Ask HN: How to ignore guilt while using open source code? - <AUTHOR>

Whenever I want to use an open source code(marginally non-trivial functionality, properly licensed), I have this irresistible feeling of guilt and shame. There is something in my head which says, "This code is easy. You are a cheat for using such a simple code. You should write your own". But then I remember the advice of more experienced programmer's about code reuse and focusing on unsolved problems. Even right now, I am in an internal strife between writing my own or using an existing solution. Why do I feet guilt? And how do I completely ignore it?And should I ignore it? <comment><USER2> Is your identity wrapped up in being a super-competent programmer who can do everything by himself?

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

I can suggest three approaches to not feeling guilt over using other people's code:

1) Get "writing difficult programs" out of your system by writing some really difficult programs. Don't let it contaminate your more practical work. Optimize separately.[1]

2) Notice inconsistencies related to the guilt - can you do more good in the world with the time and money saved by reusing existing code? Know the concrete thing you're trying to achieve, and remind yourself of it when you feel guilt over trivial things. Another inconsistency: you probably don't feel guilt over using Intel processors or Linux or all the amenities of civilization.

3) The nuclear option - hundreds of hours of meditation. If you can notice the guilt over and over again, or repeatedly ask yourself _who_ is feeling the guilt, you are almost certain to attain mastery over these unwanted thought patterns. See [2]

[1] [http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_separately/)

[2] [http://sharanam.tumblr.com/post/865951869/kenneth-folk-a- sys...](http://sharanam.tumblr.com/post/865951869/kenneth-folk-a-systematic- approach)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are making a lot of sense. Especially "writing difficult programs" out of your system". I am going to attempt this. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't feel guilty using open source code. I have more confidence in using code that has been battle-hardened and there is more time saved. And since it's open sourced, if something doesn't work right, I can go in and fix it. I'm a results driven guy. I care about getting quality results. Perhaps you are more into coding for the sake of coding?

</comment><comment><USER4> You should be optimizing for value produced per programmer-hour spent. If an open-source solution lets you do this better, then go with it; if it doesn't, then don't.

Note that "value" may be different for different situations.

* If you're writing code for a bootstrapped one-person startup, i.e. this is a software product, website, or service that you're going to sell, then you would probably measure value as expected profit.

* If you're writing code as part of your job, you should probably be trying to maximize the things that the software's supervisor(s) / user(s) want the software to do. This is usually (but not always) aligned with expected future profit/revenue for the business.

* If the project is a learning experience to improve your own understanding and capabilities, then you should seek out unfamiliar technologies and interesting problems, and not worry so much about polishing the rough edges.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's like feeling guilt when hammering a nail because you didn't forge the hammer or cast the nail.

Sometimes I also feel that way. But then I remember that I'm not writing a data-structures library or ORM framework, I'm trying to build a product.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry your guilt make no sense. If your goal is to write code then write code. If you want to create something new/cool then do that. Goals and means are two separate things.

</comment><comment><USER7> Open Source is designed for re-use, you also can give something back. It could be a code, documentation or support for community in any valuable means.

</comment><comment><USER8> Everybody's nailed everything I already wanted to say, except for this... if you make improvements, send back a pull request.

There's absolutely no shame in using battle-tested code that somebody else wrote. If you really do experience guilt though (you shouldn't), the easiest way I can think to mitigate that is to just promise yourself to contribute any improvements you make, and don't worry about whether or not those improvements are accepted.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can't really cheat unless there are rules.

As for not feeling guilty, maybe you should give something back to the community? Work on an open-source project or something, maybe?

Or maybe you can put it on the same level as something you're happy with. Like working with other programmers in your company, whose code you could probably write.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do that. But I am not very regular. I should change that.</comment></comment>


Older Chromebooks, including the original Pixel, won't run Android apps - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/if-you-want-to-run-android-apps-on-chromebooks-youll-need-a-newer-model/ <comment><USER2> A little disappointing, given that I own a first-gen Chromebook Pixel and have kept ChromeOS on it with the hopes that it would eventually get Android apps.

Maybe it's time to finally wipe out ChromeOS altogether and install Fedora on it.</comment>


George Scialabba's 40-year fight with depression (podcast) - <AUTHOR> http://www.radioopensource.org/depression/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something of an audio addendum to the BAFFLER article that rose and fell here last year. It's moving to hear Scialabba talk it through himself, with some of the notes read aloud by an actor. As a sometime-depressive myself, I found it to be a Big Time Relief to listen through to the end + make the connection to somebody else's vicious, hard-fought, victorious war of attrition contra depression.</comment>


The new CKEditor 5 release is out with Electron support, autosave and more - <AUTHOR> https://ckeditor.com/blog/CKEditor-5-v11.0.0-released/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant!

CKEditor is an highly under-rated drop-in solution for web sites and applications that is lodash of embedded text editing.

If your application requires a decent text tool and you aren't using CKEditor you're doin' it wrong...</comment>


Multi Touch Table... Made Out of a Cardboard Box! - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/394426/college-student-makes-multi+touch-table-out-of-cardboard-box

<comment><USER2> Gizmodo seems to be freaking out with URL resolution. There was a post awhile back about Lux. Here's a post from the forums for the group that builds the device shown. <http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/1731/>

</comment><comment><USER3> this is really cool. i had no idea you could do detection with a webcam. does this require a pretty good overhead light to work properly? I'm gonna try this.</comment>


Comedy Theory inspired by ANNs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e <comment><AUTHOR> For the past several months I have been trying to understand how comedy works, to figure out a step-by-step process for coming up with jokes, and I think I'm onto something.

This is my first attempt to express the ideas I have about it. I'm not a neuroscientist, and my theory can be totally incomplete and mistaken, but I think it has some useful epiphanies that explain a lot of things.

I am still working on it and trying to figure it out, and now I'm looking for some feedback/ideas, I really want to talk to some smart people about the subject.

Please let me know what you think. Any criticism/questions that you have, anything that is unclear or can be better explained, any thoughts/ideas would be very valuable to me!</comment>


Scotland Threatens to Leave U.K. If Forced Out of Single Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-19/scotland-threatens-to-leave-u-k-if-forced-out-of-single-market <comment><USER2> English & Pro remain, but frankly, good riddance.

I'd happily divest NI and Wales while we're at it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is excellent.

Friendly devolution of sovereignty back to the various peoples is the moral way forward.

</comment><comment><USER4> People should be weary that this is not 'Scotland threatening to leave' necessarily, it's the SNP ginning up their audience. Obviously, there is concern, but anything existential the SNP will use.

I lived in Canada throughout the 20 years or so of near-Quebec separation, it's similar in rhetoric.

Absolutely every bit of legislation, every policy, every cause - is run through the separatist opportunistic filters.

Because they don't really have a majority, they're pressed to do anything they can to 'keep the base' and to find that bit of anger that gets them over the top.

<comment><USER5> Bearing in mind that I know next to nothing about Québécois separatism (including whether that's even the right thing to call it), I am genuinely curious whether this is a good analogy. There is no "American Union" that Canada threatened to leave while Quebec wanted to remain a part of. Surely that's a hugely significant difference?

