How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/ <comment><USER2> As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me.

RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT because Qualcomm holds CDMA patents and they won't license them to anyone. Finally, Qualcomm was, while very technically competent, will give you no assistance whatsoever if you deviate from what they want you to do. Basically 'my way or the highway.'

Edit: As an aside, my heart goes out to Intel's defunct Infineon-based 5G modem team.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems.

Here is the thing. If Apple sold a 2G network based iPhone with a non Qualcomm IP modem, and a 4G iPhone at 2x the price with a Qualcomm modem, which one would make more money for Apple?

<comment><USER4> Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm? Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

<comment><USER5> > Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

<comment><USER6> But they're adding a fixed amount of value regardless of the phone, and so they should get a fixed sum per phone. This business where they get a percentage of the retail price is ridiculous.

Consider the 64 GB iPhone XS selling for $1000 vs the 512 GB one for $1349. Is Qualcomm adding any extra value to the second phone as compared to the first one? Obviously not, so why should they capture any of the extra purchase price?

<comment><USER7> At least for the license with Apple, it was capped at the first $400 of the phone. I.e. it was a flat rate for virtually all iPhones.[0]

For the industry at large it was $500 (now $400) [1]

[https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/47691-apple-qualcomm- licens...](https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/47691-apple-qualcomm-license- issue-is-about-13-usd-per-device) [0]

[https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-qualcomm- licensing/qualco...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-qualcomm- licensing/qualcomms-patent-deals-aim-to-ease-apple-regulator-tensions-exec- says-idUSKBN1I22IP) [1]

<comment><USER5> I believe there was no flat rate. I think during the first FTC trial, it was revealed that Apple paid on average $7.50 per device, or ~$230 (Foxconn's wholesale price for iPhones) x 3.25 = $7.50

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After reading through the comments quarreling about whether Qualcomm and Apple are acting within their rights to charge monopoly-sized rent where they can, and do, it's hard for me to fathom the depths of confusion Americans are reduced to whenever these topics come up.

First and foremost: when you are as big as Qualcomm and Apple are in their respective spheres, you don't _need_ rights. You have POWER, which is far, far better, especially when you can use it to extract money to buy more power with.

Rights are for little people. Qualcomm has been at this for _decades_. How long can you get away with just parking your car in the wrong place?

Second, when you talk about abuse of monopoly power, it makes no sense to look at it from the standpoint of the monopolist. Everything is stacked in their favor. The important question is, what can the little guy do? Not other companies, even though they complain most effectively (like Apple or Intel complaining about Qualcomm), or even small ones that can't. They would all love to be monopolies too, and sometimes are. What matters is, what is the experience of somebody who got an iPhone for her quinceaña, or of the farmer stuck with a busted John Deere tractor?

Each is obliged to pay a huge premium -- for software, or repairs -- because the 400-pound gorilla can force the matter. The fact that somebody else has an Android phone or an IH tractor doesn't help either of them. Each is stuck with what Apple or Deere is willing to let them have.

The law doesn't need to define a monopoly: only a monopoly can exercise monopoly power, so it suffices to look for that happening. Any monopoly not visibly abusing its monopoly power has nothing to worry about, because nobody can tell.

Anti-trust law doesn't make it illegal to have a monopoly. It just says that if you choose to make one -- and every monopoly chose it -- different rules apply. The law defines lots of rules, but the DOJ has chosen to ignore almost all because of a lately fashionable notion promoted by Chicago-school economists that nothing matters except high prices. Under the law there is a hell of a lot of monopoly abuse nobody at DOJ will even look at, that have all kinds of deleterious results. Anybody who wants to do anything about any of it gets mobbed by defenders of monopolists' rights.

And that's where we are today. Qualcomm got in trouble by making things unpleasant for other 400-pound gorillas, and we get to watch. Offenses against us are entirely ignored, and now people insist that's normal and right, law or no law.

<comment><USER9> _Offenses against us are entirely ignored..._

Meanwhile everybody _else_ is saying that US antitrust law is concerned entirely with consumer harm and not with competition. Although in this case the consumer harm seems to be that a >$750 phone costs ~$20 more than it might otherwise.

<comment><USER8> No, nobody thinks the enforcement is about consumers. Obviously it is on behalf of Apple and, maybe, Intel. But case law says they have to cite costs to consumers, so that is how the complaint reads.

A zillion other companies do the same things, and much worse for "consumers", but are less openly greedy toward other big companies, so are ignored.

<comment><USER8> That said, Qualcomm's bad behavior has harmed the rest of us far, far more than just costing us a little extra for each phone. That Intel and Samsung have not been able to enter the market means that Qualcomm gets to dictate not just prices, but what you can buy. As the only implementer of many standards, they get to say what will be in standards, so the standards are ruinously complex to keep anybody smaller from being able to implement them. They get to dictate what RF engineers are paid. And so on. Monopoly power is poison wherever it operates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The strangle hold is extremely bad for security, too. All of those Qualcomm chips are designed as black boxes. Nobody knows what kind of horrible flaws are inside them because trying to get at the code is like trying to rob the federal reserve.

We need open source 3/4/5G chips, but the R & D cost would be astronomical. If you ever think that TCP/IP is complicated check out the mobile system specs some time! They span 1000s of pages... It's amazing to me how much complexity is there. Those phone engineers deserve way more money, IMO.

<comment><USER11> Where can one take a look at those specs? Are there RFC like things available?

<comment><USER12> Here's the landing point I use: [https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification- numbering](https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering)

In particular, serie 36 is for the LTE RAN (radio access network) while series 38 is for the NR (~5G) RAN. But other series are relevant, for the core and services parts among (many) other things.

All the specs are publicly accessible, and also the change requests (CR) submitted for discussion at the standardization meetings, as well as the minutes. From a spec page you can get to its history and the related CRs. Now of course, there are side discussions but the process is still very open in practice. But it's really huge, don't really expect to make sense of it with a little casual looking around. It takes some real time investment and commitment.

Another point to keep in mind: the cellular industry has one of the most demanding certification process for consumer grade devices. And operators often add on top of this. You don't want buggy devices messing up a shared medium, particularly when it's a scarce resource in many places (high density urban area at peak time). If designing a cellular modem is hard, making it go successfully through certification and also work well in the field and pass the tiers 1 operators field trials (drive tests in particularly harsh locations) and interoperability tests is even harder.

