Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy - <AUTHOR> https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-catalina-are-so-buggy/ <comment><USER4> That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a particularly feature laden update either.

But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally weird behaviour of many apps.

I have identified one particular area where bugs are endemic: iCloud and it's complete failure to deal with multiple OS and client app versions. This is clearly a design issue as it also manifests itself in many ways that are not bugs as such.

For instance, Notes has gained the ability to share folders via iCloud. But if you create a folder and then share it from a device with the latest OS version, that folder disappears from all devices running older OS versions and importantly also from the icloud.com website.

Reminders on Catalina warns you of such version incompatibilities and the wording is telling. It's talking about "converting" something to the latest version. "Conversion" shouldn't even be a thing that users need to know about where no user controlled files are involved.

All indications are that there is a fundamental design error at the very core of iCloud's architecture. It feels like iCloud operates not as a single source of truth but as yet another device that participates in peer to peer syncing. This is a very complex architecture and they haven't been able to make it work.

So my conclusion is that iCloud which has always been exceptionally buggy has become pervasive within Apple's ecosystem. This is what has changed.

<comment><USER5> > all previous macOS updates

My experience is this is true of recent updates, but I don't think the data would support such a sweeping statement beyond that. I remember the dustup around this in 2015/2016 after comments by Marco Arment:

[https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high- grou...](https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground) [https://marco.org/2015/01/05/popular-for-a- day](https://marco.org/2015/01/05/popular-for-a-day)

I haven't listened to the interview that Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi did with Gruber since it aired, but my recollection is that they said that they actually measure these things and there had been FAR fewer bugs over years (from that date) and that we've simply come to expect less buggy software as a result. Or at least that's my years-old recollection, I could be wrong. And so I think what's likely is that this version is worse than recent versions, but if you compare to, say, 10 years ago it's less buggy. Kind of like what people experience when we have increases in the crime rate -- far better than it used to be, even if people don't recognize it, but (1) still an increase, and (2) we should _expect_ progress, not things getting worse!

[https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/02/12/ep-146](https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/02/12/ep-146) (I could be wrong and maybe it was a different interview)

Anyway, there was a ton of chatter here and everywhere else in the tech community around that time. Here's a quick example at the time (but I imagine there are dozens of others, if not hundreds):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071)

<comment><USER6> When people stop filing bugs, because it's futile and pointless waste of time, then you get fewer bugs and your metrics go up...

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that they have ways of discovering when something breaks beyond the user having to file a report. But I agree that Apple is terrible when it comes to communicating back to people about what they file. It doesn't happen. (They've also been bad at this for as long as I've been paying attention to these things. I don't think they're worse than they already were in the last year.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing.

In contrast, big companies like Apple try very hard to avoid and ignore user bug reports. There is no way to easily E-mail them, "filing a radar" is hard, and even if you do they do their best to ignore your report.

When I wrote "percentage of revenue", I meant it. In my software business ([https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)), I dedicate about 10% of my time to reading, analyzing, and responding to user bug reports. Carefully thinking about every report let me catch bugs and problems that I never would have found. I also learned that every user bug report carries some information: even if something isn't actually a bug, getting multiple reports about it might point to a usability or a documentation problem.

If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs, they would not have a quality problem like they do now.

<comment><USER8> > If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing > bugs

Just to be clear, you're suggesting they dedicate $25B/year to bug fixing? Seems high, given their total R&D budget for 2018 was only ~56% of that.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/05/apple-2018-form-10-k-hi...](https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/05/apple-2018-form-10-k-highlights/)

<comment><USER9> Sure, why not? It's not like they're doing anything else with the money. It doesn't have to be only software fixes either. There's plenty of hardware issues like the keyboard.

The spending doesn't have to be instant either. Just start increasing the spending and measure user satisfaction and bug report counts. Once you've arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing the spending.

<comment><USER8> > Once you've arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing > the spending.

How do you know they're not there now? It's hard to believe they're not thinking very carefully about these sorts of things, given how successful they've been establishing a place in the market.

<comment><USER9> > _How do you know they 're not there now?_

I don't know for a fact but I have more respect towards Apple than to think that the current state is the best they could do.

<comment><USER8> > I have more respect towards Apple than to think that the current state is > the best they could do.

$265B in Revenue and and $59B in profit seems to indicate they're already doing pretty well. Maybe your definition of 'best' isn't in perfect alignment with the rest of the marketplace?

I get that there are things about their products you can point at and wish were done better, or at least differently. I use Apple products myself, so I have a list of these things myself. But, the thing is, this isn't unique to Apple. Have you ever been completely satisfied with a product or service? I can't really say that I have. About the best that I've ever been able to achieve is something that's a close enough approximation to my 'requirements' that I can adapt what I'm doing to make it a solution.

Point is - you're never going to find something perfect. There will always be a gap and hopefully effort on both sides to close that gap. Those financial numbers aren't a perfect indication by any means, but they do signal that Apple's doing a reasonably good job of closing that gap for a reasonably large number of people willing to part with their earnings to buy Apple's products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again.

Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4 times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the features end up getting removed later.

As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here [https://xfce.org/about/screenshots](https://xfce.org/about/screenshots)) It has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades.

(edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a year.

<comment><USER11> I'm reading this on a late-2013 MBP retina running 10.9.5 and not only does it do everything I need it to do, "upgrading" from here would actually cause me to _lose_ essential functionality (which is why I haven't done it). I have a stash of replacement MBPs to replace this one with when it finally does die, but I don't know what I'm going to do when they're all gone because AFAICT everything Apple is producing nowadays is shit and everything else on the market is vastly worse. Sometimes contemplating the future (or even the present) causes me to sink into deep existential despair because I remember what the world was like when there was a company that made computers that Just Worked.

<comment><USER10> Although older software usually does what we need it to do, I question the wisdom of running an Internet-connected machine with software that no longer receives security fixes. If the various Linuxes might give you what you need, I encourage you to check them out. Debian with XFCE and Xubuntu's LTS are both very good options that stay stable and secure.

Out of curiosity, what would you lose functionality-wise by upgrading? What's your mission-critical workflow?

<comment><USER11> > If the various Linuxes might give you what you need

Oh, how I wish! The problem is it's not just me. I'm the IT department for my wife as well, and there is no way she's going to switch to Linux. For on thing, she's a writer, and she uses MS Word. That is not going to change. :-(

Also, what to do for a mobile device? They all suck big fat honking weenies AFAICT. We both have iPhone SE's which, AFAICT, are the least bad of all the available options. We both tried Android once and it was a disaster.

<comment><USER12> > she uses MS Word

I've always wondered about people that are able to switch platforms. I've always thought that you pick the operating system that best runs the software you want to use. So it makes sense that a Word user wouldn't switch to Linux.

> We both tried Android once and it was a disaster.

Why was it a disaster? Were the apps you needed not there? I use iOS (on an iPad) and Android (on a Pixel phone) and they both seem good enough.

<comment><USER11> > Why was it a disaster?

It was a long time ago so I don't remember the details, but it was just a slow, buggy mess. Maybe things have gotten better since then but the experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I've not gone back to re- evaluate the situation. It's an expensive experiment to conduct in terms of both money and time. Also, the fact that Android is so intimately intertwined with Google gives me serious pause. At least with Apple there's a chance that my data is somewhat secure. With Google I know with certainty that it isn't because their entire business model is to surveil me and sell the data to third parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been told by multiple sources that Apple engineering salaries are not competitive with industry leaders and haven't been for a long time. I wonder if the dissolution of the Jobs anti compete agreements exacerbated the issue.

However Apple seems to be willing to pay for highly sought after skills.

I have also been told that they don't have company level hiring standards so you should expect uneven abilities across different teams.

I have also been told that things were being rewritten or rather that Apple likes to rewrite. Apple doesn't seem to be very good at limiting regressions caused by these rewrites.

That's why there are so many crashes across the board. The crashes are caused by bugs or changes in behavior in common frameworks. This seems to jive with the author saying that Apple doesn't do enough automated testing.

<comment><USER14> I was just speaking with an acquaintance at Apple this weekend that works in a group in this area at Apple, and they pretty much said exactly what you just said.

Also, it doesn't help that they can't directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform.

<comment><USER15> > Also, it doesn't help that they can't directly benefit from the general > progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas > without rewriting for their own platform.

Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?

<comment><USER16> The macOS kernel (XNU) does not have any kind of containerisation support. I believe "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a hyperkit/xhyve VM, and uses Linux's container support.