<comment><USER6> > There is no "American Union" that Canada threatened to leave while Quebec > wanted to remain a part of. Surely that's a hugely significant difference?

What about NAFTA?

<comment><USER7> Canada never threatened to leave NAFTA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does the rest of the UK also get a vote to leave Scotland?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the popular language for web development? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> HTML

</comment><comment><USER3> Javascript and English</comment>


Microsoft's Creative Destruction  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?ref=opinion <comment><USER2> _Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business._

I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.

<comment><USER3> I agree, even that is an impressive accomplishment. But after nearly 10 years, it would be nice to see them actually profit on the endeavor.

<comment><USER4> Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter: <http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp>

<comment><USER5> "made" $375 million? Is that profit or revenue? One is very good, the other... not so much without a clear view of expenses.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft's entertainment group's revenue was 2.9 billion.

<comment><USER5> Good deal, thanks for the update. The parent's article wasn't terribly clear. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20 person startup.)

The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer.

Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries.

To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on.

Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.

<comment><USER8> My opinion is that Steve Jobs won't survive in MS due to their culture. Their take on innovation is to be a late market joiner.

They win because they do things better with their resources.

MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative innovation model.

<comment><USER7> The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve widespread market acceptance.

Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.

<comment><USER9> Yes, even though their successes with that model were in the OS, browser and office wars decade _s_ ago, they made billions on those success _this year_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and those who hold us hostage.

The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business.

I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that).

Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today?

Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would _love_ an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the _enterprise_ is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.)

Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices?

[Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]

<comment><USER11> So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.

<comment><USER12> An MS-based "Enterprise IT" is more than that, much more. It's not about the Windows client version and choice of browser. They'll have heavily integrated server products (all of them, multiple instances), sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. SQL Server, ISA, "Office Communication Server", "Team Foundation Server", SharePoint Server, Active Directory Services, etc. pp. you name it, ad infinitum. All with the appropriate, sometimes buggy GUI tools, and the much-needed, sometimes buggy, 3rd-party add-ons and tools. Often this ends up as a big mess, and while the products have certainly matured over a decade and thousands of developers working on them, a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update. In the end, it's a big pile of mediocrity and un-agility, and yes, despite that "deciders" often buy into it because-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-etc. Of course, this will not go on forever...

<comment><USER13> > Often this ends up as a big mess

Care to give us a concrete example? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point here, but my experience has been somewhat the opposite. The tight integration of the Microsoft development tools (for example Visual Studio, SQL Server) is what makes it such an appealing and easy to use development platform for so many enterprise developers.

> a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each > update.

I find that silly - what are you basing that argument on other than anecdotal evidence? Using that same logic you'd expect linux to be extremely flawed since so many developer's hands touch it.

<comment><USER12> Sure, the integration of dev tools is pretty slick and appealing. But I wasn't talking about VS at all, but about all the various servers and how they are typically deployed in the Enterprise.

You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a _lot_ more of that anecdotal evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on:

1\. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business- groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.

2\. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.

<comment><USER15> I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.

<comment><USER16> Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling businesses to reach their full potential".

But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.

<comment><USER3> Based on their latest presentation at CES, they have even lost that tiny sense of direction. Now the strategy has become "Many screens and a cloud" to encompass netbooks, tablets, etc. that weren't easily anticipated a year or two ago.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I feel like a long-term mission statement shouldn't be changing every 12 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them.

The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.

I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.

See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.

Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.

Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.

We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.

<comment><USER17> It depends how you understand the innovation.

I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model.

For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.

The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995.

By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.

<comment><USER17> Replying to myself, but I don't want to edit the former comment.

I think that iPod is the excellent case study for what the innovation actually is. From the technical standpoint, iPod is a garbage. I mean, less space than a nomand, lame. iPod wasn't very innovative in the terms of technology. MP3 players existed for years, and I was, as a nerd, relatively happy with them.

However, iPod played a significant role in bringing in the basic innovation to the masses. Downloading music with a click, instead of ripping it from CD with some weird tools, keeping your music library in a sync. It makes no difference for you or me, but it makes a big difference for your friend from different department, which is not tech savvy.

That's the actual purpose of innovation. It's about a Marry from the street.

People using the standard Microsoft environment, still use their computers as a bit better typewriter, faster snail mail, and an interface for finding stuff immediately, through Google. They do nearly the same stuff they were doing in 1995. Except, Internet is more popular thing.

People in the standard Apple environment, share their personal data between many devices, use nice touch interface, download music and movies with a click, without need to buy/rent a DVD, put their photos on the web easily etc., etc. Soon, thanks to iPad, they're going to enjoy the touch screen on daily basis, and forget about the standard folders-based filesystem, Desktop and other concepts that, actually, might be unnecessary for them.

<comment><USER18> So you're comparing Windows since 1995 with _everything_ Apple have made? No wonder Microsoft appear to have badly stagnated.

Microsoft have changed a lot since 1995. They moved into the mobile space with Windows CE and Windows Mobile. They moved onto the web starting with software like Internet Explorer, Outlook, IIS, Windows Live Messenger and moved onto websites such as MSN, Hotmail, Multimap, and, more recently, Bing. They moved into hardware and released the Xbox, Zune, Zune HD, Xbox and Xbox 360. They moved into online gaming with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live, which have evolved into social networks and marketplaces for both these products. That's ignoring all the different major changes to Windows-related technologies, whether .NET, DirectX, Exchange, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, Windows Firewall, or Microsoft Security Essentials, which have all changed beyond recognition or outright didn't exist back in 1995. Hell, Microsoft have even made a standardised video codec called VC-1. There's probably others, but that's much more than "nice fonts, widgets, and ... nice shadows here and there".

Were these products innovative? Some definitely were (Xbox Live stands out), some weren't especially innovative but had advantages that caused them to compare favourably to their competitors to gain significant marketshare (Xbox, Internet Explorer, DirectX, .NET, Windows CE, Exchange, IIS), some weren't and have largely languished (GfwL, Windows Media Player, Bing). Besides, Microsoft's victories have traditionally not been through direct innovation as much as incremental product iteration which they generally do well.

Apple have grown at an unprecedented rate, and any company compared to them doesn't compare favourably, but that hardly means Microsoft have just sat there doing nothing. Trying to this into a "Apple environment vs. Microsoft environment" battle which is completely artificial when neither company exists in a vaccuum as they create platforms for other companies to build on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success.

Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end).

And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced?

To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation.

There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well.

Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?

<comment><USER20> _Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet?_

And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent profitability: [http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=1265317200000&chddm=492269&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0;0&q=aapl) msft&ntsp=0

<comment><USER21> That's a link to Apple's chart, not MSFT. And MSFT has been tracking the overall market pretty closely over the past few years. It hasn't been tanking, nor booming. I'd say that's a _validation_ of wglb's point, no? Investors don't care about anything but revenue, and revenue of a company this size tracks the economy, and thus it behaves pretty much the same as the market does.

<comment><USER20> Look closer. It's a link to a chart that compares the share prices of Apple and Microsoft over the past five years. Apple, driven by innovation, has increased by 400%. Microsoft, with its consistent profits, has remained almost perfectly flat.