A lot of people miss this part. It takes millions in test equipment just to get ready to enter certification, and that's not the main cost. Even if it's painful, it's also important to make sure things work reasonably well in such complex, multi-parties systems. Which is why certification is legally required to operate in many places (e.g.: Europe requires GCF certification). There are open implementation of LTE, but none certified and legally usable in the field because of this.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the great info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is a good read, adding a lot of context to my understanding of the Qualcomm/Apple spat and it's merits. You can see in the history there were several potential market opportunities that companies were unable to act on due to Qualcomm's behavior.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is Qualcomm a ruthless monopolist? Yep. But what people forget is that _EVERYBODY_ was knifing one another in that space when CDMA originally came out. The only difference is that Qualcomm is the ruthless monopolist that won.

In addition, while I have no love lost for Qualcomm, what you do have to remember is that CDMA was a "bet the farm" moment. If CDMA could be delivered, it was significantly better than what existed at the time.

However, there was no promise that a power amplifier could be delivered with the specifications demanded by CDMA--Qualcomm bet that they could. Rockwell had a worldwide monopoly on CDMA power amplifiers for years because they were delivering that amp, and the yield was _abysmal_.

The original Qualcomm stuff was a significant engineering achievement, and, while they probably don't deserve to continue to abuse their position at this point, they certainly deserved some time to profit from their work.

<comment><USER15> What other corporation requires paying to license their patent portfolio in order to be allowed buy their products? I don't have to pay for a license from McDonald's to eat their burger. I'm not an expert in this domain, so there might be more relevant example.

Update: fixed up my wording.

<comment><USER16> You do have to agree to the McDonald's app terms and conditions so you can get its benefits, like skipping the line. You pay twice: first, with money; then, with data.

<comment><USER15> You're paying to skip the line using data, but you're not paying for the meal with data. If you could only purchase the meal using the app, then you could make the argument that some part of the meal price could be paid from the data itself. I don't know if there are vending machines that will only sell if you have the relevant app installed first, but I think those come closer.

However, unless the terms of service of any of those approaches penalized me for buying a meal at Burger King, then we aren't quite at the same level of scrutiny as opposed to what was reported to have happened in this article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Part of this comes from the willingness of EE standards bodies to standardize on stuff that is covered by patents.

I was going to say "part of the blame" but it was Qualcomm's choice to take advantage of this. Rambus is another bad guy in this regard.

<comment><USER18> This +1. Imagine if ECMA script or the ISO C++ standard were covered by patents.

<comment><USER19> Well there is that one company that keeps claiming that they own C++ and keeps trying to sue people for using it.

<comment><USER8> Oh? Please expand.

<comment><USER19> Sorry for the late response. A company named SCO claims they own the language. They obviously don't (possibly just a specific compiler), but they still try (or tried for a while) to charge licensing fees. I'm having a hard time finding references to this now, but here are two links that talk a bit about it:

[https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/](https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/)

[http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues](http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find great irony in Qualcomm exercising a monopoly position to take a % of total phone price from Apple... since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue.

What Apple thinks would be fair for Qualcomm chip license fees would also be reasonable for App Store fees.

<comment><USER21> Apple doesn't get a percent cut of _Android_ app sales.

<comment><USER22> I don't think this "blunte" guy really quite understands what people in the cell phone industry mean when they say that Qualcomm had a stranglehold on everything.

They mean _everything_. Every thin dime spent anywhere you care to spend it. There really exists nothing else quite like Qualcomm around out there. We tend to throw the monopoly word around so loosely that we start to equate things like Apple and Qualcomm. It really does make it difficult to try to generate support to dig out from under abusive companies like Qualcomm when they have an army of people out there advancing the narrative that they are no different than any other company.

Meanwhile real engineers are losing their livelihoods by the thousands when companies succumb to the Qualcomm chokehold. Then a lot of those engineers have to go work for Qualcomm. Etc etc, on and on. It's sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I recently worked with a technical VP at a chip foundry in South Korea. One day Quallcom came up in discussion and he said "Qualcomm are like gangsters in the industry".

<comment><USER5> I know this is completely tangential, but just wondering if Apple ever came up in discussion.

<comment><USER24> Apple is the gangster in the hood.

<comment><USER25> What Apple did to/with that glass foundry that went under was straight-up gangster.

<comment><USER26> And because of that the little glass (actually sapphire) company´s execs are in court for fraud and the little glass company Apple raised from obscurity (Gorilla) is doing pretty well - Right. Gangster

<comment><USER25> I might be missing your sarcasm (as they are not 'little'), but are you suggesting that Apple raised the 168 year old, S&P 500 _Corning Glass_ from obscurity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article makes it sound like Apple and Intel and poor victims of Qualcomm's bullying. That is hardly the case. Both are much bigger than Qualcomm, and have been bullies in their own way. Funny to see them cry wolf

<comment><USER28> Try working at say LG, HTC, BlackBerry, anyone that wasn't top dog in their ecosystem.

You pay Qualcomm a lot of money just to get access to the modems, but they'll ignore you for bug fixes, firmware, etc...

The word Qualcomm drop (update in the Qualcomm code) sent a shiver down my spine. They'd fix one bug and introduce two others, that is if the bug big enough that they couldn't simply ignore you in the first place.

<comment><USER29> This is more or less totally false more than any other hardware vendor Qualcomm delivers working phones to its chipset customers so that they can copy and modify the designs and so that they succeed it's the failure of Intel to provide a well-integrated working product to customers that made them flop. Qualcomm provides demo phones and schematics for every generation of chipset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The monopolistic position of qualcomm has ~~not only~~ perhaps driven up prices, but of even greater concern, has created a single point of failure for phone security.

I have concerns that, even as full device encryption has evolved and many of us have moved communication to more secure media (Signal, Riot, etc), the very baseband chip of the phone is still acting like a bug in our homes.

<comment><USER5> > The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices,

What is your evidence of such claim?

<comment><USER30> I think that a monopolistic shake down of this nature is always connected to price increases, but you're right that I don't have specific evidence.

