Why is there still a registry in Windows 7? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351198,00.asp <comment><USER2> "If anything will drive people to Linux, it will be this Registry-centric architecture of Windows."

Wait... what?

This whole article is laying things on a bit thick, but this quote is especially hard to swallow.

The two groups of people that primarily buy Windows are individual consumers, like my dad, and corporate IT decision makers, like my boss.

I can't imagine either man saying to me, "I'd love to stay with Windows but its damn Registry-centric architecture is something I just can't get past. It's sure making Linux look pretty attractive."

There are plenty of legit reasons for choosing or not choosing to use Windows. I have a hard time swallowing that its Registry-centric architecture is high on most people's lists.

<comment><USER3> But might your dad (or your boss) say that the upgrade to Windows 7 is so troublesome that they might just as well switch to Linux? I've been amazed at how easy a switch to Linux (by other family members) has been in some cases I have observed.

<comment><USER4> Switching to Linux is as easy as switching to Windows 7 -- both options require reinstalling your operating system and all your applications.

<comment><USER5> Switching to Win7 doesn't require you to _give up_ all your applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Microsoft has a problem—the whole industry has a problem. Everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success. In the past week, even Intel has been bemoaning the fact that nobody is upgrading machines like they used to."

I really don't think this has anything to do with Windows 7 specifically. What's happening is that PCs have reached the point where even a machine that's a few years old running Win2003 is entirely adequate to do the things most people and businesses want a PC to do: run Office, read email, watch YouTube, surf the net.

The value-added argument is just no longer convincing for many consumers, especially in this economy.

<comment><USER7> "Everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success."

Well... I sure don't. In fact, I wish it fails big and drives the market towards greater diversity.

But that's me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I clicked the link because I was interested in the topic. Then I saw Dvorak wrote it and I had to close it with extreme prejudice. Dvorak is one of those writers that I consider hostile to intelligent discourse. He is a master troll who knows how to get page views by making people who understand the things he's talking about waste thousands of man hours formulating pointless rebuttals. If he could be banned from Hacker News it would be in everyone's best interest.

</comment><comment><USER9> Backwards comparability? Windows is a platform. If Microsoft revamped the whole thing, it would turn into a whole new platform.

And as a side note, Gnome has gconf. That's an awful lot like the registry, just with XML and directories.

<comment><USER10> Apple did this, with OS X. Microsoft could easily do this, and write the compatibility layer to allow 'legacy' applications to continue running for the next N years.

They don't have the balls to take the risk, though.

<comment><USER11> Actually, I think MS's approach here is riskier. By not providing an upgrade path and admitting up front that many things will break they are essentially saying "OK XP users, you will have to do a clean format, reinstall everything, and it will be a pain, but it is worth it because of how amazing Win7 is." Providing a compatibility layer requires fewer balls because people have to make less effort to switch.

<comment><USER12> Firstly since when is upgrading any OS while skipping a version easy to do? It's even difficult in Linux from what I've seen and experienced.

Secondly there's a migration tool available on the install DVD which saves all of your documents and application settings, meaning that you don't have to spend a lot of time configuring your applications again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "At some point, maybe soon, the Registry will be the death of Windows. At some point people will simply refuse to go through this sort of upgrade process to accommodate what is essentially a mediocre architecture based on ideas from the 1980s."

If I remember correctly, the story of how the Registry was invented (for the first version Windows NT) was told in the book Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary. The rationale for the registry didn't inspire confidence (in me) at that time, and now the registry seems to be an idea whose time has passed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Imho he doesn't make a lot of sense. First, he is claiming that Windows 7 breaks more backward compatibility than previous Windowses. I find it very hard to believe that Vista->7 upgrade would break more applications than XP->Vista, especially at the time when Vista was released.

Secondly, he is saying that registry hinders portability of applications. Well, that's kinda true, but on the next paragraph he is already promoting Linux-based systems as alternative.

Just try to install an application on usual Linux OS and then move it to another system, with all configuration data. Just for extra fun, install it originally with classic configure-make-make install-method, lose the source tree and move it another distro (or different version of same distro).

Registry may not be perfect, but it isn't that bad either. Worst part is that many applications abuse it a lot, causing all kinds of problems, but would flat configuration files really solve the problem of misbehaving apps?

If registry would be bit more organized, and had some inline documentation it actually would be much better.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is still a registry, because the registry is still a great idea.

Dvorak argues that the registry is 'a pile of junk clogging up the machine'. The registry is a tree data structure - more nodes won't 'clog it up', it'll still take the same number of operations to get anywhere in the tree

<comment><USER15> Yeah, the registry is great. It would be much better though if the data was stored in application specific data files. They could still provide a unifying API but make it really easy to remove an application.

<comment><USER16> Correct me if I'm wrong, but it wouldn't really be a registry then, would it?

<comment><USER15> Depends on what your definition of _registry_ is. If the current registry is stored in two non consecutive disk blocks (due to fragmentation), is that still a registry? Think of per application files as disk blocks, with the registry API caching those into memory and operating as if it was a single database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It sounds like the author of the article is pining for NeXT/OSX App bundles, though he doesn't seem to know they exist. Anyway:

The Registry in windows was a /proc-alike database for twiddling system and driver settings, except slightly smarter in that it was automatically persisted to disk. Application-writers hijacked it to store their own applications' settings. At this point, if HKLM/Software and HKCU/Software were just transparently transformed into configuration files stored in the user's Profile folder, I don't think any harm would be done. The rest of the registry, though, is actually centralized by necessity (though you could argue that nodes for the kernel and the shell should probably live in separate hives.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow. I always knew Dvorak was insane but this is insane++. I don't even know what he is talking about:

1) Is he talking about the upgrade path from XP to Windows 7?

2) Does he know that there is an upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7?

3) Does he know that all three versions use the registry so it clearly has no impact on upgrade paths?

4) Is he advocating that microsoft make smaller changes in order to provide an upgrade path to older versions or is he advocating they make bigger, breaking changes like getting rid of the registry?

5) Is somebody checking his pill box to see if he took his medicine? Because I am sincerely worried for his health.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been using the RTM and so far I plan on installing XP on my newish notebook that came with Vista. My biggest issue with Vista is the way it keeps pinging the hard drive:

[http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista- performance/974285....](http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista- performance/974285.htm)

I could never get it to stop completely and it runs down the battery and causes extra noise and heat. And its the same thing with Windows 7.

I'm going to pay $140 for a XP 64bit license. I would love to downgrade but MS doesn't offer that for Vista Home.

</comment><comment><USER16> The idea that Microsoft could remove the registry without breaking millions of applications is a pipe dream. Say what you will about Microsoft's love of backwards compatibility, but they'd lose customers if half of your applications broke with Windows 7.

</comment><comment><USER20> How about using GUID as another namespace on top of registry's key value?

</comment><comment><USER21> Why? Compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wait a sec, this is a Dvorak article. Oh, you got me; clever.

<comment><USER23> IMHO the reason people never give upgrading OSX a second thought is the learning curve. Apple does not change where things are for no reason. Microsoft seems to be supporting bloated IT departments with needless changes to system setting menus. Someone has to learn and then teach where they were moved. Case in point: My Mom (82 years old) upgrades her Mac with every OS apple comes out with and never misses a step. Her needs are quite similar to my Wifey who teaches yearbook at the local school. Both use Photoshop, excessively email, make slide shows and albums. Wifey is running XP because Vista required learning new places for the same old or slightly upgraded settings. I doubt she will change to Vista until Microsoft forces her to for the same reason. You can guess who is having a good user experience.</comment></comment>


Open sourcing our email signature parsing library - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailgun.com/open-sourcing-our-email-signature-parsing-library/ <comment><USER2> This is cool. It's great to see so many small-medium size projects implementing machine learning algorithms. It wasn't that long ago that such a capability was far beyond the capabilities of an average programmer. Libraries like numpy/scikit, pyml, and their counterparts in other languages have made this far more prevalent.

I recently helped my girlfriend (bioinformatics PhD! /brag) implement an SVM in Python for feature selection of 20k genes, to determine which could be used to classify a tumorous cell. I was amazed that with less than 20 lines of Python, she had a fast, functional SVM that could classify with ~80% accuracy. That's damn impressive.

In general the scientific community is not filled with the highest quality programmers, so it's great that we are seeing development in easily accessible ML toolkits, because they enable sub-par scientific programmers to employ modern ML algorithms without needing to know the details of how to implement them.

