Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links - <AUTHOR> https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html <comment><USER3> I'm partial to ShadyURL: [http://www.5z8.info/start- trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe](http://www.5z8.info/start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe)

<comment><USER4> Did you link to a malware executable?

<comment><USER5> > Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder why Google is reusing the Firebase brand so much? It doesn't really fit with messaging (GCM -> FCM) or links, among other functions. Seems like an odd choice, even if the backend infrastructure/team is the same.

Reminds me of Microsoft reusing "Surface", or prepending "Live" to everything once upon a time...

<comment><USER7> Firebase is their Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service brand.

The product they're driving customers to, Firebase Dynamic Links, is not really a web URL shortener, but more of a bridge between URLs and in-app links. In this light, it makes sense.

<comment><USER8> I thought it was their repo of entities that was used for displaying Google Knowledge results? Or the ecommerce product repo...

or am i thinking of totally different things? I feel like there are other google products that end with "Base"

<comment><USER9> That was Freebase, which was acquired by Google for use in their Knowledge Graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Probably a good chance to inject this here:

You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD).

[0]: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless- priv...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-private-url- shortener/)

<comment><USER11> URL Shorteners break the Internet[0] (2009)

With Google Or Twitter, at least, they have some semblance of permanence, but with everyone hosting their own private shortener, will just lead to madness.

[0]: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying- the-...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web- since-2002/)

<comment><USER12> Since then, URLs have even less to do with any real underlying directory structure.

What's another level of indirection between the browser and your CDN, your reverse proxy, your cache and your web framework?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Total guess here: In addition to having two products that do the same thing, I'm guessing they may want to distance themselves from goo.gl links since a shortened URL with that domain somehow seems associated with Google and seems more legit (as opposed to, say, a bit.ly or ow.ly link.)

<comment><USER7> This is highly unlikely to be true, considering Firebase Dynamic Links also generates URLs where the domain ends in 'goo.gl' [1].

[1] [https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create- manual...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manually)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In regards to the shortener replacement, it might be nice for app developers, but as a user, I loathe when a link that can go to a website tries to bring me to the app install. I don't want to install your likely crappy, less featurefull app.

</comment><comment><USER15> Google should give the whole dump of the redirects to the Internet Archive (or at least stop banning their crawlers) [https://archive.org/details/301works](https://archive.org/details/301works)

</comment><comment><USER16> This has been poorly handled.

I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links.

Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack.

Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had.

Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can't improve their communication on this.

<comment><USER17> > Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing > attack.

> Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had.

At my place of employment, we are instructed to "hover to uncover" every link in an e-mail. Yet every link I get from virtually any automated source reads something like this:

"To accomplish the task you need to accomplish, simply visit us at h t t p s: / / example dot com / some / simple.url.html"

Yet the ACTUAL link is: "h t t p : / / linktracker9 . unrelatedentity4 . subdomain . example dot io / asdflkjawsfq3894gfjwerfgouiewjngwskuvhawesri7gfhwe4i7fghwefv / qwerog9f8weh8w4fhw98ry2938hwf?utm_lol=hahaha&utm_more=roflcopter&utm_howabsolutelylongcanwemakethislink=shadyb1zn3zz&phishing=no&itscool=thisis_definitely_not_phishing&utm_feed=buzz"

I understand, but do not accept, why every link sending program on the planet insists on doing this. It is broken and wrong.

<comment><USER18> You've just given me an interesting idea for an extension to HTML itself - <USER2> anchor tag / link type where the text displayed can and must only be equal to the href value of the link. Additionally, any rendering client could render such a link with a special visual cue, perhaps, to help the user understand that the visible link text should equal the link href value and only the link href value.

Could just be, maybe you could make an anchor tag which is like, ](http://www.google.com">) without a closing tag, and browsers know to render that where the text displayed equals the value of the href. Additionally, clients could detect such links and give them a visual cue to indicate they are "safe(r)" relatively speaking?

Just an idea that popped in when you said this.

<comment><USER19> What if the page tries to position another element over the link? If you just say that the safe-link has the highest z-index, then you'll have plenty of awkward cases where it shows through stuff like sticky navbars/headings or dropdowns that happen to be opened over them. And what would the browsers do to show those links specially? Could a webpage do the same around their own links?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, those are legitimate problems, I agree.

I guess I was thinking, browser vendors and clients that care are already taking measures to inform users if the URL they are browsing is safe / secure (HTTPS enabled UI for example) - I was just trying to think of some way for the HTML source itself to indicate "hey, the value of the href of this link should be exactly 'X', and a user can see that relatively easily, and if for any reason it is NOT 'X' then the link should not be trusted". I mean, the clients could also take active measures to block such links as well... if the "href" is not the same as the expected value for the href (or if it changes), then the client disables the link automatically.

I don't think one would use the "safe-links" I described everywhere (like, not in places where they would bleed through). I think they might be a special use case, maybe for emails and clients that are rendering more document oriented HTML as opposed to web-site/web application type HTML, although browsers could certainly render them.

Of course, those clients would have to be trustworthy too.

I suppose rather than showing any visual cues that the link is enabled, clients could just validate that... if they see a link like this (without text or an ending anchor tag) -> ](http://www.google.com">) then the one and ONLY action the link can take is to navigate to the precise href specified, and it would only render the text of the href as the content of the anchor tag.

So maybe a visual cue is not even needed - just enforcement by trustworthy clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> URL shorteners accelerate linkrot.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you want a free OSS URL shortener for your own domain name, I built a simple one at [http://xluh.co/repo](http://xluh.co/repo). Will be expanding on it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER22> Since they will be continuing to honor existing redirects, do they gain anything by disallowing new redirects? If it is engineering effort they want to save, they can just stop developing new features, right?

<comment><USER7> Continuing to honor existing redirects is a relatively simple gesture of goodwill -- it's absolutely what customers expect, it's good for the web, and doesn't need a lot of ongoing effort.

Rather, it looks like they're driving people to a different product intended for a different set of usecases [1]. They want to get out of the generic, commodity web URL shortener business, and drive more of their customers towards more purposeful destination forwarding.

[1] [https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use- cases/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/)

<comment><USER23> Crucially, the new product is unlikely to be available through a web interface (at least, without an account), so Google no longer has to deal with their link shortener being used for spam and fraud.

<comment><USER24> Spammers would not be dettered by the need to use an API. Besides anyone could build a frontend for accessing the API</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finnish Startups Are Raising Large Rounds by Targeting the Largest Opportunity - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/09/21/how-are-finnish-startups-raising-large-rounds-by-designing-their-startups-for-the-largest-possible-opportunity <comment><USER2> > Supercell attacks the $ 7-10 billion mobile games market,

So does every other mobile game company. Why this one is better than others doesn't open to me by reading this blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founders are game industry veterans.

A recent proof that Supercell founders know how to execute is that they changed their focus from Facebook games to iPad and have released two successful and polished iPad games in a short period of time. Both Clash of Clans and Hayday are hitting top grossing lists. And they have a third polished title, Battle Buddies, coming out soon.</comment></comment>


New controversial theory: Past, present, future exist simultaneously - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/a-controversial-theory-claims-present-past-and-future-exist-at-the-same-time <comment><USER2> Is it possible that time is simply a misplaced analogy of space and movement? That we assume a fourth dimension because of the other three? After all, if nothing actually disappears (conservation of energy) but merely changes form (entropy) then the atoms that made up Shakespeare and Mozart are still here. It is the information (structure) that is lost. In this sense, there is and has only ever been a 'now' of ever-shifting forms, and our propensity to talk about time as a dimension (with forward and backward movement) might be a projection of our tendency to imagine spatially.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from Special Relativity, were each event has a (ct, x, y, z) coordinates, and nobody can agree which is the true reference frame and what exactly "now" (aka ct=0) means?</comment>


What if Quality Journalism Isn't? - <AUTHOR> http://www.baekdal.com/insights/what-if-quality-journalism-isnt/10C3F189EE6048BBB4D5CB448CE6F069DAC6C08B6F9E7F72EF24FC33EAC1F946 <comment><USER2> Journalism is publishing the truth that someone does not want told; all else is stenography and marketing.

We, the people formerly known as the audience recognize this. We can tell when we are being lied to. We can tell when the truth is being shaded to benefit the beneficiaries of the status quo.

If you hand us shit and call it ice cream we still aren't going to like it, on facebook or anywhere else. We know that our vaunted 'free press' is a bought and paid for lie. We know that much of what passes for journalism is a ham- handed attempt to manufacture social proof for the acceptance of the current order of things.

Burn it down. All the way down. We're going back to word of mouth, moderated by cryptographically attested pseudonymous identities because that will work so much better...

<comment><USER3> You aren't a day over 19, are you?

P.S. No, wait, I can't really tell, if you are being sarcastic or not, so sorry if you are.

<comment><USER3> Wow, I got pummeled there.

