Facebook is imposing American censorship on the rest of the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/09/12/facebook-is-imposing-prissy-american-censorship-on-the-whole-res/ <comment><USER4> Aw, let's be fair now. After all they also ban religious material at the request of the Pakistani government [http://tribune.com.pk/story/855030/facebook- censored-54-post...](http://tribune.com.pk/story/855030/facebook- censored-54-posts-for-blasphemy-in-pakistan-in-second-half-of-2014/) and political content for Hong Kong too! [http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/news/art/20100205/13699972](http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/news/art/20100205/13699972) (translation [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhk.apple.nextmedia.com%2Fnews%2Fart%2F20100205%2F13699972&edit- text=) )

<comment><USER5> There's actually probably an interesting bigger point here. Why is this image the content that sparked so much outrage? As you point out, they ban a lot of things on behalf of other countries. There's been complaints of conservatives getting censored (who knows how accurate those are). And of course, the hot mic gaff of Zuckerberg talking with Angela Merkel about censoring migrant crisis criticism on Facebook.

So is this just the event that caused sentiment to hit critical mass? Or did it touch a deeper nerve that's got people stirred up?

<comment><USER6> I would guess that censoring a head of state is what made most people react.

From my European perspective:

This is a case of an american corporation imposing censorship based on american values (that almost no european care about) on an European head of state, where the message being censored is of historical importance while painting america in a negative light.

While other claims of censorship is easily shrugged of as unimportant this one makes it blatantly clear that an american corporation is trying to interfere in our democracy, something that is going to annoy a lot of people to the degree where they are going to at-least complain loudly about it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that, it's an interesting difference from my own opinion, and totally understandable. I don't like it because it clearly (to me) is a censorship of art, and famous art at that. It violates principles of free speech as I understand it (from the US).

But the angle of it being an American company meddling in European politics is also an important idea. For what it's worth, I doubt they care about the picture's portrayal of America so much as the simple fact that it's a naked child.

There seems to be a fine line between diplomacy and meddling that hasn't been going too well lately.

<comment><USER6> yes, I don't think that facebook cares so much about the america perspective of the picture, nor do I think that it's the major point for most people complaining about the censorship, but it is that little extra twist. Compared to if they had censored the photo of the man in front of the tanks on tiamen square in china; it would still technically be as bad, but I would guess that fewer people would complain as it would _feel_ less politically motivated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Americans are so bought into the idea that "explicit" images are bad that they can't see another viewpoint. Its become "natural". And, as the author pointed out, Americans are so blind to it that you don't even see the problem with censoring nipples but not beheadings.

We literally cant see that noone should be injured by seeing a womans breast, but seeing a beheaded body - thats OK?

Its interesting to see this story come out so soon after the LA times story about libel and the fight against court ordered take-down of posts critical of companies (think Yelp, etc.).

Maybe the point is that censorship shouldn't be allowed?

<comment><USER5> America has something like 330 million people in it. I assure you, there are a lot of us who see the basic logic around this and think we should stop worrying about the occasional nipple.

In this particular instance though, it's worse than your complaint. We're talking about censoring an iconic image captured from an important time in our history. I'd be willing to bet that even among the anti-nipple people, this image gets a pass, hands down. Clearly there are some who object, but the vast majority of people understand the message in this image isn't 'enjoy looking at a naked young girl'.

*edit: spelling typo

<comment><USER8> >I assure you, there are a lot of us who see the basic logic around this and think we should stop worrying about the occasional nipple.

I think the basic problem here is not that there aren't Americans who don't have a problem with seeing a bit of nipple, but that a majority of Americans don't seem to understand that if you censor this kind of thing from people, it makes them a lot more reactive to it when they do in fact encounter it - <USER2> is to say, by removing from society any acceptance of sex as a positive thing, American society has become far more malleable and reactive to sex - and thus can be sold more things using sex - than it should be.

Sex wouldn't be a billion-dollar industry if nobody was bothered by seeing it now and then.

The same position, by the way, can be taken with regard to the way Americans view their wars. The average American has no clue what it actually means to let their military-industrial complex run rampant across the globe - <USER3> they don't see the images, the video, the very real facts of the matter, on the ground. And thus, those who profit from such acts, profit.

<comment><USER9> Agree. And at the same time Americans have been inundated with "war" and the pro-Nationalist message that we should always, ALWAYS, 1) support our troops no matter what and 2) never forget.

The fear-mongering is rampant and relentless. And everyone is afraid to question it.

<comment><USER10> Nothing wrong with supporting the troops. Marion Le Pen was questioned on his regarding French military action a long time ago. Her correct response was to point out that the French soldiers did their job, did what they were supposed to. If apologies and shame are appropriate, it needs to be aimed at the leadership.

The attitude towards Vietnam vets was disgusting, right? Drafted people forced into a pointless war. Support the people not the leaders...

<comment><USER11> "Nothing wrong with supporting the troops."

That depends on what you mean by "supporting the troops." I actually have no definition or even a clear idea of what this means and I'm certain no one else does either. It's just a generic motto used for brainwashing. Does it mean that I support the individuals not dying? Because if so, then yes, I support the troops very much and I hope none of them die. Does it mean that I support what they do? Fuck no! It's atrocious and criminal. They are murdering and raping people. I would never support that. And of course, it also could mean every single nuance in between. So it's a meaningless saying that seems to exist for the solve purpose of controlling the people who refuse to question basic things. The mere fact that it _can_ mean that I support the troops' actions (murder, rape, and even wasting trillions of dollars of our money) is reason enough for anyone to not "support the troops," and is certainly why I would never utter such an ambiguous and clearly manipulative phrase.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, and exactly why it works so well.

If you question "the troops" including why they were sent there to begin with, then you are easily labeled "unpatriotic" and your ideas are immediately dismissed.

It is a very easy way to implement self-culling behavior among the masses. The "powers" do not have to black bag the dissidents, if they are never able to achieve any viable mind-share.

<comment><USER12> Nah, just go ahead and criticize. You are going to be fighting an uphill battle, but as someone who spent over a decade criticizing the military while in the military, I can tell you that the bark has no bite, as is often the case with things like this. You'll actually find a lot of people that agree with you, even though they won't add their voice to yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Facebook ploughed on – before performing an embarrassing 360 and claiming that it was imposing this policy out of concern for victims._

A 360 would be embarrassing as it places you back to the same road. Perhaps it was an "embarrassing 180" instead.

<comment><USER14> It's actually is one of the rare instances I've seen "do a 360" used appropriately. Facebook revamped their policy around the issue while ending up at exactly the same place: you have to use your real name.

<comment><USER15> But doing a 360 doesn't mean doing a 180, and then sometime much later, doing another 180.

<comment><USER16> I think it's a matter of context and time-frame. If the end up pointing the same way they started, that's 360 degrees. That might entail two 180 flips at different points, and if talking about one of those specifically, it would be appropriate to say they did a 180 when referring to that specific situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get why this is such an issue. I understand the sheer numbers of people that use fb and get their 'news' from it, but it amazes me that people are shocked that fb censors the content.

Facebook never claimed to be a news organization nor part of the 5th estate (which, pretty much doesn't exist). So that being the case, I would never expect fb to be a partner for democracy.

Just because some recent revolutions were helped by fb and twitter doesn't mean that these for profit corporations are for freedom of expression and 1st amendment rights.

People need to remember this whenever they post something on these sites. Especially since they outright claim to own the content (last time I checked).

<comment><USER18> That seems, to me, to miss the point.

No one is surprised a private company censors content, it's the cultural homogenisation on a global service that can grate, _even though it 's no surprise._ A global service that tries very hard to be the global platform for everything, including news publication (that may have been unsuccessful). No surprise after many years of this most people's networks are on Facebook.

No doubt to an American some of the things I, as a Brit, think and do will be plain weird yet Brits are quite close compared to some nations. For all us outsiders, FB (and other US sites) and US attitudes to nudity and violence are, well, interesting. Usually just amusing, sometimes it can be annoying like in the case of this globally famous photo. Don't forget none of us foreigners _have_ a first amendment or rights under it - so that's not even relevant to us.

It wouldn't be that hard to have regional appropriate guidelines for censorship, acceptable behaviour and what have you. Then Americans could have American mores, Norwegians theirs, and we can be confused, amused or fascinated when something goes viral enough to overlap.

I'd like to preserve more of the global differences - it's what makes the world interesting. We might find others do some things better.

<comment><USER19> You say it wouldn't be that hard to have regional guidelines, but that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Even within a country you can have strongly divided opinions on what's appropriate or inappropriate to be hosted on social media, now not only do you need some way to document these (including refining them as norms change), but you also need to implement a system that can "know it when it sees it" so to speak and filter on the fly. That's either going to be a large number of humans filtering the content more-or-less by hand (already got FB into trouble when the humans filtered stories they didn't agree with) or build an automatic screening process that can make the appropriate decisions on the edge cases, which would be difficult to say the least.