This makes the previous poster's claim that investors have responded positively to Microsoft's approach look pretty weak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten years (since ballmer got the CEO spot).

They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy.

Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money.

Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of:

-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.

-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.

-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.

-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.

<comment><USER9> Another thing is that "embrace and extend" tends to lead to monolithic, dead- end products. You can only cram so many useful features into a closed desktop application before in becomes a nightmare. This prevents you from doing the sane thing - producing a bunch of small modular tools. A lot of the good coming out of the web is just a product of not having to start with context of an application competing with other existing applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it:

<http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/>

<comment><USER24> My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is the best word to describe it :-/

<comment><USER23> In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure.

There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products...

Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.

<comment><USER25> That was my experience as well (seeing many brilliant engineers leaving after deciding they've had enough of being let down by MS). Lack of other people on my team that I felt I could look up to and that I enjoyed working with was a big factor in why I left. I suspect the brain drain from MS will only accelerate over time though there are still a lot of truly excellent engineers working there.

Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the luster of working at MS has evaporated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> b-man _No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure._

I've met quite a few people, who in my opinion had quite sane and intelligent minds, who wished for MS failure, for a lot of well based reasons.

<comment><USER26> It would hurt for a while, but I for one would welcome Microsoft's demise. Linux is much nicer to program for, and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it, and thus most programs.

Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.

<comment><USER27> Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI? Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which case programming the server on _Windows_ is much easier. The environment provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares?

Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest.

[1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hackers take note.

The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change (soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either built in house or purchased).

That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require windows and aren't going away soon.

Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department. Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to do in a browser.

Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in customer base.

<comment><USER29> I'd say companies are less locked into Windows the OS and more so tied to binary compatibility with Windows products. I've been watching and using Wine since the project began, and it has made unbelievable progress in the last decade. Given a few more years, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the stage of near perfect compatibility with Windows products. That coupled with the shift to more and more "cloud applications" spells big trouble for Microsoft.

<comment><USER30> Given the success of serious virtualization platforms like VMWare ESX I do think there is a long term danger of Windows becoming a rather thin shim between actual applications and the underlying "real" OS. Especially with the current "Best Practise" of every application running on its own dedicated server as everyone is terrified of the potential conflicts if you have more than one vendor application on the same instance of Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational, but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.

<comment><USER32> Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a single product that isn't.

So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation.

All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.

<comment><USER33> Why is being focused on the iTunes Store bad? I understand how reliance on the actual software is a bad idea -- although it's rumored that this is being replaced with a web front-end (hence the acquisition of LaLa).

But I don't see how owning such a powerful distribution channel is something they should let go of. Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.

<comment><USER32> > _Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just > music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well._

This is where I disagree ... they are doing the same mistake Microsoft did. Right now to develop apps for your iPhone, you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99 and that only works on Mac OS X.

Do you know how much of a PITA this is? I am on an NDA and I can't give details about what I'm doing right now, but believe me ... dealing with iPhone is the ugliest of all mobile platforms.

When your distribution channel is tied to your software platform, that's when it's starting to smell. When you also have lots of rules about what gets in, that's a first sign it is not sustainable ... throughout the history businesses have always been interested in eliminating the middle-men. That's one reason web-apps are getting so popular.

And now here comes the iPad, which promises to do for books what iPod did for music. I'm failing to see how this will work, since Amazon is already there, and I can't picture myself watching movies on a tablet.

But maybe Jobs knows what he's doing, I really don't know ... what I do know is that my colleagues that were ecstatic about iPhones are now switching to Nexus Ones and Druids. And the iPhone used to be cool, now it's just popular ... the only reason we are supporting the hell of the App Store approval process.

<comment><USER34> _"you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99"_

The SDK is free.

<comment><USER35> The apple tax is not ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.

<comment><USER37> From article:

 _But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it's a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist._

If you want people to forgive your "accidental monopoly," it pays to not act the 800 pound gorilla.

<comment><USER11> When was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve Google Voice for Windows?

Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.

<comment><USER38> Railroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it did so. That was a dick move.

<comment><USER11> Hm, good point. I forgot about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So, they managed to destroy a competitor producing a tablet computer, only to fail to produce their promised product because of infighting?

(See Jerry Kaplan's book, "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" for the depressing story.)

How exactly is this defensible behaviour?

<comment><USER17> It's defensible on the personal level.

People from other cubicles felt threatened, and they had to defend themselves. ;-)

<comment><USER39> I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought the shipping product.

The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury.

Read the book, it's a good story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past _decade_! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did

<comment><USER32> Sorry, but many companies are using the Exchange/Office combination simply because there isn't anything better.

Also, while many developers are preferring Unix-like OSes, customers actually want Windows. It's what they know and it works well for them.

Another example would be their developer tools ... which are quite well integrated with each other. I have seen many (good) devs that wouldn't dream working without Visual Studio, and if you get a MSDN subscription, the resources offered are top-notch. Myself I wouldn't touch any of that, since I can't stand working with Windows servers, but if they made their tools multi- platform, I would switch without blinking.

> _they're not really thinking about what people need_

And since when do people really need iPods / iPads or whatever else comes out of Apple?

Actually I think Microsoft does a pretty good job about what people _need_ ... but they aren't particularly good at anticipating what people _want_.

<comment><USER40> To clarify, I was only focusing on their approach to emerging markets. How many successful products/services have they created and launched in the last year? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?

Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft, Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device and the ads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, _the vice president in charge of Office at the time_ decided he didn't like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. "

This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.

</comment><comment><USER42> By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none.

But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.

</comment><comment><USER43> "At worst, you can say it's a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist."

Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist.

`

"It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets."

By monopoly...

`

"over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole."

So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it.

`

"Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure."

This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't forget about xbox360 - most US males age 7-18 wants/has one. It's an excellent Microsoft product that is often overlooked.

<comment><USER45> "Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business."

He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't consider it a success.

<comment><USER25> He probably doesn't know much about the gaming industry. The 360 is already an unqualified success. It's unquestionably reached status as an iconic platform in the history of console gaming, right up there with the NES and the PS1/2. To outsiders it may seem as though Nintendo is leading this field but that's somewhat misleading. Nintendo opened up a new market and has been able to sell console gaming systems to a whole new group of people who wouldn't have bought them before. This is fabulous for Nintendo, but in a very real sense it means it's no longer operating in the same market as Microsoft and Sony (though there is some overlap).

The 360 is the go-to console for any major game developer. Partly because 360 owners buy about 50% more games than either Wii or PS3 owners. Given that games are responsible for the bulk of the profits related to console gaming that's an enormously significant figure. The 360 console is raking in cash for Microsoft and continuing to grow in popularity. It's one of Microsoft's most successful ventures of all time.

<comment><USER3> Well, define your criteria for success.

Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a few more $billion in the bank today.

Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.

Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started to begin with.

<comment><USER46> No, Xbox has largest market share in the gamer community period, with > 25 million units shipped worldwide. And they will be profitable overall on their gaming unit by the time this console generation is over (2015?).

