Facebook Home over a week later: only 500K installs with a two-star user rating - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/22/facebook-home-over-a-week-later-only-500k-installs-with-a-two-star-user-rating/ <comment><USER2> The title feels clickbait-y. It should be pretty obvious why there were only 500K downloads- it's only available on around three devices. I'm interested to at least take a look at it, but I can't.

As for the reviews, many of them are of the "I hate Facebook" variety, but others seem to state (correctly) that it need some work. Given Facebook have committed to monthly releases, I don't think this is the end of Facebook Home.

<comment><USER3> Even if the 500k number is acceptable since it's only available on selected devices, the 2 stars average rating is undeniable.

As comparison, Facebook for Android app has the average rating of 3,5. So I guess the 2 stars should be taken as an alert for the Facebook Home developers to keep working on it.

<comment><USER4> A lot of people rate Facebook at 1-star because they don't like Facebook as a whole (I think I saw the term "protest vote" somewhere else in this thread). The reviews that just say "I hate Facebook" clearly aren't indicative of Home as a whole.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, there must be lots of people like that. I'm just comparing it to Facebook app which has 3,5 rating (which I'm sure lots of haters 1-star it too but still end up with acceptable rating)

<comment><USER5> I mentioned this downthread, but Google unlike, say, Amazon doesn't let you rate things you haven't downloaded/purchased. If these really are protest votes, that would mean users are going through the effort of downloading the app, then uninstalling it, then leaving the crap rating.

So either there are some dedicated facebook haters out there, or the people who tried this app really hate it that much...

<comment><USER6> I rated the Facebook Android app 1 star because it came preinstalled as crapware on my cell phone and there was no way to remove it. I had never downloaded it.

<comment><USER5> You negatively rated the application because your carrier chose to abuse the system/ partition?

Seems like misdirected outrage...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The irony of forcing Facebook users to create a Google+ account so that they can give it a favorable review...

</comment><comment><USER8> "mostly thanks to more than 5,800 one-star reviews."

AKA, protest ratings. "This sucks in principle and I will never use it since Facebook is stupid."

<comment><USER5> Android doesn't let you rate things until after you've downloaded them, though. If that's truly the cause of these ratings, people are going through a lot of work to just say "facebook sucks".

<comment><USER8> Actually, it does seem like a lot of people are writing somewhat legit reviews, although they show a pretty complete lack of understanding of what Facebook Home is. Stuff like "takes over my phone" and "hides my widgets" are the point of the app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The freedom of Android allows me to turn my ordinary smartphone into a free, personal data mining, advertising platform! Take _that_ , Apple!"

</comment><comment><USER10> This is irrelevant.

those intrusive apps are made with carrier integration in mind.

You can't uninstall Facebook from any Samsung phone. And you won't uninstall Facebook home from the new s4 and updated s3 and notes.

So, why care about user ratings?

<comment><USER5> You can't "uninstall" any app that the carrier forces on you, but you can disable it as of ICS or better. The app is both prevented from running and hidden from the app drawer.

In practice, the amount of storage you're denied from not being able to completely wipe these apps is miniscule.

Just one of the neat bits of control that the newer Android versions give you :)

<comment><USER4> Wait, can you do that for the Google-default apps too? I have a half dozen Google+ settings/messengers/other things that I can't uninstall from my phone (Nexus), when I really just want to hide them from view.

<comment><USER5> My Galaxy Nexus lets me do it, anyways. I tried on the Play Store, GMail, etc. Looks like the only things it doesn't work on are the apps that are the interface to basic phone functions (dialer, messaging, etc).

<comment><USER10> sorry, we are talking about carrier locked phones and custom samsung images.

Nexus devices do not fit the bill.

<comment><USER5> Parent comment was explicitly referencing a Nexus device...

<comment><USER10> But he was replying to my comment regarding Samsung phones

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am amazed that there is an app worse than Facebook for Android.

<comment><USER12> Only if it's another app that's made by Facebook, it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They should have released two different products. Chat Heads and Facebook Home.

I think Chat Heads looks like a strong product (only from referencing the videos though, I don't have it).

Without Chat Heads, would Facebook Home have been released to such a fanfare?

<comment><USER14> Unless I'm mistaken, they _did_. Chat Heads is part of the most recent Facebook Messanger update. You can get it without Home.

<comment><USER15> and that's why I uninstalled Messenger. I don't want messages (which is facebook's version of email) drawing on top of my other apps.

<comment><USER16> Turn that feature off then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These numbers are misleading. Facebook Home only works on a handful of devices. Even some of the devices that will actually allow you to download it, sometimes the install will then claim it is not supported. A lot of the reviews whine that the app is just not available to them. From people who actually can use it, Home seems rather well liked by Facebook users.

</comment><comment><USER18> To be fair, the slow growth might partly be explained by their restricting it to a few devices in the US only.

</comment><comment><USER19> Advertisement in my phone's background? Thanks, but no thanks

</comment><comment><USER20> May be this is just be but I have never been comfortable with facebook's make- many-apps strategy. I've always used fb as a collective experience. I find the need to use different apps for different functionalities a pain in the ass, mostly because all facebook features are so intertwined.

</comment><comment><USER21> For those who tried it, is Home the answer to the conflict between Messenger and Facebook? the two apps from Facebook that would give you twice the notification in case of a message.

I get that people will all have internet on their phone in a few years and that launching a service like facebook messenger right now is clever, but it didn't have the technology to detect if facebook app was installed to disable the notification in at least one of the apps.

I'm seeing Home as the "fix" but can't try it on my device...

</comment><comment><USER22> I've just installed it, and unfortunately most of my friends post food/baby photos and weird re-shares, and there's no option to download only on WiFi, so I uninstalled it.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Only 500K installs". How many app developers would kill for 500K installs. Its a good number for what it is - letting Facebook take over your home screen.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure if average user rating is a good indicator of quality. I've seen people give 1-star ratings because they wanted a feature that was missing.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would use it, but Facebook has just become one giant hub of spam for me now. Maybe 2 years ago, but now all I see on the lockscreen is stupid memes and posts from people I don't even know. I like the chat-heads concept though. To have a UI like that for texting phone-wide would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure a lot of developers would be more than happy with "only" 500K downloads ... especially with only a few supported devices like this. Makes me wonder if a lot of negative ratings is just another marketing strategy. "You have to see how crappy this app is"

<comment><USER27> What an average developer would be happy with is not relevant in any way to a multi-billion dollar company with investors to answer to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How people are led to believe the lie, its only available in 4 devices..they compare it to instagram's android entry..how dumb can one get..

facebook should have released it as a beta product, it feels very barebone

</comment><comment><USER29> 500K installs. How many turned around and uninstalled? So far everyone I know that tried it has uninstalled it. (I understand that it could be my circle of friends...)

</comment><comment><USER30> I tried it out but I found it too suffocating -- Facebook, like Google, wants their "feed" to be your main IV-line of info-tainment but in practice the vapid updates of friends mixed in with poorly constructed advertisements isn't very engaging.

If someone makes Facebook Home for aggregated RSS feeds, than they've invented mobile crack and I will never be able to put it down. So maybe don't do that.

Also, Chat Heads is the best SMS implementation I've used on Android, so kudos to Facebook for that.

<comment><USER5> _vapid updates of friends_

Don't friend people on Facebook who post garbage. Any social service (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is only as good as the effort you put into curating the experience.

Oh, and if you feel you must friend someone, you can just hide everything they post from your news feed.

<comment><USER9> Stop blaming the users for a bad product, especially when your suggestion goes against the core purpose of the product in question.

<comment><USER31> Oh yeah and there's email, phone, and all kinds of other communication platforms. They are all bad products because there's so much spam, right?

<comment><USER9> "e-mail" and "phone" are not products. That's like calling Facebook "internet".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Racing - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/racing/ <comment><USER2> Wow, this really looks like it might be another "gmail" in that it's such a ridiculously awesome thing that releasing it on April 1st will keep everyone guessing if its actually real.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, looks like it's definitely an April Fools Joke. (The "Interested parties" section under Future Uses seems intentionally creepy.)

<comment><USER4> The Future Uses section certainly has a joke-y tone, but if it's an April Fool's Day joke, then NASCAR has given them a huge amount of leeway.

Usage of NASCAR trademarks, hosting videos, and even linking to the video on their homepage.

I'm more inclined to believe that it's real. But I've fallen for more Google April Fool's jokes then I'd care to admit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The video ( <http://www.nascar.com/video/none/none/120331/cup-mar-google/> ) the site links to on NASCAR.com is pretty well done. I mention it because I almost missed it.