And in any case, my comment is not about prices, but about security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> for a counter view on this from yesterdays WSJ [https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust- ov...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust- overreach-11559085055) this is by the FTC commissioner (the agency that sued Q)

<comment><USER32> Very interesting I had not seen this.

Note there are five ftc commissioners. Christine Wilson is one of three republicans. She is unfortunately the one who seems the most trumpian. She misleadingly quotes a filing her own agency made in this op-ed. Because of that, and a few other turns of phrase in here that appear frequently in Qualcomm PR (such as the factually incorrect statement that this case was filed during the Obama administration--it was actually filed under Trump) I'm willing to bet a lot of money Qualcomm wrote this and gave it to her and she signed off on it.

<comment><USER31> it was filed when the last administration was on the way out but still had dem majority. also see the dissent written by one of the commissioner at that time. [https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualc...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualcomm_mko_dissenting_statement_17-1-17a.pdf) i feel the ars article is a hit job as is the PR from Q.

<comment><USER33> I just looked at the FTC government archives from 1919-2009 and there is a gap after 2008 with missing volumes 146-148.

[https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/commission...](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/commission-decision-volumes)

Does anyone know why this is the case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems it is pretty much a one sided opinion against Qualcomm, without taking a look into actual details. I read the 233 page report, and I have to admit I am surprised at how some of the wordings and conclusion the judge came to be. ( And I was very surprised how Ars's Author read the report and did not question anything about it )

And in defence of Qualcomm, I would post a few links from people that had the same thought as I did. [1] Is the Qualcomm information, I think it provides a angle just how much Qualcomm has spent on R&D. While I don't normally consider Cnet as Quality source of news, Shara Tibken [2] has been following the Apple and Qualcomm Trial and has been in the court for every trial between the two, reporting on the "exact" wordings some of these people gave in court. There were lots of details, and Qualcomm clearly has some very decent explanation in every accusation against them. And somehow none of these made it into many other mainstream media.

Patrick Moorhead wrote about this [4][5] and I agree with him on every thing ( Apart from the US politics which I am not well versed in ). Things Such as the "common interest agreement" Apple has with the FTC, and Huawei's involvement. Along with completely ignoring the defendant's testimony. It really opens my eyes as to how US law system works compared to UK or Germany.

And I would just like to remind everyone, Hating Qualcomm, Qualcomm doing wrong, and Qualcomm is a monopoly are 3 different things.

[1] [https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc](https://www.qualcomm.com/ftc)

[2] [https://twitter.com/sharatibken](https://twitter.com/sharatibken)

[3] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/05/28/ftc- case-against-qualcomm-gets-weirder-with-northern-district-of-ca-court- ruling/#74c6752412bf)

[4][https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/03/31/the-10-most- bizarre-things-about-the-ftc-qualcomm-case/#599798d72d5f)

</comment><comment><USER35> And congress will do nothing about IP, specifically patents as it relates to this story.

<comment><USER36> I wish... patent reform on extension patents in particular in addition to a dual sourcing requirement from the FDA would let a more natural market take care of a lot of what's wrong with medications.

In general, at this point, I'd love to see the entire patent system dismantled rather than keep what we have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So why did Apple decide to make its own SOCs but not its own modem chips?

I would expect making CPUs and GPUs to be a lot more difficult than modems, no?

<comment><USER9> CPU design and RF stuff are both very difficult; I wouldn't assume one way or the other. I wonder if knowledge of CPU design is more widely dispersed (e.g. you can hire ex-Intel, ex-AMD, ex-IBM people) than cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.

<comment><USER38> > cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.

Seems strange, given that plenty of manufacturers are making the radios on the _other_ side of the cellular connection. Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?

<comment><USER39> > Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo > their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?

Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM dominance Intel hasn't managed to get anything meaningful.

<comment><USER40> Intel could probably do it if they had the luxury of redesigning their instruction set. They're stuck with supporting an overly CISC-based instruction set whose roots date back to the early 1970s. ARM didn't have that problem and designed a much more modern RISC-like instruction set which requires a lot less power.

<comment><USER41> This argument has held progressively less weight since 1995, when Intel released the Pentium Pro and started the precedent of deciding x86 CISC instructions into the micro-ops which are actually executed. ARM is a respectable architecture and Apple has shipped some very competitive chips but it's not like Intel's engineers have been in a coma for forty years.

<comment><USER42> All the moving pieces in Intel x86-to-RISC decoding (instruction decoder, μop cache, Microcode Sequencer ROM...) use up a non-trivial amount of silicon and power.

<comment><USER43> I'm not sure. If that were the case why wouldn't intel expose a native, better fit to uops instruction set in addition to the legacy, difficult to decode one and let the apps use the newer ones (or the subset of existing ones which do map well)?

<comment><USER42> My guess is (1) inertia, and (2) not wanting to commit to a specific instruction set because they tweak the internal μop set with every release.

And (3), this would _add_ complexity, because, even though one is much simpler, now you need two completely separate decoding pipelines and mechanisms for switching between them.

<comment><USER43> Can't argue with 1. For 2 it's still an instruction set separate from uops so you might not be as sensitive to changes you still get a level of indirection. For 3 .. it depends. You might gain in power if you use the newer one more and you might as well make the older one simpler to achieve 90% of speed maybe. But maybe the decoding of instructions that counts is not that expensive compared to OOO branch predictors and 512 bits ALUs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sounds like we should just abolish patents.

</comment><comment><USER45> From everything I hear from him, Judge Koh is consistently one of the better judges I have seen in some time.

<comment><USER29> I don't think so at least if you look at the background of this journalist he writes 100% hit pieces on the tech world. 100% hit pieces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I hate this entire situation and the article. The feds literally give Qualcomm an IP monopoly and then act all surprised when they exercise those powers. Then the fed expands its own powers to 'deal with it', and the cycle continues. Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was missing the three most important words in this ongoing battle: 1) baseband, 2) backdoors, 3) Huawei.

</comment><comment><USER48> America is rife with de facto monopolies and duopolies. That is our version of capitalism which champions competition but its all talk with little walk. That the government would pick on Qualcomm is a mystery to me. Its lobbyists must not have paid off the right people.