Nintendo is operating in a different market. They are a toy company, first and foremost. And it's better, conceptually, to think about the Wii and DS as toys. They have a completely different audience - and completely different revenue model. People buy toys for a short-term entertainment value, or novelty - and then the novelty wears off.

This describes the Wii exactly - people buy one, they play a game or two, or maybe Wii fit, and that's it. You aren't seeing serious time spent with it - and the tie ratio demonstrates that.

BTW - I think I'd classify Guitar Hero / Rock Band as toys, too. Hence the horrible sales numbers this season - people are sick of this particular kind of toy.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure it is valuable to segment the market into those who buy "toys" and those who buy "hard-core games". At the end of the day, there is just one big market: the human population.

Yes, Microsoft sold 30 million Xboxs to "hard core gamers" and effectively conquered that market niche.

But, in the same time, Nintendo sold 50+ million Wiis to people who like "toys", making billions of dollars in the process.

As a hypothetical investor, I don't really care if Microsoft "wins" the hard- core market, I care about the bottom line. Nintendo effectively created a new market and capitalized on it, and they would get my hypothetical dollar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers"

Someone mistook the problem as a benefit.

</comment><comment><USER48> Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.

</comment><comment><USER49> To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making. What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast that far just on malignant business practices?

<comment><USER38> This article lays out a big problem: internally the competition is won not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.

He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because _externally_ the competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.

Live by the sword, die by the irony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "The much more important question is why Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future . . . "

Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know that.

<comment><USER14> Not really. If you were following the company in the 90s, two quick examples are Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4 (Remember when IE was actually _praised_ for better standards-compliance and developer-features?)

<comment><USER51> It might appear that way if Microsoft was the _only_ company one was following back in the 90s. While they were freezing the market with promises of what Chicago would be, NeXT had already brought the future - and that codebase still feels like the future today.

<comment><USER25> Except that a NeXTCube cost $10k at the same time that a decent windows PC cost $1.5-2k. Even though both NeXTStep and NT represented full, proper 32-bit "modern" operating systems and were both invented in the early 90s it took until 2001/2002 for both to come of age as consumer grade operating systems (NeXTStep as OS X, NT as Windows XP). In the meantime MS put forth an interim solution (Windows 9x) that was still suitable for consumer-grade PC hardware, resulting in a continuation of Windows market dominance and billions of dollars in profits for Microsoft. In contrast, NeXT took the intellectual high road, stubbornly refusing to compromise its vision of the future, resulting in massive financial losses, being forced to lay off 2/3 of its employees, and a long, slow slide into bankruptcy and irrelevancy before being acquired by Apple (which had stretched the decrepit Mac OS to its breaking point).

Had NeXT maintained a little more pragmatism and a little less stubborn pride it's possible that they could have become the next Apple or the next Microsoft, rather than merely a juicy intellectual property morsel for the real players in the industry to pick up and take advantage of.

<comment><USER51> Sure, I couldn't afford a NeXTCube in 1990. But by 1993 I was running NeXTstep on my generic intel hardware, a full two years prior to the release of Windows 95. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of running it on a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole, and on one of the HP PA-RISC "gecko" machines, but those were owned by employers. I could afford to run it on a PC, though.) But, you're right, people continued to believe that NeXTstep required a $10000 machine long after it did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives them feedback and lets them measure engagement.

MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one <http://www.barrelfish.org/>) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .

</comment><comment><USER53> Just curious: Wouldn't these types of details be subject to an NDA or whatever agreement he signed when he left the company?

<comment><USER54> Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific technical information that lets them do their job better than others.

Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that.

The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think Microsoft is playing its cards very well. They have a very firm foot in ground through their office and OS business. And they have presence almost everywhere from phones to web. They can simply acquire a small time company like Twitter to fill up the Gaps.

</comment><comment><USER9> IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT. They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same, they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.

<comment><USER9> Part of the reason MS isn't growing is that they have colonized the desktop to such an extent that innovators look elsewhere for opportunities. If MS could successfully open source windows, it might create an explosion of innovation on the desktop (or probably in integrating the desktop and the web but still). Of course, I doubt MS could handle losing the license fees at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Perfect byline: Dick Brass.</comment>


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/?repost-after-a-year

<comment><USER2> And yet there is no formal set of rules for names that can be enforced. Without it, we are forced to pick and choose assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been posted a few times and is almost a year old. It is an excellent blog, though. Worth reading the newer entries.

<comment><USER4> >and is almost a year old

I think the submitter realizes this. The end of the URL includes '?repost- after-a-year' :)

Edit: But it is still worth pointing that out to people reading the comments here since obviously not everyone will notice that.

Edit2: While roughly a year since it was last posted (nine months), the article is two years old now.

Original discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472>

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think the submitter realizes this

I actually retitled it "Falsehoods Programmers (Still!)Believe About Names," but somehow it is back to the blog's title.</comment></comment></comment>


IPhone 4 Drop Test with Bumper Case Shows Little Protection - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/09/iphone-4-drop-test-with-bumper-case/

<comment><USER2> Coming from a guy called iFixItYouri that doesn't surprise me. Damn it, I hate it when Apple pulls 2 1st Gen failures in a row, makes me think of the cube days.</comment>


British Airways: Computer problems cause flight delays - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40069865 <comment><USER2> "power supply issue"

You can almost forgive BA for suffering cyber terrorism, but entire IT system being brought down for tens of hours due to power supply issue?

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems pretty major. I'm currently stuck on a flight that can't depart as they can't get any flight plans etc. Also BA's main website is down.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429858)

</comment><comment><USER5> No redundancy system in place, sounds like they have an awful tech stack for a company of that size.

</comment><comment><USER6> They need to seriously deal with the upcoming 2038 bug.</comment>


The Myth Of Outsourcing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.arc90.com/2009/07/the_myth_of_outsourcing.php

<comment><USER2> This is a thinly veiled marketing pitch, justifying the extra cost of buying from the guy with a team in NYC, rather than the guy with a team in Russia.

 _To get it right, we need to not only have a tight feedback loop with you, we want to become you. ... That's hard to do across two oceans._

No, that's hard to do - full stop. You're not bringing your full 15 (I'm guessing) man development team to your client-site for more than a curtesy visit - and certainly not "to become" your client. That's for your analysts. And why would that be significantly more difficult over an ocean than over a desk?

 _It's nearly impossible to do that if we're shipping chunks of an effort in packages halfway across the world._

Then don't ship "packages". My offshore team work off the exact same Trac- issue-list that the rest of my team does.

 _Software can always be built elsewhere, but the basic premise that the early blueprints are 100% dead-on are a fantasy._

Strawman! "outsourcing=waterfall=bad" vs. "insourcing=agile=good"? No..

 _But connectedness alone doesn't lay the groundwork for building great product._

But somehow you seem to argue that un-connectedness does? Bah.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that this is a marketing pitch, and plays it a little fast and lose, _all other things being equal_ local is better than remote. Of course, all other things are never equal, and finding the combination that works for you is the important part.

<comment><USER4> An excellent point. Of course, it seems that more and more that balance is shifting to other countries, largely because of their lower cost of labor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We can quantify this.