<comment><USER6> [http://ht.cdn.turner.com/nascar/big/cup/2012/03/31/cup- mar-g...](http://ht.cdn.turner.com/nascar/big/cup/2012/03/31/cup-mar- google.nascar.nascar_640x360.mp4)

direct mp4 w/o ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post ( [http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2012/03/bringing-self- driving-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2012/03/bringing-self-driving-cars- to-nascar.html) ) was updated:

 _Update Apr 1, 10:05 a.m.: As you probably guessed—no, Google Racing isn't real. We were really happy to work with NASCAR on this April Fools' joke. The technological advancements this sport has made in the last decade are impressive and while we won't be providing self-driving cars to compete in the races, we look forward to working together with NASCAR in the future on projects like their YouTube channel. What better way to drive change?_

</comment><comment><USER8> That scene in the video, of the driver looking very confused asking "So... you don't need me?". Got me thinking, that was probably the same scene when some record label executives heard about the internets for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't believe this. I hope it's real, because then it would be clear that Google is very close to being able to market their autonomous car technology. I imagine a move like putting their autonomous car in a NASCAR race is part of a larger plan to familiarize the masses with their technology and serve as great advertising. To get enough people comfortable with computers driving cars Google will need to fight a hard PR battle, even just to get sensible legislation passed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I realize this is probably an April Fools' prank, but I'm guessing that a race around a fixed track would actually be a great way to test autonomous cars: you don't need to worry about pedestrians, bicyclists, stoplights, pets, traffic laws, etc; all you have to do is focus on driving and turning at high speeds, and on the other cars on the track.

<comment><USER11> The more I think about it, the less likely this is to be real. Normal day to day driving is actually incredibly easy. But racing requires intense and constant concentration and quick reactions.

<comment><USER12> > But racing requires intense and constant concentration and quick reactions

Which is exactly what computer are great at. What they are terrible at is dealing with incomplete information.

A computer would actually make a great race car driver.

<comment><USER13> I don't think it would. Because part of racing is gambling on the other driver to back off when fighting for position. And when I say "gambling", there are a lot of very human factors involved in trying to figure out an opponents likely behavior. It's not like chess.

<comment><USER12> Computers actually play poker rather well.

And in racing computers have no fear for their life, and they know exactly what their (cars) limits are - I think it could be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although this happens to be for April Fool's, the funny thing is Stanford already did this with their Pikes Peak Audi TTS race car [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february1/shelley- pikes-p...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february1/shelley-pikes- peak-020310.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm kind of hoping this is real, I'd love to see a robot racer take on the humans at least once.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd actually love to see an iea like this come to fruition. It will probably be something more like an autonomous robot fight. But, it brings something tangible and a different dimension to competitions among coders

</comment><comment><USER11> Who wants to bet that this one isn't a joke?

</comment><comment><USER17> Likely an April fools, but actually seems like a good idea. The car could be lighter, wouldn't make as many mistakes, and could help get people comfortable with the idea of autonomous vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would totally pay to watch this.

Edit: I would totally pay to see autonomous robots race on a track without the limitations of human drivers.

I've actually driven on a track (once) and it's surprisingly different/difficult.

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprise! As you might have guessed, Google Racing is an April Fools joke brought to you by Google and NASCAR. And while we won't be providing self- driving cars to compete in the races, we look forward to working with NASCAR on future projects.

</comment><comment><USER20> Larry and Sergey mentioned it on gplus. <https://plus.google.com/109813896768294978296/posts>

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting idea to use an April fools joke to raise awareness about probably one of the lesser known projects.

</comment><comment><USER22> So now there are 3 April Fool's jokes? This, Chrome multitasking and 8-bit game cartridge Google Maps?

<comment><USER23> And the downloadable YouTube Collection: <http://www.youtube.com/theyoutubecollection>

<comment><USER8> That link is down for me. But you can read more about it here:

<http://youtube-global.blogspot.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And I thought that the chrome multitasking was too much effort.

</comment><comment><USER25> I lol'ed at the Android Paint Scheme...

</comment><comment><USER26> Can we use this to bring ultimate defeat and ruin to Danica Patrick + GoDaddy?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure this is another April Fool's Joke. I didn't find anywhere where it said "April Fools" but maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER28> Entering one of their vehicles in real NASCAR seems rather impossible, but perhaps an exhibition race? Still a long shot, but maybe... here's hoping.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if any existing rule prevents them from entering? I doubt anyone previously saw the need to say "all cars must have drivers".</comment></comment></comment>


Review my startup - Adventure Cow - <AUTHOR> http://adventurecow.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, here are some screenshots of designs I tested for the frontpage: <http://drop.io/frkcsbx>

</comment><comment><USER2> What is the target audience for this and how would you monetize it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Writers/readers - sales (that's not yet)

Educational institutions - writing software

<comment><USER2> That monetization strategy makes sense, though I'd find out what such institutions are looking for in writing software before going too far.

I'd suggest refining who your target audience is. Writers and readers is far too broad. Having a better sense of who would use this will help you develop and position the product much better. As it stands, when I hit the site I can't tell if it's for adults or children. The answer is probably both but when you go to start marketing this you'll have to choose one.

<comment><AUTHOR> You hit the nail on the head - I've been thinking about it for a while and _I_ still can't decide if it's for adults or children.

<comment><USER2> In that case my pragmatic side says to approach some educational institutions and see which they'd be more likely to buy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-abandons-do-not-track-privacy-protection/ <comment><USER2> Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet.

Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

<comment><USER3> What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme?

I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

<comment><USER4> IDK really, but i found this article lately:

[https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad- ideas-a...](https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-ayn- rands-fanboys-take-the-reins-of-power/)

Make your own conclusions.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure one one can make their 'own' conclusions from reading that article it was clearly biased towards reaching the conclusion that Ayn Rand was a writer for 'juveniles' which I don't think is a fair appraisal. I mean I don't agree with her conclusions on the world but I would say the world she has created in her novels are at a higher level than juvenile reading.

<comment><USER3> Why, I enjoyed this article, particularly the part about rape and the end:

 _I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they're way too deep for him._

Make your own conclusions, indeed.

 _Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism._

Um, I only hope they don't give awards for _that_.

<comment><USER6> Salon is a very left-wing site, heavily opinion-based. You get about the same kind of thing when looking at opinion sites from any part of the political spectrum.

It's glorified trash talking really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting how Microsoft killed DNT - by supporting it.

Once they made it the default, it was all over. It was so obvious that doing so would kill DNT that I have to wonder if they did that on purpose.

It's definitely an interesting way of stopping something you don't like - support it to such a degree that those who asked for it don't want it anymore.

<comment><USER8> This.

If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this.

It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly.

This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided to use DNT as a marketing platform instead.

<comment><USER9> I think you're putting too much blame on Microsoft here. DNT was always garbage, the fact that as soon as anyone used it (it becoming default for IE being the push in this case) it would fall apart just shows that it was always doomed.

 _Shouldn 't_ not being tracked be the default? Shouldn't we be opting into targeted ads, not out of them? Seems reasonable, if DNT weren't garbage, to have it be on by default. But it was garbage and so it was never really any help to anyone anyway.

Really, everyone should just install an adblocker, and whitelist sites that are non-invasive, don't track, and that you want to support. Then the responsibility isn't on advertisers not to track us, it's on citizens to whitelist sites that they genuinely should be supporting.

<comment><USER10> I think you're right that "not being tracked" should be the default, in so much as having an adblocker and blacklisting known trackers should be defaults. These are things that my user-agent should be doing automatically to protect me and improve my experience.

On the other hand, DNT is intended to be an opt-in polite request for _other agents_ to change their usual behavior. An adblocker or tracking blocker at the browser/user-agent level does nothing to change how the servers that I _do_ connect to behave. It just alters the behavior of my browser to _not contact at all_ unrelated third parties.

With DNT, my user-agent still contacts those third parties, but with a request to alter _their_ default behavior. "Please, give me adco.com/somead, but please don't correlate this request with other information you have on me, etc."

I do think there's a possible place for something like that, but it has to be opt-in or nobody will listen to it. Trivial examples of other "please deviate from your default behavior" requests are things like "show desktop version" on mobile browsers, Accept/Accept-Language (where supported), etc.

On the gripping hand, it's also yet another bit to differentiate me from everyone else, and expecting polite and ethical behavior from advertising corporations probably really is doomed to failure.

<comment><USER9> > On the gripping hand, it's also yet another bit to differentiate me from > everyone else, and expecting polite and ethical behavior from advertising > corporations probably really is doomed to failure.

Yeah, I considered bringing this up in my original post - DNT is garbage for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones being that it actually _sucks_ for privacy, especially if it's not used a ton. It's one more thing that can make you trackable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> DNT made sense only in a world where there would be some sort of law to back it up.

I actually had my adblocker turned off on websites I knew at least tried to respect DNT (reddit, medium and twitter), guess twitter's getting completely adblocked now.

<comment><USER12> I have no issue adblocking Twitter since they use deceptive ads.

It used to be ads had to be clearly labelled as not to confuse with regular content. Twitter buries their "promoted" label at the bottom in light grey text, so you only know it's an ad after you've read it and asked "WTF? Why is this in here?"