</comment><comment><USER49> Whilst it seems good to break up this market, it also was rather interesting to see Apple whinge about monopolist market behaviour. Pot calling the kettle black; how very hypocritical.

<comment><USER50> In which market does Apple have a monopoly?

<comment><USER49> App Store, in their ios ecosystem.

<comment><USER51> Jeep doesn't allow me to install my own apps on Uconnect. I guess they are a monopoly. Sirius, Apple, and Android are 3rd party products that are allowed on Uconnect but not my own.

<comment><USER52> > Jeep doesn't allow me to install my own apps on Uconnect. I guess they are a > monopoly.

Why wouldn't they be? Does someone else compete with them for distributing apps on Uconnect? Can you install Ford Sync apps on your Jeep?

<comment><USER51> Can I install android apps on my iPhone? Automakers like BMW have cut out people like Dinan when they locked down their firmware and refused to work with them.

Alpine and Pioneer probably make replacements for Uconnect (iPhone) but it is not even close to the integration I get with my Jeep and Uconnect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips."

Wow, shocking.

I'm surprised Jobs didn't gather a forum of all the handset makers to work as a cabal against QQcom on the issue.

<comment><USER29> Apple is a monopolist and now that the worldwide market for cell phones is shrinking it hates the thought that it is the highest-cost producer dependent on another monopolist. Qualcomm charges effectively a 4-5% VAT on the end-user price of a product. Qualcomm wanted to give the little guys a break. I worked on radio systems design and my wife worked directly for Irwin Jacobs. The big monopolist just fakring hates that the little guys have a chance. It's why you see Apple screaming louder than everybody ...

Apple is struggling to raise prices in everything they do these days. They invented the $1,500 phone. They make phones that more and more cannot be disassembled. They started soldering everything to the motherboards (phones, MacBooks). They now put lock down chips in the phone and the laptop so most of the hardware cannot be swapped out and repaired. They charge $500 to replace the back of a phone when Samsung charges $20. They make defective failure- prone keyboards and keep selling them 3 years after the market began complaining. They took out functionality and raised prices with USB C.

We are actually close to "peak apple" if you think about it for just 10 seconds. Growth under Tim Cook (mid-2012 to now) has been one third of growth under Steve Jobs (mid 2007-mid 2012).

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Cool story

</comment><comment><USER31> for a counter view by the current FTC commissioner [https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust- ov...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-courts-dangerous-antitrust- overreach-11559085055)</comment>


It's Hard Today to Know Where to Spend Your Time Learning - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/it_39_s_hard_today_to_know_where_to_spend_your_time_learning <comment><USER2> I agree with the authors views. I'd say its most valuable: 1\. Learn what you like 2\. Diversify your learning into non coding skills like finance and pyschology and understanding the complexity of the world. 3\. Learn a problem solving mindset thats domain independent. what do people here think?</comment>


Roboto: Google's signature font is now open source - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/05/roboto-googles-signature-font-is-now.html <comment><USER2> Also worth take a look at the Roboto specimen booklet which presents the font in a better light than the Google Fonts website (PDF): [http://material- design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/materi...](http://material- design.storage.googleapis.com/publish/material_v_3/material_ext_publish/0B0J8hsRkk91LNGdYTEF0VnVPT0k/RobotoSpecimenBooklet.pdf)

<comment><USER3> They say they keep updating it, which kind of makes me wonder what the best way is to keep up to date with the newest versions. Is there an automated way to do that? I don't like to manually check every other month if a font has a new version, and cloning the repo seems overkill if all I want is the output.

<comment><USER4> Oh wow, they got rid of the Helvetica-style R entirely. Good riddance, that's my least favorite thing about Helvetica.

<comment><USER5> I really appreciated they decided to blow away all the Helvetica characteristics and go straight for an inspired variation of Akzidenz-Grotesk. It looks great on print!

<comment><USER6> It's really come a long way since launch.

[http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is- a-f...](http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four- headed-frankenstein/)

Kudos to Stephen Coles for keeping that article updated as the font has evolved and improved.

<comment><USER7> The K's with the flat middle were horrible. Interesting that they were the only characters poached from Ronnia and now replaced with something more familar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not that many people respect font licensing, but the Roboto font has been Apache licensed since it was released (like the rest of AOSP and fonts previous to Roboto in Android). Moving to a full open production and tool chain is interesting though.

<comment><USER9> It was always Apache, but having these source files makes a huge difference on the "open source" part of "free and open source".

<comment><USER10> "Free and Open Source Software" (often abbreviated F/OSS) doesn't refer to two different features "free" and "open source", it attempts to bridge two different communities preferred terms for licensing with essentially identical features, OSI's "Open Source" [0] and FSF's "Free Software" [1].

Being Apache licensed already handled both the "open source" [2] and "free software" [3] parts.

[0] [http://opensource.org/osd-annotated](http://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html)

[2] [http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0](http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0)

[3] [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.en.html#apache2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.en.html#apache2)

<comment><USER11> Hmm... gnu.org is down for me and I can't actually check these articles to make sure I'm not imagining things, but I will link them anyway:

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for- freedom.en.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for- freedom.en.html)

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.e...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.en.html)

Probably you can understand simply by looking at the urls anyway ;-). To say that F/OSS doesn't refer to 2 different features, "free" and "open source", is to advance only one of the viewpoints from the 2 movements.

As much as it would be convenient if it were not the case, "free software" and "open source" software do, in fact, refer to different (although similar) things in many people's minds.

I am not the right person to explain the differences and if gnu.org were not down I would simply point you to the arguments that the FSF have against referring to free software as "open source". However, I will do my best to explain. Please verify what I'm about to say when you get the opportunity.

The intent of free software is to ensure that all users and programmers can deal with the software on a level playing field. By this I mean that one programmer can not use legal or technical mechanisms to have more capability than another. Everybody has the same access and ability to run the software for whatever purpose they want. They can inspect the source code in an un- obfuscated way. They can modify it in any way. They can distribute it, along with their modifications, to others. Most importantly, they can not do anything that will take away these abilities (either through legal or technical means) from others.