Apple hasn't put much public effort into making macOS work well inside a virtual machine. Recent versions in particular, where the window compositor uses Metal for drawing, don't run well. Apple hasn't opened the API for writing GPU drivers, so there are no drivers for the virtualised GPUs provided by VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, or Qemu in their VMs. (The tightening of code signing requirements [see the 'library-validation' flag] even locked out nvidia from providing their own GPU drivers from macOS 10.14 onwards.) The only way to have GPU acceleration in macOS guest VM is to pass through a whole GPU at the PCIe device level. (I don't know if anyone has tried AMD's MXGPU tech, which allows GPU 'slices' to be passed to VMs, with Macs and macOS VMs; the GPUs that support it are a little too expensive for a weekend project.)

There are signs that Apple does use virtualisation internally; specifically, they've started adding drivers for virtio devices and one of Qemu's display adapters to macOS.

<comment><USER17> > "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a hyperkit/xhyve > VM, and uses Linux's container support.

This is indeed correct. Your Docker VM lives at:

        /Users/$USERNAME/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/Docker.raw

It would be very nice to be able to use libvirt from my Mac in the same way as my Linux workstation. Or be able to migrate VMs between the two. They're both using the same-ish CPUs, after all! (Workstation has a "i7-5820K" vs the Macbook Pro's "i7-8850H")

<comment><USER16> _It would be very nice to be able to use libvirt from my Mac in the same way as my Linux workstation._

I believe libvirt as such is supposed to work on macOS. Furthermore, recent versions of Qemu apparently support using macOS's Hypervisor.framework. So it seems like this should be doable, although I've not had a chance to try it myself yet.

<comment><USER17> Cool, thank you for the info. It's been a while since I tried it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only iOS 13 bugs I've been bitten by are:

1\. Safari's back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes.

2\. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn't ask for, don't want, and can't turn off - and it creates the risk of super- inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.

<comment> Engineering-MD I completely agree with point 2, and I have already accidentally shared a hacker news story to a work colleague without intending to!

I can't understand why there is no option to remove it.

<comment><USER19> > I can't understand why there is no option to remove it.

You can i think... but not sure;

Settings > Siri & Search > Messages > Learn from this app < uncheck

<comment><USER20> Didn't work for me. I unchecked all boxes for Contacts, Phone and Messages, rebooted my phone, it's still there.

<comment><USER19> Strange. At some point after i changed multiple settings this feature _stopped_ working for me. Instead of the "suggested contacts" i only saw a sort of blurred panel without any contacts.

So i started searching and re-enabling things and suddenly the suggested contacts were back. Not sure what caused it then, might have been a bug...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess of their current core products.

Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a _user_ of his own products, like us.

It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore. They can only try to guess at what it must be like to be a user, so they can't nitpick all the little things that annoy us.

<comment><USER22> With their culture, something big will be worked on by a relatively small team in total secrecy. The team, in name of secrecy, will repeat the same mistakes that some other teams are fixing elsewhere.

<comment><USER23> Secrecy inside a company may help a team to focus on only one thing but it also prevents people from understanding the "big picture" and unless there is a special process for "sharing lessons learned", people repeats the same mistakes over and over. It is a little sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a VoiceOver user, I can provide a lesser known perspective. I've gotten used to waiting several months until I actually install a new major release. With the exception of iOS 12, basically all releases since iOS 5 were quite buggy when it comes to apples screen reader VoiceOver. Luckily, applevis.com these days publishes a list of known problems with accessibility on iOS a few days before every major release. So those of us that depend on lesser mainstream features feel the bad release quality already since quite a long time. Still, with all the hickups that Apple has during new releases, their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android.

<comment><USER21> > _their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android._

Don't you mean "ahead of"?

<comment><USER25> That's what that means, "before" being the opposite of "behind". It's just not as common a construction in most English locales as it used to be. It does still get more restricted usage in this sense: when considering the future, "this is what lies before us" wouldn't sound out of place.

<comment><USER26> Out of this context, I would assume that "before" is being used as a location instead of a temporal reference. I.e. "this" referring to some kind of object; "the food was laid before us".

As a temporal reference, it's definitely valid, but it bears a somewhat highfalutin connotation. It sounds like someone who is trying to wax poetic.

Not that I would fault a non-native speaker for using it; it's a very nuanced and probably subjective interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> After doing some iOS/Mac development, I'd say some bugginiess is caused by changing APIs and behaviors inflicted by Apple, expected to be absorbed/dealt with by developers. They mercilessly do this with every release and no doubt that affects their internal projects. Also, xcode has gone the way of iTunes and ObjC was always a huge pain. It's a really hostile environment to develop in, where you're having to play catch up all the time.

<comment><USER28> Wow. My experience is opposite. Been in iOS development for over 10 years already, little less for Android. App made for iOS still works with very minor adjustments, while on Android it's a mess. We was forced to change build system several times, breaking changes and just silly API renames, service depreciations, generations of push services, forcing firebase and AndroidX, change of permission model, of concurrency model.

Honestly, I can't even name single such change for iOS. At worse it is adding interface implementation.

About objective c and Xcode. Just lol. I love being able to debug by pressing single button and putting breakpoint. Android studio, being abominably ugly and slow, and killing battery like in 1 hour, still struggles to do that for native code.

Also, what is wrong with Objective C?

<comment><USER29> > I can't even name single such change for iOS.

I can give you one. A few years back an important interface was arbitrarily renamed in the CoreBluetooth stack. I would look it up, but I'm on mobile and laying in bed. Ask tomorrow and I'll find it.

anyway, I was overseeing a half-dozen BT apps for a hardware company at the time. Was a real pain to go through all those projects and #ifdef the interface name for the iOS version. Very odd change since I've never seen Apple do anything like that before either.

<comment><USER30> Lol this one was painful. And they also moved where the peripheral identifier is located in the object hierarchy to a superclass CBPeer which was wrapped in available MacOS 13+. So all my existing code that referenced the identifier on the CBPeripheral where it was prior to MacOS 13 needed warning suppression since identifier has been available through the object hierarchy on peripheral since forever

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs.

Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.

<comment><USER21> Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products.

As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least until 2021.

Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?

<comment><USER32> Rolling updates is the reason I loved using Arch Linux instead of the more common Ubuntu.

Though if quality control is bad, rolling updates means many broken updates spread over the year instead of an optional huge broken update every October. Right now I'm on Mojave, works well enough, and I can wait until next summer to update to Catalina, when hopefully the major bugs have been ironed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This article explains why something is buggy. Maybe why Apple's software is buggy.

It does not explain why the latest stuff is so buggy.

Is Catalina that much more complex than, say, Mavericks? Are managers playing deadline chicken more?

I don't see evidence for this.

<comment><USER34> The author used to work at Apple, but no longer does, so they probably can't comment accurately on anything super recent. I agree with you, it doesn't really deliver on the title, but I still found it an interesting read. But yeah, a more accurate title would be something like "common causes of quality issues in Apple software."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one.

And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next .0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.

<comment><USER36> _Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one._

I've run and tested every release going back to 2001 and it's been a while since a macOS release has been _this_ buggy and caused serious data loss in some cases.

So even for .0 release, this has been pretty bad.

<comment><USER37> May I be Goldilocks? I've used basically every iOS beta. Beta 1 is always AWFUL. Then it gets better and better. iOS 13 is probably the worst, but only incrementally so. It's hardly worth having a fuss.

<comment><USER38> It's not a beta, it's what they encourage their users to upgrade to

<comment><USER37> I know. I'm talking about iOS 13 beta 1.

If you think this is what a bad OS looks like, you should try that.

<comment><USER39> iOS 12 beta 1 was a lot better, FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it's no longer the "current" version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13.

I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?

<comment><USER41> Safari 13 is supported on Mojave. You can install it in System Preferences->Software Updates (there's a link that says "more updates" or "other updates" or something along those lines).

<comment><USER40> Thanks you, I did not know this. I looked into it a few days ago and Apple's support page[1] seemed to tell me pretty clearly that I had to upgrade. I know see the small print that says:

> For some earlier versions of macOS, Safari might also be available > separately from the Updates tab of the App Store.

1: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204416](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204416)

<comment><USER40> I suppose no-one is reading this thread anymore, but for the record I was now able to check, and I do _not_ have an option to download Safari, neither in the App Store nor after clicking the secret link in System Preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was thinking.

Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs.

The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow. But it ain't gonna happen: "Apple could address this scheduling problem by not packing so many features into each release, but that's just not the company culture."