Additionally, you run into the problem that many social groups overlap. How many German users need to be friends with a French user before they're covered in the same filter? What about an American vs Iranian? Ultimately you need some way to decide how to break ties and at the moment they're all breaking on the side of the US because that's where FB is based. Unless that changes, I don't see a shift to fragment what's considered acceptable on the platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The FSF has a lot of good material to read on why we don't want centralized control of our data. Applies to Facebook, Google, etc. As a card carrying FSF member (and supporter of EFF, ACLU, Software Conservancy) it embarrases me a little that I probably spend 30 minutes a day using Facebook, Google +, and Twitter; but I enjoy them, I keep the material I produce largely on my own infrastructure, and I work to prevent these actors from tracking me except for when I am actually using their services.

I use GNU Social a lot, but there is not as much interesting material to read there.

Last week I wished that Facebook screened violent pictures better: someone I know posted a picture of someone receiving 200 lashes, in way too much detail. That picture still disturbs me, just remembering it.

<comment><USER21> FSF has a lot of problems, too, like an unresolved contradiction in its rhetoric between claimed populism ("everyone can be free!") and evident elitism ("but if you don't choose to act in exactly the way we promote, to hell with you!") I thought hard about joining, but I'm not comfortable with endorsing such a contradictory and self-defeating stance.

I don't see why you should be embarrassed to use Facebook et cetera. As I've discovered to my personal cost, there can easily be very real social consequences for opting out of these services, Facebook especially. I think you'd have to be Richard Stallman to blame someone for choosing not to suffer those consequences over a point of principle. And I don't think very highly of him for so doing, given the nomadic and largely asocial sort of life he's chosen. That such a life suits him is clear, and he's welcome to it, of course. But his judgment of those who find it not so easy to make the same choice is harshly contemptuous and utterly lacking in nuance, and I find that impossible to respect.

<comment><USER22> GNU legacy aside, I see RMS as a sort of extreme moral compass whose views and principles are an important contribution to a number of conversations, but anyone would be insane to actually try and live by them.

<comment><USER21> I find I feel rather the opposite - that while Dr. Stallman's technical accomplishments are meritorious in the extreme (especially to a longtime Emacs user like me!), his principles are so uncompromising and lacking in subtlety that they do more to polarize a discussion than the converse. Such, at least, has been my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1\. This won't last as people will want their own cultural and legal rules to apply on Facebook.

2\. Facebook is not just a private company anymore. It's cool to have success, but that comes with bigger public scrutiny, and possibly a lot more obligations than a normal startup who would have only a few users.

3\. Don't think this is minor. Facebook will need to evolve, even in the US. This is a matter of Free Speech and Freedom of Thought.

<comment><USER24> _Facebook is not just a private company anymore._

In what sense? Legally they are, they act like one so I am not sure in practice what makes that distinct.

Perhaps you mean that user expectations makes them not "just a private company." In which case I see no reason why that doesn't also extend to pretty much any other much smaller platform in which users complain about moderation or opaque governance (reddit, twitter, linkedin, tumblr etc...). There are numerous examples of change.org petitions asking for kickstarter or some other platform to change how they do business.

<comment><USER25> > In what sense? Legally they are, they act like one so I am not sure in > practice what makes that distinct.

Facebook, Inc. is a publicly traded company. An example of a private company would be Dell Technologies.

<comment><USER26> Step 1) become facebooks majority shareholder. Step 2) do whatever you want with their censorship policy. Publicly traded companies are still private in the sense of ownership, their publicly traded because anyone can buy that private ownership, but until you do (and a lot of it) Facebook doesn't have any obligation to put what you want or don't want on their site. I still agree that their censorship policy is ridiculous, but they get to decide what kind of forum they are. I suggest you find a better forum cause imho fb just sucks in general

<comment><USER25> > I suggest you find a better forum cause imho fb just sucks in general

"Better", for what I use Facebook for, is equivalent to "has more people that I know". I don't expect much from it, and I get what I expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Lots and lots of people seem to forget: Facebook is an American COMPANY.

It is not a utility, it is not a non-profit organization. People choose to use it, and hence they have to put up with their rules.

If they don't like it, they should stop using it and start using the open alternatives.

<comment><USER28> Much like the dichotomy between violence and obscenity which is the subject of the article, the public and private distinction on the ethics of censorship is extremely American.

Consider, a "privately" owned company that opens its doors to the public is absolutely not allowed to refuse to serve someone on the basis of their skin color.

The fact is that when you open your service to the general public then you are no longer strictly speaking a "private" organization: you open yourself up to be regulated by the governments of those people you invite into your service. When you operate what can be argued is very close to a natural monopoly, you have even more duties.

<comment><USER27> Regulation is one solution with a lot of problems.

A much better solution is switching to an open alternative.

<comment><USER29> No, a better solution is regulation. A personal solution that can be put into action immediately is switching to an open alternative.

<comment><USER30> Unless it's a bad regulation and you a left without a choice because everyone is regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The United States are a great country, but in the topic of censorship, balanced politically correctness and easy to speak about all the topics, I believe that the old Europe has very interesting things to say, so I'm also a bit worried that the technological leadership of US may have an effect on what is believed to be sensible to discuss / post in Europe too. I hope is the other way, that is, we european can in some way mitigate certain extreme positions I see in the US regarding what is appropriate or not.

<comment><USER32> France in the 18-19th century had many smart people who spoke against this type of stuff (everyone loves to quote Voltaire). But modern France has become the absolute counter-point for wishing to have less censorship and centralized social control. So this problem isn't limited to the United States.

This is an issue in all modern liberal societies. Big government and centralized control has exploded over the last century, nation-states have become bigger than they've been in any time in history. The first half of the book "Fourth Revolution" has a really great history of how the state has massively grown, largely starting after WW2, to the point it becomes embedded in every parts of our lives (whether it's explicit or not). This type of thing always happens through small slivers and cuts, largely promoted via community complaints calling for government to solve issues - much like what Facebook has experienced.

This is the side-effect of a society where the hair-trigger response to every small problem is to look to government to solve it - not just economic but social issues too. Instead of resolving them internally or via community, or just moving on because the solution is sometimes worse than the problem (see: terrorism).

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Revolution-Global-Reinvent- Sta...](https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Revolution-Global-Reinvent- State/dp/0143127608/)

<comment><USER33> It's absurd to think governments grew because of "community complaints". The rise of nation states happened precisely to benefit the megacorps that now exist - to support massive, centrally planned economies and subsidize megacorps that now rule the planet. The gov (or rather, the public, us) have every right to demand certain basic guarantees from these companies that benefit so much from public investment.

<comment><USER32> So megacorps regulation = always bad, community-backed regulation = always good?

I agree with you that large companies can have a significant influence of policy and legislation. And yes they definately contributed to the problem. But considering the standard approach to everything (including your own comment here) is that 'more centralized control is the solution' it's not surprising that corporations are playing the exact same game to their advantage.

I'm questioning the value of using that approach as a default solution. With the exception of it being the very last resort rather than the go-to solution to every problem. Because the state is good at a few things but it many cases it's heavy handed, expensive, time consuming, and very slow to adapt to change.

Regulation, policy, and agencies should only be used carefully and there should be a culture of constantly re-evaluating the necessity of programs/agencies/policies - which doesn't seem to happen. Once it's set up it stays, scope and legislation only grows in size, government employees are incredibly hard to fire, etc, etc, and that's how a nation-state grows into a massive unwieldly beast.

It's a complicated problem no doubt with many sources. But the status quo of the modern nation-state is very dysfunctional. It's sad that people so passionitely defend it blindly on ideological grounds. Questioning the value of government as the solution to all things brings out people who defend it like a religion. Which is how it ends up functioning in places where it often doesn't belong or worse ends up contributing to societal problems.

This same ideology is the reason why Facebook gets blamed every time there is something posted that makes people uncomfortable. Instead of the person who posts the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe it's time to consider Facebook, Twitter, et al, as common carriers, which, under the new net neutrality law, would disallow them from censoring content.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunications)

<comment><USER35> While I often disagree with the censorship on Facebook I also think it's required to some extend. Imagine an uncensored Facebook: how quickly would it degenerate into 4Chan?

If Facebook allowed nudity it would become a massive porn site over night. I actually understand their nudity censorship, just censor anything with naked people, to avoid complaints about differential treatment.

Facebook would go out of business if anyone could post anything. It wouldn't be a place most average people could enjoy or feel safe in.

<comment><USER36> >just censor anything with naked people It's a simple solution for a complex problem. Countries that follow this way end up covering up ancient statues - just in case, you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you don't like Facebook's actions then don't use it. Having open speech on Facebook's platform is not an inalienable right.

