Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-community-project.html <comment><USER2> TL;DR, "After years, and hundreds of thousands of your dollars, we couldn't do it. Can you code it, too?"

Don't mistake me; I'm a huge fan of what they were trying to do. I'm just really, deeply disappointed in their execution.

<comment><USER3> When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

I applaud these guys -- at least they tried to improve the world in some way.

I don't think HN should stigmatize failure.

<comment><USER4> Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot more credit than they actually deserve.

<comment><USER5> "Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so."

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open- faceb...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open-facebook- alternative-releases-code/)

<comment><USER6> Requiring users to have the resources, time and technical expertise to set up the server themselves is hardly making a beta version available.

Most "beta" web services are still hosted.

<comment><USER7> It's also not how Diaspora works. Setting up a server is _possible_ but not _required_.

Get your facts straight much?

<comment><USER6> Sorry, where did they host the Beta?

<comment><USER8> joindiaspora.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So if this is, as some comments are suggesting, an indication that Diaspora is essentially dead… what can we learn from it? What did they do right, what did they do wrong? Is "distributed social networks" a fundamentally flawed idea, or was their implementation flawed?

I mean, they certainly did _something_ right, given that G+ swiped liberally from Diaspora's design.

(What would a distributed social network that was dead easy to host look like? Imagine something like Diaspora that lives _on your phone_ instead of on a server, for instance. Right now D* is a giant pile of Ruby, which means that interested amateurs are pretty much not gonna be able to play with it.)

<comment><USER10> Of course it isn't a fundamentally flawed idea. At least, from a technical perspective.

Email is a distributed social network. It just doesn't define very many types of actions or objects.

You can create "messages" and then you can "send" them. The user sees the guts of the message -- the "from", "to", "subject" and "body" portions, mainly.

As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'".

This seems like mostly a matter of agreeing on some new types of messages and some suggested ways of handling and displaying them.

I'm not saying this has to be built on top of existing email protocols -- it's really just independent sites exchanging messages of some sort. But email is a good working example to point at today.

The hard part is getting adoption, and getting different implementations to interoperate. Once you dive into this, you find a huge soup of different projects working on different pieces of the puzzle. Some of these projects have a future, others do not. It's going to take some time for this to shake out, and for the developers to resolve issues with bringing this stuff together.

A lot of this work has been going on without a lot of fanfare. See for example <http://indiewebcamp.com/> or <http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/>

Naturally, it couldn't hurt to bring a lot more help into these efforts.

<comment><USER11> _As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'"._

This is a very cool and exciting idea but my feeling is that email clients are hard to code because they're full desktop applications. Even standard email clients are hard to get right - building a social network version (with encryption) would be quite a challenge.

The rewards could be nice though - such as being able to use mailinator or mixmaster for anonymity.

<comment><USER10> Email clients have been made for every platform imaginable. Note Zawinski's Law:

<http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html>

Gmail is an email client. Facebook is now, too. So are the default 'mail' applications for Android and iOS. And let's not leave out Emacs :)

The challenge of email (which comes with its advantage of being ubiquitous today) is its plethora of standards documents one must read and respect if one wants to make a serious go of developing software that will work well with most of its corner cases.

<comment><USER11> I'd hazard a guess that none of the examples you gave were easy to code :-) Also, I'd argue that Gmail and Facebook type clients are non starters as its hard to do meaningful encryption in Javascript since you always must trust the server.

But if you disagree, please write one - I'd be a very willing beta tester and would even be keen to help in a limited way.

<comment><USER11> I just thought of another potential challenge - SMTP limits. I think Gmail limits you to sending 40 messages per day for instance. This sucks if you have >100 friends.

<comment><USER10> Those limits are imposed by existing email software. The real underlying challenge you are getting at is dealing with spam. And that would be just as much a challenge with any distributed social network too, for more or less the same reasons.

Email did this badly from the start, because it started in a much more trusting world of people who did not spam one another. Authentication features were added later, but there was no requirement to use them, which limits their effectiveness.

Perhaps for a project starting fresh now, this can be handled better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those up in arms about their 'abandonment' of Diaspora, I think they have toiled enough (2 years+) and deserve to move on. I doubt "own our lives" was part of the reward. I am even really amazed they could carry on even after one of them died.

Looking forward to how Mark.io eventually turns out. Best of luck buddies!

<comment><USER13> I do find it a little funny that makr.io uses Facebook for it's login.

<comment><USER12> I have to agree with you. I doubt they were very passionate or/and experience to tackle what they did.

To be fair, it was a little bit of fun for 3 college kids looking to raise $10k that blew out of proportion. I am sure they tried too hard to live up to the expectations.

Their new side looks quite interesting although I have my reservations about the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This stings a lot less after the announcement of Tent (<http://tent.io>, discussed at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904>), a project aimed at similar goals, but starting with a protocol, not an application. I think Tent, or something like it, is what those of us concerned with Facebook's monopoly power should keep our eyes on.

Why? Because it's just a protocol, so you can build a Facebook alternative on top of it, sure, but you can also build services equivalent to Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Path, you name it, all interoperable. And the guys coming up with Tent don't have to be the ones who design the application layer. If they suck at UI/UX (which was questionable in the case of Diaspora), no problem, we can still build on their underlying tech.

Plus, it's not inherently noncommercial. With email you have three hosting options: free with ads, paid, and host it yourself. That's the best possible situation. On the one hand, companies are making money off ad-supported and paid email hosting, so they have incentives to provide the best service possible — unlike the non-profit "community pods" of Diaspora. On the other hand, you have interoperability and the freedom to use your data as you want — unlike on Facebook or Twitter, which will block you from exporting your contacts to a competing service. The Diaspora hosting model — where random people hosted servers for free just because they thought it was cool, or something — basically doesn't exist for email (or, say, web hosting), which is a good sign that it's unsustainable.

Diaspora was a flawed idea, but Tent, because it's a protocol, looks like a much more promising and realistic way to open social-media walled gardens.

<comment><USER15> Tent looks promising, but the Internet wasn't based on "push."

Tent is just the initial iteration of a new, more open and more private social sphere.

<comment><USER14> In fairness, what they have up right now is just the initial iteration of Tent. Basing Tent on PubSubHubbub (which is confusingly abbreviated as "PuSH") would address your criticism, and this has been suggested in an issue:

<https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/7>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> XMPP seems to be a better protocol on which to base such a [higher -level] protocol. There are a couple projects following this path, but both seem to be a bit timid about trumpeting their own horns. I have nothing to do with either of them other than silently hoping they eventually win the day:

1) <http://onesocialweb.org> (Not sure about their future)

2) <http://buddycloud.org> (some of their contributors are HNers, but even though they're recipients of Google Summer of Code 2012, they are also quite modest).

These are the approaches that seem to be the most promising to me, even though their use of XMPP has been disparaged as non-developer unfriendly. I simply disagree, as a non-developer (though I am working to change that; I've got simple Django and Rails up and running on my LAN).

I believe the ideal hardware for such a project is:

~1.2GHz ARM CPU

-4GB RAM

-64GB SSD

-2x SataIII HDD (~6TB RAID)

-on a consumer ISP connection with 250GB soft cap

<comment><USER17> I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform.

Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood.

Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc.

If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.

<comment><USER18> Didn't they open source the code? It might make a great starting point.

<comment><USER17> The codebase was donated to the Apache Foundation, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In many ways - I'm fine with what happened. It demonstrated that creating great projects/systems/code requires more than money, mindshare, and enthusiasm. While those are all useful, also important is skill and experience.

Think of it this way, if five, not particularly experienced programmers, could dive in and just create a fully functional distributed-replacement for Facebook, then wouldn't that make a mockery of the skills/experience of developers that spent a lifetime acquiring them?

If anything, this enhances the kickstarter ecosystem, putting an emphasis on how important it is to evaluate the experience/skill of the principals behind a project.

For the counter-example, look at Dalton Caldwell's App.net. Here is a guy with a heck-ton of experience, and, from what I've heard, a talented developer.

He had a mostly functional API/Alpha of the twitter-clone portion of app.net (and, long term, I think the twitter component may not be the most important element) before they had even reached their funding target. And, the UI/App continues to land new features, week after week. In less than a month, alpha.app.net is already more feature complete and functional compared to where it needs to be to replace Twitter, than Diaspora was after two years.

Talent and Experience are critical. A great developer can accomplish in a few weeks, what less talented developers can't accomplish in a couple years.

That's my takeaway from Diaspora, and it's kind of a positive message.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm really interested in what percent of Kickstarter projects end up abandoned, like Diaspora just was? Are there any statistics?