Ok, so maybe someone would care to explain, how the belief, that encrypted, anonymous and unaccountable news sources would be any better, than journalistic outlets whose profits depend on their reputation; how that belief is not infantile?

Why is it not possible, that groups opposed to transparency, like for example certain governmental organizations, would be able to join in the fun and flood the "encrypted, word of mouth, anonymous" space with their own opinions and propaganda?

<comment><USER4> Even if you were right, that comment was unconstructive. If you think someone's wrong, argue the other side, don't just call them names. And equating youth with stupidity is as dumb as it is rude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The future of news is halfway between stratfor and private eye magazine. It should be written from an "out-universe" perspective, unlike the "in-universe" perspective of all current journalism, ie. it should treat the upper two or three layers of PR and realpolitik that cover every aspect of modern life as fictional, and skip straight to the real reasons for things: "control over regional energy markets", "elections in 2 years," "these two celebrities are both managed by the same agency and so they are having a fight to boost sales of celebrity A's new book" and so on.

Also it would ignore the news cycle.

<comment><USER6> But would people pay money to read this?

It seems that people don't _want_ a factual news source. Especially not for celebrity coverage. It's the same reason that people flock to talk radio or fringe conspiracy sites: the truth is boring and/or depressing. It's the humor sites that come closest to the bone (the Onion, the Daily Mash etc).

<comment><USER7> _It seems that people don 't want a factual news source._

Ding ding ding! What we call news is mostly consumed for entertainment and identity-reenforcement/social currency, so that's what the news business serves up. It's made out of real-world events and facts, but the actual end product is to reality as "frozen dairy product" is to ice cream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investigators (think popular bloggers like John Gruber or The Macalope) on the other.

To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around.

Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.

<comment><USER9> I think your placing of John Gruber and theMacalope among the side opposite the "oceans of random trash" really says it all: the future of journalism is not two sides, it's just oceans of trash.

the future of actual journalism is probably something like Pierre Omidyar's new venture - Benevolent billionaires supporting actual investigative journalism because it provides some public good, and not expecting it to be profitable on a scale like big media houses such as the New York Times are expected to work.

<comment><USER10> and yet the Guardian (in Australia) which is owned by a trust spends the centre of its landing page real-estate on tacky opinion pieces to compete with local tacky opinion pieces.

Article such as "Can you <insert phrase> and still call yourself a feminist (immediate bingo if there reference is to sex/porn)" and "Twerking - everything you need to know" have begun to appear[1]

I am not sure if a Trust, or philanthropic entity solves the problem while we still refer to DailyMail or HuffPo as a 'news site'. 'Trash aggregator' would be more appropriate.

[1] Made up titles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a very long time newspapers and local television stations had a near monopoly on local media. That put them in a unique position to serve as a conduit not just for news but also for things like business advertisements, all of which was enormously lucrative. Many folks fell into the trap of thinking that because local reporting was highly needed and very popular that it was good. You see that in the way that newspapers and journalists are portrayed through most of the 20th century.

And then along came the internet, the king of all disintermediators. First local print news lost its readership and ad revenue, and many thought it was a matter of media, printed matter vs digital matter. Then over many years a lot of newspapers shut down, while others attempted to modernize and enter the digital age. And now we're at a stage where the truth is harder to hide from. The fact is that most journalism just isn't very good, and never has been. But when it was the only thing available it was better than nothing so it was consumed regardless.

Now the regurgitation of wire reports, simple duplicate coverage of a story, and uncritical passing on of news releases from 3rd parties holds no value. Those are things that rely on distribution, and in the internet age that is trivial. This puts into sharper focus the kernel of original, serious reporting that journalist do. And it turns out they have historically done very, very little, and even less of it of any serious value.

The problem isn't that print journalism uses an outdated media, the problem is that the vast majority of what used to pass for journalism is now largely redundant. And most traditional news organizations still don't realize this or understand that the news organizations which will be able to survive in the 21st century will be very, very different from those of the past, and not just old organizations with a few modernizations bolted on. That's a tough pill to swallow because it means both that most journalists have quite frankly not been doing worthwhile work, it also means that there is no place for the vast majority of traditional journalism jobs. People within the industry naturally flinch away from such hard truths, but it won't stop them from being true.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is an extremely poorly thought out article. The core idea, that you can't be the best at something and still fail, is so naive that it ruins everything else that the guy says.

<comment><USER13> Yes, the important thing is getting good information to the right readers, for whom it is relevant. Counting absolute page views is in the interests of SEO wizards and social media specialists. They monetize through page views and spam is a legitimate tactic.

It's hard to measure engagement on a news site when someone doesn't "like" and "share" the story because they don't want to share it with their social circles. If only there was a site that kept track of personal bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't care about the survival of newspapers from a financial or economic perspective, I care about the survival of newspapers from a social good perspective and it's not clear to me that targeted news can supply that since it filters out everything you weren't inclined to already view but was still important. If I bought a newspaper and it had a bunch of stuff in it I didn't care about, I might still pick it up and read an article or two if I got bored enough or was using the bathroom. With targeted news and a smartphone, I don't ever have to do that again.

</comment><comment><USER15> He rightly criticizes newspapers for all thinking their only problem is getting their impeccable journalism to readers... but then talks only about ways of letting readers organize and select what they want to read--how is that different? If content is the problem, then ease of access is secondary.

<comment><USER16> I can imagine getting scared off by trying to address the quality issue- the Grey Lady is an institution, a lot of journalists aspire to work there, and journalism has been done in the One True Way for so long it's hard to imagine alternatives.

I remember reading a science article in Ars for the first time, and thinking "wow, this doesn't suck. I thought all articles about science sucked." There was even a link to the paper at the bottom! Ryan Paul wrote articles about programming and open source, and they were nuanced, coherent, and made sense. He could even program!

Still, this is all nerd shit, right? Real people don't care. Vox seems to be addressing this in other fields- you read an article about a speech ([http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full- speec...](http://www.vox.com/2014/6/15/5812752/read-obama-s-full-speech- ripping-into-climate-deniers) chosen by fair dice roll), the same article every other two-bit news outlet hammered together in 45 minutes. Then you go down to the bottom of the page, and you've got a bunch of explanations of every related thing. What, why, more details, links to rebuttals.

Still, politics is just nerd shit for innumerate white people. _Real_ people don't care, right? Grantland writes sports articles with heat maps, diagrams, tactical explanations, as well as the usual platitudes about desire, and perfunctory examinations of the politics of sport.

Quality is an issue, and it's certainly becoming more pressing. As to whether or not people who are not insiders are interested in the opinions of subject matter experts over professional summarizers, we'll see. Not everyone wants to know more about everything, but everyone wants to know more about something sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Journalism forms a cornerstone of our democracies. It's function is as relevant today as it ever was (perhaps more so in the light of Snowden) so we better think carefully before we write it off.

But this is where I think the article falls short. I think if someone is interested in the wider world they will figure out how to get what they want from the newspapers of today. Some news agencies will be bad at it, and some will be good. That's just the nature of diversity.

But, to say that a small percentage of online news is relevant to me is only true if I don't go looking for the parts that interest me. This was never true, not even for the old dead-tree news.

Whilst I think things can be done to make digital news more engaging, I think the real 'problem' is to be found elsewhere in the ever sub-dividing space of our 'free' time.

<comment><USER18> Journalism _thinks_ it forms a cornerstone of our democracies. But then it also seems to believe that we have democracy, which we plainly don't.

I like the article. It has weaknesses, but it makes some good points.

The bigger issue - to what extent should the media be about political empowerment - is another question.

I'd suggest current branding/advertising strategies are entirely about disempowerment, because they train consumers to think and act passively.

When you believe that politics is about voting for Product A vs Product B, which is almost like a Facebook like only it lasts a little longer, then you've already lost all your political power.

Traditional journalism was sometimes able to hold power to account. We're not going to that from clickbait intent/interest marketing. Can anyone imagine Buzzfeed breaking the next Pentagon Papers?

So who's going to hold power to account now? And how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At the beginning of the article, the point seems, in line with the title, to be that the core problem is the journalism. By the end of the article, he seems to have come around to the conclusion that the problem really is the marketing and/or delivery, with the supermarket analogy, and especially with the example of ostensibly interesting things like the Takei video from the WP.

There were a lot of interesting points in this post, but they don't seem to add up to a coherent argument.

</comment><comment><USER20> Tim Cook hagiography != world's best journalism

Neither is war propaganda. Or kowtowing to the government on the Snowden documents. The NYT is the shiniest outlet for establishment "news." At a time when the establishment is so rotten, even the NYT can't make it smell nice.