I don't agree with Facebook's privacy policies and thus have deleted my account and use other platforms. This isn't difficult. This article is tantamount to saying "Woe is me, NYT won't publish my op-ed." and expecting anyone to take you seriously.

<comment><USER4> I don't think this is a given. When Facebook is many people's main communications platform and source of news, censoring Facebook is, effectively, censoring communication and news. Since they have such power to affect our societies, they should have some obligations.

<comment><USER38> I completely agree with the above. The idea that society should accept that it has no control over the design of a major artery of communication is not sensible.

With print media, TV, phone and post, all developed countries have special regulations that ensure these (often privately run) services align with values of democracy (with varying effectiveness).

I think the ideal solution would be to compel Facebook to make its architecture more open. For it to have real APIs, which, among other things, would allow other companies to transition users from Facebook effectively and seamlessly.

This is analogous to the reasoning that says that banks cannot make it unreasonably difficult to switch to another bank by creating admin around direct debits and the like (rules currently being implemented in the UK).

Facebook can engage in whatever kind of censorship it likes as long as the barriers to leaving it are sufficiently low that we can realistically imagine users doing so.

(Unfortunately FB is not a formal monopoly because it's free to users.. so we absolutely do need new legislation).

<comment><USER39> You can download an archive of your Facebook data already. What "real APIs" would you like the government to "compel" this private corporation to add?

<comment><USER4> You can't download most of the data facebook collects about you. This guy tried, and it was a legal battle. [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/privacy- versus-facebook](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/privacy-versus-facebook)

"The concept of access [to your data] was just alien to them. In the US consent is just a privacy policy and a tick-box approach." "They break democratically decided laws in the EU and get away with it. Instead of putting money into compliance, they expect NGOs and authorities to do that work for them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> American censorship is bad, but wait until you meet Russian, Chinese or Pakistani one... If Facebook limits itself only to American censorship that won't be as bad, a bigger concern would be it will apply censorship rules of any country that has enough market pull to influence Facebook's monetary interests. As soon as you start on this road, Russia would say if you censor what's bad in America, why don't you censor what's bad in Russia?

At least cat pictures aren't banned anywhere that I know of, so 99% of facebook content is safe ;)

<comment><USER41> Tell us more about this Russian censorship, you seem to know a lot about the subject.

<comment><USER40> How many weeks you're willing to spend on it? :) Yes, I know a bunch about the subject, but most of it hardly relevant to the topic at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Facebook pays its bills by primarily being a mass reach advertising platform just like any mainstream TV channel. They are not some public communications service.

Therefore they will curate their content in such a way that preserves and expands the mass reach as much as possible (eg. by following country specific content guidelines) and keeps them out of legal hot water (in this case, the risk of child porn) and negative imagery contexts to keep them an attractive source for advertising. For instance, mainstream advertisers (with the exception of the Bennetons of the world) don't necessarily want their brands to appear in possibly negative contexts.

Given these economic interests, any content process they have will necessarily lean towards extra caution. It's not so much "censorship" really as economic self interest.

In these things, follow the money.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's true that Facebook (and Twitter, Youtube, etc.) are expressing the point of view of the platform creators as to 'acceptable content' and it's worth pointing out. On the other hand, if I made a product that hosted user generated content I would probably have pretty similar guidelines to them.

e.g. Yes the "nipple double standards" can be criticized but given current cultural norms, when this limit doesn't exist, you end up hosting a lot of explicit images like Tumblr or MySpace. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER7> But, thats exactly the point. Americans are so bought into the idea that "explicit" images are bad that they can't see another viewpoint. Its become "natural". And, as the author pointed out, Americans are so blind to it that you don't even see the problem with censoring nipples but not beheadings.

You literally cant see that noone should be injured by seeing a womans breast, but seeing a beheaded body could.

Its interesting to see this story come out so soon after the LA times story about libel and the fight against court ordered take-down of posts critical of companies (think Yelp, etc.).

Maybe the point is that censorship shouldn't be allowed?

<comment><USER44> Americans? How about the British, Mexico, Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, every country in the Middle East except Israel?

Then you have a German freak out over even talking about Nazis.

Almost every country has some hang up or another. Suggesting that 'Americans' have a fear of nipples is short sighted. Every culture has something that causes a collective freakout.

<comment><USER45> The difference (that mgleason_3 was saying) is that Americans cannot see that other's have different viewpoints. Other countries are able to see that others have different viewpoints and can justify their own decisions in comparison with others.

It's why, for example, they are often puzzled when abroad and note that "some people don't like us Americans" and cannot find out why.

I have noticed this particular way of looking at the world with many Americans when working in global collaborative tech projects - it's a kind of imperialism - a built in sense that their way of looking at the world is the only way. It seems to be a common thing, and not everywhere. It also has the characteristic that those with that mindset are unaware about it.

There are many exceptions of course, and the most successful people are able to work with people from other cultures. But I believe this is what the article and mgleason_3 is trying to say.

If you'd like another metaphor to explain the theory: Privilege. Americans have a privilege as the "top" culture which makes them blind to others below them.

<comment><USER26> So I'm an American but to be fair I'd like to think I'm one of your acceptions. Personally I agree with you, the female body as a whole is overly sexualized and part of that is making nipples taboo, but Facebook isn't restricting your ability to show your friends pictures of your nipples, or going to a nude beach. To me, their privacy policy is an expression of their own opinion/ideals (or more likely the opinion advertising firms have decided will make them the most money). And while both I have the right to think nipples are nbd and they have the right to say nipples aren't a big deal, I think telling Facebook they must have pictures of nipples on their servers infringes on Facebooks right to freak out about nipples just as Facebook preventing you from making a nipple collage and showing it to all your friends would restict your rights to think nipples are no big deal. It's all good to say anybody should have the right to express whatever they want, but part of that right is to not express things you don't want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This issue is quite easily fixable if Facebook would have set up their censoring policy in a different way: allow everything by default, detect or let users flag illegal posts or images (e.g. child pornography) Make the post invisible for others from that point on, but do not remove it nor notify the author. Alert the authorities when child porn is uploaded, and let them figure out whether they'd want to pursue it or not. If authorities decide not to pursue, make it visible again. If authorities do decide to pursue the author should've abided the law. That way Facebook moves the entire censorship discussion to law enforcement, which is pretty much the best place for it to be.

Furthermore, because this may yield some shocking images into ones timeline, Facebook should try to use machine learning to invisibly tag posts by their content. For nudity there are already algorithms, and I'm sure other shocking content could be tagged in a similar way as well. Last step: give everybody a settings panel with what they want to see, except for kids, they can't see anything that isn't according to the PG-[age] regulations.

That makes it completely PC :)

</comment><comment><USER45> In writing some replies to a couple of comments, I think that the article is referring to cultural privilege. Americans have the privilege as being the most powerful western culture, Facebook comes from an educated, technological, rich, American, culture and cannot see others that with less power should have some of influence in how a global culture can be. Also, as with most forms of privilege it's not common at all that those at the top need to compromise with those below and characteristic is that those with the most priviledge cannot see their own position at the top and inability to acknowledge their issues of others.

What the article is showing is the privilege of American culture interacting with other cultures and peoples.

edits: I think it's actually a great time for the Internet - I am seeing this as the growing pains of a new global culture - a new global way of looking at the world. We are seeing the makers and police of the rich west seeing that the world is more complex and diverse than they are comfortable with, and the result will be interesting to say the least, and glorious and rich if all cultures can be supported in a global way.

</comment><comment><USER47> It hurts my brain when people describe censorship as "liberalism". Especially fellow Brits.

<comment><USER45> Agreed. It's not Liberalism at all - if anything, from the article, thinking about this on a global scale - it's a cross between a Silicon Valley tech mindset, American puritanism, and the current flavour of rich, white, university educated politically correct behaviour. In short it means an odd mixture of whats allowed and not which the article talks about, but it's nothing to do with liberalism.

edits: I think it's cultural privilege. Americans have the privilege as being the most powerful western culture and literally cannot see others that with less power should have some of that influence.

<comment><USER47> Sorry, I can't allow the context to make it seem as if I approve of being deliberately thoughtless. I generally try hard myself not to be incorrect (politically) since it would break one of Bill and Ted's two commandments.

I just dislike it when Liberalism, which I believe in whole-heartedly pretty much exactly as I think Mill intended, is dragged into this debate about censorship, when it was about what should be _illegal_ not what was moral or immoral. (Indeed, it is a way for people who _disagree with each other about what is immoral_ to live in the same country under the same law and feel safe.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's facebook's platform. They can do with it whatever they want. And if they prefer to remove certain content it's their good right.

If you don't like their policies don't use their platform. (No, "all my friends are there" is not an excuse. At some time you have to decide what's more important - your morals or whatever your peers pressure you into).