The licenses in the free software movement are a means to that end. The free software movement defines licenses that are free (in other words licenses which do not impose restrictions that would remove the level playing field). Some licenses, though, are free in and of themselves, but do not actually stop people from working in a non-freedom-oriented way (I'm sure I am not the only person frustrated that there is no antonym for "free software" \-- all commonly used ones being deprecated by the FSF).

For example, there are many licenses which are free licenses but which allow people to leverage the code in software that is not free. This creates an un- level playing field because those people can build on top of the software, extending it in a way that only they can use and then compete against the original project without being free. In other words, if project A is free software licensed with a permissive license, someone can make A+ which is essentially A but with more features. They can release this under a non-free license, competing against A and taking mind share without giving people the freedom to modify or distribute A+.

For this reason, people in the free software movement prefer some free licenses over others. Their entire reason for having the licenses in the first place is to avoid the situation described above.

The open source movement is not as concerned about the issue described above. While they advocate nearly identical methods, their goal is to encourage licenses that allow people to interoperate smoothly if they choose to do so.

In the open source movement, it is unreasonable to prefer licences that enforce software freedom over other OSI software licenses. In fact, many people in the open source movement consider these kinds of licenses to be undesirable because it stops them from using F/OSS to build products that are not free software -- in other words, they are diametrically opposed to software freedom and only cooperate in a similar fashion when it is advantageous for them.

In my opinion, the term "Free and Open Source Software" is useful for discussing the very large amount of area where the free software movement and the open source movement overlap. It is important not to conflate the two movements, though, because whether or not you value software freedom there are many people who do.

In my own usage, I prefer to use the term free software when I think that the freedom aspect of it is important. I use F/OSS when I am just talking about interoperating with people using free software/OSI licenses. I use OSS when I am talking about leveraging F/OSS into software that is not free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Screenshot:

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto)

<comment><USER13> thank you! was just looking for a quick example and was surprised to not see it immediately/obviously linked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Roboto is very nice and I use it a lot. Roboto Slab [0] is also good if you want a serif font instead.

[0] [https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab)

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope this is not a dumb question, but as I have no experience/knowledge in creating fonts, I will ask nevertheless.

I quickly scanned through the repo and assumed that the font is created programmatically through a Python script. Is that correct and a common way to build a new font?

<comment><USER16> The actual "Font" data lives in the `src/v2` directory. For example, open up "Roboto_Thin.ufo/glyphs" from here, and you'll see a lot of ".glyph" files. These are essentially SVG's it appears. The python script pulls this content together and generates appropriate font files (WOFF, TTF, etc).

<comment><USER17> Technically, they are GLIF files and not SVG. The GLIF format is specced here: [http://unifiedfontobject.org/versions/ufo3/glif.html](http://unifiedfontobject.org/versions/ufo3/glif.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> there's a LaTeX package (last version dating 2015-04-16) available [0] (with samples [1]):

 _This package provides LaTeX, pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX support for the Roboto, RobotoCondensed and RobotoSlab families of fonts, designed by Christian Robertson for Google_

[0] [https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/roboto](https://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/fonts/roboto)

[1] [http://ctan.uib.no/fonts/roboto/doc/samples.pdf](http://ctan.uib.no/fonts/roboto/doc/samples.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> I may be reading this wrong, but the only annoyance I would find with their toolchain is that it seems like their true source is the FontLab files which is not open source. The readme says that you should be able to edit the UFO files and generate the FontLab files from that, but it doesn't seem to be the process they are using. It would be nice for the UFO files to be the true source rather than a derived one.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, doing TrueType hinting more-or-less requires FontLab. There are other alternatives that are being developed, but by and large FontLab remains the industry tool for building TT-hints. Part of this talk by Tal Leming ([https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s](https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s)) explains some of the interchange issues with TT-hint formats. Long story short, everyone has a slightly different hinting compiler, and they're all proprietary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a font nerd here who can describe what makes Roboto unique?

<comment><USER21> I don't know specifics about this particular typeface (and I haven't been "into fonts" for a while), but Roboto is pretty much another typeface with some Grotesk (e.g. Helvetica) lineage. What can typically said about these sorts of new-fangled typefaces is that they're well-optimized for reading on screens and scale well to smaller sizes (that is to say, good for mobile). A simple example is that the x-height (i.e. the height the lowercase 'x', and thus roughly the height of most of the lowercase letters) is higher than a typeface made, say, sixty years ago. The x-height in this case looks to be about 70% - 75% the height of the capitals, which is pretty darned high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like the quick fox is no longer.

"Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack."

[https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto)

<comment><USER23> I can't tell what type of lower case 'g' i'm getting without looking deeper :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great, now we can have a monospace version for the terminal/editor.

<comment><USER25> I've been using Inconsolata (Consolas inspired) for a while now... but something closer to Roboto in terms of character coverage would be really nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wish the Literata font from Play books would become available.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e- boo...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046511/how-google-made-an-e-book-font- designed-for-any-screen)

</comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone tried to release an app into the iOS Appstore which uses this font? It looks great in my app and I'd like to know if there are going to be problems with Apple if I use this for an iOS/Android multi-platform app .. anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER28> Unfortunately, since a week or so it's all over YouTube. Arial was much easier to read.

</comment><comment><USER29> The thing most enjoyable about Roboto is how it's changes are a near perfect reflection of Google's design capability.

</comment><comment><USER30> If it's a "signature" font, isn't it covered by trademark, and would this not make any copyright licence irrelevant?

<comment><USER31> No.

<comment><USER30> Well alright then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hmm... What's up with this page?

"Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition has blocked a page! Malware detected! Access to this page has been blocked."

Any idea what's in there tripping out Bitdefender?

</comment><comment><USER33> The term "open source" only means that the source code is published; it says nothing about the license. Perhaps I'm nitpicking but the title of this post isn't very clear in my opinion.

<comment><USER34> [http://opensource.org/osd](http://opensource.org/osd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The font is still very ugly though.

</comment><comment><USER36> Shameless plug: Here's a poster I made recently using Roboto Slab:

[http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/when-doubt- move/](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2015/05/when-doubt-move/)

Edit: Is it bad etiquette here at HN to do shameless plugs for the purpose of finding work?

