Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/over-200-students-admit-to-cheating-on-test-after-professor-dedicates-lecture-to-proving-he-knows-they-cheated/ <comment><USER2> But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn't penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it's assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.)

See:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students- admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating- studying.shtml)

Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions _is_ knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher's test bank is very clearly not made for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case.

However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat. So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I can't possibly see how students who didn't confess will be found out, especially if the exam was multiple choice!

<comment><USER4> No, I really don't think this is actually cheating. He handed out a test that, while claiming to be original, was actually from a standard bank provided by the publisher. This isn't a SAT or GRE that is standardized by an organization or the U, it is a test in a class that he claimed to be the author of.

What really annoys me about this story is he is covering his laziness / inattentiveness to his class of paying people and having "fun" doing mathematical analysis of his class to prove "cheating" instead of spending time creating a test. If he won't even put effort into original tests what effort does he really put into the class? Are all his class lectures equally canned? Would these students be better off with a video lecture series from the publisher and taking an online test? What value and insights is he bringing to the lectures. He sure isn't testing on those insights.

<comment><USER5> I will agree with you. I'm not familiar with these test banks, but if they are publicly accessible, what's the point in banning them? Here in Greece, all our university teachers encourage us studying any material we can find, even past exam papers, and most provide the papers themselves. We are also allowed to take the exam paper with us when we finish the examination.

If you're a teacher, it's part of your job to write novel test questions. If you can't be bothered to do that, you can't tell people "this is what I'm going to ask in the exam, but don't read it". This isn't even the minimum amount of effort to keep honest students honest.

As another poster said, studying an entire test bank _is_ studying the material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous submissions of the same story from various sources. They all have some discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243> <\- This has the most comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931>

</comment><comment><USER7> What the professor knows:

\- Some students had an advance copy of the test

\- The grade distribution indicates cheating

What the professor doesn't know:

\- Who cheated

Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this.

<comment><USER8> On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level, for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a training set, do a question-level analysis.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't prove anything. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep and do poorly on a test. Sometimes you just have a great day. Using statistics as though they are hard facts and not merely suggestions of likelihood is a terrible idea when there is a question of guilt or innocence.

I have in the past had wildly fluctuating grades. Don't believe everything your powerpoint-prettied software stats tell you.

<comment><USER10> Does it 100% prove it? No. But what he can easily do is call up the top 200 most suspected students, get them to sit down in an office with nothing but a calculator and a pen and give them a very small subset of the original questions with the numbers changed. 20 people might be able to get them right, but a good 50 people arn't going to know where to start for any of the questions. Then all of a sudden it is "oh shit" time. If I were one of the "cheating" students I would come forward too.

This actually happened when I was studying engineering at Waterloo. The course was calculus 3 and the prof, who normally taught math majors, didn't know that there was a _university commissioned_ exam bank with previous exams for courses. Course coverage was sporadic for all but final exams, so we normally didn't check it, but the previous midterm was actually there. One of us found it 24 hours before the midterm, so half of us got it and half of us didn't. The prof had reused the hardest question. Long story short, nobody got in trouble, but the prof made it so your top and bottom "midterm" (there were 5 of them before the final) could be optional dropped together or not at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses.

Is this not common elsewhere?

<comment><USER12> in all the universities I've seen in italy you always have access to the previous written exam tests for preparation. For the oral part, when teachers have repetitive behavior, I've often see people collect datasets and use them for studying.

But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests from a given set and this set was known in advance. This is silly of the teacher, not of the students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You have to think that if the professor really could identify the culprits he'd be limiting the retakes to them.

Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no "forensic analysis" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100% confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them.

<comment><USER14> Of course, the test of confession doesn't have 100% confidence either. See for example the Innocence Project's page on this:

[http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False- Confessions...](http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False- Confessions.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device. The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can sit around flipping through their notes.

Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging reviews).

So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life, don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve problems?

<comment><USER16> Exactly. The best professor I ever had did exactly this and he was from India and dressed like a cowboy (not important but awesome). He posted a few previous semester's tests online. And he allowed us to bring whatever assignments, reference manuals, etc. (except for computers) into every test, but wrote a brand new test. I think this sort of thinking came about because he was just the kind of teacher that really cared that his students wanted to learn and it showed in the lab assignments and when he was actually giving lecture. This is when you know what learning is really about and you stop worrying about grades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might have missed something in the video, but if I were an innocent student, the benefit for me in falsely claiming I cheated far outweighs the risk in defending my innocence.

The choices as I see them are these, whether you're innocent or not: 1) say that you cheated, and you get to retake the test as though you never took it the first time -- you don't even fail the test! -- but you never get to ask this professor of a lecture with 600 students for a favor. 2) don't admit that you cheated, get caught in some dragnet based on pretty flawed statistical reasoning (or better yet, a witch-hunt), and "not graduate." 3) Best case scenario: You say nothing, don't get accused of anything, and you get the undying loyalty of the professor, though that loyalty fails at the first try, because it doesn't extend to you getting out of a test you by definition shouldn't have to take in the first place.

I'm a bit stunned that only 200 students "confessed."

<comment><USER18> An additional penalty for confessing was having to take a 4 hour ethics course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think it is really possible to keep a question bank secret. Some students tend to follow up with those who had taken the course last time, at least in my university. So if the question bank is _voluminous_ _enough_ , why not just make it open ?

Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question- bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year.

But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately) who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.

I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can be marked suspicious. But a test will have only a few of those.

But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB. Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.

<comment><USER20> > I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.

I agree. It sounds an awful lot like a bluff.

While in college I worked as a teaching assistant, on a few occasions me and my staff identified cheaters.

No one ever got caught by getting the right answer. Cheaters got caught when they had mistakes in common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931>

was posted just yesterday

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - didn't see that

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials, and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing materials.

Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials.

Not to control access to information.

If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not helping me advance.

If a presenter is reading off the slides?

If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think. To research.

We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism. Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test.

Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research.

It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has failed.

<comment><USER23> "Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials"

I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material?

I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1\. Human contact 2\. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3\. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience 4\. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time

Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together.

I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time.

And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".

<comment><USER22> Thinking like the instructor/presenter/seller quite clearly, though also remember to think like the student/purchaser, too.

You're clearly familiar with running the process line and incremental improvements for yourself and optimizing your work, but are you equally comfortable being the widget that's being processed within the assembly line, and whether the widget is getting the best value?

My trip down that educational assembly line was seriously and mind-numbingly unpleasant, and I can only imagine what it's like with all of the current standardized-tests model. Looking back, what we were taught and what we learned for those tests was sufficiently ridiculous and, well, wasteful. We didn't learn that most of what we learned would be outmoded, that the tools we were taught would be gone, and that memorization was far less practical than learning how to research.

As a presenter, I don't want to repeat that for the folks I am teaching. Though thankfully, I don't have to teach to standardized tests.

As an instructor, you're selling a service. Are your students buying?

<comment><USER23> "are you equally comfortable being the widget that's being processed within the assembly line, and whether the widget is getting the best value?"

A valid point. There are many ways of learning though, and if you want instruction and materials personalized to you, those are available -- albeit at a much higher cost. And there are other, self-directed methods of learning that are a much lower cost than either method (e.g., going to a library, doing research online, etc.). [Aside: who pays the cost is a separate issue, but someone must pay it.]

Given that society is constrained by scarce resources, I think that re-using tests is a perfectly reasonable allocation of resources for many teaching situations. Other materials are re-used regularly, such as textbooks, and there's nothing personal about that. Would you say that using the same textbook as someone else turns you into a "widget"?