<comment><USER13> Somehow my brain has figured out how to notice that and ignore them.

Scrolling through my feed I swipe past the ads faster than the other tweets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My ad blocker has a DNT they cannot abandon.

<comment><USER15> Even better when used in conjunction with Firefox's Tracking Protection (`privacy.trackingprotection.enabled` in about:config).

<comment><USER16> Well I guess I didn't know that!

I thought 'do not track' was on and I was OK but trackingprotection is a separate option in Firefox configuration.

<comment><USER15> Websites can ignore DNT, but Tracking Protection eliminates trackers in Firefox itself. It's like an ad blocker, but focused on identifying and removing trackers specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you take a look at any fingerprinting code in the wild, ALL of them use your DNT setting as another bit to track you.

It had the exact opposite effect it intended to have.

</comment><comment><USER18> > "DNT seemed like a good idea. By setting DNT on in your web browser, > websites that supported DNT could neither place nor read advertising cookies > on your device. Well, that was the idea anyway."

No, DNT seemed like a stupid idea right from the beginning. It's nothing but an "evil bit" that websites were always free to ignore (and what's more, ignore silently). I never understood the outrage when Microsoft had IE set DNT to True as default, all they were doing was making explicit what a useless, feel-good piece of nonsense it was while everyone else was just ignoring the elephant in the room out of motivated self-interest.

So, good riddance. DNT was always an attempt by advertisers to distract people from the fact that the only real solutions to privacy problems are legislative, and they don't want that. Twitter abandoning it might be one tiny step closer to broad awareness of that.

<comment><USER19> Another example of the fallacy of suggesting a 'free market' will lead to desirable outcomes for society at large when those outcomes are counter to the goal of maximizing profit for individual players. I believe the idea was well- intentioned, but as noted had no chance from the start without some kind of regulatory enforcement behind it.

<comment><USER20> Not really. You could easily argue (and I would) that people simply don't value it highly, on average. You are free not to visit websites that track you, or use various other technological solutions (Tor, private browsing, ad blockers). There's not a great deal to learn about the "free market" here.

<comment><USER21> > You are free not to visit websites that track you

Let me just check the public registry of what companies track me and what they're tracking.

<comment><USER22> If people really wanted this, you could easily build this tool for money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Online privacy remains an issue that upsets people, but at day 's end, neither companies nor the Trump administration have any real interest in protecting privacy. _

Does not surprise me at all.

As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Unfortunately, it's becoming a textbook case of how massive ego corrupts and destroys a product, a company, and now even a country. It started with the lockout of developers' ability to write frameworks around the APIs and is ending, naturally, with these massive political bots owning 10K+ followers, spam that always ends up on the top layer of search.

My disenchantment had been growing for a long while. Finally shut down my accounts earlier this week after they refused to offer "verification" my ecosteader account. Ten years I've been waiting it out, promoting this company for free, adding Twitter links to websites I build for customers and clients... and they do not even grant a courtesy gesture to show people that yes, the owner of these Twitter accounts is indeed associated with these websites.

Instead, like everything else on the Internet these days, it's all about popularity and ego and bribery.

Apparently, the rumor that the best way for a small company or org to get verified is to cash-bribe somebody who works there is true? If that's what you wanna do, go for it... but at least document your corrupt dollars needed and standards for bribery somewhere, so people can have some reference before they waste their time. The echo chamber and circlejerk thing has gone on for far too long.

<comment><USER24> > As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform > had a lot of promise at one time.

Given that is was a centralized, proprietary service from day one, so it necessarily would follow the interests of the owners, and that also has a strong network effect that locks people in ... how did you come to that wild conclusion?

<comment><USER23> There was a (brief) period of time many years ago when Twitter was more friendly to developers; that is what I was referring to.

What followed was a series of terribly bad decisions to turn it into a marketing platform, rather than what it what it was organically becoming, which was a real-time market research tool + analytics API.

As a result of bad direction and big ego, today it is just an extremely noisy, mostly irrelevant, echo chamber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> (Kicking around an idea to build this:)

Would anybody be interested in a local DNS server that automatically updated its list of black-holed domains through a mechanism that preserved your privacy? (Assuming, of course, a decentralized representation of the block lists.)

Would anybody be willing to sell their attention by accepting payment (BTC), perhaps through a dutch auction, to re-enable a black-holed domain for a time- limited period? (Hand-waving the mechanism for ensuring that the domain was actually whitelisted.)

I'd personally be interested in the former, and would likely use the latter - even though I find it hilariously unlikely that Ad Networks or Web Sites would participate in bidding for my attention directly.

<comment><USER26> If you don't already know about it, definitely check out [https://pi- hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

I'm not totally clear on where their blacklist comes from but their mainpage claims "Known ad-serving domains are pulled from third party sources and compiled into one list"

This is pretty much exactly your first suggestion and seems like it would be an excellent platform on which to launch your second suggestion.

<comment><USER27> Default block lists appear to be: [https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/wiki/Customising-sources-...](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi- hole/wiki/Customising-sources-for-ad-lists)

The most comprehensive of the lists appears to be [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) , which is the same list I use for DNS filtering on my DD-WRT router. Seems to work pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py what if instead of using ad blockers we use ad amplifiers that downloaded 10 or 100 copies of video ads to make sure we got the data correct?

Serving video is pretty expensive. How big are the ad networks' margins? Let's see who blinks first.

<comment><USER28> Ironically if you make this look like "click fraud" you can probably ensure that the site doesn't get paid for serving ads - but the ad network was still paid by their clients.

<comment> awinter-py If an ad network marks a click as fraudulent but still charges the advertiser, aren't they guilty of fraud as well? That seems like risky behavior for a company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What a shock - the voluntary and arbitrarily interpreted 'feature' designed by advertising companies failed to protect anyone's privacy...

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, ad blockers are still here.

</comment><comment><USER31> Commenters are confusing ads versus tracking.

Remember that it is possible to track users without the use of ads.

A browser written by an organization that profits from ad revenue or collecting user information (hereafter "well-known browser") will load elements, e.g., images, in a web page automatically.

No user interactivity is required. The user need not "click" anything. The user may not even be able to see the element loaded.

Email clients supporting HTML email can do the same thing, loading images automatically, hence suporting a method of tracking.

This is a very old method but still widely used.

What if the user is not using a "well-known browser"? What if those elements will not be loaded automatically? Will these methods of tracking still work?

All methods of tracking, other than IP addresses in access logs, rely on assumptions. Many rely on assumptions about usage of a "well-known browser".

The assumption re: automatically loaded elements, "beacons" or whatever one wants to call them, is that the user is using a "well-known browser" that will load elements automatically. If the user is not using a "well-known browser", all bets are off?

Another example is the HTTP header "fingerprint". HTTP headers are tied to "well-known browsers". What if suddenly all users decided to only send the same minimal headers? In the way that some server software might try to hide its version (e.g., BIND) imagine that users decided to hide their client software version.

Aside from IP addresses, many methods of web tracking are heavily reliant on assumptions about use of "well-known browsers" and the behavior of those browsers. Could these assumptions ever fail to be true? Can users think for themselves?

The www as a medium for exchanging information or even doing commerce does not necessarily require the use of any particular browser. That "requirement" is only imposed by certain sites on the www, for reasons that may ultimatley benefit the site owner more than its users. No such "requirement" is imposed by the www itself.

Thinking of this in terms of "a carrot and a stick", as far as I have seen using the www since 1993 there is only a carrot in the form of a "well-known browser". _There is no stick._ Users are free to make HTTP requests using _any client_ they choose, including ones that do not expose them to advertising or tracking. Such clients may not require an "adblocker" because _they do not requests elements automatically_.

There used to be and perhaps there still is a never-ending battle between commercial entities over which is the "default browser" in a graphical OS. Certain companies tried to coax users into using certain "well-known browsers". There was even a large antitrust case in the US over this issue.

The implication seemed to be that if not set _by default_ users might otherwise choose some other HTTP client to interact with the www. In those days one company wanted to sell a browser as enterprise software. Today that browser is owned by a "non-profit" organization of salaried employees. Other well-known browsers are owned by "for profit" (subject to taxation) commercial entities with thousands of employees.

Today, these well-known browsers are "free". And yet these browsers are written by salaried employees, not open-source project volunteers. These entities continue to market their "free" browsers aggressively to users.

As a user, ask yourself why.

Ads? Tracking?

</comment><comment> awinter-py upvote != endorsement

</comment><comment><USER32> I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy. It was a doomed idea from the start -- all DNT does is politely ask a website not to track you. Setting their browser to DNT on did give tens of millions of Firefox users the illusion they were getting a high level of privacy (so they presumably would stick to Firefox) even though it didn't actually do very much.

<comment><USER33> > I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy.