Software Estimation by Steve McConnell on page 66 lists many factors from the Cocomo II studies with their relative impact on software development. Multi- site development on average causes things to take 1.56 times as long to develop. How much does that extra time to market cost you? I submit that in a competitive world, often a lot.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it oddly disturbing that someone would react with surprise to find out that one has _not_ outsourced one's development team.</comment>


Watch AI predict Conan O'Brien's gestures just from the sound of his voice - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/watch-artificial-intelligence-predict-conan-o-brien-s-gestures-just-sound-his-voice?rss=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Paper and code at:

[http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shiry/projects/speech2gestu...](http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shiry/projects/speech2gesture/)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some examples of good Computer Science patents? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Listen to those crickets chirping!</comment>


'My sister says I am an alien': 9-yr-old applies for planetary protection job - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/06/my-sister-says-i-am-an-alien-a-9-year-old-applies-to-be-nasas-planetary-protection-officer/ <comment><USER2> I love it when people like that are so kind to kids. That makes a big impact on them. Kudos to the guys at NASA.</comment>


Setting Up a Minimal, yet Useful JavaScript Dev Environment - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/corgibytes/setting-up-a-minimal-yet-useful-javascript-dev-environment <comment><USER2> While I admire the article I remember when "minimal JavaScript dev environment" meant just a notepad app and a web browser...</comment>


New police radars can 'see' inside homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-see-through-walls/22007615/ <comment><USER2> That device is more useful for firefighters than for cops. Firefighters need to find people inside burning buildings. Looking for trapped people is one of the more dangerous jobs in firefighting. The fact that it's being sold more to cops than firefighters indicates that cops are getting too much money for tactical gear.

The device is a fairly basic Doppler radar, although the sensitivity is impressive. Someone might want to look up the FCC approval data for it to get the full technical specs.

<comment><USER3> > Someone might want to look up the FCC approval data for it to get the full > technical specs

Someone using a new account named throwawayranger did that and posted the results, but the comment was promptly killed because it was a new account posting via TOR.

For those without "showdead" enabled, here is the content of the dead post:

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

L-3 Communications RANGE-R Operator's Manual [http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-1.pdf](http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-1.pdf)

Internal Photos [http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-2.pdf](http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-2.pdf)

External Photos [http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-3.pdf](http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-3.pdf)

Test Report [http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-5.pdf](http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/RANGE-R-5.pdf)

Handheld Radar Frequency Scanner for Concealed Object Detection U.S. Patent 6,950,054 [http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/US6950054.pdf](http://blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/mil/wall/US6950054.pdf)

<comment><USER2> It's a low power device (35mw), but it's in a radiolocation band, so they had to get a wavier from the FCC. That's an interesting read, because it lists the uses. They're getting surprisingly good range for only 35mw radar power.

[https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-09-2482A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-09-2482A1.pdf)

The patent is for a different device - that's for a better version of those wands used in security screening. The approach is similar, but the power is much lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past.

It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your own house and hear your every word.

<comment><USER5> Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes one of counter-measures.

<comment><USER6> Development? The technique has been well known for a long time, I remember hearing about it in the late 90s. It isn't widely used because it isn't practical. Also, your countermeasure doesn't work if there is another reflective surface inside the room.

<comment><USER7> > Development? The technique has been well known for a long time

The difference is that these things used to be the domain of major government agencies rather than a hobbyist with a few hundred dollars and a poor sense of privacy.

<comment><USER6> In the 70s maybe, but in the late 90s? No, it has been a potential hobby project for a long time now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My first reaction is that Anne Frank's diary would have been much shorter had this technology existed then.

<comment><USER9> The problem with that line of thinking is that you're really arguing that an entire technology is 'uninvented' because it could be used for evil. Suggesting that we ought to give up doppler radar entirely, with all its benefits like detecting victims in natural disasters, finding people trapped in fires, detecting criminal suspects, etc because it might be used by the next evil dictator is ridiculous. It's a completely unmeasured response. Besides being impossible to uninvent things, it just means we lose out on potentially useful technology now for an intangible benefit that might never come to pass.

The fact that the next evil dictator could have access to tools like this is reason to be vigilant not to let an evil dictator come to power and to be sensible about how we use these tools today to stop them being used in ways we think are unreasonable. It is not a reason to suggest we shouldn't have the tools.

<comment><USER10> That's absolutely not what parent was arguing, though. Also, that "line of thinking" not necessarily leads there. Accepting the technology is but one step. But we still need to raise moral and ethic questions about it. All parent was really saying is, that the nazis wouldn't have thought twice about using said technology to kill even more people.

<comment><USER9> It absolutely is what the parent is arguing. It's impossible to say "Evil people would use this technology for evil!" without implying something should be done to stop them, otherwise you're tacitly condoning evil. The thing that should be done is stopping the evil people from doing things, regardless of what they use, rather than questioning morally ambivalent technology just in case evil people use it.

<comment><USER11> Once a technology has been invented, uninventing it because it might be used to harm people doesn't work. Especially if the people wanting to do the harm are in a position of power (like the nazis were).

Wondering about the countless wonderful or horrific uses new technologies might have is simply part of critical thinking.

I don't think anyone did that calculation but if we were to add up all the good technology brings us with all the bad it brings us, I'm not sure we'd end up in the positive.

So I think it's pretty natural when you hear about some new technology to ask yourself "great, how's that thing going to be used against us?"

Asking yourself what you could do to stop it is a completely different matter. And we all know here that security through obscurity is a pretty poor defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What if it's passive? Wifi from the routers of homes emit the RF energy and all the police do is use a detector I could see that as legal since it's energy being emitted just as if it were light shining out a window and you were a silhouette.

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133936-using-wifi-to- see-...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133936-using-wifi-to-see-through- walls)

>The system, devised by Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, requires two antennae and a signal processing unit (i.e. computer), and is no larger than a suitcase. Unlike normal radar, which emits radio waves and then measures any reflected signals, this new system operates in complete stealth.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't consider the passive/active distinction the definition for 'invasive.' I'd consider thermal imaging from the outside of the home w/out a warrant 'invasive', but a thermal camera is just picking up the heat radiated by your body.

<comment><USER14> The article links to the relevant Supreme Court decision. They, in "Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging, or FLIR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant." -[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States)

The article goes on to say the Supreme Court "specifically noted that the rule would apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed."

<comment><USER15> Thank god for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a really hard time believing that this will pass constitutional muster if this ever the use of this device ever gets challenged or gets into the court system. One's home is generally sacrosanct -- there are some exceptions, but those are few and far between.

<comment><USER17> Kyllo v. United States [1]

Law enforcement used a thermal imaging camera to detect hotspots consistent with marijuana growth inside Kyllo's house. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that this was a 4th amendment violation.

[1][http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2000/2000_99_8508](http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2000/2000_99_8508)

<comment><USER18> That's pretty close. I could see it going the other way just as easily.

<comment><USER19> I would argue the opposite. The dissenting opinion's rationale doesn't hold up in this case

> Heat waves, like aromas that are generated in a kitchen, or in a laboratory > or opium den, enter the public domain if and when they leave a building.

In the case of thermal imaging, you measure light waves that is already leaving the building. In the case of radar, you are actively sending in light waves to bounce off the inside and return to you.

