How We Get Things Done (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.canva.com/2015/08/25/how-we-get-things-done/ <comment><USER2> _Concentration indicators:_

 _Wearing headphones_

 _Working away from normal desk_

 _Interruptions still happen, of course. When one does, we suggest letting the person know upfront that you're concentrating on something, and asking them if it's urgent. And if you're the person doing the interrupting, try not to get offended when you get asked if your needs are urgent._

OMG yes big fan of this. Setting expectations up front for this kind of behaviour is great. Without a 'culture' for allowing people to stay focused without an immediate interruption, I have always found it hard to explain to people interrupting me why they could have used an asynchronous communication tool, like Slack/HipChat/email, for non-urgent questions.

<comment><USER3> Trying to figure out how to tackle this issue right now as we just went to an open floor-plan. Wondering if getting all of the team using [https://blink1.thingm.com/](https://blink1.thingm.com/) with a standard set of color code conventions (red=Do Not Disturb) would work better. The headphones trick doesn't seem to be sending any message at all.

Really great list though. Good read.

<comment><USER4> Can't you just have a card on everyone's desk. One side is green, one side is red. If you put the red side up, it means do not disturb? I don't mean this in any way as a personal attack on you, but tech culture in general sometimes gets too focused on using technology instead of just finding a solution that works. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and ask again what the goal is.

<comment><USER5> The headphones act can be unconscious, seeking silence, whereas a card is more abstract and could have stale state. My fave is putting in earbuds, then noise-cancelling headphones, and no music. The earbuds reduce subsonic cancelling pressure.

Sometimes people are just listening to music and could be interrupted. How do we distinguish this form?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> why-el > In many chat tools, notification state is not preserved across network > reconnection or signout/signin. If you send someone a message, you have no > way of knowing if they're ever going to notice it.

This is no longer true with Slack no? I mean, Slack is smart about when to email you in case you miss reading a post, and it's all perfectly synced between desktop and mobile.

<comment><USER6> Agreed; HipChat is unfortunately a bit terrible about this. I'll often "lose" a notification from someone when I'm offline: it sends an email, yep, but the chat client itself loses the "unread message" bubble. I have to make sure I check email on every reconnect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Our open plan office is great for camaraderie and vibe, but it can sometimes make it difficult to focus, especially if you're working on a task that requires deep concentration. Some people hold a lot of context in their working memory at any one time, others don't. Some people welcome interruption, others don't. To work together effectively, we ensure that everyone is aware of the almost-universal-but-usually-unspoken ways that engineers work day to day."

It's fascinating how resilient the open office plan is to all the research showing it's bad for productivity.

"Camaraderie and vibe" are difficult to quantify, or to even explain in concrete terms how they contribute to profits, revenues, or whatever your most important metrics are. Or, for that matter, demonstrating "camaraderie and vibe" actually increase with an open plan office, versus individual offices.

On the other hand, the ability of engineers to focus and solve problems obviously has a direct influence on the company's bottom line, I would think.

Frankly, it would be refreshing to see more executives just admit they don't want to spend the extra money for real offices, than hiding behind "camaraderie and vibe" to justify their decisions while trying to still seeming cool and hip.

</comment><comment><USER8> > There are few problems that can't be solved quickly by judicious browsing of > Stack Overflow.

Only for the simplest of problems.

<comment><USER9> I read this as "If you need to use stack overflow then you're not a real programmer. " Was that your intention?

<comment><USER10> No, it's "if you constantly need to use stack overflow, you're most likely a beginner in a given tech", and real programmers are going though beginner phase much more often than fake programmers, because they learn more new stuff.

But also "if most of your problems can be solved by stack overflow" than you're either not solving hard problems, or, and this is much, much worse, _you 're not aware that you're facing hard problems_ with things like architecture and code organization, and solve them in a naive, straight- forward way, not even recognizing the future implications — and that, indeed, means that you're not a real programmer.

<comment><USER11> When I first started programming professionally a few years ago I, like any beginner, leaned heavily on Stack Overflow.

When I became experienced I prided myslf on the ability to solve simple poblems with nothing more than my knowledge of the language, frameworks, and occasional trip through the reference manual.

Eventually I realized it was just faster to google those questions as soon as I had them rather than try to remember or solve simple problems.

Stack Overflow is useful precisely because it lets me focus my mental energy on solving hard, "real programmer" problems like architecture and code organization.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Just Gave Millions Of Users A Reason To Quit Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/02/20/google-chrome-80-upgrade-deep-linking-update-chrome-browser/ <comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the example given of a link with "cancer" in the scroll-to-text part wouldn't show up in a DNS query would it?

My understanding was that only the domain is queried, but the full path is not seen by a DNS server.

<comment><USER3> The images and other resources _would_ be part of the query. I don't know how Chrome prioritizes loading of resources, but if it prioritizes those resources in the current view, it might be possible to tell specific information about a page based on DNS traffic.

Example: Let's say Chrome loads resources in the current view first, and you send a deep link with "cancer" as a search term. If a gullible user follows that link, then...

\- If "cancer" does _not_ appear, the first resources queried will be those at the top of the page.

\- If "cancer" _does_ appear, the first resources queried might be those used elsewhere in the page.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't it mean that by watching DNS requests for resources, one can also derive which path on a web server I am visiting? For instance when fetching over TLS, such attacker should be able to tell whether I requested [https://example.com/dank-memes.html](https://example.com/dank-memes.html) or [https://example.com/just-text.html](https://example.com/just-text.html), right? If that's the case, then this feature (ScrollToTextFragment) will not make privacy worse that it is already and the worries are just contemporary security theatre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm missing something here. Fragments (everything from #to-the-end-of-url) are never sent as part of the request to the server.

As a developer, I can't even know if a user has a fragment server side. Instead, I'm forced to use JavaScript to read it.

</comment><comment><USER6> The example that keeps getting put forwards seem unrelated to the new feature in the sense that you can do the exact same with a [https://url#cancer](https://url#cancer) link .

</comment><comment> e-clinton Don't see a security issue here. Only the domain is sent to DNS, not the full uri.

</comment><comment><USER7> Holy hyperbole batman. Flagged.</comment>


Better data centres through machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.googleblog.blogspot.in/2014/05/better-data-centers-through-machine.html

<comment><USER2> So many submissions, so little discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7810155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7810155) (14 points!)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7810257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7810257)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811204)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811388)</comment>


Show HN: REREAD.io – Rediscover those saved and forgotten Pocket bookmarks - <AUTHOR> https://www.reread.io/ <comment><USER2> Nice. I did something similar a while ago with some different services. It's been a while since I touched it, so it may be broken.

[http://www.readagainlater.com/](http://www.readagainlater.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What would probably happen, if I used this that I'd just Pocket the link I received in email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Am using a simple random pick from your list of Pocket bookmarks, so hopefully, you wouldn't see the link that you have just Pocketed so quickly. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great, added to pocket</comment>


Ask HN: Ruby on Rails or Image Processing? - <AUTHOR>

Hi<p>I need to decide between two job offers. The problem is that they have nothing in common. The first is a Ruby on Rails developer and the second is a research position working on image processing algorithms. Both might get me a Job in USA or Europe within a year which is my ultimate goal. However the former is boring and easy, and the latter is exciting and difficult. I'd really appreciate your comments. <comment><USER2> it is easier to learn Ruby on Rails part-time than it is to learn image processing algorithms part-time. Go for the harder one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you already know what you want. Take the job you find exciting, no questions asked!

</comment><comment><USER4> Well image processing will not go out of favour soon. A lot of large companies like Philips have divisions that use image processing.Think what you will do in 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER5> A choice is good to have any time. I would not look the choices as "boring and easy" vs "exciting and difficult", as both the choices can be in that state depending on the situation. To me, the choices represent "generalist" vs "specialist". I also disagree that Ruby on Rails can be learnt on part time because there it is not just Ror, it is the whole open source eco system you will be learning about.</comment>


The Hackaday Prize. You Build the Future. You Go to Space. - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.io/prize

<comment><USER2> I want to go to space!! But I'm seriously unclear on exactly what I'm supposed to be building here...

<comment><USER3> Oh. Ideally you would be building the spaceship.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for clarifying that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Residents of these area are specifically excluded from entry: Italy, Quebec, > Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan, Syria

Seriously? Italy?