What motivation does Mozilla have to want to "undermine online privacy?" Of all the major browser vendors, they seem the _least_ coupled to the privacy- invading ad ecosystem.

<comment><USER32> The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem?

That gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google & Yahoo/Microsoft in search revenues without pushing them to provide a genuine private search?

<comment><USER33> > The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads > to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem?

Yeah it's the least coupled, because the major alternatives (e.g. Google) _literally run the privacy-invading ad networks_.

Mozilla walked back from the tab-page ads more than a year ago.

> without pushing them to provide a genuine private search?

How much leverage do you think Mozilla has with the search engines? Google canceled their deal with them because they are so dominant and Chrome has been so successful. Mozilla needs revenue to keep the lights on, and the search engines are the source of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The TikTok ban and the openness trap - <AUTHOR> https://unintendedconsequenc.es/tiktok-ban-openness-trap/ <comment><USER2> There is always a reason why it might be a good idea for some government to prop up this and cut down that industry. The temptation is obvious, which is why people sometimes start believing in 5-year plans and great leaps forward, or enjoy Sim City.

Arbitrary action such as this is a sign of weakness: of economic weakness, and the fear to no longer be good enough to be the single biggest winner of free trade the US was for most of the 20th century. It's also a weakness of the law: of institutions competent and empowered to specifically define and litigate harmful behaviour, within the existing confines of law, such as due process. Instead, it's executive fiat, directed against foreign companies that have no lobby powerful enough to protect them, and coming from an office where nobody bothers to ask for reasonable explanations, because (last weakness) the guy is incapable, uninterested, and really just completely devoid of any understanding of the rule of law.

Americans already are losing as much as China is from this action. But its only in mindless entertainment that people won't complain about because they fear being mocked for enjoying such things. But if it works, the hits will start creeping closer, and you now need to make sure to stay not just on the right side of the law, but also the far-right side of politics.

Meanwhile, China isn't going to change for economic reasons: countries from cuba to North Korea to, for the longest time, the USSR have not budged in the face of sanctions. A country in the process of cutting off the lifeblood of its status as a superpower of science and entrepreneurship, just because people in rural counties that have never seen a foreigner have decided they don't like them, should really be in a good position to understand how powerless economic interests are against ideology and jingoism.

<comment><USER3> China isn't going to change for economic reasons because it is extremely successful economically. I wonder how the American psyche will be able to withstand the transition from demanding arbitrary sanctions on China for humanitarian reasons to demanding that China stop their sanctions on the US, also for humanitarian reasons.

<comment><USER4> Is calling for the release of a million Uyghurs from re-education camps an "arbitrary humanitarian reason"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why doesn't anybody talk about AirDroid "Remote access & File" which has over 100 million downloads and was developed by China-based Sand Studio. That app has complete access to a huge number of Android devices and suffers from far greater Chinese Communist Party data access issues than other Made In China applications.

At least currently, AirDroid is a FAR greater threat to global security than TikTok is.

<comment><USER6> I'm more interested in the ways you can subvert a nation covertly by adjusting the algorithm.

Up weighting/down weighting content that exacerbates a rival nations problems or promotes the virtues of its own

<comment><USER5> Delivering content curated by Chinese Communist Party approved algorithms and censorship on what may become a core part of world pop culture is definitely a powerful piece of soft power. It's no exaggeration that any app delivering content to young people several hours a day may one day rival Hollywood in cultural influence.

But AirDroid gives you full remote access to your Android device through a web browser. Including messages (reading/sending/receiving), camera (taking photos/videos, and accessing existing photos/videos), and __full access to files __. It 's used widely (even by corporate IT) to transfer files between Android devices and PCs over Wi-Fi.

It's a very functional app with remote access to millions of devices, and just like Huawei there are of course a steady stream of major security vulnerabilities. These may be plausible-deniable "bugdoors", or just sloppy practices introducing major vulnerabilities than happen to be exploitable by independent researchers and nation states.

The issue is that it's developed by a company based in China and thus very closely linked with the Chinese Communist Party and given what we know about the CCP, it's almost certainly regularly being used by the Ministry of State Security and People's Liberation Army for to exfiltrate specific highly valuable files eg, private messages, VPN and SSH keys.

It seems strange there's no debate on banning AirDroid when it poses a far greater immediate threat than TikTok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Even the ACLU seemed to be both against and for a Tiktok ban in recent > tweets: "Banning an app like TikTok, which millions of Americans use to > communicate with each other, is a danger to free expression and > technologically impractical." But the prevented free expression on Tiktok, > noted above, is a great danger too. And since when does the ACLU care about > technological impracticability?

> Another ACLU tweet: "To truly address privacy concerns with companies like > TikTok, Congress must ensure that ANY company that services US consumers > cannot hand over our data to any government without a warrant or equivalent. > Letting the president selectively ban platforms isn't the solution." That > tweet seems to be in favor of the ban and a process for banning other > companies as well.

Seems pretty clear what the ACLU stance is. Banning TikTok is a political move that curbs free speech and has nothing to do with protecting speech. This is because we have domestic apps that not only can, but are, doing the same thing (Instagram silently dropping kamalaharris.info messages for violating "Community Standards").

If we ban the techniques that curb free speech instead, seems more in line with the argument of protecting free speech.

</comment><comment><USER8> This story is still developing, but I think a forced buyout or outright ban is shortsighted.

The underlying fear is the impact that a foreign entity will have on our political and social fabric (because America has _never_ done that before). It's a valid concern, especially after Cambridge Analytica. But TikTok falls into the same regulatory challenge forces that can impact change through social media platforms. Building a better framework is a long term solution that encodes into law American values, transparency, and constraints by the legislative branch, not precedent set by the executive branch.

At the same time, every time there is a major hearing against big tech, it's always disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article neglects to mention that Zoom video conferencing is largely developed in China (due to doing its R&D there). This point tends to start flame wars, but it's worth mentioning.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a valid point. They are probably doing R&D there because it is much cheaper than doing it in US. There was news somewhere that Zoom was moving all servers to US, and chances are they will have to move some development here as well, if they want to avoid being directed by the Chinese government.

The point about China R&D is a good one, and of course something to consider for other companies now and in the future. After all, he explains that Google was not banned in China, until Google put some operations into the country.

I think the article isn't trying to cover all the basis, but rather highlight that there are many difference ways to look at this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"While the news about Microsoft's potential acquisition of TikTok was a huge relief for its American users, it was received poorly on the Chinese internet, with many calling Zhang Yiming, ByteDance's founder and CEO, a 'spineless traitor' and a 'despicable coward,' among other insults."

Seems like Weibo users are just as inflammatory and insufferable as Twitter users. Probably just as irrelevant too.

<comment><USER10> That's because Zhang Yiming is a big fan of American free market. Now they're mocking him because the free market he loves is not tolerating him. Gotta admit it's pretty funny.

<comment><USER11> yeah, it is super funny

have to feel bad for the guy

he basically was taking over the world

And now he's getting kicked out of the biggest market on the planet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Without getting into the political aspects of this issue, I really appreciated the sophistication of this article. The author was able to provide a nuanced perspective that generalized into a meta-commentary about media and culture in general. For instance, the author's point that US based media/commentators should consider how their Chinese counterparts are talking about the issue is really important for understanding this issue and similar cross cultural concerns, and sadly it is all too often overlooked.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a more level-headed description of the situations and their background.

But I think it's still missing the point:

* There isn't a legal process of banning TikTok.

* The current process is overly politicized.

It's not that there isn't legitimate reasons to motivate banning TikTok. It's that such reasons cannot legally justify such action.

Of course there is presidential executive power to do that. But that should be used as a less common mechanism. Not on this minor issue.

My conclusion: The whole situation is out-of-proportional because of politics.

<comment><USER14> One other issue is that China did not just outright ban Google or Facebook or Twitter.

The Chinese government gave these companies a chance to stay, as long as the complied with the censorship laws.

Google was going to re-enter the Chinese market again with Project Dragonfly, but they backed out due to bad publicity.

<comment><USER15> >but they backed out due to bad publicity.

And if they hadn't, I would hope that this discussion we're having would include what sanctions Google should face for not backing out. I'm having a hard time following how folks in threads related to China are not seeing that this game is being played by two players with completely different understandings of the rules. Player 1 spends an inordinate amount of time with the rule book, complaining to others that player 2 isn't playing fairly. Player 2 continues taking territory knowing that by the time player 1 realizes it's not about following the rules - it's about winning - it'll be too late.

<comment><USER13> > what sanctions Google should face for not backing out

What are the sanctions?

I am not aware of firms doing business to China are punished by any sovereign nations?

> this game is being played by two players with completely different > understandings of the rules

What do you mean by different understanding of the rules?

I thought here China and US do have different rules, and firms are facing different rules when they operate at these 2 nations. How and why that leads to different understanding of (the same set of) rules?