It's unfortunate that your educational experience was so unpleasant. My K-12 experience seemed quite wasteful as well. But I think that has more to do with incompetence and laziness. Doing more personalized teaching requires more teachers, which means they will have an even harder time attracting enough quality talent, and an even harder time firing bad teachers. That doesn't sound like a net win on quality to me, even if it is more personalized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Scaring shit out of you since 1981.

While it is generally true that good students should not cheat, but using questions from standard question bank was somewhat asking for it :)

Nice and simple trick with distribution and disturbances, though.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam questions and change them often.

You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.

</comment><comment><USER26> The students actually were asked to confess if they had seen the sample test before the example or not. They weren't confessing to actual cheating.

</comment><comment><USER27> This guy seems like a crappy prof to me. He essentially got caught taking the lazy way out and is now acting surprised and trying to blame the students.

</comment><comment><USER28> Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A" and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.

</comment><comment><USER29> A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters, and rewrote the final.

As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.

</comment><comment><USER30> I use to have a professor that actively encouraged us to review old tests, question banks, friends, anything we could get our hands on. Hell his tests were even open book/notes.

The tests were genuinely difficult. You could pass by looking at the material because some of the questions were just lecture examples with numbers changed. But to really ace the test you needed understanding of the material.

</comment><comment><USER31> Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students. 1\. fear mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION" 2\. the SAME test for the last FIVE years? 3\. some crap sob story about "what were the last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a 5th year PhD student who is teaching a large (80 student) section of a course, this is the 4th course I've taught. I've also taken plenty of exams as a student, and they are still fresh in mind.

I would want to know more information before I decided the students were cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an "exam room", and gave an hour range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question.

If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off).

If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated.

Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.

<comment><USER33> "Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard."

I hope I don't come off as flippant, but you're shooting for a PhD, the most advanced degree you can hold (if I'm not mistaken); isn't "surprisingly hard" kind of the name of the game? I'm sure if you ask students, many of them would say taking the test is "surprisingly hard," are shortcuts justified for them too? I'm sure a building contractor will tell you keeping track of and in compliance with environmental and safety regulations is hard, but we expect them to do it nonetheless, because that's his/her job!

Ultimately, whichever method allows the instructor to most effectively perform his or her job is best, and maybe that's question banks. Cases like this one are notable because they call into question the stance that using banks is as effective/more efficient.

Good luck on your degree!

<comment><USER32> I'm not interpreting your comment as flippant. :)

In terms of shortcuts, that would depend on what they were. Some are fine, others are not. E.g. 'borrowing' answers from other students on homework is a shortcut, but it's okay if the student understands the material in the end; cheating on an exam is not an okay shortcut.

"Surprisingly hard" is the name of the game. I mentioned that writing exams is hard to motivate why an instructor would use a test bank. At a research school (I'm at a research focused school), being an instructor is only a small part of a professors (or grad students) job. Using a test bank (from books/publishers or private ones) is considered to be fine, as it lets them focus more time on the things they "should" be doing. Many things that are considered okay in this context are abhorred in others, e.g. having grad students be primary instructors is okay here but would be taboo at a teaching focused school. Of course, most teaching focused schools don't have big grad programs.

Incidentally, I'm on track to graduate this year. I'm sending out academic job applications and I find myself more drawn to teaching schools than I thought I'd be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At my university usually all tests are published by the institutes themself on the iternet. They even advice you to train with the old exams. Some of them are also open book. But every exam is individual and so different (not only numbers changed) that you really have to train all the stuff to get a positive mark. Relying on "secret" question caches or buying questions from a third party is not very smart, lazy and really makes no sense to me. They did´nt cracked the system, they only used it for their belongings.

</comment><comment><USER35> Students repeat courses, audit courses. Students can be exposed to these canned test questions in this way. Universities push the general learning experience in selling their education product. Those who want to make the student the commodity and control how they learn for better quality control strike me as dyed in the wool bureaucrats.

</comment><comment> cool-RR What a petty man.

<comment><USER36> "The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over."

He's full of crap! He doesn't do any attempt at proving at all. He merely keeps threatening and intimidating, and the only thing he knows is that the numbers are suspicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This disgusts me, but I totally believe it, as a college student seeing these kinds of numbers do not surprise me at all.

Where I go to school though, the test is given at one hour on one day. The whole you have 52 hours to take the test thing. It seems like whoever takes it first could still help others study.

</comment><comment><USER38> After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where everyone takes it at once?

</comment><comment><USER39> For most courses the exams don't stray far from what's already been asked before. Competition between universities has made this problem a lot worse. Students choose courses with high pass rates and favorable grade ratios.

</comment><comment><USER40> The prof's home page states: "Important Note: I have chosen not to participate in any social networking environments." <http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/>

</comment><comment><USER41> The entire education system is essentially one big game, from the obscure admissions process to professors sticking to predetermined grading distributions; and these students are simply playing along.

</comment><comment><USER40> It was probably more work to memorize the test bank than to study the material as normal... It's ironic that those who memorized the test bank probably know the material best.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here's the video of a part of the first lecture in which he claims he writes the test questions:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJG7aCQtI8E>

Based on that, I think a reasonable student would conclude that even if a publisher's test bank is not supposed to be accessible to students, using that test bank would not constitute cheating. Since the prof wasn't forthright in stating that he would use the publisher's test bank, he has no right to complain that students used it to study.

</comment><comment><USER43> Those who cheated because they did not know the material will not do as well on the makeup. That is one way of finding out who cheated.

<comment><USER44> By your logic, those who did well on the original exam but could not do as well on the makeup because they happened to have a bad mood/health/etc. will also be qualified as cheaters.

How does that make sense?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I just wish I could plusvote this one twice.

</comment><comment><USER33> "The consequences will never be the same!" ;)

</comment><comment><USER46> Dupe.

<comment><USER47> That's how you do that: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525>

<comment><USER21> can you please explain that for future use?

<comment><USER47> Referencing past submissions about the same topic, whether they are exactly the same or merely similar is very useful, especially if those past submissions contain discussions.

You should always link to those past submissions and remain otherwise neutral (or positive if you like). It is not and cannot be the submitters duty to closely track Hacker News for all stories that have been submitted in the past [0]. Duplicates are inevitable, just writing "dupe" helps no one. Be constructive!

[0] I'm not entirely sure whether the submitter should check the front page before submitting. Since a bookmarklet is officially endorsed and prominently linked I would rather think that checking the front page is no requirement. You should maybe only be careful and check the front page or the new page when you want to submit a story about an event that you know will be a hot topic on Hacker News (say, a Google press conference).

<comment><USER21> As a new member in Hacker News I have thought of this problem a bit. I would like to know the opinion of the community. There are some pearls on the internet that even though can be old and maybe posted before(some months or years ago) they can be useful, interesting and even rekindle discussions where new ideas can be introduced. At the same time posting something that was discussed one two days ago and attracted attention(as you have pointed- I am not talking about the specific topic but in general) should be maybe linked to be fair with the original uploaders.

And I agree that it is good practice at least to check at least the first page of Hacker News or the "news" section to avoid obvious duplicates .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Mail hacked(?) - B-Con

It would seem that many Yahoo! Mail accounts have been compromised en masse this evening. I saw a couple of friends' get hacked myself, and read other people report more of same.<p>Anyone have any details? Was this a server side breach? Currently the news and Twitter are relatively silent about it. <comment><AUTHOR> I think it is a windows virus going around and yahoo webmail is just a symptom:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/163uph/a_bunch_of_pe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/163uph/a_bunch_of_people_i_know_with_yahoo_email/)

Any non-windows users affected?

