Show HN: PolyBrowser goes open source on GitHub. Let's re-imagine web browsing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PolySuite/PolyBrowser <comment><USER2> This might be the very thing I need on this big 4k screen.

Edit:

Feedback:

\- This logo is way too big. Use logo only, no text. I know what browser I'm on already

\- Allow the viewports to snap to the side of the screen

\- Allow grid. Right now, I have a lot of websites horizontally but this vertical space is wasted

\- Allow me to have a regular search bar

\- Allow me to zoom / un-zoom individual viewports

\- I feel like the new tab button (+) should open an address bar when I click it, and not a whole new tab to about:newtab. But that's personal opinion

\- I can't pin tabs (make them smaller)

\- How do I remove Firefox Hello?

\- I wish there was a way to view all my open tabs as thumbnails in the main viewport (a bit like about:newtab) and be able to manage them from there (close, reorder)

\- Bookmark toolbar should be displayed when I'm in a new tab

\- The whole thing is a bit laggy

\- I should be able to have a website opened in a tab but hide the viewport (pin tabs?)

\- about:newtab breaks on small width displays

\- I can't select multiple tabs by holding command key

<comment><AUTHOR> If you open the menu and select Customize PolyBrowser, you can add the standard Firefox search bar back, and get rid of Firefox Hello. Also, the tabs automatically collapse in size when there get to be too many, reducing the need to "Pin" tabs. Otherwise, thanks for the punch list! Please let us know if you or someone you know would like to contribute to the project on GitHub to help make these features happen.

<comment><USER2> No problem, this was my first impression. Those are valuable, so I love to make lists out of them.

I added the search bar, but I can't figure out how to make it bigger. It shows correctly in "edit" mode but shrinks to something very small on the actual browser.

As for the pin tab feature, sure, they get smaller (like they would in Chrome) but I usually pin a media player and my email client to the left, in icon format. I let my 10 other tabs at full width. This allows me to ignore the media player altogether unless I need to change the current playlist.

In poly, I wish I could hide those tabs and only have them display when needed. A minimize tab feature, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's almost as interesting as what they've built is that they've built this based on Firefox. It's impressive that the UI can be so thoroughly re-imagined with not that much code (not to say it is a trivial project, or to diminish the work put into it; it's very impressive).

I've never thought "I want a panoramic browser", but I never thought I wanted tabs until I had them, and a dozen other large and small now-mandatory features. I'm looking forward to playing with it, to see if it unlocks usage patterns and new efficiency in the way tabs did. Or, perhaps it'll cure some of the negatives of tabs (losing my train of thought, a tendency to always be multitasking poorly, etc.).

<comment><USER4> what I really want is to be able to navigate the web, as 3D stacks of elements with writing on their faces, with a Tron-bike

<comment><AUTHOR> You will... in the year two thouuuuusand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a result format for web search, this could work well on big screens.

With web sites putting all the useful info in a tall, narrow bar, the user can use their screen real estate better. Have a desktop browser tell the sites it's a mobile device with a narrow screen, get the smaller mobile version of the site, and lay the search result out in columns.

<comment><AUTHOR> The move toward responsive web design works perfectly with PolyBrowser... These days you can resize the website down to a narrow strip and get just the key content. We also have a user-agent switch addon that you can use to retrieve the mobile versions of websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know, I don't consider myself to be OCD, but the thought of scrolling horizontally through webpages that essentially never really align worth a damn on the actual browser window honestly makes me a bit nauseous.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. It's not necessarily for everyone, but it's fantastic for anyone who switches between websites for comparison searches and multitasking.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're excited to announce that the source code for PolyBrowser, the "Panoramic Web Browser," is now available to the community on GitHub! Please join us in developing the browser of the future, or share the news with your friends and colleagues. Let's re-imagine web browsing, together.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice stuff !

3 Qs:

\- any keyboard shortcuts ? \- any list of all the features (apart from the one listed on the website home) \- touchpad usage, hints or doc ?

Keep up the good stuff !

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We worked hard to maintain all of the keyboard shortcuts that are used in Firefox. See here: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard- shortcuts-perf...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts- perform-firefox-tasks-quickly)

Our own (limited) FAQ is here: [http://polybrowser.com/faqs](http://polybrowser.com/faqs)

It's fully touchscreen-compatible, and you can pan and pinch/zoom with your fingers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who thinks this browser looks like a bad toolbar your grandma would install?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've done design surveys and found that most people like the design. That being said, it's impossible to accommodate everyone's disparate tastes. User- generated custom themes are actually the next feature we're adding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does the pan feature work with touchscreens? That would be very, very, very fancy!

<comment><AUTHOR> It does work on touchscreens! You can also pinch and spread your fingers to zoom out and see everything at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not at home right now so I can't test it out, but I'm wondering how heavy it is?

Some website are already hard to render, I wonder what happens when more than one of them are rendered at the same time, side by side!

<comment><AUTHOR> We've tapped into Firefox's ability to asynchronously render websites, meaning that the load on one website doesn't slow down the rest... That feature isn't even released yet as a standard feature on desktop Firefox, but we are able to tap into it already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems pretty nice, but I'll stick with Firefox + the TreeStyleTabs addon.

<comment><USER12> Someone is going to take the chrome content API (or CEF or something similar) and make this happen and will become very popular (or even better, an "IDE" environment of sorts for browsing w/ good context switching). No, I am not talking about a separate window with hierarchical tabs, I am talking about being able to use some of this horizontal space I have plenty of.

The other barrier (which I guess PolyBrowser suffers from too) is that Chromium is so adamant on separate processes per tab that it becomes painful to use a lot of tabs. I wish they would officially support "\--single-process" (doesn't need to be default or anything).

Edit: I see PolyBrowser is in XUL so it's already FF, pardon the comparison.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, PolyBrowser is designed to make the most of your screen real-estate, not matter what screen size you have. It automatically utilizes your horizontal space for large monitors, and you can zoom out to fit more on small screens.

PolyBrowser also supports large browsing sessions with better memory manegement than Chromium.</comment></comment></comment>


My totally paranoid way of working - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sugarenia.com/archives/life/my-totally-paranoid-way-of-working

<comment><USER2> Not 'paranoid', 'psychotic'. However, she's cute AND nerdy, so I'll give her a pass on the bad terminology.

Her 'process' for design is pretty much exactly why I'm not a designer. At all. Some people can find that inspiration quickly and bang out 3 drafts of a site in no time. Instead, I follow her pattern and agonize over it for hours or days before finding some small spark that gives me an idea. It's just too painful to go through daily.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for keeping me in line, wccrawford, I always mix them up :)

I hear you - I often question my motives. I simply cannot come up with so many ideas for the same thing at the same time.

But when it works, it's awesome.</comment></comment>


India (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jimrogers.com/content/stories/articles/india.html <comment><USER2> If I have to blame one thing and only one thing, I will spare the Indian politician and blame the "babu-giri", Indian Civil Services, which is still modeled around its colonial predecessor. These are people recruited in their 20s and have a lifetime appointment in the system. Some are wise enough to get foreign education when possible, but most live in this bureaucratic bubble, and methodically eke their fiefdoms. These guys are the policy wonks, district level executives and every thing in between, and they do not have one frigging Idea, how the private sector works. They are worshipers of process and people are not in the picture. This culture permeates to every level, a culture of gatekeepers and fiefdoms, from the Secretary to PM to the peon in the municipal office.

India was called hope of Asia in 50s. The hope and promise was nothing new, and the delivery was never there.

<comment><USER3> I read a column about that recently: "End the IAS" (the IAS is the successor to the Colonial-era ICS iirc) [http://www.business- standard.com/article/opinion/mihir-s-sha...](http://www.business- standard.com/article/opinion/mihir-s-sharma-end-the-ias-115060501417_1.html)

<comment><USER4> That article is highly one sided and too radical. What would you do after abolishing the IAS? What would it be replaced with? Is that going to end all the evil in India? The diversity and complexity in India is so huge that every policy decision needs to be considered from multiple points of view before implementing. India is now in a position were it has to manage the aspiration of both the new middle and upper middle class who aspire for things which developed countries have and also at the same time cater to the needs of more than half its population who are below poverty lines. People who complain usually would not have a good solution or are probably too far away from the ground reality.

<comment><USER5> >>That article is highly one sided and too radical.

Not at all. If anything, It is In fact too soft for the problems IAS system continues to cause.

>>What would you do after abolishing the IAS? What would it be replaced with?