<comment><USER5> Our law is a clusterfuck :)

See [http://www.slideshare.net/Promosfera/sweepstakes-and- contest...](http://www.slideshare.net/Promosfera/sweepstakes-and-contest-in- italy) and [http://www.promosfera.it/faq_italia.php](http://www.promosfera.it/faq_italia.php) (in Italian).

This is the actual law: [http://www.cr.camcom.it/files/concorsi- premio/dpr_430_2001.p...](http://www.cr.camcom.it/files/concorsi- premio/dpr_430_2001.pdf) (in Italian too)

Basically, you have to have a fiscal presence in Italy, and your servers (or a mirror of them) must be here too. The assignment of the price must be done in front of a notary, and you have to take care of tax/vat as well.

<comment><USER4> What if you just send BTC? I mean, without a presence in Italy, their courts can't reach you anyways.

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of people ignoring this law, in Italy and in the world. But I'd say that a trip in the space is something a bit too big for just ignoring laws :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 支持Hackaday</comment>


Dots, apparently, do not m.a.t.t.e.r in G.mai.l addresses - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150 <comment><USER2> I thought this was well known. Additionally you can add a +whatever, such as firstname.lastname@example.com would also send the e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment>


Ken and Roberta (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/ <comment><USER2> When I was in 7th grade in the late 80s I sent Sierra a letter asking for something...perhaps a disk exchange or maybe it was just fan mail, I don't remember. But since I wasn't used to sending letters I completely forgot to put my return address on the letter and possibly not even on the envelope I sent it in. I did however include the name of my junior high school and several weeks later I was called to the principals office and told that they'd received some mail for me. I was stunned to find a letter from Sierra with whatever it was that I'd requested. They'd literally tracked down the address of my junior high to avoid disappointing one of their fans. Many of my most formative game playing experiences were with Sierra adventure games. It was really a different time.

<comment><USER3> I got stuck in the _Mystery House_ forest back in 1981 or 1982, and wrote a short letter to them to get help. They wrote back a typewritten, personalized, and hand-signed response that thanked me for buying the game, told me how to get out (dropping things, moving forward/up, and paying attention to the exact text in the messages), and giving me a couple extra hints for the next challenges I'd hit.

Definitely a different time.

<comment><USER4> A different time indeed, I feel like I'm the last generation to embody those days in any way, shape or form culturally. Everything feels so foreign today, there was a definite cultural shift around 9/11 permanently, for the worst.

To continue this chain with my own letter writing story.. I was a little younger than you two since I was born in the very early 80s, but I sent a letter in the very late 80s or early 90s telling whatever address was in Interaction magazine that I was one day going to work at Sierra.

They wrote me back telling me they'd be waiting for me. Of course being a Xennial (Oregon Trail Generation), I never made it in time. But wow, would I love to be there today. Two moments in gaming history that I've witnessed that were outstanding for me, 1989's Hero's Quest and the launch of the 3dfx Voodoo 4MB in '96\. It was thanks to King's Quest & Space Quest that I learned how to type and spell at an early age. As well, a little later on when I got my hands on them, thanks to Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Hero's Quest.

I was a totally ignored child, I can't say how many days & nights playing those games, eating up bologna and Velveeta sandwiches that I made myself at a pretty tender age, and washed down with RC Cola. Pretty terrible mental image, I know. The isolation just made it all that much more impactful. It was the happiness & high point of my life and honestly, still is. Sometimes I still sit and think about the worlds that Sierra created to bring myself a bit of happiness.

Sierra, and especially Hero's Quest / QFG will live within me for the rest of my life and die with me as probably the most cherished memories, characters and stories in my heart. Tolkien and the rest could never have anything on the impact Sierra adventures had on me.

<comment><USER5> Breaking the chain, I was amazed at King's Quest V and Conquests of the Longbow when I was 8 or 9 and sent a letter out asking how they made it and how I could learn to make something like that, never got a response.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps they wanted happy customers, but not happy competitors :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've heard someone suggest that Roberta Williams being at the head of Sierra was one of the reasons why Sierra had so many games designed by women. People usually have trouble naming even one prominent woman game designer, but Sierra had several - in addition to Roberta Williams, you had Jane Jensen, Lori Cole (with her husband Corey), and Christy Marx. The first three made some of the most famous adventure game series of all time - King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, and Quest for Glory. Christy Marx isn't as well known, but her Conquest of Camelot and Conquest of the Longbow games are held in pretty high regard by those who have played them (worth noting that Roberta Williams' The Colonel's Bequest is similarly lesser known but still highly regarded).

<comment><USER8> > Quest for Glory

I still prefer it's original name "Hero's Quest". Is a much more fitting title. The protagonist had not so much an interest in "glory" but was training to become a hero in order to save the town. I'm probably biased and sentimental.

(They had to change it due to a trademark claim. I think I still have the infringing floppies around somewhere.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun to read along with this recent article

[https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra- an...](https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra-and-a- disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s)

which portrays early '90s Ken Williams as callous tool of the Man, in contrast to the the free-spirited hacker/entrepreneur version you get in the post's origin story. (I don't have any strong feelings or opinions about the accuracy of either portrayal)

<comment><USER10> Gates certainly sounds deplorable, but it's interesting that one of the criticisms is:

 _"with Carey incinerating the killer—a cross-dressing man who is given about as much humanity and depth in this story as you 'd expect"_

despite this hit piece being little more than an exercise in denying Gates himself of any depth or humanity.

<comment><USER9> It's highly critical of Gates but that doesn't make it a 'hit piece' nor does it deny Gates depth or humanity. It just isn't very fond of his particular humanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you are interested in what Ken and Roberta have been up to since 2004, check out Ken's blog [1]. In short, they have been travelling the world on their Nordhavn motorboats. Ken does a good job describing their travels and issues along the way, with many technical posts. Plus there are occasional references to Sierra.

[1] [https://www.kensblog.com/](https://www.kensblog.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd highly recommend reading more of that blog. He's been publishing consistently for 7 years (!), tracking down obscure interviews and conducting a few of his own. I spent almost 2 hours this morning digging through his full history of Sierra.

Some interesting nuggets:

\- Al Lowe basically invented beta testing at Sierra for Leisure Suit Larry. He wrote a program to capture user inputs that didn't work onto the floppy disk, which the beta testers then sent back to Sierra. They then updated the graphics, text, or parser to account for these confusing areas.

\- Ken Williams was quite a visionary on several things, including the rise of IBM compatibles, MS-DOS, and the early internet / social networks.

\- Lori Cole's vision for Quest for Glory, using a cardinal direction, a season, and an element as inspiration, was really fascinating to reflect on. (I have a soft spot for Quest for Glory IV's Eastern European mythology, which was very rare in the pre-Witcher days.)

\- There was a failed merger between Sierra and Broderbund (Carmen Sandiego, Print Shop, Prince of Persia) in the early 90s that could well have changed the face of the industry.

Overall, was way better than the average internet rabbit hole!

</comment><comment><USER13> My native tongue is french. I was very bad at english at school (my teachers were awfully bad too). I had never met anyone not speaking french (that was inconceivable for me at that time of my life). And then "King's Quest 3". I spent weeks and months struggling to end the game. And to understand the texts, too! My french-english dictionary became my dearest book. And after that experience, I highly praised foreign-language skills. (I could buy/read the RPG books directly in English, idem for fantasy literature such as LotR). Learning how Ken and Roberta started their business (and eventually changed my life) is a really nice moment. Thanks!...

</comment><comment><USER14> I spent many many hours playing Sierra games as a kid. Really high quality gameplay that in some ways is hard to come by in modern games.

<comment><USER15> Favorite? Mine was King's Quest IV.

<comment><USER16> King's Quest III and IV are my favorite in the KQ series. But overall I'd probably say the first Quest For Glory. It was such a great melding of Sierra adventure and RPG.

<comment><USER17> Couldn't agree more! I got into QFG1 at the time of Sierra's VGA point-and- click remake, and what a lasting impression.

The artwork, music, sense of humor, and character building - including being able to import your character and keep building your skill points through each successive game in the series - made it really special. Truly the golden years of graphical RPGs, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I attribute most of my adulthood problem solving skills to figuring out how to get Larry laid.

</comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for all the good games from Sierra Online!