</comment><comment><USER21> "You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time." Oh yes you can. You can be the best at providing something people don't want. You can even be the best at providing something people _should_ want but don't. The NY Times is in the same boat as so many smart, literate, thoughtful, and educated communicators before them: either (1) dumb down the content, (2) fight the vain battle of trying to snaz up clever content with whiz-bang visuals and "Tweets" and whatnot, or (3) go out of business. Not a happy choice, but sometimes, when you're surrounded by swine, your pearls have no place to go.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting read but I would disagree that prestige papers aren't like a brand. I use aggregators, mostly, but when I see articles from certain sources (e.g. NYT, Economist or CSMonitor) I'm more likely to click on those. That tells me that quality papers still have some value but maybe only because they have maanged to keep good journalists together.

I'm guessing the future will be individual journalists/columnists marketing themselves directly via aggregators.

</comment><comment><USER23> So you could amost say that they are winning at journalism and failing at getting their journalism to readers.

The entire article is about how that's not true, but the conclusion was that's true and the way to fix it is for NYT to make a Flipgboard clone. That's actually a great idea, and maybe they already do that I don't know. I use HN to aggregate my news.

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't the second part contradict the first? First part: "It isn't about delivering, your product sucks." Second part: "People have narrow interests, they want to see relevant content and you send them everything mixed up". It looks like the second part is about delivering after all - about better filtering in particular.

</comment><comment><USER25> The issue is simple. I know what the times is. But I don't know why I would want to read the times. I use news aggregators because other readers seem to be the only ones to know how to deliver what I want to read . Reading the times directly feels like rolling the dice on finding interesting or important news.

</comment><comment><USER26> _But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers? If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience? You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time._

Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop.

The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time".

 _This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it 's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers._

Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs.

 _On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about._

Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once.

 _Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online._

Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us.

 _Today, the newspapers ' editorial focus is to create random packages of news._

Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events.

 _They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos._

With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.

<comment><USER27> > because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every > starving genius writer/artist

I am glad to read an article like the original post, about how the incentives of the world we live in distort the effects of the things we consume. I am distressed to read top comments like yours, which lazily declare that the world sucks because _you 're too smart_. Even if you were right, and you're not, you wouldn't change anything.

For instance, your comment about '"intellectual goods" like art' is completely off the mark. Having dabbled in both music and writing, I have found that there's a huge difference in attitude between your stereotypical "starving artists" and people who produced art and music that the world actually liked, if only a little bit beyond their circle of friends.

Generally, the people who ranted the most about popular art were people who least understood how to craft music or writing that people wanted to read. This sort can often be found roaming university halls and earning degrees making art nobody actually wants. On the other hand, the guys who played at bars, or published stories in small magazines, almost universally had respect for the extraordinary amounts of talent in even the "lowest" books and music, even if they strongly disagreed with the value of the art. They also had very sharp analytical and critical minds when it came to the art in question.

<comment><USER26> The world doesn't suck or not. The world is. For _me_ the world often sucks, and I realize that there is little I can do about it. I would if I could, and I try my best in my own small corner of it.

Because I was, for four years, a regular long form writer, and later a bi- weekly columnist, in the most prestigious weekly magazine supplement in my own small country, I can actually provide some first hand perspective. The newspaper the magazine belonged to was the NYT of my country, and "enjoyed" a readership of just a little over 100,000. That isn't enough to keep the paper going (it's still around, but it's uncertain for how long).

Obviously everything is on a spectrum. While I expressed myself in black and white terms in my first comment, my point is that there is little correlation between quality and success, and I stand behind it. The fact that some quality writers and musicians achieve some level of success -- some of them enjoy quite a great deal of it -- is not enough to change the overall picture. A newspaper isn't an individual writer or artists. It's a big business with very high costs. Modest success enjoyed by a writer is total failure for a newspaper, because a newspaper needs some specific measure of financial success in order to break even. For a newspaper, the outcome is often binary: live or die. It can't generate a side income like an artist could.

As to the last paragraph of your comment: I agree, but that has little bearing on the matter at hand. I love popular art, and I enjoy popular news outlets (like Gawker) immensely. But I wasn't saying that the people creating popular art aren't smart or talented. I was merely questioning whether highbrow art or journalism is economically viable. As far as art goes, we know the answer: it isn't. Pretty much every art museum in the world and every opera troupe is state supported. This may or may not be the case for journalism as the NYT practices it.

As a matter of fact, I'm not even lamenting the state of affairs. I was simply reeling against the assumption that popularity is any sign of quality; that's all.

To add a little more information about the paper business -- to those interested -- I'll explain that a newspaper survives by cross-subsidizing reporters. You maintain a bureau in France and one in Iraq. When there's something interesting going on in Iraq, people buy the paper to read about that. When something happens in Europe, people buy it for that. But the cost of the paper stays the same, and it's not a price anyone would pay for a single article. Once you unbundle the package and allow people to read (and generate revenue) for a single article, the entire business model becomes unsustainable. You simply can't pay for the guy in France with the little money generated by the guy in Baghdad. Saying something like "you should produce more interesting content" misses the whole point of how a newspaper works. You can produce all the interesting "content" in the world, but you still won't know what's going on in Europe or Iraq. You can't have "unbundled" beat reporting (although you can have unbundled, occasional, long-form magazine assignments), because maintaining eyes and ears somewhere requires a constant cost whether or not there are good stories there at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here in Norway newspapers more or less survive, although perhaps not with the younger generations. They are generally the best source if you want to follow up on local events.

How do Americans follow local news?

<comment><USER29> Newspapers that rely solely on local readership are doing okay. NYT is not one of those newspapers. They need national readership to sustain their size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> He should rewrite the title. I suggest...

10 Ways Journalism Has Changed You Won't Believe

<comment><USER31> ...and you will be amazed at what happens next!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Quality Journalism = oxymoron</comment>


Ask HN: What are good bad HTTP clients you use? - <AUTHOR> What are good "bad HTTP client"-s you use to test your HTTP servers? For instance, there are servers like
1) https://httpbin.org/ 2) https://badssl.com/ which allow you to test client against different, sometimes intentionally bad, behavior. I seek for intentionally bad HTTP client, which will send wrong Content-Length or close connection in the middle of request, etc. <comment><USER2> I normally end up writing my own or using curl</comment>


Snapchat Said in Funding Talks With Alibaba at $10B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-30/snapchat-said-in-funding-talks-with-alibaba-at-10-billion-value.html

<comment><USER3> It seems, we are seeing the repetition of the first tech bubble when it comes to overblown valuations. Those valuations aren't really on realistic future earning potentials anymore. They rather are on future expected selling price. The idea being that 'I buy something for 10 times as much as it is worth, in hopes that I find someone who will pay me 20 times as much as it is worth' etc. Obviously that can't go on forever and the bubble burst might be as dangerous and devastating as the first one, unless valuations magically cool down.

<comment><USER4> Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's a bubble.

Remember the outrage at Instagram's billion-dollar valuation? Looks pretty cheap now. Same thing with Facebook, Netflix, Uber. Snapchat's simple idea is every bit as transformative as the simple ideas behind these companies.

Here's what smartypants bubble-callers were saying in 2004 about Google before their $2.7 billion IPO[0], also built on a pretty simple but world-changing idea:

"Pent-up demand for hot tech stocks is driving Googlemania."

"There are serious questions about Google's long-term viability"

"Word has it that Microsoft will feature an immensely powerful search engine in the next generation of Windows, due out by 2006."

"Taking down Google with better search is in [Microsoft's] strike zone."

"Google stands a good chance of becoming not the next Microsoft, but the next Netscape."

"It's tough to see why many Windows users would even bother with Google."

"Yahoo! has the advantage of being able to cull demographic data from its millions of subscribers and match them with advertisers."

"Google relies on ads for 96 percent of its revenue making it a one-trick pony vulnerable to the swings of the market."

Any of this sound familiar?

[0] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/bubble- bath](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/bubble-bath)

<comment><USER5> You're not really making me feel any better about this. Google's IPO was only 2.7 times the purchase price of Instagram? Even more, Google's IPO was a fourth of the current valuation of Snapchat? Those numbers don't feel right to me. Google also was actually profitable at the time of its IPO. It had a _real_ business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Alright, I really can't take it anymore. Is there any good literature explaining why users of Snapchat are worth this much? From my limited perspective it seems a lot of the services valued so highly for their user base have an incredibly hard time generating revenue from those users, particularly from short lived services like Snapchat. I keep seeing "promise" and "expectation" but what are those things when you're talking money? I read on NBC News estimates put the number of users at 50-70 million. What kind of ad revenue can you expect from that many users in an app where interactions are short lived on a single screen? What would be the conversion rate on IAP?

I'm extremely skeptical this company could be worth this much. 10 billion / 70 million is $142 dollars per user. (Supposedly this metric means something as FB paid $42 per user for Whatsapp?)

Not to mention, how does a company with the leadership this company has get valued this highly? I would think when the Controversy heading takes up 70% of your Wikipedia page that would negatively impact your business, obviously this is having the exact opposite effect though.