<comment><USER42> They could simply decouple the apps from the OS, like Android. Safari and Mail.app do not need to be tied to OS releases.

Android OS releases do not get nearly as much fanfare because a lot of core functionality is decoupled from the OS: app store(s), mail clients, browsers, todo lists, even the text messaging apps and some security frameworks.

Which of course is exactly why Apple keeps everything in one big release. They want lots of press talking about the brand new features.

<comment><USER43> I wonder if there's some anti-trust consideration to it. If Apple were able to update all their apps separately from the OS that would mean they had accessible APIs to do it. People would complain a lot more loudly about Apple blocking replacement functionality and Apple wouldn't want to allow a replacement for, eg, the messages app.

If you integrate the apps directly into the OS then you can just say that no APIs exist, those are just features of the operating system itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well.

I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my machines and wouldn't want them to break post an update. But so far, this lag in my update schedule has served me really well for years now and looks like this won't be changing anytime soon for me, either.

<comment><USER23> The "Regressions Get Fixed. Old Bugs Get Ignored." thought does not help your strategy.

After 6 months into the new version of iOS and MacOS, there is a lot less attention to fix problem in the previous version of the OS. It is even worse when it comes to firmware problems on older hardware.

If you have a 2+ year old Apple device you need to hope that all the security bugs on your hardware are also in the latest software or hardware, otherwise it may just never be fixed.

<comment><USER45> Google is just as bad at this and have many of the same issues of too many things being built at the same time. Googlers often lament that fixing bugs is never a priority to new features which is pretty much Apple as well. Perhaps too much complex technology is hard to do.

I work for a non-tech similarly big company that uses a lot of software (that we make ourselves as well as integrating vendors) and our processes and quality are even worse than Apple and Google.

But as an iOS dev I would happy if at least Xcode was built and tested properly...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this is a known problem! I had to disable Time Machine and do some kind of tmutil command, then delete the recent snapshots. All that and she still has very little disk space. These are the kind of shenanigans I'd expect from Microsoft, not Apple, where everything is supposed to "just work". I'm disappointed that Apple has released such a buggy OS update. Not even the Linux distros I use have been this buggy.

<comment><USER47> I had that too, and 'disk write' errors (which definitely are not). Ended up repartitioning and reformatting, and they went away (though the install and upgrade process even beyond all that still seemed hugely buggy - at one time the fresh install said install couldn't complete. And then it did. With no intervention).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove that?

<comment><USER49> Hold down the space key as if you would be force touching it. It will make your finger become the "cursor". Slide it around as you see fit.

<comment><USER48> I was referring to text that's not editable. I can no longer select text on the screen without peeking under my finger to see if I selected everything

<comment><USER50> Yup, the magnifyig glass is gone. A horrible design choice to get rid of it IMO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.

<comment><USER52> This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that preserves privacy and doesn't basically become a hidden "telemetry" system?

<comment><USER39> Make it opt-in and require a privacy review every time something like this goes in?

<comment><USER23> If you make it opt-in, the company will not get a lot of reports. If you want to get enough data, they should be opt-out as the others.

<comment><USER39> Opt-in analytics fail to account for people who turn them off because they don't like opt-in analytics. So you might be getting more data, but it might not necessarily be any more representative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> All the points are sensible. But hardly any of them is new so it doesn't help explain why iOS 13 is so buggy.

</comment><comment><USER54> I could understand iOS 13 being buggy as they are trying cramp more features in every year. But the thing is, there is nothing on Catalina that felt new, unless you take removal of iTunes and new PodCast / Apple Music App as _new_.

99% of the macOS remain the same. The removal of 32bit Apps are long time coming. I just dont understand why it had so many problems.

</comment><comment><USER55> Ya'll just have hindsight issues.

Every MacOS upgrade has been a problem for a non-trivial number of users. It's much more likely that YOU didn't have a problem because you were new the platform and didn't have much stuff to migrate. If you just got a Mac in 2018 moving to Catalina is no problem at all. It will probably go flawlessly and the only issue you might is with Adobe software… but if you use Adobe software on any platform that's nothing new either.

Moving from PowerPC to X86 had a bunch of problems. Remember when they dropped Rosetta completely? Or when they dropped support for the first Intel Macs because they were 32-bit only that was a problem. Remember when they changed QuickTime? Or dropped AFP? How about dropping Firewire? Or how about the changes to Filevualt? Or when they integrated your Apple ID into the user login and then removed it? Or how about all those times you upgraded and iTunes stopped working and you had to reinstall it manually. Oh man, how about that total abandonment of OS X Server.

Apple has NEVER been good about upgrades. Ever. You buy an Apple device and it's good for that point in time. In 2-3 years when the warranty is up and the platform evolves it's anyone's guess as to what will happen.

</comment><comment><USER56> _But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it's marked "not a regression."_

In case you were wondering why 13.1 got rolled out so fast. Snark aside, this annoys me because the message is, "haha, didn't find it fast enough, and now we don't have to fix it." And you jackasses think this clown shoes attitude should be enshrined on a t-shirt?

</comment><comment><USER57> I still remember at WWDC a few years back, I went with some older radars to the labs, only to get turned down with a "You already have a workaround - <USER2> do you care?"

...that made me mostly stop filing radars for older issues.

</comment><comment><USER58> > apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn't do a lot of automated > testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so.

That's the last thing I expected to know about such a big company.

<comment><USER23> They should have more automated tests. But considering this article does not surprise me at all. That also mean probably almost no exploration/fuzzy tests. The kernel may be one of the few exceptions.

Considering the secrecy infra-team I would expect almost no integration tests.

That also means that Apple products are pretty bad when it come to security contrary to what Apple's marketing wants you to believe.

<comment><USER39> Considering that they own the entire stack, I honestly think that one of the unofficial integration tests for lower-level components is when the apps sitting on fail to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the software side.

Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing, seem to have gone a bridge too far.

Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division doesn't count.

</comment><comment><USER60> I refuse to install iOS 13.0 because it's so buggy, and refuse to install Catalina because all it does is take away features rather than adding value. They can't seem to stop to fix what's already broken, so they add a few things, break a few more and remove some I use and say "the emperor's new clothes are awesome."

<comment><USER61> 13.1 is out now, and it's pretty slick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> My number one iOS bug right now: "Hey Siri call Scott's conference line" That exact text shows up on the screen...and Siri says "Calling Don's conference line". Both are in my contacts list. I have not had this problem prior to this week so it's probably a backend issue.

</comment><comment><USER63> This narrative repeats with every release.

But is each release actually worse than the last?

My guess is, not really, though the perception persists for a couple main reasons:

(1) For a certain subset of people, the last release really was worse than ever before. New releases have new bugs, and those bugs will affect a certain subset of people that isn't necessarily the same as the bug from the last release. Those people complain (justifiably, I think) though of course people don't create a lot of posts to describe the problems they aren't having.

(2) We all naturally forget about the annoyances of years past while focusing on the current annoyances. (Generally, that is.)

</comment><comment><USER64> I made a mistake of installing Catalina. Since the day the system is acting up weird. Apart from rejecting 32-bits apps, Catalina is also having memory kind of issues. After working for a few hours things start getting weird, chrome's extensions start crashing, if I try to open a new tab it does not let me load the page. I also start getting messages "X Application can not be opened" where X is ANY application I wish to open. The issue got a bit better after a recent 1 GB update but the main problem persists. I am seriously considering to downgrade to Mojave.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've having a feeling that iOS 13 & Catalina is felt buggy b.c. it's not the operating system itself that's buggy but that the updater is buggy. Many things have changed in this release, and the installer/updater had to handle too many different scenarios.

For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/. I don't remember such directory appearing after an macOS update, and I've had many friends (that aren't really technical) appear that to them. There were lots of new applications (like Music.app and Podcasts.app), and data migration between internal databases weren't perfect.

I've installed Catalina two times, first by upgrading from Mojave and second a clean re-install. When I upgraded Mojave, I found too many bugs that I was worrying about data-loss, which lead to a full backup (I do backups regularly) and a clean re-install. (Admittedly, this was my first clean reinstall for a major macOS update) I clean-installed Catalina and manually restored all of my files from the backup, and except for some minor bugs I'm good.

It's a pity that updates aren't seamless, but if there's anyone having trouble with various Catalina bugs, (while Apple updates it's imperfect macOS updater) I would recommend a full clean re-install for macOS Catalina.

