Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/millionth-stack-overflow-question/ <comment><USER3> Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about getting ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans- forwarded...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded- over-x11-font-problem)) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is someone elses.

We've come a long way since expertsexchange.

<comment><USER4> And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault" before anyone could answer it.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't it just get moved to ServerFault, and then someone would have answered it, and the Google result would have pointed at ServerFault instead?

<comment><USER6> No, unfortunately it wouldn't. The google juice is completely concentrated on the stackoverflow domain — I constantly find insta-moved SO questions at the top of the search results, with the moved question on SF or SU nowhere to be found. Yet another defect of their asinine community silo policy.

They don't do a 301 redirect — how would google know where the real question is?

<comment><USER7> we do a 301 redirect if the stub is deleted. We probably should be auto- deleting the migration stubs after a period of time but haven't gotten to that quite yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java) seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to answer a few times a week, I never find anything.

At least I can get points by asking good questions.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow.

[1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.

<comment><USER10> There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as correct.

It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I want to be able to find too.

These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.

<comment><USER11> When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them lower than us.

<comment><USER12> That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow, but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for certain questions.

You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a slightly different Url form to the one you use.

For example : [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack- tr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-trace-with- line-numbers-from-user-bug-report-in-net) this question appears on scraping sites (not going to name them for fear of feeding them traffic), but they link back with this Url: <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925> \- which doesn't resolve back to the longer version. I know there's a canonical link on it (for the longer url) but I'm wondering if this strategy is working or not.

Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to slow them right down.

It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same answer spammed 5 times back at you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..

<comment><USER4> Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.

<comment><USER14> Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox (<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches>). I created the following bookmark:

      Name     : [so] Search StackOverflow     // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic
      Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s
      Keyword  : so

Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google.

I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "<http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s> in the location field).

Chrome has something similar: [http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95653)

<comment><USER15> Just to clarify, in Chrome this works automatically. After performing one search on Stack Overflow, you can now start typing "stack overflow" into the address bar. As soon as you see that the first autocompletion is StackOverflow.com, you can hit tab and perform a search.

This works automatically with any site you perform a search on, with no need to configure anything. One of the main reasons I moved to Chrome after years of being an FF user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While it's cool they've had a million questions, I feel more interested in seeing stats on things like:

# non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non)

# questions with an accepted answer

# questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not

<comment><USER11> Just go here and type in your SQL query:

<http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new>

<comment><USER16> Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really interesting stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My default google query for a programming problem has become.

[keywords] site:stackoverflow.com

And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats and thank you for making the web a better place!

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, that truly is amazing.

On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P

<comment><USER20> My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google -- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust it.

<comment><USER21> Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.

<comment><USER22> It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?

<comment><USER23> On the StackOverflow podcast they had talked about some of the issues faced with awarding points for asking questions.

Apparently many people feel that asking a good question isn't worthy of points (or as many points) as answering a question.

They at one point (IIRC) were awarding points for asking a question, but that led to people spamming in low quality questions.

My personal rule is that if the question was interesting enough to make me read it, it should probably be upvoted.

<comment><USER24> They've also recently created a Gold "Electorate" badge, which is defined as "Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions." This should encourage people to vote up good questions as well as good answers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - <USER2> then promptly forgot.

</comment><comment><USER6> How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh forever?

</comment><comment><USER26> Bet they'd have more questions and answers without that stupid third-party login crap. (OpenID)</comment>


After Twitter fact-check, Trump threatens to regulate or close down social media - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/after-twitter-fact-check-trump-threatens-to-regulate-or-close-down-social-media-platforms/ <comment><USER2> Discussion already underway at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322112](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322112)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. We've moved the comments thither. I'll probably move the URLs too because the other article contains an autoplaying video.</comment></comment>


World's largest optical lens is 5.1 feet wide and took 5 years to make - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2019/09/27/this-is-the-worlds-largest-optical-lens-its-5-feet-wide-and-took-5-years-to-make/ <comment><USER2> Come on. Petapixel is a blogspam site. At the bottom of the posts you can find the source. In this case it's "via Engadget":

[https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/23/moving-the-largest- high-...](https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/23/moving-the-largest-high- performance-lens-ever-built/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also helps when you need to burn some very large ants.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's cool. But I am wondering how they keep that big a piece of glass from sagging. I am asking because I have read that's a problem with big lenses, and a key reason reflectors became the way to go for large telescopes.

<comment><USER5> Because glass does not sagg.

It is a myth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glass)

<comment><USER6> You are mistaking two effects. Indeed, glass does not "flow" (it's not a "very, very viscous liquid"); but most assuredly it does sag under gravity - just as a heavy steel beam supported at the ends would.

This problem is much simpler to solve for mirrors than lenses, as mirrors can be supported under their entire surface (see [0] for how it's done in larger amateur telescopes), while lenses - only along the edge.

[0] [https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/562906-18-point- flotation...](https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/562906-18-point-flotation- mirror-cell-question/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article misses the big question: why did they put all this work into developing a solid lens rather than a mirror or a Fresnel lens?

<comment><USER4> My guess is a mirror wouldn't fit into the design, and a Fresnel lens would not have the needed accuracy for astronomical work.</comment></comment>


Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars–Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117943/googles-self-driving-cars-miss-problem-mobility-america <comment><USER2> This misses the point, in many ways:

* Driverless cars means safer cars.

* Driverless cars means independence for people who otherwise are restricted (elderly, kids, blind, etc).

* Driverless cars are more fuel efficient. Sure, they aren't as efficient as not driving, but, just like driving with cruise control is better than not, complete automation will be better.

* Driverless cars will enable more productive use of the commute time.

There are probably many more benefits as well.

The one thing the author probably gets correct is that this will increase traffic load on the roads, and it is questionable whether it will increase efficiency of roadway usage more than it increases traffic load, but I'm guessing it won't. I can imagine a case where I have a single car, driving me to work, then going back to take my wife, then back to the house to pick up kids, then back to pick up my wife, and so on. In other words, a lot of empty drive time. This would be mitigated by a taxi-like "call the nearest car".

<comment><USER3> > Driverless cars means safer cars.

Where's the evidence for this?

 _perhaps_ if everyone on the road was in a driverless car, and they all communicated and prevented crashes. But that's not going to happen.

<comment><USER4> "perhaps if everyone on the road was in a driverless car, and they all communicated and prevented crashes. But that's not going to happen."

I hear this sentiment a lot. Having a higher percentage of cars following safe practices is safer even if those are cars aren't perfect and even if 100% of the cars aren't automated.

Can you tell me the logic (I've seen it many times in posts) that there won't be any safety benefits until all cars are automated (or until there aren't any manual drivers?).

I disagree that the benefit will be that discrete.

<comment><USER5> The trouble is that even if driverless cars are overall vastly safer, in today's litigious environment it just takes one fatal crash to derail (!) the whole concept when the car maker is sued out of existence. Whereas suing individual drivers doesn't take down the whole system.

<comment><USER6> I see this argument a lot, and it seems to beg the question to assume that there is such a "litigious environment."

Why are Google and other companies trying to develop this technology if all it takes is a single fatal crash, and therefore a single lawsuit? It should be in their rational self-interest to avoid any contact with this technology. It would be lighting on money on fire.

This is not the strongest example, but automobile companies have ignored fatality inducing problems, yet the practice didn't end their business. There is likely enough profit in the pursuit to deal with such issues. These lawsuits are slow-moving enough that there would be room to maneuver.

The greatest threat, in my opinion, is over-reacting politicians passing laws due to a shock in public opinion on the safety of the cars. The shock could be legitimate, due to reckless implementation, or just due to an unpreventable accident.

<comment><USER5> I trot out the power generation industry as an example. People sue nuke plants out of existence, despite them being far less damaging than coal - in both lives and environmental destruction.

There's also the vaccine industry. Some vaccinations result in severe adverse reactions in a handful of people. But the public health benefit is so vast that the government has stepped in to shield vaccine makers from the lawsuits.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know, nuclear power and the disposal of nuclear waste is more of a NIMBY problem than a problem of excess punitive damages or other alleged problems with lawsuits. This could also be an example of public shock putting pressure on politicians and public utilities to shy away from nuclear power.

The vaccine point suggests to me that it's not so black and white about if self-driving cars are doomed. If the public safety benefit of self-driving cars becomes so great, then maybe the government will be pressured to ensure they're here to stay. I think there will definitely need to be changes in the law to accommodate this tech, but it's not impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure, the first driverless car doesn't really help other people. But there are network effects. The more driverless cars, the better everyone else is off.