<comment><USER21> Lots of them do and quite a few flounder in the "I'm working on it, sorry!" phase. I backed a project in early 2010 (A documentary) and the total raised was $15k, initial estimates were a few months. It's approaching 2 and a half years, the guy still updates monthly with "I'm editing this piece!" and "I did this" and sometimes he'll even include an excuse and apology!

I said it last year and I'll say it again now, Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart because Kickstarter act like this big wonderful place for nurturing these projects and a lot of people seem to believe Kickstarter has some sort of interest in helping these projects succeed, but they don't, they are nothing more than a funding platform.

The problem is unavoidable I guess; give creative people lots of money, no guidance or supervision with only the _moral obligation_ to actually do what they promised and inevitably quite a few will quit, change their idea or under deliver.

A common thing I've read on reddit is people believing that either Kickstarter makes the project creators accountable for not delivering or that the project creators don't get the money until they deliver... I wonder how a lot of people would react if they realised all they're paying for is a promise.

(oh and to clarify, I really do love Kickstarter and hope they continue to do what they're doing, but I can't help but disagree with their (potentially necessary) approach to projects after they've finished getting funded -- maybe they're working to solve this)

\---

I backed a project in May 2011 called "MemeFactory Writes A Book", billed as a book about internet culture. The idea was cute and I wanted a t-shirt so I backed it with $100. Now a year and a third later they've "changed direction" because their original idea "wasn't what they thought it would be" so here I am with $100 in a project that is never going to happen and instead I'm waiting on a new project... they also still didn't deliver my t-shirt. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory- wri...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rugnetta/memefactory-writes-a- book/)

Another project that I didn't back but I'm aware of is by a Youtube video creator called Bashurverse, the summary is: "Donate to us to go to a convention and we'll make a documentary", they got $4k and went to the convention... and apparently got the $4k scammed from them by an evil company... so now they've not delivered anything and the people that backed them are left with nothing and thinking "...oh". [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft- the-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bashcraft/bashcraft-the-legend- of-minecon)

Will kickstarter do anything? Nope. Do people know that? Nope, they think accountability exists. When I now back a kickstarter project it's "I guess this would be nice to have, I'll send some money and maybe I get it, if not then whatever." instead of "holy crap this is amazing, I'll stick in as much as I can I can't wait!" which is how it should be.

<comment><USER22> " Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart"

Well, this is one of their high profile projects, and it's fallen apart.

It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.

<comment><USER23> There will always be a certain number of suckers ready to pay their money for vapourware unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm impressed they kept up in Rails versions, starting apparently with 3.0 beta

[https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30...](https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0390bbde8a74ec30ea89b98d587e36d5171cad19)

</comment><comment><USER26> I haven't used it, but Friendica seems to deliver on everything that Diaspora promised, and then some. <http://friendica.com/> \- anyone has experience with it?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.

</comment><comment><USER28> They should merge the project into RetroShare - <http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER29> "Announcement: Scam complete"

Did anyone else get that out of this? I had no faith to start with though...

</comment><comment><USER30> How much of the $200 000 went to founders' salaries and personal expenses?

</comment><comment><USER31> <https://joindiaspora.com/> – where are the screenshots? I click around to see other Diaspora installations, and what I get is stuff like this one: <https://pod.pubis.se/>

WTF is this?

<comment><USER32> There used to be a page at <https://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html> with screenshots, but it doesn't seem to exist now.

Edit: I found this video <http://vimeo.com/37411394>

<comment><USER31> Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to understand the what and the how of Diaspora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great news.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty sad.

<comment><USER34> Sorry for not being clearer — it's probably a fair downvote, but I'm being totally honest and don't mean to disparage the work of the Diaspora team. I thought it was a great project and really hoped it would succeed. I don't fault them for their failure or think it comes unfairly. I think they gave it their all and it's sad that it didn't work out. Perhaps it will in the hands of the community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> wrong solution to the right problem.

</comment><comment><USER36> While I am disappointed, I understand completely because I too had a co- founder die and it _completely_ stops _everything_.

Most companies under the startup gun that lose a key member to death don't recover.

They did exactly what we did when we lost Brandt Canicci, they buried themselves in another unrelated project.

You're not sure why you're doing it, but it's all consuming. You're grieving, although you don't know it, and you just can't wrap your mind around anything but the only life preserver you have until you come to your senses and let yourself move on.

Kudos Diaspora, it was a valiant effort.

</comment><comment><USER37> How about you guys open up registration on the main site? I registered, what, a year, two ago, and never was able to make an account.

I signed up on another pod but it was never up to date or stable.

<comment><USER38> They said they did in the article. Is it still telling you to wait for another invite?

If you want to join another pod I'd recommend diasp.org if you are in the US.

<comment><USER37> Wow, it's in the first sentence even. I'll blame it on the glaring "announcement" typo. How does that even pass a browser spell check?

Wow. After I type in my username, the "username" label disappears. Pressing "signup" does literally nothing. It changes colors. No page change, no error msg, nothing.

(JS console says 404: <https://joindiaspora.com/validators/uniqueness?>[...])

And it's doing a blocking call? The whole damn page freezes until it bounces back with 404. This is embarrassingly awful in the first 30 seconds. Funny, the uniqueness checks works from my browser, but apparently their js is doing something silly.

edit1000: If others have this problem, omit the period in your Gmail address.

edit1001: Connected Facebook, went back, White Page. This just gets better and better.</comment></comment></comment>


Search Crunchbase/HackerNews/Angel.co/TechCrunch/VentureBeat/ProductHunt/Wired… - <AUTHOR> http://careerasaurus.com/cs9

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this link, which leads to a simple Google custom search that can be used for a quick check for startup activity in your industry, within the sites listed below.

For more control over results, copy and paste the line below into a Google search, along with your search term(s):

site:crunchbase.com OR site:angel.co OR site:fastcompany.com OR site:techcrunch.com OR site:venturebeat.com OR site:technologyreview.com OR site:producthunt.com OR site:news.ycombinator.com OR site:wired.com OR site:popsci.com OR site:computerworld.com OR site:sciencedaily.com</comment>


GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa?CMP=twt_gu

<comment><USER2> "This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as 'intercept partners'. […] some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned 'sensitive relationship teams' and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of 'special source' material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause 'high-level political fallout'."

<comment><USER3> It's nice to see that giving all their users data to the spy agencies is a _business model_ for these companies.

<comment><USER4> "Paid for the cost" \- to me - means no profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since this is part of GCHQ's mission, and publicly declared on their recruitment website, it shouldn't be that surprising.

([http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/about-gchq/about-gchq/](http://www.gchq- careers.co.uk/about-gchq/about-gchq/))

> As one of the UK's intelligence and security agencies, we gather and analyse > digital and electronic signals from many channels, from all corners of the > world. Converting this information into intelligence material, we play a > significant role in informing national security, military operations, police > activity and foreign policy.

</comment><comment><USER6> This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who's actually surprised by this revelation.

<comment><USER7> Yes but one month ago they still had plausible deniability, not anymore. In short the term it may change nothing but in the long run it will have an impact, no doubt.

<comment><USER6> I'm confused as to how anyone could have believed that one of the 5 largest signals intelligence agencies in the world could _not_ have been tapping Internet backbone cables.

Can we just resolve this right here? The Internet backbone is tapped. To whatever extent NSA isn't looking at our traffic (or is pretending not to, or pantomiming not doing it), some other foreign SIGINT agency is.

To believe otherwise is to believe that state-sponsored intelligence agencies somehow believe the Internet is off limits to surveillance because I don't know freedom and progress or something. Of course they don't believe that.

<comment><USER8> > I'm confused as to how anyone could have believed that one of the 5 largest > signals intelligence agencies in the world could not have been tapping > Internet backbone cables.

I feel bad for conspiracy theorists. Had they made the same statement a month ago, they would have been called tin-foil hat wearing nuts and now people say things like the above so casually and pretend like it was obvious all along.

I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow it is revealed that the NSA has collaborated with Verisign and other certificate authorities so as to decrypt SSL certificates a whole bunch of people would come out of the woodworks to claim "of course the NSA can decrypt your SSL connection".

> To believe otherwise is to believe that intelligence agencies believe the > Internet is off limits ... Of course they don't believe that.

Of course they don't. People probably doubted they had the capability to sort through and and find useful information inside an internet backbone. It's a tremendous effort collecting and querying that much data.

<comment><USER9> So much this. People on this forum have consistently presented very compelling arguments that they don't have SSL keys and couldn't retroactively decrypt collected traffic even if they did. Unsettling then that people I generally considered trustworthy in the crypto community (say, Matt Blaze) previously were adamant to claim that large scale duplication and retention of backbone traffic was not only highly unlikely to be attempted, but technically unfeasible.

