, unicode support and mouse reporting, but nothing truly ground breaking.

It strikes me that what's really missing here is the development of a new class of terminal emulator which implements a much more advanced presentation layer. For example a full PS/PDF-style drawing model, and/or OpenGL-style graphics facilities. Combined with an extended set of control codes to manipulate the data layer, you could effectively have a browser rendering engine and DOM equivalent in terminal form. Which could be driven by any language capable of using stdin/stdout, from a shell script to Python and C++. No reason it couldn't be xterm compatible either; there's lots of ways to extend the control code space, and we already have termcap/info to add support for new functionality.

</comment><comment><USER23> There was a bug in the last version of iOS which, using an obscure series of commands to trigger, turned off all animations. It was amazing how much faster and more responsive the OS felt. It disappeared after each reboot and I eventually got sick of trying to trigger it but it was a good couple of weeks of iOS bliss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I saw this too, and it was like a momentary glimpse of Shangri-La before it disappeared back behind the clouds. I'd love to see Apple offer an option to disable all animations, permanently.

<comment><USER24> Android has that option, hidden in the "Developer Options" menu. Apple tends not to be friendly to customization, so I wouldn't expect them to add it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Absolutely agree. I find myself frustrated with using iOS Safari when opening a tab in the background - the animation has to finish before I can resume browsing the current page.

I also frequently think back to the OS we had on the Nokia 3310 generation of phones; how easy it was to navigate to exactly what you needed (with shortcuts like menu button > keypad 3 > keypad 2 or something like that). There were no animations to slow down that navigation either.

</comment><comment> sim- On the desktop, prelighting _used_ to be a functional aid: as the mouse cursor hovers between two items, the instantaneous lighting of the next and darkening of the previous provided immediate feedback that a click would reach that widget. Chromium and Chrome decided to fade this in and out (countering the whole usefulness of the feature), and now do some sort of lagged/animated mouse surround, which seems to make even less sense.

</comment><comment><USER26> Have you ever used BeOS or Haiku? 90% of the speed in Haiku is placebo, because it exactly has _zero_ "effects".

Of course it is also a very cleanly designed system and it takes advantage of the parallelism today's processors give us. If you work for a little while is Haiku, you will find everything else intolerable and slow.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish the author had gone into more detail as to how we elevate users to the skill level that they can use more "power user" oriented interfaces. Is it more training for the elderly, more exposure to computers when children are young, a combination, or something else? Per research from the Neilsen Norman Group ([https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill- levels/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/)), the vast majority of users are simply not at a "strong" level of computer skills. As a UX professional, if I had to make a UI that was tailored to the general public, I would specifically focus on power users last since they make up the smallest user group.

That being said, I agree with the opinion about superfluous animations. More programs need to have the ability to turn them off.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps it would be enough to just stop offering the shiny dumbing-down that are just there for marketing advantage. After all, people could manage to get their things done with DOS, people could manage to get their things done with Windows 3.1, Windows 95, etc., with early Linux. And, except for the last example, I don't mean computer scientist or technically literate people, non, just the average Joe could use those OSes and the software running on it when they wanted to or had to. So if we stop dumbing down people and doing everything to forbid them from learning anything, most of them are able to make the tiny effort it takes to learn at least basic things.

<comment><USER27> What would fall under basic things? I feel that the average user just wants their computer to work without having to think too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Animations are a lot more useful than no animations, if used correctly.

I love material design's principles on this regard, where animation is used to convey how the app works (where a menu came from, what will happen if clicking on something).

As for the examples, the author needs a faster computer or connection, all the apps mentioned that I've used don't feel sluggish at all. This includes Slack, which although takes a while when first connecting, it runs great after that.

I guess the way I see it is, animation isn't bad, but it can be used ineffectively, but like anything else.

</comment><comment><USER30> Slack waiting times are horrendous. Glad they are being called out on it

<comment><USER31> Given that Slack is IRC on steroids, I always think about e.g. the Freenode webchat - it makes you wait something like 20 seconds or so. Yeah, they do it for antispam/antitroll, but the effect (initial delay) is the same.

Once the apps are loaded, it's a simple alt-tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Been kinda playing with a similar notion in recent days.

The other day i learned of the existence of feh, the image viewer.

[https://feh.finalrewind.org/](https://feh.finalrewind.org/)

It seems to straddle between being a CLI and a GUI program.

And it got me thinking that while for Apple and Microsoft it kinda made sense to sideline the CLI and focus on the GUI as their CLI offerings were anemic to be polite, this hard split feels misplaced on unix derived platforms.

Instead the GUI on _nix can be used to enhance the CLI.

</comment><comment><USER33> I recently had some problems with my smart phone losing battery power too fast, so I started putting it in battery saving mode. I would have expected things to get more sluggish, but I actually experienced quite the opposite. In battery saving mode, most transitional animations are disabled, resulting in an (in my opinion) vastly more responsive experience. Since then, I have went out of my way to disable as many animations as possible, and I have not found myself missing any of them yet.

</comment><comment><USER34> For any interface state, there are only a few hundred plausible user interactions. CPU cores are getting cheaper and more numerous, so let's speculatively execute all of them and keep the one that was actually chosen. Zero latency interface unless you do something extremely unexpected. The wasted power is irrelevant on desktop, and wouldn't be a serious problem on mobile if we stopped making devices so ridiculously thin. Human time is more valuable than a few watts.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't think it's "the terminal" that tends toward composability - rather, it is the shell and some measure of standardization around I/O. I think many people are confused here because the shell typically _lives in_ a terminal, but a lot of terminal _applications_ compose poorly (as opposed to _utilities_ ).

That said, I'm super in favor of getting some modern takes on rich terminals going.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Animations are a particularly egregious visual gimmick

some lightweight animations might work to cover actual loading times.

> The learing curve is steep, but rewarding

That's almost a contradiction, at least considering parts of the curve. If you average an upward curve to a linear function, of course the slope will look less steep over time than it actually is at the time.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Monospace is the best family of fonts for programming,

Citation needed. Seriously. People state it as fact when it is quite debatable.

I only use a monospaced font because using Vim is more important to me. Otherwise I'd probably switch to the Poly variant of Triplicate, which makes it not-quite-mono.

<comment><USER28> A 1st word: alignment.

A 2nd word: regularity.

(If we had a monospace font here, the colons of the two lines would be aligned...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> One problem with the argument...animations are often added for a very good reason.

I suspect in the Slack example, it's to cover for the fact that there's a bunch of network calls being made behind the scenes. A terminal version of Slack wouldn't be that much faster since it would still need to make those network calls.