Tl;dr Cool project, glad to see machine learning libraries taking off, will lead to curing cancer :)

<comment><USER3> > In general the scientific community is not filled with the highest quality > programmers

Some will think different. Peer groups tend to think they are the greatest (academia, doing a phd... I know of some with very good self-esteem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The example with dashes made me chuckle, because there actually is a standard for setting off a signature --- two dashes with one trailing space. Searching for this works tolerably well in my experience; if it's in a message and not more than X lines from the end, it's a pretty reliable indicator.

Where Mailgun's library looks really useful to me is in parsing HTML mail (ironic that a supposed semantic markup language makes this problem _harder_ to solve, but that's the net for you...)

<comment><USER5> How is this a standard? I agree that it's fairly common, but I see a lot of different variations just in my own inbox.

<comment><USER6> It is literally a "proposed standard": [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3)

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Checking for a signature in email is pretty easy[1]: look for eol- dash-dash-space-eol ("\^-- \$"), if found, cut there. If not found, the sender and/or email client can't be trusted to compose proper email -- don't attempt automatic signature stripping, and forward the whole (probably top-posted) mess.

I'm only half-joking.

[1] Because, if "proper" quoting is used _and_ the client can't properly strip signatures -- at least those included signatures will be "\^>\\+ -- $", not "\^-- \$". Now assuming a proper email client/user, those sigs should've been stripped anyway... But such an assumption is likely to lead to tears and unhappiness anyway...

It even works for "proper" top-posters (as if there was such a thing) -- because the last reply will come first, followed by a dash-dash-space delimited signature, followed by all the stuff you'd typically strip out in a reply.

<comment><USER8> my team has parsed over a billion emails in the past 3 years auto-updating our clients' address books.

the "\-- " is indeed the standard and most common ever since Usenet in 94, but of course we've built a ton of variation within our algorithms to handle every thing else you might see.

Feel free to check out our infographic on what you'll find in the average professional's email signature: [http://www.evercontact.com/blog/infographic- the-anatomy-of-a...](http://www.evercontact.com/blog/infographic-the-anatomy- of-an-email-signature.1.html)

<comment><USER9> FYI: the infographic shows the delimiter as "\--" instead of "\-- "

<comment><USER7> As I mentioned elsewhere, that's more than a small nitpick, because something like:

        XI
        --
        Chapter XI...

Is perfectly fine in text-email -- so adding the space on the end is very useful -- as you'd rarely need to escape "\-- " on a line by itself -- not so for just "\--".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be nice if email just had a separate signature field (e.g. subject, body, signature)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A little gem to solve a royal pain in the back, that anyone working with email data can relate to

</comment><comment><USER11> Should we be concerned that they are looking at our email contents in order to build this system?

      We did a lot of research, looked at all the variations of
      email that passes through Mailgun

<comment><USER12> Probably not. Here are enough public mailing lists to use as training sets I think. They could have used company mail to train on as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We use Mailgun and their parsing tool @ sendsmart.com and we LOVE IT! Thanks Mailgun!!

</comment><comment><USER14> This is fantastic that they are open sourcing this. I've tried stripping out email quotations in the past and it's definitely a hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> I guess there is the "standard" of two dashes before the sig

<comment><USER7> To clarify, the nice thing about dash-dash-space, rather than simply dash-dash ("\-- " vs "\--") is that the former will very rarely need escaping (because you _could_ conceivably delimit parts of a message by two dashes, like:

        IX
        --
        Chapter IX.

Without the trailing space, everything below your "sub-header" won't be cut).</comment></comment>


Great video to help OO programmers begin to think functionally - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8I19uA-wGY&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Scott Wlaschin is excellent, and his website [http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/](http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/) is great in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> I want to punch that guy who is laughing way too much. His jokes are kinda funny, but not that funny.

<comment><USER4> There's always that one guy! I agree, he's quite annoying, but he made me laugh to be honest. At 4:20, he gets pretty crazy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good video, but I wish I could find a video that helps OO programmers begin to think in an object-oriented way. Most OO programmers don't.

</comment><comment><USER6> Please don't rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. That's in the site rules:

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. Won't happen again

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just watched this a couple of days ago. Great video :)</comment>


WiFi-Direct gets startup in the door - <AUTHOR> http://fndrs.net/PHK8iC

<comment><AUTHOR> I am interested in what technology startup founders use to differentiate themselves from competition. Allen Tsai leveraged Wi-Fi Direct. You?</comment>


NewsLabs (YC W10) folds months after launch, regrets big promises to journalists - <AUTHOR> http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999 <comment><USER2> I'm Paul Biggar, one of the founders.

There's a lot of speculation and reading between the lines going on here. There is really no information to go off, and jumping to conclusions based on that email is a little unfair. (By contrast, the journalists to whom that email was addressed had tons of context.)

I'm in the middle of writing a "what went wrong" piece, which I'll link to here, but I'll ask you guys to hold off judgement until then.

<comment><USER3> dude, seriously? honeymoon right after launch = guaranteed fail OR I want a "lifestyle business." How did you guys pass the PG sniff test??? #YCadmissionFAIL

I don't mean to be a total dick, but when you're doing a startup and OTHER PEOPLE ARE DEPENDING ON YOU, going on a vacation of any sort right after you launch is just plain irresponsible.

People like you give the rest of us who are busting our ass and putting everything on the line to make our companies work a bad name.

<comment><USER4> Some things are more important than money, companies, startups etc.

Don't be so quick to pass judgement if you don't know the full story.

<comment><USER5> It's not the fact that he left the money/business for the honeymoon. It's the fact that he, presumably, screwed investors, his cofounder, and their customers by doing so, all people who were relying on him in some manner or other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm usually very reticent about making snide remarks about a startup as it deadpools, but in this case I'll make an exception.

As someone who's working in this space (and was not fortunate enough to have been granted the imprimatur, mentorship, and network of YCombinator), it pisses me off that this company garnered so much hype and is now giving up so quickly. It'll now be that much harder to get print journalists to put their faith in new business models for their work.

From the start, I thought the promises NewsTilt was making were great but it wasn't at all clear how those promises were going to be fulfilled. On the strength of YC's reputation, I assumed that there was some "secret sauce" that differentiated them and made their promises credible. According to this e-mail, I was wrong. And now, mere months after being given what I'd consider to be the chance of a lifetime, they're just giving up. Not evolving, not making changes, just giving up. What a joke.

Have some passion about what you're doing or just don't bother.

<comment><USER7> _And now, mere months after being given what I'd consider to be the chance of a lifetime, they're just giving up. Not evolving, not making changes, just giving up. What a joke._

Companies (or people!) who make bold promises, get the press excited, and then fail to deliver make it harder for us all to get our stories across.

I usually play down what I'm doing and underpromise, but it seems reaching way beyond your limits and impressing journalists is the way to go for coverage (Sam Sethi's exploits that TechCrunch covered so deftly come to mind here, too.)

<comment><USER8> Exciting the press just for the sake of PR can backfire on YC anytime soon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let me recap:

* One of the two cofounders was on his honeymoon for the month of May, right after launch.

* The other cofounder had difficulty managing everything on his own.

* Cofounder comes back from the honeymoon and decides to leave for good.

* Remaining cofounder doesn't want to run it on his own.

In my past life, I've been both of these guys and frankly, it is hard to blame either. If the passion somehow died for honeymooning-cofounder, you can't expect him to give his very best on this startup. On the other hand, if your cofounder leaves, you have very little incentive to do everything on your own. Part of working with a cofounder is each person doing what the other most probably dislikes (usually biz vs. tech). What's the fun if you have to get better pricing AND write efficient code? Most people like one or the other.

I think the take-away from this and my own life examples is to start small, not try to get too much publicity early on, work on finishing the product before making promises, and most importantly, be honest to yourself and your cofounder.

<comment><USER10> Wow. Maybe it's because I've never been either of those guys, but I have trouble rustling up as much compassion as you seem to.

One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon? Who does that?

And, after just a couple months, the passion dies? What kind of commitment does that show?

I agree with your take-away, though. Don't try to get hype, until you actually have something solid to hype.

<comment><USER9> > One of the two co-founders schedules a launch right before his honeymoon? > Who does that?

Life. Nobody knows what happens next. I have no idea how/what/why this transpired but it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine that the wedding/honeymoon was planned well-in-advance. And the success of the startup was a last-second thing. Sure, the honeymoon could have been postponed but then again, maybe he wasn't certain about the startup, the other cofounder, or his life in general. Truth is, nobody knows other than the guys themselves. That's why I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Because I've been there. And because if you are in a position where you have to choose between commitments you've already made and dreams you wish to pursue, you have to say "no" to someone.