Because of this I'm almost ashamed of how much credit I've been doling out to other allegedly shady accusations that get made and dismissed as passing conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER10> Just because someone is an expert in the field, doesn't mean what he says is to be trusted. Some are just supporting the status quo and the "government wisdom". Some might even be paid to say what they say or be linked by contracts to such stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The TL;DR is, quote:

"The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America."

<comment><USER12> A couple more eyebrow-raising tidbits:

"One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months."

"UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA"."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases."

850,000 employees/contractors?? - That can't be correct can it?

<comment><USER9> Roughly 1.5 million people have top secret clearance[1], I would personally be alarmed if over half of them had access to data like this, although I can't say it would surprise me at this point.

[1] [http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people- hav...](http://news.clearancejobs.com/2011/09/26/how-many-people-have- security-clearances/)

<comment><USER14> I'm personally alarmed that so many people (presumably) have had access to this material and yet these leaks are only _now_ coming out.

<comment><USER15> Most government employees with top secret clearance (DV in the UK) like I was are scared of the consequences of breaking the rules.

When someone puts their life on the line and opens their mouth, there is enough attention on the matter for other people to come forward safely.

If the attention is not there, people disappear (without trial in some cases) and end up rotting in jail somewhere.

<comment><USER9> Comments like this are really telling of how far down that slippery slope we already are. Troubling.

<comment><USER15> It's always been like it. It is just publicised now thanks to free communication over the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "... This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites ..."

Isn't Facebook using SSL these days?

<comment><USER17> Not by default on every account. I have recently changed settings on couple of my friends account to force SSL.

<comment><USER18> What is the current understanding regarding the crackability of SSL?

<comment><USER17> It has been discussed over and over on hackernews recently so just tldr version. Let's consider two scenarios. 1) NSA forces CA to issues a certificate for google.com and decide to man-in-the-middle you. In that case there is a mechanism call certificate pinning. To put it simply certificates of Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. are hard coded into Firefox and Google Chrome. (Microsoft provides this ability in IE using latest EMET 4.0). So if someone tries to send you cert for google, which doesn't match the one hardcoded your browser would get crazy and issue a big red warning :) 2) NSA records your encrypted communication with Google and later obtains Google private key (either by factoring Google public key or using some secret court order or whatever). In this case they CAN'T decrypt your communication with Google because Google uses version of Diffi- Hellman protocol with so called ephemeral keys. More here [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting- data-for-long-term-with.html). Ephermal DH is not implement by many sites (hackernews does it, facebook doesn't)

SSL can be broken in myriad of different ways but at least in these two scenarios you are to certain degree safe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> o0-0o From the article, "(Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)".

Could someone let the journalists know what metadata really is? I mean, come on. Metadata is a concise, highly valued description of the data, also including identifying information. In other words, keywords!

For this comment, the keywords (metadata) might be:

Journalists Metadata Meta Data Article

<comment><USER19> I think your definition of meta-data is too narrow. It's not just keywords.

Excuse me if I state the obvious, but with something like a web page access, the meta data will be in part: your internet address, what time you accessed it, the referring url etc. A phone call's meta data could include the length of the call, which phone the call was made on, which mast was used etc.

Meta data is additional data about the data isn't it?

One assumes that you could then make telling deductions from that meta data. Like a persons movements (acquired from phone, financial and internet records). You can also draw a lot about their character: their interests, their political views, their cicles etc.

The meta data is very revealing in itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is what I thought all along.

A) Access is MUCH broader than just tapping Google, FB, MSFT, etc. Access is at the far broader level of telecommunication cables. Encryption can be broken later, with specialty FPGA chips.

B) More importantly, with the US taking "everything foreign" and with GCHQ (also) taking "everything foreign" ... the Venn set of these two closely associated govt spying operations means they get "everything, period", including US domestic communications.

If true, the original Snowden revelations are (small) child's play to what may actually be being surveilled, which may indeed be everything.

<comment> o0-0o Important to extend your Venn diagram to the "Five Eyes". Canada, US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. A much wider intersection is possible in that context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://www.submarinecablemap.com/](http://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

</comment><comment> UVB-76 This is disgraceful.

</comment><comment><USER22> 21 pb a day - someone has an expensive storage bill

<comment><USER19> Better store it all on site or they'll end up with a feedback loop; if they pump it back down the commoner's pipes. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No big deal. It's Silicon Valley who's to blame.</comment>


The Feds Found the Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht Thanks to a Leaky CAPTCHA - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/06/the-feds-found-the-silk-roads-ross-ulbricht-thanks-to-a-leaky-captcha/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> Primary source: [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/09/dread-pirate-sunk-by- leak...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/09/dread-pirate-sunk-by-leaky- captcha/)</comment>


Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/international/2018/01/10/teenagers-are-better-behaved-and-less-hedonistic-nowadays <comment><USER2> That's because everything they do is monitored and posted online before they have any career reputation whatsoever.

Oh and they're being billed maybe $300-600 a month in student loans while working a job that pays $1600 in an area where rent is about $700</comment>


Django CMS - The new CMS for Django - <AUTHOR> http://www.django-cms.org/

<comment><USER2> The Django wiki has a nice comparison of cms apps:

<http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison>

<comment><USER3> It seems that DjangoCMS covers almost all of those comparisons. I would assume this is good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's too monolithic for my taste.

It should be taking a leaf from Django's own design book and providing some high-level CMS building-blocks. Otherwise you just end up reinventing Wordpress or Joomla. Look at Pinax* or FeinCMS for a much smarter sense of how to get Django goodness without reinventing the CMS wheel everytime.

* I know Pinax isn't a CMS - but it's tackling the hard problem of how to allow several apps by different authors to work together and integrate into the same site.

<comment><USER5> Ah, but Pinax isn't a good solution either: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764566>

Having said that, FeinCMS looks pretty nice and more modular, as you say.

<comment><USER4> Mmmm. Interesting. I wonder how much of the criticism of Pinax there is down to the specific apps and how much is down to the architectural philosophy it's trying to put in place.

On one hand Pinax guys are smart, on the other packaging/deployment/reuse are hard problems.

Here's hoping x>y!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They've basically created nested flatpages and added some UI. This should be called "nested-flatpages" and distributed as an app rather than a "CMS".

</comment><comment><USER7> The features remind me of the CMS that is built in James Bennett's Practical Django Projects:

<http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590599969>

</comment><comment><USER8> There is not a lot of information on the site. I have only a cursory knowledge of Django, but the django-cms features seem to be the same as those of Django. Can anyone enlighten me to the benefits of django-cms?

<comment><AUTHOR> The way I understood it this integrates a number of common elements that go into makeing a CMS in to one package.

I'm searching around today to see how much of the 'drupal' functionality that we have used for the last 2 years or so can be achieved with django.

Unfortunately their wiki is down... I was hoping somebody here already has experience with this package.

<comment><USER9> Drupal's all about the hook system and modular architecture, and to recreate it in Django along with even half of the good stuff in contrib would take a very long time.

More importanly, Django will need to make progress in schema evolution to allow for easy DB upgrades between versions. This is the area where Django lacks most right now.

<comment><USER10> You mean something like South (<http://south.aeracode.org/>)? Did you have any problems using it or did you prefer something else?

It would be nice to see something like this incorporated into Django itself, but I guess you can't expect it to bake you a cake, manage your finances and provide you with an easy way to build websites all in one single package. But a man can dream.

<comment><USER11> Schema-migration utilities are in a phase where there's some competition going on and features and support cross-pollinating; sooner or later there'll be a clear winner and it'll be time to talk about bundling with Django itself, but for now it's best to let the community evolve things, since that'll develop useful things much more quickly than stuffing something prematurely into django.contrib.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was the last Math formula/concept you used while coding? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Most recently today? Addition. And counting. This isn't "snark", I work in BI. Counting things and knowing what to count is half the job.

<comment><USER3> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Euclidean gcd algorithm to determine colinearity of points on an integer grid. Double precision slope/intercept fails here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Recently used Euclidean distance, weighted average, N-period moving average and Pearson correlation coefficient.