Also, adding animations can improve the trust that a user has in the product. The CoinStar example is a great one...when they just immediately displayed the count of coins to users, they didn't trust the count because it was too quick. When they added a delay and played the sound of lots of coins bouncing around inside a machine for a while, people start to trust the count. And that's not unique. I've worked on at least 3 projects now where we've done something we felt differentiated our product but, in testing, our users notice. But after adding a delay and animation, we retested it and our users were much more impressed and happy with our product. By making it slow, it was much more apparent that the system was doing something impressive. Never mind the fact that we'd optimized the hell out of queries and made the execution time snappy, it needed to be slow for them to see the value.

Also, animations can be useful to draw the eye to a change that's happening in the system. When something changes in a UI, you can't just expect the user to notice it. The human visual system isn't good at noticing those small deltas without some visual cue to make the change pop.

None of this means that all usages of animations improve the user experience. But nowhere in the article does the author acknowledge that animations can serve an important purpose. We need to take a balanced approach to animations and make sure we test each and every animation we use with users to ensure that it's better than the non-animated alternative.

One other small point, as someone who has developed software for people over the age of 70, I believe the author will be singing a very different tune with regard to "overly-large fonts sizes" once his eyesight starts to deteriorate. I'd actually say that the tendency is actually worse in the other direction...developers make font sizes too small, since they're young and have good eyesight. Apps should be optimized for large font sizes with a setting to allow users that want smaller fonts to choose that. But the number of times I've seen my mother be unable to find the setting to increase the font _because the default font is too small_ is a non-trivial number. And even when I increase it for her, it's a good bet that the app is unusable since that configuration hasn't been tested.

</comment><comment><USER39> Your honor, Exhibit A in "Why engineers should not design interfaces."

<comment><USER40> OR perhaps engineers and UI/UX people should be doing the design instead of PMs, sales people, and tight schedules.

Though on the engineering guilt side, add to that dozens of layers of bloat, VMs, interpreted languages, and, "performance doesn't matter, scrum deadlines do" attitudes, and yeah, I bet you end up with 45 second load time for your chat client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like the author has very vague and wrong idea about computing in the past. With so many factual errors, it is hard to accept it seriously.

> Somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s we made the decision to jump ship > from desktop apps and start writing the lion's share of new software for the > web. This was largely for pragmatic reasons: the infrastructure to talk to a > remote server became possible for the first time,

I am not sure what this means. Javascript (1995)? or XMLHttpRequest (2005)? You can create web apps without any of this technologies -- they make web apps faster and UX better, but they were not the critical pieces. for example, one of the most famouse webapps of this era -- webmail interfaces such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com -- worked just fine without javascript at all.

> good cross platform UI frameworks had always been elusive beasts,

Technically true, but misleading. This sentence seems to imply that this mattered, and web was somewhat better. Both of these are false. Back in then no one cared about non-windows systems, and the amount of effort required to display site properly on all major browsers was staggering. It was way, way easier to make desktop apps which worked on 99% of all computers than web apps which worked on 99% of the browsers.

> and desktop development frameworks were intimidating compared to more > approachable languages like Perl and PHP.

This was a time of VB 6, Java, Delphi, and later this fancy .net thing. Designing a desktop all was drastically simpler that creating a website of the same complexity.

> The other reason was cosmetic: HTML and CSS gave developers total visual > control over what their interfaces looked like, allowing them to brand them > and build experiences that were pixel-perfect according to their own ends.

This is so false this is not even funny. The desktop apps were trivial to make pixel perfect, the web took a LOT of work (I still remember the countless nested tables with 1x1 images in them)

Here is winamp 1, released in 1997: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Winamp1.006.P...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Winamp1.006.PNG)

Here is web in 1997: [http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web- in-1996-1997/](http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web-in-1996-1997/)

now, which one is more customized?

> This seemed like a big improvement over more limiting desktop development, > but its led us to the world we have today where every interface is a > different size and shape,...

And of course, the author misses the most important reasons why people spent all the effort to make the web apps. Spolsky said it back in 2004 in [http://new.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html](http://new.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html):

> Today I installed Google's new email application by typing Alt+D, gmail, > Ctrl+Enter. There are far fewer compatibility problems and problems > coexisting with other software. Every user of your product is using the same > version...

Then the article goes on to advertise the advantages of terminals and "terminal programs": fast startup, no animations, "interface elements are limited", optimized for advanced user, "output that I can process in some way to get into another program" This is accompanied by a picture of emacs running in a terminal.

The problem with that, of course, is those properties are not bound to "terminal" programs at all. Many software which comes from Linux/Unix world will have all of these properties, even if they do not require terminal to run. Even graphics editors like "gimp" start up fast, have no animations, etc...

Conclusion: the only way this article makes sense if the the author equates "the terminals" with "apps without animation". The author does not seem aware of what the "terminal software" means (all communications go through a single bidirectional pipe).

</comment><comment><USER42> Your forgot to mention the problem you want so solve)

</comment><comment><USER43> This is resonating because a cool person is saying it instead of me. Preach on my brotha!

</comment><comment><USER44> Hmm. There is a (minor) flaw in your argument.

But before I get to that, there are a _few_ places where non-developers have user interfaces that reward expertise. One prominent example are Bloomberg terminals: [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/05/13/business/sub-...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/05/13/business/sub- jp-bloomberg/sub-jp-bloomberg-superJumbo.jpg)

Notice that the interface (which is extremely customizable, feel free to look up other images, each will be rather different) is more-or-less a tiling window manager with terminals in each window that have rich media, nice fonts, non-ASCII UI elements (albeit ones that seem somewhat stuck in the '90s), etc. Quite bit to learn from there.

So here is the flaw: I am afraid the reason _most_ interfaces that non- technologists have to use cater to intuition and a pleasant appearance rather than rewarding expertise is all to simple: _No one wants to spend any time becoming an expert at using a gajillion specialized, but infrequently used, software interfaces_ , each of which would, according to your ideal, be optimally designed to allow an expert to perform the associated task efficiently and well.

The average person pays off their credit card once a month, and pays their taxes once a year. The incentive for them to learn to do these things more efficiently isn't very compelling, and the number of people who have 20 active credit cards for whom it _would_ be compelling isn't large enough to be worth creating an expert UI for (that _may_ change as another couple of billion people get online, if software markets don't fragment further)

Now, all that said, there is certainly a _lot_ of room for improvement in web- based user interfaces: animations can be faster and more subtle, the use of whitespace can be reduced, typography can be more restrained, decoration and color can be used only when it conveys information (basically, everything Tufte has been telling us for a couple of decades).

Windows' Metro and Modern, and Google's Material, are both nice steps in that direction (with the exception of animation), and each represents a _lot_ of difficult design work by large design and development teams. Less certainly _is_ more, both in the sense of the return it offers but also in the investment required. The simpler and less cluttered a user interface is, the more you have to sweat the tiniest of details. This post on redesigning bits of the Chrome browser's, uh, _chrome_ is a good case in point: [https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome- desktop-...](https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome- desktop-769aeb5ab987)

You can expect user interface redesign churn to slow down only once display resolutions stop climbing (because they have exceeded what can be distinguished by the human eye) and form factors stop changing (because the only remaining meaningful constraints are ergonomic).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading!