<comment><USER7> For investors, controversy is seen as meaningless (and sometimes as a good thing) unless it's hurting the business. In the case of Snapchat, it hasn't. As for making money, one shouldn't judge their ability to do so based on how the product looks today. More than half of Facebook's revenue now comes from mobile, a product that they only perfected a year ago.

<comment><USER6> It seems like Facebook had a relatively clear path with already having the news feed. Keeping users on a single page absorbing information with ads intermingled unobtrusively, but with Snapchat I'm in any of three views for just a few moments before I close the app again; all that to say, I just don't think it's a very good comparison.

<comment><USER7> That's the point I was making. As it is now, it's hard to see where they would fit in advertising or whatever. It's better to look at the product as a foundation. Having tens of millions of users using your product multiple times a day is a good starting place to build on.

<comment><USER5> So apparently a mere starting place, which may or may not yield any actual profit (in an unspecified amount) via an unspecified method at an unspecified date in the future, is worth $10,000,000,000, about four times as much as Google's IPO, keeping in mind that Google had a real profitable business plan at the time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand this valuation - it's makes no sense to me. Can anyone explain how SnapChat could be worth even a fraction of this? Where is the value in SnapChat's user base, future blackmail? It's not like someone using SnapChat is in the appropriate state of mind to follow any ads in the app. I don't get it...

<comment><USER9> It's a communication platform that the younger generations are using as their primary form of communication. That is big.. not saying it's $10B big, but SnapChat has the chance to become something larger than just stupid selfies.

<comment><USER10> What you wrote sounds to me like this: if SnapChat were something else, and not (just?) SnapChat, maybe in the same "space", it could be worth a lot.

Edit: I am deeply skeptical that a market filled primarily with people who have little or no income will support an ad-based revenue stream valued at $10bn. I would be even more skeptical if the revenue for SnapChat were supposed to come from a pricing structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding of why Snapchat is worth so much. At first, I didn't get it either, but I think there is one main reason for this high, and what I feel might be justified, valuation.

"Single mode visual media capture" [1]. You might be asking "WTF does that mean?"; Well that's the title of Snapchat's patent which was granted for haptic video recording. That means all of the apps where you press and hold to record a video could face legal action for copying Snapchats technology. So if you look at the list, you've got:

      - Facebook's Slingshot, Instagram, Bolt
      - Twitter's Vine
      - <USER2>
      - Many others

One of my friends works for the USPTO and he says that a patent portfolio is the difference between a multi-billion dollar valuation and a multi-million dollar valuation. With the backing of Alibaba, Snapchat could essentially shut down all haptic recording apps or force clone companies to pay a licensing free for the technology.

[1] - [https://www.google.com/patents/US8428453?dq=snapchat&hl=en&s...](https://www.google.com/patents/US8428453?dq=snapchat&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kbKhU4quJNiXqAbFs4KQCw&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ)

<comment><USER12> Ah, yes, hold down a record button instead of pressing it on and off! What a grand innovation worthy of a patent!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry if this is a dumb question, but how does Snapchat make money?

<comment><USER14> They don't currently but they will have to display ads eventually like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumbler, and the like because a business can't run on VC fumes forever with stockholders.

<comment><USER15> And to iterate a bit on my last point ... there are spaces where advertising is inherently valuable, where you have a captive or semi-captive audience ... I don't see messaging (at least in the mobile space) as particularly banner- friendly.

Now obviously I wish I knew how to target the mobile messaging market; I don't. But it seems like you could see mass migrations based almost exclusively on presentation the way MySpace rapidly lost to Facebook.

<comment><USER13> Jesus they're going to have Microsoft send me a movie ad of their next flop.

I don't see why they didn't just take FB's money at what has to be their peak relevance. The only advertising opportunity I really see is unsolicited snaps. But I don't see users liking that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ok, who wants to create the next chat app?

<comment><USER15> Everyone. And that will be the problem.

Just be prepared for a bunch of "think Snapchat, but for ..." or "Snapchat meets ..." proposals in the coming months / year.

<comment><USER17> I can already see the craigslist "entrepreneur" billion dollar ideas...

"It's like snapchat, but for dogs!"

Of course as the "coder" you will only get 1% equity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Alibaba...

</comment><comment><USER19> My company has already created an 11main.com (Alibaba's first US ecommerce website) account and setup a significant amount of our catalog. The site is still in private invite only -- but hopefully will go public soon.

We expect Alibaba to come into the US on a storm. They are huge - they have capitol, and they can afford losses in the hundreds of millions per quarter just to compete with Amazon (and snuff out part of their market) - amazon just posted an 800 million USD loss last quarter without flinching.

Their revenue last quarter was greater than Amazon's and eBay's combined.

I think we are about to witness a clashing of the titans in a big way.

<comment><USER20> I'm just glad that Amazon has competition. I love them, and I don't want them going the way of the Comcast-style behemoth.

<comment><USER19> There's already a lot of dirty things Amazon does -- try selling in the same sector as them. You can't compete with a company that is willing to take tens of, sometimes hundreds of millions in losses for years just to ensure 10 years down the road, they have a controlling interest.

<comment><USER21> It is still different. Comcast got to where it is by buying out competitors and with a monopoly in providing cable within a city. There is no choice to shop for alternatives in many cities. With Amazon, there are multiple competitors. It is just that Amazon is willing to take little or no profit on an item.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dieter Rams's 10 Principles of Modern Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2011/08/27/braun-product-design-photos.html

<comment><USER2> When done effectively, I'm still impressed by a product that screams simplicity.</comment>


How to Multiply numbers by 9, 99, 999, 9999 and so on in less than 5 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2012/03/multiplying-numbers-by-9-99-999-9999.html#links

<comment><USER2> Why not simply show the formula?

x * (10^n - 1) = (x - 1) * 10^n + (10^n - x)</comment>


Only the Paranoid Survive: 10,000 pigeons go through anal security check - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PDChina/status/516962895662682112/photo/1 <comment><AUTHOR> From China's People Daily's Official twitter account.

Someone is learning well from Andy Grove.</comment>


Scrolling HTML with Flash Content on Touch Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/02/23/scrolling-html-with-flash-content-on-touch-devices/

<comment><USER2> It is kinda interesting in all of Adobe's push into the mobile space, they seem to ignore all the problems that current flash content is going to have.</comment>


Google is missing in the photo with Chinese president Xi Jinping - <AUTHOR> http://www.pinganew.com/article/1443082411-Google-is-missing-in-the-photo-with-Chinese-president-Xi-Jinping <comment><USER2> Also I don't see HP.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you hate your competitors? - <AUTHOR>

Hate is a powerful word. When you think of a competitor what emotion pops up? <comment><USER2> Egads no. Competitors are like ballet dancers -- I understand in an intellectual sense that they exist, but spend very little time thinking about them.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have 3 or 4 main competitors.

Of one, I have much respect. They act like a real company (they are the only vc-backed co. among us), are pleasant when we chat, and we even send referrals to one-another when a potential client isn't a "good fit".

Of another, I feel a mix of anger and indifference. They are a horribly run company and I honestly marvel at the fact they have not imploded yet. Anger because they treat their customers so poorly (numerous BBB complaints and forum/Twitter rants).

Of another, confusion and mistrust. This (more recent) competitor was once a known name working in the industry who then moved on to the workshop circuit and eventually selling competing software/services. While we've had a decent relationship in the past and he positions himself as a Christian & a helper in the industry, he's also very careless with his mouth(IMO). He'll jump at any opportunity to publish disparaging things about competitors, including blatant non-truths.

I know the startup thing to do is not focus on competitors and worry about your products ... which we do ... but at the same I don't ignore them. And I'm definitely not the type to sit by and do nothing if a competitor is going to play dirty. I won't drop to their level but I will defend/reply and make sure they look like a fool.

Needless to say, ours is a weird industry.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like this quote from Milan Kundera: "Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary" If you feel too strongly about your competition, you'll lose all perspective and get defensive and will tend to copy them.

<comment><USER5> What a great description of what has lead Microsoft astray, in some of their projects. Zune, Bing, Xbox (although that may yet pay off) expose their hatred to Apple, Google and Sony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We decided to invite the competition over to have a few beers with us. Now we use the relationship with them to fuel our own competitive streak and to enhance team cohesion. Just so as long you keep focusing on your own customers, and solving problems your own way, it works.

<comment><USER7> "Now we use the relationship with them to fuel our own competitive streak and to enhance team cohesion."

It's human to feel threatened, to take offence, to mistrust, and misjudge. Even people who try to be noble tend to do it, however there seem to be great benefits for people (like yourselves) who can put themselves in a position to learn from their competition. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I compete with <http://favstar.fm>

I think Tim is a pretty nice guy. I'd buy him a beer.

<comment><USER9> I honestly didn't get what favstar is trying to do. What's your site?