1\. Owning a driverless car and leaving it parked would be a waste of money. Either rent out your car as an Uber taxi, or simply don't own a car, and use a driverless one as a cheap taxi to work. Long-term, if everyone had a driverless car and used it like this it leads to an 80% reduction in the number of cars required. Isn't that good for the world? (minus GM shareholders). That's some major congestion relief.

2\. A lot of congestion is due to drivers screwing up. Bad lane changes, driving too close to each other, idling, etc. Google cars would smooth this out.

3\. Easy to send the driverless car to the supercharger station to fill up while you're at work.

4\. We get driverless buses too, right? Meaning cheaper buses, meaning more quantity demanded.

The author is correct though, in that a lower cost of usership will lead to a higher quantity demanded.

Some of my previous comments here:

[http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self- drivin...](http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-driving-cars- are-going-to.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6007977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6007977)

</comment><comment><USER8> The typical human driver, due to reflexes, follows the car in front of them with 2s of response time, Indepedent of speed. Therefore you can really only hope for 1800 cars/hour/lane under ideal conditions and at speeds where the length of the vehicle is a rounding error. Self driving cars could safely follow much closer, perhaps 0.5s of response time. This by itself could increase lane capacity by 4x without accounting for bad drivers getting into accidents or just disrupting the flow. Self driving cars are going to be amazing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like this guy can't see the forest for the trees. Does he really think that this technology isn't going to get applied to mass transit? Buses are an obvious next step, but making a driverless car is the relatively easy _first_ step.

If we don't get started on the first step, we'll never solve the second, or the third or the thirtieth.

He complains that Manhattan would be better if it was pedestrianised... really? Does he think that they're going to knock down buildings and remove the roads just so we can all have a chat in the street? And has he ever been on mass transit like trains or subways? I dunno about the rest of the world, but I can guarantee there's almost no "valuable, often spontaneous social interaction" going on in London. You sit/stand quietly, generally in some discomfort due to overcrowding or tiny seats, maybe talk to a friend (if there) but probably not. They're anything _but_ sociable.

There's always some complaint that you can raise about any future technology project, but sometimes you just have to get it done using what you have. Those dense pedestrian friendly cities in Europe didn't get that way by design, they just couldn't be knocked down to expand the roads for cars, so they made do with narrow roads. Likewise, US car friendly cities aren't going anywhere, deal with what you've got.

On another note, he seems to be ignoring the growing trend in renewable power sources around the world. There is a big push in Europe to switch to cleaner energy sources, thus making electric cars a great idea. eg. Combine the solar panels of the Tesla charging stations with automated cars that can drive in and charge while you're at work and you've got a revolution in how we get around.

Not to mention that there are countries like France that have 75% nuclear power, thus making the electric car almost emission-free from the very start.

</comment><comment><USER10> A few years ago, I spent a month working out of my firm's SV office. Coming from Manhattan, it was quite a culture shock. Suburbia as far as the eye could see. But eventually I realized that people there chose to live that way. It wasn't just because they had kids and couldn't afford to live in the city anymore. Folks actually preferred their sprawling office park to a downtown skyscraper. Technology will be designed to enable that culture, and given the importance of Silicon Valley, probably spread it.

I still don't get it, but you can't say that Google isn't fulfilling a need. Its a catch-22: self driving cars are the right solution for America the way its designed now. And their adoption will entrench the design even more. The suburbs will get even sprawlier when people can commute an hour each way without actively driving. Its not what most futurists imagined that the world would look like, but it seems inevitable at this point. Urbanists can decry these trends, but who are we to judge people for living the way they want?

<comment><USER11> As a dude with a physical disability, using a car is a godsend.

While living in cities like SF/NY, taking mass transit was a nightmare for me. Escalators were often not working. Elevators were either out of order, disgusting, or just plain slow. So I often just had to walk up stairs which was pretty painful for my shitty joints.

Then of course, there's stuff that affects most people. Some buses in downtown SF that just wouldn't show up. Or trains in NY which were packed to the brim on rush hour, extremely uncomfortable especially on summer days when specific cars don't have A/C. Or maybe shivering for half an hour in the station during winter. Or having to go uptown to go downtown because of construction. Or walking two miles between transfer points. Or maybe a subway line that just doesn't run during the weekend because fuck you.

What I went through is nothing like what people in war torn countries have to go through, so yeah, it's definitely first world problems and a lot of bitching. That being said, I'm so glad my years of work in SF and NY are over. Love the food and communities in those cities... plus biking in SF was helluvalot of a fun. That said, while it might not seem like a big deal, not having to climb several flights of stairs with bad joints or deal with transit uncertainty is a huge relief for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nail. On. Head.

What does it matter if the guy in the front seat is twirling a steering wheel or not? His personal possession is still taking up a vast area of a public space - the city street. He's still driving 150 polluting miles for a meeting that could be held just as well electronically. He's still using way too much energy to transport just one person, whether the oil is burned in his car or in a power station somewhere else. And he's still sitting on his increasingly wide butt.

Google's self-driving cars will entrench one of the biggest problems with Western culture, not fix it. The answers are mass transit, active travel, smarter workplaces and better urban design, not the same old cars but with the ability to twirl the steering wheel themselves.

(and before the obvious rejoinder: I live in an English rural town with a population of 3,000. I don't own a car. It's possible right now; it'd be much, much easier if public transport and bike routes got the same investment lavished on motorists.)

<comment><USER13> I just don't understand these types of articles.

"Driverless cars don't cure cancer. They're a complete failure."

Would you prefer to have autonomous cars, with their reduced incidence of accident/ability to reduce traffic through smarter driving, or not? Who cares if it doesn't solve every one of the world's problems?

And I'm a person who actually hates cars/suburbia/etc.

<comment><USER14> > _" Driverless cars don't cure cancer. They're a complete failure."_

It's called the Nirvana Fallacy. Very common in our profession and in others where folk like us wind up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> assuming self-driving cars don't get road rage and try to cut people off, they absolutely will improve my commute[1]. the more emotionless drivers, the better.

[1]my theoretical commute. in reality, my commute is a ten minute bike ride along a riverbank.

<comment><USER16> They also probably won't follow bumper to bumper right into the middle of a busy intersection right before the light turns red, thus blocking most of the perdindicular road for its green duration. I see that every afternoon in SF financial district, and I can't imagine how many person-hours are wasted every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, this article is way off base, it will be referenced to years from now as a joke about how no one saw the trans-formative technology coming.

Don't get me wrong, nothing beats the "live where you work principle" in terms of efficiency. it should be the primary choice for professions that this is possible. this principle would also do wonders for the financial and ethnic diversity of neighborhoods instead of the tossed salad we have today.

Driver less cars will have a huge impact on efficiency and safety as they become the norm. someone already mentioned driving efficiency, but as the safety record of these vehicles sky rockets, cars will become lighter as they won't need to be designed such rare high speed collisions. This will also greatly improve efficiency and shrink the carbon footprint.

</comment><comment><USER18> One question that interests me is what the self driving cars will do for congestion. One question I'm sure Google developers are asking is "What's the minimum safe distance between cars?".

If every single car is cruising at the same speed and distance between them, would our roads then be more or less congested? From the things I've read from German autobahn research seems to indicate that congestion should be less. On the other hand some roads here in Denmark seems to be design for less traffic that they currently carry and I doubt it would work if cars where forced to keep a fixed distance.

It would be interesting to get the reaction from the politicians, if some one like Google reported it's actually impossible to drive a certain road while following the recommended safety rules.

</comment><comment><USER19> awful article.

yes internal combustion engines are inefficient. yes mass transit offers superior energy consumption per passenger mile in many cases.

BUT

when cars are good enough at coordinating to make streetlights irrelevant, or park themselves, or self distribute among different routes to globally optimize road throughput, the carbon footprint will be substantially lower.

when the grid is cleaner which is happening every day, the point of electric cars being dirty is that much less valid.

cars are like packets. the cost per bit is higher, but the dynamacism compared to circuit switched systems is a GIANT feature. trains and buses lose their efficiency edge quickly as density lowers because of their inherent inflexibility.

even if my commute was to take the same amount of time, have the same carbon foot print and nothing else changed. The fact that I do something else besides play organ with my cars controls is a giant improvement. Maybe i will spend my new found free time coming up with explanations for why this luddite can't see the forest from the trees as @inmyunix astutely points out.

AND

the author is suggesting that limited reagent is roadways and that cars don't offer a solution to that. well, there are more creative solutions that can play nice with self driving cars, like time multiplexing roadways. a global system can decide that you may as well leave 20 minutes later because you will get there in the same amount of time and hence send a car to pick you up later. or more generally, just shifting the hours slightly so that instead of most commuters leaving at ~8 and ~5, its half ~7, ~4 and half ~8, ~5 etc. or even more granular.