<comment><USER37> I didn't downvote you, but this struck me as quite a bit more shameless than most of the shameless plugs here. :)

But the downvotes might have been worth it. I'm sure some people clicked through.

<comment><USER36> Thanks, I'll try and behave myself more :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to deal w/ client where the 2 owners have each fired the other? - <AUTHOR>

So I'm dealing with a situation where the partners of one of my clients had a falling out, and now each are claiming to be the true owner of the client company.<p>So now each of them wants me to block the other from accessing the admin side of the website we built for them. I currently have both of them blocked, but that can't last forever. And obviously I'm requesting legal docs, but I'm curious if other people have dealt with this, and if so what they did. <comment><USER2> Don't get dragged into this. Insist that they agree on a third-party lawyer to handle the split, and you give the keys to that lawyer. Let them sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> > And obviously I'm requesting legal docs ...

And it hasn't occurred to your to hire a lawyer? Do you know the term "due diligence"? In the present context, due diligence means getting competent legal counsel, not asking the opinion of HN readers.

And if you don't get competent legal advice, because you are blocking both parties, in the long run they will both win, and you will lose.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have in-house counsel. And we even have access to a big SF firm. And we are getting both their opinions. But as they say the wheels of justice move slowly, and I basically have to decide on no access, access for one or the other or access for both, while waiting for the lawyers to sort through things. That's the issue.

<comment><USER3> > I basically have to decide on no access, access for one or the other or > access for both, while waiting for the lawyers to sort through things.

Okay then, the best advice is to tell these people that you're waiting for legal advice -- don't do anything on your own. In other words, _you don't have to decide_ , and you shouldn't. Any decision you make independently may be contested by one or both parties, against your interest.

Just say you're waiting for competent legal counsel "in the best interest of all involved parties".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldnt get dragged into this at all! Either keep them locked out and as others have said check out an attorney or look for legal advice online.

Have you been paid?

On a lighter note - you could unlock them both, then see who gets in first and locks the other out, then you'll have a clear winner! ha!

<comment><USER5> "On a lighter note - you could unlock them both, then see who gets in first and locks the other out, then you'll have a clear winner!"

I think there is something to be said about this approach even if it was said in jest. You might also want to change your own terms and conditions before you do this, to allow you to do this.

I doubt very much if the parties care about you at this point, they are mainly focussed on each other, and if you hand over "the keys" in an email to both at the same time, and resign your role as supplier, with the support of your T&Cs your should be OK.</comment></comment>


The Golden Rules of JSON - A collaborative set of rules for JSON API developers - brad-curran https://github.com/bradley-curran/goldenrulesofjson

<comment> brad-curran Right now there are only three rules, all of which I've run into in the past two weeks.

I hope that this becomes a go to guide for people developing JSON APIs so they know how to implement it correctly, or more importantly, how not to implement it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> good one</comment>


Experimental New Directions for Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2p58mpwToefRzlGMzRxTnhNb00/view?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> Programming language researchers always seem to miss the biggest selling point of manifest and (partly-)nominal typing. It's the thing that happens after a C# programmer types a "." in Visual Studio. Want someone to use a single language and voluntarily turn the play-doh of a prototype into a sound concrete foundation via gradual typing? Tell them they will get full IntelliSense.

That Microsoft environments are STILL 15 years ahead of the Unix / web world on this (and modulo F# type providers, themselves 15 years behind Genera and SmallTalk) will be recorded in history as one of the tragic ironies of this age.

Give up assuming that all programming must be done on a teletype from the 60's. It's time to move on to at LEAST the Lisp Machines of the 80's. Please??

By the way, for those who didn't understand what Kythe[1] was all about: THIS is what it's all about. It's possible without types, but it's MUCH better with them.

[1] [http://www.kythe.io/docs/schema/](http://www.kythe.io/docs/schema/)

<comment><USER3> I like IntelliSense and its just-as-good brethren mostly in Java-focused IDEs, but my perspective is that it's a valuable but small bonus, rather than anything like a 15-year leap of progress. It's nice, but it _just isn 't that important_, and it's very annoying when people act like if you don't see it as some sort of Best. Feature. Ever. you're living in the past.

IntelliSense isn't even close to the coolest thing about good type systems. What's cool about them is catching dumb errors and contract violations statically and reducing the number of unit tests that it takes to feel confident in a piece of software.

Kythe is a really great project, though.

<comment><USER4> Intellisense is an amazing friction reducer for good APIs though. Having something pop up, give you the exact spelling, what's available, and the parameter names, massively reduces the learning curve.

I don't see how wanting it is "living in the past" \- because we certainly don't have it - not on Linux - in the present.

<comment><USER3> You misunderstood me. People who use editors that don't have IntelliSense are the ones accused of living in the past by my parent comment. I think liking and wanting IntelliSense is incredibly reasonable, but I think that the perspective that it is _indispensable_ and that people who don't use it are products of the 80s (or the 60s!) is ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> People still drive around without live GPS, many find it distracting and prefer old fashioned maps or to remember all their routes in their heads.

Having code completion allows you to work with bigger APIs in an ad hoc manner (discover Inge as you go). You don't need that, but it is nice. There are other factors that can improve the experience, which you have to look at holistically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR>
        * SoundScript (Google)
        * SaneScript (Google)
        * TypeScript (Microsoft)
        * ECMAScript 4 (Dead)
        * AtScript (Google)
        * Flow (Facebook)
        * Closure Compiler Strict Mode (Google)
        * Asm.js (Mozilla)
        * Dart (Google)
        * PureScript (OSS)

Welcome to the Typed JavaScript Thunderdome! Ten contenders enter, one JS leaves!

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

<comment><USER6> Asm.js is just standard JS that happens to conform to Mozilla's performance guarantees.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, and it benefits from ES6 stuff which was added for asm.js's sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > [SaneScript] Accessing missing properties throws (on both reads & writes)

Ah, I would love this. I have a small, thoroughly tested JS app (15k+ lines of code) but the biggest pain in the butt to debug is, "how did this 'undefined' get here?" I wish there was a way to fail early without putting tons of guard clauses everywhere.

<comment><USER9> I hear ya. One of my greatest frustrations with reading "Javascript: the good parts" is where Crockford dismisses the legions of faults with Javascript as 'things that never happen to him anyway". Well in my bloody world, these JS faults go undetected in production code, causes days lost to debugging, cause customer complaints etc...