I learned a foreign language English by playing text based adventure games such as those from Sierra! Got the English basics from school, but it was by playing text adventure games that my English got much better. In order to play the text based games in English I had to use a Swedish to English dictionary to understand the words. Remember Sierra games such as Police Quest, Kings quest, Magnetic scrolls, Lucas art games.

Links to Police quest [http://www.sierragamers.com/Police- Quest-1](http://www.sierragamers.com/Police-Quest-1) [http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/police-quest-in-pursuit- of...](http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/police-quest-in-pursuit-of-the-death- angel)

</comment><comment><USER20> Gotta love those Space Quest games! You haven't really lived until you've played Astro Chicken in a space diner.

<comment><USER21> SQIII was the greatest of all the games they made.

<comment><USER22> SQIII was great, but IV really was the peak of the series for me. The time travel to future installments (you went to Space Quest 12 I think?) was really well done, and it had a slightly more serious edge that all the others in the series lacked. I remember years later trying to play the cartoonish SQVI and thinking they'd turned it into a terrible caricature of itself, which is a mighty feat.

<comment><USER23> _The time travel to future installments (you went to Space Quest 12 I think?) was really well done,_

And traveling back to Space Quest 1 with EGA graphics.

There is also this scene where you have to free up memory on some machine by throwing applications in the thrash can (erm toilet) [1]. The first time I made the mistake to trash the SQIV icon, which throws you right back to DOS. Of course, I hadn't saved for a while.

[1] [http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/space-quest-iv-roger- wilco...](http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/space-quest-iv-roger-wilco-and- the-time-rippers/screenshots/gameShotId,773368/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sierra had a game called Police Quest that I played religiously. Ahead of its time. It was also edgy with sex, language, and violence.

<comment><USER25> Ahead of its time would be one way to describe it. I highly recommend this essay [https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra- an...](https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3n8ea/how-sierra-and-a- disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s) on the development and politics of Police Quest 4.

<comment><USER24> Just found a walkthrough of Police Quest IV. What a blast from the past!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BR1u-qT3J4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BR1u-qT3J4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's not just Sierra I miss, it's RPG games that aren't mostly first-person shooters and smashers.

Maybe people of our generation will have their needs met with a new popular genre of games 'discovered' by a later generation? Maybe many of these games exist but I'm naively missing them since I'm not following the releases?

<comment><USER27> There's absolutely a glut of throwback adventure games on Steam nowadays. Take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good read. Such a fun era! Glad I was there to enjoy some of it.

</comment><comment><USER29> IIRC the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy has a decent amount of background story/info on the Williams'.

EDIT: oh... duh - there's a link to the Levy book in the blog post!

</comment><comment><USER30> Funny that just today I was searching for old D&D campaign settings and found that Birthright had a game called Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance, distributed by Sierra.

Ah, the nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice throwback WordPress theme. Every website is so flat now, and sometimes much uglier than before (cbc.ca comes to mind)</comment>


Porting Node to Windows With Microsoft's Help - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/06/23/porting-node-to-windows-with-microsoft%E2%80%99s-help/ <comment><USER2> This is great news, i cant upvote this enough. Ever since learning what Node is, its always excited me.

I'm only into part-time/hobby development and so havent been able to justify spending the time (or the money) to do a Unix based OS setup for this, since all my machines run Windows.

With a node executable and native Windows support, it means i can have a dabble more often, which could lead to completion of a real project, even if im only working on it part time. I think for that reason alone, it will increase adoption of Node many fold. Not that i have anything against Apache, but it might just get unseated as the hobbyist's first choice as multi- platform web server (assuming its still on the top spot. I havent used it in ages).

I just hope it doesnt get restricted to the Windows Server family of OSes. I did a quick dig, and can see Windows 7 supports IOCP, so i'm hopeful.

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu: free. VirtualBox for Windows: free. Even 512 MB virtual RAM for the VM should be sufficient for Ubuntu 10.10 to get you started. No need to wait! =)

(I've meanwhile reversed my setup to reflect the majority of my dev work: physically installed Ubuntu, virtualized Windows.)

<comment><USER2> thanks. that is something i did have setup. its a very useful stop-gap solution. but at some point one does inevitably have to work with the platform itself, and in all fairness, i just feel 'safer' in Windows. simply because its quite the learning curve to learn development but then to learn about a new OS adds to that.

I do see what you are saying though, and its ideal for someone that isnt as unfamiliar as i

<comment><USER4> Since graduating a year ago, I seem to have turned into a Windows guy, simply because I use it all day at work.

Having a reflective moment a couple of weeks ago, I decided to learn something completely different (for me) and try Ruby. Not wanting to become type-cast as a Windows guy, I chose to do it on a unix based system. For this, I use an Ubuntu image in Virtual Box, and have been very happy.

> I just feel 'safer' in Windows.

I guess I could say I'm the same, though I think its more down to simply preferring Windows 7's UI/UX over the likes of Gnome and KDE. I've also tried customising a whole variety Linux window mangers, but always gave up.

So what I'm doing now is using Virtual Box in headless mode, then ssh-ing in with X-forwarding enabled. This gives me new icons in Windows 7's task bar for every 'remote' Linux window I have open. (though really I don't use much more than a terminal and maybe gvim). To an observer looking over my shoulder, it would just appear that the 'remote' Linux applications are native Windows programs.

[edit] I didn't really address your point about the learning curve to learning a new OS. This is valid issue and all I can suggest is to give it a try, and using a VM is an easy way to just dip in. You can get pre-installed Virtual Box images for many Linux distros such that it is really easy to get started. Unfortunately, my set-up took quite a bit of effort to get started (even with my familiarity with unix), but using a full-screen Linux VM is a good place to get started.

I guess what I was describing is just where you can go with it once you're comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ooh, node on Azure. Finally a good excuse for a .Net guy like myself to finally play around with Node.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't surprise me, but it does amaze me. What was stopping you from playing around with Node before? I know that comes off as flippant, but I'm genuinely interested in understanding this self-imposed limit on learning.

<comment><USER7> I'm speculating, but...Barrier to entry? If you're not familiar with the UNIX stack then getting up to speed on that just to play with node might not seem like a great idea (especially if you don't have a lot of spare time) or lack of applicability? It can often be really frustrating to get up to speed on something you know you're never going to be allowed to use in your current job. Some places are MS-or-the-highway shops...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got node.js to work on Windows XP via Cygwin about 4 or 5 months ago. Here are some useful links:

\- Building node.js on Cygwin (be sure to RTFM regarding which version to build). [https://github.com/ry/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on- Cygwin-(...](https://github.com/ry/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on- Cygwin-\(Windows\))

\- helpful comments on StackOverflow - in particular running the obscure ash.exe and doing rebaseall seemed to help [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3360948/compiling-node- js...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3360948/compiling-node-js-on-cygwin)

\- self-contained windows binaries of nodejs - I did't try this, but seems like it could save some headaches <http://node-js.prcn.co.cc/>

<comment><USER9> I wish I could up vote you, but Cygwin prevents me. Imagine a world where all of the cool software was written on Windows, and the Linux folks had to be happy using Wine to run it at all. That situation would suck; that's how I feel when someone from the Linux side says "it compiles on Windows with Cygwin" as if that's some kind of achievement or favor.

<comment><USER10> > _Imagine a world where all of the cool software was written on Windows, and > the Linux folks had to be happy using Wine to run it at all._

Is this a joke? It sounds like it could be, but if it is, I can't tell.

That _was the world_ before ~2005. The use of Windows has always been predicated on the notion that for-pay software is the default, and that, as a business model it is desirable. Linux has always been the opposite. Thus, as Linux users, we get the attention of open source developers -- usually people who are developing things about which they are passionate. We also have to suffer through version <1.0 (often, <<1.0).

The "cool" software, much of it, is still Windows only (or maybe Windows and Mac). The Gimp and Inkscape are pale imitations of Photoshop and Illustrator. Video editing that is as good as Premiere or Final Cut? Forget about it. And forget about modern gaming too.

All of that has to be run with Wine, if it can be run at all.

Driver support is minimal as well -- Nvidia only last week released a beta driver which begins to address bugs which arise in Gnome 3, while introducing new ones. Imagine if that were the case with Windows: your graphics driver did not operate properly with your desktop shell and you have to wait for a new driver.

So be happy that you have Cygwin, which can almost perfectly implement a Linux environment. Wine only occasionally runs a program well enough to be usable.