> Player 1 ... Player 2

Who are these corresponding to China and US?

I am fairly exposed to the complexity involves in the sino us relationship both economic and political. There certainly isn't systematic imbalance in terms of one government is playing by rules and the others don't.

<comment><USER15> >What are the sanctions?

There are none right now, that's my point. But if PRC is going to co-opt US companies as they implement other strategies to become global hegemon in 10 years time, it's perfectly appropriate to ask questions about whether or not American companies should play party to this - and whether or not the American government should do anything to stop or reverse the trend.

>What do you mean by different understanding of the rules?

>Who are these corresponding to China and US?

I'm not really convinced you're arguing in good faith if your null position is that the US and China are behaving the same way in international markets. There's mountains of evidence to the contrary, going back 30 years.

<comment><USER13> > your null position is that the US and China are behaving the same way in > international markets.

Of cuz they are not behaving the same way. But the issue is: are they behaving in the framework of law?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The free market will create the greatest amount of wealth from a given amount of resources. Resisting the market will result in less wealth. But maximising wealth isn't the only strategic goal when dealing with China. The Communist party leadership are scary people.

China was wise not to let American tech companies have free access to their markets. America would be wise to reciprocate. Data is much more valuable in aggregate than it is to individuals and keeping it in house seems like it would be worth the costs. Europe has started to adopt a similar strategy of blocking data egress (via GDPR) and that makes sense to me too.

<comment><USER17> >The free market will create the greatest amount of wealth from a given amount of resources.

What do you mean by this? Most free markets have a significant amount of dead weight loss.

<comment><USER18> > Most free markets have a significant amount of dead weight loss.

This tends to be moved into "externalities" and doesn't affect the direct recipients of wealth. It does affect things like quality of life, environment, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A better ban would be on platforms that force you through a single organizations servers. That would solve lots of problems the internet has.

</comment><comment><USER20> What I found most funny about the situation is that Trump and people alike blame TikTok (at least partially) for their (for the lack of a better word) embarrassment. Is it not a known fact that our current president is hated by many? I don't need China to tell me that.

<comment><USER21> Most politicians are hated in the US. I believe congress has a much lower approval rating and the media even lower. 40-20-10 as a rough ratio if memory serves me well

<comment><USER22> That's very misleading.

Congresspeople have high approval from their own constituents. Everyone hates _other_ district's congresspeople.

[https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down- congress-...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-own- representative.aspx)

<comment><USER21> The numbers you show confirm my statement, I was talking about congress, the legislative branch, on the whole. The point is that we do not approve of our government and media organizations by and large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The author is diminishing the bigger picture geostrategic issues such as trade, security, influence and state control.

This has little to do with 'expression or values' \- they are hardly part of he equation.

TikTok is a 'large Chinese company' which means it has deep ties to the government. TikTok users were apparently partly responsible for screwing up Trump's rally. I don't actually believe China was behind this, nor are we sure how much said users had an effect, but the fact that this is plausible is a very, very serious concern.

Authoritarian states are getting really, really good at controlling information, it's much more effective than nuclear threats.

That most of us happen to loathe Trump (who as far as I am concerned would for TikTok to ban negative videos of him if he could get away with) is besides the point.

The 'tit for tat' issues are not issues of 'values' \- they are mostly issues of trade asymmetry, and there are very legit concerns there.

The notion that one state could have so much information about another state and act coherently on that in the context of a fairly aggressive, almost Imperial plan, is something we're going to have to contend with very soon.

Edit: I should add that values/freedom of expression do matter of course, but they are absolutely not the driving factors underlying this issue. Arguably not even part of the equation at this point.

<comment><USER24> There are literally thousands of apps that do that, but they were targeting TikTok?

This is a political and economical move, if this is how US and Trump wanted it to be, by forcing another company to sell into another local company then it would be a forced acquisition and this would make other companies to reconsidered to invest or build their company in the US.

By this rule, other country in this case China could also enforced banning on services and products into their market with the reason of "Security, Influence and State Control"</comment></comment>


Wall Street's Largest Oil Trade (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/uncovering-the-secret-history-of-wall-street-s-largest-oil-trade <comment><USER2> How interesting, I was just reading that same article yesterday!

The article is from 2017, but Mexico has been doing the same trades still every year - for example:

[https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/1/3/mexico- hedges-2020-cr...](https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/1/3/mexico- hedges-2020-crude-oil-exports-at-49-per-barrel)

This is from this January 2020 - they hedged at $49 per barrel... just before the coronavirus demand shock and oil price fall... another great Hacienda hedge.

<comment><USER3> Pardon my ignorance but if they bought puts at $49, with the current price they must have made a killing right?

<comment><USER2> Yes an absolute killing, similar to the one mentioned in the article for back in 2008 - may not be as much as back then but still a lot.

This is a case where a hedge plays out well, and the main motive for their play is stability for their government spending. Good for the citizens of Mexico

<comment><USER4> Not a killing. Only 25% of Mexico's oil production was hedged. So we're still losing ton of money on the other 75%, since oil is one of the main revenues of the Mexican goverment.

It's just insurance so when the prices crash the country doesn't go with it. Since no insurance company in the world can insure even a small govt, the only way to go for it is with financial instruments.

We rather lose a bit of money during the good times and not get wiped during the bad times.

It also seems Hacienda is quite decent at reading the markets from the article, I didn't know as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real story: "Large country buys insurance on largest asset." Not as exciting, but more contextually accurate. As is always the case with unique or monstrous assets, the insurance mechanisms require invention.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would be useful to know the long term profitability of this annual hedge rather than cherry picking a great year. If, hypothetically, every other year they lost a billion, then this $5B gain doesn't seem as great.

<comment><USER7> It's not just about profitability, but insurance. It allows you to distribute the losses over a much longer period of time and fix them in your budget.

<comment><USER8> Exactly, its a hedge. You hope you don't make a killing on the hedge!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The context is important. Right now, Mexico doesn't want to join OPEC+ production cuts because of their hedges (long puts).

<comment><USER10> Exactly [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-11/the- secre...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-11/the-secret- weapon-that-gives-mexico-power-in-the-oil-price-war)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://archive.md/PvlHS](https://archive.md/PvlHS)

</comment><comment><USER12> 2017

<comment><USER13> Mexico hedged at $49 this year for about 234,000 bpd, extremely relevant. Lots of incentives (about $6bn) to both have oversupply and not cut production.

<comment><USER14> Actually if it's simply a put the profits on the hedge stand independently of what they actually produce. They could lift the hedge at any moment or take the opposite bet to offset it regardless of their actual production. It seems to me it would be more advantageous to lift part of the hedge at a profit and then produce less since the price is way under the cost of production.

<comment><USER15> Unless them producing more drives the payout on the puts up more than what they pay for production (minus world prices).

Oh, and of course, this is all politics. They are not just maximizing profits, but they also have to worry about the optics of firing redundant workers, if they stop production.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Domain Driven Design When Surrounded by Legacy Development (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://domainlanguage.com/ddd/strategy/GettingStartedWithDDDWhenSurroundedByLegacySystemsV1.pdf <comment><USER2> I have to deal with a large, legacy Rails app, my strategy is to cordon it off and treat it with kid gloves. In this case it's quite literal, my main work machine cannot run a development server or even deploy the codebase. Instead I use a separate laptop. 95% of my time is spent building an external architecture with the eventual goal of pulling out successive pieces of functionality from the main app until nothing is left. When things are planned I push hard for building on the external architecture rather than extending the legacy app.

When I first got to the job I thought it might be worthwhile to refactor and upgrade the old codebase, but eventually settled on the cordon strategy because it's ultimately more flexible, and not having to touch the production site every day gives me a lot of peace of mind.

Anyone in this situation, I would recommend re-implementing your Active Record models with an external database connection using Sequel or even just regular SQL queries. I have a giant query with a crapload of joins that can retrieve product data, it's among the very first things I built at this job.

This provides a nice base to build on, the database is the heart and soul of the business, and it is far easier to work at that level of abstraction rather than trying to mess around inside the codebase.

<comment><USER3> This is heresy and unbelievers will be punished! Seriously though, I agree whole heartedly and am often dismayed at the lengths developers will go through to not write sql.

<comment><USER2> Oh believe me, I tried to use Sequel to get that data. After I realized just how many joins and how many layers of abstraction I'd need to debug the damn thing through, I knuckled down and built the query. Even so it runs behind a caching layer. Thankfully, I don't need up-to-the-minute product data.

<comment><USER3> At one previous gig we had a product-god query similar to what you're describing, which was the source of neverending sorrow. Eventually, the solution was to write and schedule a stored procedure that built a 'current_product' table with essential fields. Products and catalogs weren't updated that frequently, so it ran nightly, or could be run on demand. Performance increase was immense.