> _First, there are a few places where non-developers have user interfaces > that reward expertise. One prominent example are Bloomberg terminals:_

I didn't mean to say that it was _just_ developers that have access to these sorts of power tools, but it is the most common case. I would have actually used Bloomberg terminals as an example to support my arguments, and in general am hugely in favor of this sort of app that rewards the time invested in learning it all the way up to advanced levels.

> _The average person pays off their credit card once a month. The incentive > for them to learn to do it more efficiently isn 't very compelling, and the > number of people who have 20 active credit cards for whom it would be > compelling isn't large enough to be worth creating an expert UI for._

Yes totally, but what if you had just one common UI that was pretty standard and which your credit card company could easily plug into while building interfaces for their users?

Modern native apps for smartphones are probably the best example there because even though they're not perfectly consistent, at least they have standardized toolbars, navigation, and controls (far beyond what you get on the web). I think this idea could be take even further.

<comment><USER44> _> what if you had just one common UI that was pretty standard_

Yes, well, the reasons _that_ is unlikely is because banks need to differentiate their offerings and... you know what, scratch that. Just observe that this hasn't happened on the desktop in the way you describe, though every so often someone does try to reintermediate an industry in that way, which usually only works if you (a) control the distribution platform, so can bundle in the standard UI to the platform, and (b) manage to fool the industry into going along, eg. iTunes, Kindle). Banks, specifically, have yet to fall for any of the attempts along those lines, and there have been quite a few.

The situation is unlikely to change until/unless newly formed banks embrace splitting out the "dumb money pipe" as shared infrastructure and modern standardized interfaces so their value added services are separate (but integrated). To some extent you see glimmers of this in medicine with (almost, but not quite) portable electronic medical records. What progress has come about is solely due to the government ratcheting up the carrots and sticks to get "meaningful use" to happen, and those may get rolled back now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I like snappy as much as the next guy. But then I switch to another UI and find myself delighting in animations (the very ones the author deprecates). Animation disguise loading times or make them more bearable. They're useful for conveying semantics of actions and relationships. If you choose animations thoughtfully and time them well or make them opt-out, there shouldn be no problem.

I'd also like to address "big fonts": I grew up with UIs from the turn of the millenium and back then I thought professional software had to show a lot of things on the screen and have extensive menus. But I also noticed I could burn a CD much more easily using a free wizard-like version of the burning program than the paid full version. Thanks to mobile, at the price of shortening applications to apps, the world got easier, friendlier, cleaner UIs. While we previously thought that reducing the font size on our websites made them look cooler, now we saw that using big fonts we could make text look good while actually being radable.

So let us not go back to terminals maybe. Let us use the right (visual) tool for the right job.

<comment><USER22> I also love animations... the first time, and for a short while after. They are new and exciting. But they quickly start to grate, then frustrate, and then become downright annoying. Like the article stated, the MacOS spaces transition wastes time. Animation has its place--progress/loading being one. Or situations where processing takes time and/or you might want to abort the action before it commences. But any time an action could and should have an immediate effect, a transition effect actively impedes the user's workflow. These are unnecessary, and should at a minimum be configurable.</comment></comment>


Study: Over 20 years, Silicon Valley workers' median wage has fallen by 14% - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/study-over-20-years-silicon-valley-workers-median-wage-has-fallen-by-14/ <comment><USER2> And they will continue to go down. Infotech as an industry is no longer new. The number of people being trained and automation will certainly bring about a glut of workers relative to demand and reduce the wages.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comparing against the peak of the dot com bubble seems like an interesting choice.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is why there is a push to teach everyone coding.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not a surprise, since the real wage of most American jobs has been flat for 50 years. _Boom times_ don't last.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has it been adjusted for the living cost? Because I feel (without data) that it would be much worse.</comment>


Don't use Sails.js - <AUTHOR> https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/dont-use-sails-or-waterline/?full=true <comment><USER2> Similar to Rails.. when you have to 'new' up a project for an API it doesn't feel right to me. Considering our production APIs have far fewer files and modules than even the most basic Sails project.. I am not surprised to find this is this case for the framework's users.</comment>


Oculus and the Rift are (probably) dead - <AUTHOR> https://annoyedadmin.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/oculus-and-the-rift-are-probably-dead/ <comment><USER2> _Loyalty lost is rarely regained. Now they'll have to work twice as hard to remain credible in the industry_

This happened to the OLPC. It was the darling of open-source fans who were scrambling over each other to write free software for it, who would nearly fight each other to play with it at conferences, attracted by its open-to-all ethos. Then they did the deal with MS ("for the children") and the buzz almost literally disappeared overnight. The army of developers willing to create content for free for the machine disappeared.

And when the buzz disappeared, the tech blogs stopped reporting on it, because no-one in the tech space was interested in it anymore. And the mainstream press was no longer interested because the tech blogs weren't. It was quite educational to watch the nosedive of the OLPC. There were other criticisms causing issues for the OLPC, it wasn't just the loss of tech buzz, but buzz is a major contributor to saleability, as is an active and expansive dev community.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many hours has it been since the announcment. I hope you save this post and review it in a few years. Perhaps it will give you a moment to ponder over your character.

Edit: To qualify, by character I mean its easy to be critical and negative, perhaps that has a negative effect on ones life or outlook.

<comment><USER4> His character? Did you read the post? The author raises some interesting points about the competitiveness of Oculus' latest development hardware in the face of Sony's recent Morpheus product announcement. You have to admit the timing is suspicious.

<comment><USER5> No, he doesn't make any interesting points at all. He says the latest devkit was a disaster. (Was it?) He says that the sale proves that Oculus has failed utterly and can't compete with Morpheus and they failed to solve the motion problem etc etc. (Wow, we're really confident we know everything about something which just got some press and few people have actually tried, and apparently we can't think of _any_ reason the Oculus shareholders might accept a few billion bucks, no, it _must_ be that they are failing hard and are rats scampering off a sinking ship, we've thought of and carefully dismissed all other possibilities...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is littered with half baked, border line conspiracy theories. Worse, it's on the front page of HN. This is probably the reason I frequent other sites a lot more than here now.

It's okay to be against an acquisition, but try to back it up with facts and critical thought.

<comment><USER7> Facts are not always available to us, especially when there is a lack of information / communication / when we discuss unprovable things like human motivations.

Who knows what the Oculus people are actually thinking? That's why we usually make hypothesis and conjectures: we can't prove it wrong or right, we still think something's fishy. I however agree that the tone of the article sounds too certain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > A lot of investors and enthusiasts saw Sony's Morpheus as a potential Rift > killer.