<comment><USER10> "We asked some of our users who've been coming here for a while. @wondroushippo summarized it well - 'A site tracking what you, your friends, and everyone else is favoriting on Twitter.'" @ <http://favstar.fm/faq>

According to this, they have to ask their users what they do. I find it hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a lot of things I've worked on competitors were a great thing - you can see their mistakes and correct them ahead of time.

But when you first discover a new one who's doing a better job its always a downer. Founders can get really depressed when a better-funded competitor comes out of stealth one day. The lowest lows I've experienced on startup projects routinely stem from the first 24hrs after we've discovered a new competitor. Especially when the CEO gets spooked there can be crazy emails, spec changes, scared/angry all-hands meetings etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now, I am in no liberty to answer this, so I will paraphrase what a local record company owner has said.

"Years ago, I used to watch competitors go down and celebrate. Now, they're dropping like flies, and we all need to fight to stay open"

Now, his situations pretty specific, but I think what he's saying is that without competition, you are left alone and vulnerable.Competition is healthy and necessary, so you shouldn't hate them. You should even help them if they're in trouble.

<comment><USER13> Well, well. I'm not sure about this. The reason he was sad that his competitors were going away is because it was evidence that his market was collapsing. I'm sure he would have been just fine with it if he was absorbing all the business his competitors had been doing and the overall size of the market was flat or expanding.

In many ways, your competitors are what's standing in the way of your success. You can tell yourself that you are trying to outdo yourself, but I don't think that Tiger Woods' primary motivation on the course is beating his last score. Beating another person is more deeply rooted in the human psyche.

Now, there are really only two paths to growth for a company: grow the market, or take share from your competitors. Even growing the market is normally in some sense taking business from other players in your segment. For example, if you grow a music business some of that is probably going to eat into other forms of entertainment. Witness the rise of the video games industry. And in many cases, the path to expanding the market is unclear or you do not have the skill to execute it, so the only thing left is to take business away from your competitors.

It's _possible_ you could do that while still bearing them personal good-will. But I suspect that the human brain is going to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance in trying to say that on the one hand you like the people but on the other hand you're fine with hurting them or even putting them out of business. This is probably true even with the rationalization that you're doing what's best for the customer (which is not always true).

IMO you have a real problem when your employees stop _emotionally_ disliking your competitors on average. That means that their products are so much better than yours that they overcome the natural distaste for "the enemy" or, even more reptilian, "the man who wants to eat the food that I want to eat." (That's why I think Google doesn't have much hope in the social space, because internally there's very little ill-will towards Facebook or Twitter. Apple is more of a contest.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dont hate my competitors, without them it'd be like running a race all alone. You dont know if your running too fast or too slow cause you have nobody to compare yourself to, its just you running down the track by your lonesome.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does Microsoft hate competitors? Yes.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft is not a monolithic entity. Might one of their famous executives hate certain competitors? Yes. Do their employees, on the whole, hate the competitors that exist in their myriad markets? Probably not.

So if Steve Ballmer = Microsoft, then sure, Microsoft hates their competitors. But if not, then no, they don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like my competitors. I don't think about them much (weird, and potentially dangerous, I know), and I would never link to them, but I do respect them.

I'm currently looking for a blue ocean strategy that will erase any competition, but regardless, I hope we all eat well.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm thinking about building an open source voting system - <AUTHOR>

Hoping people can tear this apart... The general process is as follows:
Before voting day:
* The user registers to vote following existing processes.
On Voting day:
* The user logs into the system, and requests a key.  A hash is generated which is good for 60 minutes.
* After the key has been delivered the account is marked as unavailable.
* There is no association in any form between in the database between the account and the key.
* The user votes. using the key to complete the process.
Available immediately, and held for as long as the system lives
* A public facing page that let's anyone query the raw voting data including, deidentified data detailing how many people requested keys.  Which keys voted, and for who.
This is my first stab, and i'm sure a bunch of people have thought about this.  What might I be missing? <comment><USER2> What happens if, say, a user loses their key? Or the delivery mechanism fails after the account is made unavailable?

<comment><AUTHOR> What if we generate a base key, then the user supplies a pass phrase. The pass phrase generates their hash against the base which is used as the key in the db to associate with the vote. That hash, is hashed again by the pass-phrase, and associated with the user. So what we save associated with the user, is the base, and the verification hashes. And so long as the user supplies the same pass phrase, they can retrieve it again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is useless. Electronic vote systems are put in place so they can easily cheat. An open source one would prevent it, so it will never be used.</comment>


The Piston image library is now pure Rust - <AUTHOR> http://blog.piston.rs/2017/01/08/the-image-library-is-now-pure-rust/ <comment><USER2> Image libraries are exactly where we need rust-style safe code.

<comment><USER3> No, image libraries is exactly where performance always beats safety and where other approaches to secure them actually work, like sandboxes and containers, and kind of have to be used anyway, since memory safety doesn't guarantee that unpacking an image won't DoS the system.

<comment><USER4>
         here other approaches to
         secure them actually work,
         like sandboxes and containers,

"It is a fallacy to think that for 30+ years people haven't been able to write a secure OS. But virtualization, and containers are" \- Theo de Raant

<comment><USER5> GEMSOS, KeyKOS, ASOS, LOCK, VAX VMM, INTEGRITY-178B, seL4, NOVA... all in the 4Kloc-50+Kloc range for a reason. All simpler, smaller, and easier to model than a full OS. Two survived pentesting by NSA with others during validation way better in defect rate or correctness case than most OS's.

Theo's quote is BS by the numbers and pentest results. Sandboxing done right is way more secure.

<comment><USER6> While true, in practical terms, those OSes are not what people have lying around to do their image processing. I'd love a secure, formally verified, capabilities-based microkernel OS as much as next person, but all I have is Linux and various BSDs. It's a bit academic at this point.

<comment><USER5> The commenter countered that sandboxing was worthwhile by citing a claim by Theo de Raadt that getting those (i.e. VM's) right was about as hard as getting whole OS's of code right. That one proved futile meant the other would. I countered that citation with numerous examples that disprove his point. Then, by implication, sandboxing might be effective if it's done like in my examples. And there are CompSci designs doing stuff like that.

Whether you want to do image processing on a Linux, BSD, or one of my kernels is a separate topic. However, it's worth noting that even stuff like I cited could be useful for that where it stashes the image processor into its own protection domain with read access to memory containing input and write access to memory that will have the output. The code itself isn't allowed to do or touch anything else. At this point, exploits must be chained in clever ways. Modifying this to preserve pointer integrity, lowest overhead range being around 1-10%, would choke those kind of attackers further.

Using Rust is yet another tactic that can work well with or in lieu of a sandbox. Ideally with for issues the language itself can't cover. Three precedents for that are right on my list: GEMSOS's safety was improved using a Pascal subset with call-by-value semantics; ASOS was a combo of security kernel and Ada runtime to host embedded, Ada applications (lang-safety + sandbox); separation kernels like INTEGRITY-178B usually support runtimes for Ada and Java subset to get safety within components. Now, there's some OS's like Tock and Redox plus low-level libraries written in a new, safety- enhancing language. Such designs can benefit from the old strategies which we see a few in Redox. On other end, Genode uses many old and recent tricks in architecture but not safe language. It can also run a Linux desktop with your image processing code. ;)

Note: A bit academic is also misleading. Several, separation kernels are deployed commercially for things like secure, web browsing. INTEGRITY and LynxSecure are among oldest. The Nizza and Perseus architectures got turned into Sirrix's Turaya Desktop. These things aren't just academic.

<comment><USER6> It's academic in the colloquial sense that the tools you describe aren't available to use. I'd love to have all the futurustic, secure stuff you describe, but for a user's run-of-the-mill AWS deployment, that's not an option.

All the other stuff you say is on point, of course, and there's an argument or a hundred to be made that a lot of these problems are already solved, and that we (as users and developers) are missing out on a massive amount of amazing OS research that could have made everything better than our current insecure, 1970s-tech monolithic kernel OSes.

<comment><USER5> "It's academic in the colloquial sense that the tools you describe aren't available to use."

I just named multiple tools available to use in commercial sector and FOSS. Their predecessors were used by commercial and government sector for a decade before that. That's 100% not academic even if a few started there. If anything, more work just needs to be poured into FOSS stuff so it gets more deployment and impact.

"All the other stuff you say is on point, of course, and there's an argument or a hundred to be made that a lot of these problems are already solved, and that we (as users and developers) are missing out on a massive amount of amazing OS research that could have made everything better than our current insecure, 1970s-tech monolithic kernel OSes."

We're definitely in agreement there. Fortunately, we're seeing some exploration into that including on the Rust front with Redox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit offtopic, but when Rust will have incremental compilation? I just tested Piston's hello world and it takes 4 seconds to recompile. A bit too long for my taste.