<comment><USER11> I think by "cool software" politician meant "cool dev tools". When you're a hacker, it's easy to get them confused, and it does seem like a lot of cool tools are Unix only. Go comes to mind; it was basically Unix-only at first, if it isn't still.

<comment><USER9> Actually yes, I did mean cool dev tools. Sorry if that was unclear. However, I don't think Photoshop is a good counter-example since OSX has top-tier graphics applications AND runs on Linux.

<comment><USER10> > _I don't think Photoshop is a good counter-example since OSX has top-tier > graphics applications AND runs on Linux._

No, OSX runs on the Darwin kernel, not Linux. For a number of reasons, you can't take an app designed for OSX and run it on a laptop using Ubuntu (or another Linux distro).

<comment><USER12> To be fair, it would be rather trivial to port the upper levels of OSX to any other Unix-like OS. Darwin exposes a very BSD-like interface to applications.

Apple considered, for some time, replacing classic MacOS with Linux (I have used Apple's MkLinux a lot).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> (Node.js Windows server side) + (HTML5 + javascript + CSS on Windows 8 native ) == really really interesting

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice. The first time I heard a node.js talk my first thought was, "shouldn't be too bad to implement with IOCPs". Glad to see it happening.

</comment><comment><USER15> Surprised that Microsoft would support V8 as a server side JavaScript engine instead of doing something with Chakra.

<comment><USER16> Embrace, extend, extinguish.

<comment><AUTHOR> What was the last thing Microsoft successfully "extinguished"?

<comment><USER16> That doesn't mean that it isn't still their modus operandi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> thats great, funnily enough loving working with node, is one of the things that pushed me over the edge and made me buy a mackbook pro, sick of having to deal with cygwin on windows. but this is good news, albeit too late for me.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, what's wrong with cygwin? I'm not a big Node guy, but I run it on cygwin for the sake of CoffeeScript and I've written a few small Node apps as well. Hasn't been even slightly painful.

<comment><USER19> Not fast, ugly, bad integration in the OS, often outdated, bad package manager. Well, still better than not having a Unix prompt I guess.

<comment><USER12> The minTTY terminal helps a lot. Windows console is, indeed, a horrid environment.

<comment><USER20> Try Power Shell.

<comment><USER21> ... which runs in the standard console, and therefore does nothing whatever to address the problem with the Windows console being awful.

<comment><USER20> It adds a bunch of useful stuff to the Path including select, sort, and ls. The lack of utilities in the standard cmd is my major gripe, what's yours?

<comment><USER21> You were responding to someone's complaint about the lousy console window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now tell me they're writing a SQL Server driver, and I'll be very interested...

<comment><USER23> I highly doubt that they are, but I wouldn't put it past anyone from the community to have one shortly after Node for Windows is released.

<comment><USER24> Microsoft wrote an SQL Server driver for PHP as part of their push over the last few years to get people using PHP on Windows: <http://sqlsrvphp.codeplex.com/>. I suspect they'll do the same for Node, if they're serious about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is great news - although I'm more than happy using it on linux, it will help adoption by being "officially" supporting windows.

</comment><comment><USER26> Overblown .net developer panic in 3...2...1...

<comment><USER27> I am not panicing, just resolved that MS is probably deprecating .Net, it's obvious by the messages they are sending.

Hell they can't even settle on a single UI technology, .Net has 3 right now, looks like a 4th coming in Win8.

<comment><USER28> Please read this [http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/windows-8-for-...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/windows-8-for- software-developers-the-longhorn-dream-reborn.ars)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Open Source Node.js on Windows using IOCP = great

M$ involved in any way with Joyent and/or Node.js = really bad idea

<comment><USER30> Why the downvotes? Just for the knee-jerk 'M$' maybe?

Node on Windows _is_ great, or at least kinda cool, but the direct involvement of Microsoft in 'embracing' disruptive upstart technologies has, historically, been a decidedly not-great thing for said technologies.

Why on earth would one assume things will be different this time around?</comment></comment>


Gmail.com redesign leaks, looks pretty incredible - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/gmail-com-redesign-leaks-looks-pretty-incredible/ <comment><USER2> From the article: "Thankfully, one of Google's most popular productivity apps is not turning into a whitespace-infused nightmare hellscape (like say, Google Inbox). The layout is mostly the same as the existing Gmail.com, and, just like today, there are three information density settings to choose from. The new Gmail really does seem fine on the whitespace front."

Great to know!</comment>


Search the Big Lebow.ski Quotes - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebiglebow.ski/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.thebiglebow.ski/633](https://www.thebiglebow.ski/633)</comment>


Ask HN: How to motivate people to help speed up medical discoveries? - <AUTHOR>

The Problem: There are more medical mysteries than one may think. In order to solve them, we need help of the community, including healthy individuals, we need diagnostic measurements beyond human genome sequencing,
The Idea: Use Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, whatever you think would work, to tell about prospective projects and let people make pledges for the amounts of time they could devote, samples they are willing to donate, money to cover cost of reagents, etc
We are working with medically underserved populations willing to spend their own money to conduct clinical trials and find reasons for their conditions. We are lacking healthy controls for our diagnostic & observational clinical trials. We do comply with all applicable federal laws, so privacy and confidentiality is guaranteed.
Do you think these kind of projects could be crowdfunded? Would there be healthy people willing to pay for diagnostic tests and share the data with the trial researchers (HIPAA protected)? In return, we will analyze their results and place it in the context of other people's data and known biomedical information, make predictions, give early bird access to software, device and so on. Could such a project be Kickstarted? Thanks for your input! <comment><USER2> One model I would like to see works as follows:

1\. there is a patent pool to which all participating entities assign their rights

2\. there is a functional specification for the medical device (e.g. a full- body imaging scanner that puts dose < x milliroentgens of ionizing radiation into the subject per scan)

3\. there is a cyclical competition (yearly, quarterly, monthly, whatever is found to work best) during which multiple cross-disciplinary teams are invited to submit working prototypes that meet or exceed the functional specification. The funding entity guarantees that any entry meeting the minimum standards of the specification will get an order of x thousand units for testing.

4\. The funding entity also gets a non-exclusive license to manufacture the winning design. (non-exclusive, as in any of the teams are free to commercialize their own work at their own risk, not freely licensed) Profits from the sales and licensing of devices would be apportioned based on the use of technologies licensed from the patent pool.

This model would implement a positive feedback loop in which competition between teams would not be an obstacle to teams building on each others work. The main obstacles to this model are legal and political, and radically improving medical care and medical technology are likely to be popular actions. The key I think would be to get the FDA (in the US and it's counterparts in the EU, Japan and elsewhere) to rule on the safety of the functional requirement and the informed consent of beta testers rather than post-approval of completed devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good model. We can address the regulatory obstacles. We are in the process of forming an independent international ethics committee - review board addressing requirements of US, Europe and Australian authorities. Our interest is in harmless diagnostic analyzers and test kits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> how about doing trials in countries with lax regulations where people would love to get paid to try medications they otherwise would never even be able to afford</comment>


Show the politicians what we think about Obama's immigration action - <AUTHOR> https://www.barackobama.com/fight-for-reform

<comment> div-0 I left him a very special message and donated a bizillion dollars.

Enjoy!</comment>


Show HN: I made this search engine for Reddit using Bing+Reddit API. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ftfysearch.com/

<comment><USER2> I can't PM you for some reason, must be my low karma. I found a reflected XSS vulnerability since it doesn't really matter for this site, I'll paste it here, I hope you don't mind.Just html encoding the <, >, &, " characters will fix it.

[http://www.ftfysearch.com/search?q=%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3C%2Fhead%...](http://www.ftfysearch.com/search?q=%3C%2Ftitle%3E%3C%2Fhead%3E%3Cbody%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%22hi+friend+from+HN%22%29%3B+%3C%2Fscript%3E+%3C%2Fbody%3E+%3C%2Fhtml%3E)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'd forgotten to escape the search string in the title element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for doing this. Much like <http://www.searchreddit.com/>, this is cool but missing a lot of data and features.

You may want to check out these links, also:

<http://www.searchreddit.com/faq.php>

<http://www.reddit.com/help/search>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback :).

I just noticed that I'm seeing a 30-40% failure while using the API - is there any reason that should be so ? I'm batching around 20-30 ids together (as recommended).