So this is going to be an expensive additional add-on for the PS4, that would somehow have killed the Rift? Optional console add-ons rarely gain any traction, and while Sony made a great demo unit, they have plenty of money to make powerful, fancy prototypes. There's no way of knowing what the actual consumer units will be like until they actually create a product out of it.

Oculus started basic and is improving because that's all they could afford to do, given their need to release actual usable, mass produced hardware to backers. Sony started huge, and now they'll see how they can distill that down to a mass-producible item. And that probably won't be for a year or two.

So yeah, they have competition now, but Oculus did not sell because they were afraid of a shiny demo. It's not a product yet, and there's no guarantee that it ever will be.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do you assume the product is no good simply because they sold out?

I prefer to look at as they simply didn't have deep enough pockets to go up against the likes of Sony and no doubt Microsoft and Valve in the near future. Being acquired by a giant like Facebook - as distasteful as it may seem at the outset - gives them the capital they need to execute on their vision and not have to worry so much about being buried by the gaming titans.

This was a strategic play to keep Oculus alive, not to kill it dead.

</comment><comment><USER10> The most interesting part of the article to me was the second to last paragraph.

We've been down this road with VR technology before in the mid-90s. Our enthusiasm is way ahead of anything that's ever been delivered on.

Just to salt the wound a little more, I'll leave this here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k)

</comment><comment><USER11> Just wait a few days and this back lashing will be over.</comment>


Marshall McLuhan Speaks - <AUTHOR> http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/

<comment><USER3> I was surprised to learn from a review of Coupland's recent biography (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115029>) that McLuhan largely deplored the social changes he was writing about. "Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button." The popular image of McLuhan (and he was extremely popular - <USER2> there with rock stars) was definitely not that of a button-turner-offer.

Such a mindset in many critics would make them predictable and boring, but to me it makes McLuhan more interesting. The knock against him was always that he was glib, but this suggests a depth that isn't obvious.

I remember hearing that McLuhan was once at an academic conference where some professor excoriated him after his talk (McLuhan was loathed by his fellow academics). McLuhan shrugged and said, "You don't like these ideas? I got others."

<comment><AUTHOR> Folks at Facebook talk about McLuhan all the time. <http://livestre.am/wRA>

I wonder if they know that. It's the first I've heard of it. I certainly disagree with it. I think the internet makes us more connected and aware of what is important in the world. For some, it is an addiction, but that isn't really the average case. Maybe Zynga developers would disagree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great, McLuhan has a lot to teach.

I tend to find his work much more insightful and broadly applicable than Kevin Kelly, et al.

His ideas reproduced in _The Medium is the Massage_ are the most popular, but my favorite is the concept of the media tetrad because it tends towards the descriptive, instead of the prescriptive: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects>

Taking Twitter for example, instead of saying "Twitter has foo effect on society", McLuhan's tetrad provides a framework for discussion and analysis. e.g., Perhaps you think Twitter retrieves the telegraph, maybe you don't, but McLuhan provides an easy method for discussion.

<comment><USER5> "The Medium is the Massage (sic)"

Freudian slip? :)

<comment><USER4> Heh, actually, no.

Says McLuhan Biographer, W. Terrence Gordon: _"by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan no doubt recognized that his original saying had become a cliché and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue — the subtitle is 'An Inventory of Effects,' underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying."_

<comment><USER6> Wow, thanks for posting that quote. This and the parent post assuming the title was a typo is really making my day.

To add to the discussion, the first pages of the book are a photograph of a hand over an ear, overlaid with the words "...the massage?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If, like me, you have heard bits and pieces about McLuhan, but never delved deeper, the 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolfe is well worth your time.

<comment><USER8> I'll have to look into it given my knowledge of McLuhan extends as far as his _Annie Hall_ cameo.</comment></comment>


Balls - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/balls <comment><USER2> The problem with Gruber is that he'll write a fair analysis only as long as the fair analysis favors Apple. This means we won't get a fair analysis from him on things like the patent war and app store high-handedness. Sometimes he'll do a great piece. Sometimes you have to sift carefully for the bias. Then there are articles like this - insults, lies and condescension:

\- _Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter?_

\- _you just look childish when, only after losing the auction, you then claim you didn't really want the thing anyway_ (google never cried sour grapes on nortel)

\- _Motorola knew they had Google by the balls. ... and they made Google pay and pay handsomely_

The trick is not to get fooled by the reasonable-sounding phrases like: _Another way to look at this story..._ and _That's not to say it wasn't a bold, brash move, or even... the right move_.

To those of you discussing Gruber's position on patents: it is the patents that change position relative to Gruber. :)

 _edit: typos, formatting_

<comment><USER2> To clarify: a biased Gruber article may actually have valid points. The problem is that Gruber will only include pro-Apple points.

For example, note that Gruber does NOT point out how the acquisition will allow Google to do Apple-style seamless hardware/software design.

 _edit: Android - > Google as pointed out by m_eiman below_

<comment><USER3> The interesting bit is that on the conference call they did say that that was actually _not_ the plan (most likely to keep the other android partners comfortable). Supposedly their process for Android remains the same and Motorola will be on the same footing as everyone else when it comes to software access.

This says that the deal was 100% about patents and nothing else, which in turn says it wasn't that great of a deal in the first place (considering as they paid a big premium for the patent portfolio).

But assuming that they break their promise to partners and do what apple does too by designing both hardware and software together: it would be a good thing for Google as a phone maker, but a nail on the "Android as open" coffin. I don't think they'll be able to risk a move like this - angering their partners and probably breaking Android up -, which just means that the actual impact this will have on the quality of phones coming from Google _and_ Android as a mobile OS is slim to none.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I agree the patents are the main driver.

But I hope they use the opportunity to make great Android handsets. (a role HTC seemed to take on and then drift away from).

They don't have to worry about their partners. It's not like any of them have much choice - only Android & WP7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All I can think about is that Microsoft/Apple blew billions on patents which forced Google to blow billions more to block their move.

Think how much real innovation $20 billion could have created if it weren't for the shitty patent system.

<comment><USER5> This is the most sensible commentary I've seen yet. Fits the "America is pretty much screwed" articles making the rounds these days. It's actually pretty damned depressing that $20 billion dollars was spent on a legal game rather than awesome R&D.

<comment><USER6> The money's not gone, it's mostly just transferred from one party to another -- in this case, from Google to Motorola's shareholders. Of course, many man- hours are wasted in the legal wrangles, but it certainly doesn't add up to $20 billion dollars of lost productivity.

<comment><USER7> You can say that about practically any transfer payment. The cost of a transfer payment is opportunity cost. If Google invested 20 billion dollars in R&D, we'd have 20 billion dollars of R&D done in _addition_ to someone, somewhere, having that 20 billion dollars to spend again.