These are difficult problems and there is no way a single solution should be expected to solve all problems. This is a step in the right direction, despite Ben Walsh's lack of vision.

</comment><comment><USER20> Driving is a frustrating experience. When you're a passenger that frustration is decreased by quite a bit -- I always get out of driving if I can. Not having to drive is a MAJOR improvement to anyone's commute.

Think about it, you've now gained X-minutes to and from work or where ever per day to focus on reading, chats, etc.

</comment><comment><USER21> _> Driving is a miserable experience inflicted upon 86 percent of us every morning and every afternoon, five days a week._

But you won't be the one driving. You won't have to deal with the stress of making those decisions and being constantly aware and hoping that some a-hole doesn't mess up and hurt you, or that you'll mess up and hurt someone else.

So, what's the problem meant to be?

 _> The notion that hundreds of thousands of Google car pods will glide through cities in humming packs just inches apart is deeply naive. Almost every major city in the U.S. contains the rebuttal to that idea, in the form of new freeways that ere supposed to relieve congestion and improve commute times._

Very few demands are uncapped, and I've not seen any evidence that the demand for transport is so.

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem with mass transit is that you can't have a stop everywhere people are (and want to go) and even if you could you'd end up with a transit system that looks awfully similar to google's self-driving cars in practice.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. Self-driving cars could increase use of public transportation; order a car to pick you up and drive to the nearest bus/train/subway station. Ditch the car because it can take care to park itself/do whatever is next.

So if car-commuting is as terrible as the article thinks it is, and mass transit is more pleasant, it can help with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> this guy is way off base. can't see the forest, etc.

personal, private transportation isn't going ANYWHERE.

Google isn't required, nor are they attempting, to reinvent propulsion mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish people would think of these more as self-driving _taxis_. And thus, cheaper taxis.

Because most people that live in cities don't need a car all the time. An awful lot of people can use mass transit most of the time, and then a car occasionally. Turn that occasional car usage into a cheap self-driving taxi and you save on a lot of parking space.

</comment><comment><USER26> >visually, the comparison is comical.

That visual comparison is flawed. Just read the comments.

<comment><USER27> [http://the-riotact.com/the-muenster-photo-remade-in-canberra...](http://the- riotact.com/the-muenster-photo-remade-in-canberra-how-much-space-do-those- cars-need/82745)

Here you go, the same size group of people and the vehicles required to transport them. 69 people: 1 bus, 69 bikes, 60 cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> driverless cars are such a dopey idea... money would be best spent to improve public transportation.

<comment><USER29> The money being spent of driverless cars is chump change compared to the amount that public transportation costs. It probably wouldn't even be enough to build a single light rail line.</comment></comment>


Samsung Files Suits vs Apple in Korea, Japan, Germany  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/42714182

<comment><USER2> It takes a reasonably long time to prepare and file a patent suit, so this has been in the works for quite a while--probably as soon as they and Apple started talking about the issues for which Apple finally sued over last week.</comment>


How some good corporate engineering blogs are written - <AUTHOR> https://danluu.com/corp-eng-blogs/ <comment><USER2> > One person at a company with a compelling blog noted that a downside of > having only one approver and/or one primary approver is that if that person > is busy, it can takes weeks to get posts approved.

Heap CTO here. I'm pretty sure this quote is about me! Or if it's not, it would be equally true about me. This is why we rolled out the "buddy" system described in this post. That way 90% of the iteration can be between the engineer writing the post and someone else who will be a lot more available than I am. This matters a lot if a post requires three or four round trips to really get it right. Plus, in a lot of cases, that other person is better at technical storytelling than I am to begin with.

I'd also note that this post and HN discussion focus a lot on reducing friction, as if having a really good blog is the state of nature. In my experience, this has not been true. A good blog won't just happen if you get out of the way.

Someone senior at the company needs to actively prioritize the engineering blog. You also need eng leadership that respects that writing posts is real work and is willing to have engineers spend time on-the-job working on them. At Heap, we do this down to the level of taking this into account in sprint planning. Also, a lot of the good ideas for posts come from working with engineers to find the kernel of a story in something they're working on. This is an active process, not something spontaneous that you just have to permit to happen.

We also benefit from having a lot of legitimately interesting technical work to talk about. This is more true at some companies than others, and is a big multiplier on how compelling you can make your blog. The success of a blog post is pretty non-linear – either it gets wide readership or not much at all. Having something interesting to talk about is pretty important, and is hard to manufacture.

<comment><USER3> Dan, having been that exact same bottleneck it's common for many.

And echo everything your said. In terms of getting something out the door as soon as you do that you've diminished the impact of the post. It's similar to quality engineering you ship it when it is ready, not because you said it'd take a week and you spent a week on it. Most engineers hate artificial marketing deadlines, being able to work on a post to get it into a good state can be equally as unclear in terms of timing as engineering.

I've found that a dedicated mentoring process, similar to your buddy system can work well. As you're growing the people that are able to review/drive content having them follow along as I review posts and provide feedback helps for them to internalize some of the steps. In my experience after shadowing for about 5 posts they're able to start guide someone else with still some need for support and final reviews.

A final note, as someone that has written a lot of content I can crank out a post in anywhere from a day to an hour. For someone that has an interest in a topic you shouldn't expect the same output (time wise) as someone that does this more frequently, a quality blog post for someone not used to the process can spend multiple days up to a week in total on it. This comes down over time and with practice, so you shouldn't assume it's always that high, but it does take repetition.

Finally, everyone has interesting technical things to talk about. Anytime an internal email is sent to engineering@ about some interesting tip, how some problem was solved, or a guide to how to accomplish something it's a great candidate for a post.

<comment><USER2> :wave: hi Craig!

I'll also note that we asked Craig for eng blog advice way back in Jan 2017, and he was very helpful. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I feel the main part where I face the most difficulty in writing blog posts (for companies), are illustrations which adhere to the branding guidelines/style of the company. I feel these custom illustrations are something that makes the blog stand out and the content easy to consume (attractive?) for a general reader.

Even if there are no direct instructions to follow the design principles/themes of the company, it kind of makes sense that there are some underlying design principles that all the tech blogs are adhering to (in terms of videos, animations, illustrations, code snippets).

I know about tools like [1] but they are fairly basic (afaik) in terms of visuals.

For instance, look at the amount of work in creating illustrations for [2], it seems they had someone assigned from the design team to help with these. Another example is in the blog post [3] linked in the original post.

[1]: [https://www.websequencediagrams.com/](https://www.websequencediagrams.com/), [https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/](https://mermaid- js.github.io/mermaid/#/) [2]: [https://www.toptal.com/ruby-on- rails/decoupling-rails-compon...](https://www.toptal.com/ruby-on- rails/decoupling-rails-components) [3]: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2019/06/leak2-2.p...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2019/06/leak2-2.png)

<comment><USER3> One of the best pieces of feedback I got at Heroku was don't stress too much on it being perfect. In fact you can make it rough as if drawn on a napkin so it intentionally isn't visually polished and it accomplishes its goal. I in fact started doing some of this way back at Heroku 9 years ago and the approach worked well. Now I've leveled that up with an iPad and paper.

Yes, there are places that have designers and they're a great resource, but don't let that be a blocker. If a company has a designer that can be dedicated and support such awesome. If not just try something and see what works, then keep using it.

Edit: An example of very crude/napkin style drawing - [http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2011/11/07/how-heroku-works- ma...](http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2011/11/07/how-heroku-works-maker-day/)

<comment><USER5> Now that you mention it, Ben Thompson uses this hand drawn art style at Stratechery[1] - it seems like something that is easy and fast enough to do with one of the countless iPad drawing apps and an Apple Pencil.

[1]: [https://stratechery.com/](https://stratechery.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I definitely become more attracted to companies with high quality blog posts on things I'm interested in. The right blog is a really big signal that I'd be interested in the work at the company.

Besides picking the next company, great blog posts can be a real help in sanity checking the work that's happening in our team. I've noticed even senior engineers treating good blog posts from big companies as "See, we're not crazy".

Right now I'm operating in the data science platform space at my company, and have been reading a lot more company blogs than usual. Wayfair is a company I now know of after an engineer I really respect shared on Twitter "Bayesian Product Ranking at Wayfair"[1].