<comment><USER2> My problem was that there was so much baked in logic that I had to trace through the codebase to figure out, and even so, I was getting lots of incorrect results for months until I'd worked all the issues out. Even now sometimes my boss will be like, "there's bad data in the feed, can you check the query?" Most of the time it's bad data, but every time I have to load the damn query up in SequelPro and make sure it's doing its job. I dread the day when I actually have to understand what it's doing again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not only I'm discovering a lot of jargon that I should have known before, but also this document is giving me formal knowledge for the project I have currently at hand.

To the op and the author, my most sincere thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking user _zgm_ 's comment [1] in the current Ask HN regarding large code bases and it reminded me of this InfoQ talk by Evans and Foote:

[http://www.infoq.com/interviews/eric-evans-brian-foote- desig...](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/eric-evans-brian-foote-design- discussion)

Mud flowing into a project scope is a powerful image.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061217)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been re-reading Domain-Driven Design bit by bit on the train each morning and nearly every day I find something I can immediately apply.

Bonded contexts, for example, immediately clarified how to establish naming conventions across micro-services.

<comment><USER6> The Domain-Driven Design book is awesome, but a bit heavy. InfoQ published a nice introductory book called "Domain Driven Design Quickly". A free PDF is available, too:

[http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design- quickly](http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have seen the proxy pattern being used before. It's quite nice as it create a foundation that you can build on. Requests can either be sent to the legacy system(s) or redirected to the new system (for new functionality/ fixes). Working with incremental changes, rather than trying to replace the whole system thing at once. The tricky part is dealing with more data silos.

No one sets out to create a legacy system (maybe some consulting companies do), they just get more complex/ scary overtime. As the codebase and layers of technical debt are added, while documentation and the original creators disappear.

I'd love to know the economic cost of businesses held back by legacy systems each year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, one of the points that Eric Evans makes in the article is that programmers should set out to create legacy systems, because that means that they are really good at solving the business problems they are supposed to solve for a really long time.

I used to think that an open source project that hadn't been updated since 2002 was inherently bad. Now I've realized that sometimes this means that it is just done and it's so simple that everything that has changed over the past decade is addressed by ./configure and make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Evans re-invented many tried and proven concepts and gave them his own names which lead to much confusion. I prefer not to use his idiosyncratic terminology and stick with the established terms.

<comment><USER9> Can you expand upon this? I was recently introduced to DDD and had the same gut feeling, although am having trouble articulating exactly why. It does feel like a lot of what Evans is saying has already been said in design patterns books.

<comment><USER8> E.g. Repository. It's clearly similar to other persistence designs. OTOH, it's somehow different from plain ORMs - and it has a different name.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25648676/ddd- repository-u...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25648676/ddd-repository- unit-of-work-orms-and-dependency-injection)

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't feel strong enough to support the claim that Evans is repackaging established terms.

<comment><USER8> Don't be so lazy. Take any of the DDD concepts ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain- driven_design](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design)) and try to find the equivalent real-wold names.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Chinese Have Been Slow to Embrace Hugging - <AUTHOR> http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000611/why-chinese-have-been-slow-to-embrace-hugging <comment><USER2> Why do they need to? If the goal is to communicate affection, there are plenty of other options.</comment>


50 Cent Shares His Attitude Toward Investing - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/32736386/

<comment><USER2> _While in the past it would be considered selling out to team up with companies for endorsements, now it's a smart way to make money_

It was always a smart way to make money, even when MC Hammer did it in 1991. It was also a smart way to crossover into the mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very surreal. I don't know if anyone here knows, but Curtis Jackson started out in life as a drug dealer.

<comment><USER4> But he was smart enough to recognize that the vast majority of drug dealers make crap wages, despite the high risk and unpredictability of the job. It's roughly the same as saying someone started out in life in the military, a cab driver (Philip Glass was driving a cab when _Einstein on the Beach_ opened, for example), or as an overnight gas station cashier (all risky, relatively low-paying jobs), though with the added risk of ending up in prison.</comment></comment>


Do NLP Beyond English - <AUTHOR> https://ruder.io/nlp-beyond-english/ <comment><USER2> With new direction of research, like pre-taining and subword vocab, the models now are mostly language agnostic. English or not, it is just sequence of tokens.

Difference mainly lies in data abundance, where the distribution is severly skewed.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> English and the small set of other high-resource languages are in many ways not representative of the world's other languages. Many resource-rich languages belong to the Indo-European language family, are spoken mostly in the Western world, and are morphologically poor, i.e. information is mostly expressed syntactically, e.g. via a fixed word order and using multiple separate words rather than through variation at the word level.

I thought I'd give an example of this for readers who don't speak many languages other than English. My native language is Greek, which _is_ an Indo- European language, but it has some morphological intricacies that make it more complicated to learn and use (as a second language and from what I'm told of course) than English.

For example, in Greek, nouns have a gender [1]: masculine, feminine or neuter. For instance, "the dog" is "ο σκύλος" ("the male dog") while "the cat" is "η γάτα" (the female cat). However, grammmatical gender is not necessarily fixed so one can also say "η σκύλα" ("the female dog") or "ο γάτος" ("the male cat"). So there is a word-root ("σκυλ-" for dog, "γατ-" for cat) that is then modified by a termination, typically -ος, -η -ο for the nominative of each gender. The terminations change depending on the declention, for example the genetive for "σκύλος" is "σκύλου" and the generative for "σκύλα" is "σκύλας", etc. The termination also changes to denote number, singular or plural (ancient Greek also used to have a dual number, used to refer to pairs of nouns). Terminations vary depending on number according to gender and declention. So for example the plural of "σκύλος" is "σκύλοι", genetive "σκύλων" and the plural of "σκύλα" is "σκύλες", genetive "σκυλών".

Compare this with English where a dog is a dog is a dog, there is only one plural form, "dogs" and there is only one genetive form "dog's" or "dogs'" for each number. And a female dog is either a circumlocution, "female dog" or an entirely new word, "bitch", with its own simple set of transformations for number and genitive "bitches" and "bitch's" or "bitches'". Basically, changing meaning in English can be represented by adding a few words to a vocabulary- but changing meaning in Greek requires manipulating words at the structural level.

There are probably a few counter-examples to the above but my understanding is that this is how it works for the most part. And this, in particular the abilty of English to represent more meanings with more words, might go some way to explain why approaches that work best with large datasets tend to be favoured in English NLP.

Edit: not an NLP expert or a linguist so corrections welcome, of course!

______________

[1] Other Indo-European languages also have genders but the interesting thing is that those genders don't always match, between languages. This is an endless source of confusion for foreign language learners. For example I speak French from an early age and I only realised much later in life that Greek and French do not always use the same gender for the same nouns, even though I'd been using the right genders in my speech. For example, both "dog" and "cat" are masculine in French: "le chien" and "le chat". But while I always used "le chat" correctly, I always thought of it in my mind as "η γάτα", the feminine Greek noun. Human language is weird!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm reading lots of comments reacting against the premise of the article in name of some kind of efficiency or inherent value of a universal standar.

I wonder if commenters have considered that Research is useful to understand the present and more importantly prepare for the future. While English being useful língua Franca today seems to back decision to just focus on English research the point is: will this English uptake continue at same rate in future? Isn't there some kind of bubble effect where here in hn many think that (as non English native speakers) we can all engage so we think English is the only useful thing for us to understand?

What about all possible unknown Mandarin NLP research (which I think many agree) may be useful for non-mandarin speakers?

Also, isn't one of the points of Information Technology to enable/create value in a long tail of experiences? Focusing on a single attribute of a substantial part of the world seems counter productive and shortsighted...

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone chime in to how Chinese NLP compares? I speak Mandarin as a second language at an intermediate level, and from my perspective it has some interesting properties compared to English (my native language) that seem like they might make NLP easier in ways that English NLP might be hard:

\- The grammar for standard Mandarin is much simpler than English. No verb conjugations or strange tense rules ("go" -> "went")!

\- Tense and even voice are explicit and additive - i.e. adding "呢" or "吧" to a sentence.

\- Written, it seems less ambiguous. i.e. "duck" or "grave" have different meanings in English based on context, but that seems much much rarer in Chinese - two words spoken the same way but with different meanings usually have different written forms.

<comment><USER6> Mandarin has even less morphology than English[1], so to some extent, working on Mandarin would not "fix" some of the issues of NLP models often performing poorly on morphology-rich languages.

But it's possible that focusing more on Mandarin would still lead to improvements in other areas, because the two languages are otherwise quite different (I wonder how well speech recognition works for tonal languages, for example?).

[1] Possibly not without reason: there is some indication that languages spoken by a large number of speakers tend to become structurally simpler, while very small isolated languages can often develop surprising complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The cheap money, as in Oligarchy backed petrodollar slush funds, is residing mainly in the US. The 'defacto' second language of the world is English. Combine those two and it is not hard to see why English NLP is so dominant.

I'm not yet sure whether that is a good or a bad thing for non-English-as-a- first-languege regions.