<comment><USER66> > For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' > directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/

This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT210650)

Even with SIP disabled you can't do shit to that volume until you remount rw (at least, this was reported to work in betas, haven't seen anyone test the shipped OS).

<comment><USER67> This isn't true, /usr/local is one of the writable firmlinked directories. How else would homebrew work?

<comment><USER66> Huh, I definitely have some moved files, and they're definitely from homebrew. But you're right, they're not from /usr/local. Perhaps the OP made the same mistaken assumptions of origin as I did?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they think they are doing a great job.

But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash.

Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes:

> Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer > time, they're starting to become a public relations concern.

Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.

</comment><comment><USER69> Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in- store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved methinks.

<comment><USER70> As someone described, Jobs focused heavily on the sale experience - <USER3> after that, unless someone (or his own experience with his product) convinced him, was irrelevant.

The moment your money parted with you, your importance ended. This was visible, among other things, in gutting departments that kept Apple alive when literally everyone else had better hw & sw - people who did long-term accounts with for example government customers, specific market areas, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> _" No need to go into the details here, except to say that, apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn't do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so."_

This tells you everything you need to know about the poor state of Apple's software. A large, untested code base that's been in development for years and years is going to reach a maximum point of complexity where the cost of adding new features exceeds the business value. The ROI turns upside down. That's when your technical debt turns into a bankruptcy and your software is kaput. It's quite conceivable that Mac OS, which is built on top of NeXTStep OS which dates back to the mid-80's, is reaching this state.

</comment><comment><USER72> So a few days ago we had an article on the front page claiming Windows 10 was buggy because of automated testing, now we have an article claiming iOS is buggy because they don't use enough automated testing...

</comment><comment><USER73> I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.

<comment><USER39> Very little has been rewritten in Swift.

<comment><USER73> Really? I read otherwise: [https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift- ios13/](https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/)

It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might be wrong :)

<comment><USER74> It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented might get written in Swift nowadays.

<comment><USER75> _"It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff"_

I don't think _"for a resource constrained company"_ makes a difference there.

That's good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource constrained.

<comment><USER39> Apple doesn't actually have a lot of engineers on most projects.

<comment><USER76> The resources are there to hire engineers. If they're not being used to hire engineers that's a management choice, not a resource constraint.

<comment><USER77> I wonder if that is true in reality. I know at one company I interviewed maybe 80 people. Of those I think 3 or 4 were hired. The point being it was hard to find qualified people. You could argue they should offer more money and they'd get more applicants. Say they offered 4x what they are offering now. They'd likely just end up with a bidding war with the other rich tech companies and so in the end nothing would happen (if all the companies raise their salaries then it seems arguable that there'd be little affect on applicants). Other solutions might be longer term like investing in education or hiring less experienced people and training. Others might be opening more remote offices hoping to find more talent in other locations.

All I'm really saying is as rich as Apple is I don't think hiring more engineers is as easy as just deciding to hire more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I've been super annoyed at some bugs in iOS Safari. In particular, double tap to zoom on web pages is completely broken. It's a really old feature that just suddenly stopped working in the new iOS release.

<comment><USER79> Yep just noticed this today. Why remove this feature ? Did people complain about this during beta and Apple ignore it. Although zooming in by pinching and then double tapping reverts to original size which is nowhere near as useful. Fingers crossed for a point release that brings this back.

<comment><USER80> It's actually still around, however on some pages Safari will go into some sort of weird state where scrolling is slightly broken (you can't overscroll and have the page bounce back is the indicator that you're in the broken state). When you're in that state, double tapping to zoom doesn't work either. I find that I mostly encounter this bug on Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I expect the number of the new security vulnerabilities to be a lot more than the bugs visible to the users. Considering the MacOS track of record in the last year ( [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222) ), I am pretty worried.

When I see a weird behavior I always wonder if it is a Apple's bug or a bug introduced by something trying to exploit a vulnerability.

</comment><comment><USER81> It's popular tendencies today: release aplha/beta stage product and get free QA from users. Apple isn't an icon of hardware/software quality anymore.

</comment><comment><USER36> The Apple USB keyboard on my old Mojave iMac works fine but doesn't work when I plug it into the iMac running Catalina.

I submitted the bug yesterday.

<comment><USER36> The latest Catalina beta released today (build 19B86a) fixed this bug—the keyboard now works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> One of the things that I heard about Windows 10 was that Microsoft switched from testing on real hardware to virtualized testing and relying on end-user crash reports. If Apple did something similar, that would explain why more nonfatal bugs make it through to final release.

</comment><comment><USER83> Are they that buggy? They seem very stable to me and I've been running them since the betas.

<comment><USER21> I'm on the second-latest MacBook Pro. I completely erased my disk and installed a fresh copy of Catalina when it was released. It's been patched with the post-release update.

Almost all settings are at their recommended defaults, there is no third-party stuff that modifies system behavior, and I mostly only use Apple's own apps and services for stuff like music, books, cloud, mail etc.

And boy yes there are bugs. Not outright crashing/rebooting, but bugs there are.

I've been using macOS since Lion and I can't recall such a dismal release as Catalina's.

<comment><USER84> So... what are the bugs?

<comment><USER21> My earlier comment about files disappearing from Music.app: [0]

Just now, I had taken some screenshots in a game. One of the screenshots insisted on sitting outside the Screenshots stack for some reason (Stacks automatically collapse similar items on the desktop.)

When you open a book in Books.app, then view a different Desktop Space, the Books window automatically jumps to that space, even without the "Show on All Desktops" option.

Activity Monitor column widths randomly grow towards infinity.

Display Accessibility options randomly stop taking effect until relogging.

Widgets randomly rearrange themselves in the Notification Center.

Music/TV/Podcasts/App Store sometimes show no content, just blank views.

On the developer side, many bugs and missing documentation for SwiftUI.

I don't have the energy to type them all out here again after writing their bug reports.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318159)

<comment><USER21> Some of these bugs like the Books issue have been there for _years_ , on multiple machines/macOS versions.

If that doesn't happen to anyone else, I wonder if it's my iCloud-stored settings for Books.app

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> This is a pretty subjective take.

<comment><USER86> Nothing in that article seemed surprising or especially odd. Most software development shops operate that way, especially the bits about management and feature culling before deadlines.

From talking to a few friends who work at Apple, I believe the article when it says they're not too big on automated testing, which is a shame.

At any rate, nothing in there seems new, as in, that it would explain why _this year 's_ releases are particularly more buggy than in any previous year. Assuming that is actually the case; I imagine every year's releases are pretty buggy, but after the .1 release comes out, everyone forgets until the next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Why do any SW/QA engineer _routinely_ accept to work night and WE? Of course this is gonna be non productive and produce only buggy crap. I expect any reasonable person to understand that, and only very naive and/or junior people to not.

So just don't. What is your employer going to do? Fire you? Good, you don't want to work there anyway. And especially if you work at Apple, it is going to be easy to find a new job.

Refuse to ship crap. Refuse to work in insane conditions. If you don't it is not your employer's fault. It is yours. (I'm saying that in the context of highly qualified jobs, like engineering -- it does not apply to other situations where the employer has all the power and people are easily replaceable and sometimes have a hard time to find a job.)

</comment><comment><USER88> None of this is unique to Apple — this is all standard practice for giant mass-market software projects. The "closed, not a regression" thing used to drive me crazy at Microsoft. It makes no sense whatsoever!

</comment><comment><USER77> tvOS 13 seems to also be buggy. After the update I can no longer wake it via HDMI/CEC. Once I wake it some other (inconvenient) way then HDMI/CEC control works. Wake up was working on tvOS 12

<comment><USER89> I had to disable HDMI/CEC a while back because the AppleTV kept switch the TV back to it's own HDMI, stealing "focus" from the PlayStation.

<comment><USER77> strange, I haven't had that issue. I have 4 devices connected to the TV; A Mac Mini (running Ubuntu), An Apple TV, a PS4, and a Switch. If I turn any one device on it will wake up the TV if off and eventually switch to that device's input. But I haven't had any device switch the input to the TV out of order that I remember. I wonder what the issue is. My Apple TV is only used for 2 things, Kodi and Amazon Prime. I wonder if it's a particular app? I'm using the Apple TV 4k (not sure if that's the newest model or if there is another since)

Frustrating that this stuff is so finicky. It seems as simple as a USB keyboard which seem to generally work everywhere so why is it so hard to make work and keep it working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Has anyone done back of the envelope calculations into how much it costs Apple in bandwidth to push an update?