</comment><comment><USER2> Where did you see this? Personal experience ?</comment>


Make the Web Work for Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/make-the-web-work-for-everyone/ <comment><USER2> As a anecdata-point, Stanford's CS 142: Web Applications course was previously focused on Rails, now it teaches a MEAN stack:

[http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/)

It requires students to test on Chrome:

> _Unfortunately, Web browsers are still not 100% identical in their behavior, > so Web pages may behave differently on different browsers. For this class, > the reference browser is Chrome: your project solutions must work on Chrome, > and the CAs will use Chrome to test them. Your solutions need not work on > any browser other than Chrome. You may use a different browser to develop > your solutions if you wish (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all have very > similar behavior), but please test on Chrome before submitting. We do not > recommend that you use Internet Explorer for development: historically, its > behavior has been quite different from the other browsers, so things that > work on IE may not work on Chrome, and vice versa._

I have mixed feelings on this. Sure...open web, and everything. But in academia, Chrome is one of the more ubiquitous dev environments to be used...I remember being locked into Visual Studio. And purportedly, the class isn't just about job skills...it's attempting to teach HTML/CSS/HTTP/JS to students who may have not had real exposure to any of those concepts, on top of Angular/Mongo/Node/Express. Restricting the environment allows at least for more consistent instruction/grading.

<comment><USER3> Not the first time that I see academia teaching their students the wrong way of doing things. I had to work with some graduates with certain strange ideas about approaching the work and tried to teach them an alternative, at least open their eyes and consider the possibility that what they are doing might not be the right way. Tough job. Sometimes it feels easier to hire somebody with no programming skills and teach them from scratch than to change the mental pathways of stubborn graduates.

On that note, my experience has been that academic environment often does more damage than good to its students. It sometimes takes a monumental effort to make the graduates unlearn all the wrong things they learned in the academic environment before they can proceed further in their professional development without all that bad baggage that keeps pulling them in the wrong direction.

It's like children mistreated by their parents in their youth who will carry their psychological trauma from the childhood through the years and that would detrimentally affect their lives until they get some professional help from a skilled counselor.

<comment><USER2> I currently work in academia so I'm obviously biased, but I'll argue that wrong things learned in college is quite a bit different paradigm than child abuse. Hard to unlearn child abuse, it seems.

<comment><USER3> The long term effects may be just as devastating.

Consider that as a lecturer every your word will carry a meaning. Even an innocuous remark may turn out to be something that will stick with one of your pupils for years and will lead them to make a sequence of wrong decisions that will eventually ruin their life.

Having access to younger minds and influencing their personal and professional development is not a joke. It's that kind of a job which if not done properly may potentially produce the next tyrant.

<comment><USER4> As a solid example of this... A fellow student was working on a problem that had a key-value mapping, but instead of storing them in a hash table/map/whatever the language wants to call it, he was storing them as pairs in a list and complaining about the performance on a large data set.

I asked him why he wasn't just storing it in a hash table instead. His answer: "Because I sometimes need to iterate over it and get both the key and the value"

My brain had to sit and parse what he'd said for a few moments, before I realized what the heck he was talking about. In all of the data structure courses, he'd been taught "A hash table hashes the key, and stores the value in the corresponding slot". In that mental model, there's no way to retrieve the key, only to retrieve the value given the key.

I explained to him that real-world implementations do do that, but also store the key along-side the value, so that you can still iterate across it. You could see the look of amazement wash over him, and then he frustratingly declared "Why the hell didn't they mention that?!"

<comment><USER5> What does that have to do with academia? That's just having an overly simplified mental model of something, which all humans do when learning any new thing, whether through a lecture, a random stack overflow question, the compiler manual, or through pure experimentation.

<comment><USER3> Academia carries with it a larger amount of authority than a random programming forum. Students have the expectation that the academic staff is generally knowledgeable and wise and what they say in all probability is very important, has to be remembered and followed (even if you don't quite understand why yet but perhaps you will in the future).

<comment><USER6> I don't think "Academia" that doesn't teach critical thinking and only practices its authority over students should be called academic institution.

<comment><USER3> I agree. And yet, this seems to be the rare type. Often it's just a few people in the staff that are trying to do things the right way, for the others it's simply a nice job (with few responsibilities and seemingly no obligations). That's what I've been trying to get across. Teaching is a sensitive job with far-reaching consequences, yet more often than not people don't take it seriously and don't care what their students will carry with them into the life when they leave the walls of that academic institution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bravo! As a Firefox user, the trend of web developers only testing in Chrome (and ending up using features that only work in Chrome) is getting really annoying. Most of the time, the fixes are really simple, like including more prefixes than -webkit.

Very happy to see Mozilla raising awareness around this issue.

Personally, I have Firefox and Chrome open side by side for development. If those two work, Safari and Edge generally will too. I'll add IE specific rules/hacks afterward.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil. I found it rather difficult to read large bodies of text in Chrome which was giving me quite a bit of eye strain. Not sure why anyone would want to test their pages in that in my opinion broken rendering engine.

I'm aware there is a setting which has to do with subpixel rendering or whatever this is called, I tried switching it on and off for no perceivable visual change. So I gave up on Chrome.

IE also has had broken font rendering since they moved to subpixel rendering several years ago, but at least it draws fonts in a strong and dark fashion making them more readable than in Chrome.

Personally, I design for Firefox which I consider the gold standard of web development. Then, at some intervals I check if things are okay in IE and Chrome and usually they are fine. Chrome was useful once in helping me spot some sort of a race condition, its developer tools also conveniently allow you to quickly bypass caching for testing purposes, but other than that I found it useless and unusable.

<comment><USER8> You're probably seeing this bug [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=146407...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=146407#c155) and it is indeed a sad story, especially because Chrome 21 worked just fine. Then they rewrote some gamma correction code in the Skia that shipped with Chrome 22.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. Based on some of the screenshots posted over there it indeed looks like what I've been observing on my machine (version 47-something).

Not a problem really. Never used Chrome before. Only installed it out of curiosity and also for testing purposes. Within the first day of using it on my development machine it became clear I wouldn't be using this piece of software in the future either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I may contribute to the article somehow, I'd tell people this: stop using JavaScript for basic markup. I sigh every time I visit a site whose entire navigation structure is spit out in front of me as a disorganized wall of text, and only when I enable JavaScript that mess gets cleaned up and arranged back into something organized. It's just no way to design pages. CSS is for visual appearance and styling. JavaScript is for interactivity. If you can't give your site a proper look without resorting to JavaScript then you have no business designing web pages yet and need to go learn the basics first.

<comment><USER9> Thats because CSS is not powerful enough, not helped that you can't use something like flexbox if you need to support old browsers but even the latest version of $YOUR_BROWSER does not have a way to say that I want a list element to layout its elements in one vertical column that is also centered vertically on the screen if it has fewer elements than there is space for on a screen, but having it split into additional columns and align all elements in all columns to the top if there are more elements than space on the screen. It is a fairly simple layout and I ended up having to do it in JS because flexbox only has a few standard modes for what to do when the content overflows and those don't effect the margins of the element.

CSS needs to be replaced with a more capable scripting language, or at least one based on constraints but until that happens we are stuck with javascript.

<comment><USER10> > Thats because CSS is not powerful enough

This kind of objection is totally missing the point.

And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limits (it does) or even about what constitutes "enough" (within its limits, CSS offers enough possibilities that your own ideas of what the app "should" be like may be as much as a limit as the problems of CSS are).

The power of CSS is largely orthogonal to the underlying issue.

Ideally, your web site/app is still usable even with every last stylesheet completely ignored. It should work with Lynx, or with entirely non-visual user agents (screenreaders, search bots, Siri etc).

CSS should enhance via layout and other presentation rules where that's possible.

JS should provide more convenient application behavior where that's possible.

Instead, we've slipped into a space where the browser (and, frequently enough, _one_ browser) is simply considered The VM That Lived™, just another runtime target. And that's a sign of its growing power, and that power isn't a bad thing because there are in fact some applications that don't fit the hypermedia model well and the browser's ability to play the just another runtime role opens a space for them. But the rush to get into that space is considerably overdone and apparently executed without a lot of awareness of what's been lost in moving that way.