<comment><USER8> Google bought a lot more than just patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The primary issue that I have with Gruber's argument is that it seems to reverse some of his more recent assertions about the Google Patent Wars(TM). Haven't we been hearing from Gruber for months on end how patents were going to somehow destroy Android (or cripple it, which is basically the same thing)? Now we're supposed to simply ignore that Google bought 3x the Nortel patents at 3x the price[1] (Gruber's math, not mine), a move that greatly diminishes (if not negates) their loss in the Nortel auction? Now we're supposed to focus on Motorola's problems as a handset manufacturer?

I get that Gruber's mainly going after the over-the-top Lyons piece (a piece which strikes me as poorly thought out and terribly argued). But it does seem like this is Gruber's first move toward a pivot away from the importance of patents in Android vs. Everyone.

You know, those patents that Gruber has been trumpeting for weeks now as the death knell of Android.

 _Just ignore those_.

[1]: Or cheaper?: See recoiledsnake's comment below: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890038>

<comment><USER10> Gruber has for a long time made his living off of propping up strawmen and beating them down, much to the amusement of his readers. Everyone knows that Leander Keahney and Dan Lyons are insane, only Gruber goes to the pain of proving them so, with little insight or value added to the discussion, other than to incite his audience to gleefully laugh at the stupidity of the 'other'. I can't believe it actually took me so many years to realise this, but he is off my rss now.

<comment><USER11> As you know, it's easy to get backslapped on pro-Google hn by dissing Gruber, but why not just respond to his analysis instead.

Gruber seems to be right an awful lot for someone so casually vilified. For example, he took a lot of flack here for defending Apple's move to leave flash out of mobile safari. I think enough time has passed to make clear that he and Apple were right.

The anti-Gruber hate looks more like sour grapes every day.

<comment><USER12> Is Gruber right, or has Apple made all the right moves since about 2003? I think the main complaint by people who see Gruber pieces on HN all the time is that they argue that he's just an Apple pundit and/or apologist.

Another way of asking this question is, can you name three times that Apple and Gruber differed, but Gruber was in the right?

<comment><USER13> Another example, I'm not sure it qualifies, is that Gruber never liked the brushed metal theme and the inconsistency with which Apple applied it to different applications.

Apple did eventually retire the brushed metal theme and is getting a bit more consistent in the styling of their applications. Still some way to go here, too.

Apple and Gruber has generally diverged in how they think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) should be applied. Gruber has called them out for not applying it as consistently as they did in the past.

But regarding the HIG, it seems Gruber has resigned and is now calling the HIG basically defunct.

I think in general, Gruber is _not trying to be_ right/wrong vs Apple, not trying to offer a strong opinion, except in some unusual cases (see: AppStore rejections). Mostly, he is just trying to _understand_ Apple, and to offer his analysis since Apple is famously quiet and other analysts are often clueless as Apple is a bit of an oddball in the corporate world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be just fine with banning Daring Fireball from HN, if it meant we could avoid the biweekly DDoS on HN's intellectual capacity sparked by tens- deep threads arguing about Gruber's pro-Apple bias.

Only on HN or Reddit is Gruber's pro-Apple stance not the most boring conceivable topic. It's embarrassing to see ostensibly smart people _pick it apart_ , as if it was faceted and nuanced.

I myself love Daring Fireball, because Gruber is an f'ing good writer. But I could give a sh!t about discussing him on HN. Anyone else want to just start flagging these things off the site? Look at these silly comment threads. You'd be doing a lot of people a favor by nipping them in the bud.

<comment><USER15> He seems like a good writer only if you're already under the RDF, otherwise he comes across as a shallow spin and mudslinging machine and defacto Apple PR. Example of a predictable and hypocritical post: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/15/apple-samsung- im...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/15/apple-samsung-images)

This is the reason for the disconnect between the HN commenters and the flame wars. It's just hard for people to understand others almost-bordering-on- religion obsessions and biases.

While you say you'd be fine with banning DF from HN, we all know which segment of HN'ers vote up DF, Asymco and some of Marco's stories here, some of which have very convoluted and shallow arguments/analysis/math which seem cherry picked and tailor-made to prop up one particular company and don't withstand five minutes of reasoned analysis.

The problem is that some of these articles are "something that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" (from the HN guidelines) to a group of people rooting for a company and totally shallow drivel to others, so no wonder it's all a flamefest that isn't going to go away soon.

<comment><USER16> I'm an admitted Google fanboy, but I think Gruber (along with the other two, generally) is an excellent writer and analyst when he's writing about Apple unrelated to any other company. And since it's pretty undisputable that Apple is one of the most important companies in the world and such an _anamoly_ in so many ways, I find it pretty important to read Gruber on the subject.

In fact, I often wish there was a writer with as aserbic a wit and as insightful an analytical mind on the subject of Google (Dan Lyons doesn't qualify, though fake Steve Jobs was pretty funny). Not for the apologia like this piece, but for when writers like Gruber, Marco, and especially John Siracusa are critical of their subject of obsession. The thing I love about Siracusa's podcast (Hypercritical) in particular is that you can really feel true, unadulterated, and unself-conscious devotion to the subject in the unchecked criticism he gives. And I wish that culture existed around Google.

There are plenty blogs that follow Google news in a sort of flat way (9to5google, GoogleOperatingSystem), and Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand provides analysis, but it's all on sort of a surface level. (And, Sullivan is great, but I wouldn't call him a great writer so much as a comprehensively knowledgeable one.)

Maybe what I really want is Steven Levy to write a blog for real.

(Note: I try to be the change I want to see in the world, but I don't have the talent, sources, or time to write as well as I'd like. But I do my best. <http://blog.byjoemoon.com/> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does Gruber ever add any real information in an information theoretic sense? He seems to be on Apple's side 100% of the time. (I guess he suggested that the App Store approval process was broken at some point...)

He mostly just appears to be a pro-Apple pundit who has a popular blog that gets a lot of revenue in advertising. But I never see Cringely or Dvorak posts upvoted. What gives?

This does not seem to be very reasoned analysis. He calls the CEO childish and Android (the largest smartphone OS in the US?) desperate. This feels like a hyperbolic opinion piece. What should I be getting out of this article?

<comment><USER17> _Does Gruber ever add any real information in an information theoretic sense?_

I'd say the main information content is in who he attacks in the process of boosting Apple. Microsoft and Windows barely get mentioned these days; it's all Google and Android all the time.

<comment><USER15> I think Gruber, Asymco, et al. have been taken aback by Android's year over year ascendancy. They were certainly predicting gloom and doom of Android, so patents are their last resort to reign in Android now.

See units and marketshare of Android for 2nd quarter 2010 vs. 2011.