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, considering I've been reporting the same photo for years, which is constantly _not_ deleted by these people. The photo itself shows the naked, bloody, mutilated corpse of a woman who was raped and murdered, then had a crucifix shoved down her throat. For what it's worth, the image is absolutely real, a crime scene photo. Every single time I report it, I get "We reviewed the photo you reported ... and found it doesn't violate our Community Standards." Humans are _definitely_ reviewing that photo. I would post a link (in hopes that others here could help me report it) but it's extremely graphic and I'm sure HN would implode.

Facebook is pretty much 100% terrible and 0% great. I don't think it does _anything_ positive for anybody except Mark Zuckerberg.

</comment><comment><USER49> Facebooks' an american canc^^^^company, so naturally it acts only in its own thinking.

I mean what do you expect? It's facebook. It was founded on dubious merit, the company will operate in the most grey it possibly can.

(Not wanting to anger the tech nerds here: various FB employees have released super interesting stuff back into the tech community such as the recent SSH CA auth article)

But c'mon. When you see anyone accused of foul play, facebook should be the least surprising of them all.

</comment><comment><USER50> I love the stackoverflow model of up and down voting and how it is moderated so well. It is apples and oranges to a large degree but I wonder if there was a way to introduce up and down voting, then having things show up based on that, rather than having some moral authority taking things down. For example, if enough people down vote something, it has the effect of disappearing from the public stream but of course you can still see your friends posts. Maybe this is just a software problem given the right setup.

</comment><comment><USER51> And yet for all their pretty words, the Telegraph don't show the actual image at the centre of this furore? Too scared of upsetting their own advertisers perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER8> "You need to subscribe to read this article". Well, then, I guess there are forces more powerful than censorship that can be applied to this problem ..

</comment><comment><USER52> If you are fighting for your rights on Facebook, you are going to be disappointed and you are very, painfully niave about how walled gardens operate.

</comment><comment><USER53> I feel bad for Facebook here. Having been responsible for managing this same problem for another (albeit smaller) multinational user generated website, it's a tough problem.

Everyone around the world, and even within the United States, have a vastly different sense of morality and taste. Which do you cater to?

Not to mention the legal issues, where some content is legal in one place and illegal in another.

</comment><comment><USER54> Not sure how the 'flag' system works but based on the two examples (famous news photo and famous work of art), you could easily circumvent wrong flagging (wrong = deleting famous and important photos) by generating a 'similar photo search' in the system and giving context. That would help the over-ambitious flagger to recognize this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Twitter is just as bad, if not worse. Take yesterday for instance. The Hillary health issue EXPLODED on Reddit and other places within 2h. And I saw single tweets with multiple thousand retweets on Twitter as well. But not single trending topic on Twitter about the incident the whole day.

There's NO WAY none of those hashtags weren't eligible for trending. Twitter has been caught doing it before, but I think yesterday was far worse than anything they've done before. They've must've told everyone to be on the lookout of any Hillary-related topic becoming a trend, or just automatically banning anything that may be been about it from trending.

Only today you see the body double thing trending, which I'm sure has far fewer tweets and at a much lower speed than yesterday's incident had.

I know Trump looks to be a terrible human being and likely an even worse president, but it really scares me to see that not only the mainstream media actively try to side with Hillary, but now also tech/social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google, etc. I think if Hillary is president, you'll see the US succumb to the same media censorship and _self-_ censorship that you see in Russia.

<comment> k-mcgrady As someone standing on the outside looking in you're definitely letting conspiracy theories get the best of you. BBC had an article up while she was still in her daughters house and had a video of her fainting not long after. As did most 'main stream media' sources. I can't speak for Twitter's trending system but mainstream media had the facts up very quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Facebook can do what they want, but they do censor everything. I don't care about FB, as I have an account that just sits and does nothing. When some organization censors something, they should say a reason, though... Some sites like to delete things and act like they never happened.

</comment><comment><USER57> So is Google: [https://sputniknews.com/us/20160912/1045214398/google- clinto...](https://sputniknews.com/us/20160912/1045214398/google-clinton- manipulation-election.html)

</comment><comment><USER58> I think people are conflating real violence with pretend violence in many of these comments. Real violence is way more restricted than nudity in US.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't go to hacker news to read recycled UK tabloid journalism. Who cares what some hack in London who is paid to provoke outrage thinks.

</comment><comment><USER60> lol, here we go again, like Facebook is an public institution that owes anybody anything ... But outrage sells so let's trigger a few people that have nothing better to talk about than censorship on Facebook, when their own government is restricting their speech everyday, this is especially true in UK. The biggest hypocrites, ever.

</comment><comment><USER61> I cannot wait until the post-Facebook era. Hopefully whatever comes along next will learn from this mistake.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm not a fan of Facebook so this is great news. The more they manipulate the platform and undermine its objectivity and freedom, the less people will trust it. And while the reasons they shouldn't trust it - namely privacy- are not directly related to these actions, Facebooks attempts to control people like this will make them aware of its untrustworthiness.

TBH this is an area very prime for disruption, the "next Facebook" is right around the corner, but it will bear less relationship to The Facebook than The Facebook did to Myspace.

</comment><comment><USER63> Complete FUD. The rest of the world is not forced to use Facebook. Neither is anyone in the US.

There is no such thing as free speech on a social network, nor should there be.

</comment><comment><USER64> If you don't like it, don't use it. It's really that simple.

I stopped using Facebook about five years ago, no complaints. Wish I had deleted my account sooner.</comment>


Posterous Jumps On The Revenue Wagon; Signs Coca-Cola for Promo Site  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/18/posterous-revenue-coca-cola/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> Firstly, congratulations to Posterous. They are one of my favourite startups.

It's impressive how their platform lets you post via email, but at first I didn't quite see how this was special, besides the ease-of-use angle.

But use cases like this (Coca-Cola) clearly show that by factoring out the common entry-point of email (which everyone understands), they not only have an elegant unique value proposition, but a viable commercial product too. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> On a side note:

Is it " _post_ erous," as in making a post. Or is it " _pos_ terous," as in preposterous?

I tend to think the former, but every time I bring it up with someone, they use the latter.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat, wondered how they were going to generate revenue. A two tier system should work, low level is free, professional level gets the bells and whistles.

<comment><USER3> Funny, I was just introducing Posterous to a friend the other day. As I was explaining it, I wondered out loud how they make money. The thought hadn't crossed my mind until then.

I'm glad they're viable, they are my favorite blogging site.</comment></comment>


Writing code doesn't mix well with oration - <AUTHOR> https://inconshreveable.com/11-13-2015/your-live-coding-demo-is-boring/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I always agree with this. David Beazley's 2015 PyCon talk on concurrency ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4)) was one of my favorite talks of the conference, and it was almost all just live coding.

Part of what made that talk compelling was that it took a concept that lots of people find complex/intimidating (how the internals of an asynchronous IO library work) and in ~30 minutes created a full working example in front of a live audience. Writing the code live in front of the audience helps to nail down the central theme of "this stuff isn't actually as scary as it looks".

There are certainly talks that would be better of just presenting snippets of code, but I think there's a time and a place for live coding examples as well.

<comment><USER3> Being in the crowd during this talk was seriously like being at a rock concert.

Beazley was 'playing' the keyboard like an instrument. Every square inch of floor space had someone sitting or standing. The crowd was incredibly invested - nary an eye nor ear wavered. Even Guido looked on with a hawk eye.

I was in a small circle on the floor of people who had just smoked some amazing herb before the talk. I was hanging on his every word and every expression. I've rarely felt so engaged by a conference talk. I'll never forget this one.

He received a _raucous_ standing ovation that is not evident from the conference video.

I asked a question at the end, and I was so giddy I had trouble getting it out. :-)

As a core contributor to an async framework, I felt that this talk gave me a lot more enthusiasm and confidence about my work which has lasted to this day. I think about it often. Definitely a track for the PyCon greatest hits album.

<comment><USER4> > I was in a small circle on the floor of people who had just smoked some > amazing herb before the talk.

This is a thing at software conferences?

<comment><USER3> I think it's a thing anywhere people gather, no? It's probably more a thing at community conferences than corporate conferences.

<comment><USER5> Did you stand in the designated smoking area?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like cooking shows get this right. A lot of prep work is actually already done, but not all of it.

It's nice to see that parallel in software presentations where most of a method or main loop logic is already written out and the important bits, processing, or concepts are explained within the relevant 5-10 lines of code.

Show me some of the prep, but don't make me watch dough rise.

<comment><USER7> Good analogy! Perhaps judicious use of libraries is like those little bowls full of chopped and measured ingredients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Living coding isn't lazy, _unpracticed_ living coding is lazy. I find live coding to be a lot more effective than explaining code that's already there; as a speaker, you have the opportunity to explain the _reasoning_ behind and _relationships_ between each line of code.