</comment><comment><USER6> For production code well, If (p then q) = (NOT p or q)</comment>


This website lets you check if your PC can run a specific game or not - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspecs.io <comment><USER2> nice idea but im not sure how accurate it is, i checked my gen 1 X1 carbon (i7 3667u 8gb, intel HD4000) and it returns several games im relatively sure wont run even close to playable such as Ark, GTA V, Starwars Battlefront 2 and others that i dont imagine would run in even their lowest settings

(either that or im drastically underestimating the performance of the HD4000)

<comment><AUTHOR> You might be underestimating your HD 4000. Here is a limited list of games the HD 4000 can run according to Intel [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005659/graphics- drivers/graphics-for-3rd-generation-intel-processors.html)

<comment><USER2> maybe, i was quite shocked when i was able to run overwatch playably on it, thankfully though i should have my new laptop by the end of the month and shouldnt have issues running any games in reasonable settings (1050ti)</comment></comment></comment>


Wanted: Gullible Lawyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=2497

<comment><USER2> I couldn't help but think, what if the scammer had actually gotten investors to fund him?

With the team he'd hired, and the website and other work they'd produced (ok, so maybe the author took some creative license with how _good_ it actually was), how far would he have gotten?

<comment><USER3> "So, while News Corp bid 5 billion for the WSJ, you think you can get it with your 50 million dollar capitalization?"

Hmm. Pass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. That story was... unbelievable.

<comment><USER5> It's a classic shaggy dog story, its veracity notwithstanding...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The secret to a good con is finding marks who _want to believe_.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gullibility and desperation are separate but closely related things.</comment>


The iPhone 5 - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/iphone_5

<comment><USER2> This is not really a review - reads more like a lover on his last moments of love, desperately rationalizing things. Personally I think smartphones have almost commoditized. Apple has added ZERO product innovation this time in software or hardware. No - making a thinner, taller phone is not innovation.

To summarize the 'review'

0\. Glass was the best material for the phone till last week. Now it's aluminium. Plastic sucks because it scuffs instead of breaking but feels cheap so I hate it. Why doesn't everyone else use an inferior material that Apple just stopped using?

1\. The bigger screen sucks. But after using it for a week, the old screen is too small. 3.5" was _perfect_ till now. 4" is _perfect_ hereon. Anything bigger is only for stupid people who have and use two hands. And if they have two sizes, stupid people will always choose the bigger one - it's better that apple decides the right size for me.

2\. The display is brighter and more saturated than the 4S. But not AS bright or saturated as the S3. It's _just_ perfect, because its from Apple. Oh wait - the display is from LG. It's got a lower resolution than the S3? Crispness is what matters.

3\. The Camera is good.

4\. AT&T sucks. Verizon rocks. Oh you can't do data+voice simultaneously on Verizon. But who needs that?

5\. Battery life is same as on 4S. Who needs more than that?

6\. The benchmark score of the processor is the highest Apple has so far. The S3 beats the pants off the iPhone 5? That's not a phone is it?

7\. iOS6? There's nothing to talk about. I mean they screwed up the Maps. They copied notifications last time so there's nothing left to copy.

<comment><USER3> So this is the level of discourse the community has decided that best engages with Gruber's review? Just seven lines of banal vitriol and claims--without justification--that the review "reads more like a lover on his last moments of love" and "making a thinner, taller phone is not innovation."

The miniaturization of electronics is arguably one of the most significant trends of our technological era. Many of the great science fiction writers of the 50s and 60s, despite getting so much right, in large part missed miniaturization. What once filled rooms was reduced in the 80s to what could sit on a desk, and now to what can fit in our pockets. So making a thinner, taller phone is not innovation? Why?

I know that Apple isn't popular around these parts, but let's at least have an intelligent conversation about specifically what we find fault with instead of ranting and rage-upvoting incoherent rants.

<comment><USER4> >I know that Apple isn't popular around these parts

Except that we know from surveys that most HN readers use Apple computers, phones, and tablets. And yet, even here, you can't appreciate feats of design, engineering, and usability without s vocal minority getting amusingly angry.

<comment><USER5> The median HN user is a white male who uses Chrome on OSX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny, I've bought every iPhone to date except this one. In fact, I went out and bought a Galaxy Nexus instead. I did it because Apple's fascination with perfecting form and design has somehow morphed into this inability to innovate.

The primary reason I switched was that one day, I opened up my home screen and realized it hasn't changed in 5 years. We still open apps one at a time, each app allotted a sort of pseudo background API that allows minimal functionality. And God those apps are pretty. And the FPS is amazing. And the fluidity of the experience is breathtaking... but at the end of the day, my device is about acquiring information. I want to know when my train is coming, I want to save map info when I don't have a connection, I want to know that when I leave for work and hit the subway, Pocket auto downloaded all those articles I saved for later.

Apple still maintains the best hardware, hands down. It's not even comparable. But it's irrelevant if the apps that reside on that phone are completely crippled by a draconian sense of design and control. If the phone has a "workstation tower processor" inside it, why the hell can't they let up and let the thing actually PROCESS more information?

I'll miss the beauty of it, that's for sure, but unless Apple gets its act together with background processing and figuring out how to actually do cloud anything right, I'm moving to Google.

<comment><USER7> > If the phone has a "workstation tower processor" inside it, why the hell > can't they let up and let the thing actually PROCESS more information?

Because of power. It may have "workstation tower processing" power, but it's not hooked up to a wall socket. Power consumption is the gigantic bugaboo that plagues mobile devices, and that (in my opinion) justifies Apple's policies about background processing on iOS.

<comment><USER8> I wish they'd go further, though: how much battery life could Apple get out of an iPhone if they kept their great minimization and efficiency-maximization of the electronics going, but pulled back from the thinner-and-lighter-every-time mantra and devoted all the saved space to a bigger battery?

An iPhone that's smaller than my still-pocketable non-Apple phone isn't that appealing to me (yay for having above-average-sized hands!). An iPhone that could go a week easily on a single charge would make me sit up and take notice, though.

<comment><USER9> If you care more about battery life, why not just add something like [http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=112&c...](http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=112&cp_id=11213&cs_id=1083111&p_id=8292&seq=1&format=2) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Disclaimer: Android user.

Every time I'm up to get a new phone I come _this_ close to switching to iPhone. My wife has one, and I've switched to Macs. But there are certain utilitarian functions that keep me on Android.

As of the last two design revs, though, I also have an aesthetic aversion to the iPhone. Gruber describes the jewelry or fine watch-like quality very well. But I don't wear jewelry or fine watches. (Ok, I wear a wedding ring, but it's a plain band.)

Maybe I'm just a philistine, but there's something about old original Motorola Droids that are at this point beaten up and worn that have a really nice aged, aesthetic weight to them.

It's a sentiment similar to the one Khoi Vinh lays out here: <http://www.subtraction.com/2007/07/16/designed-det> but not quite, because I think smart phones become obsolete too quickly for 'designed deterioration' to be realistic.

Maybe it's more that I don't want to feel that precious about these objects. I like to be able to not have to worry that much about taking care of my phone, to be able to toss it around without worrying about damage.

Or maybe it's just an emotional, class-based aversion to luxury goods because I grew up in working class conditions.

<comment><USER11> There is something a little crass about this angle of iPhone marketing.

But marketing the iPhone as a luxury status symbol could be a little dangerous for them since they really only make one flagship phone. Even here in Vietnam I see iPhones all over the place and it just isn't a very effective signal of wealth anymore. But when I pull out my S3 people always want to look at it and play with it.

<comment><USER12> What do you do in vietnam?

<comment><USER11> Freelance mobile development. For the last 18 months iOS and now Android.

<comment><USER12> Pm me a portfolio and your rates please :)

<comment><USER5> I see what you did there.

I hope he sends you rates on par with London, NYC, or SF. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad he spent a long time on the feel. My primary criticism of my 4S echoed Edward Tufte's words here:

 _Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh)._

Those creases between the antenna bands and the glass back combined with the 4S's weight were very noticeable the first time I held the 4S for more than 5 minutes and through the first week I had it. It faded completely fairly quickly and I laugh about it now but I have to think one of their major goals with this iteration was to erase that defect.

People seem disappointed every time Apple doesn't come out with a total redesign but total redesigns are basically admissions that what you were shipping last week was totally wrong. I have to think that a unibody metal frame is what they've been shooting for all along. They couldn't work the antennae properly so they settled on a lot of plastic and then glass and finally they got their unibody aluminum chassis. I wouldn't be surprised if by next year they completely remove the glass inlays on the back and move to liquidmetal alloys.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great review. I'm disappointed that the screen size change is noticably awkward -- I was hoping it would be something that you'd get used to in a matter of minutes. I currently have a Galaxy Nexus and hitting the top left is impossible without two hands or hand contortion that leaves the device in serious risk of being dropped.

Also, why on earth would Apple choose to have apps letterboxed in portrait mode? Wouldn't it make WAY more sense to align them on the bottom of the display, so that the keyboard would at least be in the same place across all applications? Here's hoping developers don't lag on updating their apps.