That's a good question. This has been studied at length by many many brilliant minds. One of the bright minds (an EX-IAS officer) that I know who studied this at length is Sanjeev Sabhlok ([https://twitter.com/sabhlok](https://twitter.com/sabhlok)). Sanjeev has a rigourously refined solution. Highly detailed implementation plan that is so detailed that even a junior IAS officer can understand. Please visit [http://www.sabhlokcity.com/tag/ias/](http://www.sabhlokcity.com/tag/ias/) for general reading and his book "Breaking Free of Nehru"

>>People who complain usually would not have a good solution or are probably too far away from the ground reality.

One does not need always need to know the solution to recognize a problem. Recognizing and acknowledging the problem is first of the many steps towards solving it.

>>Is that going to end all the evil in India?

This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. No one thing will end all evil in India. There are ways to end, but not one silver bullet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like an outdated story (seems like it's a 2001 article). (I'm ignoring fundamental problems like corruption etc. below) As far as the anti- foreign investment sentiment goes, it sounds repulsive on face value, but those of us (Indians) who've lived in the US would want a Walmart (just as an example) destroying all the mom and pop shops? I think a cautious approach for foreign investment is the way to go, the income inequalities in India is already pretty bad, opening the floodgates without adequate measures of certain protectionist policies (not blanket protectionism) would make it worse. We need to realize that India is too big a market for multi-national companies to ignore completely; the Indian govt. should have the upper hand in any deal. And it should strike a deal which is in the interest of the Indian people.

<comment><USER7> As a person who's shopped at both walmart and local "mom and pop shops", yes. We also want Uber or Ola destroying the local taxi industry, and providing safer and better service to consumers. We want Flipkart or Amazon destroying local retail, Toyota destroying local automotive, etc.

Big scary (sometimes foreign) players only manage to "destroy" a local industry when the local industry is failing to satisfy local customers.

<comment><USER8> > We

You're speaking neither as an Indian national, an Indian shopowner, or even an employee of a low-margin local business in India.

I understand that people living elsewhere have perspectives on this, as do ex- pats living in India, but those aren't the people who are principally harmed by this. It's very easy to conclude that this is "worth it" when you're only benefiting from it[0] not the one feeling the pain.

[0] 'As a person [from the US] who's shopped at both walmart and local "mom and pop shops" [in India]'

<comment><USER7> I'm speaking as a consumer in India - one of the people hurt by the current regime. You seem to want to ignore the value to consumers - why?

Also, what is the relevance of my nationality? I make no secret of it, I'm merely trying to understand why you bring it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jim you really don't get India, do you. The intelligent, educated and high tech India that you talk about and are surprised about has actually existed for ten thousand years now. It has nothing to do with modernity, its just that quest for knowledge is deep rooted in that culture. You mention India where phones don't work and traffic jams are commonplace, in other words, India where its inconvenient to lead a modern life, even thats existed for ten thousand years, even during the harshest days of starvation under British rule Indians were reasonably happy and not many people revolted for 250 years (they had to be prodded to do so for the last 50 years). In a way, they were ok with it and had accepted it as a way of life. What in western countries is a huge inconvenience, in India it feels like something that you will get used to eventually. The feeling of its ok to be inconvenienced and still be happy in life is deep rooted in the culture.If you notice, both these things, quest for knowledge and resilience towards inconvenience is needed in spiritual quests, something which India pioneered to the world. India is in every way consistent with what it should be if you look at it its whole existence and not just take a snapshot of its past 100 years and correlate it with what is happening in the world. And thats precisely the reason why I think India will thrive in the coming decades and centuries. It's quest for knowledge will propel it forward and its resiliency towards not being inconvenienced by petty things would keep the momentum intact.

<comment><USER10> I agree.

As a bangladeshi I have watched privatization and IMF destroy my own country.

Its rich that someone who took a vacation in India somehow figured out all its problems and knows all its solutions.

Strong labour laws in India prevented Indian workers from being exploited by foreigners - Unlike in my own country where my people are slaves to american consumer demands via walmart.

India is exactly what you end up when you institute democratic rule over a real nation.

The idea of self-reliance is what allowed Indians to develop their own space mission, nuclear power, submarines and unique cryogenic rockets that even the american cannot get their hands on. And now the british use our rockets.

I went to a rural village in west bengal where they got their first light bulb. What is cool about it is not that its basic electricity but because it was powered using a nuclear plant.

Its embarrassing that in the UK the electricity is generated mostly by coal. Who is the backward nation again ?

Indians are not interested in your fancy iphones. They have no purpose when you think about it. India is completely happy to wait for technology to catch up rather than destroy and pillage their environment and water.

Unlike the americans the indians didn't have the luxury to rape and pillage an entire continent and another one. Resources are scares - water, food, land.

India is now developing thorium and is building power plants in the south. Sounds like they are doing perfectly fine. Slow,steady and sustainable progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is honest but the last paragraph makes me question whether it really was..

> India really is not a rational country. The English mushed India together in > the panic of independence in 1947, but little heed was given to ethnic, > religious, linguistic, historic, national, or geographic considerations > which is one reason India has had problems with every one of its neighbors > since. India as we know it will not survive another 30 or 40 years. This of > course does not have to end in disaster, but it probably will given the > chauvinism of its government and the way history has always worked.

Really? A democracy of 1.3 billion people which has held together for > 60 years and endured > 4 major wars will just topple? I find that very unlikely.

The fact is that despite a lot of troubles, the country has managed to remain more or less true to its principles of democracy and secularism, instead of devolving into a chaotic mess that most of the neighboring countries have faced. One reason is that the Indian Military has historically been apolitical, unlike many neighboring countries. I don't really understand how it has managed to stay together this way but I really hope that it does continue.

<comment><USER12> People have been talking about the "Balkanization of India" for a while now. But there are no signs of this yet. Indians have a deep rooted (albeit slightly misguided and maybe even chauvinistic) sense of patriotism.

<comment><USER13> Patriotism is there, but the main problem here is that India is pretty much already very Balkanized in geography and class if not national boundaries. It also has a strong central government. Any revolutionary/indepedence movements therefore tend to be fringe (someone in Maharashtra does not really care for farmer movement in Bengal) and easily controlled (due to the strong center). The patriotism means that any overtly violent army action is not frowned upon but rather encouraged by most who have a voice. The extreme poverty means the poor are so wretched they do not have a voice. We have met people on a two hour drive (which means only about 30 km) outside Mumbai who have never been to a big city and know nothing beyond how to get to the next day. If by some magic, most Indians become a bit educated tomorrow, and have some life other than mere existence, then we can talk about actual Balkanization. Until then, India will exist as it always has. There is also the Partition which has affected the national psyche: talk of dividing the country is like so far out there, you'd be considered a traitor a few levels before that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are 2 amazing things about this article: 1\. It was written a while ago, and the general description of the country and its problems are just as true. 2\. This quote: "In the eastern section of India, there is a company called Bengal Fertilizer, which was built in the early nineties. The government spent $1.2 billion on it and it took seven years to complete. It now employs 1550 people with complete work schedules, vacations, canteens, unions, etc. And yet they have never produced an ounce of fertilizer."

A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes from a place of affection for the country.

<comment><USER8> > A good piece of writing - quite critical about the country, but also comes > from a place of affection for the country.

I'm not sure where you're reading "affection" from. Rogers has been predicting and even actively cheerleading India's financial decline consistently for literally two decades. He even closes the article with a claim that is laughably ignorant[0] of historical facts, and just reeks of colonial apologism.

> India really is not a rational country. The English mushed India together in > the panic of independence in 1947, but little heed was given to ethnic, > religious, linguistic, historic, national, or geographic considerations > which is one reason India has had problems with every one of its neighbors > since. India as we know it will not survive another 30 or 40 years. This of > course does not have to end in disaster, but it probably will given the > chauvinism of its government and the way history has always worked.

The reason that India has been at war is because the world's then-largest superpower[1] (the British) _openly_ declared that they wanted to start a civil war in India, and then actively funded terrorist[2] groups to ensure that it happened.

There are people in the US who have affection for India. Rogers is not one of them.

[0] No, I don't think that Rogers is actually ignorant of history; I'm saying he chooses to ignore history.

[1] India's fight for independence was just around the time that the US took over that epithet from the British

[2] That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them today

<comment><USER15> Re: "terrorists" and India at the time of independence

> That word didn't exist then, but that's absolutely what we would call them > today

It had actually existed for about a century and half before that, and had been used in the modern sense (including referring to non-state and subnational actors, often directing violence against a state, rather than the original use referring to terrorism strictly in the sense of a top-down means of state control originating with the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and its architects, the original "terrorists") for about 70-80 years prior to Indian independence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funnily enough, after reading the first paragraph, it still sounds like a recent article even though it has been years. In fact, the country probably has taken two steps back under Manmohan Singh.

To a certain extent, even if the article was recent, it's not a surprise. Democracies are SLOW and India is still a social democracy trying to be a capitalistic democracy - so even slower.