<comment><USER9> I think OP addresses that concern:

>That does not mean you shouldn't show code on stage. Please, by all means, put code up there on your slide and talk about it. Just don't write it in real time. Live coding is lazy; it is a shortcut for creating quality presentation material. On well-prepared slides, your code will be magnified to ensure that I can read it. It will be highlighted so that you can direct my attention appropriately.

<comment><USER10> Well, there is some ambiguity here.

I would say that I much prefer live coding to code on slides because I can see it actually compile and run. Proof that what is said works, works. I might even get to see common gotchas. It's obviously a gigantic failure if we only see errors and never working code, but then that speaks to the nature of what is being demonstrated.

With presentations, you can show a chunk of code with a presenter confidently stating "This works!". Of course, that's no guarantee that it does, and frankly if you tried to implement what was demonstrated and it ends up not working, you would get blamed for it. "You clearly did it wrong, you were supposed to do it like this: ".

Live coding shows you all the context, because you must show all the context, and it gives you a concrete example that you can yourself run. A working hello world. It does something critically important, it takes the blame of something not working for you, off of you.

of course the ambiguity I mentioned are the golang slides, which are actually demonstrable pieces of code. With a little "run this for yourself" button on each slide. That's a really awesome solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually feel and do the exact opposite. I find code on slides to be boring. When I present I want to give the audience an experience like they will have. Live coding can do that well. But it certainly can go bad quick. Live coding on stage takes a TON of practice. Most presenters don't put in the prep so it comes out boring and fail-prone.

Probably the most important thing I've learned in 10 years of tech presentations is that every person in the audience learns in a different way and wants something different. You can't please everyone no matter what you do.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't really agree with this. There are certainly some really bad ways to give live code demos, but I find that when its done well it can be very effective. I feel like the small delays and the slower buildup of code can give me in the audience time to understand and follow along.

It makes me think of my college math classes, I always preferred the professors who would work through the problems by hand on the board during lecture because you could easily follow along through the whole process. I had some professors who used examples prepared ahead of time either on powerpoint or overhead projection, even though the same steps were there, it was harder to follow. I found it more difficult to learn from the prepared demos because it was easier to get overwhelmed, you went from 0 to a lot of content instead of slowly building over time, additionally the professor tended to move a little more quickly than they would have otherwise.

I also think live-demos can be potentially more interactive. Obviously it depends on the situation, but I've seen demos where the audience starts asking questions and its very effective when the presenter can respond with, "let's try that".

</comment><comment><USER13> I disagree with the idea that live coding demos are universally bad. In cases where they are practiced and calculated, they actually convert better than slides. I don't have any hard numbers on hand to back that up, but I worked as a developer evangelist for SendGrid for a couple years and I've probably spent too much time thinking about and attending Hackathons, so I feel ok speaking from experience. At any given Hackathon getting 10% of teams to use your product or API is impressive. Whenever someone has a polished live code, interactive demo I can assume it'll easily hit that mark. Being able to demo you API live in 5 minutes is a pretty strong guarantee that it'll be easy enough to implement during the weekend. Plus, developers love to see code and understand how other developers think!

I wrote about how to give a great API demo a few years ago. Points are still true, worth a read if you're thinking about live coding: [http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/02/01/the-elements-of-a- grea...](http://theycallmeswift.com/2013/02/01/the-elements-of-a-great-api- demo/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Dan Abramov's talk on Redux and hot loader at ReactEurope really nails live coding for maximum effect: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs)

His presentation is web-based, so his live coding interacts with his "slide- ware", e.g. changing slides is accomplished by setting application state.

<comment><USER15> I was going to mention this same presentation, but you beat me to it. He does a wonderful job with the code, as well and keeping the material interesting, and he has a good sense of humor. I'm looking forward to the videos he's working on for Egghead.io.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I haven't had occasion to use it in anger, but I keep doitlive[0] in my back pocket for such things. 'Live' typing, but repeatable and working each time.

[0] [http://doitlive.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](http://doitlive.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

<comment><USER17> Well, that just records the _commands_ , the output can still change, internet connections fail, etc. I have a tool I wrote for some internal presentations that uses the dumps from ttyrec to play back _everything_ in response to random input.

Here you go: [https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/a267b97a52f7a1f70c46](https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/a267b97a52f7a1f70c46)

Rather than use a single dump, this expects multiple dumps, allowing you to treat them as slides, and preventing you overrunning after each command. It also lets you rewind & replay if needed.

For the demo I did with this, I recorded figlet commands printing large bullet pointy things for the bits where I didn't want to show code, and cat'd ascii art for endpages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any talk or presentation can be boring if the presenter or the content is boring. It has nothing to do with the medium whether it is coding, bulleted slides, or funny cat picture memes. The OP may have seen some bad presentations, but that doesn't mean there can't be good ones.

For example, look at any talk that Kelsey Hightower (ex-CoreOS, now Google) has done lately on Kubernetes, CoreOS, or Golang. He mixes in live demos, coding, CLI, and even live video game playing along with a small handful of slides. His talks are great and engaging and you walk away excited about his topic. That's because he's a great speaker and passionate about the topics he talks about. It has nothing to do with the medium.

Ex: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pozC9rBvAIs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pozC9rBvAIs)

</comment><comment><USER19> Whether a demo is helpful really depends on the audience, the nature of the presentation, and what points you are trying to get across. It's just one of a number of rhetorical devices.

For example in sales presentations to C-level managers it's generally better to avoid a demo and just assert the product works and sell the benefit to the business. When selling to technical folks demos are often a critical part of the pitch to show you are for real. Videos make it look as if you either don't know the technology or are afraid to show the product in action.

This is all part of basic rhetoric. If in doubt, just ask: what would Cicero do?

</comment><comment><USER20> Live coding doesn't mean a poor presentation. Thought bad live coding generally does. I don't want to see someone stumble around, but Jim Weirich's live coding of katas turned me on to a lot. Not only katas, ruby, but how he coded- refactor menus, etc. Extremely valuable.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBJ3hdcM7G8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBJ3hdcM7G8)

<comment><USER21> Jim Weirich's "Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming"[1] is perhaps the most entertaining and interesting technical talk I've ever seen. It would absolutely not be as cool or as fun without the live coding. Additionally, the incremental process by which he arrives at the conclusion makes the topic much more approachable.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs)

<comment><USER22> I came here just to say the same thing. I loved Jim's presentation and have watched it several times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The rise of livecoding, especially with the ability to now stream any kind of programming on Twitch, should lead to a reevaluation of how to properly present coding live in an engaging manner.

Recently, YouTuber slowbeef has started streaming live ROMhacking of a Japanese ROM to translate it into English (archive of 1st stream: [http://youtu.be/kCaj88nLY4o](http://youtu.be/kCaj88nLY4o) ). While this example is not explicitly coding, the emphasis on explanation shows how important presentation can be to engaging code demos.

I've been working on Twitch-streaming workflows myself for potential live code streaming. Just enabling OBS and turning on a webcam while coding is not enough to be engaging ipso facto. There needs to be some semblance of planning beforehand. (also keep in mind that any code you stream may be seen on mobile devices, so you will have to increase font size accordingly.)

<comment><USER24> Wow, never thought I'd see slowbeef referred to as a YouTuber.

I helped a bit with his work on Policenauts but we haven't kept in touch since then. Maybe I'll try to get involved in this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It really depends. Some seminal live coding has introduced for me new programming techniques in a really impactful way. I needed the programmer to talk through and introduce the techniques as they worked slowly because I needed time for what he was saying to pass the BS filter and otherwise ring positive bells in my head.

The most recent instance of this for me was a talk on TDD that featured testing, of all things, CSS! My eyes were opened and I am now trying to test- drive my CSS with the tools/techniques described.

[https://vimeo.com/144642399](https://vimeo.com/144642399)

There are some funny moments at the beginning and a good agile intro overall, but the CSS TDD part starts at around 21:00 if you are interested in that.

</comment><comment><USER26> No mention of Jupyter notebooks? By re-playing previously-typed code in notebooks, shouldn't that give the audience a REPL-type experience without waiting for the person to type? Like having your cake and eating it too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why was the title changed? The original title was both less pretentious and more accurate.

Original title: "Your live coding demo is boring"

Current title: "Writing code doesn't mix well with oration"

</comment><comment><USER28> I had to upvote this even though I've done my share of live coding presentations. It hits very close to home.

How many people have to watch me misspell printf? 50? I think they know what I'm getting at.

Something else that bores the living shit out of me? Those videos where you watch people code. Oh my god. It's like watching paint peel.

Now, having trashed the concept, I'm going to keep doing it. I did this "Code along with me on an app" last year and got several emails that folks found it helpful.

What to make of the fact that I find it boring yet continue to do it? My feeling is that a presentation that's lively and informative to me isn't necessarily a presentation that has impact with the people watching it.

Last month I wanted to do a demonstration of how to split user stories in a backlog[1] -- but not just the high-level crap you get in class. I wanted to show the whole thing from concept to code.