<comment><USER3> Email me your IP (firstname.lastname@example.com) and we'll see if we can figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have tried searching Reddit several times for an article I read last week - to no avail. It was result #4 in your search results. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> You, sir, have done a great public service.

<comment><USER6> I couldn't agree more. Well done. Any plans on releasing the source? I've been looking to play with AppEngine for a project just like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

About releasing, I'll clean the code up and share it when I have time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just a FYI - reddit allows me 1 request/2 seconds - so a lot of queries may only return Bing data (no score/comments etc)

</comment><comment><USER7> just a heads up, I'm getting a BadQueryError if my search term contains an apostrophe.

</comment><comment><USER8> seems to work great, thanks.

any chance of changing the link color? too much red.</comment>


Are closed social networks inevitable? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/open-social-networks/ <comment><USER3> Who is "Rebecca"? I agree with 90% of her statements, and she appears in this conversation to have further ambitions of continuing with the ideas and convincing some powerful people, especially Paul Krugman, of their validity.

Did she ever succeed? Did she write her thoughts in a more digestible format and make those writings public? Does she have further commentary on her thesis on the capitalist or non-capitalist tendencies of modern software companies, or on other topics?

Mostly I'd just love to read more of her writing, if it exists.

Edit: I believe she is Rebecca Frankel, according to [http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca- frankel](http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/#rebecca-frankel). Still interested in any pointers to more of her writing if it exists.

<comment><USER4> Many of her comments are very interesting and I'd probably like to read more on other subjects. That said, she almost shills for Google even if she doesn't intend to. This jumped out when she pointed out that Microsoft's strategy was to profit off of "artificial scarcity" while Google's was not. Bullshit haha! It's called PageRank: the patented, artificially-scarce algorithm that made them the multi-billion dollar company worth discussing. That plus them going public told me they'd shift toward evil for the financial, "greater good." Which is evil in surveillance and software empires more often than it is good. We see them pulling stuff with Chrome and Android that wouldn't have gotten them celebration in the early days.

Another is the part about people paying ad words for freedom or stuff they couldn't otherwise get. The fact that Google's system can reach more people and more cleverly than before is certainly a benefit. There were alternatives, though, like listing your product in online stores, Buy It Now on eBay with a link to a store, or mass marketing after buying listings of leads. Similarly take less staff than traditional marketing at big firms. The online ecosystem for ads also involves lots of fraud with estimates showing it is a good percentage of ad expenses. So, Google is actually yet another middleman in this sense that tries to lock you into their set of benefits and problems. They also try to shift the benefits toward themselves a bit more over time like any business. So, they're just middlemen with a bent toward lock-in rather than purveyors of freedom.

So, aside from the Google comments, other stuff was pretty interesting. Lots of historical and economic tie-ins to her analyses.

EDIT to add: I'm only through around half the post. It's pretty huge haha.

"When I was at Google I hung out "

She also apparently worked at Google. Explains the bias. :)

<comment><USER3> I suspect, though I have no way of knowing, that she has been thoroughly disabused of any Google-exceptionalism she may have harbored at one point. Remember this was from 2010. Google Reader was 3 years from being discontinued, Google's motto was still "Don't be evil," Buzz was an experiment that people still took seriously. The rose-colored glasses were firmly affixed to many intelligent faces, and it's hard to fault her for hoping something was intrinsically different about the company and its culture.

I'm very curious whether she still thinks and hopes the same things about Google that she did then.

<comment><USER5> She is right about one thing, "Silicon Valley", is the worst thing that has happened to the decentralization and distribution or the powers of the internet. Their entire motive is centralization and monopolization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP.

Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use.

I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss.

Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.

<comment><USER7> Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with sometimes broken img links.

> If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

But only after consent from your the sender, right?

<comment><USER8> >I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links

BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm)

<comment><USER7> That's brilliant, and I wouldn't expect anything less from the BBC. They are technically competent and innovated in the broadcasting space, like a few other networks did/do. It surely helped that the BBC have (had?) an R&D department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Brilliant, and eloquently phrases something I've tried to convey to myriad technologists during my time in the valley:

 _" When I was young my father read to me "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," advertising it as a great classic of futuristic science fiction. Unfortunately, I was unimpressed. It didn't seem "futuristic" at all: it seemed like an archaic fantasy. Why? Certainly it was impressive that an author in 1869 correctly predicted that people would ride in submarines under the sea. But it didn't seem like an image of the future, or even the past, at all. Why not? Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.

Futurists consistently get their stories wrong in a particular way: when they say that technology changes the world, they tell stories of fabulous gadgets that will enable people to do new and exciting things. They completely miss that this is not really what "change" – serious, massive, wrenching, social change - really is. When technology truly enables dreams of change, it doesn't mean it enables aristocrats to dream about riding around under the sea. What it means is that enables the aristocrat's butler to dream of not being a butler any more — a dream of freedom not through violence or revolution, but through economic independence. A dream of technological change – really significant technological change – is not a dream of spiffy gadgets, it is a dream of freedom, of social & economic liberation enabled by technology."_

<comment><USER10> >Because the person riding around on the submarine under the sea was a Victorian gentleman surrounded by appropriately deferential Victorian servants.

As someone who actually read Jules Verne (instead of watching the Disney movie or reading a poorly-translated abridgement,) I would not characterize Nemo as a Victorian gentleman.

First of all Verne wasn't English, and Nemo isn't a Victorian gentleman, he's a rebel and a terrorist. He doesn't have appropriately deferential Victorian servants, he has fellow freedom fighters.

Arronax's servant Consiel is the closest to a "appropriately deferential Victorian servant" but the way he is written, he comes across as a borderline Asperger's Syndrome savant scientist, not at all like Mercury from "Bleak House."

I get that people make up stuff to support their thoughts and biases, but calling Jules Verne a Victorian writer is simply incorrect. He's a lot closer to Dumas than Dickens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The part that jumped out at me was this:

Piaw: "The magic trick that Facebook pulled off was getting the typical user to provide and upload all his/her personal information. It's incredibly hard to do that: Amazon couldn't do it, and neither could Google. I don't think it's one of those things that's technically difficult, but the _social engineering required to do that demands critical mass_. That's why I think that Facebook is (still) under-valued."

Rob: "@Piaw - it was an accident of history I think. When Facebook started, they required a student ID to join. This made a culture of "real names" that stuck, and that no one else has been able to replicate."

I added the emphasis. I think this exchange is significant in thinking about an open and better replacement. Why hasn't popped into my head.

<comment><USER11> Facebook also grew, specifically, on the appeal of Harvard / Ivy Leage / Selective University association. Part of the reason for being on the network was to 1) show who you were and 2) associate with a high-affinity social cohort.

I've been pointing this out for years, recently ran across another source, at Unz, who makes the same observation.

<comment><USER4> That's another good point. I couldn't be sure if it was fiction or accurate but The Social Network movie kept referencing the exclusivity of the clubs that everyone wanted. He was moving that experience online. So, being the cool thing plus your list being exclusive and in your control could definitely be a driver. Each of these are individually motivating for users.

<comment><USER11> The risk Facebook runs is in having lost that cachet.

Facebook transitioned from "the cool kids" to "all the kids". They've been playing a highly defensive game, through pricey acquisitions, of seeing that they remain "all the kids", though with significant leakage forming.

No single other party has decided to enter into the frey with a decentralised social networking model (Google could have, didn't, and at this point I'm suspecting won't, more on that: [https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ5An)).

One thought that's been bubbling up my head is that we still don't fully understand networks, values, and costs. First it was Sarnoff (V = n), then Metcalfe (V = n^2), then Tilly-Odlyzko (V = n(log(n))).

I argue that V = n(log(n)) - <USER2>

That is: there's a _decreasing_ value for each additional user, but a _constant_ cost function. Where log(n) < kn, adding additional users hurts you.

You also risk a smaller, higher-value network beating you out.

There are a few implications, one of which is that network size is highly dependent on 'k'. This strikes me as a very general characteristic, common for pretty much any network-type structure: social networks, phone systems (crank and sales calls), cities (crime, disease, congestion), computer chips (heat, noise, defects), and more.

There are also some psychological and perceptual limitations at play. I've been trying to find what I can on human limits of information consumption. Several sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest ~100 - 300 emails/day is a near upper limit, the NY Times comments moderation desk averages slightly fewer than 800 comments/day per person. That's about one every 36 seconds, straight.