Democracies move fast only during a crisis. Otherwise, they are inherently slow.

Even in the US, a majority of top issues have not changed much since the 90s. Politicians have been debating pretty much the same thing without much progress...

<comment><USER17> Factually if we take each point in the Article, a lot has changed and yet not enough:

1\. You can get cross country SIM card easily in India today.

2\. Taxes for IT business is uniform (no incentive for export per se)

3\. Indian IT industry did just fine during bubble burst so Author's cyncism was bit misplaced.

4\. Indian aviation industry is fierecly competitive. Today no one worries about future of Air India not because Air India has become good but there is enough competition.

5\. I would argue that a lot has been done to ease Foreign investment since Article was written. Why just yesterday new measures were announced ([http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/no-mat-on-fii- why...](http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/no-mat-on-fii-why-issue-of- taxing-foreign-investors-flares-up-repeatedly/))

<comment><USER18> Sim cards charge heavily for "roaming" in other states. A sim card still truly belongs to only one state.

Despite the tax reform, doing any business in India is still a hassle nevertheless.

Indian aviation industry may be competitive, but can a middle-class family really afford an airplane ticket ? No. They are only afforded the option of a second class train ticket which have toilets worse than the one shown in Trainspotting. And I haven't even touched the topic of trains being overcrowded. Seriously, who thought letting any number of people with a ticket on the train was a good idea ?

<comment><USER16> The Raj - or the consequence of The Raj are still ubiquitous. They were moving in right direction with BJP in charge (and talking about capitalism only not other issues). Last 10 years of Congress has stifled lot of the progress that Narshima Rao's Gov started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We (Indians) can look all over for the causes of what ails India, but not at the one place where a majority of the blame lies: ourselves.

We will bemoan the corrupt system; but given a chance to make life a little bit easier, not hesitate to offer a bribe.

We will spew venom at the useless politicians who do nothing but line their pockets; but then turn around and vote for one based on caste/religion.

We will express angst at the garbage that litters our cities; but not hesitate to toss it out the window (or our home's garbage on the street).

Gandhi said, be the change you want to see. I'm not a fan of Gandhi, but in this he was right. We must change our behavior, before we can expect the system to change.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you. But you are not giving India enough credit.

India has a corruption problem - and so does the americans, british, europeans, etc . Hell The LIBOR scandal is on 900 trillion dollars. And this is before I bring up 2008.

Privatization is not that answer. Look at the situation at Bangladesh if you want to see what privatization leads to.

<comment><USER19> Corruption may be a problem in the US too, but, having lived here for a decade, I can assure you I've never been asked nor offered a single bribe. Corruption doesn't affect the common man directly here. In any case: just because it's in some other country, makes it all right to do it in India, right? Instead of racing for the bottom, why not try racing to the top, and compare India to Sweden, Norway, etc.?

Secondly: I never brought up privatization.

<comment><USER5> >>Corruption may be a problem in the US too, but, having lived here for a decade, I can assure you I've never been asked nor offered a single bribe.

Not being asked for bribe is not necessarily absence of corruption. For a crash course on How Real world corruption works. Great place to start is [https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/c84bp/how_realwo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/c84bp/how_realworld_corruption_works/)

>>Corruption doesn't affect the common man directly here.

Incorrect. Read the link above

>>In any case: just because it's in some other country, makes it all right to do it in India, right?

am 99.99% sure poster is not suggesting it is right thing. Hust saying it is not an India only problem and that it exists everywhere.

<comment><USER19> >> Not being asked for bribe is not necessarily absence of corruption. For a crash course on How Real world corruption works. Great place to start is [https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/c84bp/how_realwo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/c84bp/how_realwo..).

Having in lived in India most of my life, I don't need to read an Economist article to find out what corruption is. Want to get a passport? Pay a bribe. Want to construct an addition to you house? Pay a bribe (or just do it illegally). The list goes on. In countries like US, Sweden, Canada, etc at least you're not hammered with corruption requests in your day-to-day existence.

<comment><USER5> What you are describing is bribery. Corruption is a closely related and slightly different thing.

<comment><USER15> Bribery is a form of corruption.

<comment><USER5> >Bribery is a form of corruption.

Agreed

By "Corruption is a closely related and slightly different thing" I meant the same thing. My point is non existence of bribery does not automatically translate to no corruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Heh. It reads like the usual "business" article with several apriori assumptions. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm OK with bias as long as people don't claim to be neutral.

* Capitalism good, Socialism bad * All countries should emulate the west. * "Not Business friendly" \- Code for this country won't let us exploit their people.

Then we come to the actual substance.

>First, revenues from software made by Indian companies is taxed while export revenues are tax-exempt. In other words, an Indian company has no incentive to do local business.

Uh, yeah. Sure. All the people doing exactly that don't exist. They have no incentive !!

>By then, India may have learned to practice true economic reform, taking a lesson from their neighbors in China.

Why would anyone want to take a lesson from China? - Which BTW continues to forcibly exert control over the lives of her people (including businesses).

>Maybe then they will understand that a free-market economy isn't necessarily a new form of colonialism.

Wow. Dude, India has been trading and doing business with East Africa, the Middle East, all of south Asia including China since like 6 AD. We 'understand' how to trade just fine.

</comment><comment><USER21> > No bubble ends with two-year lows. Bubbles end with 10 or 15 year lows

It seems like the software bubble ended with lows for maybe half that time. Is there anything peculiar to software or that time that made it different than other bubbles in history?

</comment><comment><USER22> Can a title be more vague?

I think it may make sense to use this title in the original article as the site might carry some context but using it in HN doesn't seem too efficient.

<comment><USER23> A little inefficiency—not much, just enough to be a speed bump—is a good thing on the HN front page, because it interrupts the usual internet reflexes. Reflexive responses, being predictable, are not interesting. What we want are reflective responses. Reflection is a slower process, requiring a pause. So I think it's good if we readers have to work a little: it slows us down, and maybe activates better circuitry.

<comment><USER22> I agree with you on slowing down "reflexive responses" but I would say cryptic titles may not be the right approach specially on weekdays.

If I've to read an essay to understand the context the chances are I'll put it off for later and unfortunately will not be able to participate in the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > You can get just about anything in China or even in parts of Africa, but not > here.

Any concrete examples? I think this is inappropriate any more.

<comment><USER25> A cheeky example. The 6 months I spent in India a couple of years ago, I found it impossible to obtain a canister of compressed air to clean my laptop, which had accumulated more dust in the 6 months than the 4 years prior. There are much better examples, but still.

<comment><USER26> Amzn seem to have it: [http://www.amazon.in/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3Da...](http://www.amazon.in/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=compressed+air+can+for+laptop)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Jim Rogers, you may know me from such books as:

Investment Biker

A Bull in China

Adventure Capitalist

Hot Commodities

(seriously, [http://www.jimrogers.com/](http://www.jimrogers.com/)) This guy has traveled the world and learned lots of puns.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this is from 2002, a pretty long time ago. The infrastructure issues don't seem to have gone away though.

</comment><comment><USER29> How old is this article ?

From the content this looks pretty old, like India having 25 states etc.

<comment><USER30> Looks like "6 Mar 2001" according to the link that goes to the article.

He recently appeared in the news for "quitting" India: [http://www.livemint.com/Money/Hii5NshplbswnJpcb0cHgM/Jim- Rog...](http://www.livemint.com/Money/Hii5NshplbswnJpcb0cHgM/Jim-Rogers-exits- India-says-one-cant-invest-just-on-hope.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How is this relevant now? We are in 2015 not 2001.

<comment><USER2> Because most of the broader conclusions barring some minor details including brown-outs, dilapidated roads and crumbling railways and insane government officers has not changed.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Chrome Extension – NoDisguisedAdsAnymore - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nodisguisedadsanymore/iohkikhambmlojkaeabhoioiccjgmfco?hl=en-GB&authuser=0 <comment><AUTHOR> Comments here: after a post from Jason Fried [https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?s=...](https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?s=20) ranting about how Google is disguising ads into search results, I decided to create this Chrome Extension to at least try to reduce ads importance and make users focusing more on organic results.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why should I use this instead of blocking the ads entirely?</comment>


John Carmack: "I just dumped the C++ server I wrote for a new one in Racket" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/577877590070919168 <comment><USER2> It's refreshing how humble Carmack always sounds in his Twitter feed. I've found that old school game programmers tend to be hardline and a bit belligerent about their code; Carmack, on the other hand, often tweets about going against his better instincts and exploring new technologies. Not a lot of sarcasm or negativity at all. If only more people had Twitter streams as pleasant and informative as his!

<comment><USER3> Carmack is constantly challenging himself. A trait common among masters. Louis CK is so good at comedy because he throws away all his material each year. Carmack used to practically write a new game engine every year. Now he's doing _even more_ challenging work than that.