<comment><USER8> I don't have a horse in this race, but surely it could only be bad for those regions, right? There's a whole world of applications involving NLP which non- English speakers don't have access to.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, a _huge_ amount of those applications target consumers to get them to misspend more money, so not having them might be a benefit?

Surveillance capitalism relies on getting ever more info about you, and exploiting it or selling it on to all that want to exploit it. NLP is one vector to extract that info from raw data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >> Recent models have repeatedly matched human-level performance on increasingly difficult benchmarks—that is, in English using labelled datasets with thousands and unlabelled data with millions of examples. In the process, as a community we have overfit to the characteristics and conditions of English-language data. In particular, by focusing on high-resource languages, we have prioritised methods that work well only when large amounts of labelled and unlabelled data are available.

This is an interesting observation. Training on large datasets tends to be framed as a strength, e.g. we have recently seen articles praising OpenAI's GPT-3 for being, well, big. The truth is that model size (and the assorted dataset size) is a bug, not a feature. It is the result of a dearth of research on approaches with low sample complexity. Or in other words, it's the result of consistently picking the low-hanging fruit and calling sour grapes on any domain for which there isn't sufficiently large data ("who cares about Swahilli?").

>> In contrast, most current methods break down when applied to the data- scarce conditions that are common for most of the world's languages. Even recent advances in pre-training language models that dramatically reduce the sample complexity for downstream tasks (Peters et al., 2018; Howard and Ruder, 2018; Devlin et al., 2019; Clark et al., 2020) require massive amounts of clean, unlabelled data, which is not available for most of the world's languages (Artetxe et al., 2020). Doing well with few data is thus an ideal setting to test the limitations of current models—and evaluation on low- resource languages constitutes arguably its most impactful real-world application.

And this is interesting to read in the context of the recent manic hype about GPT-3, itself described in a paper titled "Language models are few-shot learners", hilariously attempting to sweep under the carpet the amount of data and compute required to get to the point where a language model can do "few" shot learning.

In general, the excitement about the successes that have come from training large, deep neural nework models with very large datasets has only served to avoid posing the obvious question about such data-hungry approaches: what do we do when there isn't a lot of data? Human language with all its minutely fragmented diversity, turns out to be just that kind of domain.

<comment><USER8> I see this argument a lot. I have essentially zero ml experience, but isn't it fair to say that DNA indeed carries a similarly large amount of data? Also, it's not like any human is just born fully capable of inventing an entire language. It seemingly takes entire societies to pull this off.

Granted, our ml isn't even close to human intelligence yet. But why is the assumption made that humans are "trained" with very little data? We've collected millions of years of data to accomplish what we have.

<comment><USER3> Humans seem to come into the world with very good quality biases that allow us to learn any human language but I don't think anyone has ever found DNA encoding information about, say, the English language. An I misunderstanding your comment? If so, I apologise- I'm not sure where DNA comes in.

>> Also, it's not like any human is just born fully capable of inventing an entire language. It seemingly takes entire societies to pull this off.

This is a complicated matter and as I'm not a linguist I don't know what theories there even exist. However, I think a human child is perfectly capable of inventing an entire language. Small groups of children are certainly capable of doing that in the early stages of their lives. For example, see Creole languages [1] which are the languages invented by the children of people who only have a pidgin as a common language. A pidgin is not a fully developed language and pidgins are used e.g. for communication between migrant communities with different origins and who do not have a common language, while a Creole is a fully developed natural language that is invented by the migrants' children, who have their parents' share pidgin as a maternal language. The children start with their parents' pidgin and develop it into a fully formed natural language with all the bells and whistles. It's quite a thing to read about really, have a look at the wikipedia article I link above it's very interesting.

Also, as far as I understand it there's a lot that we don't know about how the first human languages were created. From some short readings, the current understanding is that at some point, humans must have become capable of producing natural language whereas before they weren't. The way things usually work the turning point for this was most likely some random mutation that affected a very few individuals, possibly no more than two. So the first natural language was probably invented not by an entire society but by a couple of people, probably a pair of siblings. The idea is that the ability to use natural language gave those very few individuals an important advantage that ensured its propagation through generations until our time.

In any case that all goes to invention of a new language. Learning an _existing_ language is quite another matter. Children who grow up to learn their maternal language don't have access to "millions of years of data". They certainly don't have access to a few billion examples of utterances in their maternal language, like the datasets that language models are trained on. That is to say, kids learn whatever language is their maternal language very, very quickly as they grow up and from very few examples. And they're capable of learning _any_ of the few thousand natural languages, beyond English. For me at least this lends credence to an idea of an innate bias to learn a certain type of language, a type broad enough to cover every human language. To put a name on this idea, that's through and through Noam Chomsky's idea of an innate "Universal Grammar". See wikipedia about criticisms of UG and linguistic nativism in general [2].

____________

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Though i agree with the main point, the blog post went off on a tangent about how some other languages are in danger because of English. IMO if the speakers of the language do not:

1\. Provide materials in their own language

2\. Consume materials in their own language

3\. Actively and exclusively contribute to the world in English

it is already a statement about the necessity of their language: it isn't. Why should non speakers of a certain language invest money and/or time on a language its own people don't even invest in? If its own speakers kill the language (actively or passively) who are we to say they shouldn't?

<comment><USER10> > Why should non speakers of a certain language invest money and/or time on a > language its own people don't even invest in?

Because rational choices at an individual level do not necessarily align with rational choices at a social collective level. "Meditations on Moloch" is a good read on this topic. You can easily see how collectively the language diversity is positive, but individually it kinda makes sense to bet for the biggest language instead. And to be fair, there's a lot of people investing in their own languages, just not enough, or not with enough power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My native language is Dutch. Google handles it poorly. As a result people have adapted to either search in English, or to morph the original search (that google does not understand) into sometime that has a higher changes of yielding good results. I'm pretty sure Dutch isn't the only language that fares this way.

Now the main reason (at least, I think it is) it's handled poorly is that Dutch has an infinite number of words ( * ) and order in compositions matters a lot. This conflicts with the typical precomputations that try to reduce the number of words etc.

( * ) take any 2 nouns A & B. you can concatenate them into a new noun AB or a new noun BA (with completely different meaning). German has this concept too.

<comment><USER12> > take any 2 nouns A & B. you can concatenate them into a new noun AB or a new > noun BA (with completely different meaning). German has this concept too.

This is also how it works in English, except the concatenation may be written with a space as "A B". If anything, writing it as "AB" should make search more accurate, since you're less likely to get results with "BA" than getting results with "B A" when searching for "A B".

<comment><USER6> Only if your NLP models actually decompose words. Simpler ones don't.

But while it's technically true that English also has compounds, it just writed them apart, it is also the case that German (don't know about Dutch) uses compounds, and especially long compounds with more than two nouns, a lot more than English, where you might more often use a whole sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I generally agree with point made in the article that too much NLP research is focused only on English and a small number of other high-resourced languages. To me, this is part of a larger problem with natural language processing's obsession with "state-of-the-art" metrics and general abandonment of broader research in linguistics.

The situation for those who, like myself, work in applied linguistics is not actually so dire... At least when working with the languages that have a reasonable amount of training data. Decent enough treebanks exist for lemmatisation, POS-tagging, and dependency parsing for dozens of languages [0]. Fast tools such as spaCy (15 languages) [1] and udpipe (40+ languages) [2] are freely available and work well for most applied tasks. There are even decent word embeddings available trained on various versions of Wikipedia [3].

Of course, some of the issue is that these very tasks are biased towards the specific structures of Indo-European languages. However, for getting work done (building sentiment classifiers, document clustering, NER, ect.), currently available tools make it possible to work with a large proportion of the currently available data.

There is still a lot of work to be done own regards to computational research on non-English languages, but a lot of the problem right now is recognition of applied work by the top NLP conferences rather than a complete lack of quality work currently being done.

[0] [https://universaldependencies.org](https://universaldependencies.org)

[1] [https://spacy.io/models](https://spacy.io/models)

[2] [https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/udpipe/models](https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/udpipe/models)

[3] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/doc...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText/blob/master/docs/crawl- vectors.md)

<comment><USER14> One thing i think about is what where would NLP and linguistics research gone if another language (other than english) was the predominant language. Granted there is quite of bit interesting fundamental research in other countries and languages. But it seems many of problems and approaches developed in language understanding and NLP target specific idiosyncracies of the English language. If NLP researched with say German (which has a deep and overly explicit vocabulary) or Hindi or Mandarian, would the fundamental NLP approaches and problem areas be different and potentially better?