[http://wmpoweruser.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/image66.pn...](http://wmpoweruser.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/image66.png)

Asymco failing at analysis and predictions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2887430>

<comment><USER18> Units and market share don't mean much if your margins are razor thin (or, worse, nonexistent).

<comment><USER19> People only believe that to be true because Asymco keeps repeating it and getting quoted widely by people like Gruber in the Apple echo-chamber (and because they desperately want it to be true).

A key diversionary tactic Asymco uses is to combine dumbphone and smartphone sales, so companies like Samsung that are transitioning customers from genuinely low-margin, low-cost, end-of-lifecycle products onto relatively much higher margin Android phones are presented as if they are not doing very well, when in fact they have two seperate business: a rapidly growing and profitable Android business, and a break-even or loss-making dumbphone business that they're winding down.

Notice how much "better" HTC is doing in his stats (despite regular doom'n'gloom predictions from him about them in the last year) because they don't have a dumbphone business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see this: Google was a happy accident because of the web.

Given the trajectory of Apple, where would the web be in 10 years if Google wasn't throwing everything, and clearly they are doing so, at keeping their platform alive.

Android is about keeping the web a dominant platform as we shift to the next generation of computing.

Google is right to bet the farm on keeping that endeavor alive.

It appears as though they got backed into the corner, but we've never seen Google make a purchase like this.

It's more expensive than usual. And it's not an obvious up-and-comer.

I imagine the #1 thing they could do would be to start picking off staff from both companies to form a super-group to push the hardware into yet unknown territory.

(As a person whose career interests align with Google's I hope the knock it out of the fucking park.)

</comment><comment><USER21> _Motorola held out for a full acquisition at a premium far above the company's actual value, and threatened to go after its sibling Android partners if Google didn't acquiesce._

Say what you will about Gruber and his Apple fanboyism, this rings true to me. By and large, the article seems very astute.

<comment><USER22> Threatening to go after other Android partners makes little sense for Motorola. It's not something Motorola would do to get most profit from it. If Motorola has threatened Google something, it would be to sell to Microsoft. That will make much more sense.

<comment><USER21> _I would bring up IP as a very important for differentiation (among Android vendors). We have a very large IP portfolio, and I think in the long term, as things settle down, you will see a meaningful difference in positions of many different Android players. Both, in terms of avoidance of royalties, as well as potentially being able to collect royalties. And that will make a big difference to people who have very strong IP positions._

[http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay- jha-o...](http://www.unwiredview.com/2011/08/11/motorolas-sanjay-jha-openly- admits-they-plan-to-collect-ip-royalties-from-other-android-makers/)

<comment><USER22> That doesn't mean the action make sense. My point is that it won't make sense for Motorola to do that, not whether they did or did not do it. Google can easily tell them that if they do that prematurely, Android ecosystem will fail, rocking the same boat they are in. Sensibly, you can't get much royalties from a failed platform, and Apple/Microsoft won't give Motorola any medals for going that path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Gruber claims that Apple and Microsoft probably are feeling great that Google had to shell out $12.5B to acquire a failing company like Motorola along with its 'misguided' management and rapidly declining sales.

So what is wrong with that loaded closing statement? Well lots. Firstly he admits the patents part was a good move for Google and the Android platform. He also does math and says they bought 3x Nortel patents for 3x the price. So essentially Google got ton of other Motorola stuff (hardware division, cable modem, set top boxes, Android handset software team et.al) for free. Plus so far as I can tell Droid is a pretty well known and fairly successful brand and Motorola's management did the right thing in saving the company from going down under - not exactly misguided. Gruber would perhaps only call them guided if they did not compete with Apple in any way shape or form!

And what did Gruber had to say when Apple spent billions on Nortel patents? Nope not desperation or anything. Just the fact that Google lost was super important and Android was going to be in trouble.

Gruber also leaves us with no insight on what Google could have done better. He also doesn't feel nearly as bad about Google having Apple by the balls on Nortel patents and making them pay good for Nortel patents, as much as he does about Motorola having Google by the balls by just doing what any sane business will do to maximize its valuation. In comparison actually Google got an arguably better deal - 12.5B for 25000 patents, and a whole functional, moderately successful hardware company with diverse business.

P.S. Motorola has done phones long before Apple thought about it. As such they know a whole lot more about the hardware part as I can tell by the signal and voice quality of my Moto phone. Google and you will find many that can make reliable phone calls with Motorola phones when iPhone could never. So dissing Motorola may be fashionable but I think they know better.

<comment><USER24> just FYI, the "Droid" brand is licensed by Verizon, not Motorola. There have been many "Droid" phones, all of them on Verizon and from several different manufacturers.

<comment><USER23> You're right of course. But even so, Motorola had lot more to do with Droid brand's popularity than any other Android OEM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Motorola — a handset maker with rapidly declining sales"_ \-- Gruber (with a link to an Asymco post, which doesn't actually mention sales figures, only market share)

Last quarter they sold 4.4 million smartphones, up from 2.7 million the same quarter last year. (If you're more interested in market share as depicted by Asymco's graph then they're growing slightly at around 5% of the smartphone market, compared with say Apple which is growing slightly at around 15%, or Samsung which has _gained_ 15% in the last year to just under 20%.)

Even if you like to play the Asymco game of including dumbphones that don't run Android to make Android look bad, they still increased total phone sales year-on-year, to 11 million, meaning their increased Android sales replaced a smaller number of lost dumbphone sales.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok, so the math for everybody.

Google spent 12.5B. Motorola has 3B in cash. The stock market thought motorola was worth around 6-7B incl cash (assuming they weren't just factoring in a takeover already).

So google really paid around 6B for the patents, they don't have to do anything to motorola. They can sell all or parts of it, maybe muck around with some of the parts of Motorola _other_ than cell phones. But either way the Nortel auction was 4.5B for JUST patents while google gets a mobile electronics company + patents for its 12B.

</comment><comment><USER26> Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel...

And they paid… nearly three times as much...

and a phone company came free?

<comment><USER27> Patents are not measured by quantity, but by their quality. A ton of patents doesn't mean anything if you can't use them in court to hold AppleSoft back.

I don't have the faintest idea whether these patents are of good quality or not, I just wanted to point it out. It's beyond me why so many bright people here on HN think these 25,000 patents might worth the same as (or three times more of) Nortel's patents. They 'might', but we don't know that as a fact. I'd always heard Nortel was strong on patents, but prior to this day I didn't know that Motorola had any patents at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's true that Motorola is not the most exciting handset maker. However, if Google could just get rid of the nonsense and get Motorola to create "pure" devices, some very good things could come out of it. They are certainly capable of it.

Personally I am hoping to hear an announcement of the Xoom 2 as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> The price of $12.5B is prior to discounting the $3B+ in cash the MMI is holding. A lot of emphasis is placed on the '$12.5B' value in this article, without taking into consideration that this is really 25% higher than the effective price of $9.5B, once you back out the cash.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article makes a great case that Motorola is the real winner.