<comment><USER18> That's certainly true using that reasoning (which, incidentally, I think is ridiculous). Of course, they could come up with a workaround. Like perhaps it's not a violation of property rights for invisible and virtually harmless waves to enter private property, and if they happen to bounce off something and come back to the source for collection and analysis, so be it.

<comment><USER20> > That's certainly true using that reasoning (which, incidentally, I think is > ridiculous).

While Kyllo was obviously decided correctly, I don't think the reasoning of the dissent is ridiculous. Arguably, it's better scientifically.

Premise: It's not an unreasonable search if police stand on the public street outside a house and hear someone shout: "I killed Jake!"

Argument: Use of thermal imaging is indistinguishable from standing on the street hoping to hear a shout. Sound waves and infrared light waves are both generated inside the building, escape into public space, and are captured by passive receiving devices (ears, IR cameras). It's arbitrary to treat sound and infrared light differently.

The above may be a good example against hyper-technical reasoning in court cases (but see: everyone's support of the argument advanced by Aereo), but it's not a scientifically unsound argument.

<comment><USER21> I would argue that if the police require any equipment in addition to the normal range of human senses to detect evidence, the use of such equipment should be considered a search. Whether the feet physically move onto the property or not, the equipment is breaching a privacy barrier.

If you confess to murder in your own home on an ultrasonic carrier wave, and the police happen to be outside on the sidewalk pointing an ultrasonic microphone at your house, no reasonable person could deny that was a search of your home.

A visible-light camera with an audible-range microphone that coincidentally covered your home in the course of otherwise lawful activity, on the other hand, would be more in the nature of accidental eyewitness than intentional search.

When people take steps to create a private space for themselves, they judge by their own senses whether their precautions are sufficient. If I stand outside my own house and cannot see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense any activity within, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I typically do not use a wi-fi packet sniffer, or a FLIR camera, or a laser microphone to ensure that my activities are safe from interception from random passers-by, because they do not carry such equipment.

<comment><USER20> > If you confess to murder in your own home on an ultrasonic carrier wave, and > the police happen to be outside on the sidewalk pointing an ultrasonic > microphone at your house, no reasonable person could deny that was a search > of your home.

What if I broadcast my guilt on un-encrypted FM radio?

Again, I think Kyllo was rightly decided. But I don't think the dissent's argument was "ridiculous." I think there's some logic to asking: why the heck should the 4th amendment treat sonic and EM emissions differently depending on their wavelength?

<comment><USER21> Because the wavelength determines whether you need to make an explicit effort to retrieve the information.

The search is not a matter of retrieving what is possible to retrieve, but is instead about intentionally breaching a privacy barrier.

As long as you have taken a single safeguard to protect yourself from casual observation, anyone circumventing that safeguard with the intention of observing you is performing a search.

Thus, if you want to make an FM broadcast, it would be prudent to do so on a frequency that is not expected to be routinely monitored. Anything that could be directly intercepted by commonly-available radio receivers, such as car radios, walkie-talkies, police scanners, or similar would not create a reasonable expectation of privacy. Anything that might cause interference in an electronic device is likewise non-private, as anyone who transmits should be aware that amateur and professional radio operators may investigate interference.

In those cases, sending your FM transmission from inside a Faraday cage, through a shielded cable, to the inside of another cage, would be sufficient precaution against casual observation that anyone hearing your signal must have been searching for it. I contend that even if the shielding is imperfect, the signal leaks, and the cops are able to monitor and record your transmissions, they are still peeking behind the fig leaf, so to speak. The instant that they become aware that the transmissions were intended to be private, all subsequent monitoring is a search.

Were it otherwise, a person not acting in his official capacity could breach the privacy barrier, and then later monitor under the presumption that no such barrier existed. A cop might take off his badge and shove a pin through the shielding on the cable into the center conductor, then put the badge back on and tune in the radio signal as though it were meant to be a broadcast.

The dissenting argument is ridiculous because the "searchiness" of an observation does not depend on some law of physics. It depends on whether you are exposing something that I wish to be private, regardless of the means by which you do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So does using these new devices mean they will be using the flash bangs less? They should be able to see who all is inside and realize a child or person that is not the suspect?

<comment><USER23> It doesn't sound like it can positively identify people; just pinpoint where they are in the house.

<comment><USER24> It could help determine if there are infants or children in the house before a raid.

Then again it really isn't hard to determine if there are children in a house without advanced tech...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Range-r simply tells users how far away movement is occurring in a building.

Useful for a no nock entry, but not much more.

The bigger issue is the number of tactical police raids on private homes, plus some of the other technologies in development and currently available.

Stingray, which is currently in use, acts as a portable cell tower. All cell phone calls in the vicinity of a stingray unit get routed through the mobile cell tower, warrant or not.

</comment><comment><USER26> > and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even > basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past.

Even at current price ($6000), the thing is cheap, taking into account what it can do.

As for privacy, forget about that, at least privacy by default. that's so dead. Start thinking about counter measures.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does the US use "sarking" [1] (metal foil insulation) in house construction?

Most Australian houses are wrapped in a layer of metal foil insulation. Presumably that would offer some attenuation to radar, though the windows must still allow radiation though, as mobile phones typically work inside. Perhaps a house with metal foil based window tinting would offer a reasonably complete Faraday cage?

[1] [http://www.bradfordinsulation.com.au/Products/Residential/Th...](http://www.bradfordinsulation.com.au/Products/Residential/Thermal- insulation/EnviroSeal-roof-sarking.aspx)

<comment><USER28> People use a lot of different construction materials and techniques across the country, but I don't think this "sarking" is common for residences.

People don't want to live inside Faraday cages though, for the reason you already mentioned: their mobile phones wouldn't work. Not to mention broadcast television, AM/FM radio, garage door openers, etc.

<comment><USER29> I've thought about living in one, I only use radio in the car and TV comes in through cables. On the plus side my wifi would be protected from wardriving (or an outside access) as it would never leave the house.

Cell service would definitely be a problem though.

<comment><USER30> While this is admittedly off-topic to this thread, I too have given this some thought. I'm coming around to the opinion that losing cell service wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

I prefer to live in a rural area, and a landline would definitely be cheaper. Ditching the smartphone in favor of a feature phone, which could remain off, battery disconnected, and in it's own little faraday cage in the car -- because being prepared for an emergency is a thing we should all do -- well, it all seems very appealing. Nothing in my pocket, no wifi sniffer gathering the hardware address off my phone, no location tracking services, etc.

Best of all, the people in my life would adjust to me not being available 24x7x365. I think that would be highly beneficial when compared to the constant stream of interruptions that seem like an invasion of privacy all on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This quote from the article made me think immediately of the 'motion trackers' as used in the Aliens films, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yNOT6lWedA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yNOT6lWedA)

 _" The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving."_

<comment><USER21> For the speculative future sake of humanity, if you ever work on the GUI for one of those things, make sure it has an elevation indicator.

More than 1m below the detector, show a downward-pointing triangle. More than 1m above it, show an upward-pointing triangle. Within 1m, show a square. Change the relative size of the icon according to the size of the moving object. Add telltale lines extending from the center of the icon in a contrast color to show direction of motion and speed.