<comment><USER15> It's most likely for the consistency within apps that can rotate to landscape and still have a keyboard displayed.

Would you expect the app to then slide to the middle? Or stay aligned-left and make it harder for the right hand?

<comment><USER16> I'd vote for slide to the middle. Bottome-aligned in portrait, centered in landscape sounds good to me. I know that sounds "ugly" but it's probably pretty practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Gruber says that _"none of the competing phones on the market are made of metal"_.

So what about the Lumia 800 (1)? Or the One S (2)?

1) [http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/3/2534861/nokia- lumia-800-re...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/3/2534861/nokia- lumia-800-review)

2) <http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/2/2916098/htc-one-s-review>

<comment><USER18> From theVerge review on the Lumia800: "What you see and feel in your hand is a seamless piece of soft-touch plastic"

From the Wikipedia Article: "A trough-colored unibody shell is made from polycarbonate plastic."

And, Gruber had a demo-unit of the Lumia 800:

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/04/03/>

<comment><USER17> Sorry, misread the review for the Lumia 800. I'd always been under the impression that the Lumia phones were anodized aluminum; turns out they're polycarbonate.

Still, there's the One S, for... one. And that was just a quick find among the current crop of recommended phones; I wouldn't be surprised if there are others.

<comment><USER19> Nokia N8 and E7, last flagship Nokias before the lumias, were made of Anodized Aluminium. I own the N8 and the N800 and both feel great in the hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For being a review of the iPhone 5, notice that it is only focused on the hardware. There is no talk of iOS 6 at all.

And personally, I think that iOS 6 is a disappointment and no one wants to admit it. The hardware is eclipsing the software.

<comment><USER21> > And personally, I think that iOS 6 is a disappointment and no one wants to > admit it. The hardware is eclipsing the software.

The actual explanation is that the iOS6 beta was made available in June, people have been talking about it for 3 months. It's old news (and felt enormously boring during the keynote as we'd already seen pretty much everything they demoed aside from — I believe — panorama). The hardware, on the other hand, is new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Gruber is right to spend the first 750 words talking about something that most people won't care about, the fit and finish. Smartphones are pretty much all the same, despite parties from both camps rearing up and claiming their phone of choice is The One True Phone, so companies need to find ways to set them apart. Apple's devotion to realising their designs is what sets them apart. Whilst Joe Public won't care about precision manufacture and such he will notice how _good_ the phone feels. There's a reason Rolex, Omega and so on still make very expensive, high quality watches, and a reason why people still buy them.

Unfortunately there's a vocal group on here who are willing to just sit and go "Gruber is an Apple shill, there's nothing in here, he makes weird justifications", and he does in places, but he's also given Apple a hard time over changing display size so it's slightly hard to cover the screen but he knows they've had to do that in response to the market.

There's plenty to like in the iPhone 5, and I'll be upgrading my 4 to one when I can because for me Apple is still producing the nicest hardware for a smartphone and that trumps anything else _for me_. Stop assuming your personal feelings about it are real world facts, because you love the iPhone doesn't make it the best, and because you love the Galaxy doesn't make it the best.

</comment><comment><USER23> > But navigating the full screen while holding the iPhone [5] in one hand is > worse ... Consider the windshield wipers on a car, and how, because they > swing in a radial arc, they can't reach the passenger-side top corner.

Gruber brought up a very good point about the somewhat less than perfect screen size which shows a UI weakness of iOS: the back button—one of the most used UI elements—is always at the top left. Try it yourself, go to versus io to see the iPhone 5 in its orignal size, calibrate your screen (click at the top-right corner on versus io) and place your hand next to the iPhone and see if your thumb would be able to reach the top-left corner: [http://versusio.com/en/apple-iphone-5-64gb-vs-samsung- galaxy...](http://versusio.com/en/apple-iphone-5-64gb-vs-samsung-galaxy-s3) In contrast, Android has hardware back keys always at the bottom, so even 4,8" phones could be used for a short while with one hand (just try the same experiment with the S3). Moreover, there's a huge target not bothering about bigger phones because they have space in their bag and don't put them into their pockets (women). So, I agree with Gruber to start offering two size: 3.5 and something about 4.5 or even larger (and changing the back button UI in the long run).

<comment><USER24> iOS 6 has the back button on the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting to see both Gruber and Dalrymple find the taller screen and letter boxing to be troublesome. Though it will take some getting used to, the main stream press will certainly clamor over this being a largely negative move by Apple.

Gotta love Gruber's continued adherence to succinct style and message. Makes for a great, consumable read.

</comment><comment><USER26> Personally, I'm disappointed. The thing is, I know I'm totally wrong because the iphone 5 is such a beautiful beast and probably the best smartphone out there.

Still, what I liked the most about the iphone, and the ipad, and the macbook, was how innovative it was. Everything was new. New concepts, new icon, new look and feel.. a whole refreshing new feeling.

I feel like the iphone5 is mostly a simple hardware update. I.e every now and then, I'll switch my old memory for a new one 2x faster. It's not innovative or original.. it's just faster memory.

So, this is why I'm disappointed. Not because the iphone5 is not good (it's great!). It just didn't satisfied my _WOW_ factor.

<comment><USER27> > what I liked the most about the iphone, and the ipad, and the macbook, was > how innovative it was. Everything was new. New concepts, new icon, new look > and feel.. a whole refreshing new feeling.

I can't help but feel that you're misrepresenting the past. The iPhone has had the same look and feel, icons, and basic design since the very first version released 5 years ago. The iPad UI is very much a scaled up version of that very same look and feel. It seems odd to stop and complain _now_ that the phone is an incremental upgrade.

The iPhone is _always_ going to be a simple hardware upgrade; its entire design is based around making the software front and center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If the only nice thing you can say about a phone is the camera and how it feels, not to mention devote at least 2 paragraphs to how pedantic Apple is about design and it paints a familiar picture. Apple are losing at their own game, the game they started and now a game that others are finishing for them.

The only great thing about the new iPhone is the fact that the iOS 6 operating system is comes with has an awesome vector maps feature that blows Google Maps out of the water. I'm not prepared to spend $1000 AUD on buying an iPhone 5 when it doesn't offer anything significantly new, where's the NFC chip?

<comment><USER29> NFC is nearly useless at this point and there is a possibility it will never become ubiquitous. I don't see NFC being a huge selling point outside of the techies fpr quite some time.

<comment><USER30> Well, if only NFC had a big backer and became much more popular.. then maybe merchants would use it. A backer like, you know Apple?

<comment><USER31> So, you are saying that Samsung and Nokia aren't popular enough?

Samsung and Nokia are popular enough and have the resources to back NFC but as of now they haven't done anything besides launching phones with the technology.

NFC today is just a dummy selling point and they know it, because they haven't done anything to make it popular.

<comment><USER32> This is basically where Bluetooth was in, say 2003. People are disappointed because Apple is generally forward-looking when it comes to standards and tech, but has shied away from NFC (which shouldn't be surprising given their stance on USB3.0 and Blu-Ray).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's interesting to note how, unless I've missed it, the verge has been left out of the party. I enjoy reading Joshua's reviews, which are critical when appropriate, although somewhat verbose. I'm sure the iPhone 5 is solid, I'll probably be ordering it, but it seems like the product is intentionally kept away from more critical reviewers.

<comment><USER34> > it seems like the product is intentionally kept away from more critical > reviewers.

Macworld didn't get one either, and they're not exactly known for their critical reviews of Apple products: <https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/248233492650020864>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can we stop pretending that Bruner has anything interesting to say about Apple products? You know what he's going to say before you click the link. It's just self-congratulation for apple fans.

Now, I don't hate Apple, behaviour aside. They make great products. But Gruber has nothing new or interesting to say about them. It's just the same old, and is uninteresting. Anyone who feels the need to read what he thinks about Apple can just go to daringfireball; nobody's discovering any great insights here.

</comment><comment><USER36>
        In an ideal world, perhaps Apple would offer two iPhone sizes — like they do
        with products such as MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and iMacs. A smaller one with
        the classic 3.5-inch display, and a larger (say, 4.5-inch?) one for people who
        want that.

Isn't this exactly what Apple's doing? The iPhone 4 and 4S aren't going away, people now have a choice which size they want.

<comment><USER37> No it isnt. Apple will not produce more 4's. The ones on sell now are production lot's remainings. The only reason "apple can offer them" is because it wiser to sell them than to throw away.

And people don't have a choice in size. They have a choice in sie that goes MANDATORY with other specs, such as slower CPU, less advanced OS, less functionality, heavier/thicker device, have they decide to go with smaller screen.