The buyout can't have been solely for the patents, because Motorola are losing patent battles. It's unlikely that it was just to own a phone manufacturer, because why buy a 3rd rate one at a 60% premium? So why? Because Motorola had Google by the balls and could have further fucked Android up for everyone else.

It's a shame how every discussion of a Daring Fireball article here collapses into 'Gruber is a fanboy', but it's particularly frustrating when it's an insightful article like this one. If he's half as bad as some of you make out, it should be easy to argue the points without resorting to attacking the man.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it an analysis or rant? Looks like JG is more annoyed with the fact that GOOG got patent portfolio than credible threat to iPhone with possible all integrated Moto based Android devices.

He is absolutely wrong on whole "patent wars" issue. Of course GOOG is showing its "big brother" attitude time to time but his beloved AAPL is not clean either. This holier than thou attitude sucks!

Moto may be "second-rate" mobile maker. They may be in loss. GOOG is not stupid to shell out 12B "just" for patent portfolio. Always remember GOOG thinks ahead of everyone. People were criticizing GOOG when they made Android open and free. They were criticizing about paying too much money to YouTube (which is on fire now). GOOG is definitely smarter than Gruber.</comment>


An introduction to Opera Unite - <AUTHOR> http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/an-introduction-to-opera-unite/ <comment><USER2> This is a huge developement IMHO. If executed correctly, this has the potential to change how we look at the web. This is something that can be the starting point of web 3.0.

I have an opinion that instead of some crappy and diffiult to use address like unite://mymac.chrismills.operaunite.com/ they should register a TLD (I guess it is possible. Isn't it?) like .OP or something and start using that. So my address will be simply _niyaz.op_

I think, (as always) someone else will come along and do it better than Opera does and opera will be forgotten again. Sad, but true.

Anyway I love the Opera for these innovations. They are the pioneers in many cool things in the web. Kudos guys!

<comment><USER3> "I think, (as always) someone else will come along and do it better than Opera does and opera will be forgotten again. Sad, but true."

You might be right but I think, for better or worse, this is the type of thing Opera should be pursuing. Opera's only chance in the market is to spread virally. To have an Opera user tell an IE/Firefox/Safari user about this cool new feature that they could both use if that IE/Firefox/Safari user would just switch to Opera.

So I applaud them for moving in the right direction.

That said, the problem I see is they are focusing more on the platform than they are on the apps. Being a platform makes sense for web apps that have a large potential audience and can therefore draw developers. But for a browser with 2% of the market I think it makes more sense to roll out a comprehensive suite of apps first and introduce the platform later (the apps they do have are interesting but not enough to get me personally to switch).

I mean honestly, does anyone see a large number of developers making a special effort to develop for Opera?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't have to be a large number of developers. They just need a killer application. The File Sharing service seems to work just fine. And it's ok for both Intranet (unlike existing sharing application on the web) and Internet usage.</comment></comment></comment>


Graylog2 v0.20.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://graylog2.org/wow/such/0.20.0/

<comment><USER2> By going through the page I understood:

* Graylog2 is probably version 2 of Graylog (fair enough) * It's a data analytics platform, where you can feed your syslog. * Has a REST interface

What I would like to understand but was not able to:

* Do they open source both client and server? * Is it only a server app with a web interface? * To they sell anything at all? (support, plans, etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all open source, you can feed _any_ data, not only sylog and TORCH ([http://www.torch.sh](http://www.torch.sh)) is selling commercial services.

Also take a look at: [http://support.torch.sh/help/kb/general/graylog2-architectur...](http://support.torch.sh/help/kb/general/graylog2-architecture- high-level-overview)

The feedback here definitely helped us identify that we need to make our websites more obvious about what Graylog2 is actually doing. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are heavy users of both Graylog2 and Logstash and they both shine at different things at the moment.

In an enterprise context with lots and lots of logs Graylog2 is making the process of segregating access to certain logs very,very easy. It's interface is a lot less "bling bling" than Kibana but much easier to use for a certain type of users.

Logstash is still king for parsing logs into structured events (and we use it a LOT - our current config file is ~2.5k lines) but we had issues with stability and loosing messages (crashes due to character issues, etc).

The core of Graylog2 rocks - it's stable and very performant (we are pushing 30k+ msgs/s over a single node with room to spare) and the support we have received from the Graylog2 team has been nothing but awesome.

I am confident that they will catch up with Kibana (in terms of visualisations) very, very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been unable to use Graylog for a long time now; if anyone can provide any pointers I'd greatly appreciate it. No matter what installation method I try, eventually my Graylog instance crashes, or Mongo crashes, or Elasticsearch crashes, or my hard drive gets filled up with huge amounts of error logs and the whole system grinds to a halt, etc etc etc. I am using an Azure "large" instance and trying to log about 300 or so messages per second. I make sure to only log enough messages so that old ones get thrown away before the hard drive fills up, but it doesn't matter, it still crashes. It also crashes if I add an external large drive and log to there, eventually I will get an insanely large number of elasticsearch errors.

I eventually had to take it down because it keeps crashing but now I have no error information. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please contact the mailing list and we are happy to help. 300 msgs/sec is not much and we should easily get that unter control. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started playing with this over the weekend. Great stuff.

Also, if you're on the fence about whether to use this or Kibana, they're compatible with each other, so give them both a try. (Set up Graylog2, point Kibana at G2's elasticsearch instance, profit.)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if it is just my browser, but at the top of the page where it says "everything we learned from users" the "d" in learned and the "f" in users are on-top of eachother.

Sorry I don't have anything constructive to post.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, what browser is that?

<comment><USER6> Chrome on Fedora Linux. Here is a screenshot. [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58437091/Selection_016.p...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58437091/Selection_016.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'll look into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see that there is (almost) always a great open source alternative to expensive proprietary IP products! Splunk can become very expensive very quickly if you have a lot of data, so this is great news. Wish they would have shorter release cycles though...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :) Regarding the release cycles: We just released v0.20.1 - just a week after v0.20.0.

It took us a while to build us this foundation but now we are constantly releasing updates on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice to know what Graylog actually is after reading the entire linked page. It left a fluffy impression, but most (all) of the information there is explaining nice things _about_ Graylog.

This seems suboptimal from a marketing perspective.

<comment><USER9> It has 2000 commits and a REST interface. Was there something else you needed to know?

<comment><USER10> That page seems to be targeted more at people who already know or have used graylog in the past. If you go to the main website it's more clear and there is a screencast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has come a long way since I last used it around 3 or so years ago. I'm looking forward to trying it now since it's re-done and ditched mongodb for elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER12> in the URL: "/wow/such/0.20.0/"

in one of the first screen shots: "wow such monitor"

I'm guessing that was just a test name for the purpose of the screenshot, or so I hope.