I realize that the shortcomings of the device UI were critical to the dramatic tension, but whenever I see that scene in Aliens, I can't help but sympathetically think about the poor military-industrial-complex gadget developer who wasn't even allowed to think about the user experience, because the requirements were determined by someone who would likely never use it, and cast in concrete long before anyone was hired to implement them.

And the thing that really kills me is that the person who created those requirements probably based them on a device seen in a sci-fi movie. This is why it is so important for film directors to employ technical consultants whenever they include gadgets and computer monitors. Anything seen on the big screen will have an ongoing and possibly unintended future influence on design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That's nothing, wait till they get hold of an ADR scanner, it can chemically identify everything it scans and can do it through miles of rock. In interview, Colin Stove is quoted as referring to it jokingly as a "quadcorder", on the basis that it is much better than a tricorder - [http://adrokgroup.com/technology/how-it- works](http://adrokgroup.com/technology/how-it-works)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's radar. So it is emitting radio waves, with a tiny tiny percent of them bouncing back to the detector. So it can be detected and/or jammed.

Assuming these devices work on a very narrow frequency range, it shouldn't be too hard to passively hear them coming. If detectors appear, these devices would become a serious liability for anyone looking to "storm" a residence.

</comment><comment><USER23> That story links to [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1505137-12-6001.html](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1505137-12-6001.html) when talking about a court upholding Denson's conviction, which mentions nothing about using radar to search a house.

<comment><USER34> I found it here: [http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/13/13-3329.pdf](http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/13/13-3329.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any examples of the display output of the radar device?

<comment><USER36> The posted pdf to the manual shows a little bit of the device. But here's another larger and more advanced device (linked in the article). It is doing the same but with an more elaborated output visualization.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt3ecnqdUCo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt3ecnqdUCo)

You can clearly see the output in the video.

<comment><USER37> My mind immediately screamed "game over man, game over!" and reached for the flamethrower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yikes, that site makes noise shortly after opening it. Fank you very much, will never visit again.

</comment><comment><USER39> What are the power levels this thing emits?

</comment><comment><USER40> the transition to a surveillance policing state is nearly complete.

</comment><comment><USER41> Privacy? Fuck privacy!

The 21st century attitude.

People, seriously, we need to do something about it until it is too late.

<comment><USER42> I think it's not "fuck privacy", but merely realizing there wasn't really privacy to begin with. More like "privacy is an illusion".</comment></comment>


Show HN: pan.do/ra - a free, open source platform for video archives - <AUTHOR> https://pan.do/ra

<comment><USER2> I'd be slightly worried about trademark issues with Pandora the radio -- wouldn't you?

<comment><USER3> (One of the authors here.) Good question. Does Pandora the radio have a global trademark for what is essentially a US-only product? Would such a trademark cover any type of online service, including a video archive platform? And if so, would it apply to a piece of software that is explicitly spelled pan-dot- do-slash-ra? IANAL, but I don't think so.

<comment><USER4> Don't risk it, get a lawyer. The last thing you want is to create a recognised brand only to have to change the name because you saved some money by not checking.

<comment><USER3> But what if we wanted to be recognized as the brand that is spelled pan.do/ra - which happens to be the URL of the product?

And what if getting recognized as the brand involved in a trademark conflict about the name of a Greek mythological figure is a risk we're totally willing to take?

<comment><USER5> _And what if getting recognized as the brand involved in a trademark conflict about the name of a Greek mythological figure is a risk we're totally willing to take?_

That's some bravado. To make the case more poignant, you should also open an online shoe store at <http://ni.ke>

<comment><USER3> I'm beginning to think that the Ancient Greek should have sought better protection for their intellectual property:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_(mythology)>

<comment><USER5> My point exactly. "But, what about the Greeks!" doesn't carry much weight in a trademark lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey pan.do/ra team! Just stumbled upon your work, and I'm quite simply amazed. It even has a clean API, which I can't wait to play with.

I'm one of the guys behind movies.io - instead of becoming an ad-supported pirate site, we're trying to spin it into a wholly different direction (platform to spread indie movies, etc.)

The 0xDB player is quite simply stunning, and offers features that are very suited to studying particular movie clips (continuous image preview, subtitle sync with seek, reminds me of Mark Boas's work). We'd love to integrate it with movies.io where possible.

If you're reading this (hopefully - you seem to check the thread often), my e-mail is in my HN profile. Looking forward to talking about this with you!

</comment><comment><USER7> If you need a new name, Pando (Latin for "I spread") is the name of the largest and possibly oldest single organism on Earth.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion. But if you reload <http://pan.do> a couple of times, you'll see that there are already quite a few contenders...

<comment><USER2> I don't get it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The OxJS library is really impressive, it's the JavaScript library used to build pan.do/ra's frontend. [1]

[1] <https://oxjs.org/>

<comment><USER3> Thanks! We're planning to formally launch it in a couple of days, and we're looking forward to your feedback...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Forgive me for being dense, it's a really hot evening, but basically I can have my own instance of 0xDB with any clips and movies I choose, yes?

What do you mean by "pan.do/ra is a website that runs in your browser"? The movies and clips are stored on the server? Or is it some mix of local and remote media?

BTW I like a lot the way you prepared it, as an Ubuntu package and a prebuilt image -- makes it seem easy to use and tempting to try.

<comment><USER3> Yes, precisely. You can run your own instance, with your own videos, and your own configuration. Pad.ma, for example, is quite different from 0xDB.

"pan.do/ra is a website that runs in your browser" was our attempt to communicate that pan.do/ra is not just a server backend to store and serve your media, but that it comes with a web frontend to browse and manage your archive.

What you see on 0xDB is one such frontend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I seriously think the poster is not mature enough to be the recipient of any advice. This is not a productive anf fruitful way to handle received feedback.

<comment><USER3> I'm not too interested in ad hominem attacks. Can you cite any specific examples? Would it contribute to the overall discussion if we debated them here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OxJS... haven't heard of that one before. Anyone used it for anything else?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have just released OxJS, so it's unlikely someone else already build something with it. We have other projects using it, but they are not public so far.</comment></comment>


Analyse Asia Podcast #2: Console, Social and Mobile Gaming in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2014/09/10/episode-2-social-mobile-gaming-japan/ <comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis for Episode 2: Our second episode of Dr Serkan Toto, CEO of Kantan Games Inc and former TechCrunch correspondent in Asia. We focus on the evolution of the gaming scene in Japan from its leadership position in console games through Sony, SEGA and Nintendo to the present state in mobile and social gaming with the social networking platforms (LINE, Mixi, DeNA and GREE), and dive deeply into looking at the business model, customer acquisition channels and how games from the other parts of the world penetrate into Japan. We extract Serkan's insight on the state of global gaming companies and why they end up becoming one track ponies like Hollywood movie studios, and his thoughts on the Japanese technology scene and how the giant players such as Softbank and Rakuten are faring so far in their global expansion out to the world. Last but not least, both Serkan and Bernard gave their predictions on the Apple Event @ 9/9/2014 just three hours before it started.</comment>


Ask HN: What (desktop?) software have you paid for recently? - <AUTHOR> For me possibly the only thing I've bought in years is Simplify3D -  http://Simplify3D.com/ - which is a fairly powerful STL-slicer-to-any-3d-printer magic box of tricks that I'm very happy with. There are open source kinda-solutions that I got tired of fighting.
I'm getting pretty close to buying Scrivener - https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview - despite it's various weird interface choices and apparently multiple conflicting codebases for difference OS.
I've also run in to the limits of Inkscape and can crash/hang it reliably which will mean a move to Adobe, which I've never touched before.
Curious to hear what else is out there? <comment><USER2> [https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_server_software](https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_server_software)

Usb over Ethernet! I run it in my homelab and it's worth every penny. Amazing tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the last year:

dBpoweramp for, finally, ripping my whole CD collection to lossless. Advantages over itunes: much faster, better feedback on read errors.