<comment><USER4> Arthur Whitney, author of A+,k and kdb/q always starts from scratch when he develops a new version of his db. From scratch means throwing away even the lowest-level routines like basic string operations and low-level file i/o.

<comment><USER5> And the source code is bizarre but... works for him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really love that the majority of the responses to that tweet are of the form: _Why not X? Use Y!_

It's very illustrative to me of just how tribal we've become. As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use. I'm sure it's a boon to the Racket tribe that the others are now jealous of. To have the name recognition of John Carmack tweeting about your language! Imagine!

Racket is a fine enough language and ecosystem. I'm more curious about what he's building. Is this the VR-version of Facebook?

<comment><USER7> >As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use.

I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is driven by the top 1% endorsing it. I think its a pretty big deal when high profile people endorse a technology. Social capital is as real as financial capital. Carmack has lots of social capital and it can get results. His celebrity helped launch Oculus from a weirdo company playing with 90s relics to a Serious Threat to The Status Quo and I'm sure drew in big investors and eventually Facebook's purchase of it.

>It's very illustrative to me of just how tribal we've become.

This is how we've always been and will forever continue to be.

<comment><USER6> > I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is > driven by the top 1% endorsing it.

I suppose this might be true but it's rather hard to quantify. I don't recall ever choosing to invest in and master a language from a celebrity endorsement. Some people might have -- I can't say. But it obviously does have merit because of the responses Carmack's tweet solicited so I don't disagree.

I just found that the majority of responses were of this patronizing sort. If Carmack is amongst the top 1% of programmers, as you say, and is a minor celebrity as we both know then it seems disingenuous to immediately ask him, "Why not Haskell/Erlang/Clojure/Whatever-my-favorite-X-is?" Given his previous essays on functional programming and his move to adopt C++ I think it's safe to say he knows what he's doing and picked Racket for good reasons (even if it's as simple as, "I like it."). I made the tribe observation when it became apparent to me that perhaps they were jealous that Carmack didn't pick their tribe and bring his celebrity power along to them.

I find that kind of sad and funny. I'm more curious as to what he's building than what language he's using to do it with. There are interesting things to talk about wrt the system he's building and the run-time he's building it on but that seems to go over the majority of peoples' heads. Even as a newcomer to the Racket ecosystem I think Carmack will have quite a lot to teach us as he develops this system: about Racket, the language VM, system architecture, his process, etc.

So when I said, "As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use," what I was implying was that he probably has reasons and it's more interesting to know what those are. He could have continued writing it in C++, Haskell, anything... it's what he does choose, as opposed to the multitude of choices he didn't make, that is interesting here in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is not hard to write code in Racket or Clojure; what's hard is maintaining it!

I've written a small Clojure project, maybe 3k loc. It was great fun. But when I go back to add small features I find it quite tricky. Bugs often sneak in.

<comment><USER9> I think maintaining old software is a known problem, regardless of the language. What about lisps make them more challenging in this regard?

<comment><USER8> Lack of types.

I don't want to start a discussion here on typed vs untyped so please consider everything I say to be qualified "It is only my personal opinion and experience".

I'm writing Haskell in my day job, Clojure for fun side project, OCaml because it's a nice language that's a bit underused and C++ because it's useful to know and not so evil as most people say (and it's progressing fast!). I should throw Rust into the mix because it might have a bright future.

WARNING: personal opinions and anecdotal evidence ahead!

Maybe there's a level of lisp enlightenment that I haven't reached yet but I can't just get by with writing lisp without writing tests. On the other hand I can get by with writing Haskell and OCaml without writing tests.

This is particularly true when I'm coming back to a project that I haven't touched for a few weeks. I change something and something breaks. In Haskell and OCaml I change something and compiler complains.

Maybe we'll see HaLispML one day.

<comment><USER10> The types objection may apply to Clojure (I've never used it, I don't know) but one of Racket's major development thrusts has been providing a way to get the benefits of both typed and untyped languages.

* Racket has a sophisticated contract system that allows you to enforce "type-like" properties at runtime very easily (e.g., you can say "This function should behave as an ((int -> int) -> int) function" and it will do all the necessary runtime checks to make sure that contract is honored as your program executes)

* It also has an optional modern type system, Typed Racket, that you can opt into on a per-module basis. Typed Racket modules can interact with untyped modules safely via contracts. The Typed Racket type system was designed specifically so that it's easy to migrate untyped, idiomatic Racket code to the type system, so you can write untyped Racket code idiomatically, and then go back and port your untyped module to Typed Racket with a minimum of fuss and get the benefit of the type system.

<comment><USER11> Clojure has Core.Typed, which lets you add optional typing.

<comment><USER12> Core.Typed is directly inspired by typed racket :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Carmack has a secret affection for Lisps I think. A while back he wrote about programming in lisp on his iPad (which is nicely suited to editing S-expressions).

Anyway, Carmack has convinced me to take a look at Racket again. When I looked at it a few years back, it seemed nobody was using it.

<comment><USER14> Well the only other thing i know of which is written in Racket is HN. So not sure if it's any popular today either. IMO it looks like were getting too many damn programming languages which is something I'm starting to really dislike. Too much shit flying around forcing you to pickup some niche languages for a project, and worse having fresh developers being forced to learn like a billion languages instead of mastering 1 or 2.

<comment><USER15> Learn scheme and you can handle all lisps, learn C/C++ and you can handle all the imperative languages, learn ocaml/haskell and you can handle the rest. That is 3 languages to master.

<comment><USER16> Until you come to Prolog, or APL/J/K and realise that none of these languages have fully prepared you either. And then there are other things out there too, that will leave you learning all over again.

<comment><USER17> I have this ritual every year or so, where I try to write J, sigh, and go back to pedestrian F#.

<comment><USER18> I always do one-liner stuff in J, and I keep trying to get into F#. I recently bought Dyalog's APL. I thought the symbols would get in the way, but it's a whole other door opening. I really like the array-oriented languages for math and science. Even Julia and Numpy are attempts to do what the APL/J/K family have always done. I've always had Racket on my machine, before it was called Racket. Having an IDE and a good standard library right off the bat is great for beginners and dabblers like myself. I do not program for a living. I only program when I have a math or engineering problem to solve.

<comment><USER17> Racket is amazing, I agree. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Always interesting to see what Carmack is up to in Lisp land. It's particularly interesting to me because he seems to have some sort of Lisp guilt. Every time he talks about it, he has to mention that he's not sure if it's useful for "serious" projects because it's not statically typed or because it might not scale.

<comment><USER20> I remember him (either in the QuakeCon 2013 talk, or one of his writings) mentioning that all these years he was so busy he never got a chance to have his lisp enlightenment. I think he might be having it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been vaguely aware of Racket, but I haven't paid much attention to the details.

If I'm reasonably familiar with Common Lisp, what are the main differences/advantages of Racket to pay attention to? What's the best resource (preferably online) to use to learn about Racket?

<comment><USER22> > What's the best resource (preferably online) to use to learn about Racket?

You could work through SICP using Racket instead of MIT/GNU Scheme. I'm currently in the midst of this and the differences thus far have been relatively minor (e.g. Racket doesn't have `inc`, `dec` or `nil`).

<comment><USER23> > e.g. Racket doesn't have `inc`, `dec` or `nil`

I'm assuming those are trivial to add?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, you could add 'nil' easily.

inc and dec I assume mean increment or decrement (I have no experience with CL) - racket/base includes (add1 .) and (sub1 .) for the same effect. If they didn't exist they would be trivial to add I think - if this isn't what inc and dec mean then I apologise.

In Scheme/Racket truth and falsity is really simple - #f is false and everything else is truthy. There's also already a null value for the empty list (which is 'true'). I don't know if nil would be useful.

<comment><USER23> And it looks like someone's already done it: [http://planet.racket- lang.org/package-source/neil/sicp.plt/1...](http://planet.racket- lang.org/package-source/neil/sicp.plt/1/13/main.ss)

<comment><USER24> I dunno it looks to me like they've just defined nil to be equal to null/empty, which is not exactly the same.

In Common Lisp, unlike Scheme/Racket, nil is the null value AND the false value. In Scheme/Racket, 'nil is true unless you define it to be #f. If you wrote an if or cond expression to evaluate the 'nil in the link, I think that it would return true, whereas in CL nil is falsy (I think it is the only falsy value in CL, but I would still describe it as 'falsy' rather than false, possibly incorrectly).

e: Ah, I see why I'm not understanding you now - you're talking about the differences between Racket and SICP/Scheme whereas I made the assumption that we were talking about the difference between Common Lisp and Racket (from OP's comment). To further clarify, I believe this was my fault in comprehension, not yours in communication.