I wonder if that is a reason there isn't a stream of x.1 updates every few weeks as things are fixed?

<comment><USER91> this already happens, but x.1 updates are beta tested. If you're running the beta channel, you'll get x.1 updates shortly after launch.

These beta updates can go through a couple iterations before being released to the public, which is why it seems like there's a long delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Is there evidence that crash reports are being systematically analyzed? It seems more likely those are collected and reviewed as convenient for the highest priority fix investigations.

</comment><comment><USER93> Operating system should stop trying to do everything and just focus on giving basic functionalities in almost perfect way.

Let third party developer use those building blocks and add this magic!

<comment><USER94> I think this is where Apple's walled-garden approach is actively harming the growth and resilience of their operating system.

Unlike GNU/Linux, only Apple's in-company devs get to work on the proprietary code base, to build features based on a small number of decision-makers, and test them before release. Questionable decisions in the core don't get questioned by a wider community of devs before they get released to the public.

In Jobs' days, this approach might have worked better due to (maybe smaller code base and) higher quality and dedication of their internal dev teams.

Open-sourcing macOS maybe wishful thinking, but it's not an unreasonable idea, considering it's not their main money-maker (anymore?). In my opinion, this would vastly improve its future development, active participation by motivated community, and quality control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

</comment><comment><USER96> It's simpler than all that. They're buggy because Apple inexplicably decided they need to ship a new OS every year rather than when the features are ready. Reap what you sow.

</comment><comment><USER97> The bugs shows very increased complexity in the system, which causes so many exceptional scenarios that it is hard for QA to catch them all. This is the reason

<comment><USER97> They need one year of tech debt payback to get things back on track like what happened to one of their prev releases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> >practically impossible to create a comprehensive test suite.

Maybe it's time for the community to look deeper into formal methods.

</comment><comment><USER99> Interesting insights. It's like a laundry list of software engineering management failures.

</comment><comment><USER100> My wife's Iphone lost most of its battery life since the update. Very dramatic difference

<comment><USER101> Since the iOS 13 update, I'd had this happen almost daily:

The battery level is reported as fine and everything works like normal from 100% to about 35%. At about 35% (could be 36 or 32 or whatever any given time --I can't see that the exact percentage matters), the phone crashes to powered off state. If I try to start it up with the power button, I get the "plug this in" indicator. If I start it using the hard reset method, then it'll power back up normally, and the battery will _always_ report as 10% at this stage. It can stay like this for a few minutes up to a couple of hours, but it'll inevitably crash again if I don't plug it in. After it crashes, I can do a hard reset again and it'll come back up and the battery will often show something percentage in the 20's. Often if I try to use _any_ app in this cycle, that'll cause a crash. If I do plug it in after a second crash, then suddenly the battery is reporting at maybe 23% again. Like, WTF?

It only started happening since iOS 13.

I would be happy if my iphone only lost most of its battery life. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> iOS 13 was pretty buggy but the amount of improvements all across the system has been significant. I can live with it. But installing Catalina on my daily driver: no thanks. Xcode will force me to upgrade eventually I guess.

</comment><comment><USER102> A bit ironic the author use to be on the Radar development team at Apple.

</comment><comment><USER103> Sounds a lot like Windows development haha

</comment><comment><USER104> iOS 13 has been pretty much flawless for me. However, I am waiting to update to Catalina until 2020 because support for 32 bit apps and OpenGL has been pulled.

<comment><USER105> Catalina does not drop support for OpenGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> And it can't play TF2.

</comment><comment><USER107> TLDR, technical debt.</comment>


Ask HN: Not sure what to do here - <AUTHOR> One of the founders of the startup I work at threatened me today when I said: "If you're not going to pay me what I'm currently getting paid, I'll probably quit." I was trying to be transparent about my feelings when saying this and they fired back with: "I'll sue you and take your shares back!". My shares haven't vested so I don't really care too much about that, but I am scared they'll try to drown me in legal fees from suing me.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks... <comment><USER2> _" "If you're not going to pay me what I'm currently getting paid"_

Not sure exactly what this means. Are you saying that they're not paying you your salary, or something else?

What could they possibly sue you for? Do you have a contract with them that says you'll work for a particular salary for a fixed amount of time? If not, you're an "at-will" employee, and can leave at any time. In any case, I don't think they can drown you in legal fees because they seem to have nothing to sue you over. I'm pretty sure this startup's investors wouldn't be happy if the founders started pursuing frivolous lawsuits against their employees - it's a waste of money, and companies that have a reputation for suing their employees will find it very hard to recruit new employees.

If my employer made a crazy threat to sue me, I'd be looking for a new job right away.

</comment><comment><USER3> If we're talking about employee stock options then you loose them if employment ends anyway. Some contract give you let's say 90 days after leaving to sell (well convert, same-day-sale) them.

On what grounds could they sue you? I mean you have the right to quit for any (or no) reason. I'd say it's an empty threat.</comment>


Crowdfunding Sites Scoot Around a Regulatory Traffic Jam - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-28/crowdfunding-sites-scoot-around-a-regulatory-traffic-jam

<comment><USER2> Good summary of the landscape, thanks for posting.</comment>


Apple's 3d touch – an evolutionary perspective - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@srikanththunga/apple-s-3d-touch-evolutionary-perspective-1f1defe30716 <comment><USER2> The real news here is people believing pressure sensitivity is a novelty.

Been there done that view is that this interaction makes difficult to have repeatable feedback from an app given fuzzy boundaries around what's long, what's short, what's high pressure and what's not.

The touchscreen may be very precise, but what about the fingers and the human attached to it?

We had synaptic measuring pressure sensitivity with accuracy for some time now, but adoption has always been a problem. It goes well with fuzzy apps like drawing, where feedback from pressure is immediate and visible, but giving two coordinates to a single touch and having no feedback is a pipe dream.

But hey nobody seems to care about accessibility anymore so meh.

<comment><USER3> I actually use Apple's accessibility features quite a bit. I'm not visually or aurally imparied, but sometimes I like the features provided to those users. Apple seems to care quite a bit in this regard.

I haven't looked into Apple's 3D Touch documentation very deeply, but the OS seem to respond, by default, to just three levels of pressure -- the first, the lightest, is treated as a traditional touch. The next level we might call a press, and is given an immediate "taptic" feedback, to differentiate from a touch. A "deeper press" gives another haptic response. In fact, it vibrates/taps twice as an error, if deeper press is not supported on the element.</comment></comment>


Honeycrisp and SweeTango – Apple Breeding, Branding, and Trademarking - <AUTHOR> http://discover.umn.edu/news/food-agriculture/apple-breeding-program-continues-shine

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, here is a Planet Money episode about this: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episode-627-the- miracle-apple)

</comment><comment><USER2> I grew up in MN and always loved Honeycrisp, but after relocating I was surprised to hear people describe them as tasteless or mealy. It turns out they vary a lot depending on growing region. Cold hardy apples produce very different fruit in warmer climates. I have heard this is a big part of why the SweeTango brand has been limited to a small number of growers in select regions.

Minor correction for the title: "SweeTango" has just one 'T' ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SweeTango](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SweeTango))

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the idea of keeping apples to their proper growing climate is a crucial point: these new tasty apple discoveries occur in the UMN orchard, and once selected, a branded apple really will do well on the market if its quantity is constrained and only grown by a few farmers. So, with the UMN orchard as ground zero for the apple discoveries, it would seem that farmers nearer to the orchard have a huge advantage with regard to actually taking an apple from lab orchard to farm to market.

Tainting the identity of the Honeycrisp for example because it was grown in the wrong climate would be something any farmer growing Honeycrisps would want to prevent, else risk the bad impression and lower sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honeycrisp are easily the best apples I've ever tasted.

Which makes me wonder how we ate so many Red Delicious when I was a kid, because they taste -- as the article said -- like sawdust.

<comment><USER4> The Red Delicious of your youth was probably a lot better. I loved Golden Delicious, but now can barely stomach them.

I don't understand how a cultivar degrades over time. A buddy of mine comes from an apple growing family. He explained the decline to me, which I barely understood.

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

Plus the best of the bunch get exported, so we're eating the rejects.</comment></comment>


Germany tightens online hate speech rules to make platforms send reports to feds - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/germany-tightens-online-hate-speech-rules-to-make-platforms-send-reports-straight-to-the-feds/ <comment><USER2> I don't like how the liability for finding hate speech is being shifted from law enforcement to private companies. If you want to make laws restricting what people can say, social media companies shouldn't be the ones enforcing it, law enforcement should be. Pass a law requiring all content flagged by the police to be removed, don't pass a law requiring social media companies to act as the police, with millions of dollars in fines if their rulings don't line up with law enforcement.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the dumb practice seems rather feudalistic effectively in trying to dragoon "guilds" of entities they can deal with in domains with raised barriers to entry for the sake of their ease of administration and grip on power.