Maybe the passion did not die. Maybe there were other reasons that the founders do not want to share. Maybe it was personality issues, financial issues, or even health. Who knows? The reason I am giving them the benefit of the doubt is that they came out clean and apologized. That is action and it was direct, honest, and to the point.

<comment><USER10> Definite props for the act of apologizing; less so for the reason sounding so shallow.

Sure, weddings are planned well in advance. Product launches should be, too.

Maybe there were other reasons. Shit happens. But, when shit happens so fast as to lead you to shut down two months after launching, we're deep into the "failing to plan is planning to fail" category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does YC see a problem with founders being the technical developers?

When I saw their bio when this was announced a few months back, I did scratch my head a little. One was a PhD in computer science, the other was a researcher at ARM.

None had a media background.

I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It doesn't matter how good your platform is. This hacker culture of thinking everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop.

Here are some qoutes from that letter:

"If I could rewind and start again then I believe the pitch for NewsLabs should have been simpler and much more realistic: we will build you a technology platform and strive to work hard for you as programmers... but we cannot magically generate you an online brand or guarantee traffic."

"It seemed like we had the right parts (your writing and our technology)..."

This is why Mark MacLeod, in a recent post on his blog startupcfo.ca, said that one of the traits for a successful founder is domain knowledge:

"Lets look at domain knowledge first. This is not about having studied or otherwise artificially gotten to "know" the industry. This is about coming from that industry, having lived it, knowing the players and knowing the pain firsthand. There is no substitute for this. You can't fake it. You either come from the space or you don't."

<comment><USER12> > None had a media background.

With utter honesty; this was my biggest concern with the whole thing. I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea.

<comment><USER13> _I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea._

Interesting you say that, given how well the idea matched the first RFS. [1]

For better or for worse, I got the same impression about NowMov.

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Paul was kind enough to include me in a prelaunch mailing list of journalists where he discussed his vision.

At the time I have to confess I was not convinced Newstilt was the right product at the right time. It was an interesting vision (in a nutshell: to have journalists establish their own brands and syndicate content more directly to publishers/websites) but I did forsee traction trouble:

\- Firstly because I felt journalists would have difficulty "getting" the new concept EDIT: by this I mean there was far too little content coming into Newstilt, I'm guessing because the writers didn't see instant returns and therefore gave up. As the email says Techcrunch took dedication and unfortunately for Newstilt they needed dedicated writers aiming for the same vision, hard to find.

\- But mostly because publishers and websites would be resistive and negative about this concept (or simply uninterested).

I actually think it is a good model. A few years ago myself and others tried to form a similar style collective for UK tech magazines. It was a _very_ hard to sell and ultimately failed because it was so radically difference.

I suspect one of the major problems was that it is such a different approach to media that it put many people off.

I've come to the conclusion that, for this sort of thing to work, it has to be built by journalists with both the contacts and the ability to placate both of the above problems.

(also, taking a honey moon in the first few months of a startup is never going to end well!).

Good luck Paul and Nathan - I really was rooting for you and it sucks that such a cool model never got off the ground.

<comment><USER14> If its a good idea, then it will find its champion and its moment in the sun ... eventually.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it will.

Something like it is on my back burner still (after 3 years - which in my mind makes it a great idea).

One way it could work is for a site (or a collaboration of sites) like Tech Crunch to create a network for aspiring tech writers - and go from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> pg has said (<http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>) that "Not having a cofounder is a real problem" and that finding a co-founder should be the "first priority" for any single founder and that this is "more important than anything else". This is a fairly common meme in the startup world.

Newslab looks like a great example of how that meme gets it wrong. Many other things are far more important than finding a co-founder

In this case, it looks like one co-founder goes on a honeymoon and decides to drop out. Then the other co-founder decides that he doesn't have the passion to run it on his own. So the whole company collapses. I'm assuming that a more passionate person who didn't believe in the co-founder meme would have shown more perseverance.

<comment><USER16> Actually this case isn't a counterexample. Paul wasn't someone Nathan recruited; more the opposite.

<comment><USER17> What I have found in terms of co-founders is that people will join when you have traction.

At least in my circle, people aren't risk takers and wouldn't stop their own personal project to work on someone else project.

With so many people having problems finding co-founders, I would suggest they implement something and get some traction. After, find a co-founder who now you can offer less equity since they weren't there to share the initial risk then approach investors.

<comment><USER18> YES! Oh man, I want to thank you for saying that.

I would _love_ to find a co-founder. I've bootstrapped a successful business, it's going quite well, and I've been doing it for 2.5 years now. I've simply refused to give up at every step of the way -- even though I've often wanted to. And if I have my way, this business is going to get quite big.

But, I'm not running the sort of thing that YC would be interested in, and my sporadic efforts locally to drum up support have accomplished little.

<comment><USER19> Have you considered asking HN?

<comment><USER18> Yes, but I'm following the same pattern that everyone does when they start getting in their own way: there's a laundry list of stuff I want to get in order before I start shopping on sites like HN.

However, skmurphy contacted me privately yesterday as a result of the comment, which was awesome. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TheAwl has a solid little write-up about this: [http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/another-journalism-changing- st...](http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/another-journalism-changing-startup- bites-the-dust)

"It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!"

</comment><comment><USER21> There must be some backstory -- out of money, irreconcilable founder differences, etc. -- which will only come out if the principals want it to. Without that, speculating on their "boredom" or "impatience" or "seriousness" is unfair.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's it? They lasted 2 months? Did they get bored?

<comment><USER22> I'm curious to know how long they worked on the product before YC.

<comment><USER20> In their Reddit AMA I think they said they originally were going to sell a white label Disqus commenting system to newspapers as their product, only to find out that building it would be easy, but selling it would be extremely hard. So they decided to go with the True/Slant/Examiner/Associated Content/Demand Media model of getting a whole bunch of people publishing in one place to pool their collective Google juice.

My sense, from comments made here and there is that they hadn't really been working on the site itself all that long when it launched. Some of the features they said were on the way seemed pretty core to me (letting writers sell their work directly, for example).

<comment><USER12> I think this is right; in the early stages (post YC funding) when they were doing a QA mailing list wwith some journalists they were just building the product.

(in fairness it appeared very fast and iterated really well from what I saw/heard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think one problem they had early on is that technology is not the answer to an editorial and writing problem.

Many people on the newslabs lists questioned their experience in journalistic and publishing oriented endeavours - the founders' answers to quality and editorial concerns weren't very convincing - and always came back to technology. Ideas like building mass-comment moderation systems, crowdsourced editing, etc - don't work if the people moderating don't have literary taste.

But it was a good try - and I hope that other people tackling this problem space would think about some of the questions raised by the newslabs contributors.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seems like they wanted to build a brand overnight and then give up when it didn't happen. I've never even heard of them, personally. Is there more to the story than what was in the post?

</comment><comment><USER25> I still think the offering of: we handle technology+monetization for journalists/online publishers is a very valuable proposition.

<comment><USER20> I totally agree. One of the big problems with that though is its nearly impossible to bootstrap an audience on the web. That's why Kevin Rose pimping Digg on Tech TV was such a coup. He had product/market fit AND could drop an audience on it.

With most publishing startups, you have to survive the whole first year until Google un-sandboxes your domain and you get legit Google traffic. Until then you have to find other ways to build numbers, Reddit-baiting, cutting deals with other publications etc....notice none of these are technical problems?

So you can't really sell publishers on traffic, you've got to offer them something else. Then at that point, how are you better than Wordpress.com?

<comment><USER25> Is it impossible to boostrap an audience on the web? I feel like that's where most successful online publications have come from. Techcrunch came out of arrington's boredom and Pete Cashmore started mashable in scottland at 19. I think it's all about baby steps. If your goal is to get 1 million visitors fast that won't work. It's the first 50k or so.

Technology is the less important than traffic/content/readerbase, but it's certainly something you do not want to deal with. Wordpress.com is certainly great, but I wouldn't be running that if I were trying to do something professional (I would use Wordpress though).

<comment><USER20> That's not exactly bootstrapping though. Those are both examples of organic growth that happened over YEARS. That's very do-able if you are making content people actually want to read.

<comment><USER25> That's definitely bootstrapping. Arrington and cashmore didn't raise a single time. Sure their current success took years, but even where they were at 6-12 months afterwards could show they were on the rise.

If you're not making content people don't want to read then you're doomed regardless. It's like making an app people don't want: push it and fund it all you want, you're probably fucked.

<comment><USER20> They bootstrapped their business, but not the audience, i.e. they didn't magically start out with a built-in audience through a deal or prior celebrity, they had to build that up over time.