<comment><USER23> > I dunno it looks to me like they've just defined nil to be equal to > null/empty, which is not exactly the same.

But it is how nil is defined in SICP:

'The value of nil, used to terminate the chain of pairs, can be thought of as a sequence of no elements, the empty list. The word nil is a contraction of the Latin word nihil, which means "nothing."' \-- [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html#%_idx_1596)

And then in a footnote to that paragraph:

"It's remarkable how much energy in the standardization of Lisp dialects has been dissipated in arguments that are literally over nothing: Should nil be an ordinary name? Should the value of nil be a symbol? Should it be a list? Should it be a pair? In Scheme, nil is an ordinary name, which we use in this section as a variable whose value is the end-of-list marker (just as true is an ordinary variable that has a true value). Other dialects of Lisp, including Common Lisp, treat nil as a special symbol. The authors of this book, who have endured too many language standardization brawls, would like to avoid the entire issue. Once we have introduced quotation in section 2.3, we will denote the empty list as '() and dispense with the variable nil entirely." \-- [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-15.html#%_idx_1598)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > but it is winning for development even as a newbie

Not sure Carmack qualifies as a newbie when it comes to anything programming- related.

<comment><USER26> In my opinion anyone can be a newbie once taken out of their comfort zone.

John Carmack was mostly a C programmer up until quite recently and then started experimenting with some Functional Programming languages, and I'm sure he had a few things to learn when doing so.

Not to take away from an obviously intelligent individual.

<comment><USER27> > Not to take away from an obviously intelligent individual.

It's interesting to observe how programmers and other similar _intellectual_ workers prostrate themselves in their own specific way when referring to someone of high status in their field.

<comment><USER28> I tend to observe that seasoned/good software engineers are too busy tackling problems of similar difficulty to be caught up praising, following, and prostrating themselves to others. It's not a habit of mine and I don't hold anyone who does it in high esteem. I tend to think someone praises another to a large extent because they don't hold themselves in high regards. If they did and were of similar skill level, it wouldn't seem a big deal to them right? i.e : Tweet (high profile software engineer) : Today I cut 500ms out of a 4 second operation on a consumer device Me : OK .. last week I cut a 10 second switch-over operation on a enterprise switch (grosses 8 billion dollars in revenue a year) down to 300ms. I thought that was just a part of my job as a software engineer.

<comment><USER29> I think that may be the most annoying post I've read on Hacker News this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack 3h3 hours ago > @touristtam If I run into > catastrophic perf problems, I may try rewriting in Go.

he apparently has lots of fun with languages, very curious what kind of server he is writing now.

He also spoke highly about Haskell before.

<comment><USER31> Hi I did ask the following:

> thoroc @touristtam 12h12 hours ago > @ID_AA_Carmack what guided your choice > of Racket vs Rust and Go? > Just curious. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've always thought Racket to be a highly under-rated language.

<comment><USER33> I use it for everything I write. It brings the joy back after having to maintain a Java project in my day job. Well written racket code brings so much satisfaction :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what kind of server it is. What is it's purpose?

<comment><USER35> _" multi-user VR stuff"_

[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/577889129284898816](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/577889129284898816)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> ...* after reading some of the comments here *...

I think we would be better off caring a little bit less about what language to use and a little bit more about what programs to write.

</comment><comment><USER37> Had to read that twice. Was pretty sure he meant "RakNet" the first time ;)

Oh, and just gonna put this out there: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=racket&lang2=go)

<comment><USER38> Then again: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=racket&lang2=hipe)

and Erlang is certainly a valid platform for servers, so as usual benchmarks are just benchmarks... would be interesting to see if typed racked made a difference in these tests -- although I'm not sure if performance is the main focus of typed racked (as opposed to just type safety).

<comment><USER39> [http://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html#idp32166576](http://www.erlang.org/faq/introduction.html#idp32166576)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> >May not scale, but it is winning for development even as a newbie

Sounds like Python.

Works great at the start, and then one day you wake up and realize you are running 50K ppl online at the same time MMO (Eve Online), your code cant take advantage of multi core CPUs = every game region (star system) starts to lag above ~500 people and there is nothing you can do about it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Honestly, just about anything is going to be faster, productivity-wise, than C++. When you stop having to think about how you're going to structure your inheritance and classes, you--shockingly--get things done. But more metaprogramming is not the answer. And I've used Scheme since 2002 or so. I'm implemented Scheme interpreters and compilers. But I'm no longer a cheerleader for macros and call/cc or Scheme (or Lisp, for that matter).

You know what gets things done and makes things easy to maintain? Boring ass code. IF statements. FOR loops. I mostly use Perl today. It doesn't get in the way. But getting things done is not trendy. That's where we are today.

<comment><USER42> You know what's the problem with boring code? It's boring. This means its information content is low, and its abstraction level is low. This means that you need more of it to express an algorithm.

When you have a lot of wordy, boring code to maintain, you have to make coordinated changes in more similarly boring places. A human's brain can only keep that many lines of context. So it becomes easier to make a mistake.

I understand that abstraction astronautics can leave you with puzzling, convoluted, hard-to-maintain code full of leaky unintuitive abstractions. This problem is not unique to Lisp macros; languages like C++ and even Java are known to be widely used by perpetrators of the above-mentioned atrocities.

What makes code easier to maintain is clear separation of concerns and low impedance between code's abstractions and the subject area. This is, again, attainable in a number of languages (though expressive power and minimalism help make it even nicer), given the right mindset and skills. I suppose John Carmack possesses both.

<comment><USER43> I recently watch a colleague write an elaborate system to parse a few different CSV feeds. There are a dozen different interfaces and mixed in with all the lovely Java design patterns.

I'm beginning to use a phrase that I'd rather deal with poorly written code than well planned architecture. Obviously by well planned architecture I'm referring to overly architected solutions.

<comment><USER44> When it comes to architecture, I've lately turned towards BCNF as my god. My premise is that if my data model - my internal application data, not just "the database" \- is as in as normalized a form as I can reasonably get it given typical constraints of procedural/OO/functional styles, my features automatically grow into a flexible and decoupled grain because they're operating on exactly the right slice of data, no more, no less. "Guess and check" and "OO design pattern" strategies don't seem to get me there because they tend to start with whatever is language-easy or looks pretty at first glance, and then take on the problems later. And it seems to work - the thing I have right now is, indeed, incredibly flexible for the amount of code involved. And it isn't really "architected" in the usual sense otherwise - there are no grand plans.

The only problem I'm having with this tack is that it reveals all the technical debt at once, which produces an enormous amount of pain early on. My friends smirked at my woes today of trying to make a clickable button, which has to piece together stuff from the graphics layer, input events, text fields, and internal button state. An enormous variety of data, altogether, with the debt usually hidden from view at some level. It all makes sense, it's all decoupled, the lifetime of the state is automatically managed, any configuration you want will just be a matter of making the data for it. But making that first button is quite a headache.

<comment><USER45> I had a funny feeling doing a SQL MOOC when I had to re-learn normalization, and how it was a very generic decoupling algorithm. Suddenly all OOP became tiny and ad-hoc.

<comment><USER46> Would you mind telling me which MOOC you did for SQL? I am quite rusty - (~10 years since I did any serious SQL stuff) but I am finding it is coming up quite a lot now for me.

<comment><USER45> IIRC it was Stanford's (I have memories of a mainly red interface)

[http://www.erictimmons.com/node/18](http://www.erictimmons.com/node/18)

I don't know if it qualifies for serious, I'd say challenging enough, but it was great to revisit with another university material.

<comment><USER46> Thanks for that. In case anyone else is interested, they now have it set up as a self-paced course here:

[https://class.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/about](https://class.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/about)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I guess this is where the anti-FP people forget their staunch scepticism for a second because a respected imperative programmer uses an FP language? Regular functional programmers haven't been able to change their view, but I wouldn't be surprised if all it took was one tweet from the right person.

Other than that, I don't see what else there is to say about this. 'Dropped some C++ for Racket server: may not scale but is more productive'. That's the most standard high-level vs. low-level dichotomy.

<comment><USER47> > I wouldn't be surprised if all it took was one tweet from the right person.

Well, the "Argument from Authority" is called out because of when it's misused (kinda how "experts are always wrong". No: those are only the times you remember), but it _is_ a fundamental way of how social humans form opinions.

<comment><USER27> > , but it is a fundamental way of how social humans form opinions.

Wow, that's amazing: people form opinions in part based on how much they respect/trust someone. Consider my cynical views totally and irreversibly changed.

Then there are those times when it is taken too far: like 115 points on HN for a pithy message like "rewrote to another language".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> So many brackets. Resolving mismatched brackets seems to be just about the most pointless developer activity possible.