I know my own bandwidth for articles, comments, posts, and books is limited, as well as my capacity for handling longer forms once I've started consuming shorter-form content.

I'm tumbling this around to see what I can get out of it. Not sure yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I only read the start of this, but already there's 2 big problems with the idea of a collectively-owned social graph:

1\. I may want to have different social graphs on different networks. Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for work, Google Plus for hell if I know, etc. Not only would I probably want different graphs for the different networks, I'd also explicitly want to avoid having those networks know about the social connections I have outside of it (e.g. I don't want to just tell LinkedIn to ignore my family, I specifically don't want it to have access to that info in the first place).

2\. The social graph isn't the only component of the network effect. Even if we had a collectively-owned social graph, all of the content that you produce or consume is limited to a single social network. So even if Google Plus could see my entire Facebook social graph, anything I post on Facebook would not be on Google Plus (and vice versa). So the network effect is still strong, because everybody would still have to gravitate to the same social network in order to see each others' posts.

The only way this really works is if we have a federated social network, where all federated networks share the same social graph and have access to all the content. But while federation works for a messaging platform, it doesn't really work all that well for a social network because it also means all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely restrictive. If Facebook was federated with Google Plus, Facebook couldn't introduce any new features since Google Plus doesn't have them. Or Google Plus couldn't introduce its Circles concept because Facebook doesn't (didn't?) have that.

<comment><USER13> > all networks have to have the same feature set, and that's hugely > restrictive.

The ideas of microkernels and, well, TCP, suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER12> I don't follow. What do microkernels and TCP have anything at all to do with federated social networks?

<comment><USER13> They both manage to produce great things and new features not hinted at in their spec (ie. An OS and The Internet (kinda; TCP != IP), respectively) despite having a limited, shared feature set.

<comment><USER12> This is complete nonsense. You may as well say that apples and oranges are a counterargument, because both can be made into different delicious desserts even though both are fruits with a lot of similarities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not the same definition as discussed here, but: All my social networking among friends is "closed". I almost never post publicly, everything happens in closed groups on facebook, in a group chat, in a Slack for a group of friends/coworkers/organization, Snapchats where you're either in or you're out etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From TFA: "Lessig told me I had to write an account that fit in five pages in order to hope to be heard, to which I reacted with some despair. I can't! There is more than five pages worth of complexity to this problem! If I try to reduce beyond a certain point I burn the sauce. You are watching me struggle in public with this problem."

</comment><comment><USER15> Potentially this could have been titled: 'Technology, Freedom, Economics and Scarcity'. Rebecca is rarely well articulated, her arguments are innovative, nuanced and delightful to read; to which the closed social network issue seems merely as an aside.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps you meant that she is _really_ well articulated (rather than rarely)?

<comment><USER15> No, I meant _rarely_ as in it is rare to find a person so well articulated in their argument.

<comment><USER17> I took it as she is articulate only on occasion.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex it was a rarely well articulated appraisal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> MySpace appeared to be a big winner too. Facebook's time will come.

<comment><USER19> I hear this but I'm not sure something will replace MySpace as violently as facebook did. Nothing says they can't come along even though competitors come and go. People still buy things on eBay and craigslist, people still shop on Amazon, people still search with Google.

<comment><USER18> The big Internet brands have various levels of vulnerabilities/opportunities for competitors. Google search is weakening day by day. Wikipedia's design and software is static. Facebook can't decide whether it's a social network or a news network. Amazon and Ebay are vulnerable to niche competitors. Change is coming, and when it does it's usually unexpected.

<comment><USER20> Does anyone else think the static design of Wikipedia is a good thing?

<comment><USER21> I love the static nature of Wikipedia's design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> there seems to be a flaw with rebecca's only example. she seems to imply that google is responsible for the conference tables existence, which is most certainly not true. if anything, Google in this case is responsible for restricting local markets, and directing traffic to foreign ones. Conference tables have always been needed, and have always been made (most often sourced locally), Google didn't create the conference table business, it just helped direct conference table buyers to this one particular site. that seems to be to restricting market freedom, not expanding it.

<comment><USER23> Agreed for that example, especially in light of what Google later became. Pre- Google, what would the custom conference table guy do? Presumably cold-call and place ads in trade papers. Not an insurmountable problem, assuming there's demand. All Google does is in this scenario is put you in front of office managers searching for "conference table".

But I think the larger point stands - the real change is in indexing the public internet, making it possible (in theory) for a small player to reach the larger world without the capital investment that would've previously required.

Reality is not living up to the early optimism over the so called "long tail", but I believe that only reinforces her point about the dangers of centralizing the internet.

<comment><USER22> certainly. centralising is bad, but this article seemed more like a google shill, rather than debate about keeping/making the internet decentralised. i mean, for the majority of it she was talking about google being a white knight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new.

Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite.

In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with.

Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.

<comment><USER25> Usenet was pretty much utterly anarchic. It faded. I'm still not completely sure why - the people who got off of it can't really say. Perhaps it's as simple as port blockers on corporate networks and people going around corporate networks with phones.

<comment><USER26> Spam, AOL ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)) and the high cost of hosting the binary groups are mostly responsible for the decline of USENET.

I know I slowly stopped reading it as the spam and new customs (top posting, not trimming posts) crept slowly in, and most of the action switched to web forums (because of shiny HTML and what not).

<comment><USER25> I keep forgetting about binaries.

Even if your ISP dropped NNTP, there were still free NNTP servers around, so I'm less than agreed about that expectation. And the Eternal September was in 1993. Usenet was "viable" well past ten years past that.

I think the best explanation is "new shiny Web" although about... half of the folks I used to read on Usenet are now on Other Fora and it's nowhere near the same - it's not a substitute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We designed a decentralized platform to power social apps. Precisely to give organizations the power and choice of running their own server and install social apps, the same way they can run Wordpress and install plugins. While regular users have their accounts seamlessly work across all domains, and connect with friends across communities and privacy just works as it should.

See it at qbix.com/platform -would love to hear your opinions.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah yes, the Eric Schmidt-era Google was so seemingly altruistic with so much hacker ethos that all the cynical hackers dared to dream that they would save us. Alas.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the key take aways I got from this article is that it is nearly impossible to depair the efficiency of exploitative capitalism of 'physical industry' and the abstraction that is an economic, or generically a bloodless, revolution.

It is economically more efficient to centralize the resources but far less robust. SV could disappear tomorrow and a significant amount of the Internet's "revolutionary" capabilities would disappear. This doesn't appeal to SV's narcissistic sell of a special snowflake, but the power they wield in their capacity to damage any progress associated with the growth of the internet.

On the other hand, a distributed internet is far more diverse and robust yet the economic costs can be exponentially far more damaging and costly.

<comment><USER25> There's nothing efficient about centralizing resources. SFAIK, this always holds except for odd edge cases of truly public { nonrival, nonexcludable } goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > "The Social Graph" and its associated apps should be like the internet, > distributed and not confined to one company's servers.

It is like this though. Any one of us can re-create our social graph in a heartbeat on any of these services at any point in time by importing our contacts and letting the network present us with our associations at the moment in time we want it to.

I've done this with linkedin, having zero presence there until the moment I wanted to network in a new area.

I've done this with snapchat

Telegram

anything I want at that point in time

there is no need for continued presence on any one of them since you can come and go as you please with new profiles and reconnecting to existing associates.

<comment><USER30> That's a great concept: The fact that a list of {name, email, mobilephone number} allows you to effectively re-create your own network wherever you want is pretty cool.

I read the open/closed in the article as less about that and more about the fact that e.g. I can't push a twitter post to Facebook without Facebook specifically putting that function into Facebook. I also can't combine the comment streams from Twitter and Facebook. That's the kind of openness that I thought the article was referencing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We already have an open graph, its the Internet Protocol and associated addresses. All other experiences that are delivered over IP are just sub- protocols with attached UX that is preferable for the users.

<comment><USER32> It's probably worth pointing out that a graph consists of nodes _and edges_. The Internet (protocol(s)) standardized building & discovering nodes, but they are not standardizing edge discovery. And they only cover a very ephemeral mode of edge building.

 _That_ is what the social graph is about - making it possible to describe and discover the edges.

<comment><USER11> What would you hope to have / expect to find for edge discovery? Any examples?

What types of edges might you want to have that existing models don't support?

<comment><USER32> The things a social graph gives you - Friends of a Friend, graph overlap, graph complexity, etc.