However, speaking in general (and not just aiming it at this project), can we please leave the cutesy little Doge talk out of documentation and marketing? I'd say that's true of all "memes" in general. In theory anyone can look at a project if it's useful, and believe it or not, not everyone spends enough time on Reddit or 4Chan to have a clue about what a Doge or a Harlem Shake is.

tldr; such dogetalk. much child-like. so annoy. wow.

<comment><USER13> I'm ambivalent on this topic. The dogespeak in this particular announcement made me chuckle and envisioned the team as people I'd personally get along with. They're catering to like-minded individuals.

If I had opened an IBM-enterprise-blah wall of text, I'd probably have not spent nearly as much time learning about their product.

<comment><USER12> I think the project is a great one whether you work in an enterprise or wear thick plastic glasses and an ironic t-shirt from some startup no one has heard of.

"catering to like-minded individuals": yes, people with logs they need to analyze. That could be a 20 year-old with a MBA stickered up, or a 53 year old analyst working inside of a Active Domain enterprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone compared Kibana with Graylog 0.20 series recently?

My use case is (currently) more in exceptions catching than performance monitoring. Judging from that screenshots alone, I would say that Graylog is a better fit for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kibana is a great product for very dynamic analysis and is definitely still better there than Graylog2. However, we hear from a lot of people that they prefer Graylog2 for monitoring and searching.

Also Graylog2 has stuff like a user/role model, (authenticated) REST APIs and generally a more integrated approach.

I suggest you give both a spin and decide. :) Both products are easy to setup.

<comment><USER15> No Kerberos auth via reverse Proxy. Nobody uses it in our team because its the only app where they need to enter a password.

A shame since it should be very easy to implement similar to the REMOTE_USER env in other langs, maybe via X-Authenticated header or something for play.

<comment><USER5> There's an issue on GitHub for this; I've wanted it as well.

[https://github.com/Graylog2/graylog2-web- interface/issues/56...](https://github.com/Graylog2/graylog2-web- interface/issues/560)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this compare to logstash? I'm trying to decide what log aggregator use, and I don't have much time to test both. BTW, I'm running SLES 11 SP 2.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, this is great news. One more project off my never-ending todo-list (write log aggregator backed by elastic search). Nice to see binary packages for Debian too!

</comment><comment><USER18> Is the graylog beast still the logo? I love that guy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately not! It came with permission from theoatmeal but now that we approach bigger things with Graylog2 we felt like we have to get an own logo.

You can still expect stuff like the famous Party Gorilla (aka "That drunk sloth") though. ...and rumors are that he might come back in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Never heard of Graylog and after some introductory reading, I'll be giving it a spin today. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congratulations to you and the team Lennart. It looks awesome. Will try it out!

</comment><comment><USER20> Great news. Many Thanks for all the hard work.</comment>


The Torture of Bradley Manning - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/the-torture-of-bradley-manning

<comment><USER2> Just because someone breaks the law doesn't mean the Constitution doesn't apply to them.

He should have his day in court.

I wonder if there's a legal framework for reducing his sentence due to the harsh, probably Unconstitutional treatment?

<comment><USER3> _I wonder if there's a legal framework for reducing his sentence due to the harsh, probably Unconstitutional treatment?_

Wrongs committed against someone don't diminish their own crimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Age should definitely be taken into account. He was a kid when he did this. Do you really think he understood all the ramifications of his actions?

</comment><comment><USER5> Manning's a hero.

</comment><comment><USER6> I knew vice was liberal and slightly anti-american, but this takes it to a whole new level of hate. There is nothing new about prosecuting a soldier for releasing classified information to the enemy (which is in effect what Manning did) the fact that he did it in the name of transparency doesn't absolve him of guilt. He swore to protect any secrets divulged to him and to protect his fellow country men, he failed on both counts.

I'm sorry that anyone thinks its okay to betray one's country and fellow people in such a way.

<comment><USER7> Can you actually, you know, read the article before commenting on it? It's not very long.

Here, I'll help by pasting one of the more important paragraphs right here:

 _At Quantico, Pfc. Manning treatment wasn't by the book: the sleep depravation and stripping of clothes; the humiliation; the taunts and mockery; the nine months of putting Pfc. Manning in protected custody citing concerns over suicide—concerns that were rebuffed relentlessly by both Pfc. Manning himself and qualified psychiatrists. That's why Coombs is looking to have the case against his client thrown out, and Manning's own testimony this week only accentuated the living nightmare he was made to endure for nearly a year while only a half-hour drive from the capital of the nation. As testimonies from Quantico staff, health professionals, and the private himself continued late into the night all week, often for hours without intermissions, more unraveled about not just the torturous conditions imposed on Pfc. Manning but the blatant mismanagement in the same institution he is accused of blowing the whistle on._

<comment><USER6> Oh I saw that: Manning's crime wasn't quiet by the book either. Never in America's History has a natural born citizen released so much private government data for no other reason than to allow his country men to be embarrassed and slaughtered.

But the article completely ignores his crime, making him sound like a mistreated child, not a treasonous bastard

<comment><USER8> What is so bad about what he did? Someone had a video of a helicopter shooting children, and he gave that video to the media. Technically treason, but is it really that bad? Who is the victim of this crime?

<comment><USER9> Technically treason — the best kind of treason</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Good agile book? - <AUTHOR> I'm outside of Amazon coverage right now, but I'm going in there soon. What is the one book on agile development I should get? Also, how good is agile for teams of 2 or individuals? <comment><USER2> I'll let the other folks point you to the books. There are a lot.

Agile rocks for small teams. Set up a work queue (backlog) and an iteration size (how often you want to build/release). Then just start pulling things off the queue and putting them into your releases.

If you get caught up in the details, you've missed the point. Agile is about flexibility and adaptation -- a team of two guys should be _very_ flexible.

E-mail me if you run into any snags.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a lot of them. A lot!

But it depends if you are interested in pure methodology, or you want to see some example of applying it in software/Web development with PHP/Java/RoR/...

From my experience, I found helpful next books:

"Test Driven Development: By Example" by Kent Beck

"Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices" by Robert C. Martin

"Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman

"Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber

"Agile Software Development Ecosystems" by Jim Highsmith

Those are pretty "technology independent". Helpful to understand the idea. And the authors are respected and well known in the community of agile developers.

If you work with RoR (which is popular choice nowadays) you may find "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Hansson interesting, but it does not cover "agile methodology" itself too wide. But it does give a good overview of practical usage. Anyhow, personally I still prefer to learn theory before practice, but many people see it working for them ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> "The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore & Shane Warden

As for individuals it works, but you'll have to pick out the parts that you really could make use of and leave other parts to the wayside.

I'd say it helps organize your project but it all comes down to you being disciplined. For that Agile isn't going to help much.</comment>