<comment><USER49> Lisp uses the same number of parens as most languages per call – the only thing that's different is whether the paren goes before or after the first part of the call.

        (print "hello")

vs

        print("hello")

So to the extent Lisp is paren-heavy, it's more a stylistic thing. Lisp programmers tend to chain up calls more.

<comment><USER50>
        (-b + sqrt(b*b - 4*a*c)) / (2*a)
        (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (- (* b b) (* 4 a c)))) (* 2 a))

It does depend on your use case.

<comment><USER51> That's why we have macros [http://liebke.github.io/incanter/infix- api.html](http://liebke.github.io/incanter/infix-api.html)

[https://github.com/incanter/incanter/blob/master/modules/inc...](https://github.com/incanter/incanter/blob/master/modules/incanter- core/src/incanter/infix.clj)

<comment><USER52> Lisp only has infix macros so that we can say "we have that".

Nobody in their right mind uses this stuff in production code.

It just overcomes objections. "Oh, if I start using Lisp, there _is_ be a way to use infix, should I really need it". Ten years and six Lisp project later, you still haven't used the infix stuff; the situation never comes.

<comment><USER53> > Nobody in their right mind uses this stuff in production code.

You sure about that? I thought the lispy approach was generally pragmatic - you use what you deem handy for your application. It this weren't the case, there would be little need for macros in the first place. I can very well imagine, say, a scientific or engineering application that would share a common infix parser for both user-provided expressions (in the UI, to be more friendly to non-lispers) and heavy math lifting in the source code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> A random Carmack tweet is news now?

<comment><USER55> Carmack is an interesting fellow, especially interesting to the types that frequent this forum.

What he is doing is thus interesting to this forum though maybe as you pointed, not news worthy.

But since when does everything has to be news worthy?</comment></comment>


In China, social divisions are written in a little red booklet - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-hukou-20121212,0,1248525.story

<comment><USER2> Could somebody with a background in economics explain to me why hukou was introduced in the first place?

Why couldn't they let natural market forces determine where people stay. And why would it cost 240 billion to change this? Is that how much covering everybody's medical, insurance, and all that stuff cost?

<comment><USER3> It was the same way in the USSR. Moscow and St. Petersbrug were significantly more habitable. If you were going to find goods in the USSR it was going to be in Moscow. In parallel many Russian cities of 100,000 were inhospitable, isolated, and dull places. Nevertheless Russia is a large country and if free travel was allowed key industries such as mining or wheat production would disappear. In modern Russia large areas that were cultivated in Soviet times (due to this system) remain underutilized. Lastly finding work was never a problem in the USSR and hence anybody transferring would be likely to find work as long as they were a legal resident (not working was criminal). To counter any potential demographic shift the Soviet authorities made it difficult to move from rural area to the city. A similar system existed in China.</comment></comment>


Early-career funding for individuals interested in improving long-term future - <AUTHOR> https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/other-areas/early-career-funding-individuals-interested-improving-long-term-future <comment><USER2> It sounds nice in theory, but in practice programs like this strike me as not very effective in achieving their stated goals.

The applicants who get accepted will tend to be those whose ideas are within the Overton Window and who are good at playing the game, politically/career- wise, under the current system. Real change tends to come from the margins and tends to be overlooked initially as nothing worth anything.

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

I've lived without a car for over a decade. When I worked at Aflac, they had a number of programs to try to encourage people to car pool and the like and these programs were mostly useless because they were mostly created by people with car-centric lives, for people with car-centric lives and they defaulted to car-centric assumptions. They mostly didn't fit my life -- a person actually living without a car -- and I stopped participating in some of them for fear of getting in trouble after there was an incident where the parking privileges of a friend of mine were revoked under one of the programs when it came out she was giving me a ride to work, but not home again in the evening.

So I have some first-hand experience with how such things go and I'm not hugely impressed. Real change tends to not qualify for this kind of support.</comment>


Everlane's Promise of 'Radical Transparency' Unravels - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/fashion/everlane-employees-ethical-clothing.html <comment><USER2> I was in a meeting once and a VP used the term "give back component" in a way that made me realize that the actually giving back was irrelevant, it was now just a marketing gimmick.

"Radical transparency" seems the same</comment>


UK spends billions on high-tech IDs, forgets to buy card readers  - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/05/uk-spends-billions-on-high-tech-ids-forgets-to-buy-card-readers/ <comment><USER2> I think the key sentence in the article is: _While it would make sense to get a few IDs out there first and then follow up with the readers after six months, perhaps, that was not at all included in the budget and in fact the readers' manufacturers haven't been convinced it's 'worth their while' to make the things._

Deferring deployment of the readers until a reasonable size population cards is a reasonable step to take.

Leaving the readers out of the budget so that the project looks cheaper than it is, is a dirty trick that frequently gets done. I saw it done for some of the projects related to the public office I ran for, and this was part of why I ran.

But this is even worse than that - the folks who would be making the readers aren't even making them.</comment>


The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security <comment><USER2> Completely agree with the article. The TSA is expensive, ineffective, and unreliable. Moreover, between immigration and the TSA people actively avoid flying through the United States if they can help it.</comment>


_why's Estate - <AUTHOR> https://viewsourcecode.org/why/ <comment><AUTHOR> Still remember hoodwink.d wow that was a long time ago</comment>


With Snap's IPO, Los Angeles Prepares to Embrace New Tech Millionaires - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/technology/snap-ipo-los-angeles-real-estate.html <comment><USER2> Realistically, with all the various ratchet terms in Snap's financing, how many of the 2k employees will see very significant income from the IPO? By very significant, I mean >$150-300k per year in wealth creation adjusted for # of years it took to vest.

I honestly suspect not too many. A majority of the money that people will earn will just offset the difference in salary between Snap and larger more established companies that give out liquid RSUs - like Google. Plus Snap significantly backweights their equity. So the people who can cash out on all of their equity are a small percentage of the 2k employees (since it's still such a young company) and most employees probably haven't vested the full 4 years.

Still, the IPO will have an impact on the local economy - but probably not as much as is being purported.

Maybe someone with more experience in large financial liquidity events like this can chime in?

<comment><USER3> Zach Holman recently blogged about this:

 _I saw GitHub's valuation move from sub-$10M to more than $2B; beyond that, GitHub is turning a decade old this year. Traditionally, this would be a great point where lots of little companies get spun off from this created wealth, and employees and former employees would be able to help with that.

In reality, I can probably count on one hand the number of people from GitHub who are in a financial position to become true angels. This is far from a problem unique to GitHub; the entire industry is concentrating its cash in a select few._

[https://zachholman.com/posts/slow-exits](https://zachholman.com/posts/slow- exits)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13655855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13655855)

<comment><USER4> Holman was writing about slow exits, and how they keep employees illiquid and even claw back equity from those that leave.

Snap is not a slow exit. It may or may not produce a bunch of millionaires but it's definitely not what Holman was complaining about. In fact he would probably praise them for going public ASAP, like the old days.

<comment><USER3> Mmh. Yes, but I think the two are two sides of the same coin. Not only are exits rarer, but the companies who do exit produce fewer people who are then in a position to keep the innovation cycle going. Holman touches on a few reasons why in his post: _"...concentration of wealth, and legal stipulations like gnarly 90 day exercise windows"_.

<comment><USER4> The exercise window is a non-issue after a company goes public. That's his main complaint about what's keeping wealth tied up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Not everyone is happy with the changes. Gentrification has pushed artists and working families out of Venice. Some restaurants have shut down because they can no longer pay soaring rents. In response, some politicians and residents in Venice have pushed for density restrictions, said Emil Schneeman, a real estate agent at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services._

Why has no community adequately planned for this sort of tech boom? Looks like the tragedy of the Bay Area housing crisis is going to replay itself, again and again. Seattle and Austin have already faced similar challenges.

<comment><USER6> I think its largely due to selfish residents in these cities. Other than a few property developers who would benefit from building lots of condos most of the residents benefit from keeping development at bay. They enjoy increased housing values, fewer new homes built keeps the "character" of the city the same and less new people who can afford to live in the area maybe results in less traffic (probably not as people just commute long distances and its worse but residents are often delusional).

<comment><USER7> Not all residents, but just home/land owners, I think.

I think current renters have reasons to want price pressure to stay down as much as new ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those who do not remember pets.com are doomed to repeat it.

This IPO is going to wipe out the unicorn bubble. The valuations for this company are utterly delusional.

It's being pumped on all the investment forums by people who seem to honestly believe that the embarrassingly dorky Spectacles are going to be the next iPhone, even though investors seem to be the only people who have even heard of the thing.

This IPO is going to tank.

<comment><USER9> People said that about FB in 2012. And I dislike FB as much as the next guy.