One of the few good things to say is that Germany's case doesn't seem to be an attempt to try to bypass its own internal restrictions at least. But that bar should be so low that it is buried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > an obligation on social network platforms to remove hate speech within set > deadlines as tight as 24 hours for easy cases — with fines of up to €50M > should they fail to comply.

Is only hate speech criminalized, or do false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements [1] _promoting_ multiculturalism also face such legal risk?

[1] I'm assuming truth is a defense in either case. Please correct me if otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER5> What does Germany define hate speech as?</comment>


Meet Winnie, a female-founded startup pioneering better tech for parents - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/winnie-labs/meet-winnie-16d689d9bd4f#.iluyurk6j <comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I'm one of the founders and I lead design & development of the iPhone app. I welcome any feedback, comments or questions about Winnie!</comment>


Passwordless authentication via user-unique URLs - <AUTHOR> http://www.drmaciver.com/2010/10/an-interesting-idea-for-authentication/ <comment><USER2> This one fails for the simple reason that URL's are stored in the browser history. So now if you don't clear your history then anyone using the same browser after you finish logging in with your "unique" url simply has to open the history to get your credentials.</comment>


Law of Triviality - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

<comment><USER2> _In the third chapter, "High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest", Parkinson writes about a finance committee meeting with a three-item agenda. The first is the signing of a £10 million contract to build a reactor, the second a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff, and the third proposes £21 a year to supply refreshments for the Joint Welfare Committee._

Of course, committees that can sign off on staggeringly expensive items like nuclear reactors are rarely tasked with approving things like bicycle sheds in the first place. To relate this back to the real world, I highly doubt that White House cabinet meetings end up in long debates about what color the curtains should be.</comment>


Why was the Zimmerman Telegram so important? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38581861 <comment><USER2> Code interception and breaking. Cutting undersea cables. Parallel construction. Carefully managed release to manipulate public opinion.

It's nice to have an inside view on an intelligence coup - albeit from 100 years ago.

<comment><USER3> It somehow shows that what we see at the moment isn't new at all. Yes, there is a different scale of information gathering, but that's just because there's more information flowing. 100 years ago it was very hard to communicate over a distance without traffic being intercepted, and the same is true today.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make communication more secure, but it indicates that we are not heading towards an ever worse surveillance state.

<comment><USER4> I find it scary. If they could do that 100 hundred years ago, what are they doing now with the added century of experience and the new tech ?

<comment><USER5> I find it reassuring. If _we_ could do that 100 hundred years ago, what are _we_ doing now with the added century of experience and the new tech?

<comment><USER4> The benefit of experience and tech is diluted among the public, but concentrated in corporations and govs. The will and ability to use and understand them even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that most amazes me about the Great War is how so many fought and died to prevent the EU [1].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemberprogramm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemberprogramm)

Edit. It seems my brevity has caused some people to miss my point (or maybe not). I am lamenting the huge loss of life that flowed from the Great War that was fought trying to prevent the creation of the EU.

On a personal note my great uncle died in the Great War and the effect this had on my family is still with with us to this day.

<comment><USER7> Your comment is short and slightly offensive, but sure there's some truth to that the diplomatic/economic European Union could have happend faster if people just hadn't warmongered so much.

The people living there were, to put it midly worse off, but I'm sure the leaders thought it was a great idea to expand their culturaly influence just a little bit too far.

But is unification really always the answer?

<comment><USER6> The history of Europe in the 20th C. is really the long march towards a EU with Germany at the heart. It is more than a shame that so many died to end up exactly where we would have been if the Schlieffen Plan had worked [1].

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan)

<comment><USER8> Right... Except, of course, that the EU is a voluntary union rather than an attempt at conquest.

<comment><USER6> I think you should ask the Greeks how voluntary the EU is these days.

I am actually not opposed to the EU, I am just making the point of how little wars or personalities matter in the end.

<comment><USER8> Your comment about Greece can easily be turned around: ask the British how voluntary the EU is.

<comment><USER2> It became voluntary for the British only because our Prime Minister was weak and (foolishly?) gambled on a referendum in return for strengthening his personal support among some of his eurosceptic MPs.

Leaders of other EU countries are unlikely to make the same mistake of letting their populations vote on the issue.

<comment><USER9> How are leaders of EU countries decided?

Hint: it's by a similar mechanism to referendums

<comment><USER10> > How are leaders of EU countries decided?

Same way as the structure of the EU itself is decided. Governments fight to keep things away from a vote. Regularly a vote is called anyway because some politician uses the promise of a vote as a way to get elected. Then the EU loses the referendum, election, ... that is called, and then the result is ignored.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_European_Union)

Direct quote from Wolfgang Schauble (according to Yanis Varoufakis) : "elections cannot be allowed to set economic policy for the EU".

That sums up the attitude of the EU, and is the attitude that permeates both the EU itself and the basis of it's support. This is a quote from a private conversation I had with a Dutch judge. "What would have happened if we had let elections decide ? Norway would be driving on the left and we wouldn't have the Euro anywhere". The EU is seen by the local elites (the non-businessmen. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, ...) as a way to impose what they consider good policy.

The EU institutions itself are importantly not the real basis of power in the EU. Politicians get sent off to the EU to have a cushy, but faraway, job. It's where political careers go to die (especially the parliament). EU politicians are perceived to have less power than the local ones, even though the opposite is true. And that's what's really happening in Europe : power is shifting more and more locally. Barcelona's increased independence is big. The real power base of the Belgian and Dutch governments is specific cities (Antwerp and the Hague). Outside of those cities, things are going very wrong and support for the government is nonexistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-lebo Interesting article, though the answer in the title seems pretty obvious: Germany was offering a previously hostile neighbor of the US land as long as they'd enter the war. No matter whether that was transmitted in secret, in the open, or through diplomatic channels, that's virtually a declaration of war.

Even without unrestrained submarine warfare, that alone might have been enough to bring the US into the war in 1915. It took some restraint from Wilson to prevent an earlier entry, anyway.

<comment><USER11>
        virtually a declaration of war.

Have you reflected properly on why Germany felt a need to defend itself against the US?

<comment><USER12> Because they were already in a stalemate with France, the UK, and Russia. And their allies the Austro-Hungarian Empire were more concerned with Serbia and Italy than France, etc. So this was a move intended to counter the US should we enter the war ("give them something besides Germany to worry about" was likely the thinking)

<comment><USER13> They basically needed a WW2 Japan in WW1

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york Thanks for posting this! That knowledge is power is not in doubt. We in the West would be fools to hamstring our own intelligence services in their mission to defend national security.

Is privacy important - absolutely - but the correct mechanism to protect not just privacy but against abuse is not to reduce the agencies intel capabilities but strengthen our democratic means of oversight.</comment>


Jack Ma retires as Alibaba's chairman - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/09/jack-ma-officially-retires-as-alibabas-chairman/ <comment><USER2> People seem to be missing

> The transition was announced a year ago.

<comment><USER3> He has been planning on retiring for a while now as he stopped being CEO back in 2013

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it will be really interesting to see if Alibaba significantly changes after Ma. In silicon valley you absolutely have the cult of the founder - Apple would be nothing without Steve Jobs, Facebook would be nothing without Zuck, everything Bezos touches turns to gold.

People around here seem to have a very low impression of Ma (apparently based on one youtube video), but I can imagine running a huge e-commerce empire in China is non-trivial. I could imagine the personal management of relations with the senior Chinese politicians could be make or break for a Chinese company in a way that US companies simply don't face.

<comment><USER5> I think people who came away from that video thinking Elon won don't understand the Chinese sense of humour. Jack Ma was trolling the shit out of Elon ("Alibaba AI", "the future is not IQ or EQ, but Love Quotient"), and not only did Elon take the bait, he seemed like he was trying to one-up Ma's ridiculousness. "Protect the light of consciousness!". Musk even managed to mention aliens at one stage. To me it seemed like the kind of video someone might show their children: "Don't do drugs, or else you'll end up publically making a fool of yourself like Musk did!".

<comment><USER6> I highly doubt your point of view on this. Can you provide any evidence?