Lyft, on the other hand, disappointed me with "How Lyft Designs the Machine Learning Software Engineering Interview"[2]. That post sounds like it could have been victim to what Dan notes as:

> Approval/editing process mainly de-risks posts, removes references to > specifics, makes posts vaguer and less interesting to engineers

1\. [https://tech.wayfair.com/data-science/2020/01/bayesian- produ...](https://tech.wayfair.com/data-science/2020/01/bayesian-product- ranking-at-wayfair/)

2\. [https://eng.lyft.com/how-lyft-designs-the-machine- learning-s...](https://eng.lyft.com/how-lyft-designs-the-machine-learning- software-engineering-interview-bbbb9fc8bb28)

<comment><USER7> I was the eng blog lead at Lyft until recently, and ran it for years. We have a really lightweight process: just needs to be approved by your director, and copy-edited by someone on the blog team. Process usually only takes a week or two. You should probably check out the other posts on the blog.

We aim our posts towards a number of audiences. Our posts related to our interview process are to let candidates know what to expect when they're coming in for specific interview types. We actually get very high traffic to those posts, and we've gotten strongly positive feedback from candidates about those posts, so we've written them for a number of positions.

We also have posts oriented towards working with non-engineering teams, mentoring, engineering processes (like writing tech specs), and other things that aren't only technical deep-dives, because we believe in diversity of content.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough. So not true that an editing process watered down that particular blog post. I still maintain that that blog post is too wishy-washy, and others agree[1].

I've read other posts on Lyft's blog that are awesome. I did not intend to say that Lyft's blog is bad _in general_.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21409066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21409066)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post is totally accurate. I am a corporate blogger, and when I started at this company, we had a ridiculous approval process involving legal. Now, we just don't do that process, and focus on getting the engineering stuff right and doing absolutely no other content: engineering only, no marketing crap. By removing legal approvals, we went from publishing once a week to publishing once a day, and our hits have doubled in a year. Approval processes that extend past engineering are evil.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think this doesn't account for what is, in my experience, the most common reason why engineering blogs fail: they have the wrong objective altogether.

In a former life, back when printed magazines were still a thing, I used to do some (pretty bad) tech journalism, so every time $crt_employer wanted to run, or expand their blog, I ended up going to meetings (I now do that professionally as well, actually -- it helps keep those programming-related brain cells sane). The vast majority of posts (and blogs) that I've seen were awful not because of a tortuous approval process or lack of high-level support. They were awful because communicating substantial, serious engineering information was not the main point. Or _one of_ the main points. Or a point at all, really. It was usually just an excuse to push out some marketing and "establish a presence", and management felt that involving technical people writing on technical subject would lend that effort the kind of credibility that ads don't have.

This had repercussions over the whole publishing chain, and these efforts were doomed from the beginning. Topic selection was inadequate (topics were selected primarily so that they'd have the right "ring" to product/marketing/business development managers, rather than so that they'd be interesting for a technical audience). Editing was done with the wrong objectives and targeted the wrong metrics, and was often based solely on input from non-technical people who didn't understand what a technical audience wanted. Then this article -- on a topic that wasn't really interesting for a technical audience, and not really written for a technical audience -- was promoted mostly for a technical audience. Since the people who were doing the promotion were, inherently, in non-technical position, and they mostly consisted of a boring tech article with a mini sales pitch attached at the end, everyone ended up seeing them as marketing fluff.

It doesn't help that our industry is still stuck in this world where "technical" and "non-technical" is a very strict dichotomy, where technical people are basically like a 2020 Mr. Spock and non-technical people can barely type on a computer. That hasn't been then case in more than ten years. A lot of people who are seen as "non-technical" \-- people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with computers. Lots of people in decision-making positions used to hold a technical position at one point. The kind of depth that a non-technical, but not tech-illiterate audience appreciates can be very surprising.

<comment><USER10> > people in sales, marketing, or in management positions -- have grown up with > computers.

This doesn't mean anything. Have you watched some 15-22 year olds interact with computers lately? (I'm 23, for reference). They don't hunt and peck on the keyboard in stereotypical fashion but they're just as clueless for anything besides basic interactions. They -are- essentially tech illiterate once they step outside of google sheets, etc, or the web browser in general.

I'm tired of hearing people say "digital native" like it means anything with regards to tech literacy. We're going to have another generation come in and take power that has zero idea of how computers function. At least we understood this and factored this in about the last generation- now we just assume the new generation knows things because they grew up using apps.

If anything, the new generation is more illiterate on average, but with better mechanical facilities and understanding of typical modern UX for apps.

<comment><USER11> Your definition of "tech literacy" is way skewed. These people are able to use technology to do what they need: they're tech literate. They can talk with their friends over the internet, create and layout documents, print posters, do research; they're fluent across multiple devices and platforms; many of them interact with some sort of computer for hours each day. What more do you want them to do? (I'm in the age range you specified, by the way.)

<comment><USER10> My definition involves understanding how computers work to a decent degree outside of basic app usage.

Being mechanically efficient at using computers (and by this, I mean being efficient at using carefully- designed apps) does not count in my eyes. If any problem occurs, or if one has to do anything outside of the basic app flow, then people go blank.

I operate a car daily, does that make me car literate? I understand mechanically how to operate a car, but if anything out of the ordinary occurs I have no idea what to do. Except to call someone who is actually car literate to fix the problem. Usage does not correlate with literacy.

When a problem occurs, I've seen many people not even read the error messages or display basic critical thinking ability. I can't call this tech literacy.

> They can talk with their friends over the internet, create and layout > documents, print posters, do research

This is a testament to programmers and UX designers making easy to use applications, not people being "tech literate".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rv-de The question on how to utilize social networks and platforms like blogs and connected to that Twitter etc is a recurring theme of all my employers so far. And it's an unsolved problem. The core question is who should create a text (or pretty much anything not resulting in a product), when and why? Obviously it would be a red flag if a company expects an employee to invest private time into something like this. But how much time is supposed to be dedicated? I have been blogging on data stuff for a while and a sound, well-written and non-trivial article takes longer to write than a work day. And that is an investment that most managers shy away from and instead compromise on quality or just ditch the idea. Writing shallow articles for a while will be demotivating, boring and not worthwhile in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really respect companies that have well-written engineering blogs that go in-depth into their technical problems - Figma comes to mind here, for example.

For a small team/company, what are some good tips or resources on how to start an engineering blog? We've worked on many interesting challenges and I know the team would have a lot of insights to share, but it can be difficult to find and justify the time that writing a good article takes, and it's not something that everyone is necessarily interested in doing either.

I'm curious about the mention of Cloudflare's culture of "internal blogging". That seems to me like it could be a first step in that direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> We use Confluence for all sorts of stuff and there's a blog category. It's full of stuff. Some of it would make a great public blog (in fact, one cool investigation is getting turned into a public blog right now). Some of it is so internal and full of details that it wouldn't do well publicly but is good for others inside the company to read (and a good way of having a memory of how we did something).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My experience at Pivotal (now VMware) echoes Dan Luu's point: the less friction to publish, the more posts on the engineering blog [0].

Our current set-up is simple: clone a repo, create a blog post (in Markdown) from a template, and when you're ready to publish, commit & push to the master branch. We put a lot of effort into making the process simple for engineers.

However, before that process was put in place, it was much more burdensome. I remember in 2014 I had written a blog post and it needed to go through Marketing: Branding was important, and formatting was a challenge. Also, I encountered feedback unrelated to engineering content: "You need a call to action," said the person in charge. I was baffled: "If they've found my post, it's because they're trying to fix a particular problem--they've already had their call to action." The process was discouraging, and I didn't write a blog post for a long time afterwards.

[0] [http://engineering.pivotal.io/](http://engineering.pivotal.io/)

</comment><comment><USER14> While the concept of blogs for engineers by engineers is great and has many benefits I think author is understating the risks.

There is a non-trivial overlap between "look at this cutting edge cool stuff we're doing" and the company's strategic edge over competitors.

These types of posts get dissected by the competition & a small slip up can give away a lot of clues.

<comment><USER15> To be honest, I don't think giving away information about your strategic edge matters that much. What does matter is the culture of a company. If you're hustling, you'll create extra new edges big and small all the time. If it's a big edge, the general outline will be good enough to tip off your competitor without you talking about it. As the saying goes, execution matters a lot more than ideas.

You can share your knowledge, which quickly turns you in a gathering point for interesting knowledge. This makes interesting stuff, good employees and new customers come to you begging for attention, which is a much bigger strategic edge.

See for example the story of Tom Wilson's videocard at Mike Abrash's [https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html](https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch64/64-01.html) \- a minimal hint which turned out to be wrong was enough inspiration for a better product.