<comment><USER11> If my users care about and/or use Lynx that I will support it. Until then, it's just a feature that doesn't have the ROI to invest in.

<comment><USER10> Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in.

But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that _entirely non-visual UAs_ are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand.

If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not _just_ a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually _is_ ), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed.

If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a long time in the early 2010s, Chrome had superior developer tools built- in, while Firefox needed addons like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar. While these addons were good, you needed to know about them and download them separately, whereas Chrome shipped with better out of the box.

It took several years for Firefox to catch up [1], and in that time, Chrome's market share exploded, and Chrome's underpinnings V8 and Webkit found new uses outside of Chrome. Furthermore, Firefox was late to Android, where the Android Browser, and later Chrome dominated.

Part of the problem is a website/webapp developed and debugged using Chrome will work with Firefox more often than not -- so some people have been cultured to not even bother checking it in Firefox. Ironically, if more things broke spectacularly, more people would test in another browser.

This PR effort is nice, but it won't reverse the tide on its own. However, once Servo is released and sees use in an embedded setting, developers will no longer be able to get by without developing (or testing) on a Mozilla engine.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/mozilla-promises-to- improv...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/mozilla-promises-to-improve- firefox-developer-tools/)

<comment><USER13> > For a long time in the early 2010s, Chrome had superior developer tools > built-in, while Firefox needed addons like Firebug and the Web Developer > Toolbar. While these addons were good, you needed to know about them and > download them separately, whereas Chrome shipped with better out of the box.

I agree regarding the relative quality, but developer tools have no place in a default Firefox install; the whole point of Firefox was to streamline Mozilla by moving as much as possible to plugins. It's unfortunate that they've recently started bundling stuff again (developer tools, PDF reader, pocket (whatever that is), etc.).

> Chrome's underpinnings V8 and Webkit found new uses outside of Chrome

To be clear, WebKit came from Apple (as a fork of KDE's KHTML), so this wasn't really due to Chrome devs; they were just part of the WebKit bandwagon.

Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine) was already quite widespread before Chrome existed, e.g. it was/is used in Gnome and GTK programs (Epiphany for sure, and I assume other HTML-consuming applications like Liferea); similar to the way KHTML is used in KDE programs, although it was more painful to integrate. Some of these programs were cross platform, so may have had a reasonable userbase (I don't know; I've used Linux exclusively for about 15 years).

Programs based on the XUL toolkit presumably had a much larger installed base; e.g. Thunderbird, RSSOwl, Songbird, Miro, etc.

I didn't notice any conspicuous users of Mozilla's Javascript engine except for Gnome 3, although there were other JS engines around for those who wanted them (e.g. Rhino for JVM applications). V8 certainly opened the floodgates for embedding JS though; I think I first started treating JS as a serious language when the D8 repl came out; node.js followed quite soon after.

> Furthermore, Firefox was late to Android

Well, Chrome and Android are both Google projects; we could say that Chrome was late to FirefoxOS ;)

> Part of the problem is a website/webapp developed and debugged using Chrome > will work with Firefox more often than not

This is tricky; when I was doing Web dev around that time, I'd do a quick checking in FF or Chrome (whichever I had open) to spot glaring problems, then switch to IE6 for my serious testing.

<comment><USER12> > but developer tools have no place in a default Firefox install

Completely agree! But the fact is, Google shipped them anyway, and so people began using them. Now Firefox has to live with the (unintended) consequence of their decision.

> Well, Chrome and Android are both Google projects; we could say that Chrome > was late to FirefoxOS ;)

Sure, but marketshare! My point is, Mozilla is doubly disadvantaged by having to battle against a vertical entity (Google), AND also being very late to the game on that platform.

> I'd do a quick checking in FF or Chrome (whichever I had open) to spot > glaring problems

I'm pretty sure this is what most people do, and that's the problem, because most of the danger is from stuff that's only subtly broken, that a quick look won't catch. The non-web world has automated tests to help with this. Maybe we need tests that can run inside the browser script engine to test our webapps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Speaking of accessibility: the "tota11y" bookmarklet by the Khan Academy people is a useful tool to check your website

[http://khan.github.io/tota11y/](http://khan.github.io/tota11y/)

<comment><USER15> That looks really cool. I don't think that accessibility will get too much traction unless the tooling for checking it is much easier.

As a side note I wish that there was a link to "installing" tota11y near the top of that site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And ironically enough, whatever they use to set width of the text doesn't work for me.

Web working for everyone is easy, you just don't add crapton of pointless script bloat and use what's been working for decades - unless you need to do something special, but then you can't expect it to work for everyone.

<comment><USER17> This is what's so frustrating to me. A perfectly working web is _easy_. Most sites actually put more effort into making it work _less_. This is insane to me. Keep it simple and minimal (in size, features, frameworks, etc, not "lots of whitespace") and it will work for more users. Most sites are _not_ special snowflakes. There are exceptions where lots of formatting/scripting needs to happen, but most sites are better off without.

<comment><USER7> [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER18> Yes, but — as soon as _Cascading_ Style Sheets existed, browsers _should have_ had a sane base so that [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) looked like [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER19> There comes the question, why not go a bit further and make it like [https://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co/](https://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co/)

And then we start displaying ads. Maybe add analytics? Probably a developer with 300 stars implemented scrolling better in JS than the boring old native. Then you look at the calendar and it's already 2016.

<comment><USER20> I was only familiar with the original, and enjoyed finding out about these "better" and "best" variants. But I'll note:

[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/) is really quite good, and it's a single 4KB request

[http://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co/](http://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co/) is 19 requests, 1.37MB, and the appearance and functionality are terrible

Yeah it's what everyone does these days, but it's everything I hate about the "modern" websites:

      * it shows no content without scrolling
      * full background photos with no relationship to the content
      * gratuitous transitions and layout changes
        with only the most tenuous relationship to the content

There's also a link to [http://evenbettermotherfucking.website/](http://evenbettermotherfucking.website/) which cuts the contrast too far, but otherwise is fine, and only 5KB.

So really, the "best" variant is not "a bit further", it's a full hop/skip/jump into the deep-end of "modern" anti-patterns

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any research about whether users prefer web "applications" (SPAs and everything related) or good old web pages?[1] Hackernews and sites similar to this work on pretty much all browsers and devices. So, other than clients wanting to put big CSS banners and animations and using bootstrap and The Theme™[2], is there any valid reason to intentionally bloatify a page?

Edit: Sorry for not being clear, I meant websites where SPAs are _not_ required, and plain old websites would do. In other words, do users (unconsciously?) prefer eye-candy over readability?

[1]: The benefits which users will prefer "applications" for like progressive enhancement with offline first thingy isn't here yet, and virtually no one is using it in real life. So please don't count on that yet. [2]: [http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/#](http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/#)

<comment><USER22> I think it's going to vary wildly to what the website actually does. Something like Gmail or Slack? I'm probably going to be happier with a (well- constructed!) SPA. If managing state across things is important to the core functionality of the site, then use the paradigm that's appropriate.

<comment><USER23> The ticketing part of Zendesk is a tabbed SPA of sorts, while the help center is a wiki-style set of webpages. It works well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Everything in the web technology stack has been intertwined to the point where incomplete browser support for some JavaScript API could cause a bug with any level of severity, ranging from "site is ugly" to "nothing works at all". (And it drives me crazy when some site can't even show me a critical _button_ because of its fanciness.)

There needs to be more work separating a critical base set of features from the rest. There needs to be more separation of the fancy from the functional (i.e. instead of requiring some bizarre mixture of JavaScript support in order for anything to look right, you have two choices: "turn on animation support" or "turn off animation support", or some such division).