VueScan for using my old scanner with modern Windows. Just worked.

OrCAD because Cadence was running a low-cost promotion.

I also upgraded my home use license for Mathematica.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought cyberduck last week as I had enough of FileZilla's update nagging and main thread hogging shenanigans

</comment><comment><USER5> Jetbrains Toolbox subscription

</comment><comment><USER6> TurboTax

<comment><USER7> H&R Block here.

At $DAY_JOB I paid for VMware</comment></comment>


How to banish business cards from your life -- the digital options - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/08/06/how-to-banish-business-cards-a-ranked-list-of-digital-options/

<comment><USER2> Single page view:

[http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/08/06/how-to-banish- bus...](http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/08/06/how-to-banish-business- cards-a-ranked-list-of-digital-options/?single_page=true)</comment>


Is React Fiber ready yet? - <AUTHOR> http://isfiberreadyyet.com <comment><USER2> How common is it common to write thousands of unit tests before implementation the refactor of something? Or did they take the existing React unit tests and build against their interface?

<comment><USER3> I can't comment on this specific implementation, but it depends on your tolerance to risk.

If you're going for a backwards compatible change to some thing that is quite complex, it's not unheard of to create a suite of tests that fully describe the features of a piece of software (if they don't already exist) and then compare the 'old' and 'new' results.

This then allows you to understand if you've changed anything, and can even highlight where you've fixed bugs in the old codebase.

I've done something similar before when refactoring a reasonable sized portion of legacy code that had no unit tests (code was old + organicly changed over the years), plus a good number of configuration options that all had to be backwards compatible (work like it used to, or have a good explanation why it doesn't).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site could use an explanation for what React Fiber actually is.

<comment><USER5> Here's more info about it [https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber- architecture](https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture)

<comment><USER6> so, quick read seems to me it will be mostly backwards compatible?

<comment><USER7> Definitely. We have 30,000 React components at Facebook so we're not planning large breaking changes.

<comment><USER6> This actually makes me question the utility of the site - the old is angular 2 production ready site had the utility that angular 2 was going to break angular 1.x so you might want to think about which you were going to use.

I guess it doesn't really matter, just the site seems less useful. The technology however seems more useful to me for that.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this was designed for our own internal purposes and is not meant to be outgoing communication. The Fiber project shouldn't deter anyone from using React.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe post this again when the answer is yes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've seen a few domains for specific upcoming events like this lately. I wonder if it'll take off and inspire someone to make a "yet" TLD.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a really cool idea.</comment>


Walker's Alias Method for quickly sampling from an array - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cantino/walker_method/ <comment><USER2> There is a great article on engineering a whole bunch of increasingly good solutions the discrete random sampling problem.

[http://www.keithschwarz.com/darts-dice- coins/](http://www.keithschwarz.com/darts-dice-coins/)

And the corresponding HN discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3401510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3401510)

<comment><USER3> Yeah that keithschwarz.com writeup is super readable and pleasant, with simple illustrations and figures that just leap out and practically explain everything themselves.... :]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The links to Python and Node versions were also helpful. The comments in the Python version [1] were especially helpful at explaining what was going on.

1: [http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576564-walkers-alias- met...](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576564-walkers-alias-method-for- random-objects-with-diffe/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the README mis-describes the performance comparison with the naive "huge array of samples" method.

In particular, both methods are O(1) after a precomputation step. What the Alias Method appears to get you is a significant reduction in space required.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of my lecturers at Imperial College called it the most beautiful unknown algorithm. :)

<comment><USER7> Do they think Reservoir Sampling known then? ;)</comment></comment>


What not to expect from Apple's upcoming iPad announcement: A moon shot - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2825946/opensource-subnet/what-not-to-expect-from-apples-upcoming-ipad-announcement.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If Apple announces just a new iPad and Mac refresh, as the rumor mill has suggested it will, couldn't the company just post it on its blog like Google did today?

Tomorrow id Apple just announces an iPad and a Mac , only Apple customers will be impressed. Apple's brand is only making incremental progress. The automotive industry makes incremental improvements every year, but the world doesn't take notice. The world anticipates the next Apple product category to follow the Mac, Macbook, iPod, iPhone, and iPad breakthroughs. To meet consumer expectations, Apple needs to introduce the computer industry equivalent of a flying car. In Google terms, Apple needs to land a moon shot.</comment>


GazeHawk (YC S10): On Accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/on-accuracy/

<comment><USER3> I'd like to know what goes into the loss in accuracy. At first you'd be willing to try to say the extra background, or the quality of the camera.

But after a little thinking I bet its more because of the unknown angle, possible variation in screen size, and where the user is sitting/the camera mount position.

Is it users that don't track well, or a combination of them and their hardware set up? If someone doesn't track well, does another person with a different eye color then sit down in the same position and track better?

<comment><AUTHOR> The loss in accuracy between us and a custom hardware setup for eye-tracking is primarily due to the fact that we're using a very different eye-tracking method. The "gold standard" for eye-tracking involves shining an infrared LED at the user's eye and measuring the reflection.

Since we're trying to use no custom hardware at all, we have to use machine learning techniques to extract features from the visible-light image of the user's eye. This is a lot more difficult than locating the bright spot in a reflection, so there's a lot more that can go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 70 pixels? that ought to be good enough to implement an optical alt-tab.

i would agree to arbitrarily invasive monitoring of my web activity in exchange for that.

details: special behavior for, say, the vestigial enter key to the right of the space bar on my old MBP. When it's depressed, trigger exposé and start tracking my point of fixation. As it's released, return from exposé with focus on the window i was looking at.

or maybe aapl would pay? it's got more wow factor than spotlight or time machine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just some information about the accuracy of our eye-tracking software - <USER2> have been curious, so I thought I'd share it with the community.

Feedback appreciated, as always!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorely tempted to become a customer of yours, one of these days, when I've found the energy to rework my site it will probably happen.</comment>


Springboard launches dedicated hardware incubator - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/the-diy-renaissance-u-k-accelerator-springboard-launches-dedicated-bootcamp-for-hardware-startups/

<comment><USER2> I am so looking forward to this. There is so much potential in this market and smart people getting involved.

I truly believe that "hardware is the new black".</comment>