"Fail early" (and loudly!) ought to be design goals for all programming languages IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am all for recreating JavaScript the way it should have been, but aren't the problems this tries to solve solvable with a good linter? (perhaps a very smart one, on the verge of a compiler, but still a linter)

I think TypeScript et al provide the needed type safety (until ES6 is fully supported) I'm just not sure we need a new "the good parts only" language. Didn't Google already try to do that with Dart?, I think Dart is great, but it still long way to go.

There a tons of bad things you can do with any language, Java, Scala, Ruby, Python that people don't do anymore and any automated style check / lint will fail. You don't go and remove parts from the language, you just have a good style check / lint plugin. I mean, you can use "go to" in the form of break to label in Java, but I don't see anyone using it much. This is very interesting, but I'm not sure it will get a lot of traction (mostly due to the need to rewrite huge parts of your code as they won't compile, vs gradually fixing your code using lint warnings). Am I missing something?

p.s. took me a minute to realize who is the OP (Jeremy Ashkenas of Backbone and CoffeeScript fame), I would love to hear your opinion on this, I highly respect it!

<comment><USER11> > a good linter

No doubt this is an evolution of Google Closure, which you might call a "very smart" linter. As the author of the O'Reilly book put it, If JSLint will hurt your feelings, Closure will put you into therapy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the motivations here are noble, but what troubles me is that this is trying to fix two problems with one big risky hammer. The problems are

1\. JS has various annoying parts, like how comparisons work, or that x.y returns undefined if y isn't a property, etc.

2\. JS is sometimes hard to optimize to Java-like speed.

I think (1) is already well underway to being solved, through compiling to JS. Things like TypeScript, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Elm, Scala.js, GWT, JSIL, Emscripten, etc. Those let you compile whatever language you want, without all the JS oddities. You can use anything from a familiar language like Java or C# or C++ or Scala, to an almost-JS language like TypeScript. People aren't really limited by JavaScript's oddities anymore.

It's true these languages sometimes have downsides when compiled, e.g. due to limitations on debugging. But progress is being made there and things are pretty good already.

(2) is indeed something also worth solving. But I'm not sure the solution is the same solution, so trying to fix both at once sounds far, far riskier. For example, a lower-risk way to help with the perf issues might be work piece by piece, perhaps starting by proposing a hole-less array type for JavaScript, to avoid the sparse array problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems that Javascript was named appropriately after all. With a few more iterations it will be Java.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm so tired of these "Why can't JavaScript be just like my favorite static-ly typed language" conversations. Leave my javascript alone please.

<comment><USER15> I think the issue is that it's literally the only option for web development. If there were a common bytecode that multiple languages could compile to so that everyone could use whatever language they preferred, that would be ideal.

<comment><USER16> You can always create your own language that compiles to Javascript. There are multiple examples of this with languages that have type safety. With the Mozilla Parser API this becomes really easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I understand this correctly SaneScript is like asm.js in that it's a subset of JavaScript but rather being intended for compilers it's intended for humans so that JS engines can start to remove the insane parts of the language and transition it be SoundScript which is not to be compatible with JavaScript.

<comment><USER18> SaneScript is AFAICT like the "use strict" directive in ES5 which defines a restricted subset of the language. Compilers might also take advantage of this by performing certain optimizations. SoundScript extends this restricted subset. It is incompatible with previous versions of JavaScript only in the same sense that ES5 is incompatible with ES3: It introduces new features not supported by older engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mascara Compiler ([http://www.mascaraengine.com/](http://www.mascaraengine.com/)) supports many of these features already:

      - non-nullable types
      - proper scoping (no use before declare, block scope)
      - optional and rest arguments
      - calling with too few arguments is flagged by compiler
      - "this:" parameter
      - Function types are contravariant
      - classes, interfaces

</comment><comment><USER19> Love the SaneScript idea, that could be very big.

</comment><comment><USER16> If I wanted a typed language I would use Java. Dynamic languages allow me to get the job done faster. It is extremely rare that I run into any issues regarding type. Every typed / object oriented language I have used so far forces me to jump through hoops to get at my data and I find myself needing to create way too many objects. I want to work with data, not objects, not types.

Parsing JSON to a hash is especially problematic in typed languages. Often they force you to create a class that maps from the JSON to a class. This is extremely tedious and wastes time. Also, if the JSON can change dynamically then you are screwed as it can't be mapped to a class anymore.

If you want type safety there are plenty of means to do this in a language that compiles to Javascript or some kind of linting step.

Please don't turn Javascript into Java.

<comment><USER20> What if the typing was optional?

<comment><USER16> I'm down for that.

<comment><USER21> I'm still not, it's adding complexity in exchange for performance. I prefer ease of use of the language over performance, JavaScript is fast enough for most things and is still getting faster without adding complexity for programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why do people keep on trying to fuck up Javascript? I don't want your shit OOP and classes, take them back.

Do you even get javascript? And the beauty and ease of coding in it?

JS is amazing because of two things:

1\. VAR - yes var. it's 2015 and yet you want me to waste my time typing in useless int, float, char. Really? But wait! now that you have wasted hours adding useless types to your code, you can benefit from our IDE that will tell you where you missed one! So you see, we actually saved your ass!

2\. JSON, and everything is an object. Instead of creating 20 functions, a single function(x) can handle multiple cases with flow enhancement.

x is an array. x[0] is a number, x[1] is an optional object, x[2] is a freaking function. all dynamically changeable.

f([1]), f([2, {}]), f([3, {}, callback]). you want to add another flow? no problem, extend your array or just set a property on the object, js serves you, you are the master.

\--

instead what we get? 'too few arguments throws'; typeof D < {new(x:T):D, s(x:T):U, ...C's...}. WTF is that? Does that look like sound coherent code to you?

<comment><USER23> > I don't want your shit OOP and classes, take them back.

Most programmers disagree. Get over the fact that you are in the minority and JS has succeeded DESPITE the massive barrier to entry (beyond the simplest of tasks) and the monumentally messy spaghetti code that javascript (as a prototypical language) inevitably becomes, in larger projects.