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe we should go back to XHTML and get serious about syntax enforcement. Suggested XHTML 3 rules:

\- Everything is UTF-8.

\- All tags must balance and nest properly.

\- Any syntax errors or JavaScript errors generate a visible error message for the user telling them the site is broken. Then everything renders in the default font with default formatting.

\- When something goes wrong, the site gets a HTTP PUT request with an error report, so sites can tell this happened.

That last feature would make it possible to fix things.

<comment><USER26> > Any syntax errors or JavaScript errors generate a visible error message for > the user telling them the site is broken.

This would make users not use the browser that implemented it.

> When something goes wrong, the site gets a HTTP PUT request with an error > report, so sites can tell this happened.

If I bother to implement a handler just to get error reports from browsers, I surely took first the easier step to open my website in such a browser to check how it looks.

<comment><USER25> The parent article says that users leave the site, not the browser, when there's a problem.

If some ad code or third-party Javascript library blows up, your site may never know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Making sure a website works for everyone is exactly what the company I'm working for [1] is focussing on.

We run a large grid of all different browsers, both old and new versions. You create a test where you verify certain aspects of your website and then run it on all these versions on our grid.

With the feedback we provide (screenshots/videos) you can fix any issues that may have come up across different browsers/versions.

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

</comment><comment><USER28> While I understand and agree with what the article is saying, I think a primary driver for other browsers catching up was that they were forced to because developers refused to spend the time dealing with quirks and browsers that didn't correctly implement standards.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

If developers catered to the other browsers like they used to we wouldn't have seen the dramatically improved compatibility we now have.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good article. Web standards and portability should be a much higher priority. A little off topic, but I like to use Chrome for anything touching Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and use Firefox for everything else. Another good practice is setting browsers to delete all cookies when the browser shuts down. With password managers, this is not much of a nuisance, and makes me feel like I am getting extra privacy and safety.

</comment><comment><USER30> "it was found that there are more hard of hearing users in the United States than the population Spain and more users who are blind and low-vision than the population of Canada."

Really? There's more than 35 millions internet users with vision impairment? The previous section says there are 8 million people with vision impairment in the USA.

<comment><USER31> If they include world-wide users, I can see 35 million users being a reasonable statistic. If we're talking about just the USA though, depending on the definition of "blind and low-vision," I found figures between 8 million [1] and 22.5 million [2].

[1]- [https://nfb.org/blindness-statistics](https://nfb.org/blindness- statistics) [2] - [http://www.afb.org/info/blindness-statistics/adults/facts- an...](http://www.afb.org/info/blindness-statistics/adults/facts-and- figures/235)

<comment><USER30> They mean in the USA, it's based on a misintepretation of the graph below the quoted phrase, or on poor wording on their part.

The graph says there are as many vision-impaired American internet users as there Canadian internet users - not the entire population - around 20-25 millions (the graph is hard to read). I'm sceptical of that number because it suggests ~10% of the USA is vision impaired, seems too high.

Anyway the only reason I care is that I'm Canadian ;)

<comment> Paul-ish If the numbers include older people who undergo the usual loss of near sight vision, it isn't so hard to believe. I think a lot of web developers are young and forget that older people use the internet and that older users may have a hard time seeing the small font some webpages use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yeah ok, but am I supposed to find workarounds for your bugs to support your browser? Or should I just tell users we don't support firefox until the bug is fixed?

My website has a position:fixed canvas area that works in every browser except Firefox. For firefox I have to re-apply the fixed property regularly for it to sick, otherwise the canvas scrolls with the rest of the interface.

The bug is logged with Mozilla, but nobody over there cares. If they don't care, why should I care? [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1258911](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1258911)

<comment><USER33> Your users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I really believe Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Microsoft should consider working together. A single open source code base - rendering engine would be a better result for the web than multiple competing engines. The linux kernel takes contributions from thousands of organizations and it's true we do have BSD and it's great - linux as a unified open source code base serves everyone better than when we had multiple fragmented unix variations. There will always be room for experimental rendering engines and JavaScript runtime engines. But having a unified rendering engine and even unified JavaScript engine IMO would be a huge advance!

<comment><USER35> I recommend looking up the term 'software monoculture'. What you're talking about is, at least in my opinion, one of the worst things that could ever happen to the web, and already unfortunately, a serious risk with the prevalence of other browsers also being Chromium-based.

Competition in the software space is what encourages innovation to happen. Problems being tackled in different ways by different groups often leads to the best solution being found among them.

<comment><USER36> The corollary is that after a best/good-enough solution is found and the underlying platform unifies and stabilizes, most of the innovation moves up in the stack. Things that used to be important and hotly debated become mundane things that you can rely on simply being there, a new space then opens up for new types of software to compete in, and the pattern repeats.

See hardware architectures -> operating systems -> browser engines -> frameworks -> services etc. The first two are effectively fully commoditized, few people get excited about them anymore, even as Linux development is more active than ever. Similarly the browser engine is now entering the unification phase, with Chromium swallowing competitors. Meanwhile the battle to define how higher level components are created on top of the browser is in full swing with rapid innovation.

<comment><USER35> Lack of choice in hardware architecture and operating systems, particularly in mobile, is a huge issue, and I'd argue, a poor support for unification being a good thing. It's pretty hard to get a device that isn't running Android and a Qualcomm processor, other than an iPhone.

As Google becomes more of a looming threat on privacy, the idea that they win in the mobile space and the browser space, and we suggest that nobody should compete with them is a terrifying situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not to mention respect for meta-standards. Trying to parse RSS feeds is an impossible job. Let alone the RSS/atom dichotomy, nobody respects the standards, or purposely violates them.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Millions of websites have compatibility problems on one or more of the major > browsers, leading to a poor user experience.

Can we just let these older browsers die out by not developing for them? Surely the users using them will update once every website they visit is broken.

Personally I only add the html5shiv and make HTML5 elements display block.

</comment><comment><USER39> > The 18.2% of IE users running IE8 are on a browser that Microsoft no longer > patches

Where does this figure come from?

<comment><USER40> I don't find this all that surprising. My work transitioned to IE 11 late last year - we were running IE version 8 before that.

I work for a large company. Opposite of agile. A huge chunk of the people who work here are non-technical. Most machines are heavily locked down and users do not have permission to install their own applications. Upgrades (like changing versions of the browser) are rolled out from our Information Services department. I imagine there are many many "large corporate" environments around the world which have similar application policies to us.

The transition to IE 11 was was not all that smooth a large number of internal sites broke (including our intranet which runs Microsoft's own SharePoint product). Even today some months after upgrade some sites still behave oddly and you have to go through the enable/disable "Compatibility Mode" dance to get some sites to wok correctly.

<comment><USER39> I know that :-) I still had to maintain and test our main application for some corporate users running IE 8 until a few months ago. And I can still see some IE 8 (less than 0,5 %) visiting our main public website. But it doesn't explain where does this figure come from. The percentage seems really high, compared to stats I've seen elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> When I think about this problem, I feel like there are 2 major priorities that tug from different ends of the spectrum on this issue.

1) I want innovation. I want new features for the web. I don't want innovation to be hampered by the priority of making features cross-browser compatible.

2) I want cross-browser compatibility. I don't want to have to develop N apps (N representing the total # of browsers my website / app supports).

Personally I don't care if X browser has feature Y. As a developer, if I find a feature I want to program into my website / application, I don't want to have to wait for N-1 other browsers to implement this feature before I start using it.

I want to be able to "declare" or send a "hint" in my HTTP headers (or meta tags?) telling the browser that my site is supported by X,Y,Z browser engines. Each browser would implement a bare bones interface that decouples the "chrome" of the browser window from the "application" window, and makes the application window interchangeable (plug n play) with other browser engines. This would make browser engines interchangeable without requiring a user to close one browser and open another.