<comment><USER8> It's a priority for this year with the ground work already completed last year:

[https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1774-road...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1774-roadmap-2017.md)

[https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html](https://blog.rust- lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html)

<comment><USER9> It would be nice if they exposed these ideas, so that programs written in Rust can themselves become incremental.

<comment><USER10> What would this mean? Rust is AOT compiled, so I'm not quite understanding what it would mean for a program in Rust to become incremental.

<comment><USER11> Other programs are processing pipelines like a compiler, so the dependency graph code that computes when things need to be reprocessed could theoretically be extracted and published as a reusable library.

<comment><USER10> Ah ha! I see, that makes perfect sense, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> we are chasing more after trends than the fashion industry. The post contains no more info than that the image library is now pure rust.

I want to like rust and understand that there are benefits to it, but why is this on the frontpage? What important information does this post contain that justifies this, beside that some project now has their image library in pure- rust (does that even make sense? Not every rewrite is justified, replacing a rock-solid c-lib with a brand new rust-lib may not be a good idea)? I just loosely follow rust and i really don't see how i benefit from reading this.

I think we need to step back and realise that while there might be benefits to a certain technology, it's not a miracle drug.

<comment><USER13> > we are chasing more after trends than the fashion industry.

Larry Ellison made the same observation many years ago:

> The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud > computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of > anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The > computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than > women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is > talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is > this idiocy going to stop?

<comment><USER10> A similar sentiment by Alan Kay: programming is a pop culture.

I usually don't agree with these sentiments, personally, or at least not with the implications that are usually drawn from them. But it is something worth thinking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is fantastic news! This was the reason I kept using SDL2_image - I had too much trouble compiling Rust image crate on windows.

</comment><comment><USER15> The inflate crate is absolutely devoid of tests and full of unsafe code though, so the foundations of all of that are quite weak.

</comment><comment><USER16> If only rust had concurrency / parallel programming primitives or library as nice as golang or elixir,i think i'll move to this language right away. For now i'm still holding my breath before developping with it on the server side.

<comment><USER17> I think some of issue here is that when you ask for "concurrency / parallel programming primitives", you're actually talking about more than one problem. We can divide things up as follows:

\- Data parallelism. This is where you have (for example) a giant array of data to process and want to use as many cores as possible. For this, rayon is gorgeous: [https://github.com/nikomatsakis/rayon](https://github.com/nikomatsakis/rayon) Seriously, I can just not say enough good things about programming with rayon, and how nice Rust's "no mutable aliasing" makes coding. Also at some point, Rust will also need good libraries for talking to the GPU.

\- I/O concurrency. This is where you have a server that needs to respond quickly to 10,000+ sockets, for example. For this, it looks like everyone is standardizing on futures and tokio: [https://github.com/alexcrichton/futures- rs](https://github.com/alexcrichton/futures-rs) [https://github.com/tokio- rs/tokio](https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio)

But it seems like you're most interested in Erlang-style actors with M:N green threads? The issue here is that—as best I remember the history of Rust—the Rust maintainers decided that green threads were simply too high a level of abstraction for Rust. I think Rust will eventually move back in that direction, first using futures+tokio+async I/O, and then by eventually adding async/await sugar on top. That way, you'll only pay for coroutines/green threads when you explicitly opt in. But it will take a year or so for all this to start maturing, I think.

In the meantime, tokio's method-chaining syntax should actually be somewhat tolerable, especially because Rust has a `#[must_use]` attribute that prevents you from forgetting to use a future. If you're lazy, just run everything through rustfmt to get the indentation right.

<comment><USER10> > as best I remember the history of Rust

There's an RFC for that! [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0230-remo...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0230-remove-runtime.md) (A reminder that this was written in 2014, so statements are about Rust at that time period)

> I think Rust will eventually move back in that direction

Note that tokio is not "green threads" as they're conventionally thought of, though they are similar if you squint, kinda.

<comment><USER17> > Note that tokio is not "green threads" as they're conventionally thought of, > though they are similar if you squint, kinda.

Well, I'm leaping ahead to the end of the story, here, and speaking far too loosely about technical details. ;-) Futures + tokio + a possible future async/await proposal would provide a reasonable enough syntax for actors/coroutines in Rust, I suspect.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough! :)

Relevant links: [https://github.com/erickt/stateful](https://github.com/erickt/stateful) and [https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1823](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/1823)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any benchmarks?

</comment><comment><USER19> A bit OT, but is there a C API that Piston exports? I.e., could I use Piston from C/C++ (or another language that supports the C ABI)?

<comment><USER10> I don't believe so; Piston's goals are to make libraries for use in Rust, rather than trying to use Rust to improve other software, as far as I know. I did a quick look through of it and didn't see anything indicating there was, both in the main umbrella "piston" project as well as "image" in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does it support higher bit-depth JPEG? Or just 8?

<comment><USER21> From a quick look at the source code it seems only to support grayscale, RGB and CMYK jpegs with 8 bits per channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> ...and?

Is it faster? Is it shorter? Has it fixed bugs? Does it have more functionality? What reason does a user or potential user of this library have to care that it's now written in another language?

<comment><USER10> There is already a top-level comment asking this question, with a few replies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13351066)

<comment><USER22> My job right now is working on a C# codebase. I'd love to re-write everything in F#. I feel like it's higher level, less prone to error, and would make the codebase much smaller.

The thing is - no one is going to be impressed if they hear it's been re- written in F# because I _assume_ doing so is going to make the software easier to maintain, easier to extend and more reliable. Not management, not users, no-one.

Now, if I did the re-write and LOC went down by half, or performance improved, or it fixed a lot of bugs, or I was able to add features in much more quickly because abstractions were tighter and easier to create and the compiler was able to check more constraints for me - then people might take notice.

There is, however, no inherent value in the source language being changed in itself.

<comment><USER10> That's what makes blog posts like this tricky: this post is one for the project itself, which means that its audience is already for people who know what the project is, etc. Someone posted it on HN, and it got upvotes, so it gets to a broader audience, who may not inherently know these kinds of things, or not care.

So your point here is valid, that is, "as someone _not_ in that audience, why should I care?" That's what the other thread, with its replies, is getting at. Which is why I pointed to you to it.

It's possible as well, of course, that maybe that _still_ means this doesn't matter to you. Which is also expected; nobody is going to like every thread on HN. That's why the guidelines[1] have the section of "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." And it gives you something to do instead: " If you think a story is spam or off- topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link." And beyond that, you could just skip this thread and read any of the other 29 posts on the front page. That's how I usually handle posts that I don't have any particular interest in.

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

<comment><USER22> Constructive criticism is nothing to shy away from or be defensive about. Having criticism for something doesn't mean I think it's spam or off topic.

Again, for an example of a language X-to-language-Y rewrite story with some substance, that did a lot to boost the image of the language in many peoples eyes, see:

[http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml- ret...](http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml- retrospective/)

I'd love to something like that the next time "X rewritten in rust" etc gets to the front page of hacker news. A re-write in of itself tells me nothing.

<comment><USER23> What are you criticizing here? You're ultimately criticizing the HN community for upvoting a topic you're not interested in, which IMO is absurd, you're telling people what to be interested in. Either that, or you're criticizing the blog post author for not covering all audiences, which is also absur, folks are allowed to target audiences. This isn't really constructive.

Like Steve said, this post wasn't written for a general audience. A Rustacean will read that post and will be very happy to know that they can do certain things using pure Rust libraries. That was the audience of the post, the post makes total sense in that context, and has inherent value in that context. It got shared more widely, and HN seems to like it, which means that possibly folks who weren't the original intended audience are reading it, which is okay too, just that they may not find it that interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539387)

</comment><comment><USER3> So where is now we care about your privacy?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait apple said privacy?</comment>


Groupon Launches Personalized Deals - <AUTHOR> http://groublogpon.com/cities/personalized-deals/

<comment><USER2> Here is a very interesting stat from a blog post about their motivation for doing personalized deals ([http://groublogpon.com/cities/why-we-built- personalized-deal...](http://groublogpon.com/cities/why-we-built-personalized- deals/)):

"Over 35,000 merchants are queued to be featured on Groupon, and with 97% of our merchants wanting to be featured again".

That's an incredible number of merchants. I wonder how many of them would be willing to jump over to one of Groupon's many competitors?</comment>


USB-C and Lightning headphones aren't great news for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/09/usb-c-and-lightning-headphones-arent-great-news-for-everyone/ <comment><USER2> I understand why manufacturers are keen to get rid of the 3.5mm jack. Phones are constantly getting thinner, and the jack isn't. It's also another part on the BOM that manufacturers have to allocate PCB space for and pay money for the jack.

But here's the thing. 3.5mm jacks are analogue, and they're everywhere. They're out dated by modern standards, but overall they just work. If the industry actually cares about thickness, they'll put a 2.5mm jack on the phone, or cut the 3.5mm jack in half (this was talked about a few years ago, but I haven't seen any production phones implementing this).