<comment><USER5> This is the man who paid to make a movie of himself beating up Jet Li ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfS9Uf5SKu8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfS9Uf5SKu8)), the man who showed up to an annual company event dressed as Michael Jackson and dancing Thriller ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31pwCOSVS0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31pwCOSVS0g)). If you really think he believes that the "love quotient" is the future of humanity, I've got a bridge to sell you.

In Mainland China to get ahead you need to learn to say a bunch of stuff that nobody believes in, e.g. Maozedong Thought in high school/uni exams. Like political correctness in the West, except few people take it seriously. Ma's points were an example of this: focus on education, focus on AI helping us understand ourselves, focus on growing creativity, focus on what we can do to help the Earth, focus on automation freeing up more time for leisure. Non- controversial platitudes that nobody can really disagree with (at least not in China). Musk completely misses this, and goes out saying all kind of stuff about aliens, superintelligent robots and "biological bootloaders" that sounds completely bonkers to somebody not caught up in the hype (or somebody who actually works with ML). Ma catches on to this and has a field day hamming up his presentation, realising that this game is something Musk is completely incapable of playing. Just imagine how absurd it would be if somebody stood up at Party Congress and started talking about aliens; that person certainly wouldn't be presenting at the next Congress to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would point your attention on this video. It contains the exiled Chinese Billionaire's Accusations of China and also the speculations on what has happened to Jack Ma and what may happen in the future. The video is quite long. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwXifDaCjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwXifDaCjE)

<comment><USER8> Not sure why you've been downvoted. This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwXifDaCjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cwXifDaCjE) this guy i think is predicting the future.

<comment><USER10> Well he's not dead yet or in jail ;) But will be interesting to see how this plays out.. Are there any good resources summarizing these facts/ allegations or "connecting" them? Would be interesting to dive down that rabbit hole..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> No more AI (Alibaba intelligence)

</comment><comment><USER12> 996 for life for some, not for the winners though.

</comment><comment><USER13> He was almost certainly ousted. Look for Ant Financial to grow in even closer connection with CCP interests. My guess is that Alipay will be used as a means to strengthen international dependence on the RMB. The trail of acquisitions suggests such.

Very exciting and uncertain times we live in!

Edit: this isn't an anti-China rant at all, just musings based on observations and incomplete data.

<comment><USER2> He was ousted a year ago and was allowed a year-long transition as the ousted head of Alibaba?

> The transition was announced a year ago.

<comment><USER13> I think it's entirely possible that he's just selling high after a few decades of hard work.

Ousting to me doesn't mean getting thrown out of the building with your things in a box, it can happen peacefully and gradually. Jack almost certainly has ties to the CCP and a good dialogue with them--it's a necessity to grow a business in that country. My guess is that there was a good amount of pressure gracefully imposed by an outside group to step down.

But maybe he just wants to start a university/cure malaria and move on before China exports slow down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> anyone ever see when he shared the stage with Elon Musk?

Watching Elon control himself was amazing. the guy was _trying so hard_ to not laugh or verbally slap the guy in public.

*edit for the lazy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKYWu-S2G0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKYWu-S2G0)

<comment><USER15> For those who didn't watch it here are the highlights of that debate [https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw](https://youtu.be/aHGd6LqAVzw)

<comment><USER16> At least watching the first half of the highlights only, Elon comes off... poorly. And I'm a super fan!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> End of an era.

</comment><comment><USER18> As others have mentioned here, the recent "debate" between Jack Ma and Elon Musk was not excellent, but I put that more on Elon Musk. I have listened to other Jack Ma interviews, panel discussions, etc. and I really like his humanistic view of what life could be. People first, technology second.

I like Elon Musk's enthusiasm for difficult problems, but I didn't like his (what I perceived) lack of respect for Ma.

<comment><USER19> A person win debates does not necessarily practice what he say. Jack Ma is famous for encourage employees working overtime, and leads Alibaba to a toxic workplace where HR abuse everyone with their KPI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The quality of conversation in this thread is _really bad_. Feels like reddit in here.

<comment><USER21> reddit has become toxic pool of garbage.

the anti china sentiment that has been driven up by US media and Hong Kong protests alike is irrational and is bordering xenophobia and bigotry.

just a small glance at r/HongKong and you can see images posted out of context with slogans against the police and government, most of which are targeted towards kids in school, sometimes by the same kids.

<comment><USER22> The HK police, at the behest of a leader chosen by the CCP, are attacking journalists, beating and killing protesters and violating the Sino British joint declaration that determines that HK has their own civil and criminal law. Why would it be bigotry, rather than simple judgement of the CCP for the CCP's actions?

<comment><USER21> and are you there to witness both sides of the story? i will have a wild guess that no.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure what "both sides" of pressing someone's hand into their arm until their wrist snaps is. Nor am I sure what "both sides" of someone being hit with truncheons until they convulse and stop moving is.

Are you saying the footage is faked or something else?

<comment><USER21> not at all, but you need to consider the context of what happened. the protesters were throwing molotvs.

there are footage of protesters beating the police with equal brutality, but i guess you won't find it on reddit.

i'm ending my discussion here with you, you can choose to consume and believe whatever media you like.

my 2 cent was that reddit is a cesspool of propaganda now.

<comment><USER22> You were writing about images being posted out of context. I'm still struggling to determine the context that would make these things (or other things, like slowly sinking your thumbs into a hospital patient's eyes while they're restrained) OK. You've replied by discussing other incidents, which doesn't answer the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938262)

<comment><USER24> I found it a little unfortunate that one of the threads was so dismissive of NYT [1] due to a SCMP article [2]. I checked archive.org's original snapshot of NYT article [3] and Newsdiff [4] to try to make sure that NYT didn't edit the original article in response, and sure enough they were all worded "planned to step down" and "Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba's board of directors and continue to mentor the company's management", which is accurate.

I suppose the lesson I'm taking away is to not buy into a counter-reaction immediately. It's obvious in hindsight: SCMP is owned by Alibaba after all.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17940919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17940919)

[2] [https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack...](https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack- ma-remain-alibabas-chairman-succession-plan-younger-talent)

[3] [https://web.archive.org/web/20180907230109/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180907230109/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba- jack-ma-retiring.html) (may need to turn off JS)

[4] [http://newsdiffs.org/article- history/https%3A/www.nytimes.co...](http://newsdiffs.org/article- history/https%3A/www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma- retiring.html)

<comment><USER23> Thank you for your documented insight. In spite of our best intentions, we—as a community—often do judgement mistakes. One thing that I've been meaning to do is to write postmortems about our reaction to some events, and their eventual outcome. This would help us improve the way that we digest information.

One particularly interesting subject to cover would be Bloomberg's alleged "Big Hack"[1]. Between the initial publication and the final denial by all the involved companies, a lot of different narratives have emerged and gained traction here—and most of them turned out to be incorrect.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> after elon interview :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should take a hint like this

<comment><USER27> Let's arrange a debate for zuck and musk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> HN hates China. You can tell from the dialogue and tone whenever it is brought up. Objectivity is out of the window, all of a sudden.

When it comes to America and the beloved companies, there is always justification. The other day it was privacy and ability to unsubscribe. HN was justifiably ranked really really terrible. Of course everyone came to its defense.

Then of course the tyranny of the majority on this beloved forum, though not any participant is willing to accept it.

HN needs Dave Chappelle.

<comment><USER29> No shit HN hates China. How can you actually LIKE China?

China is literally one of the worst countries in the world at this current moment. Their ethnic cleansing, treatment of minorities, extreme censorship and state control does not make them a likable country.

<comment><USER30> I like China. Of course I hate the government. The country is super exciting though and it's very sad that it's ruled by such dystopian regime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh wow</comment>


Pocoo.org is down. Sure could use some jinja2 docs :( - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocoo.org

<comment><USER2> Unfortunate. The pocoo team is certifiably fantastic and hopefully this is just some isolated server issue and not a portend of something larger.

I (and probably others) have some experience with Jinja2 -- if there's a specific issue/question you have, I can do my best to answer it!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a surprise 12-hour outage: <https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/284058247248371712>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> jinja2 docs from google cache, if anyone's interested:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9iVBoXE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9iVBoXECs5QJ:jinja.pocoo.org/docs/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox- aurora)</comment>


EcmaScript Sixth Edition - <AUTHOR> http://espadrine.github.io/New-In-A-Spec/es6/

<comment><USER2> > fat arrow: (a) => a * a is the same as function(a) { return a * a; }

No, it's equivalent to the following:

      (function (a) { return a * a; }).bind(this);

The fat arrow has lexically scoped _this_.