All these metrics matter a lot in the social space. We can't get them (with, see below, a few exceptions like HTML - and boy is having the edges there a useful thing)

<comment><USER11> So, relationships, essentially.

An article I ran acrosss a few days back pointed out how the _nature_ relationships also matters. It starts off noting that gender is often given as binary (M/F), when reality can be more complicated (though most of the complications are a distinct minority case). That's something I ran across years back looking at healthcare data, where "gender" had in some cases five values: male, female, indeterminate, other, and unknown.

Relationships, though: "friend", "family", "co-worker", "ex-spouse", "enemy", ...

Any thoughts on capturing something such as this (or of similar complexity) on a graph? Or references?

I suspect international or inter-corporate relationships might be similar.

<comment><USER32> There have been attempts:

FOAF: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_\(ontology\))

XFN: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network)

There's probably more. There's always more standards :)

<comment><USER11> So many to choose from!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One question: why don't we see these closed systems in good old telephony?

<comment><USER34> It's much more expensive to expand your phone network and network effect between distant physical locations almost does not exist.

How much does it cost facebook to handle traffic in India? How much would it cost for american-only phone networt to create and connect new network in India?

<comment><USER33> So if we handwavingly turn the argument around: if Facebook and others had to physically build their own networks, we would have had an open social network :)

But now that they can use the internet, the networks become closed.

Interesting theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, initially. Pretty much everything starts off closed.

(DNR)</comment>


Electric cars neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17199894

<comment><USER2> From the article:

"But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative."

So the author of the article is advocating against electric cars because 1% of trips require more range?

Has he never heard of a rental car?

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course. but they are very fashionable, so we must subsidize them massively.

Of course it might make more sense to tax the pollution than for government to try to pick the next technology. Didn't George Bush tell us it was going to be hydrogen cars? Now its supposed to be electric, but who knows what will actually happen in reality?

When you pick one technology and give it all of the advantages, it makes it all that much harder for competing technologies to succeed. A level playing field is best.

We have an entire industry of people trying to figure out what technologies will win. They compete with each other and have all kinds of different backgrounds and differing opinions. And they learn as they go, something Washington seems incapable of doing.

<comment><USER4> > When you pick one technology and give it all of the advantages, it makes it > all that much harder for competing technologies to succeed. A level playing > field is best.

Haha, that is exactly what I was thinking - we've already picked combustion engines, the infrastructure for which is now solidly entrenched. This status- quo is very unlikely to be broken without additional incentives, so subsidies seem to me a good way of getting out of a local optimum.

<comment><USER5> > the infrastructure for which is now solidly entrenched

This is one of the reasons you have for making choices and having mandated standards for interoperability. Building infrastructure is expensive and if you do it right it lasts for a long time.

From an infrastructure standpoint electric cars have some serious advantages over hydrogen, since we already have extensive experience building electrical infrastructure. And it should be possible to improve batteries without replacing entire vehicles. And electric vehicles create an opening for small entreprneurial companies to try out new devices in ways that hydrogen with it's high barriers to entry and need for a massive infrastructure upgrade do not.

<comment><USER3> when you do it wrong it lasts for a long time too. especially when government builds in things that hide the true costs.

electric and hydrogen are only 2 options. We should wait for one that can actually beat the gasoline engine.

all we need do is make sure that the total costs of using gasoline are paid by those choosing to use it. That means taxing emissions too.

if another technology can beat gasoline when all costs of both are considered, it should replace gasoline. And if nothing succeeds at doing that, then no big change makes ense

<comment><USER6> >> We should wait for one that can actually beat the gasoline engine.

I'd say that motors that are _far_ more mechanically efficient than gas engines, a fuel distribution infrastructure that's already in place (electricity mains) and in-car storage of fuel that has made enormous leaps in the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down pretty much qualifies as beating the gasoline engine.

With scale, costs will be lower; there are fewer moving parts, all elements of power distribution and use can be independently upgraded to improve the efficiency and impact of the car. Gasoline cars cannot do this.

Gasoline looks quite beat to me.

<comment><USER3> then let it beat it. If its so much beater, it should be able to do without any special help.

we didn't have Steve Jobs going to DC to explain how his product is better than other phones and therefore needs a subsidy.

new products should prove themselves as they always have. it should not be whichever product that has presented for it the most widely believed theory that wins

if its so great, it should be able to garner investment dollars all on its own.

<comment><USER6> The gasonine subsidy is a non-level playing field.

Dcespite that, the cars being produced by Tesla _are_ price competitive, and are on track to do just that, despite the subsidies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not sure how they come up with their numbers. Wikipedia says that in the US an electric car would emit less than half of the CO2 of a gas powered equivalent.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emissions)

And it seems that the UK uses less coal power than the US. Thus, the emission reductions in the UK should be even better, i.e. more than 50%. But the article says the emission reductions are only 20%.

I wish they would tell us more about their calculations. With these types of estimations, one can bring about drastic changes of the conclusion with subtle changes of the assumptions in the estimate.

<comment><USER3> Maybe they consider the extra CO2 to build it. Yes, more info would be helpful.

<comment><USER6> If they do, hopefully they are including the C02 to build the gasoline car, as well as all emissions in all stages of procuring the fuel for both drivetrains.

Doing a dust-to-road analysis of impact is _very_ hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages._

Such as...?

 _Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim._

So? I care about convenience (less/no trips to the fill-up station) and overall cost.

 _But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative._

So rent a gas car. Plan for this when figuring the ongoing costs of your electric car.

 _And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range._

So require that this be disclosed, so people know to get something with at least 1.5x the range they'll need in a day.

I guess those two things were the "distinct disadvantages" mentioned earlier. Neither is terribly convincing.

 _Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven._

This should solve itself in a decade or two if we stop letting the NIMBYs block nuclear plants. And all the already-sold electric cars will benefit just as much as the not-yet-sold ones.

 _The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax._

And here I suppose we have the purpose of the article. But why not just stop subsidizing it before adding a tax?

</comment><comment><USER9> Other points aside, the last point this article makes is a good one: a carbon tax would be a far more effective way to create a more efficient transportation system (and broader economy), than attempting to pick the winner from the start.

It's sort of the "I, Pencil" problem - the interactions in the economy are far too complex to manage in a centralized manner. In this case, we have individuals attempting to predict the winner based on very limited information and applying a subsidy, which may or may not be anything more than arbitrary.

The alternative is to have all the millions of decision-makers be informed and influenced by price differences emanating from the pollutants themselves, motivating them to seek more efficient solutions. The effects are far more wide-ranging and actors are guaranteed to be rewarded in proportion to their benefit to the environment. The same holds for other subsidies: for solar, for weatherizing homes &c.

It's a shame our current advocacy & media landscape leaves little room for someone like me who supports a carbon tax but not cap & trade or direct subsidies. Here's to hoping <http://votereports.org/>, or something like it, gets us there.

Actually, I just emailed <http://www.carbontax.org/>, hopefully I can get them in the system in time for the election.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here in Kansas City, 87% of our electricity comes from coal. 11% from nuclear. Wind makes up the lion's share of the remaining 2%. One of the Sierra Club's members had his soul crushed when a friend of mine pointed out that he was, in fact, piloting a coal-powered car.

That's not to say the tech isn't cool. But it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car.

<comment><USER11> It's a common fallacy that electric cars are just "moving the emission source" and therefore no better than gasoline cars. However, _even_ if 100% of the electricity is generated from coal, an EV is actually _much_ more environmentally friendly than any gasoline-powered car.

It all comes down to efficiency numbers. Power plants and electric motors are just massively more efficient than gasoline engines, and it's much easier to scrub the emissions on one pipe than many.

Of course, they also make it easier to transition to renewable sources (replacing one power plant vs. replacing many cars), but that's just icing on the cake.

<comment><USER10> How efficient is the transmission of electricity from generation to end point? How efficient is the charging circuitry? The motors? How many kilowatts need to be burned in a coal plant to put a kilowatt of energy to the pavement in an EV? I assure you, EVs themselves may be very efficient, but the archaic technology that 70% of the US (via coal/NG/oil smoke-and-fire generation) is using to generate and transfer electricity is not.