So I did what the author suggested. I did some screen shots of code that I then walked through at the appropriate points. I was able to create an hour of video instead of dozens of hours the other way. And I think it had the same impact.

[1] [http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/technical-story- slicing-1-o...](http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/technical-story- slicing-1-of-3/)

</comment><comment><USER29> There are tons of talks where there is live-coding but it's not boring at all. But it would get hard to get by when the guy writes more than 10 characters. The it's just messy and time-consuming.

The "video suggestion" in the text is a good way to get around this and display an awesome feature without wasting time and any eye-rollings. Also you can only give a link if the code is too complex or too much to display it your slides.

Thanks for your consideration! :D

</comment><comment><USER30> I guess I'm in the minority in actually agreeing with the original post. I like when talks include code examples but hate it when a presenter brings up an empty SublimeText window and starts typing away. Just have it already written, show me briefly, and move on. I can understand your code snippet faster than you can type it, unless it's horribly written or your talk up to that point has not explained things properly.

Which is not to say there are zero presentations that are based on live coding that are good. There may even be a few. But my experience has been most presentations that are _based around_ live coding are terrible.

I've seen presentations that _include_ live coding that are good, but these presentations are actually well thought out and complete, and the live coding is only a small element, and the presenter has pre-created examples that the are basically "filling in the blanks" on.

Most presenters, though, I think would be well served to stick with the standard "show a snippet on a slide" method.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Your live coding demo is boring"

I totally agree that most live coding sessions, wherever they are demos or courses or casuals youtube videos are often pretty bad. But sometimes live coding just rocks :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvS_DG8yIqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvS_DG8yIqQ)

</comment><comment><USER32> Everything is boring if you do it wrong. For example, Jeff Lawson (Twilio CEO) is well-loved for always live-coding in his talks.

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/664298705848172544](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/664298705848172544)

</comment><comment><USER33> If you have never attended a presentation that includes a live coding session, one might find parallels in improv comedy.

Not all rehearsed comics, who assemble written jokes beforehand, and tell them as part of a routine, can be nearly as entertaining during an improv show. Watching a UCB or ComedySportz or Second City live show, or Whose Line Is it Anyway is very different from watching an episode of The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live.

While good improv comedians can usually do rehearsed shows, it is much harder to go the other way around. So unless you do a lot of live coding--perhaps you teach a university class that requires it--you probably shouldn't inflict it upon a big audience until _after_ you know you can do it without boring everyone to death.

</comment><comment><USER34> Bret Victor's talks are a counter example to this. His live programming in this[1] talk is nothing short of mind blowing.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA)

</comment><comment><USER35> You can't blame long, awkward pauses and the arrival of an "impromptu debugging session" on the act of trying to code in front of an audience. That's like saying all plays suck because of the terrible actors in one that you saw.

Plan before you present.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you think watching someone do a live coding demo is boring, you are probably not the target audience (and I would guess you may be in entirely the wrong field if you are a programmer who thinks programming is boring).

Imagine a painter saying that another painter showing a specific 'new' technique that they developed is 'boring' and they should 'just talk about painting, don't show us anything'.

I would imagine the author of this blog post is the sort of person that sat in the back of Chemistry class, and after seeing the teacher do an experiment asked "is this going to be on the test?"

<comment><USER37> In general I'm of the same mindset as you, but to be fair it's not exactly an apples to apples situation.

Painters demonstrating a new technique are far less likely to get bogged down trying to figure out why the wrong colors are coming out of their brush or why some strokes don't show any color at all, why their canvas is crashing, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I do a live demo in my talks but it's mostly CLI stuff. I start a service (on the local machine, so no internet issues), and do a few simple things like curl requests. Yeah, I could have put the same commands and output on slides, but I think there's something about doing the actions in front of people that makes the process seem even more accessible. Like "hey I could do what that guy literally just did".

In fact I did this in a talk I gave just last night. If any of the audience are also HN readers, hope I didn't bore you. ;)

</comment><comment><USER39> Your live coding demo is only boring if you do it wrong!

This is how to do it correctly: [https://youtu.be/O2XG846oKAY?t=211](https://youtu.be/O2XG846oKAY?t=211)

</comment><comment> nv-vn I think that live coding can serve as a really good tool if you do it right and it applies directly to what you're doing. For example, it works well in this demo [https://youtu.be/Agu6jipKfYw](https://youtu.be/Agu6jipKfYw) because it's a demo of how Elm can help you think about what's going on and debug your code on the spot. This presentation would have been a lot more boring if it lacked a live demo.

</comment><comment><USER40> Live coding is great when done well, and when the presenter is handling it well. Everyone enjoys seeing if the code will work, but no one enjoys watching someone sweat and stammer too much if things start going badly.

As a presenter I've done some live coding at times, but I've always had a clear plan for how to proceed if things don't work as I intended. We laugh together, and no real time is wasted. I enjoy watching other presenters who take a similar approach.

</comment><comment><USER41> I agree with the authors main point, however I did see a good counterexample a few years ago when Martin Fowler did a talk about his then recently published book on refactoring. He did the talking while an assistant did the live coding to keep up with the narration. "Now lets move this behaviour into the other class": magically the video followed his instructions, paused automatically at the right places etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> That's not always true.

LiveCoding.tv is popular, and they're not prepared demos. They're mostly people googling their problems.

Watching a flawless live coding demo can be impressive and inspiring.

Also about "I can think faster than you can type.."... if you can reason about code in a new language or framework faster than someone can type it, you probably shouldn't be in a talk about that language or framework.

</comment><comment><USER43> While I do agree that live coding can be quite boring, it is helpful when trying to demonstrate coding conventions. Learning code from a live tutorial is far easier than from a wall of code (that can be copy pasted better from a website and such). A lot of people attend these talks to learn, and it is up to the presenter to judge what best fits of the type of presentation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Your live coding demo is boring...

... But if it was mostly copy & paste from a completed project, then it would be very well put together!

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the real take away is "Don't do live coding on stage unless you are already a compelling speaker". There are several example of good talks that include live coding, but they all tend to be by expert presenters who know how to keep the talk moving and have the coding be well rehearsed.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thanks for all comments with live coding videos!

P.S. I don't know if this was really live (looks like it) "Wat by Gary Bernhardt" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20BySC_6HyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20BySC_6HyY)

<comment><USER47> Those are tiny screencasts, some as short as just a few frames, embedded in a Keynote file. I re-recorded some of them several times in my hotel room that afternoon to make sure that there weren't distracting typos. I can't get to that level of polish when doing it truly live, but with enough practice runs I can get close enough that no one is ever waiting for me.

<comment><USER46> Still great demo! Thanks for wonderful talk!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Not being cynical, but I think it's more of I don't have the attention span to follow your demo and that's why it bores me. Demos tend to move at a slower pace than what an average programmer goes through on their own so they probably run out of patience.

</comment><comment><USER49> The point of live coding is to show it works. Which is always nice to see! Also, for instruction, glad you are hyper smart, but I for one can't follow that fast if it's completely knew to me. Live coding demo I can usually follow better than a video.

</comment><comment><USER50> I feel like Gary Bernhardt gets live coding demos right, both with his DAS casts, and his conference talks.

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts)

<comment><USER47> Thanks. It takes a lot of effort to make live coding that smooth. The initial practice run of a 12-minute screencast was often 30-60 minutes, which would be boring and usually contain less information than the shorter final version. That difference came mostly from sinking effort into it: continuous simplification of examples, explanation, and even wording; and practicing until I (as the speaker) found myself engaged the whole time, with no spots where my attention dipped significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've always liked the way that Apple's WWDC videos have approached this issue. They show the code being entered, but it comes in by way of preset snippets, so they can add the code and discuss it one block at a time.

</comment><comment><USER52> That's why I implemented (an early personal version of) doitlive:

[http://doitlive.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](http://doitlive.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Live code demonstrations with the important stuff live coded (maybe a line or two), and the other stuff skipped with incremental git tag checkouts works the best, from my experience.

</comment><comment><USER54> I see Microsoft do this all the time. And I agree - it's stupid and boring. It's time wasted. They could instead be explaining the nuances of their language and platform.

<comment><USER55> I like the jump starts Microsoft do but I agree the live coding should be replaced by explaining pre-written code snippets. No one wants to see a guy spend 10 minutes debugging code he wrote in 20 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> One exception I can think of is the demos that I've seen for Overtone, the clojure music library. Watching music built in real time was rather interesting.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've also seen some people put their demo's on github and then later on the people can follow along on their commits. I think that works pretty well

</comment><comment><USER58> Even this one? [https://vimeo.com/105955605](https://vimeo.com/105955605) :)

</comment><comment><USER59> I mostly agree, I would rather have you walk me through a proof of correctness than watch you code something.