On the other hand, imagine Dan Luu's example company that takes a year to approve a blog post. If your culture is that bad, even discussing if accepting a mountain of money laying on the street no strings attached is acceptable will take a few months. Show them your edge, and assuming they see it as actually valuable instead of extra work, it will still take a year of bureacratics before they start implementing it.

See also Rudyard Kipling:

They copied all they could follow but they couldn't copy my mind so I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The level of expertise required to write a blog post is way above average. The imposter syndrome stops me from writing one.

Almost inevitably you will get comments about how your approach is bad or simply invalid.

<comment><USER3> I've had this conversation with a lot of folks, you don't have to be an expert to write a blog post. Some of the most common and valuable ones were how I learned x or y. There are a lot more beginners out there than experts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fast path is essential for corp blog posts. Reduce friction. Don't even think about using your standard corporate release approval process, it's unsuitable. As for design, I'm a minimalist. This is an engineering blog so it should be like sitting in an engineering meeting. The chairs and mugs are corporate colours but the diagrams can be _very basic_ while still being clear. It's a balance.

</comment><comment><USER18> > my blog helps me with job searching and it helps companies hire. But I only > need one job, so more exposure, at best, gets me a slightly better job

I feel the same way about open source in my case. I already have, say, 6+ repos with quite a few stars, high quality and lots of installs. I keep doing OSS because I like publishing the tools I make and other people using them, but it's definitely past the point where there is a ROI with hiring.

Recently I got `react-test` and I'm building it, but I decided to ask for help from beginner programmers. I think it can get to a very nice place within the OSS community, and I don't mind sharing the credit with other contributors. We even published a bunch of detailed issues asking for help but I haven't found many people who are interested yet: [https://dev.to/fpresencia/contributing- to-js-react-open-sour...](https://dev.to/fpresencia/contributing-to-js-react- open-source-32ok)

</comment><comment> Funes- The irony of the linked blog having no justified text, larger headlines-- instead of just using bold regular text--nor reasonable margins is staggering. I find it very annoying to read.

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone have thoughts on companies that don't include authors' names in blog posts? My (big N) employer anonymizes our technical blog posts.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't write for that company's blog; unless there was some huge internal incentive to do so.

<comment><USER19> Would it affect your decision to apply to the company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reads as if "blog" is a metaphor for "product". I'm guessing that blog process is a pretty good indicator of development strategy. Stale bland blogs predict stale bland engineering.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really like the segment.com blog.

It's not just about the content, but the typography, the style, illustrations... I don't know why but I'm more and more sensitive with the general reading experience.

<comment><USER23> I wanted to try it, but their RSS/ATOM feed support is broken. The feed[1] currently 404's with a single emoji[2]. No feed support is a non-starter for me.

Question for you since you presumably read their blog: Do you follow a bunch of blogs/news sources? If so, how do you do it without using feeds?

[1]: [https://segment.com/blog/atom.xml](https://segment.com/blog/atom.xml)

[2]: [https://emojipedia.org/police-car-light/](https://emojipedia.org/police- car-light/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I explored the business idea of "engineering blog in a box" and talked to a couple of companies about it. The idea was that, just like a drip campaign for customers has value, so does a drip campaign for engineers. You provide good content, an easy way to subscribe, and periodic calls to action (around a role) and you'll get conversions (aka hires).

Didn't go anywhere, but it seems that engineering blogs are an unoptimized recruiting channel. If anyone here wants to chat more about this idea, my email is in my profile.

<comment><USER25> I like the idea, but I think the reason it didn't stick were related to the bell curve of engineering competence in the wild. And probably the tendency of companies where IT isn't the main game but an enabler not wanting to expose the wild stuff going on to sustain the facade.

If every company blogged about how the magic happens then you'd get a couple of side effects. 1\. It'd be a coup for the open source security researchers. 2\. Companies would lie, or only blog about there flagship stuff. 3\. Companies who are honest would probably scare away engineers with blog posts like, How we support our 30 year old credit card system running on Mainframe hardware we source from ebay. 4\. Companies would use this to value signal to each other to open a new front of competitive advantage to the detriment of everyone else. Remember when K8 was just for large web scale companies.

<comment><USER24> I think the harder sell is that you can't get immediate ROI (it's a months long play).

And that the optimal customer (fast growing tech company) for this type of service quickly grows out of it and wants to insource it (or blogging gets tangled in PR/markcom).

I don't think anyone blogs about all the warts of their systems (not even Cloudflare etc). Everyone wants to put their best foot forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _One person at a company with a compelling blog noted that a downside of > having only one approver and /or one primary approver is that if that person > is busy, it can takes weeks to get posts approved._

One way around this would be to have 14 stakeholders arranged so that any individual can _approve_ the post. That would do as much to speed it up as a 14-person unanimous/veto system would do to slow it down.

</comment><comment><USER27> One thing the company I currently work for has done is to use our "corporate blog" as a directory for technical employee's personal blogs. Many of our tech team members write blog posts on their own time about technical problems they're particularly interested in. Having our corporate blog ([https://codeshare.getfreebird.com/](https://codeshare.getfreebird.com/)) redirect to their personal blog allows our company to highlight our team's ability and provide interesting content, while the authors get a signal boost from having their content referenced from the company's technical blog.

We're a small technical team so I'm not sure how well this scales, but it's worked out well for us so far.

</comment><comment><USER28> What is the purpose of engineering blogs? Is it only to attract engineers to work for you?

<comment><USER29> Well, they can actually be helpful. I've found a lot of good info on company blogs from engineers about embedded programming, electronics, and other topics.

You can also think of it as marketing for engineer types who are usually immune to formal forms of marketing. Managers don't care about details, they want to see $ numbers. Engineer types want gory details. So your engineering blog can help market your products to engineers. Just look at intels documentation pages vs their actual intel.com site. intel.com is marketing 101 eyesore.

An example would be a blog from a semiconductor company making analog circuits. Think Bob Pease types. They'll talk about a specific problem or circuit, go into the bloody details, math, schematics, charts, graphs, etc. Then toss you a product from their portfolio that can solve the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love to go through the corporate engineering blogs and learn/understand the type of technical problems they are trying to solve and enhance my skills. Good for learning about the company for tech interviewing too. But there is no simple way to search through all of them for a specific term (like kubernetes for eg). To solve this problem, I have designed [http://techblogz.co](http://techblogz.co). It currently has 10k entries from different corporate engineering blogs.

Would love to hear your feedback on it.

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER31> I have many ideas for blog posts but i cannot execute them myself.

I am solo founder and i am not great at writing English technical docs. Well i havent write a technical blog post in Greek either, so i am not sure if English is the only reason i havent written a single blog post.

Should i find a buddy for this? Proofreading? But could he provide the quality i want?

I think i will implement an excellent blog platform in Jekyll and github pages. Maybe mak it open source, this is the closest i can get to blogging.

</comment><comment><USER32> Heh. I just got a company-wide email this morning, about an internal engineering blog post. The first one ever! This could be cool? Maybe?

So I did the needful, loaded the images in the email in Outlook, and was greeted with a headline about caring for others, and why I should put MY face mask on first, before helping someone else.

Uh... Not the engaging technical content I was hoping for.

So I've got one data point for how NOT to do it, if someone's keeping a list.

</comment><comment> Jackson-Solway My company [1] writes technical blog posts as a service [2]. We mostly work with Bay Area startups. Some key observations and learnings:

\- Many companies have tried to create engineering blogs, but you'd never know because the first post was so unpleasant to create that the whole effort got called off.

\- If a company does manage to publish a first post, the experience is often so personally traumatic to the engineer that they never try again and/or tell their team members to avoid the process. This is especially true when PR/Comms insists on reviewing posts. (Legal review typically goes more smoothly.)

\- Coming up with ideas for posts is WAY easier said than done. Nobody, engineers included, likes staring at a blank page. A significant part of our work is refining ideas and creating outlines.

\- Lest you thought otherwise, company engineering blogs are almost always justified as candidate lead gen. Posts are frequently used by recruiters in outreach emails. When a post and email are well written, response rates can easily double—effectively doubling the candidate pool for a growing team. (This assumes that engineers aren't applying to jobs unprompted, which is true for about 80% of startups in the Bay Area.)

\- In our research with job seekers, we found that when senior engineers research a company, they seek the company's engineering blog before they seek the careers page, let alone a job description. This is probably obvious to folks here, but in the recruiting world this blows everyone's mind.

\- Technical blog posts are expensive whether you DIY or work with someone like us. A detailed post, let's say 1500 words, can easily consume 25 hours of time from everyone involved. 50 hours isn't rare. And this is when the process works well. (Our value prop: we shift time from engineers to our writers.) Here's the process we've found works best. Everything here happens in Google Docs.