As the article points out, the phone still needs a DAC and an amplifier to, you know, be a phone. Phones will typically have an earpiece speaker and a loud speaker, so you still need a DAC and amp to power those.

So, apart from reducing the port count (cheaper BOM, yay!) and making phones thinner, what is this really about?

It's about DRM.

As soon as headphones are digital, manufacturers can start locking down headphones.

Oh, you want HiFi audio? Well, the iPhone 9AB is only HiFi certified with Beatz(TM) headphones, so those fancy Bose headphones you bought for $500 last year, yeah, those are gonna give you ear-bud quality music.

<comment><USER3> Connectors are the #1 failure point in any electronics design. Substituting one connector for another isn't going to be an improvement in this respect but I can see why getting rid of a connector by itself could be a good thing (and then they'd need a wireless replacement, none of the bluetooth headsets I've used were good enough for day-to-day or prolonged use).

<comment><USER4> I've never had a 3.5mm jack fail me. The wires die, the PCB dies, but the connectors live forever.

<comment><USER5> Anecdotal evidence. You got lucky. Due to the sheer length of a 3.5 plug, and the sturdy design of most of these plugs, a small amount of lateral force can easily wreck the socket in a split-second; and small amounts of damage over time can easily accumulate.

I don't know if the lightning connectors are any better, but just by the fact that they're shorter, i'd hope they'd get removed from the socket, or just have the plug break, instead of the socket.

<comment><USER6> Are you actually arguing that a USB-C / Lightning connector will be more reliable than a 3.5mm analog connector?

You'll have to produce data to back that up.

<comment><USER5> I was using the wrong word, s/jack/socket/, now it should make more sense.

As to your data: Basic physics. Any plug in a socket is a lever. Its length determines to how much force any force impacting the part outside the device is translated to, at the end of the lever; inside the device.

USB-C plugs are shorter than 3.5mm plugs.

Thus, they're less likely to wreck your phone, and more likely to wreck themselves.

<comment><USER7> > Its length determines to how much force any force impacting the part outside > the device is translated to, at the end of the lever; inside the device.

> Thus, they're less likely to wreck your phone, and more likely to wreck > themselves

It's not about the force, since that goes both ways (because Newton's third law). It's about how deep damage may happen or how sooner will a jack give in before the socket does. 3.5mm plugs usually have more strength than lightning plugs (but not more than the USB-C plugs I've seen), so it is understandable if lightning plugs destroy themselves before dealing much damage to the socket.

But a shorter lever (of considerable strength to not break first) will apply the same amount of force over a smaller area than a longer lever. Less area => more pressure => more damage to socket.

This is exactly why I can (and have done so for the last three years, same phone) pick my phone up with the earphones, but not with the end of its microUSB cable: the shorter socket cannot handle the weight of the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's hard to see the upside of this, from a phone buyer end-user point of view. By looking at a USB C and 3.5mm jack next to each other for a moment, it is obvious this will enable only a minuscule additional thinning of devices. But at what cost? Most likely:

Significantly more expensive headphones for at least the next several years and possibly longer. If I were a headphone manufacturer I would be thrilled by this development. As a headphone buyer, less so.

In most cases we will give up being able to charge and listen at the same time, unless willing to add an additional external dongle. Meanwhile manufacturers will continue their, uh, curious belief that cell phone battery capacities are anywhere near good enough.

<comment><USER9> It's not minuscule at all. The 3.5mm jack is deeper than even the old dock connectors, and with a device as small as a phone every bit of space counts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't the USB-C standard already have a well-defined way of connecting an analog headphone, using only a passive adapter? Download the standard and scroll to the end, it's an appendix. IIRC, it can even be used while charging, with the correct passive adapter.

The question then only becomes, is the phone's DAC connected to the USB-C connector, or did the manufacturer omit it to save a few traces in the board? Did anyone test that Moto-Z with a passive USB-C to 3.5mm socket adapter, to see what happens?

<comment><USER11> Assuming you mean the sideband pins, the article says that Intel is working on a standard to let those pins be used for analog audio.

If there's no standard way to communicate that "yeah, the sideband pins are now analog audio out from the host", I don't think you can buld USB-compliant accessories that assume that.

This would mean that the adapter (and/or low-cost headphones, I guess) would still need to include a CPU that can speak USB to negotiate with the host about the sideband pins, would be my assumption. A bit like how max current (used to) work.

<comment><USER12> > the article says that Intel is working on a standard to let those pins be > used for analog audio

In that case, the article is wrong because the USB 3.1 spec already supports analog audio via the Audio Adapter Accessory Mode. Whether this phone supports this mode is unclear, but it's part of the existing spec explicitly to allow passive USB-C to 3.5mm adapters

Official spec: [http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/](http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/)

page 166 of the USB-C spec: [http://www.those.ch/designtechnik/wp- content/uploads/2014/08...](http://www.those.ch/designtechnik/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/USB-Type-C-Specification-Release-1.0.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Moto Z looks like an awesome phone.

The lack of a headphone jack is a complete and utter deal-breaker. I'm not carrying a dongle around so I can use my headphones. (A quality dongle will need to have some size and heft; see the Schiit Fulla. It can't even run off of Micro USB power alone as it stands, though it does work with some phones with some work.)

<comment><USER14> I think the point is that this is a step towards consumers purchasing headphones with a digital usb/lightning/whatever connector, not to carry around an adaptor.

I guess we'll see in time whether the idea takes off.

<comment><USER15> Since it doesn't actually solve any problem that any consumer actually has, I predict that it's going to go away in about 2021 and the 3.5mm jack will stick around. Personally I don't care about USB-C because it doesn't actually solve any problems for me. At least when we went to Micro-USB my device chargers became interchangeable and I didn't have to go home to charge my phone anymore.

I have USB-C on my laptop at work, and so far I'm pretty unimpressed with it. I'd much rather just have a second DisplayPort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > And here's the problem: The DAC and amp inside that $50 pair of digital > headphones are not going to be of the same quality as those in a $500 pair. > Nor will the sound they output be afforded the same time and effort. Instead > of trusting in your phone's DAC and amp to output decent-quality audio at > decent volumes, you'll now be contending with the choices of a company that > has had to cut corners to put out headphones on a tight budget.

This sounds like a good reason for the change rather than an argument against it.

Audio performance is determined by the quality of the DAC, the amp, the speakers, and the enclosure. If the DAC and amp are part of the headphones, then all factors affecting audio performance are independent of the phone. You can decide what level of audio performance you want and then buy headphones that provide that performance.

Also, many people use the same set of headphones with multiple devices. When I'm buying devices I consider how they fit in with my other devices. If I have a higher end tablet I might buy a lower end phone because many of the things I would have done on the phone had I only had a phone will be done on the tablet. Device makers tend to put the better DACs and amps in the higher end devices, and so under the current approach if I want the best audio on all my devices, all of them have to be higher end devices (and I have to get expensive headphones too).

<comment><USER17> > You can decide what level of audio performance you want and then buy > headphones that provide that performance.

That's a great point. And for people like me who don't use audio on their phones ( other than the occasional voice call ) it means I'm not paying for other people's use-cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having a single non-standard, unsupported (usb c) port for everything isn't progress, it's regress. No one wants this, especially for headphones but Apple and another clueless follower are pushing it anyway because they have the clout and they think people will buy it. Sounds like FireWire to me. That was an amazing success. Or thunderbolt. Or thunderbolt 2. Yeah I think it's clear by now Apple has an abysmal track record with such changes. Throw in something any knowledgeable consumer is against like removing the headphone jack and now you have a recipe for disaster. I hope so, not because I like others' pain but because this change, along with others, marks an anti consumer shift in policy. No longer does Apple even care what the consumer wants because it has the zombie sheep factor of millions of clueless idiots who will buy products that are clearly not in their best interests and require extra investment for no reason. Then again, Apple is hardly alone in such markets.

<comment><USER19> > Apple has an abysmal track record with such changes

Really?

Apple went all-USB, people complained. USB mice and keyboard became the standard.

Apple dropped the floppy drive, people complained. No floppy drive became the standard.

Apple dropped the CD drive, people complained. No CD drive (on laptops) became the standard.

Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, became the standard on laptops.

<comment><USER20> > Apple dropped the CD drive, people complained. No CD drive (on laptops) > became the standard.

> Apple dropped full-size display connectors, people complained. This, too, > became the standard on laptops.

You need to step out of that Apple reality distortion field, not every laptop is an ultrabook.

<comment><USER21> Next time you go to a coffee shop, airport or train station, etc. look at the laptops you see and count how many have an optical drive.

Yes, some people do still have the older corporate IT bricks but even there the trend has clearly been to optimize for size and battery life. Display connectors are a bit of a confound since e.g. an HDMI connector is already a huge improvement over a VGA/DVI port but are clearly on a similar trajectory.