</comment><comment><USER60> here is a great live coding demo that explains the y combinator from first principles

[https://youtu.be/FITJMJjASUs?t=936](https://youtu.be/FITJMJjASUs?t=936)

</comment><comment><USER61> i really love [http://neckbeardrepublic.com](http://neckbeardrepublic.com) awesome stuff by @myusuf3

</comment><comment><USER62> Did you see APL live coding on stage?

Just curious.

<comment><USER63> I haven't, any particular video you have in mind?

<comment><USER64> These are generally pretty popular:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmT80OseAGs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> We do it for the adrenaline rush

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm reminded of that video that I believe was posted to Hacker News a while back of the young female programmer live-coding a simple Space Invaders clone in JavaScript. What she did wasn't boring, but that's because it was novel (her sex provided that), it was fun (being a game), and most importantly it was obviously well-rehearsed.

If you're going to do live-coding, you have to realize that it's far less demo than it is performance; and if it's not going to be that, do us all a favor and skip it.

<comment><USER67> > but that's because it was novel (her sex provided that)

I'm hoping I misunderstood this. If not it is one of the more sexist things I've seen on HN.

<comment><USER66> Number one, even though we're talking Hacker News, it's still the Internet. Is this your first day?

Number two, there is nothing sexist about what I've said.</comment></comment></comment>


Union Square Ventures invests in Delicious' Founder new startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/11/tasty-labs.php <comment><USER2> Reading the "About" section over at <http://www.tastylabs.com/>, one might be forgeiven for thinking Schachter was/is the CEO of Morgan Stanley.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay!

Also, we're hiring!

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know what TastyLabs is?

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure they're selling jellyfish aquariums.

<comment><USER3> No no -- Jellyfish markets. That's how I roll.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, that explains your tagline: "We're putting the useful back into social software."

<comment><USER3> Can I interest you in a jellyfish?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would they not?</comment>


Oracle's license agreement as it pertains to reverse engineering - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20150811052336/https://blogs.oracle.com/maryanndavidson/entry/no_you_really_can_t <comment><USER2> The original post discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202)

</comment><comment><USER3> _Disclaimer: cross-posted from the original post, but the irony is absolutely beautiful and is a stern lesson to everyone who might think the same way as Oracle._

[1]> Oracle has told people to stop using @Veracode to test their AppSec. They already got AppSec covered [picture of JS injection attack in the blog post]

[1]: [https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/631056841670135808](https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/631056841670135808)

<comment><USER4> As Mary Ann said: "Nanny, nanny boo boo..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty surprised Oracle deleted the post, it feels like a great representation of the company and their values.

<comment><USER6> This is why I sometimes wish HN had an ::irony:: tag. :)

<comment><USER7> Only the first part is ironic

<comment><USER5> I thought Oracle was out of the - we care about money and nothing else - closet. Did I miss something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work at a security company and sometimes reverse engineer systems and/or code to see if it is vulnerable to a plethora of attacks.

Presumably the only reason a closed source vendor would be against someone reversing their source is because they're afraid someone will steal their ideas and/or redistribute their code for free.

That not being my goal I really couldn't care less. I'll just go ahead and reverse whatever I want whenever I want. I value my security, and that of clients, over some legal piece of toilet-paper. Everyone who doesn't agree, should reconsider. Do you truly believe that people should not be allowed to look at code that is running on their systems for their security's sake? I will not redistribute what I learnt, but I will analyse it to see if it is safe.

If you didn't want me looking, you should not have put it out in the open.

<comment><USER9> > against someone reversing their source is because they're afraid someone > will steal their ideas

I was once at a startup and another company in Texas released a product with identical typos as found in our object code.

Selling that software was how I got money to pay rent and buy food to put into my food-hole, so I'm going to feel a little more sympathy for people who want to stop others from reverse-engineering their stuff.

<comment><USER10> Reverse-engineering for personal inspection, and selling software with stolen code are two different things. The company in Texas you talk about was doing the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not that I agree with the sentiments in the article, but am I the only one who thought this article was reasonably well thought out?

It may have been a bit abrasive, but the points were well made, at least from the perspective of a closed source, enterprise software vendor

<comment><USER12> >customers Should Not and Must Not reverse engineer our code. However, if there is an actual security vulnerability, we will fix it. We may not like how it was found but we aren't going to ignore a real problem...We will also not provide credit in any advisories we might issue. You can't really expect us to say "thank you for breaking the license agreement."

Until I read this, I didn't think it was possible for me to hate Oracle more, because I'm forced to work with their software and that makes me already hate them quite a bit.

<comment><USER13> The problem is they don't.

It's pretty trivial to break orcaleSQL from a security standpoint. If and when you report a major issue, it'll be fixed in 2-3 years, and only the issue you outlined.

For example. I submit a bug concerning parsing, utf-8 backslash not working. Orcle will fix the bug for only that utf-8 code point, and not all other utf-8 points that also cause the bug. It'll also take them 1-2 releases and they may not back port it. 1

<comment><USER14> wow, how do they fix _only_ one code point!??! that's gonna take more effort than just properly fixing it no?

<comment><USER15>
        switch (c) {
        case BAD_CODEPOINT1:    //bug 30943
        case BAD_CODEPOINT2:    //bug 32821
        /*....*/
        }

    ?

<comment><USER16> How did you get your hands on Oracle code? The blog post made it pretty clear they won't let you read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm really confused why everyone's so upset by the blog post, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it's perfectly aligned with the world of proprietary software. Oracle is probably more protective than the other vendors, because the restricted access to the source code is at the heart of their business model. But none of the vendors I'm aware of is very keen on reverse engineering.

Secondly, the reverse engineering is prohibited for ages - it's not that it was added to the license agreement yesterday. And there are other restrictions (e.g. on publishing benchmark results), so rather that "Oracle is bad" I'd say "people who sign accept license agreements without reading them are morons."

And thirdly, the article is spot-on about usefulness of the reports generated from a reverse-engineered binary. I've seen shitloads of such reports, usually generated by some clueless consultant with the sole competence to run an automated tool and print the result. So it's probably (at least partially) a protection against a flooding the support with bullshit reports.

And it's also true that many of the companies don't have proper security rules (like encryption, identity or password management, network security) yet pay some consultant for reverse engineering one of the components. Because it's easier to spend a large amount of money than evaluating and rebuilding their infrastructure.

So while I dislike Oracle, you can't blame them for everything - the customers are the ones choosing the vendor. If you happily accept their license agreement, you can't later complain "but we want to do reverse-engineering" no matter how many MBA titles you have. If you want such freedoms, ditch Oracle and proprietary vendors in general. That's what open-source is for.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I don't think this is really about anyone being surprised by anything they read in that post. It's more... what's a good analogy... like someone wrote a long post about the ethics and social conventions of pay phone use ten years after it became clear there would no longer be any pay phones. It's partly enjoyment of a spectacle, and partly pity, because it's so painfully clear how disconnected they are internally from what is actually happening in the world.

<comment><USER19> My team and I write custom solutions for energy companies, car companies, municipalities, military, and other big enterprises. None of them have given a full minute's consideration to using OSS. 90% of them use only Oracle for their data layers. Their market is in no way dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a deleted blog post by ORACLE's Chief Security Officer.

edit: corrected my error

<comment><USER21> So the original popped up earlier on HN - was it resubmitted because Oracle have decided to delete it?

<comment><USER22> I believe it was resubmitted because Oracle deleted it, and because it was so mustache-twirlingly out of touch that it could have been from the Hacker News Onion.

<comment><USER23> [...] it was so mustache-twirlingly out of touch that it could have been from the Hacker News.

FTFY :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We sold you the car but don't you dare look under the hood, 97% of problems that these cars come with may one day be solved by us. Someone else may be trying to build the same car you already purchased from us! Why didn't we obfuscate access to the engine? Well that would have required some of the same effort it would have taken to write more secure software err make better cars in the first place! What do you take us for, competent!

<comment><USER25> I'm just waiting for the day some physical product manufacturer has the chutzpah to try to apply the "licensed, not sold" paradigm to a tangible product.

<comment><USER26> John Deere is already doing this and nobody really cares.

<comment><USER25> You mean nobody outside of farming. From what I have read, the smaller farmers who have to deal with that shit certainly care.

<comment><USER26> Well, no, not really. I mean, I'm sure some small farmers do care, but they're a vocal minority in the same way people posting on Hacker News about various computer-related ills most people are unconcerned about are a vocal minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps an apology/clarification would have been better than sheepishly deleting the entry. They seem to be only digging the hole deeper.

<comment><USER6> Let's wait and see if the Streisand Effect takes hold.

<comment><USER28> lets wait, if Oracle does a DCMA on Archive.org

I guess some more people did screenshots, or pdf prints of that page, just for the case Oracle wants a Streisand Effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Oh, and we require customers/consultants to destroy the results of such > reverse engineering and confirm they have done so.