1\. One of our writers, all former journalists, sits down with an engineer who has an idea for a post. In a 1 hour conversation, they work together to refine the idea and create a bare-bones outline. Assuming you're doing this yourself, my point is that pairing is helpful. This conversation gets recorded and transcribed by a transcription service. (4 hours total time)

2\. The writer reviews the transcript and fleshes out an outline. They note locations for graphics and code snippets. The engineer then reviews the outline and leaves comments. (4–6 hours total time)

3\. The writer creates a complete first draft, with assistance from 1–2 editors on our team. They leave space for graphics/code for the engineer to add on their own. (8–10 hours)

4\. The engineer brings in 1–3 other engineers to review the post. The team adds illustrations and/or code. More comments/feedback. (6+ hours)

5\. Our writer incorporates feedback. An editor on our team proofreads the post for clarity, grammar, etc. (2–4 hours)

6\. Legal and/or team leaders review the post. (2+ hours)

7\. Whomever runs the blog puts everything in the CMS and hits publish. (1 hour)

End of the day, we've ideally consumed fewer than 10 engineer hours. The rest is on us—anywhere from 15–30 hours.

Feel free to email me directly about any of this :) email@example.com

[1] [https://www.jobportraits.com/](https://www.jobportraits.com/), [2] [https://www.jobportraits.com/services/tech-blog-post- subscri...](https://www.jobportraits.com/services/tech-blog-post-subscription)

<comment><USER33> > Technical blog posts are expensive whether you DIY or work with someone like > us. A detailed post, let's say 1500 words, can easily consume 25 hours of > time from everyone involved.

I feel like this glosses over the fundamental question. You've just written a 500 word comment about your company's business; it's grammatical, well- formatted, communicates both overall scope and low level details, even has an introduction and conclusion. But I'm sure your team didn't spend 25/3 ~= 8 hours on it, and I'm pretty confident you skipped the majority of the listed steps. Why does scaling up by a factor of 3 require such a huge paradigm shift?

<comment> Jackson-Solway Good points all around! For the record, if you (or someone on your team) can write great posts quickly solo, that's awesome and I'd never dissuade it. But a lot needs to go right for that to be possible. For an individual to pull it off, IMO you need to meet these criteria:

\- You yourself are doing something technically interesting

\- You know enough about the project and/or topic to write on behalf of your team members and company. (Because posts on company blogs are perceived to represent everyone.)

\- You need to be a competent writer. Sub-skills matter, too: editing, proofreading, creating visuals, and more. This simply takes practice, especially if you expect to move fast.

\- It helps if you're a native english speaker, which many engineers are not.

\- If you're truly doing it all yourself, you need to know your way around whatever CMS your company uses. Most engineers don't.

\- You need to know enough to anticipate the repercussions. Love them or hate them, this is what Legal/PR/Comms are for.

If all this is true, yes, an individual can write a great post in a single day.

To answer your question directly, I was able to write my main comment quickly because:

\- I was responding to something. I wasn't writing from scratch. Hot takes are easy ;)

\- I'm a cofounder. AKA: I'm comfortable writing on behalf of my company. It's actually part of my job.

\- HN comments are lower stakes than a blog post. No long-term SEO impact, for example.

\- I've been doing this for 10+ years. And my 500 word comment still took me 90 min to write and edit.

\- Yup, I'm a native english speaker.

\- Probably some other factors I'm blind to at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The content spectrum goes from plain and often unwanted IP public revelation to blatant shameless plugs, so it really depends on the audience target and the corporate goal ( marketing, conversions, reputation)? I think third party tech journalism such as the IEEE Spectrum or the MIT Technology Review set the tone for engineering blogs these days.

</comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone experienced with blogs written purely for internal consumption(intranet)? How have it worked out?

<comment><USER36> We did. Our team provides machine learning ability for our internal products (5-8 products) and we are constantly writing for them to show how artificial intelligence works for these products. So whenever product managers come up with new ideas (e.g. AB testing, promotion based on user data, scam detection), they will contact our team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was denied a request to present, because my head of security didn't want to risk telling the world about my project. Now, they allow presentations, but I have no enthusiasm to present. Making it difficult has a lasting impact.

</comment><comment><USER38> How do I contact Dan Luu without using Twitter? Is there an email address somewhere I'm not seeing? I'd like to point out a typo :D. Great post.

<comment><USER39> You can look up the address in his VCS commits, e.g.:

[https://github.com/danluu/fs- errors/commit/053b591b123cbc790...](https://github.com/danluu/fs- errors/commit/053b591b123cbc79055461a43a7f208561753e27.patch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not intentionally trolling, but the lack of formatting on this page immediately brought doubt to anything being said (despite how valid it actually is)

</comment><comment><USER41> just recently I shared a blog post which I think has done a good job in sharing both the technical and non-technical part [https://medium.com/dsaid- govtech/using-robust-optimization-a...](https://medium.com/dsaid- govtech/using-robust-optimization-and-mixed-integer-programming-to-manage- singapores-water-resources-a0b899afe601)

</comment><comment><USER42> Ironically the post itself is in a CSS-less poor format. Definitely not pleasing to look at, let alone read.

</comment><comment><USER43> I just wanted to drop the name Gitlab.

More than blogs, they are doing pretty much everything open.

</comment><comment><USER44> tldr: fast track post approvals

</comment><comment><USER45> To be honest I didn't find this a great post. It's only on the sixth paragraph that the post starts to get to the point, and it isn't particularly insightful: organizations write good blog posts when they have simple processes and prioritize it; this is how any effective organization works.

Good blogs also employ some minimal styling to make the content easier to read. The author could slap three lines of CSS into their site and it would be a vastly nicer reading experience.</comment>


Show HN: Next Browser native on Linux - <AUTHOR> Thanks to a new design Next is now available for Linux!: https://next.atlas.engineer/article/technical-design.org
What is Next? Next is a Lisp based productivity focused browser. You can read more about that here: https://next.atlas.engineer/article/the-next-thesis.org
You can download a binary from here: https://next.atlas.engineer/download
You can view our GitHub here: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next
Thanks for your time, I'm very interested in the HN Community feedback, thanks! <comment><USER2> I see no one mentioned luakit ([https://luakit.github.io/](https://luakit.github.io/)). From the site: "Luakit is a highly configurable browser framework based on the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. It is very fast, extensible with Lua, and licensed under the GNU GPLv3 license. It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and anyone who wants to have fine-grained control over their web browser's behaviour and interface."

<comment><USER3> Luakit is probably what's closest to Next in terms of design.

The important differences, in my opinion:

\- Next is not bound to WebKitGTK+, so unlike Luakit it can run on different platforms with different engines.

\- Next uses Lisp, which is I believe much more powerful, both for large scale development and hackability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No adblock is a show stopper for me, but they have a campaign on Indie Go Go with adblocking as one of the goals

[https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next/issues/32](https://github.com/atlas- engineer/next/issues/32)

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/next-browser-nix- support#...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/next-browser-nix-support#/)

<comment><USER5> I've been going pretty strong with a host based blocker. I mention this in case you really want to use Next and are willing to try a different blocking approach :)

I know it's not as comprehensive as extension based blocking, but it seems solid.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been leaning towards using Webkit's integrated content blocking rules, but we weren't sure how effective it would be, thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What if a browser was built like Emacs is built? With low-level rendering core exposing almost everything to scripting in Lisp, and the entire UX written in Lisp, fully customizable?

It appears that Next goes in this direction. I don't know if gtk-webkit allows to script it _very_ deeply, e.g. enough to expose DOM and write extensions in Lisp.

It would also be great to have something like the Emacs's customization framework, and something like Melpa. (But this is obviously _far_ down the road.)

<comment><USER7> Ever since I started using Org Mode in the Android app "Orgzly" and in Visual Studio Code, I've been wishing a lot more was written so it could take advantage of Lisp.

Mostly because I'm selfish and want more of Org Mode's features supported in more places, but also I'm super impressed by Emacs' scripting/control abilities.

I'd also like to see vim with a mode specifically for Org Mode. But that sort of idea is very much beyond my talents :/

<comment><USER6> Yes, when I finally have free time, I'll spend some of it to write a reasonably good implementation of Org Mode data model in Typescript, and maybe in something else, to help making Org Mode support painless everywhere, like Markdown now.

<comment><USER7> I really wish I was a better, more focused, coder to be able to help such efforts. It would benefit me to really learn Typescript deeply, since many of my employer's projects are written in it. Me = Sysadmin/Devops = jack of all trades, master of none.