<comment><USER15> I recommend you to check out NLP research regarding the Czech language. It has high quality researchers keen on making use of the language's features (it's a highly regular and expressive grammar). Sadly not much research is done, but what is done is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In contrast, most current methods break down when applied to the data-scarce > conditions that are common for most of the world's languages. Even recent > advances in pre-training language models that dramatically reduce the sample > complexity for downstream tasks (Peters et al., 2018; Howard and Ruder, > 2018; Devlin et al., 2019; Clark et al., 2020) require massive amounts of > clean, unlabelled data, which is not available for most of the world's > languages (Artetxe et al., 2020).

Languages are generally not unique and this is how humans are able to deal with sparse data as well. So you can use a language model that is trained on text across all languages and then the model will infer common structures to languages with sparse data. XLM did this and seems to perform fairly well although I don't know how sparse you can go before it breaks down.

> Doing well with few data is thus an ideal setting to test the limitations of > current models—and evaluation on low-resource languages constitutes arguably > its most impactful real-world application.

This is what ML and Stats has done for the last X decades and it has limitations due to the need to constrain the problem with human generated rules/knowledge/axioms. The new large scale language models skip the human rules step and are thus able to learn the long tail of language structure. I don't see how you can have it both ways as the unconstrained problem is infeasible to learn on small data as there isn't enough to generalize from.

<comment><USER17> > I don't see how you can have it both ways as the unconstrained problem is > infeasible to learn on small data as there isn't enough to generalize from.

I mostly agree with you, but it does seem like current models require more data to learn language than baby humans.

This would suggest there is a middle ground between old fashioned data starved learning, and current overfed models.

<comment><USER18> One random note I heard on a podcast about child development is that children do not improve their language skills by watching tv or educational material and that they need feedback to learn.

Contrast that with language models which do nothing besides watching what people are writing, it potentially points to a reason who the amount of data is not comparable.

<comment><USER19> Even more crucial is that children learn language in situations of actual language use. The things and situations that are spoken about are often at hand in some way, and there is a large social element.

No matter how close you might get to "the language learning algorithm", if all you're feeding it is text, it's not going to learn the same thing that kids learn. The data is simply not there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> THe moneys all in English speaking countries and China so... do NLP in Mandarin too.

</comment><comment><USER21> A cynical take supporting the above:

NLP in other languages can help sell better ads in those languages.

You all can follow that chain of thought down to it's corporate conclusion =)

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not just NLP, English is pretty bad as an intermediate language for translations from language A to language B. If I try translating a Russian word "пружина" ("a mechanical spring") to German using Google translate, I end up with "Frühling", which in fact means "springtime". This is an obvious artefact of transitive translatiion: Russian -> English -> German.

Providing context may help, but still translation to English strips important pieces of information.

<comment><USER23> I don't think this is inherent to English, or any other language (perhaps in more specific cases when there is no word with the similar meaning).

I think in general we pack a concept in a word and lose some information this way, so when you want to be precise with what you are saying you have to bring your definitions with you. Essentially with translation you take a concept and "pack" it in a word, then look for an equivalent packing in different language, then unpack. Naturally, this process is prone to losing information.

<comment><USER22> I cannot agree. Not only English seems to have many homonyms (the word "spring" alone has more than 2 meanings), its grammar is also somewhat primitive. Let me bring one more example, this time another way around: Google Translate from German to Russian. The verb "tragen" ("to wear") is translated as "износ" ("a wear") which is a noun. Using English we lose important knowledge: we have no clue what part of speech the word "tragen" is.

This isn't an issue for any considerably long fragment of text, it will be properly translated due to context analysis. Still if the text would be analyzed using German in the first place, this would become less of a problem.

<comment><USER6> You're confusing two separate things: linguistic complexity and ambiguity.

Linguistic complexity is hard to measure, but it's not hard to show that at least morphologically, English is undercomplex compared to many other languages.

This doesn't necessarily mean that English is more ambiguous, though. Unlike German, English typically has very rigid word order, so in the context of a sentence, you'll know if a specific word is a noun or a verb.

The problem here is that many NLP models inadequately capture syntactic structure.

<comment><USER22> Sorry if it was confusing, I really wanted to mention both a) lexical ambiguities b) syntactic ambiguities as possible obstacles for NLP.

> Unlike German, English typically has very rigid word order, so in the > context of a sentence, you'll know if a specific word is a noun or a verb.

So you say you are able to guess from the word order what part of speech a particular word is. But with German you hardly need all this guessing.

If you compare two marginal examples: \- English "time flies like an arrow" \- German "Wenn Fliegen fliegen hinter Fliegen..."

you'll find out the English one has way more possible interpretations.

<comment><USER6> > So you say you are able to guess from the word order what part of speech a > particular word is. But with German you hardly need all this guessing.

Not really. It's not about guessing: in English, the part of speech really is mostly determined by its syntactic structure.

> If you compare two marginal examples: - English "time flies like an arrow" > \- German "Wenn Fliegen fliegen hinter Fliegen..."

Not sure what you're trying to say here. The English example is ambiguous, yes (and only strictly grammaticaly; semantically the meaning is clear, unless you're using it in the phrase "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", which is meant as a linguistic joke). It's also very easy to come up with examples of phrases or sentences that are ambiguous in German, or in any language for that matter. Here are some fun examples:

"Er liest das Buch seiner Schwester vor" (could either mean "he's reading the book to his sister" or "he's reading his sister's book to someone")

"der weiße Schimmel" ("white mould", or "white horse")

"wilde Tiere jagen" ("to hunt wild animals", or "wild animals are hunting")

and don't even get me started on the ambiguity of compound words or phrases with a genitive, where there are often tons of potential interpretations depending on the intended relationship between head and dependent noun.

And also the German example you gave (fully: "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach", or "if flies fly behind flies, flies fly after flies") is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does.

Look, you may make a case that it's easier for English sentences to be ambiguous than for some other languages, but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because it's just not something that is immediately obvious.

<comment><USER22> I still think you're missing my point, although I am impressed by your German skills ("der Schimmel" is BTW just a homonym, it's hardly related to the topic of syntactic ambiguity).

> is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a > case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical > case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, > something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does.

I didn't make such a strong claim. All I wanted to say in German syntactic ambiguities are much less of a problem than in English. I've brought two anecdotal evidences to let you compare possible ambiguities in both of them, these two are indeed nothing but jokes.

But let's take a closer look at them once again.

a) "Time flies like an arrow": the word "time" can be 1) a noun 2) an adjective 3) a verb in declarative form 4) a verb in imperative form. This gives us a factor of 4 on the very first word of the sentence.

b) "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen" \- ambiguitity exists just between "fliegen" as a verb and "Fliegen" as a plural noun, thus the "ambiguity factor" of the word "f/Fliegen" is just 2.

> but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because > it's just not something that is immediately obvious.

Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am not a native English-speaker, but my dream is that the world gradually converges on a single standard for international communication, and that this standard is English, so that an ever-growing proportion of the population will become fluent in it. I understand various reasons for why this is unlikely to happen; and I realise that there've been lots of centrifugal forces lately that make this vision ever less likely; but I can't help but smile inwardly when I hear that NLP is so much focused on English, and can't help rooting for it to remain so.

<comment><USER25> I am a native English speaker. The problem I have with English as the Universal International Language is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States. I am not convinced that the United States can be relied upon to use this power responsibly.

<comment><USER24> > is that it gives enormous economic and political power to the United States

All the best to them :-) I think having models in nations that actually use a language as their native tongue is far better than choosing a language for which there is no living model (such as Latin or Esperanto).

But then, why don't you also add Britain, Australia, Canada or South Africa to your list?

<comment><USER25> I am aware that there are other countries that have English as their primary language. According to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)) the US GDP is approximately 3.45 times the combined GDP of the other countries you named. I stand by my statement that the US has "enormous economic and political power".

edit: I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International Language. I believe it's much easier to learn than English.

<comment><USER24> I am not disputing this statement.

Moreover, it is well known to sociolinguists that political and economic power is something that makes a language spoken by that nation more prestigious and more desirable to attain, and, therefore, contributes to the spread of that language. So, for the purposes of my dream, I can only wish that the US remains as influential as it is (and doesn't switch to Spanish in the process) :-)

I guess my point is that I am not sure that, say, having other countries where English is the primary language (as listed in the previous comment) contributes to the power of the US. Likewise, I am not sure that the further spread of English as an international language will by itself contribute significantly to the power of the US.

> I personally think Esperanto would be a good choice as an International > Language

Ugh, not a fan. English is a vibrant, living language that already is being used by huge swathes of people for various purposes; Esperanto is not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5B - <AUTHOR> https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ <comment><USER2> Honestly I'm thinking of Zach Holman today. The poor guy in his exit blog post talked about how he had to give up his github equity due to some tax rule. That has to really hurt.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a friend of mine has been known to say, "that's a lot of billion."

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. Can't turn down that $. Good for GitHub team.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wasn't the price rumored to be $2B yesterday?

<comment><USER6> I believe that was the last valuation on investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> that's a lot of instagram!! but in all seriousness, what evaluation price would that make then for gitlab?</comment>