<comment><USER26> To my mind, bootstrapping just means making something from nothing, which is exactly what they did with their audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here are some previous posts about NewsLabs that might be interesting reading in light of this announcement, in case anyone is unfamiliar with what they were about...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159683>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259603>

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this serves to remind everyone that you need to have the will to persevere for your start up to thrive during the first few years when things aren't going your way. If you're only in it for an instant hit, you're not building a business properly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps it's just confirmation bias because I'm interested in this space, but aren't most news startups that rush to market cursed with obscurity or death?

Newsvine is the only interesting and semi-successful one that comes to mind over the past few years, and the executive team there is crazy experienced and of great provenance. All the other good news "startups" I know of have had to grow quite slowly over a long period of time or are heavily leaning on exposure in fields like politics or tech.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wrote an analyis of the newslabs model back in March prior to their launch:

[http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/03/journalism- advertising...](http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/03/journalism-advertising- business-model.html)

From my analysis I couldn't see the financials working out (obviously that wasn't the cause of their failure in this case; but I presume the financials not working didn't help the situation).

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't think I've heard of that one. Any great loss?

<comment><USER31> Was a YC W10 company

<comment><USER20> Someone should stick that up in the headline. If we're going to do it for the good news about YC companies, we should do it for the not so good news, too.

I'm assuming there was something else happening behind the scenes to cause both founders to jump ship so quickly. They made a very strong (positive!) impression on me with their rhetoric and claims here as well as over in a Reddit AMA they did (<http://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/bwrew>). I'm surprised to hear they fizzled so quickly after all the big talk.

<comment><USER32> At least we're allowed to comment on this YC company story. I still can't get comfortable with the no-comments-allowed YC stories here on HN.

<comment><USER33> Those are just job advertisements, and I still think it's a mistake, as the comments would be a great place to ask for questions/clarification that might benefit others and keep the same questions from being repeated in private email.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: It's 2018, best way to manage files on Apple devices? - <AUTHOR> I just spent the last hour trying to sync an mp3 audiobook to my iphone from my work computer and ended up deleting everything that was on it via iTunes syncing progress. Apple seems to make it harder and harder to manage my own files on my iDevice with each release, and worse than doing nothing it usually takes some action that is damaging.<p>I'm not here to Apple bash, they make great products. I want to know if anyone has a better way to manage media content on their iDevices that does not involve the iTunes sync process? <comment><USER2> iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, FileBrowser (App), even EMail: There are lots of options to move media and other files to iPhone/iPad. Once in the corresponding app on the iDevice, you can send it (via share/open in.../send to...) to most apps that can handle the file format. But to be honest: I don't use iTunes, Apple Music and iBooks much, using alternative apps fo most of my media consumption.

<comment><AUTHOR> I try to use iBooks for audiobooks because I haven't found other great options that play nicely with audio volumes etc when I'm driving.

iCloud Drive also doesn't allow me to open audiobooks in the iBooks app (maybe my settings are wrong?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does iCloud work for you? icloud.com has an online iCloud Drive, if that works on your work computer then you might be able to upload files to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> iCloud drive does work, but then I can't get it to open in iBooks to properly handle audiobooks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> iBooks will sync non-store content between devices (e.g. PDFs etc). But I can't find a way to get a .m4b file into iBooks on macOS, so that may not be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Airdrop, if the computer is Mac.</comment>


YC aspirants: if you're from outside USA then you may apply for J1 visa. - <AUTHOR>

There is this news in an indian news-paper that students from other countries can come to USA in summer for work on J1 visa - dont know whether this could be applicable to all countries and for YC program as well - you may find it out by contacting USA consulate. Please visit : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/This_summer_have_a_working_vacation_in_US/articleshow/2921315.cms <comment><USER2> Yea, I had a J1 visa once and spent a summer working in a beach club on Cape Code - good times!

They expect evidence that you have at least one more year of university left to get it (they don't want people not going back home and staying in the US illegally).

I believe it only lets you work for 4 months however, with 30 days 'travel' allowed at the end, so it may be no good for a startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, never head of this before. Found this FAQ after reading your article:

[http://exchanges.state.gov/education/jexchanges/private/swt_...](http://exchanges.state.gov/education/jexchanges/private/swt_faq.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> what about for non-students? :/

<comment><USER5> If I remmember correctly you can only get a J1 if you are a full time student and will be returning to university to complete your studies at the end of the summer</comment></comment>


Building a CPU simulator in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.pythondiary.com/blog/Oct.15,2014/building-cpu-simulator-python.html?all <comment><USER2> Related: [https://github.com/eliben/luz-cpu](https://github.com/eliben/luz- cpu) \-- real MIPS-like CPU simulator. Includes an assembler and a linker, so you can write assembly code and run it on the simulator. Everything implemented in pure Python.</comment>


Sanders unveils plan to tax companies with high-earning CEOs - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/30/bernie-sanders-tax-companies-2020-1518381 <comment><USER2> When our jobs were outsourced to India, we dreamed about outsourcing the management instead. Guess what...

</comment><comment><USER3> There goes his Wall Street donors.</comment>


Implementing an object using swift closures and tuples - <AUTHOR> I just published a post that explains how to use closures and their contexts to imitate an object. In this post I try to show how the closure captured context can be used to imitate an instance variable in a oo class.<p>http://nsomar.com/implementing-an-object-using-swift-closures-and-tuples/ <comment><USER2> It looks interesting, but would best be submitted as a direct link.

The Hacker News |submit| page will create a story with either:

      the link in the |url| field
        or
      the contents in the |text| field

But not both. If both the |url| and |text| fields have contents, the |submit| page defaults to the content of the |text| field. This means:

1\. If the |text| field is empty, the |url| field will create a linked story.

2\. If the |text| field is not empty, the contents of the |url| field will be ignored and the story will be created using _only_ the contents of the |text| field. The contents of the |url| field will be ignored.

Good luck.</comment>


How To Spread a Rumor - onreact-com http://www.howcast.com/videos/223531-How-To-Spread-a-Rumor?ref=htd

<comment> onreact-com This is how the swine flu scare works.</comment>


Sony Distributes "The Interview" DRM-free - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/5L976qp

<comment><USER2> I think they are doing this because they are otherwise having many issues with distribution - e.g iTunes Store. But definitely nice to see a step in what I think is the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> If that pic was by you, did you rent or buy it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I took the screenshots. I rented the movie from [http://seetheinterview.com/](http://seetheinterview.com/) , right clicked, and was blown away that it opened in VLC.</comment></comment>


Use of internet, social media, digital devices plateaus in US - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/28/internet-social-media-use-and-device-ownership-in-u-s-have-plateaued-after-years-of-growth/ <comment><USER2> I stopped using Facebook and Twitter. Same as majority of people who did the same, I report being happier and more productive.

<comment><USER3> Did you also stop using all Facebook products (Instagram and WhatsApp)? Many of the people I know who are proud of quitting Facebook are happily snapping pictures daily for Instagram or chatting regularly on WhatsApp.

<comment><USER2> I deleted messenger, Instagram and app, but not WhatsApp. Sadly it's not replaceable yet :(.

<comment><USER4> Why not replaceable? iMessage seems like a perfect replacement.

Edit: for Android devices, Signal is just as easy to use as WhatsApp.

<comment><USER5> Only if 100% of your contacts use iPhones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's what happens to any product or technology eventually. It's market saturation. Whether it was the TV or walkman or nintendo of the past, or the internet, social media and smartphones today, they all plateau. And then the new tech comes along and then that grows exponentially until it plateaus. Rinse, repeat.

</comment><comment><USER7> Explosive user growth in "free" SAAS and social media starts to taper towards a limit.

Public companies, pressured to maintain that revenue trajectory, compensate reduced growth by squeezing more value from existing users.

This tends to lead towards more obtrusive advertisement, aggressive data collection which, if not carefully implemented, leads to negative publicity and attrition.

The struggle in 2018+ is to find what we collectively considers "acceptable privacy", or in other words where is that line between what valuable personal information folks will offer up and what's considered generally creepy.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The shares of U.S. adults who say they use the internet, use social media, own a smartphone or own a tablet computer are all nearly identical to the shares who said so in 2016. The share who say they have broadband internet service at home currently stands at 65% – nearly identical to the 67% who said this in a survey conducted in summer 2015. And when it comes to desktop or laptop ownership, there has actually been a small dip in the overall numbers over the last two years – from 78% in 2016 to 73% today."

<comment><USER9> It's like mobile phones - everyone who wants one (in the US) has one. You can't keep expecting a rise in usage numbers on anything, as eventually you'll hit maximum usage which is very rarely 100%.