<comment><USER8> I make lists. Lists (and a planner I mostly ignore) keep my on track. The "Get(ting) Things Done" method is, in some ways, making lists. Maybe that could help?

That, and pacing myself during mentally intensive tasks. I do 25 on, 10 off (more than pomodoro, because my brain). This works really well for me. You may have to adjust the variables to make it work well for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you plan to support WebExtensions[0] once they're standardized?

It seems like every time a new browser comes out, the immediate question is, "what does the extension ecosystem look like?" Since Next's website says that its goal isn't to be a massively popular, omnipresent browser, the answer to that question is probably always going to be "worse than Chrome/Firefox." Even if I'm writing my own extensions to fill in that gap, I'm fine dipping into Lisp for lower-level functionality or to customize the browser itself, but for higher-level stuff I'd like to see browsers use existing standards rather than have 3 different APIs to do roughly the same things.

As a user, it's very tough for me to justify doing any browsing, even just experimentally, outside of Firefox where I have UMatrix and Ublock. And while I'm sure you'll put in a great adblocker eventually, it probably won't be as good as UMatrix and Ublock, because the stuff you're building won't have the same level of widespread scrutiny that those extensions get.

Nowadays I feel more and more like most browser extensions ought to be written in a way that is roughly as cross-platform as the web itself.

[0]: [https://browserext.github.io/browserext/](https://browserext.github.io/browserext/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Very nice, we need more of that.

There's also qutebrowser [1], but none of these are usable without a proper adblocker implementation.

[1] [https://qutebrowser.org](https://qutebrowser.org)

<comment><USER11> Qupzilla also was a nice one until they killed it and migrated the code to KDE (triple facepalm).

<comment><USER12> I'm using Falkon, which it became, currently. It's pretty good. You can write plugins in C++, Python, or QML (in master).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hum, a prize for such a good work, a minus for posting a [https://next.atlas.engineer/article/technical- design.org](https://next.atlas.engineer/article/technical-design.org) that's actually html, not org... I'd open in Emacs and say "sgrunt"... :D

BTW for me the sole really missing points today are addons, something like PrivacyBadger, Google/Facebook container etc I use Privoxy but that's not enough (or I do not know how to use it well enough) and I feel the need of something more integrated in Emacs that works really, not like eww...

<comment><AUTHOR> It is actually an org file :)

[https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next- site/blob/master/arti...](https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next- site/blob/master/articles/technical-design.org)

Next has a long way to go, but now that the architecture is solid, we're ready to make a lot of progress on feature building and stability

<comment><USER13> Thanks for your work, I have tried few months ago Next and really like it despite for now it's not my default browsers, I haven't really enough competence to help but I certainly follow the development process!

IMO after Ubuntu "collapse" (IOW the decision to leave Desktop apart) GNU/Linux start to be no more a generic desktop OS but again a niche desktop for us geek and in that sense it's time, at least, to regain the power of our classic tools, avoid they fade into oblivion and life as happy and comfortable we can. In that sense having a browser like Next is a needed thing.

If I look at my actual desktop usage Emacs il 100% of the time since it's my WM but the second most used application is FF and it's a pain, even with Saka key, GhostText etc...

Hope for the best :-)

Ps on org file, yep, only I was hoping to being able to browse-url-emacs directly :-) It's something like "hey, org can do nearly anything, we can start imaging a web-org sites: casual users get org-exported html, tech-savvy one get directly org so they can navigate them, save them etc with ease".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi there, bit of a lisp fanatic so excited to see this. Just some questions: I'm not very knowledgeable about browser architecture, and my search foo is failing at a first try, could you provide a couple of links on what you mean by "controller"? My second question is probably dependent on the first, but: are you worried that using xml-rpc is going to be a bottleneck? last question: I'm a little worried about the note on the installation page to modify the kernel for a userland app to change root, could you reassure me that I'm just an ignorant fool that simply doesn't understand whats going on here? these might seem adversarial, but I promise, I'm actually _really_ excited for this, I just want to understand whats happening. I'm grabbing a copy of the source and will definitely be sifting through it over the holidays, good luck!

<comment><USER3> Those are all good questions!

\- "Controller" is just for the sake if this article, to distinguish the part that this project (or any other power-user browser for that matter) is about. It's everything that it not the GUI or the renderer.

\- XML-RPC: we were asking ourselves the same question, and the answer could only come out of real-world use. The happy result: no, it's not gonna be a bottlenext, it's very smooth! In the end, XML-RPC is only a medium to send "GUI"-related queries, it's never a tight loop or anything.

\- The user namespace: this is only for the Guix pack. It allows the executable to do some filesystem name translations so that it can find it's own executables and libraries. If you are worried this would be an issue, you can simply extract the archive to `/`, it will only use two folders: `/bin` and `/gnu/store`.

<comment><USER14> thank you for taking the time to reply, all of this makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems pretty interesting, especially the mouseless part.

I tried [Vimperator]([http://vimperator.org/](http://vimperator.org/)) on Firefox for a while, but it seems the web was really hard to use without a mouse.

I might give it a try again

<comment><USER16> Sometimes, CTRL-F the text of the link highlights it, so pressing ESC and then enter would select the link.

Only allows one to not move a mouse sometimes.

<comment><USER17> When searching using / you don't need the escape part. There's also ' which only searches links.

<comment><USER18> Man, this is a handy little reference; I hadn't known about these! Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It looks like a direct competitor to Qutebrowser which uses PyQt5 + QtWebEngine: [https://qutebrowser.org/](https://qutebrowser.org/)

Interesting to see that Next Browser integrates Lisp with WebKitGTK+.

<comment><USER20> also qutebrowser is vim-like keybinding, and nextbrowser is emacs-like keybinding

<comment><AUTHOR> this is true, but one of the main co-authors is a VI/EVIL user, so we are working on VI keybindings for the next release. Still trying to work out how to best integrate them into the system, that's all :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who is every problems with the download being an lzip file?

I really fought with my laziness to search what a "lz" file is, and the command to use to extract.

I'm doing:

"tar --lzip -xvf next-linux-gtk-webkit.tar.lz", and getting "tar (child): lzip: Cannot exec: No such file or directory". I guess I have to install lzip and tar isn't enough (so, the command I found was wrong).

Is there a reason to not use the more popular (on Linux) tar.gz or even .zip? I assume lzip offers better compression, but I bet I'm not the only one who's heard it for the first time today.

<comment><USER22> From my understanding (and the biased content at [https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html](https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html) ), lzip is higher compression than zip and gzip. It uses LZMA, which makes it essentially the same as xz (which itself is 7zip without the tar-like functionality). The difference seems to be that the metadata in lzip makes some smarter choices, which reduces redundancy and makes recovering from corruption easier compared to xz.

xz is more widely installed, so it's a case of Worse Is Better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good job on the website. Clear and simple. I might give it a go, I wanted lean and keyboard oriented (never got to setup firefox extensions properly for that).

Bravo

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tridactyl ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl- vim...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim/)) is another viable alternative (modern incarnation of Vimperator/Pentadactyl).

</comment><comment><USER25> There is also Vimb [1], which is another keyboard-focused web browser. It also runs on GTK+ and WebKit2. How does Next compare to it? (Except for obviously being more suited for scripting and having Lisp support.)

When I was trying Vimb for myself it suffered from frequent WebKit («WebView crashed») crashes. And also its performance seemed to me worse than, say, latest Firefox Quantum or Chromium — it was consuming much more RAM when using many tabs or opening extremely large web pages (few megabytes of html with many pictures in it). Although it starts a lot faster than the latter two.

How does Next compare to Vimb with respect to performance and crashes?

[1]: [https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/](https://fanglingsu.github.io/vimb/)

EDIT1: minor change of wording

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thank you for your interest!

I've never used VIMB, but I guess it is subject to the webkit port, since on Linux you more or less only have Webkit2gtk+ your experience should be roughly the same.

There seems to be a lot of demand for a blink/chromium port, and while I am personally strongly against blink/chromium, we may produce a port, or perhaps a quantum port if that is at all possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Super cool that you use this Guix thing and all that (although Nix is better, who cares), but it is impossible to run this thing.

I've followed the steps and still my binary won't execute and the error messages aren't helpful. Please compile this thing into a single executable!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can produce a single executable, I will be quite amazed :D considering there is both a lisp core and platform port which are separate programs, however, you are free to try :D

on a more serious note, it is still alpha, so sorry about any issues you are having, we're working on making things easier for users to install and more robust!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm really excited to see this! I've got it compiling right now. Can't wait to give it a spin.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you enjoy it :) thank you for your interest!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Another cool side effect of this approach and that it is by design very > natural to add support for extra web renderers.