Why do you think it's overvalued? And pets.com was in a fundamentally different situation. So fundamentally different that you might as well compare it to Enron.

I think that you are overestimating the speed at which the stock market corrects itself esp when it comes to tech. Look at Twitter. It's technically dying but it wasn't a fast death.

<comment><USER10> Well Facebook built some actual technology. They aren't just making picture filters for genetalia.

<comment><USER11> > They aren't just making picture filters for genetalia.

And therein lies a wildly inept understanding of Snapchat that is so common among people outside of its main demographic.

<comment><USER12> Is it really wildly inept though? I truly cannot wrap my head around what value Snapchat brings the world, outside of maybe yet another way to ultimately advertise to young people. Just to be clear I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't get it.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, selling crap to young people is a totally valid business model. I just don't see any evidence that snapchat can do it.

<comment><USER13> Can you ELI5 this for me? I've worked since I was 16, and sure it was pure profit, but I still feel like adults should have a bit more disposable income.

It's something I've always wondered about with the movie industry and it obviously seems to be the groupthink across the board about young kids.

<comment><USER14> There's a golden period between the time when your parents are making financial decisions for you and when you make your own financial decisions where your habits are in flux.

If an advertiser can reach you during that time and convince you to change behaviors, they've locked in a lifetime pattern. Pretty much everyone, for all but the few things they care about, once they form a habit, will continue on that habit until some event is big enough to jolt them out of it. Once you've decided what kind of cereal you eat and shoes you wear and car you buy, it's exceedingly hard for advertisers to reach you and change your mind.

That's why 18-35 is such an important demo for advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Los Angeles already has an established and healthy "tech scene" although it's not a tech industry per se. Film and aerospace industries require extraordinary tech resources.

</comment><comment><USER9> Out of the 1900 employees, how many are actually going to become millionaires at a company like Snapchat?

<comment><USER16> Snapchat has 1900 employees? That's way more than I expected.

For comparison, that's 5x the size of Valve, and around 2x the size of Riot Games. Snapchat is doing nowhere near the amount of work being done at either Valve or Riot, as far as I can tell at least. So is this just a case of "growing because we have money", or is there in fact a legitimate reason behind such a large workforce?

<comment><USER17> Why are you comparing Snapchat to video game developers? They are a social media company and advertising platform and are pioneers of a new technology (AR). They should be compared to their peers.

<comment><USER18> I guess because physics based lighting engines with online realtime interaction are more complex than social networks and messaging.

<comment><USER19> Valve does not rely on advertising, and therefore does not require hundreds of salespeople, marketers, and ad account managers.

<comment><USER16> Why do you make that sound like a bad thing? I'd say good on Valve for finding a reliable and scalable revenue stream.

<comment><USER19> How does my post make it sound like a bad thing? My tone is completely neutral. I was explaining why there are so many employees.

<comment><USER16> My apologies, you are right.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your competitors Twitter followers = your next contact list - <AUTHOR> http://13.7billionyearslater.net/2010/11/20/contact-thousands-of-potential-customers-by-looking-at-who-follows-your-competitors-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Words can barely express how much I love being spammed by competitors of a company I like enough to follow on Twitter. I'll certainly rush to give them a try, not hit them block button and mentally file them under 'wilfully does not understand Internet etiquette, arrogant assholes happy to waste strangers time to hawk their crap'.

<comment><USER3> It's good information, if used correctly.

Just spamming them is the wrong approach. However, you can pull these records into your own DB and then use this as a lookup table (for example: when people sign up to contact them directly to close the sale).

Probably some other creative uses as well. As long as it avoids spamming everyone at once.

<comment><USER4> does twitter offer an email->twitter handle lookup API?

<comment><USER5> They used to. Probably they removed it to prevent this very case.

Here's the related issue #: <http://code.google.com/p/twitter- api/issues/detail?id=353>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The much better approach would be to find about 5-10 competitors on Twitter and take the intersect of all their followers. Those are people that actually care about your market.

I saw an app on App Engine out there that did this, and I've considered for a long time trying to make a business out of tools like this to analyze competitor's usage of social media to attempt to find decent leads.

</comment><comment><USER7> So this guy is openly declaring his intent to spam a bunch of people.

Honestly, good luck with that. Twitter has a lot of measures in place to prevent people from abusing this sort of thing. For example, you can't just auto add 10,000 people (you technically can, but Twitter will ban you).

<comment><USER8> Well, yes, but this is still quite interesting (imho).

In the old days, the competitor had an email list. You couldn't know how many or who were subscribed. In a twitter world, it's all out in the open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad idea.

However, you can quickly target people who evangelize your competitors by tracking which of those followers who re-tweet and follow competitors on other social networks.

Those are really the users that you want. Identify them and give them a reason to get behind you.

Mass following any group of people on any social network won't increase your reach. Targeting specific groups of users, identifying what they want and giving that to them will.

<comment><USER10> to do this, try:

\- going to <http://twitya.com>

\- enter competitor's twitter account, hit return

\- see which users are replying or mentioning the competitor

\- enter into a conversation with each one

\- if they won't use or try your product, they might at least follow you if you give good reason, and are courteous.

\- also see the friends of the competitor that you can follow too

\- read the competitor's tweets

<comment><USER9> Or just build your own. It's super easy with the API's and can be customized with much better search-and-match rules than anything out in the wild.

Some of my personal favorite stats are to watch people who RT more than once over a set time period about the competition.

"Like terms" is also handy because then you can add terms that are directly related but not identical to your competitor.

I'm sure that the big brand folks are already doing this and that there are paid tools ... but on a smaller scale, it's fast and easy to whip this sort of monitoring up.

The hard part is figuring out what these people want. You really need to have an insight into the weaknesses of your competition to accomplish that.

<comment><USER10> I mentioned Twitya cos I built it :) What you mention sounds great, and you could also run some twitter searches and subscribe to their feeds. The Twitter ecosystem is so rich, and there'd be crossover involved between different apps, and apps are being improved and new ones released continuously, with this itself a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Beyond the spam issue, the twitter follower list isn't a very accurate list of people with genuine interest in a person or topic anymore. There are so many people and bots and who simply follow in the quest for reciprocation or at the behest of the twitter suggestion engine without genuine interest

</comment><comment><USER12> I would target people who are not completely satisfied with the competitor's product. If I see people tweeting competitors asking for feature X, where my product already has X, I will send them a message.

</comment><comment><USER13> When I saw the word "clickbank" this post suddenly made a lot more sense..

</comment><comment><USER14> It's the right idea, just waaay too simplistic. Twitter is very useful for finding people who may fit your target audience, but it's not a spam and split deal – you need to build up value in your own Twitter acct. to get people interested. Spam is spam, even on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER15> The idea should not be mass spam. But you can always try to see who are the influencers in that list and then contact them through email personally asking to beta test your service and be early adopters. There is nothing wrong with this approach.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's easy to build a mailing list by using Twitter properly. I know one example of a 60,000+ email list built from a single Twitter account in around two years (2007-2009).

Messaging those who follow a competitor is just the smallest fraction of the techniques available for using Twitter for business, and one of the least effective. It doesn't scale well, for example. Also, by analyzing data across multiple social networks, a much wider variety of effective, non-spammy marketing possibilities emerge.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think having 10000 followers on twitter means much in terms of numbers, because lot of people just play the "you follow-I follow" game there. But there is a good chance of finding some 100 odd genuinely interested followers who sooner or later might use the service. So, although it sounds like spam but not a bad idea at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Earn money by selling your documents, ebooks, music and photography."

That's a stupid idea. First, are they your documents (that is you own them)? For photos, music, ebook... there are already dedicated services working on that. I mean "dedicated". I don't think that a general one will beat them in term of features, support and promotion.

Other things, like Music or Documents. First, you may not own them, so it'll be illegal selling them. Second, if you do, who will sell their private documents and who's the heck will buy them???

<comment><USER19> Don't like to read articles much? Take a look at clickbank.com.

They seem to be doing alright with a "stupid idea".

<comment><USER13> Clickbank is a cesspool of spam and garbage.

<comment><USER19> Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: What movies from an IMDB list can you watch on Netflix? - <AUTHOR> http://carmelaacevedo.herokuapp.com/netflix/ls003501243 <comment><USER2> It's unclear if the results are for a specific country or in any country's library. Would be handy to identify which countries' libraries contain each item or have the ability to specify the country.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I wasn't aware of the different availabilities. I am almost certain that the current API that I'm using is just for the US library. I'm looking into other possible API's that would offer this information!

<comment><USER3> Yeah i need one for Japan - i know that we don't have everything available here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> does this just take the lists? not watchlist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Any public list will work. You just need to find the ID that is in the form ls[number].