<comment><USER10> Broadband internet is still not available to large chunks of the population. It's really three groups those who can't afford it, thouse who don't want it, and those who can't get it.

<comment> yoz-y I'd say that most people nowadays do not really need broadband if they have a good enough cell phone plan.

<comment><USER11> Lots of people don't have great cell phone coverage where they live. I'm within 50 miles of a major US city and I have a spotty cell signal. Also data limits/throttling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's hard to blind-trust certain statistics for a simple reason, many use mobile internet when on train/bus, waiting something in line out of their homes etc, however they really use internet at home/work from a PC. In terms of time many may spend more time on a mobile devices not because it's their primary platform but because of today inefficient/poorly organized life etc.

Such scenario is hard to track statistically.

</comment><comment><USER13> FWIW, I'm in Western Europe, and "social media"-free (besides occasional use of HN) for about good five plus years. Not that I was a ravenous user before that.

Happy to report that overall well-being, reading pleasure and concentration levels have measurably increased. (I "just" need to continue to peacefully sustain it.)

PS: Normally, at this hour I would be at my Dutch class; but tonight it was "interim feedback day". And it was done in 40 minutes, instead of the regular 3 & 1/2 hour lesson; hence I'm coasting here. :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> What I find interesting is that tablet use increased slightly from 51% to 53% over 2 years, while tablet sales across the industry are on a decline [1] with the exception of a few companies such as Apple and Huawei.

This wasn't addressed in the Pew survey, but (purely speculation here), I wonder if it's being driven by an increase in older people using tablets rather than laptops/desktops, due to the larger screen sizes tablets offer over a smartphone with similar capabilities.

Anecdotally, I've started to see older people (in their mid-40s to 60s) bring iPads to meetings instead of laptops to take notes, email, and browse the web.

[1] [https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44191918](https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44191918)

</comment><comment><USER15> Was never a heavy social media user, however, Twitter is nice for getting local government updates.

FB is just gross.

</comment><comment><USER16> With this finding, I hope we can get back to developing atom based solutions as opposed to bit solutions (reference avc.com).

</comment><comment><USER17> The coming AR computing epoch will again increase the hours/day we're staring at (through?) screens.

<comment><USER18> Not for me. I've been steadily reducing my screen time outside of work on purpose. AR/VR sound like a nightmare when I think about how pervasive obscene advertising will become.

<comment><USER19> Good point about adverts. I'm so used to using ad blockers that I had completely forgotten about them.

In the absence of adverts, I can easily believe I will be a heavy user of augmented reality, as I already find the limited form on my phone extremely useful (translation mainly, but I have also used AR as a ruler, and a previous employer's main app uses it to tell hikers what the nearby hills are called).

<comment><USER20> Forgot about advertisements? They are literally everywhere. On clothes, on cars, at the bottom of your shopping cart, at the gas station, on the plane, even in the baggage screening bins.

<comment><USER19> Other than branding, there isn't any on clothes or cars around here, and only very occasionally on cars in the last place I lived (and even then 3:1 in favour of the advert being a hand written private sale offer for the car itself). Likewise, none on shopping carts or in gas stations around here. The only adverts I've seen in aircraft (unless you count in-flight menus) are in RyanAir aircraft, which I avoid. None in any baggage screening bins I've used either — those have all been plain grey no matter the airport or country.

I presume from you saying "gas station" that you're in America. The EU doesn't generally have as much advertising.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web Graphics Done Right - <AUTHOR> https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/images-done-right-web-graphics-good-to-the-last-byte-optimization-techniques <comment><USER2> These guys ([https://evilmartians.com/](https://evilmartians.com/)) sure understands a thing or two about images and image compression. I have used their imgproxy[1] (Golang image resizer) for a long time and it has been solid from the very beginning.

[1] [https://github.com/imgproxy/imgproxy](https://github.com/imgproxy/imgproxy)

<comment><USER3> I recommend Thumbor if you want the advanced manipulation and smart cropping features common in the hosted services: [https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor](https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I work on real estate websites that typically consume 50-80GB for images so articles such as this are really interesting to me. I am using PHP7 BTW...

Currently, I'm converting all the jpegs to webp at 55 compression at the time of import and I love both the quality and the sizes of the files, and so far couldn't be happier with the results[0] I managed to shave some 20GB from the disk usage as well.

The 800lb gorilla is, however, Safari. We all know that Safari does not currently support webp and due to internal politics, may never do so.

So the first "solution" is to keep copies of both formats and use the <picture> tag. This just won't do I have zero interest in doubling my already prodigal disk usage.

There are some rather complicated OS libs that will take a jpg and convert on the fly to webp...I want to do it the other way around.

One thing I hate are "kitchen sink" libs that do SO much that you are often left confused on how to do the specific thing you want to do, so I am in the process of rolling my own solution by using GD and intelligently converting the 11% of all requests that are Safari and using nginx caching to keep these converted images ready to go.

I would like to hear of anyone with better solutions, if possable, since as you can see, I haven't yet implemented my ideas.

[0][https://lasvegasluxerealty.com](https://lasvegasluxerealty.com)

<comment><USER5> I don't have a solution, but you may find this of interest: I was snooping around on AirBnB with my network analyzer. (I like to quasi-reverse-engineer sites). I noticed that if you hit the site with Chrome/FF, you get served webp images; if you hit the site with IE, you get served JPEGs.

It would be really great if there was an on-the-fly conversion library -- basically, reference the image once and let the run-time deliver up the right image type. What I _don 't_ like about that is that I generally shy away from doing any sort of "if then" based on browsers' user-agent-string.Edit/Update: I don't like that that _because_ it got us all into a lot of trouble during the Browser Wars[0] and is now generally considered bad practice. [1]

This might get me some downvotes... but hold my beer and watch this: I wonder if there is a javascript solution? Maybe you serve up the webp images, always, and write your own jquery plug-in that converts the webp to jpeg in memory and then writes it to an HTML5 canvas, but only if it's safari/IE?

[0] [https://youtu.be/yRkQOw1uRrw?t=164](https://youtu.be/yRkQOw1uRrw?t=164)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Browser_de...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Browser_detection_using_the_user_agent)

<comment><USER6> > What I don't like about that is that I generally shy away from doing any > sort of "if then" based on browsers' user-agent-string.

Can't you just base it on the "Accepts" header? That's the whole reason it exists, after all.

<comment><USER7> I think this is the right answer and semantically better than parsing user agents, guessing, or other magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile > When you are reading a text on your phone, you hold the screen at a certain > distance from your eyeballs, but when you look at a computer screen—you tend > to be further from it to read comfortably. The larger the distance between a > retina and the Retina (pun intended), the larger the size of a "CSS pixel" > will be.

That is terribly wrong. Actually it just opposite: as further you move your eyes from screen as smaller that "CSS pixel".

Yet the whole idea of that "CSS pixel" is terribly flawed:

> The trickiest one is a so-called CSS pixel, which is described as a unit of > length, which roughly corresponds to the width or height of a single dot > that can be comfortably seen by the human eye without strain.

"comfortably seen" is an "average temperature of patients in a hospital" \- makes no reasonable value at all for particular me.

CSS pixel is exactly this: a 1/96 inch square measured on surface of the screen.

<comment><USER8> > as further you move your eyes from screen as smaller that "CSS pixel".

You are misreading it. The pixel gets physically larger so that you will see it at the same size.

A CSS pixel is a 1/96 inch square on the surface _of a typical desktop screen_. (It wasn't adjusted to the recent trend of screen growth, so that number is getting more wrong with time.) Different media are expected to change that size so that your page renders the same way.

<comment><USER9> Is a desktop screen different than a phone screen? In the physical world, 1/96 inch is 1/96 inch. The notion of HiDPI abstracts for the fact that their pixel pitch is much finer than a typical display, usually by 2-4x. Otherwise, most displays fudge for the fact that they're not quite 96ppi, since 100 or 94 isn't vastly different.

Anyways, this is a good thing. It shouldn't really adjust with screen growth, but it's important to note that it's an abstract dimension (so thinking in terms of PPI/DPI with CSS pixels is unwise). It allows you to be agnostic to devices, and respect the user's preference (if possible) for how close to the physical display they are.

<comment><USER8> > Is a desktop screen different than a phone screen?

Hum... Yes. That's the entire point of my comment.

One is 90cm away, the other is 150cm away. An arcsecond of viewport on one is almost half of the linear size of the same viewport size on the other.

<comment> c-smile There is an abbreviation for that - YMMV, right?