As you start moving to other platforms and see WebKitGTK as a limiting factor, I would strongly suggest looking at CEF [0] as an extra addition to your abstraction. I know you fear a Google/Blink hegemony based on your post, but beyond that it is the best cross-platform browser embedding lib I have used (I developed a browser using it and Qt myself).

0 - [https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef](https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef)

</comment><comment><USER29> Demo videos: [https://next.atlas.engineer/#features](https://next.atlas.engineer/#features)

I don't get the choice of Lisp. I don't mind it, I use Emacs, but a more popular language can have more complete platform bindings:

> Sadly, the GTK bindings are not in a shape that is enough to fulfill our > needs. We've tried to get Next running with CL-CFFI-GTK on GNU/Linux for > many months, to no avail.

<comment><USER30> Lisp appears to be the whole point of the effort, so Lisp problems are just to be endured and, they hope, overcome.

Not having a flagship modern application has kept Lisp on the margins. Emacs no longer suffices to maintain the language's edge, not least because Emacs Lisp is not a modern dialect. It remains to be seen what improvements to the language or its ecosystem will be needed to support this development, but there is no substitute for trying.

<comment><AUTHOR> well said! another hope is indeed to increase the popularity of Lisp by providing a "killer" application. Next is still in its infancy, but we have had barely any time at all, and it is on its 5th rewrite, and already it is quite powerful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congratulations! It won't be ready for primetime until there's a good adblocker — but now that it runs on Linux, folks like me can work on an adblocker for it.

I'm really excited for you & for your browser. I was a contributor to your Indiegogo campaign & was really bummed to see it fall short of the mark (although no doubt nowhere near as bummed as you were); it's great to see that you've managed to move ahead nonetheless.

I can't wait to replace Firefox!

<comment><USER32> We should have more people who can't wait to replace chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A lot of the focus seems to be on making the browser easily extendable which is great, but can extensions interact with/modify the contents of web pages rather than the browser itself? I am not seeing it in a quick browse through the docs, and that is kind of the main point of most browser extensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> to answer your question, yes

<comment><USER33> Great, thanks. My Lisp skills are very rusty but I think I'll give this a shot.

<comment><AUTHOR> enjoy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember installing this browser after one of the first releases, but lost track of it after a little while. Nice to see all the growth its had, I'll have to reinstall it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, please give it a try :D

I think we are now on our 5th rewrite. It is still _very_ alpha, but from here on out, now that we have settled on an architecture, it should mature in stability and in feature set quite nicely!

The real hard part was getting off the ground!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Dear lisp fanatics,

Please write an ad blocker in lisp for this thing.

Sincerely Yours, Chance

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like a great idea. However as someone who spends all day in vim, I wish it had an option for vim bindings or at least some kind of modal interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> its in the works!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Should have just forked Chromium tbh. Then all the extensions and configs could easily be transferred over.

Great to see people using Common Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER38> give us microsoft users a chance too. i'd like to try it, but im not going to waste precious free time to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> please register to vote (registration is on download page)! [https://next.atlas.engineer/download](https://next.atlas.engineer/download)

if there is enough interest for a Windows port, we may very well make one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I see complaining about GTK on your first link - have you heard of Qt?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've not only heard of QT, I originally developed Next in QT. I can't say it was a good time :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The logo on github looks way too much like NeXT Computer's

</comment><comment><USER41> Crap, I thought they meant the NeXT browser.

</comment><comment><USER42> Won't start on macOS 10.14.1

<comment><AUTHOR> make sure to completely kill any running zombie instances of the program, copy it to your disk and try running it again.

(e.g. search in activity monitor for "cocoa-webkit" and "next", and make sure there are no processes with that name)

<comment><USER43> I think it is more than that, libxmlrpc++.8.39.dylib missing in my case I guess

<comment><AUTHOR> it should be shipped within the app bundle, can you please tell me what "otool -L Next.app/Contents/MacOS/cocoa-webkit" returns?

I'm not using libxmlrpc++, just libxmlrpc

<comment><USER44> This is what I get:

      /Applications/Next.app/Contents/MacOS/cocoa-webkit:
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_server_cgi.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_xmltok.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_util.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_packetsocket.8.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_server_abyss.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_server.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_abyss.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_client.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      @executable_path/../Frameworks/libxmlrpc_xmlparse.3.39.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Versions/C/Foundation (compatibility version 300.0.0, current version 1560.12.0)
      /usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 228.0.0)
      /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.200.5)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/AppKit (compatibility version 45.0.0, current version 1671.10.106)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 1560.12.0)
      /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 606.2.104)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I saw your post at lisp.reddit.com today and there was a redditor there that brought forth webkit security concerns that IMV you did not properly address.

Thread is here ([https://old.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/a3b8m0/browsing_with_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/a3b8m0/browsing_with_lisp_next_browser_new_architecture/eb5h3e3/))

I am an ex-Googler and I happen to know the effort that the Google security team expended when designing the Chrome security model was quite significant. We would all like more competition in the browser arena but running webkit without any security protections like Next browser does is putting yourself at risk, unnecessarily. I urge you to spend some time understanding the security implications of what you are doing.

<comment><USER46> Wow, that thread is horrible. It's just flamebait from both sides. From metroholografix:

> I fear that webkit can not be salvaged

> How about all the huge OSX vulnerabilities that have been discovered?

> You are so out of touch with the state of cybersecurity that it's > terrifying. Not only that, but you insist on this nonsensical adversarial > attitude towards me when I'm spending my personal time trying to inform you.

> WebKit, which is abysmally bad security-wise to begin with

From the other side:

> If I didn't know any better I would say you were a paid blink shill

> Safari, which runs webkit is safer than Chromium. Because at least we know > that Apple cares about security.

In all, I disagree with u/metroholografix's claims that Chrome is inherently significantly more secure than Safari. Sure, it might be if you are comparing yourself with running WebKit in-process and with no sandbox. But with the appropriate protections which macOS provides (which is where I fault u/jmercouris, because he cannot compare his project with Safari because his project doesn't actually implement these security features), it is stupid to move a project to Blink in this case.

<comment><USER47> Hey there.

Can you point at something in my reddit posts that is inaccurate or plain wrong? I agree that my tone could be better but notice the difference between my first post to him and my subsequent replies. It's hard to maintain a civil attitude when I am immediately accused of being a shill. Nevertheless, I think I have provided enough useful information to him. Notice how he responds each time.

You wrote that you disagree with me regarding Chrome being inherently more secure than Safari. Fair enough. Do you have any additional information that makes you think so? I pointed to PWN2OWN when I made my point. I think it easily proves that Chrome is indeed inherently more secure than Safari. That does not mean that he has to move to Chromium, it was one suggestion. He could stick with WebKit and implement a sandbox of his own. Or choose not to do that but let users know, loud and clear, that this is the case so everyone understands the trade-offs involved.

To me, based on my interactions with him on reddit, it seems that jmercouris needs to revisit a lot of his beliefs and rapidly bring himself up-to-speed with the current state of browser security.

<comment><USER48> My impression was that with the switch from (UI)Webview to WKWebKit the webview is put in a sandbox automatically. At least the rendering is now out- of-process. Do you know anything about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, WKWebKit is in fact sandboxed, on macOS, as per what is going on with Webkit2GTK+, I am less familiar, but the project is well aware and on top of all security vulnerabilities: [https://webkitgtk.org/security.html](https://webkitgtk.org/security.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I like the idea but it doesn't go anywhere near far enough.

I feel like the web has become that "City of Destruction" that is talked about in "Pilgrim's Progress"; something like 95% of the bytes transferred are just junk.

I am not at all interested in "seeing the content the way the created intended it", I really would rather decompose it into a semantic graph and then put it together to show me what is relevant.

That means no Javascript. If I have to have a malware player so I can use the junkware of the day I'll use Chrome.

<comment><USER28> I have been putting some real thought into this as an idea for client-side scraping and re-presentation [0]. I have come to the conclusion we just need a community maintained set of code that turns popular websites into APIs that people can program against. If you turn that into an easier-to-read-sans-BS page by querying the API, so be it. It of course needs to be deployed as part of the app, there are legal issues with hosting the API externally. I have started some work around this concept for my own personal use on pages that give me too much guff.

0 - [https://github.com/cretz/software- ideas/issues/82](https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/82)

<comment><USER49> I find with BeautifulSoup or JSoup it is often just as easy to write a scraper than an API client, particularly when the authentication for the API is like this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ObCoCm61s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ObCoCm61s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Isn't NeXT still a trademark name?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT)</comment>