For watchlists you can find it by looking at the "Export this list" link at the bottom of it</comment></comment>


This robot butler follows you around and carries your stuff - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2017/02/22/robot-butler-follows-around-carries-stuff/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-02/22/2017&tuid=748a83862069520d960f813bcff4827565ce62f2#.tnw_8IR8rtYF <comment><USER2> Should have called it Lydia

"I am sworn to carry your burdens."</comment>


Do Not Fear the White Space in Your Code - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/suckup_de/do-not-fear-the-white-space-in-your-code-39d0 <comment><USER2> This is terrific. My own personal C coding standard has evolved over the last few years to include quite a bit of "useless" whitespace including vertical space. I'm no longer coding on an 80x24 terminal or something like that, so why force myself to continue to code as if I was?</comment>


Doing business in a bankrupt state - <AUTHOR> http://manylogue.com/doing-business-in-a-bankrupt-state/

<comment><USER2> For a second, I thought he was talking about California.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also a good mention is exchanging tangible assets or safe currency. For example using EU dollars for transactions because it's backed more.

And, security. Always good in an unstable environment.

<comment><USER4> The currency is stable, that is part of the problem. Because their debt is nominated in euro and not in a currency they can inflate or devalue they'll have to actually pay back what they have spend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >" Doing business in a bankrupt state"....Is not that hard. Pointless article.

<comment><USER6> It might not be that hard, but getting the lay of the land is at minimum useful. Especially if your nation and/or state may well end up in a similar mess (e.g. US, California/Illinois/New York).</comment></comment>


Command Line Tools for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.toptal.com/software/best-command-line-tools <comment><USER2> The title is highly misleading. A more accurate title would be "Get started with the command line as a developer", or "Introduction to standard CLI tools for beginners".</comment>


Show HN: Client-side JavaScript error recording and XHR logging for bug reports - <AUTHOR> https://usersnap.com/features/console-recorder

<comment><USER2> Nice! Not sure if you knew about it, but sentry does javascript, python, php, golang, and several other languages all with one super nice user interface. It was originally developed by disqus, but now spun off into a hosted version as well. The code is 100% open source and I suggest it to anyone with a serious production webapp.

[https://github.com/getsentry/sentry](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry)

[http://getsentry.com](http://getsentry.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we know sentry! Usersnap focus on client-side recording of user-reported bugs - you'll even get a screenshot of the current situation.

<comment><USER2> That is pretty awesome. Thanks for releasing this!</comment></comment></comment>


Apple goes to war with the gaming industry - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/09/apple-goes-to-war-with-the-gaming-industry/ <comment><USER2> Huge, complicated companies like Apple don't see the world as you or I do. They see the world through whatever sensors they're equipped with, and they respond to what those sensors are fed by other parts of the company. They are fed a collection of proxy metric for reality.

That's why they behave in funny, distorted ways, like pissing off their developer community and acting baffled that the community is getting irritated.</comment>


What If You Go to Harvard and End Up a Nobody? - <AUTHOR> https://www.financialsamurai.com/what-if-you-go-to-harvard-and-end-up-a-nobody/ <comment><USER2> Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it</comment>


The U.S. Digital Services Playbook - <AUTHOR> https://playbook.cio.gov/ <comment><USER2> My playbook for the U.S. Digital Services: throw away the fucking playbook.

You can already see them sitting in meetings for months discussing each bullet point on the playbook, getting nothing done.

<comment><USER3> You do realize this wasnt created "by the government" but instead Mikey Dickerson who was poached from Google to fix healthcare.gov

I think it would be worthwhile to read instead of "throw away the fucking playbook" site unseen

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that this sentence, from Play 8 "Choose a modern technology stack," could have far reaching significance:

"In particular, digital services teams should consider using open source, cloud based, and commodity solutions across the technology stack, as these solutions have seen widespread adoption and support by the most successful private-sector consumer and enterprise software technology companies."

Note "open source." I doubt that companies like Microsoft and Oracle are very pleased to be reading this directive.

If the directive is taken seriously by government agencies, especially by DoD, the benefits could be very large, I daresay even transformational for the open-source ecosystem and the companies built upon it.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't the DoD already take Open Source very seriously?

<comment><USER6> Yep.

Not seriously enough IMHO, but I was using open source _in my job_ as far back as 2006, on gear that wasn't even that new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mikey absolutely rocks.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Make it simple and intuitive

Wish the back button worked. This whole section is comprised of good points, so it's a shame that this simple brochure site doesn't follow.

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/whitehouse/playbook/pulls](https://github.com/whitehouse/playbook/pulls)</comment></comment>


Open source has won. Microsoft surrendered - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3144063/open-source-tools/open-source-has-won-and-microsoft-has-surrendered.html <comment><USER2> While I appreciate the things MS has done recently with OSS I think this article is overly optimistic.

I agree they have changed and in a lot of ways for the better. But MS is a huge company and it seems to me that one hand doesn't always realize what the other is doing.

I will remain cautiously optimistic about "winning" over MS for now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft is adept in the art of embrace, extend, extinguish. And they still have enormous resources compared to most open source projects (as opposed to open source deployments).

Open source still has what may be critical, focused points of failure. Low bus number (as in, taken out by) focii and junctions.

I'm not up to speed on the latest changes. But if actions speak louder than words, there's a lot of past -- and contemporary -- action to counter-balance, before I and I think many others will put trust in MS initiatives.

</comment><comment><USER4> I _hope_ Microsoft turns out to be a spineless, inmediate profit-seeking corporation it's always been so far. It has just been turning its sails towards the wind in the past few years. Their hegemony was gone, bundling wouldn't work anymore. If they want me to use SQL Server it must come without the baggage of Windows.

MS is getting off their ass after 25 years! It's the year everybody congratulated GNU/Linux for their achievements!

edit: s:ggg:gg:g

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe because I'm not very knowledgeable about this topic, but I do not get the argument here.

Microsoft isn't a threat to Linux because they say so? Or did the market really change that fundamentally? I'm a bit lost here..

<comment><USER6> Microsoft used to only lose money from people choosing Linux instead of Windows. Now the fastest growing part of their business is Azure servers. 40% of them and growing are Linux. Their CEO is from the Azure branch of the company, the platform-agnostic part. More and more, Microsoft is going to rely on Linux servers and Android phones as their profit centers. Instead of hurting their business, it's helping them.

<comment><USER7> It almost sounds as if Microsoft is the next IBM. Rather than crush everyone else, they're finding out it's very profitable to service everyone else's hardware and software.

At the same time, though, Microsoft is selling Surface bundled with its OS despite overall market declines in new laptops. I'd bet the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, HP, and Toshiba aren't very happy about that sort of encroachment from a vendor upon whom they've come to depend. They advertise it against the Macbook using largely features a tablet or phone has, but many of their customers' laptops are also touchscreen and lightweight.

They've set themselves up as a game publisher alongside the people to whom they used to just sell OSes and developers' tools. Don't they even have a couple in-house development studios for games? So now you buy your X-Box, your Windows, your Visual Studio, and your X-Box SDK then write your game and give Microsoft a cut to sit on a shelf next to content of theirs.

SQL Server on Linux might interfere some with Oracle and IBM's DB/2\. It's also likely to try to take share away from Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite. There are lots of extensions to SQL Server already. Don't be surprised if they after a few years they make it really easy to come from other DBMSes but hard to leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

They haven't changed their philosophy one bit.

<comment><USER9> That's the Ballmer Doctrine and he's toast. His scorched Earth policies lead to things like the Zune, products like Bing getting almost zero traction, and the endless, futile struggle for Windows Phone to register at all on world- wide usage metrics.

Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.

Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.

Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving 100% market share.

Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make products that people _wanted_ , to win by simply being technically better: More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.

Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.

<comment><USER10> Gates was quite a cut throat business man. He might be the warm philanthropist gates now, but he was quite the cut throat business man back in the day. How do you think Netscape market share went from like 90% to pretty much 0?

<comment><USER11> I think the point of having an Internet browser preinstalled when you bought a computer had some merits. I can't think of many consumer computing devices that don't come with a pre installed browser these days.

In retrospect the whole DoJ trial seems rather quaint to be honest.

Plus it wasn't as if you couldn't install Netscape and decide through personal choice to use that over IE.

Compare that with iOS where not only does it come with Safari pre installed, but if you install any other browser it HAS to run WebKit and cannot provide functionality Apple doesn't allow.

Objectively that seems to be a lot more protectionist and subject to anti- trust laws than anything Microsoft ever did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Microsoft & Linux & Patents & Tweets"

[https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux- patent...](https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-patents- tweets/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sincerely asking, how long would it take for Microsoft to release their own distro or would they rather buy SUSE or Canonical?</comment>