My monitor is closer to that usually. And that's the point. It makes absolutely no sense to measure viewing angles.

The only thing that we can agree is that area of finger/screen touch measured on _screen surface_ is roughly equal for humans - 1cm x 1cm or something like that.

So size of your buttons shall be measured in units of screen surface, but not in some mysterious things that depend on distance orthogonal to screen surface.

So 1\. CSS pixels must be treated as logical length unit equal 1/96 inch, and, 2\. Browsers must ensure that 1in or 10cm are exactly that when measured by physical ruler on screen surface.

I, as a developer, must know that my 1cm button is exactly that on screen and so human clickable.

<comment><USER8> Your mileage will vary. A lot.

But CSS sizes are defined by viewing angles, not by linear size. There was plenty of debate at the time it was standardized, and really, none of the options is good so they got one of the bad ones.

<comment> c-smile Yep, initial idea of HTML as just one dimensional tape of scrollable text - something that has given width but no height - literally just a Text for reading ...

Who would have thought that we will start clicking <button>s by literally fingers.

But how much of dev time wasted already in discovering that `px` stands for points in MacOS terms (1/72 on inch initially and now 1/96 of inch) and nothing near real pixels ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good article, but the author mentions " _JPEG compression artifacts are so prominent that it practically spawned a new art form._ " and links to a glitch app.

Glitch art wasn't inspired by lossy JPEG compression, it was inspired by corrupted digital feeds and missing image data: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clarification! I still think it takes a lot from the JPEG artifacts, but I'm happy to change it if the author objects :)

<comment><USER11> Incorrect motion estimation data (e.g. datamoshing), Gibbs effect ringing, seams that come from JPEG-style macroblocks are all noticeable artifacts, along with noise from tape decks. They might not have started the genre, but they're certainly part of it now. I see nothing major to correct.

<comment><USER12> Pops and crackles to simulate vinyl record noise, too. Bands like The Bird and the Bee, and Death Cab for Cutie add those imperfections to digital tracks to get the sound they're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That 3.5MB image can be squashed down further. It has way too much resolution for something that takes up a quarter of a monitor. An optimized 1080p-size image (possibly too much for desktop, might be OK for mobile hi-res screens) shouldn't be more than 300k.

<comment><USER14> That's right :) You can compress even more without losing much in quality. 3.5Mb is an example of where to start :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently rebuilt the theme of my moderately-well-known WordPress-based site to use all vector graphics for the site UI. Further, I implemented SVG sprites so all relevant SVGs are embedded in the main HTML, eliminating the overhead of subsequent HTTP requests for those images. Along with a few other non- image-specific optimizations, that change made the site blazing fast, even when under heavy load (i.e., when linked from HN or /r/TodayILearned).

(I'll refrain from linking the site to avoid the appearance of naked self- promotion, but my username is a dead giveaway if you care to see it in action).

<comment><USER16> Did you use any tool to make the SVGs?

<comment><USER15> Mostly I used Adobe Illustrator, building up the shapes and exporting as CSV. I also did some hand-editing of the SVGs in Sublime for fine tuning, SVGs are just XML so it's not difficult to adjust colors or nudge nodes in a text editor.

<comment><USER15> Oops, I said 'CSV' above when I meant 'SVG'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's also Trimage for the Linux users that want an magic, drag-n-drop GUI to do a lot of image compression. It's an alternative to Mac's ImageOptim.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's too much filler in this article for me to understand what's being conveyed.

<comment> seph-reed Use svgs*

* when you can

<comment><USER19> I just went through a project where we deliberately converted all SVGs to PNGs (using an image CDN where we could request different transformed resolutions) and it resulted in MUCH better performance, both in tools like PageSpeed and in perceived performance, for 2 major reasons:

1\. The PNGs tended to be MUCH smaller than the SVGs, and I think you'll find this likely whenever you have even a very minorly complicated graphic (the article points this out).

2\. There is an issue on Android devices where scrolling was absolutely awful when there were lots of large SVGs on the page. This completely went away when we switched to PNGs.

I think the best recommendation is to store the initial image either as an SVG or very high resolution raster image, but then use an on-the-fly transforming CDN so you can experiment and easily get the right image (size and format) where necessary.

<comment><USER20> SVG is an incredibly inefficient way to represent a line drawing,with all the coordinates written out as text, and not as deltas from the previous one. Flash's internal representation is much tighter, but not cool any more.

<comment><USER21> SVG can do relative coordinates fine: "m 10 10" (m dx dy) rather than "M 10 10" (M x y). But yes, they're text until you compress them.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but unless you round the floating point digits, you're going to use about as much bytes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Using AV1 <video> tag with a single frame is an amazing hack. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER24> That's been known since the talk of html5 video tag started.

It's not so clever given changing implementation of video prefetch logic, and differing codec behaviour with 1 frame videos with hardware decoders.

I knew of few Android devices which claim to be able to do 4k VP9 in hardware, but plainly hang upon playing VP9 from Youtube.

Does Android Chrome do JPEG decoding with hardware these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an extraordinarily well-written, informed and useful guide. Bookmarked for future reference.

</comment><comment><USER26> In the last code example image names are probably mixed up, huge-cupcake.webp should probably go to (min-width: 800px) media size, not (max-width: 799px)

<comment><USER14> Thanks! Will fix it in an hour :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What's the story with AV1 based image format to replace JPEG?

Also, is HEIF royalty free? Looks like AVIF is using it for container, which is surprising.

<comment><USER23> HEIF container is just ISOBMFF container, so it should be royalty-free.

HEIF has problems because of HEVC encoder, which was replaced in AVIF.

<comment><USER27> ISO requires the container format to be royalty free?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This describes the problem more or less but it does not give a single working solution. Image optimization now includes videos, scaling, format and color conversion, and simply compressing images at Quality 80 does not provide consistent visual quality [1].

[1] [https://optimage.app/benchmark](https://optimage.app/benchmark)

</comment><comment><USER29> There was a footer pop-up that, I think, was about cookies. Just blowing lightly on my mouse wheel made it disappear and I can't get it back. What did I agree to via bad UI?

<comment><USER30> The text reads _Humans! We come in peace and bring cookies. We also care about your privacy: if you want to know more or withdraw your consent, please see the Privacy Policy._ and links to [0]. Like most websites, also here a lot of analytics is gathered, over which you have little control.

[0] [https://evilmartians.com/privacy](https://evilmartians.com/privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A potential future option I only just learned about is JPEG XL (not XR!) which is proposed as a _royalty-free_ successor to the JPEG we know. The draft is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03565](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03565) and a little bit about what it has and why is at [https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings- of...](https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of- spie/11137/111370K/JPEG-XL-next-generation-image-compression-architecture-and- coding-tools/10.1117/12.2529237.full) (but I haven't found nearly as much public detail on tools, reasoning behind choices, etc. as there is for e.g. AV1).

The most interesting bit of it is that it contains a JPEG1 recompressor that saves about 20% space but allows exact reconstruction of the original file. It uses more modern entropy coding and goes to more effort to predict coefficients than JPEG1. It has almost exactly the same gains as, and sounds a lot like, Dropbox's Lepton, described here: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image- compress...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/lepton-image-compression- saving-22-losslessly-from-images-at-15mbs/) .

Seems like a big deal to plug seamlessly into all the JPEG-producing stuff that exists, without either doing a second lossy step (ick) or forking into two versions when you first compress the high-quality original. 20% off JPEG sizes is also a bigger deal than it may sound like; totally new codecs with slower encodes and a bucket of new tools only hit like ~50% of JPEG sizes. As Daala researcher Tim Terriberry once said, "JPEG is alien technology from the future." :)

For JPEG XL's native lossy compression, it has some tools reminiscent of AV1 and other recent codecs, e.g. variable-sized DCTs, an identity transform for fundamentally DCT-unfriendly content, a somewhat mysterious 4x4 "AFV" transform that's supposed to help encode diagonal lines (huh!), a post-filter to reduce ringing (that cleverly uses the quantization ranges as a constraint, like the Knusperli deblocker: [https://github.com/google/knusperli](https://github.com/google/knusperli) ).

Interestingly it does _not_ use spatial prediction in the style of the video codecs. A developer in a conference presentation mentioned that it's targeting relatively high qualities equivalent to ~2bpp JPEGs -- maybe spatial prediction just doesn't help as much at that level?

Don't know if AV1-based compression or JPEG XL will get wide adoption first, but either way we should actually have some substantial wins coming.