<comment><USER38> You clearly have no understanding of Apple's obsessive degree of supply-chain control.

The 4S is likely to be still for sale for two more YEARS. You think Apple just accidentally made a two-year surplus of the 4S, and now they are stuck with them, so they have to keep selling them? The actual figure is probably more like two days than two years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Gruber really doesn't write reviews. He writes Fifty shades of grey for Apple fanboys.

His writing serves little purpose sans as a base for analysis of how the Apple RDF affects basic reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why are HNers totally incapable of evaluating high quality products? This situation is even more egregious since the high quality product costs the same as the low quality product.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think if you read in between the lines you can understand the generally underwhelmed reaction to the iPhone 5. There isn't anything on the iPhone 5 that feels like a step forward for mobile computing. The biggest change is the change in screen size, which is awkward and driven by keeping up with consumer expectation.

<comment><USER42> Maybe phones are becoming feature complete? If they add to much to quickly, they'll have nothing to put out for the next model :D

If you could magically ship something with the iPhone 5, what would it be?

<comment><USER14> Seconded. I can't think of any huge, groundbreaking features that have been included in, say, new laptops over the last 10 years. Faster, thinner, lighter, better battery life, nicer displays, what more do you want? It's turning into a software game.

<comment><USER38> I would say SSD replacing disk drives has been the most jarring performance improvement. It's really a night-and-day, sudden difference. But yes, that's not a new feature, per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This review could be the poster boy for the more and more idiotic consumerism that is the plague of our age.

</comment><comment><USER44> Gruber is an amazing writer. Blows away the other reviews.

<comment><USER45> Gruber is a great writer but a terrible reviewer. His recent writing completely lacks any balance. It's obvious that he loves Apple and doesn't give a fair review. I don't have any issue with people liking Apple products but I don't understand why Hacker News upvotes his one-sided blog posts so highly.

<comment><USER46> Exactly. His writing is way too sweet on Apple. I ordered the new iPhone and when I got to the end at the part where I'm supposed to buy it just because it says "iPhone" on the back, I was nearing the point of gagging.

The rationalizing of why they would switch from 3.5" to 4" when they always make the right choices was particularly a low point for me, also. I guess I knew what I was getting myself into when I clicked the link, though.

And shockingly, downvotes for calling a spade a spade.

<comment><USER47> From the linked article: _There's a reason why, just as with all five of its predecessors, it just says "iPhone" on the back._

An awfully awkward sentence in a muddled closing, but in context he's not saying it's worth buying just because it says "iPhone". He's saying that they all have just said "iPhone" rather than additionally having the model number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> As an aside, has anyone a clue how iTunes is going to represent the new Retina 4 capable apps in the App Store? They now require screenshots of apps for iPhone (4), iPad and Retina 4 displays. Where are those going to appear, and how will people access them?

<comment><USER49> The level of fragmentation of display targets is approaching Android levels. The whole point of retina being a straight linear doubling of pixels was that you only had two device form factors to worry about: iPhone and iPad. Now you have to worry about iPhone, tall iPhone, iPad and, soon, mini-iPad (same aspect, but different physical/touch target size).

<comment><USER50> The Mini-iPad is widely expected to be 1024x768.

So really there are only three display targets. iPhone, iPad and Tall iPhone.

<comment><USER49> I mentioned that. It is a different physical size though, so the minimum readable size text is different, and the minimum touchable target is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The iphone 5 will sell like crazy given the large number of people approaching their contract expiration with an earlier version of the device. It only makes sense for most to continue to invest in the ecosystem they have already invested. The average joe is not going to take the jump,in my opinion that is.Ideally the phone I really want to upgrade to should have the Android Jelly Bean's UI with iOS' ecosystem (read apps) combined in a Nokia Lumia phone. I would pay a LOT of money for that !!!

</comment><comment><USER52> I kept reading waiting to find the section on what he DIDN'T like about the phone. I prefer reviews that address both the good and the bad about a product.

For example, the article about the inconsistencies in Android 4.x was pretty well done and definitely points out issues I've had with Android.

I've never owned an iOS device so I want to hear all the pros and cons. Raving reviews like this one do nothing to persuade me to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER53> The part that I like about this review is the refrain — "It's nice". It's both a positive comment about the phone and also a deliberately non-quantitative, colloquial statement, recognizing it's only an incremental improvement. It's joining the chorus but also dismissing it. The argument being that yeah it's just nice, but that's the point. Stylistically, that's a neat little sentence.

</comment><comment><USER54> About the just right screensize bullshit: it may be just right - for exactly one use case, which is typing with your thumb. There are dozens of other use cases for a mobile internet client. I like to surf and read, in both cases I cherish the big display of my Galaxy Nexus (which still fits nicely into my trouser pockets, thank you very much).

Personally I have never typed with a thumb, and I was surprised to discover that some people actually do that.

Even if you are convinced typing with your thumb is your main desire in life, there are people with thumbs of different sizes. What if my thumb is 3.7 inches, not 3.5 inches. Apple would be stealing 0.2 inches from my optimal screen estate then, just to please the masses. Or what if my thumb is only 3.0 inches? No thumb typing for me :-(

What I am saying: yes, the 3.5 iPhone screen size may by just right - for a selected group of users with specific use cases and specific thumb sizes. Thank god there is Android with a little variation in devices.

</comment><comment><USER55> > So the question is, if a 4-inch 16:9 display is better than a 3.5-inch 3:2 > display, why hasn't the iPhone been using 4-inch 16:9 displays from the > start?

How about: Apple got this wrong?

To be fair to Apple, if they came out with a 4" or 4.5" back in 2007 it would have strangely large compared to everything else on the market (not to mention having the properties Gruber also mentions). The 3.5" screen made perfect sense then. However, what Apple didn't do was foresee that most consumers would prefer larger screens, and this doesn't fit with the Apple ideal of One True Resolution. (Yes, now there are two resolutions for iPhones, but only the vertical resolution has changed.)

</comment><comment><USER56> What's this. Gruber complaining that he can't reach the edges of an iPhone display? I never thought I'd see the day.

He even admits there were some people who couldn't even use 3.5" displays one handed. Is the Apple kool-aid wearing off?

<comment><USER53> kool-aid?

I find Daring Fireball to be at its best when Gruber pushes back on Apple's design decisions with thoughtful critique: skeuomorphism, Safari tabs experiments, this screen thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> In Germany there is a saying that "nice is the little sister of crap". Just saying that the review felt lukewarm to me, even by Apple's greatest fan. But maybe it was just that the first line ("it is nice") set the tone for me.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think the new screen resolution is a terrible terrible decision, I like a phone/tablet that has about the same aspect ratio as a piece of paper. For me, 4:3 and 3:2 are ideal. I have no use for widescreen, especially when I am normally viewing the screen in portrait.

I won't be installing iOS 6, I don't think it's finished and shouldn't be released in its current state. Too much functionality is lost with new maps.

I get the feeling that it's all downhill from here...

<comment><USER4> >I like a phone/tablet that has about the same aspect ratio as a piece of paper.

Once you throw some control bars at the top and the bottom of the content, you're pretty much there. They keyboard definitely needed more screen space above it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> "And compared to the 4/4S's glass back, it should prove far more durable...this is a phone that was meant to be used without a case."

I won't be holding my breath on that one. iPhones have always been more fragile than most comparable high end phones.

Anecdotally, I rarely see uncased iPhones in the wild - and I don't expect this to change anytime soon.

<comment><USER59> Anecdotally, I had the first iPhone from day 1, inherited a 3GS and been sporting the 4 since it came out. I've never used a case and the worst damage that's happened was a stuck lock-screen button on the 3GS after years of use.

I do see lots of people with cases, though I suspect they're for bling and to for the sense of peace-of-mind that they're protecting their shiny object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> More features != better: [http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your- product-is-...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is- great-it-doesnt-need.html)

That being said, I'm content with my 4s, although I will probably buy my wife a Nokia 920 so I can get a taste of the other side.

</comment><comment><USER61> Gee, I wonder why he didn't mention the maps? Apple's devices are still more compelling for me personally, but less so than they used to me. Hopefully Google builds and maintains its own iOS maps application.

</comment><comment><USER62> If it's precision-milled to the micron, why do they need "725 unique inlays"?

Serious question - I think there's something I don't understand here.

</comment><comment><USER63> tl;dr

"hi, I'm Gruber and I love everything Apple does. Well, surprise: I love the iPhone 5 too!"</comment>


Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/and_now_page_2 <comment><USER2> Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

<comment><USER3> Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.

<comment><USER2> Of that I have no doubt, but what I originally thought they would do; use their business resources mixed with Sun's engineering resources, does not appear to be their plan at all. They seem to be losing all of the best Sun engineering talent and do not seem at all concerned about about that fact.