<comment><USER6> Yeah but it isn't like Apple invented the idea of the ultrabook.

<comment><USER22> The ultrabook was almost entirely a reaction to the MacBook Air. Read initial press reports about the ultrabook, they make that obvious. Like [http://www.pcworld.com/article/246691/ultrabooks_laptops_as_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/246691/ultrabooks_laptops_as_light_as_air.html)

<comment><USER23> The MacBook Air was almost entirely a reaction to the eeePC. Probably not really, but just as much as ultrabooks were to the macbook air.

<comment><USER19> Yes, the MacBook Air was a reaction to netbooks. But it was a different category of device, a high-end ultraportable. The same category of device that Ultrabooks fit into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't want a thinner phone.

Cellphone thinness reached the "good enough" stage a very long time ago. Then all making them thinner did was start to make compromises for that thinness. For one example, while components and software continue to get more and more power efficient, they're removing more raw battery capacity within the phone so they can shave 1mm.

No 3.5mm is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to have to remember to charge my headphones, or add extra weight to my IEMs, plus now I cannot charge and listen at the same time (or use the port for anything else).

All this move will result in is more people sitting on public transport blasting audio through the front speakers because their headphones died or they cannot afford $100 IEMs or $150 headphones. I think it will be extremely telling if the iPhone continues to ship with free IEMs, if not then that is proof enough that even Apple cannot make the economics work.

Overall this is a horrible step backwards.

<comment><USER25> > Cellphone thinness reached the "good enough" stage a very long time ago. > Then all making them thinner did was start to make compromises for that > thinness

100% agree. Instead of my phone being 1.5mm thicker, I'm carrying around a huge silicon case with a battery and a bunch of circuitry included.

Although I'm sure that's all based on studies that 85% of users don't need more battery life on 90% of the days out of the year, and 96% of users when confronted with a prototype phone that was 0.5mm thicker replied "oooh I would buy this". The tyranny of the market.

That said...

> No 3.5mm is a deal breaker for me

I switched to using bluetooth headphones in 2006 (was that really a decade ago?), so the disappearance of the 3.5mm jack in particular doesn't affect me at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I assume the switch away from 3.5mm will come along with the elimination of the physical home button (replaced with a purely force-touch version) and the extension of the screen to more fully cover the full face of the phone.

I do hope they put a lightning connector on both ends. That way we're not losing a port but at least trading it for something which is arguably better. I frequently could use a top-side power port, e.g when the phone is sitting in a cup-holder showing GPS but needs a charge, and the app won't rotate 180'.

For backward compatibility, could the lightning port drive an analog output that would just require an analog adaptor to allow connecting existing headphones?

</comment><comment><USER27> I must be one of the few who is actually not against this move. I am all for not having a 3.5mm anymore. I really see no need. Things should start becoming more wireless. Heck get rid of the usb-c/lightning and just use wireless charging.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been using a SonyEricsson MW600 Bluetooth adapter for my headphones for a couple of years - it pairs with up to three devices, the audio quality is pretty good (audiophile colleagues tried it with their hideously expensive headphones and said it was "surprisingly decent"), the battery lasts me around a week depending on use, and it charges via a standard micro-USB connector.

Love it so much that when the tieclip-style clip broke, I ordered a new clip off eBay instead (Sony has a couple of successors to it, but I'll pass until this one completely dies on me).

I think this is a more interesting solution than changing physical connectors.

</comment><comment><USER29> The elephant in the room is Bluetooth - Bluetooth 5.0 spec is coming out this week, I think. And there are the codecs like AptX, etc.

I'm shocked at how good the sound quality is on my Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Bluetooth headphones. If anyone had told me that I could get that kind of dynamic range and nuance in the audio over Bluetooth, I wouldn't have believed him. And that's with Bluetooth 4.x.

</comment><comment><USER30> One downside to the 3.5mm jack is that you hear a glitch whenever you plug-in or unplug a device. It would be nice if they could fix that.

<comment><USER25> I'm expecting with a digital connection, you'll instead have a long delay when it negotiates, and then if you have any lint in your port you can look forward to it disconnecting when you jostle the cable with a "this accessory is not supported by apple" error message like with chargers

<comment><USER31> Or you buy cheap ransomware earphones and hear a "to unlock your iPhone, please pay $xxx dollars to..".</comment></comment></comment>


Inverting the Golden Cage, or a Gift to the Barbarian Hordes at Apple's Gates. - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=144 <comment><USER2> And what's to stop Apple from changing things up again? The most insidious problem with these walled gardens/lock-in environments is that you don't know what's coming next.

I got out of MSFT development when I saw that they basically said "all that stuff you learned and invested in, we've decided to break it, but you can pay us for the next version and do it all over again!" The VB/VBA programs I wrote back then are long gone. The C/Perl/Java programs I wrote against standards still work fine. Sure I might have to make some tweaks if I want to catch up to the latest version, and some day Oracle will do something stupid to Java and we'll be stuck with the previous version, but I won't concede retroactive control over my investment to another company's marketing department.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well to start with, there are patent problems. IANAL, but I presume Apple's thought long and hard about this.

Then you have the licensing issues. To get the documentation, you need to clickwrap through the license that says you can't clone it. So it's not even like cleanroom engineering, where it's possible to legally document some assembly code you bought in a box.

Then there's the real problem--Apple's SDKs are really quite good, all things considered. Cloning them would be very hard. There is some serious, complicated stuff going on under the hood, especially to make it performant. To say that a couple of clever Lisp hackers can clone it is to say that Apple could have built the API with a couple of clever hackers to begin with. It's to say that Jobs is stupid for having hundreds of people work on it.

<comment><USER4> What makes you think that hundreds of people are working in the SDK? I suspect the core frameworks are really only being worked on by small groups.

If one targeted a specific kind of application, let's say 2D gaming, then the amount of functionality is well within the size of what one or two talented hackers can do. After all, they wouldn't have to write an SDK. All they have to do is to write an Objective-C parser and target another 2D game SDK on another platform.

<comment><USER3> Let's say on average, 2D games only use 20% of the APIs.

Problem: Every 2D game uses a different 20%.

<comment><USER4> I don't see it. How do you explain something like PyGlet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just silly.

I expect Apple would hate it, but not because it would spell their quick demise.

For one thing, even if such a thing were available today, the iPhone/iPad would almost certainly be the best platform for apps developed for, well, the iPhone/iPad platform. Yes, more developers might port their existing iApp to Android, etc, but if its viable for them, then its also viable for people who creating new apps who might have bet it all on Android if they didn't have an easy way to hedge with the iPhone too.

If this idea were real, and it caught on, the bigger issue for Apple is that developers might be slower to adopt new features of the platform. Right now, if Apple releases a new OS feature, they can put it on new devices and move the installed base to it pretty quickly, which means developers have incentive to take advantage of the new functionality. If those developers depend on a translation layer to reach a significant portion of their audience, then they have less incentive to move quickly, because the translation layer needs to be updated, and that could take a while if the underlying platform doesn't provide the required functionality yet.

Not that I think it would ever get that far. It's a lot of work already, and its going to be magnified by the fact that both iPhoneOS and Android are evolving quickly. Even if this hypothetical were real, its going to be lagging the capabilities of both platforms which means that its only really attractive for apps that don't get much benefit from the new capabilities.

Look at WINE. It's been under development for over a decade. I think its impressive that it is as useful as it is, but when it comes down to it, its still pretty niche.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where by "the doom of the Golden Cage as we know it", we actually mean "a thriving AppStore market"? As far as we can tell, Apple just wants apps to run well on the iPhone and iPad. If you want to machine translate your CocoaTouch app into something else, then Apple has in a way won: the conversation is about how you can port your awesome CocoaTouch app on to some other, lesser platform. That's all Steve really wants anyway - look at iTunes/Safari for Windows. As an added bonus, such a translation framework would finally fill the gap that GNUstep [<http://gnustep.org/>] never did. You might start with Cocotron [<http://cocotron.org/>], which is a small subset of what the author describes.

</comment><comment><USER7> >For this reason, Adobe (or anyone else who stands to profit from Apple's demise) ought to seriously consider funding such a project.

How would getting the entire mobile developer world to code to Apple's API's lead to Apple's demise?

<comment><USER8> Well, if you saw a killer app on an iPhone, you could run it on your non- iPhone smartphone with this approach. Thus no need to buy an iPhone yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "nor would it be especially difficult given several months of an enthusiastic Common Lisp programmer or two" Hah!

<comment><USER10> I guess it depends on your definition of "several".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With enough time, money, and energy, we could do a _lot_ of things. This will never happen.

<comment><USER4> Why not? This wouldn't be any more or less difficult than any other cross platform framework.

<comment><USER12> Think of it as a cross platform framework where _the spec is controlled by your enemy_.

<comment><USER4> They're limited in what they can do if they want to maintain backwards compatibility.</comment></comment></comment></comment>