On an entirely different note, I never liked how generators are marked with an asterisk. A generator isn't special, it is just a function returning an iterator. A generator should be able to return normally as well as yield.

<comment><USER3> > A generator isn't special, it is just a function returning an iterator. A > generator should be able to return normally as well as yield.

But in a generator function the iterator is returned immediately, before any of the code in the function runs, so how would it return anything else?

For example:

      function* f() {
          console.log("function commencing!");
          for (x of [1, 2, 3]) {
             console.log("yielding " + x);
             yield x;
          }
      }

      var it = f();
      console.log("iterator returned from function:", it);
      console.log(it.next().value);

would print:

      "iterator returned from function:" Generator {  } Scratchpad/1:19
      "function commencing!" Scratchpad/1:11
      "yielding 1" Scratchpad/1:13
      1

So even if the very first thing the function does is

       if (isTuesday())
         return something;
       else
         yield somethingElse;

...by that point it would have already returned an iterator, so it would be too late to decide otherwise, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER2> >But in a generator function the iterator is returned immediately, before any of the code in the function runs, so how would it return anything else?

Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know ES6 implemented generators that way. That's really weird.

EDIT: Looks like PHP does the same thing. Hmm, I can see the merits of an asterisk, then.

<comment><USER3> Python works the same way, so I just assumed ES6 did as well and tested it in Firefox. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All those additions are welcome (and wayyyyyyyyy overdue to be honest) but something is striking me as quite old-fashioned :

      for (var [key, val] of items(x)) { alert(key + ',' + val); }

That syntax isn't really natural, I would think something like:

      items(x).forEach(function(key, value) {
        alert(key + ',' + val);
      });

is more natural and readable. It also brings up the question of interpolation, why do we even have to use + in the first place?

Also, can someone in the know care to tell me why that is that those additions for what is the end rather basic functionality is coming so late to the language?

<comment><USER5>
        items(x).forEach(function(key, value) {
          alert(key + ',' + val);
        });

You can already just do that, without ES6.

> It also brings up the question of interpolation, why do we even have to use > + in the first place?

Did you miss the last item, "quasis"? `You are ${age} years old.`

> Also, can someone in the know care to tell me why that is that those > additions for what is the end rather basic functionality is coming so late > to the language?

Because unlike most languages, there's no canonical implementation.

Mozilla, who actually holds the trademark on the name "JavaScript", totally tried to evolve the language since the beginning and even shipped e.g. JavaScript 1.7 (which had generators, iterators, let, array comprehensions, and destructuring assignment [1]) with Firefox 2 in 2006, but Firefox just didn't have the market share for authors to start using the new features, and no other browser implemented any of them. That deadlock was only broken by Brendan Eich using corporate politics rather than hacker-style "putting it out there": rounding up all the big browser makers (of course, it helped that Apple and Google had just broken into the scene), and convincing them to commit to implementing new features decided on by the committee they formed, TC39 (and to update their browsers at all, _ahem_ IE _ahem_ ).

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_in_JavaScript/1.7)

<comment><USER4> Unless I'm missing something, you cannot use forEach on a Javascript object as of now (or map, reduce, every, some and other methods that are available on Array.prototype).

The only way is to use:

      for(var key in obj) {...}

As for interpolation, I indeed missed the bit about quasis. Though I really wonder why they would still use concatenation if they can interpolate... Maybe to only show one feature at a time, which I guess makes sense.

<comment><USER6> You are correct, there is no forEach, a lot of libraries implement their own, but no native version.

<comment><USER7>
        Object.keys(obj).forEach(function (key) {
            var val = obj[key];

            // use key and val here
        });

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > array and generator comprehension: [a+b for (a in A) for (b in B)] (array > comprehension), (x for (x of generateValues()) if (x.color === 'blue')) > (generator expression).

Bit of an error here. The array comprehension uses "in" which will iterate over the indexes of A and B. While this is technically valid, no one would look at that and expect it to return the string concatenation of all the indexes of A and B :)

<comment><USER9> You're right; I didn't update the example while the syntax was in flux. Fixed! ☺

(There's no certainty that the syntax will be kept, though, see this[1] about deferring it to ES7 to generalize the syntax for parallelism, and this[2] to make async promises and generators work together.)

[1]: [https://speakerdeck.com/dherman/a-better-future-for- comprehe...](https://speakerdeck.com/dherman/a-better-future-for- comprehensions)

[2]: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4PVbLpUIdzoMDR5dWstRllXblU/...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4PVbLpUIdzoMDR5dWstRllXblU/edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ok but when can we expect to start using that and have our web apps work in the real world? in 10 years? 20 years?

<comment><USER4> Much faster if you are willing to punish your users for using subpar browsers that don't keep up with current technologies and standards.

A bullet I retrospectively think we should have bit a long time ago. It would have sent a strong message that you either make sure that your browser is top notch or it will be left behind to bite the dust of the power horses.

Now that Microsoft is feeling the heat under its ass (from FF, Chrome and Safari), they're making sure IE is not ridiculously worse than the competition, that it auto-updates, they're engaging the community, creating libraries, etc.

<comment><USER10> I can't even think about blaming my Clients for not using the latest IE because I want to use some syntax sugar for things that I can already do with ECMA 5.

<comment><USER4> That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about 5 years ago when IE7/IE8 were lagging behind by a HUGE margin and it was another world trying to make things compatible. It was not a matter of using the last version, it was a matter of Microsoft not paying attention or not wanting to make its flagship browser better. Not just some developer throwing a fit because he needed "sugar".

Also, and that's only personal opinion, but there's a limit to the customer is always right. What if we create a new super highway one day with flying cars, are we going to punt on moving on because some people like their combustion engine pieces of junk? It's also our jobs to make people understand that jumping on the latest technology is in their best interest. Leveling the field to the lowest common denominator brings everyone down in the end and really hampers creation and innovation.

And that is the reason why Javascript is so far behind modern languages in so many areas.

<comment><USER11> I rather have money on my pocket than angry customers.

<comment><USER12> What you seem to be missing is that having to develop for old browsers also costs money.

At some point, it's no longer worth the business of the small number of e.g. IE6 users to put the extra effort in creating a site that can work in it.

<comment><USER11> You are missing the amount of zeros before the comma (or decimal point).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome! Most of these things works under Firefox if you want to play.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great summary. Any breaking changes?

<comment> jarek-foksa In ES6 "typeof null" will give you "null" rather than "object". There were also some talks on making "__proto__" non-mutable, but I'm not sure whether this breaking change made it into the spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Please stop evolving Ecmascript. If this continues then soon JavaScript will have gone from a nice simple, elegant language into C++ 11, incomprehensible to both humans and machines, and then the replacement languages will start to proliferate, fragmentation, ugh ... Let's just agree that JavaScript only needs minor enhancements, not mind bending magical operators and keywords. Please don't do to JavaScript what perl6 did to perl. If you want a mind numbing language then please use Haskell or erlang, and let JavaScript remain simple.

<comment><USER16> I completely agree. It's like they did not learn from javascripts mistakes and just continue doing them.

Global Scope: not fixed. No integer: not fixed. Syntax to resemble JAVA more closely in a class-less language that already as 9999999999999 class libraries: FIXED

<comment><USER17> How can you fix the global scope without breaking almost all existing JS code? Browsers will never ship anything that breaks large numbers of existing websites (users don't use browsers that don't work with the web!).

Adding an integer type is far easier said than done. It was decided to leave that hard problem to ES7; integer type (or types!) are certainly coming.

<comment><USER18> >> How can you fix [X] without breaking almost all existing [Y] code?

For most cases of X, some form of declaration that is scope bound.

Look at e.g. Perl, it changes quickly in this way, with very good backwards compatibility. [Also see strict mode, of course.]

Edit: That said, new keywords like those let/const/module/extends etc should work fine. Please give me them today.

Edit 2: I have been cursing the lack of multiple returns this week. It is a pain returning a hash/object or an array. That really isn't supported, from browsing the standard? :-(

<comment><USER9> > _Edit 2: I have been cursing the lack of multiple returns this week. It is a > pain returning a hash /object or an array._

Why is that?

      let rational = (a, b) => [a, b];
      let [numerator, denominator] = rational(38, 4);
      let reduced = rational(numerator/2, denominator/2);

PS. The above code works in stable Firefox.

<comment><USER18> >> Why is that?

<Cough> Obviously because I'm blind? :-) Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>