</comment><comment><USER32> What does this mean:

 __ _Have you considered HTTP /2 that supports multiplexing at a protocol level_ __

<comment><USER33> With HTTP/2 multiple requests ca simultaneously go though one connection. This allows multiple images to be efficently used directly. With HTTP 1.1 it was common to tile multiple images together so they could be loaded in one request, then use CSS to display just the bits you wanted.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Authors, how did you find your literary agent? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a crackerjack idea for a book (doesn't everyone?) and have succeeded in securing a decent amount of press coverage for my tentative self-publish by date.
Of course the goal is to eventually win the attentions of a literary agent and find a publishing agency to take the project further.
Does anyone have advice/stories from their own experience, going through an agent and publisher? How did you make the contact? What was your approach? Or was it just a matter of don't-call-us-we'll-call-you, star-is-born type discovery? <comment><USER2> Write the book first. The rewrite it, then shop it around. Ideas are great but only established authors get paid for treatments. It's not so much the idea (although that certainly matters) as whether you can use it to engage the readers' emotions. One of the neat things about writing a book (as opposed to writing for the screen, which is where I work) is that you don't have to keep your imagination on a budget, because words work for free - so take advantage of that.

Of course I have no idea what sort of book you have in mind - it could be _Malbolge for Dummies_ or _Harry Potter in Outer Space_. The usual deal with publishers is to to identify a dozen or so who publish in the relevant field and have already put out books from authors you like, and then send query letters. You can do something similar for agents - authors often thank them on the Acknowledgements page, so hit a bookstore or start looking inside a lot of books on Amazon and build up your target list. Find their submission guidelines, by calling their secretaries if necessary, and work on short engaging query letters that tell them why you contacted them, something of what your book is about, and which create _a desire to read it._ You have to be able to do this within a couple of sentences, regardless of the subject matter and tone of your book. Expect to get rejected a lot.

You're welcome to drop me a line with or without an NDA, although I can't give you any particular contact names - the only time I talk to literary agents is if I'm inquiring about buying the rights to something.

</comment><comment><USER3> My girlfriend recently signed with an agent. It was the end of a long process of query letters, revisions, and waiting ... and waiting. Probably just shy of a hundred rejections.

That's the traditional way. So am I telling you you need to hack the system? Nope. As it turned out, there is a correlation between how much practice you put in. Some of her writer friends also struggled mightily, wrote better and better books (note the 's'), and found themselves offered representation by multiple agents.

I was all about a tech/entrepreneur solution with self publishing, but I have to admit the system does work too (we'll see about royalties later though).</comment>


Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/ten-principles-for-growth-69015e08c35b <comment><USER2> Very good points, thanks for sharing! To compliment this article, an uncle of mine who had retired as VP of a major airline company started his career there as a janitor. He told me simply, "make the company more money than they're paying you" \- by doing so it doesn't make any sense to let you go. This hasn't kept me free from layoffs somehow, but in general it keeps me afloat.</comment>


Young People With A Moral Purpose Should Work For Goldman Sachs, Not Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/nobel-robert-shiller-work-for-goldman-sachs-google-2013-10

<comment><USER2> I think he's forgetting this little thing called "fiduciary responsibility". In almost all jobs in finance, you have a legal obligation to generate externalities in the name of profit. You may learn how to make a different, but unless you get rich enough to be investing your own money to make the world better, you are often going to find yourself having to do things that damage the commons for the sake of the individual.

That being said, I used to work in finance, and I agree that there is a _lot_ of value in spending 1-2 years there since it gives you a lot of operating insight into the impact of finance in getting things done and that knowledge is very useful if you find yourself on the other side of the table trying to convince finance professional to do the right thing. They understand finance and rarely understand how industries actually work, even though they think they do and write lots of reports giving that impression. To make them understand an industry or world problem, you need to put it in their vocabulary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, talk about Wadhwa throwing up a strawman there...

I think Shiller has a point, though. If young people are so appalled by what Wall Street is doing, they should be the ones working for them and changing things. Self-driving cars are cool, but what does the US need more - self- driving cars, or a sound and ethical banking system?

<comment><USER2> You'll never get to position of having an ethical impact in banking if that is your goal. The system is very good at preventing people with anything other than a pure profit motive from rising above the rank of peon.</comment></comment>


Decisions: The Asset Pipeline - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/greypants/3590465cc1e9ad23d1c6

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in the same spot and was hoping the HN crowd might have some insights.</comment>


Google Summer of Code 2012 Stats - Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/05/google-summer-of-code-2012-stats-part-2.html <comment><USER2> No US universities, I guess they can easily get way better paying internships.

<comment><USER3> How much are internships usually paid in the US? For some parts of the world (developing, especially) the GSoC stipend is ridiculously high.

<comment><USER4> Internships in the Us pays 3000 to 7000 per month vs Gsoc which pays 5000 for 3 months.

<comment><USER5> That's high, many internships are min wage or even unpaid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very happy for Sri Lanka!</comment>


It Takes a School, Not Missiles - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13kristof.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Doesn't anybody here remember what the Taliban in Afghanistan were like before the U.S. drove them out? Well, here's a reminder: "Women seeking an education were forced to attend underground schools such as the Golden Needle Sewing School, where they and their teachers risked execution if caught."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women>

I applaud what Mr. Mortenson has accomplished, but what he did (in Afghanistan at least) only became possible after the U.S. army invaded Afghanistan and fired all those expensive missiles.

<comment><USER3> I'm sick of this re-writing of history. There are other countries that helped to remove the Taliban, among them are Canada and the U.K. Please give credit where credit is due. A U.S. pilot even killed some Canadian soldiers! So to say "the U.S. drove them out" and "the U.S. army invaded Afghanistan" is insulting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good review; the better parts are where the columnist, Mr. Kristof, describes the book and Mr. Mortenson rather than talking about his own opinion.

Most interesting: "To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local "buy-in," and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. "This is our school," the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact."

"Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan's wild Waziristan region."

Strangely, the columnist adds in "It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan," right after that, undermining his own point... ?

<comment><USER5> Why does it undermine anybody's point? In an area where millions of people live, a few dozen schools is a small number, yet thousands of them may make a positive difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the film "Charlie Wilson's War" and the story of what happened back in Afghanistan in the late 80s; after spending over a billion dollars secretly providing rebels with weapons in order to defeat the Soviets, we walk out without spending even a few million on rebuilding, and almost none of the population learns that we were the ones who saved them--and instead blame us for not helping, not being educated enough to know the truth.

And thus we created the enemy which we fight today.

<comment><USER7> Actually, what happened was that the Saudis stepped in and DID build the schools, houses, and infrastructure.

And then we're shocked, SHOCKED! that the radical elements would win out over the more moderate ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know, considering how awful some of the schools here are, do we really want to export them to other countries? It'd be nice if some countries took some chances and innovated in regards to how schools, corporations, and other social structures work instead of plainly copying the Western world.

 _edit: I agree that education is important and better than lobbing missiles and bullets at someone but at the same time..._

<comment><USER8> So many of the problems with education in the US are cultural that it's depressing. When people don't _want_ to learn, there is very little you can do to improve the situation. Especially in a compulsory system where students are not free to leave and end up simply disrupting those students who truly want to learn.

The thirst for knowledge in the third world and true desire to learn combats the worst features of the Western education model.

<comment><USER3> To an extent it is a cultural problem, but on the other hand, why would you _want_ to learn about something that's taught in a dry and boring way?

<comment><USER9> Because you're in the developing world, and you're desperate to become an engineer / civil servant / whatever, so your kids don't have to drive taxis?

I'm all for studying what you're interested in, and in general, I don't do things that I'm not at least marginally interested in, but let's not kid ourselves. This is a luxury that many don't have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sigh.

So now we have to build millions of schools around the world so people will love us.

Is this reddit, the "social" socialist propaganda site? What does this have to do with hacker news?

<comment><USER9> No, we need to win the war against violent, Islamic extremism, and violent religious fundamentalism, in general.

In that regard, schools and education are just another weapon in a combined military / social arsenal. As it turns out, the schools are cheaper than the missiles.

The point is, if we don't do this, we will _lose_.

<comment><USER11> The reason that, for example, Palestinian textbooks contain maps omitting Israel is that they don't _want_ to teach their children a fair and peaceful message.

Schools are great when people are reasonably open to living peacefully but can't work when people do not want peace and sabotage attempts at real education. So, unfortunately, we're going to need a bunch of missiles.

I know it's hard to grasp, but there are people who do things like destroy _greenhouses_ _of their own_ out of spite or hate. If you give them a a voluntary choice, some people don't want peace; their agenda for how the world should be comes first.