That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought they were doing, but succeeding at something else and I am curious as to what that is.

<comment><USER4> They bought suns business. They will probably replace engineers and continue projects they like, they will lose engineers focused in products that are cut.

I think part of suns problem was engineering that was going in for engineering sake, not business sake, and oracle is going to lose those engineers.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what businesses other people have collaborated with ... but to me the people behind the products I'm using matter a lot, I'm not dealing with faceless entities.

Personally that's precisely why I'm using Postgresql ... I can talk to the core team of developers and get their input whenever I feel like there's a problem with Postgresql. And for a web service we worked on, we even hired a Mysql developer to come and help us (was also on Sun's payroll at the time).

How could I trust a product based on ZFS or how could I trust them to build my products on top of Java or any of their Sun-derived solutions ... when the top talent that worked on those products left?

Not to mention I don't like hypocrites ... before the Sun acquisition they called on Sun to make the JCP more open. Is this an US thing? Can companies fuck with you because it's just business?

Oracle seems to me like a sweat shop. Nothing wrong with that and I'm glad they are making lots of money ... but in my shop you can get fired for suggesting Oracle products, and it's not just me, there's a whole generation of software developers that won't touch their cash cows.

There's a whole generation of developer that have chosen Mysql or Postgres or implemented their own shit, and did not go for Oracle's DB ... that's revenue and opportunities lost for them, and I'm only seeing this trend getting stronger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris.

I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.

The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably in the non-monetary sense as much as the monetary sense, to keep the top talent that came with the Sun acquisition. Personally, I agree that this sounds like a mistake, but this sort of attitude is not new for Oracle, and eh, they've done okay so far, so what do I know?

<comment><USER8> I agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people.

Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

<comment><USER6> > Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when > continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.

I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.

<comment><USER9> I think you're being unfair - some of them are "Visio resources". Tho' they call themselves "architects".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going with them."

Good luck Jeff Bonwick.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's good to see something positive coming out of the Sun acquisition: a whole crop of very interesting startups are probably being founded right now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm really uncertain now of the future of Illumos and ZFS. I hope there's more push behind these projects as well as BTRFS. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

<comment><USER13> Since btrfs is an Oracle funded project, I'm real interested to see what happens to both of these filesystems going forward.

<comment><USER9> As someone who has actually used OCFS2 on a real production system, I will never voluntarily touch another Oracle-written filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer:

<http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup>

P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...

<comment><USER15> IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.

<comment><USER16> It's the ease of usage, speed, and very large compression window that makes dedup better than traditional compression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm I was hoping he would go work for Apple on a new filesystem to replace HFS+... oh well.

Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oracle's strategy seems to be:

(1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...).

(2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years.

(3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1.

Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.

<comment><USER20> "just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, "

don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean saying "profitable" in application to Sun?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was saved by another ship.

Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know how much of the oracle's academic initiative was a success. From the likes of what is being happening to Sun's Academic Initiative to promote university grad students to take the certification exams such as SCJP now called Oracle certified java programmer. Sun has offered its student members the certification exam for 40 $ which has been recently dropped by oracle making it 40% of the voucher fee which implies 40% of 150 around 90$. The 40% discount voucher is also for a limited period which will be done for good this December. I seriously doubt oracle's contribution towards opensource too.</comment>


$1M in student loans. How did that happen? - <AUTHOR> http://archive.is/pizi9 <comment><USER2> He makes nearly $225k in Utah and is only paying $1.6k/mo on his loans.

EDIT: I understand that there are many examples of individuals taking on substantial student debt without the ability to pay it off. However, it's not clear to me that that is the case for him.</comment>


The biggest threat facing middle-age men is loneliness - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-biggest-threat-facing-middle-age-men-isn-smoking-obesity-loneliness/k6saC9FnnHQCUbf5mJ8okL/story.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> I'm married with 2 cats, 2 dogs a baby on the way and I work from home. I would kill for some loneliness.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      > a researcher from Britain's University of Oxford
      > presented study results that [...]
      > Men need an activity together to make and keep a bond. [...]
      > like school or military service or sports."

Yes, this matches my own experience, and I've heard it elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> And here I thought it was death.

<comment><USER5> Is the hardest part of a video game the end?

<comment><USER6> You get a profound emptiness when it comes time to put down a good game.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoom could be valued at $8B in upcoming IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/zoom-sets-ipo-price-range-2019-4 <comment><AUTHOR> Definitely more than I would have anticipated; impressive</comment>


42 Ways to Monetize Your Mobile Game - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soom.la/2013/07/42-ways-to-monetize-your-mobile-game.html

<comment><USER2> So 42 ways to make money out of mobile games. I guess that most games usually implement 1-3 methods. Do you have any information regarding the most lucrative method?

</comment><comment><USER3> Would love to learn more about combinations of these methods - what can work best together?

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice Article</comment>


Ask HN: good AMI for 1-click github deploy - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a good basic community EC2 AMI that has PHP 5.3 and Git installed, so I can set up 1-click deploys. I want to avoid having to do sysadmin stuff on it (install packages and such), I just want an AMI that's ready to go.<p>Related: is there a place where you can search for/find AMI's that's better than the AWS console AMI picker? <comment><USER2> Good question, but this is more a stack exchange question - I don't know which stack exchange though...</comment>


It's Not About Creating Another Silicon Valley but Preventing Another Motor City - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/17/entrepreneurial-ecosystem-global-lessons-its-not-about-creating-another-silicon-valley-but-preventing-another-motor-city/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting piece, however, I think it's misguided as to what needs to be done. Detroit fell not as much because the auto makers moved away, but because once they did, there was nothing left. This is a huge problem that I see in this area; friends with skills and desire in professions like medicine end up having to become sysadmins because it's the only way to make ends meet in the upside down economy of this area. You can't have a sustainable area economy if the working class has to commute from Stockton to do the "menial jobs".

Among other things, I think it's high time that the big players -- Google, Facebook, etc -- started growing upward rather than outwards. Sprawl is a terrible waste of land, and pushes prices that much higher, and that much more out of the way of the other people who live in the area. In order for this area to remain awesome, we really do need the Google Tower, the Facebook Tower, etc, in order to give enough space for new and small people to be able to get a foothold. Otherwise, I have a bad feeling that the Fabulous Ruins of the Silicon Valley is going to have stark photographs of abandoned sprawling compounds, much like Detroit's ruin porn has now.

<comment><USER3> Likelihood of towers being approved by Bay Area city councils?</comment></comment>


Black and White - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/black-and-white <comment><USER2> It's an educational exercise to take something like Joel's essay, try to understand it in the way raganwald advocates here, and then go and edit it such that all the caveats, simplifications, etc are all explicitly enumerated. After you're done doubling the length, ask yourself if anybody would actually have read the end result.

Having gone through a phase where I tried to write like that, I can tell you two things: First, "no". Second, it's _a complete waste of time_. Add in the caveat that you don't literally mean that there are 0 software packages sold in that price range, and you will _still get flamed_ for the claim you just disclaimed. A lot of people are sloppy readers and putting in that level of detail is like putting fine detail in your painting for a farsighted person without their glasses.

I've come to view this sort of misunderstanding as an unavoidable tax for trying to communicate with humans. I say "humans" because it's not "English's" fault. Natural language is fuzzy mostly because human ideation is fuzzy. Noticing when English creates fuzziness is a noteworthy event precisely because it is an anomaly in the vast sea of fundamentally fuzzy ideas being expressed in English.

<comment><USER3> This is why academic writing - even academic writing about cool technical topics - is often "dry." We _have_ to write like that. And it is tiresome to read. But it's necessary for two reasons. First, it would never get past peer review otherwise. But even if we could eke it past, it's still not a good idea because when someone else goes to replicate or build on what we did, all those details that drag down the writing become mightily important.

I've often thought that people who publish papers should also have a blog, and where they should have a more digestible explanation of their work. Of course, I have not done this. (Yet.)

<comment><USER4> I remember reading an advice piece on how to read scientific papers. The core of it was that you need to read them breadth first (i.e. skim many times, each time trying to go deeper into the details.)

What you have written explains why it is such a good piece of advice - if you read a paer depth first you'll get bogged in the details without a chance to get the whole picture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I continually have to be on my guard against letting my smug, egocentric engineer (not saying all engineers are smug and egocentric, but the one in me sure is) take over. Raganwald is correct that as soon as he does, I learn nothing. I like learning too much to allow that.