Granted, if a user doesn't have browser engine 'X', and refuses to download / install it, that's my loss as a developer / website owner. Or of course I could write some graceful degradation into my app / website. Already I hear some folks saying "but this is what we do now". Not quite. It's a subtle but I think important difference. Most people are willing to install (or already have installed) all major browsers on their computers. The point is, currently we must develop for / test for all major browsers to get the desired reach (or to prevent a user from having to switch browsers). This alternative approach moves the needle when a user installs a browser, not when they use the browser. So if there are a substantial # of people who have both Chrome / Firefox installed on their computers, but 'X'% of those people regularly use Firefox, I can still develop ONLY for Chrome and still get the desired reach into the world's population who have internet access.

There are of course going to be pros / cons no matter what you do, but given the above priorities, and the predispositions of all actors involved (web browser developers, web browser users, website / web app developers) I really think this is going to be the most scalable, least intrusive / obstructive path forward.

</comment><comment><USER42> Dear AndreyErmakov,

I agree with a lot of what you say but I won't upvote a comment that compares bad practices in academia to child abuse.

For the kids that are beaten, burned, neglected, abused etc: please change that.

<comment><USER3> Dear AnonymousUserWhoLikesToHideTheirName,

That's just hilarious. For as long as I'm saying things that conform with the majority's opinion, I will be upvoted. But when a have a different opinion, then I will be downvoted until I censor myself back into conformity. Is that how things work here, on Hacker News?

Have you by any chance heard of concepts like pluralism of opinions, freedom of expression and that sort of things? I'm not sure where you come from, but in some parts of the world people are freely able to have a civilized discussion around complex and sometimes controversial matters. You may consider going abroad, living there for a while and learning how a liberal society works. Will be a great help to you.

<comment><USER42> As said, I agree with the ideas, it just so happens that that _one_ comparison seems to overshadow the important parts of your message.

BTW: I did _not_ downvote you.

<comment><USER3> What if it happens to be my opinion, the way I view things? I should be able to express it, right?

I can't really crop my ideas if some parts of them are not well received. They come as packages, I either tell what's truly on my mind regarding some matter or I don't tell it at all.

If I can't say what I mean, then I can never mean what I say. And then the entire dialogue becomes meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The layout of that page is borked in IE11 - the text takes up a narrow portion on the left of the browser window.

Not much better in Chrome where the body of the article is not-really-centre- aligned.

In IE the search box is also of insufficient height, meaning that lower portion of the watermark text is not visible.

Maybe the author was being ironic.

<comment><USER44> I can't comment about the IE situation but the page looks nearly identical in Chrome for me.

I don't see any alignment issues at all actually; the text is _supposed_ to sit just to the left of the center of the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Am I really seeing this debate again? Really, fuck you web professionals. In 2005 this debate was over, and the standards were understood as positive, accessibility was recognized as important.

Now what we have got is again proprietary code, app just for smartphones, and one browser taking over all the others. Bravo. Great progress here...

I wish the web could stay open.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the web is more open than it was a decade ago. Back then I had to use IE-only tricks to make my pages look okay in IE. Today I don't care anymore. It's been several years since I last used an IE trick, and I have no plans of using tricks specific to other browsers in the future. If something doesn't work out of the box in all browsers, I consider this functionality not implemented and do not use it. That's something you could do too and educate others to approach it the same way.

<comment><USER46> You are both absolutely correct. It's better than it was AND we have to be very careful to keep it that way.

I use the exact same strategy you do: if the feature doesn't work in all browsers, it's not ready yet and I don't use it. It can be painful, but I will NEVER AGAIN use browser-specific tricks or hacks because I remember a time when we pretty-much had to.</comment></comment></comment>


Overture Founder Launches Tweetup, "Adsense For Twitter" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/11/twitter-idealab-tweetup-adsense-bill-gross/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is this yet another 'gap filler' that Fred Wilson was talking about?

 _TweetUp combines sophisticated relevance algorithms with a bidding system to raise your best tweets to the top of search results and make it easy for you to acquire new followers. No longer worry about your important tweets being pushed down by the noise and disappearing into the ether._

This sounds like it will be nothing more than someone going to google and checking the 'only show me sponsored ads' checkbox. Where is the value to the consumer in this product? Why would I want to use a service</comment>


MySQL transactions are not safe (from the command line) - <AUTHOR> http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/1561/mysql-client-believes-theyre-in-a-transaction-gets-killed-wreaks-havoc

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to call folks' attention to this, because I don't think it's well known. If you launch the mysql utility and connect to your database, you'd probably expect these three queries to do nothing:

      START TRANSACTION;
      UPDATE clients SET important_field = NULL;
      ROLLBACK;

But if the connection is lost between the first and second queries, the mysql client will "auto-reconnect" and send the second query—even though it's no longer in a transaction.

You can disable this behavior using the --disable-reconnect flag.</comment>


Learn the Command Line - <AUTHOR> https://www.codecademy.com/en/courses/learn-the-command-line?utm_campaign=lcl_release&utm_source=hackernews <comment><USER2> I finished it last night and wrote a "review" in a mailing list, so I'm just gonna copy that "review" I sent last night if anyone's trying to figure out whether or not they should take this course:

I just finished it. It took me less than half an hour.

It was OK until I finished the 75% of the course. The last 25% were pretty repetitive: use nano to edit your bash config (they used .bash_profile as a config file), type something in it, close nano and use source to set the source of your bash config. I had to execute that same process at least five times and every single time the terminal session restarted so I couldn't use up and down keys to navigate between previous commands, so I had to type them again every single time. Plus there were constant bugs in the interface so I had to manually scroll the left sidebar to see the next task in like every challenge.

All in all, you're right, very basic, thorough, and a bit repetitive at the end. Nothing really left a wow effect to me, but I knew how to use 95% of those commands. Others might find it more useful.

P.S. I'm kind of surprised that they chose nano as a text editor. I expected vi, but I'm guessing they chose nano because it's more beginner-friendly.

<comment><USER3> Just putting this out there - as a teacher, I have seen the importance of repetition. My students would benefit from the repetition at the end of this.

Whether they know they'd benefit or not.

Like scales on a piano.

<comment><USER4> The very reason that I became interested in programming is the ability to eliminate repetition. Instead of solving math problems, I could make a calculator program. Instead of typing something out many times, the computer would do it for me. Type once, run forever. That was an amazing revalation.

If I had learned programming through mindless repetition, through typing the same thing over and over again (As codecademy has students doing here), I would have quit early on.

Instead, I learned through solving problems. Diverse problems forced me to apply my newfound bits and pieces of knowledge in different ways. I always focused on eliminating repetition whenever I could. I had no interest in typing a lot.

There are different kinds of repetition. Practicing the elimination of repetition is the best repetition there is.

Finally, of all the computer-related tools out there, the command line is perhaps the best at aiding users in the elimination of repetition. With the ease of adding new commands, with programs like vi and cron at one's fingertips, there is so much even a beginning user can do to start eliminating his/her repetition. So to TEACH this tool as one of mindless typing is utterly abominable.

<comment><USER3> Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that point because that's how the human brain works.

I observe this with students who use IDEs in the beginning. Some "experienced" developer tells them they need to use an IDE because it "saves time."

Then the students tab-complete their way through code and don't really understand, or remember, what it is. The connections, the pathways to memory, aren't as great.

And not everyone learns this way. If your first program out of the gate was a program to do math for you, before previously learning anything about programming, then based on my experience you are an outlier, someone with a gift and natural affinity for this field.

Bottom line: if this was too repetitive for you, you weren't the target audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They should say, right on the landing page, _what_ command line.

This is revealed in grayed out text under a login/signup dialog when you click on Start.

<comment><USER6> Windows?