You know, it's funny, one of the memes strong enough to change some dangerous people enough to be safe is Christianity, but the idea of converting Muslims to Christianity is met with extremely loud screeching about how we shouldn't do that and they should be allowed to believe the (uncivilized) things they believe now. If we can't convert them to peaceful Western values then it's going to be missiles.

<comment><USER12> _If we can't convert them to peaceful Western values then it's going to be missiles._

Doesn't this seem self-contradictory to you? What, exactly, is "peaceful" about a value system that advocates aggressive, ideologically motivated war?

<comment><USER11> I was referring to missiles used in self-defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> it reminds me of the movie idiocracy. explosions and violence make more impression on short-term than litterature or culture

<comment><USER14> Children should be required to watch "Idiocracy" in the classroom...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Three Cups of Tea" is a terrific book. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER16> _"So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan's tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports."_

What a fantasy. I wish. But what's easier: bombing and shooting or educating? (Same goes for most other non-violent measures that could have been taken. They're harder.)

<comment><USER17> If they cost less money why are they harder? Do you think it's a question of funding or a question of scale?

<comment><USER14> It's slightly depressing to imagine that if our defense contractors could make more money building schools than weapons, we would not be having this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cripe. I have this vision of my property taxes going up 100-fold as I pay to educate every single child in the world. The NEA will be thrilled. Really, it's not the USA's responsibility to buy schools for non-Americans. Shit, it's not the USA's responsibility to buy schools _anywhere_.

Any genuinely effective techniques can be covered under this heading:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations>

<comment><USER9> This is a strawman argument. Your tax dollars are paying for the military anyway. The article claims they can build 20 schools for the cost of one cruise missile.

In the long-run, we can't win the GWOT through military force alone. Even relatively hawkish people like Richard Clarke recognize this.

<comment><USER18> Oh, man, schools and cruise missiles aren't fungible. Heck, no government program has ever replaced any other government program. We'll see those cruise missiles targeting the schools before that happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the kind of article I need to read in the morning. It gives a sense of purpose. We are seeing a shift in our collective consciousness. The system we are part of is not the best. In fact it is arguably the worst system since the caveman era. We are the first generation that truly believes we can, need and will improve our world without hurting anyone.

<comment><USER20> Then I might suggest subscribing to the New York Times. Can the rest of us keep our Hacker News feed?

<comment><USER21> >Can the rest of us keep our Hacker News feed?

The Hacker News RSS feed is in the same place it has always been.

<comment><USER20> Uhm, the point was that this isn't hacker news.

<comment><USER21> I understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News _for you_. The main Hacker News page is never going to be 30 perfect stories for every single hacker in the world because it isn't a customized page so it can't be perfectly individualized. Hackers like different stories. More than 50 people liked this. Hacking doesn't have to be in python. The hacking Mr. Mortenson is doing is incredibly noble.

Why do you find this story to be so objectionable?

From the guidelines:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

<comment><USER22> > I understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News > for you

If it gets bad enough, then eventually people will start moving on to something better, that is actually about hacker news, and not the political article du jour. This article and discussion were both extremely off topic. And it's not just any off topic, it's politics, which brings out the lowest common denominator in most forums it's introduced in. I mean, how can people vote up stuff like "The system we are part of is not the best. In fact it is arguably the worst system since the caveman era." ? Apologies to rokhayakebe, but that's not serious, interesting discussion, it's hyperbole typical of thousands of other internet forums. I would prefer to try and keep HN from becoming just like all those other forums, although perhaps it's a vain hope.

<comment><USER23> I agree with you, davidw.

Except we're beginning to have a new problem here at hn.

The only thing worse than threads about politics, religion, drugs, or popular culture are the comments about how they're not "hacker news".

We're starting to sound like a committee that gets together and spends most of our time writing the agenda.

<comment><USER22> Saying "these discussions are even worse than the ones they seek to avoid" is an easy out though, unless there's some other way to express our dissatisfaction with said politics articles (down arrow, or whatever else). Furthermore, they serve to pass on information to new members of the community.

<comment><USER23> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a way to see this article without registering?

<comment><USER25> They don't require registration for users referred from Google:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22It+Takes+a+Schoo...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22It+Takes+a+School%2C+Not+Missiles%22&btnG=Google+Search)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What if you have a school and missiles?

</comment><comment><USER27> actually, it takes both</comment>


Gina Trapani: 'Why You Shouldn't Buy an iPad (Yet)' - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1604832/why-you-shouldnt-buy-an-ipad-yet

<comment><AUTHOR> John Gruber likes Trapani's argument better than Doctorow's <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/02/trapani> Which argument is better?</comment>


Ask HN: Whether to join in Microsoft or continue in growing startup? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am presently working as Senior Engineer in one of the Indian growing startups. I learned a lot of new tech stacks and contributed well in the organisation. Even my company CTO knows about my work and query about my status to my manager. For few months, I am not seeing interesting work as I am bored of what I am doing for quite sometime close 2 years.
I got an offer from Microsoft C&E team where they are building one interesting new product. However, they are saying they are ok to move me to Redmond in next year [not promised yet]. For sure, the office known for Work Life Balance and easy going life. Compensation is not high as startups offer more stocks and the valuation is good.
MS PROS: * Better work life balance and completely new tech stack. Learning curve good be interesting * US opportunity and till that point I will be moving back to my hometown to work
CONS: * 5yrs of current stack experience * Current recognition in office
Neutral: * Compensation is not that high enough to move unless if they shift me to Redmond. <comment><USER2> I would research the terms of the H1-B visa. It isn't all roses and sunshine for the employee, essentially you will be stuck working for them, and if you ever get fired you have to find a new employer very quickly or risk getting deported. Even if you do keep your job it is extremely difficult to convert it to residence (I believe that requires costly employee sponsorship too).

While moving to the US is a great opportunity, it is only a great opportunity if you can escape the shackles of H1-B and work for whoever you want, or do your own startup.

So all I am getting at is, if you move to the US don't expect to be doing a startup again for at least ten years, unless you move back to India. It is unlikely many existing startups can bring on a H1-B categorised employee, and you definitely cannot start your own startup without being deported.

There are a few interesting articles on this topic....

<comment><USER3> > I would research the terms of the H1-B visa. It isn't all roses and sunshine > for the employee, essentially you will be stuck working for them, and if you > ever get fired you have to find a new employer very quickly or risk getting > deported.

While the last part is true (about having to find a new employer quickly if you are fired or laid off), it's not true that you are stuck with your sponsoring employer. H-1Bs are allowed to switch companies. The caveat is that if the previous employer had started the Green Card process, it is reset with the new employer, unless the employee is at the last stage of the process (adjustment of status) and has been in that stage for at least 180 days.

> Even if you do keep your job it is extremely difficult to convert it to > residence (I believe that requires costly employee sponsorship too).

All of the big tech companies apply for Green Cards for their foreign employees. Some have a requirement that you work for them for some amount of time (I've never heard of more than 1 year), others will start the process as soon as you join.

However, there's one BIG gotcha for someone coming from India: they will have to wait for a really long time to get their Green Cards. I'm talking about 10+ years here. For China it's bad too but no so bad. For the rest of the world it used to be 3-5 years (for EB-3, EB-2s have had it quick for years), but recently they sped it up a lot. I'm from Brazil and it took me a little less than 2.5 years to get my Green Card, counting from the day I set foot in the US. The actual process was a little more than a year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the information. It's about having "Bay" experience in your resume adds lot of value right?

<comment><USER3> I can't tell - I'm in the Seattle area. I think the Bay area might be great for making connections. Probably adds some pretty good resume weight too, but I'm just guessing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe that some people may be naturally gifted at raising money with an innate understanding of everything that goes into running a business. For everyone else... there's continuing education available at any number of large companies.

What you make of those opportunities... is up to you. I'm simply here to tell you that it can work, and work out well, to start at a big company, get married, have kids, and THEN launch your own business.

</comment><comment><USER5> How is anyone else supposed to answer this for you?

What do you want? Do you want to stay in your existing comfort, or do you want to try something new and expand your horizons?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's mixed feelings. I am unable to decide and for the same reason, I am taking suggestion. :-/

<comment><USER6> Probably the sensible thing to do is talk to your current employer to see if you can resolve the issues with boredom etc.. Don't threaten to leave but just be friendly.

Also look at the local job market and interview and see what is out there locally.

Then with a possibly better current job, some interesting local opportunities you can better compare the Microsoft decision to what you have.

A lot will depend on what you want. Big company vs. Small. USA vs. Home Country. Citizenship vs. Being on VISA. Money. So much! MS would be good to have on your CV if you can hold the job for a few years.</comment></comment></comment>