Are they being serious? "Uhm, yeah, sure, Mr. CSO, I deleted the file. Here, I'll show you a screenshot of a terminal where I ran the 'rm' command to delete the results. As you can clearly see, the 'ls' command does not see the files anymore."

<comment><USER30> Not "prove". "Confirm". If you ask somebody to do something, they might do it, or they might not, whether out of passive malice or carelessness. _Saying_ you have done something which you haven't done requires _active_ malice, which is much less common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What in the world is going on?

Why did this article just disappear off of the front page after receiving 318 up-votes in 2 hours?

How does post to drop from position #1 to somewhere below #150 in less than 1 minute, unless it was deleted by HN moderators, and if that's the case, why did it happen?

<comment><USER32> It means that an HN moderator squashed its appearance on the top list. Why? They felt it wasn't constructive perhaps, considering the other thread against the original article is still live.

<comment><USER31> Why not squash the other thread, since the link was dead and this one isn't? This appears to be blatant censoring of something that the majority of HN participants wanted to read and comment on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Disclaimer: cross-posted from the original HN Post, but still relevant.

Apart from the legal stuff and a lot off egocentric 'we can do it better', she has one point. There are many companies giving a lot of money for security, manually scrubbing all exploits that come out, create their own patches. While some lack the basic security guidelines. I think this money can be better spend upstream, to create tools so they can test patches for exploits better and create a faster security update release pipeline, so that all downstream and customers can rely on the security releases and that it can be released quicker to everyone. (Controversial: Maybe even adding automatic security updates to the package itself, like wordpress did, so that customer cannot be on a release with exploits)

Though saying to your client that they cannot reverse engineer to look for security problems, is totally not done! What is next? "Exploits will not be fixed, because the users has signed an agreement that they will not hack?"

</comment><comment><USER34> Honest question: So I'm hired as a consultant. Someone gives me a database login to an Oracle machine. I haven't been presented with a license agreement for the Oracle database system, nor have I signed anything indicating I agreed to give reverse engineering rights away. How am I bound by the Oracle end user license agreement?

<comment><USER35> IMHO you are not. People from your company that weren't making you read EULA and promise to comply with it (in writing) will be responsible for your behaviour that breaks the EULA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Selling machine language code and asking people not to understand it is like selling books and asking people not to read them.

"This cookbook is to be read by your personal chef only; if you read it and understand it yourself, you're breaking the book's license agreement."

If you pay for some string of bits, you have a right to look at them. Period.

<comment><USER37> Its more like selling someone a meal in a restaurant, and refusing to let them see the kitchen. You can, if you are skilled, infer how the ingredients became your meal, but you won't ever know if it was done in a clean an safe way unless you can look at the environment where it was created. You could hire an investigator to figure this out, but there is a good chance that they know that there is more money in bad news than good. So they take photos of the dirtiest 'chef' who turns out to be the dishwasher, and show you the pictures of deliveries from Walmart, but choose not to show you the pictures of the chef getting up at 4am after finishing at 1am to drive to the fish market to hand pick the best of the catch.

I understand the risks of eating in places with closed kitchens, but ultimately they make better food than I can, that requires less of my time. It may be more expensive for unjustifiable reasons, and maybe I don't want to know how the black pudding is made, I just want to focus on what is important to me: making my wife happy.

Do I prefer to eat in restaurants with open kitchens, where the ingredient list and their source is available on demand? Sure. Am I a zealot about it..? It depends how hungry I am.

<comment><USER36> > _Its more like selling someone a meal in a restaurant, and refusing to let > them see the kitchen._

I don't see it that way.

The kitchen is like a development area. By looking at just the program code (not source or anything), I'm not stepping into Oracle's engineering labs or "cubicle land"\---their kitchen, so to speak. I'm rather doing the equivalent of cutting into the meat pie on my plate and guessing the ingredients.

If I figure out what is in it and how it was prepared, I'm free to make that at home, or even serve it to the public in my own restaurant.

"Do not reverse engineer" is like "eat this meat loaf with your eyes closed, and do not share any hypotheses about what is in it or how it was made with anyone else".

> _open kitchens, where the ingredient list and their source is available on > demand?_

That sounds like an analogy to open source, which is a different topic from license agreements in proprietary software against reverse engineering.

I'm saying that if you sell me some writing, I have a right to read it. Just because that writing was written for an ARM CPU doesn't mean I'm doing anything wrong by reading it anyway.

If you don't want people to know how a piece of language is interpreted to evoke its meaning, then don't sell it. Use it in-house or run it on a server and have clients to connect to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Oracle appears to be Microsoft circa ~1999/2000\. Some of us remember when all the big software companies had this type of attitude.

</comment><comment><USER39> " We will also not provide credit in any advisories we might issue. You can't really expect us to say "thank you for breaking the license agreement.""

This is so pretentious I am completely baffled. Are people at Oracle so full of themselves?

<comment><USER40> The crux of the article is that Oracle is getting so many unsolicited false positive security threat vulnerabilities that it's a distraction to their core business. They don't want "I found a hole in Oracle" to be an achievement like "I have my name on a patent."

Investigating security vulnerabilities takes a lot of time; and it's very easy to quickly get overwhelmed by false positives. I've seen quite a few analyses of code that I write; and most of them are warnings with no context or exploitability.

If every customer expected an engineer to respond to these, my team would spend all of its time in a "PR role," and wouldn't spend any time improving our products.

<comment><USER41> Well, except that, like most enterprise software customers, these customers pay Oracle huge sums of money in the form of support contracts specifically _so_ they could have access to an engineering team. I could understand the argument if this wasn't the case, but a big part of enterprise agreements is this very thing, so I'm not very sympathetic to the argument that such a support ticket, which these companies paid a lot of money for, essentially is treated like a second class citizen because of the way the company decided to do security testing. If this support agreement weren't in place? Sure. I could easily see this argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The bit about loathing Keynes at the end makes for comedy gold.

</comment><comment><USER42> Life would be a lot better if it wasn't for those annoying clients. Oracle should just refuse to deliver software to anybody, that'd fix it all.

Anyway, I've never read a better article supporting the use of free software.

</comment><comment><USER43> It sounds like Oracle doesn't want to have any customers.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's funny and scary how it's the opposite of what Free Software stands for.

</comment><comment><USER45> > I was busting my buttons today when I found out that a well-known security > researcher in a particular area of technology reported a bunch of alleged > security issues to us except – we had already found all of them and we were > already working on or had fixes. Woo hoo!

That's like what 5yrs old kids say when they mom ask them something.. "Mooom I was already thinking about it! Hush!"

</comment><comment><USER46> Do they light sparklers and throw rice when you enter into an Oracle license agreement?

For all Mary's entertaining points, I think likening the license agreement to marriage is a civil offense.

</comment><comment><USER47> We've just been Oraclesplained.

</comment><comment><USER48> Was the post a joke? She kind of resembles The Joker on her bio page: [http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/016331.h...](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/executives/016331.htm)

</comment><comment><USER49> Afternoon laughter, thanks :D

</comment><comment><USER50> Love how fast HN'rs mirror articles ^_^

<comment><USER51> That is the web archive. It has nothing to do with HN.

<comment><USER52> Actually it would be quite interesting to read about how the Web Archive accomplishes things like this.. Do they regularly scan news sites for new articles?

<comment><USER53> There is a self-archive tool on archive.org that allows anyone to immediately archive a specific page of interest. Journalists and watchdogs use it on pages they feel might disappear. It can be considered more legitimate that a screen capture, as archive.org is a third-party. Someone might have used that here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why put a tonn of whitespace between paragraphs if the text is so small and line spacing so narrow as to make my eyes force-evolve mouths just to let out a scream?

<comment><USER55> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739)

<comment><USER54> Great, but before people submit they should consider whether or not the page they are submitting is legible. If I handed you a printed manuscript that was hard to read would you persevere or hand it back to me?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Requests for PHP - HTTP library, my project for the last few weeks - <AUTHOR> http://requests.ryanmccue.info/

<comment><AUTHOR> I say "the last few weeks", but really, that's just when I've been focussing on it. This library has been in development for at least a year. Finally getting it released feels good.

If anyone wants any help with using this, they are most welcome to contact me via <http://ryanmccue.info/> and of course via the issue tracker. :)

<comment><USER2> It's a really sexy API, good job1</comment></comment>


How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2837793/opensource-subnet/how-sony-intel-and-unix-made-apples-mac-a-pc-competitor.html#twitter

<comment><AUTHOR> In 2007, Sony's supply chain lessons, the network effect from the shift to Intel architecture, and a better OS X for developers combined to renew the Mac's growth. The network effects of the Microsoft Wintel ecosystem that Rappaport explained 20 years ago are no longer a big advantage. By turning itself into a premium PC company with a proprietary OS, Apple has taken the best of PC ecosystem, but avoided taking on the disadvantages.</comment>