<comment><USER7> Unix based systems

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in more, I recently wrote a short book about learning Bash scripting: [https://gumroad.com/l/datascience](https://gumroad.com/l/datascience)

In the book, I use "adventures" to demonstrate Bash concepts, where I guide the reader through using the command line to answer questions such as: What's the average tip of a NYC cab driver? Is there a correlation between a country's GDP and life expectancy? etc

<comment><USER9> Awesome! I wrote something related: [http://datascienceatthecommandline.com](http://datascienceatthecommandline.com)

<comment><USER8> Hey Jeroen! I really enjoyed reading your book, and highly recommend it for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lately I've been butting heads with some seriously anti-command line people. I'm not sure if this is a growing sentiment, or I'm just advocating CLI usage more as time goes on.

Anyway, glad to see this. I'll be sure to recommend it to whomever I'm preaching.

<comment><USER11> I can often navigate to a file in a GUI faster than I can "cd users/Nadya/documents/work/2015/08/24/important/file.txt" [0]

Or I could open up my GUI, click "work" from my side nav selections and navigate through 2015/08/24/important/ and click my file to open it. I can even open two directories and ^x^v into another directory. Or drag/drop to move. Rather than "mv file.txt ../../25/file.txt"

I think it's important to show the more "cool" stuff you can do from CLI. Once you have them interested, explain the building blocks for how they can get there.

Explaining the building blocks to someone who doesn't see the benefits of the CLI will have them thinking about trivial problems and wonder why anyone would ever choose to use the CLI when the GUI is so much faster/easier/less memorization. When I was taught pwd/ls/cp/mv all I could ask myself is "....why? GUI is faster/easier/less memorization/no typos wasting time".

[0] To be fair, I can autocomplete a lot of that command. GUI is still faster though. "cd/us[tab]/N[tab]/doc[tab]/wo[tab]/2015/08/24/i[tab]/fi[tab].txt"

<comment><USER12> You can't 'cd' to a file :-)

Seriously, if you have 'work' as a side nav, then you could have it as a symlink, which makes it about the same. But it's really the stuff like looping over operations, or rsync over ssh, etc that make reading & writing a bit more awesome than point & grunt.

<comment><USER11> Arrgh, you caught me! ;) Replace cd with nano and I'll try to avoid the text editing via GUI vs text editing via CLI debate.

As for symlinks, it's a fair point. But even typing the rest of that example it would be faster for me to use a GUI.

I agree on that point. CLI is much better for less trivial tasks - or making a trivial task possible. On Windows renaming files is bad, ending with an (n) structure. Where I want "file_1.txt, file_2.txt I get file (1).txt, file (2).txt. Or if I save a bunch of .jpf instead of .jpg I have to use the CLI to fix the extensions because it isn't possible in Windows otherwise.

But you won't convince a lot of people to use CLI if you're introducing them to pwd/ls/mv/cp instead of |'s, grep, scripting, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do you really have to create an account to even see the first exercise?

How times have changed at CodeCademy.

<comment><USER14> We teach things like bash by assigning each user to a virtualized Linux server. That gets really expensive and hard to manage when you give one to every anonymous user who hits the site (especially when our courses pop up on sites like HN). With that said, I have been wanting to change the UI to be less intrusive, so you can better see what you're signing up for.

<comment><USER15> Seems like a good use-case for docker

<comment><USER16> At a previous job, we had a "technical task" which formed part of the interview process for junior sysadmins. It involved setting up a couple of servers, VPNing them together, and configuring appropriate routing so VPN clients could access a server on a remote network.

We used LXC for this, but that or docker is probably a sane approach. You get some (not all) of the separation you do from VMs with all the scarce resource requirements of different users. If you consider the implications carefully, you can even give users root inside these containers in certain circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love using the command line on my Mac. I had to learn it when I decided to learn Rails. You really do feel like you have more power and control during development. Now I didn't use Codecademy, but I did learn from reading tutorials and watching a Lynda series taught by Kevin Skoglund. If you're in the process of learning the command line, definitely give it a whirl.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's great to see a course to teach basic command line use, I tried this back when it was in beta and it was great. At the time I had also emailed their support team about some security concerns regarding the course and never heard back(I'm not infosec expert but I was surprised at a few things they allowed that would seem like security issues).

<comment><USER14> The servers are all sandboxed and isolated to you as an individual learner. What problems did you find? Feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER19> This is not about security but since you're from codecademy, I'm having trouble with the font on the console, on chrome on OSX.

I'm having trouble with - and = which look almost the same to my not so great vision.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtyrq7jlao350br/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtyrq7jlao350br/Screenshot%202015-08-24%2021.52.34.PNG?dl=0)

By the way, thanks to the codecademy team. Cool stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not a fan of CodeCademy. Other than the obvious (look who's backing them) though unacknowledged objective of flooding the market with low-quality devs to suppress wages, I've seen too many complaints from users to the effect of "I completed all of the exercises, but I feel like I haven't really learned anything."

Too much hand-holding. A good book, a comprehensive tutorial, or even just reading the documentation still probably works best.

In fact, this training wheels-tutorial system, regardless of its effectiveness, fits perfectly with their goal of devaluing software engineers (whom they deign only to describe as coders); after all, if "Coding is sooo Easy!!!" it shouldn't require one to read dozens of thick books, right? Just playing a sort of game and "leveling up" every now and then should suffice. Then you too will be a coder - and Zuck will be richer.

<comment><USER21> tl;dr "omg I'm scared of new people learning how to program because it threatens my job. I learned the hard way looking through old textbooks and new entrants shouldn't get to use a nice new service to learn because I didn't have that available to me when I started!"

<comment><USER20> Also, as I stated in my post, I don't think CodeCademy actually works that well at all, so your suggestion that I'm envious of new people because they have access to CC when starting out while I didn't is groundless. I tried one of their courses two years ago and found it extremely shallow. If someone asked me today how to learn JavaScript, I would probably direct them to Mozilla's tutorial or to the Rhino book and wouldn't even mention CC.

The glut of free programming books and tutorials on the internet along with open source operating systems and development tools and the Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange websites have collectively done much more programming and CS education than CC has done and likely ever will do.

<comment><USER21> So you don't personally like CC based on your experience of it 2 years ago, so what? You don't have to use it. It just so happens that a lot of people really like their service.

If it outputs bad candidates, as you claim, then you should have no problem beating them in job interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Which command line ? Unix or Windows/DOS ?

<comment><USER23> From the first step, "This course is for unix-based systems such as Linux and Mac OS X."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the past I've recapped some of these sorts of things but to me this is tediously slow - it's almost CLI for non-computer users. I'd like to check the later material to see that I'm _au fait_ with all of it - sometimes one gets a gap in knowledge when learning piecemeal by oneself but it won't let me skip to the later lessons.

Ideally IMO there would be a simple test one could take that would open up the later lessons, like a short recap for each chapter rather than working through the whole ls, pwd, cd, ls, pwd, cd, cd .., mkdir, ls -a, ls -l ... at the start.

</comment><comment><USER25> I completed this a few days ago. Good enough to make me want to put Linux on my Macbook again. How I missed thee.

<comment><USER26> Doesn't your Macbook already have a unix command line?

<comment><USER27> It does, and most of Unix command line tools can be installed painlessly via brew or port (Mac package managers).

There are reasons to install Linux on a Mac, but general purpose unix command line isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Or, learn the Bourne shell (which is on every UNIX) with this: [http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sh.html](http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sh.html)

Even better, it doesn't require registration and passing a CAPTCHA Turing test.

<comment><USER20> The tutorial I linked to is of very high quality. Who, based on the information content of my post or the obviously disposable nature of my account, would waste downvotes on it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What do people think about wrapping a Natural Language Processing interface around the command line (for educational purposes)?