<comment><USER11> If you're interested, there's been plenty of research done on the matter. Search for "well to wheel" studies. You can find a good number of them online if you look, and electric cars beat the pants off of everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One does wonder if this article was financed by oil companies. Richard Pike, the specialist the article referred to had a 25 year career at BP [1] and has put forward arguments that oil shortage is a myth [2]. I am adding The Economist to my list of untrustworthy new sources.

[1] [http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.as...](http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.asp)

[2] [http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate- change/oil-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil- shortage-a-myth-says-industry-insider-842778.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> They forget to talk about noise pollution. Electric cars are extremal quiet, that's a huge bonus for big cities.

<comment><USER14> True, but unfortunatly blind people maybe not let the seeing keep the cars quiet.

<comment><USER15> I actually know a blind guy who walk around NYC based on sound. These quiet cars are going to produce noise soon or else interest groups will force them to by pushing for legislative action. [http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/autos/electric_car_noise/ind...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/autos/electric_car_noise/index.htm)

<comment><USER16> Doesn't he hear the tires?

<comment><USER17> No, they are silent electric tires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The fact that such a huge portion of electricity comes from coal is a much bigger problem than all the commuter cars on the road combined. Switching all those power plants over to nuclear makes sense environmentally, politically, and financially.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, not politically. Large portions of the general public are still afraid of nuclear power plants. They often like the idea in principle, but don't want to live anywhere near one, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent them from being constructed near their cities.

<comment><USER18> Er, my bad; I was thinking of terms of international policy, "politically" was the wrong word choice. Public opinion has been shifting in favor of (or, less opposed to) widespread nuclear power, but not nearly fast enough to make it a reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see a full carbon cost for some of these "green" cars. I bet that between manufacturing 5 to 6,000 batteries per car and production of the additional electronics they are creating a lot more waste than people realize.

</comment><comment><USER20> Shorter Economist: carbon taxes are better than electric cars so let's have neither.</comment>


Comparing C and Rust Network Protocol Exercises - <AUTHOR> https://ayende.com/blog/185859-A/comparing-c-and-rust-network-protocol-exercises <comment><USER3> It's hard to say anything without comparing the source code. I don't see a github reference, so I don't know if it is available.

I know his pain of rust's type inference gone insane. When things get too strange, I got in the habit of partially constraining the inferred type - <USER2> don't have to specify the full type BTW, only the part you want to constrain. Also, I'm playing with intellij which shows the inferred type in the code while you type, very nice.

OTOH, his workflow seems to demonstrate why C doesn't cut it: He spends an important amount of time to debug trough it. He is carefull and still valgrind finds errors. Trying to handle all errors in rust is too much of a burden, which probably means a lot of C errors go unhandled.

These things indicate incomplete understanding of what the C code is actually doing (instead of what it is supposed to do). Now I get the impression he is a more than capable enough developer. And still a simple but not trivial task of < 1kloc contains these kinds of errors. Do you want to trust the stability and security of your networking to this C code?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not hacking on the guy. He could be me, as I have comparable experiences in C and in rust as he describes. But the truth is, I wrote tons of bugs in C and found even more in other people's C code.

Rust takes more thinking things through. It feels slower writing the code. You'll spend a lot of time waiting on the compiler while it does it utter best to hate you and shred your work to pieces. You can't quick and dirty hack trough a job like you do in C. But in the end, the rust result is a lot more trustworthy, and that aspect alone gains you a lot of time lost on troubleshooting all kinds of weird crashes.

<comment><USER4> It would help if tutorials would advise you not to lean more heavily than you must on type inference. They have a second goal of selling you on the language, and inference is an attractive feature, in simple programs.

You often can't avoid relying on type inference in clever libraries, where the author can't necessarily spell the annotation. It is on the library author to keep that from leaking out to users.

Bugs in Rust and modern C++ are fewer and bigger, because they more often result from misunderstanding the problem or library preconditions than expressing the solution. There are plenty of such bugs, but you have those in C, too, on top of the others.

<comment><USER3> I still live in Java6 land. I love inference, despite their occasional dark side.

      Map<String,List<Someclass>> x=new HashMap<String,List<Someclass>>();

The problem of modern C++ is all of old C++ comes along for the ride. Even if you write only modern code, and manage to withstand the 'this once only' siren song there are all your (ex-)colleagues writing in their own style.

One of the major plusses of rust is that it gives you basic guarantees. C++ can't do that.

<comment><USER5> Type inference is super handy in a lot of places. The problem I've run into in the rust book and other intro docs is they almost always use type inference, which makes it harder to learn what is going on. I'd prefer they used explicit types to start and then ease into type inference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To the point of having something similar to defer in C. Gnu C has attribute cleanup[1][2] which is supported by both GCC and Clang.

Sure its not portable in the strictest sense but these two compilers offer wide enough support that may be sufficient for your use case. systemd uses it, for example.

glib is also a good general purpose library, you do not need to use GObject or it's event loop to make use of it.

[1] [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Variable- Attributes...](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Variable- Attributes.html)

[2][http://echorand.me/site/notes/articles/c_cleanup/cleanup_att...](http://echorand.me/site/notes/articles/c_cleanup/cleanup_attribute_c.html)

<comment><USER7> Zig (a modern, safer C) has defer:

[https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#defer](https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#defer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The comments on the article page (not here) show that the commenters are not reading the article carefully.

This is a scrupulously written article with deeply meaningful conclusions. Rust is an immature language -- a stage every language goes through! -- and you can tell. What no one knows, yet, is whether its designers have painted themselves into a corner that prevents fixing it. The compiler, too, is immature, and will certainly get better at localizing the causes of problems, but that is a research project.

C++ is legitimately criticized for complexity that comes from its complicated history. It inherited all of C's warts, and more from early experiments that didn't pan out. You can mostly avoid most of them, but promiscuous integer conversion and overflow always lurk, and you never know when you will encounter old-school code that revives the old monsters.

Rust claims benefits from not inheriting legacy hacks (except C linking conventions, which affect function call details), but is rapidly growing its own legacy of past design choices that constrain future choices. The only limits on this problem are foresight and mathematical rigor of design formalisms, and both are limited.

It might be that Rust programmers will need to learn to rely less on type inference, and state types "unnecessarily", just to get understandable error messages. Improvements in the compiler might include its identifying choke points where such a type annotation would help.

Modern C++ coding gives much the same experience of spending extra time satisfying the compiler, then the program mostly works when you do; but the error messages don't take hours to figure out. Usually, the most obscure complaints come out as mismatches between long function-and-template argument lists, where you have to pick out the one word that doesn't match, but these take minutes, not hours, and could be automated without a research project. Much of that will disappear (not all!), with Concepts in C++20.

The difference between the C and C++/Rust experiences is very much like the difference with interpreted languages -- you depend a great deal more on exhaustive testing when the compiler does less.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the author would appreciate Zig ([https://ziglang.org](https://ziglang.org)).

Zig strikes the perfect balance between C and Rust.

The documentation is the best place to start.

It's worth supporting Zig on Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk](https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk)</comment>


Thoughts on WebRTC Data Channels? - <AUTHOR> I'm web game developer. I've been developing my games with Web Socket technology. I was planning to try WebRTC at some point and I already started to develop a game with it. It's a fast-paced FPS shooter. I need low latency values. So I thought WebRTC might be good choice. According to Can I use website, it's only not available on IE and Edge in major web browsers.<p>I just want to ask, does anyone have any experience with WebRTC data channels at big scale? And should I really use it on my project? I can still go with Websocket, but I really want to try and see if it's powerful. <comment><USER2> WebRTC is peer to peer This means that if one of your players has a slow connection, then the updates to everyone else may be slow.

The API for WebRTC is similar to WebSocket, so the client side JS should be easy to set up, except for initiating the connection. You will need to setup a STUN and perhaps a TURN server to get everyone to join correctly.

If you are using the WebRTC for voice for the player to hear, you will also need to setup a Media server, probably with SIP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your answer. Well, I'll plan this game in an environment that doesn't require authoritative game structure. Players will basically broadcast their position and rotation information to other players and that's all.

So even if user has low speed internet connection, we'll see him slow or laggy basically.

There are also some libraries that provides easy-to-use APIs for WebRTC. I'll prefer them in this case.

I really want to use WebRTC. Because this technology looks awesome, especially for lower latency values. I'm just thinking, it can be good choice for that kind of fast-paced game.

I looked up for some examples on web, that uses WebRTC on game, unfortunately couldn't find. So I was thinking, there should be reason for that.</comment></comment>