It is also obnoxious to be in discussions with others who do that. Whether it's the mentioned "I stopped reading when" or the particularly pernicious "/s/your/you're/g" type of comments (quick, somebody point out if I was supposed to escape the apostrophe. I'm not a sed/vi wiz), it takes a discussion away from ideas and focuses them on something less.

 _Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people._

I think whomever said this (apparently there is some amount of debate about whether it was Eleanor Roosevelt or not[1]) was right. When we start talking about sentence structure or apostrophes, you know we aren't talking about ideas.

I come to HN because there are a lot of really smart people here. I find it particularly grating, then, when a thread devolves (or worse, starts) below the level of ideas. I don't get to learn anything then.

1\. <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Disputed>

</comment><comment><USER6> There's plenty of software that falls into the 1k to 75k range. Off the top of my head: any professional embedded C compiler or IDE license, MATLAB, MathCad, Adobe CS Suite, various CAD packages. These are all used in engineering environments where maybe a handful of licenses are purchased, at least in the environment I'm currently working in. We don't get salesmen calling us and pushing new releases; we maybe purchase every second or third new version.

Joel writes "You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork."

I think this is a bit over-reaching. Sure, you need manager approval, but that's been pretty easy to obtain in any engineering environment I've been in. Most of the time the software vendors come up with a new file format that's incompatible with the past, so you're practically forced to upgrade. Never have I seen bids or CEO/CTO approval on the software I'm discussing.

I think perhaps a more relevant range is 5k-75k or even 10k-75k.

(Sorry if I'm doing it wrong, this is my first post here.)

<comment><USER7> You have completely and utterly missed raganwald's point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a principle in philosophical interpretation that we can learn from here: the principle of charity[1].

The basic idea is simple:

1) Assume the other person is rational.

2) Give the other person's arguments their _best_ possible interpretation. Wherever possible give them the benefit of the doubt.

Only after you do that should you try to evaluate the person's argument.

The best short version of this principle I've ever heard came from a good friend: "The principle of charity just says, 'Don't be an asshole.'"

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity>

</comment><comment><USER9> i stopped reading after

> You don't want to go through life being one of those smug Internet people > whose sole contribution ...

smug people on the internet? frankly, i don't appreciate his overgeneralizing mischaracteristizations of people who use the internet. it's 2012! everyone and their mom uses the internet! phrases like "Internet people" make it seem like the only people on the internet are defensive, awkward neckbeards who can't relate to regular people.

honestly, things like this call into question his entire argument. if this is what he thinks about people on the internet, he can't possibly know what he's talking about (which, is presumably, colors or something)

<comment><USER10>
        overgeneralizing mischaracteristizations
        of people who use the internet

You could read it like that, but I garnered a different understanding. I read it as there are some people on the Internet whom are categorized as smug, not that everyone on the Internet is smug. We've all encountered them before surely. They tend to jump to conclusions and rush to dismiss others based on the tiniest perceived slights.

<comment><USER11> Could Mr. Lei have been engaging in parody? I tried to respond in kind.

;-)

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure fogus' response was a parody too :)

<comment><USER13> Reminds me of [Poe's Law](<http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law>) which states "it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing".

Though I think it should generalise to "there exists no parody which can unambiguously be identified as such". Doesn't that make parody's great?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just as important as trying not to be one of those people who can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak, is trying not to care too much about them. Because there's always going to be someone around to remark on spelling mistakes or taking hyperbole literally.

It's just inevitable, and to me the best response has always seemed to be to quietly mock those people behind their backs. ;)

As a programmer, I see this phenomenon as related to bikeshedding [1]. Instead of taking in and processing a complicated and interconnected argument, the gut reaction that people have is to find the smallest and simplest mistake they can and attack that. In a similar way, I try not to get too worked up about those reactions either. It's just human nature.

[1]: <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding>

</comment><comment><USER15> Before you disagree with someone on something, you need to understand it. Part of this process is discovering and understanding what is implied, not just what is explicitly stated.

An the primary problem an author has is the need to explain to the reader. Often a good way to do this is to make statements, such as those given as examples in the article. Fully qualifying every statement can get in the way of the explanation.

Of secondary importance is the need to actually prove it to the reader. Writing a proof is hard, long, and often unnecessary.

How do we resolve this situation as rational readers? When you notice a "problem" in something, you must state why that problem is really relevant to the argument at hand. It may not be relevant to the argument being made.

One of the problems here is that in order to understand the statements relevance to the argument, you need to actually read the argument. Stating "I stopped reading at x", it is likely that you do not understand the argument at hand, since you do not know what it says.

Of course, everyone has limited time, and certain cues in the body of some writing can show if it is a waste of our time. However, to say "I stopped reading at x", and then to spend 30 minutes composing a comment on HN is engaging in intellectual dandyism, not improving the world through understanding.

</comment><comment><USER16> We are on Paul Graham's Hacker News, this is already in the canon:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

<comment><USER17> Interesting, I thought of <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm grateful this exists, so that I can link to it.

When you try to point out a trend and give five or six examples, and people nitpick one but ignore the general point... I don't know, it seems almost perverse.

The magic of Hacker News (or Reddit, a very long time ago) was that it didn't have much of that. It's changing. Still the best public discussion on the internet, but pedanticism is on the rise.

HN used to feel like having a coffee and snacks in the living room of a very gracious host who created an eclectic mix of people -- just to get a good discussion going. I liked contributing, and though I'd at times make poorly thought arguments (I hadn't studied enough history to see the politics I advocated weren't quite right), I always felt like I had a shot to engage someone in discussion.

Now, the place feels like you've got to be aware of rhetoric in front of a potentially hostile crowd, fighting for the payoff of... the crowd's fleeting ephemeral approval. Which is one reason why I don't comment much here any more.

</comment><comment><USER19> I stopped reading when he discussed Joel's software pricing model, and then proceeded to make a crack about how Joel's model was more correct than "some mythical supply and demand model."

If you don't know enough about economics to recognize that Joel's pricing model _is_ a supply and demand model, you probably shouldn't try writing about the subject.

(Disclaimer: Yes, of course this post is tongue in cheek. If you had any doubts, you may need to get your sarcasm detector calibrated.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Most products showed as examples in the previous story have a very consistent profile: entrenched professional packaged software, basic for the operations of technical departments in medium to big companies: MS Tools and Office, Autocad, Photoshop... more than exceptions, it seems as a category in itself.

</comment><comment><USER21> > You don't want to go through life being one of those smug Internet people > whose sole contribution to every discussion thread is "I stopped reading > after…"

This is my biggest pet peeve on HN, and usually leads to an immediate downvote. If you stopped reading, you're not qualified to comment on the post, so don't.

</comment><comment><USER22> I come from an industry (AEC) where software tools all (in the reganwald sense) fall into that gap and somebody (again in the reganwald sense) uses them.

Why?

Because the industry leader, Autodesk, bought into $75,000 a pop software concepts from day one in the early days of PC's. They had a mini-computer model rather than a scaled up Apple II approach. Timing helped as well, early versions at $2000 a copy were not driving the total cost when the hardware was three times as much.

Now their products and those of their serious competitors all fit in the gap between roughly $2500 and $6000 a license. Those price points are pretty common among scheduling and project management software for construction contractors as well.

Not to say that I don't get Reganwald's point.

<comment><USER11> Let's have a look at Mr. Braithwaite's résumé: Hmm, he won a Jolt Programmer Productivity Award for leading the JProbe team. Fine, let's see how much JProbe costs: $3,000 for the multi-OS concurrent version.

Haha, he ought to know better before quoting Mr. Spolsky!

<comment><USER22> I'm sure he does.

The question is how much does the price of the software drive that purchasing process?

Autodesk was selling $10k solutions in an industry where the purchasing process was largely built to buy a dozen concrete blocks, a hollow core door, a tee square, a lamp and a stool (if the blocks and door could not be acquired gratis from a friendly contractor) and where $600 for a drafting table and $100 for a Mayline was seen as outrageously extravagant.

Their pricing model created a whole new tier of purchasing within the industry - in 1980 no small firm had a recurring five figure equipment expense. Autodesk's pricing changed the capital requirements of the industry. As they have shifted to a subscription model over the past twelve years, they have further changed the financial considerations within it.

I perhaps used "tool" too loosely seeing the comparison it brought. Perhaps, I ought to know better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To throw a point out there, fogbugz/Jira quickly starts to "grow" into the 1000+ range once it has over 20+ users.

The key though is that they usually start as something used by a small group of folks and then grows as more folks realize it has some niceities over the open-source solutions. It also means however that Fog Creek/Atlassian do have a sales force that will call you over the phone, personally answer your questions, and sometimes negotiate on price.</comment>