For example: "Show me all of my files, including my hidden ones" \--> "ls -a".

Good idea or not?

<comment><USER29> Just from the perspective of mapping sentence meanings to bash commands, that's a difficult thing to do. But going beyond that, I think there are issues having to do with the ambiguity of language that just aren't solvable, period.

Take your example: "Show me all my files, including my hidden ones". That, to me, should show all the files on the entire system where I am the owner. Even as someone who ostensibly knows some bash, you missed that you dropped some pieces of data which are relevant in bash terms. "my" indicates ownership, and nowhere in your sentence did you say to limit the function to the current directory. If you're making that mistake as an experienced user, what hope does a beginner have?

`ls -a` actually encodes a fairly complex query, which only becomes apparent when you attempt to really nail down what it does in a natural language. To produce `ls -a`, you would really have to type something like "List the names of all the files, folders, and symbolic links in the current directory that are visible to the current user." You could, of course, start making assumptions about certain parts of this, similar to how `ls` does, but then you get into users guessing which part of the sentences they can elide (why wouldn't we assume that "List the names of the files, folders, and symbolic links in the current directory" _wouldn 't_ show us _all_ the files, folders, and symbolic links?). At that point, the user must learn the idiosyncrasies of which exact sentence they have to type in to get what they want: i.e. when they have to say "all", when saying "my" matters instead of saying "the", etc. At that point the natural language stuff is no longer a learning tool, it's a separate, very complicated thing for the student to learn _in addition_ to what they are trying to learn.

As another example of this: if you're willing to accept some ambiguity, why did you choose `ls -a` instead of `find .`? Recognizing that `ls -a` and `find .` do very different things.

To summarize: I don't think it's a bad idea, just an impossible one. :)

<comment><USER30> _I think there are issues having to do with the ambiguity of language that just aren 't solvable, period._

This, absolutely. Once you've used a programming language enough, you'll find that natural languages are disturbingly ambiguous; it only works (most of the time, at least) for communicating with other humans because of implied context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An error occurs when trying to sign up: [https://i.imgur.com/lp6Ty0y.png?1](https://i.imgur.com/lp6Ty0y.png?1)

</comment><comment><USER32> Great, now the missing link is SQL. Why are none of the online code schools teaching such an essential skill required for web development?

<comment><USER33> Is knowing SQL still important for web development? I haven't used it in 5 years and feel I can land jobs regardless.

<comment><USER16> In many large web applications writing queries in your DBAL/whatever without being able to dive into the underlying query and understand what's going on, I'd say it's pretty crucial. For anything small (complexity or expected traffic) you can probably get by without?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Annoying that the URL is using several tracking parameters:

?utm_campaign=lcl_release&utm_source=hackernews

Can't you just read your server logs, people?

</comment><comment><USER35> Last I used it, it had quite a few bugs. Even with work abounds to the bugs I only was able to get to 75%

<comment><USER14> Yeah, we have fixed quite a few bugs in the past week. We are pretty proud of the result, maybe give it another go!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very good beginners course! Thanks guys.</comment>


Psy Curve - <AUTHOR> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PSY+curve

<comment><USER2> PSY curve vs Ellen DeGeneres curve

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PSY%20curve%20vs%20Elle...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PSY%20curve%20vs%20Ellen%20DeGeneres%20curve)

<comment><USER3> PSY curve vs Ellen DeGeneres curve vs Batman curve [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PSY+curve+vs+Ellen+DeGe...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PSY+curve+vs+Ellen+DeGeneres+curve+vs+Batman+curve) Note: it's still 'parametric' but no longer 'person' (in Wolfram Common properties frame).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonder how this was generated - surely not by hand? Is there a way of taking a set of splines or similar and creating equations from them, like this?

<comment><USER5> And is there a way to create other stuff like this? It would be neat to be able to draw some simple thing with your mouse on a canvas and then have it generate an equation that makes it.

<comment><USER6> Here are tons more 'person curves': <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=person+curve>

They can be created in Mathematica: [http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/17704/how- to-...](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/17704/how-to-create- new-person-curve)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of this clever creation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuppers_self- referential_formul...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuppers_self- referential_formula)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here are all the "person curve" possibilities

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=person+curve&lk=2](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=person+curve&lk=2)

</comment><comment><USER9> I see... so this is what Mr. Wolfram does in his spare time.

</comment><comment><USER10> pls no</comment>


The Banana Boat Swing and Other Distinctive 'Fists' (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/swing.html <comment><USER2> RST = "readability, strength, tone" ... a 3 digit number used by hobbyists to exchange information about the quality of a radio signal being received.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-S- T_system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-S-T_system)

</comment><comment><USER3> From 2005, my second-favorite old spark's sea story: "Don't send QRQ to SUQ":

[http://lists.contesting.com/_cq- contest/2005-11/msg00453.htm...](http://lists.contesting.com/_cq- contest/2005-11/msg00453.html)

(My favorite being a first hand account from W3HUV who by chance happened to be the first op to answer: "SOS DE ICEH", and was therefore by international law in charge of emergency communications. ICEH being the call sign of the Andrea Doria.)</comment>


How to record your browser window in Google Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-record-your-browser-window-in-google-chrome/ <comment><USER2> Thanks this will be really useful!</comment>


House Introduces SELF DRIVE Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3388/text <comment><USER2> There are many embarrassing things about the US government, but giving every bill a lame backronym (SELF DRIVE = "Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution") is right up there.

Just call it the "Self Driving Vehicles" act.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this one is especially forced. The bill itself is very reasonable though, and not so strict as to discourage development.

It's very refreshing to see a reasonable, important, bipartisan bill that passed out of committee unanimously. There's more information here: [https://energycommerce.house.gov/selfdrive/](https://energycommerce.house.gov/selfdrive/)</comment></comment>


Why Tether/Circle/Gemini are effectively USD - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@homakov/why-tether-circle-gemini-are-effectively-usd-2480862225ef <comment><USER2> Hi from Argentina!

We had the saying "Un peso, un dolar" (ARG$1=US$1), but it didn't last forever [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertibility_plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertibility_plan)</comment>


Show HN: My first SaaS app - Selfstream.io - <AUTHOR> https://www.selfstream.io Hi Hacker News,
I have just launched my first SaaS application - Selfstream - http://www.selfstream.io . It is targeted at event organisers with small budgets, who want to extend the reach of their events, and easily stream them live on the internet.
I have been producing managed live webcasts for a long time, so I decided to automate the process. I also wanted to build a SaaS product from scratch, as well as register a company, process online payments and all related administrative bits. Basically have a framework for any future idea.
Now that the app is online, what would you recommend for acquiring early adopters and therefore validate my idea?
For my next project, I will definitely validate my idea first, rather than dive into development!
I would really appreciate any advice and feedback!
Thank you! <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News,

I have just launched my first SaaS application - Selfstream - [http://www.selfstream.io](http://www.selfstream.io) . It is targeted at event organisers with small budgets, who want to extend the reach of their events, and easily stream them live on the internet.

I have been producing managed live webcasts for a long time, so I decided to automate the process. I also wanted to build a SaaS product from scratch, as well as register a company, process online payments and all related administrative bits. Basically have a framework for any future idea.

Now that the app is online, what would you recommend for acquiring early adopters and therefore validate my idea?

For my next project, I will definitely validate my idea first, rather than dive into development!

I would really appreciate any advice and feedback!

Thank you!</comment>


The most featureful high-level Vulkan lib by far is written in... Object Pascal? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BeRo1985/pasvulkan <comment><USER2> The author of the library seems to be unusually prolific in general, if you look at what their overall lineup of public GitHub repos consists of. They're like the Pascal version of Fabrice Bellard or something.

<comment><USER3> 149 contributions in this year? Multiply by twenty, then it would come closer.</comment></comment>