<comment><USER5> Prototypes are also OOP by the 1988 Treaty of Orlando, so we are just arguing about one kind of OOP vs. another.</comment></comment></comment>


Guido van Rossum on PyCharm - <AUTHOR> https://profiles.google.com/gvanrossum/posts/CGh9MoWU53V <comment><USER2> One part GvR didn't talk about which is top-notch in PyCharm is jumping around in your source code. The searching of symbols and classes (via a search box) is very well done and generally works quite well, which is extremely handy for big codebases, and the contextual jumps (option-click on a class name) to definitions is quite cool as well.

And in usual Jetbrains fashion, it comes with a bunch of refactoring though they tend to show their Java origin (extract method can handle multiple return values, but provides no way to set the order of the return tuple whereas you can reorder parameters)

<comment><USER2> Oh forgot one: _PyCharm has a very good support for virtualenvs_.

It's not quite perfect yet, but you can set a virtualenv interpreter as a project's current interpreter (PyCharm does not automatically recognize that, and that's the major feature lacking) and PyCharm will see the right PYTHONPATH. Very, very handy with `virtualenv --no-site-package` which I tend to use a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I won a PyCharm license at PyTexas last year. Before I wond the license I had a bad experience with the beta version. It took almost 9 months using it on and off until I it finally became my IDE of choice.

\- The Subversion integration is killer.

\- There is even a tool to apply .diffs.

\- There is a plugin that gives me VIm key bindings.

\- The Django integration is nice, including Django templates.

\- The CSS editor is fantastic. One cool feature is the color referenced in a line is put in the left gutter.

\- The debugger is very handy.

\- The quick file navigation bar is a super handy way to jump between files.

\- The "Go To" for Class , File, and Symbol is a very quicksilver-ish way to navigate your project

\- As trite as it might sound, the color themes are super easy to change. Which are close to impossible to change with PyDev + Eclipse.

\- The syntax highlighting helps me catch errors

<comment><USER4> Have you used WingIDE? How does it compare? After shelling out for a $150 license and using it enthusiastically for about 3 months, I found myself moving back to basic text editors. I guess I just found the slowdown and general clunkyness was not offset by the additional toolset. Wondering how pycharm compares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> PyCharm's been the only thing that made me leave Vim for any length of time.

It's not about having it all in one place, it's the attention to detail and the little conveniences that are everywhere. Whereas in general purpose editors I'm mostly fine, but eventually stumble on small roadblocks at the edges, with PyCharm every once in a while I stumble on wonderful gems (remote debugging, auto-fixing common issues, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER6> In case anyone was interested in buying it JetBrains has a sale going on for 2 more days. (April 30)

<http://www.jetbrains.com/specials/index.jsp?home_banner>

I ended up buying IntelliJ because the python plugin is virtually the same thing although it does lag behind the Pycharm version a wee bit in terms of features. The other major difference is the way projects are started and the feature to open files from the command line is missing in IntelliJ. If you only use Python Pycharm is definitely a more focused product and doesn't have features from other programming languages hanging out in your face in places like the run configurations.

Also according to the license matrix on both IntelliJ and Pycharm the personal versions are both for general commercial use. The difference between the commercial and personal licenses mainly seems to be about who is purchasing the software.

<http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/buy/license-matrix.jsp>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is kinda the Anti-Gosling and his "Don't use emacs" spiel. ([http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_ema...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_emacs_says_java_father/))

EDIT: That article is really golden. It starts with the silliness about not using emacs, without any clear reason why other than "not abiding to Moore's Law" (whatever that means), he praises NetBeans (as if) but claims "almost nobody bothers to modify its code because of its complexity", then, to top it off, ComputerWorld refers to him in that (and other) articles as "Father of Java", ignoring the quote at the bottom that says "People call me that because it pisses me off."

</comment><comment><USER8> Also worth a look is PyDev, the Eclipse Python plug-in.

<http://pydev.org/>

<comment><USER9> Version 2 just came out and i love it.

Also worth a look in my opinion is Aptana Studio 3, which is basically Eclipse with optimized settings and installed plugins for web-development, Python (PyDev), rails, ...

One thing I installed on top was a mercurial plugin from the eclipse marketplace, otherwise it's pretty complete for my needs.

<comment><USER10> I am using Python+Aptana+Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib for doing the programming of some physics research, and it's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bought a license of PyCharm and I'm having exactly the same experience as Guido: love the debugger, prefer emacs+screen+ssh for everything else.

I've heard others python guys saying that they have PyCharm for exploring complex repositories and debug things. The problem with emacs is that it's perfect for coding, but not for exploring.

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Vim for essentially everything, what I would kill for is if I could integrate a debugger similar to eclipse pydev, PyCharm or Komodo's.

PDB is great, but having to manually type and remember to remove breakpoints can be a pain.

</comment><comment><USER13> PyCharm is awesome. [shameless plug]: if you're using VisualStudio, give <http://pytools.codeplex.com> a try... free & open source from msft.

</comment><comment><USER14> I haven't heard about PyCharm until now. It looks like a great IDE. I think I'm going to download the trial version and see if I want to throw down the $50 for a single user license. Quite cheap and if it's as good as it looks it will be well worth the money.

Check out their getting started video: [http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/demos/quick_overview/pychar...](http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/demos/quick_overview/pycharm_getting_started.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm an avid Komodo IDE user after reviewing all options half a decade ago. Anyone with experience in both IDEs can make a quick comparison?

</comment><comment><USER16> I've read a number of discussions about python editors on stackoverflow and some random blog posts, and netbeans seems to invariably be missing from the discussion. Why is that? I've been using it for the past couple of months and I definitely like it better than Eclipse+PyDev. Am I missing something obvious that's missing relative to these alternatives?

<comment><USER17> The thing with IDEs is that there are so mind-bogglingly many of them. It's like with web frameworks. In every discussion/comparison at least a few are bound to be missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a big fan of RubyMine, also made by the same folks... although it has taken a few versions to really get good.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm starting to use wingware wing IDE. And i got wing working with web2py with code completion, etc.

Is pycharm for web2py development better than wing ? Since it is focused on web applications it has potential to be better.

Thanks.

<comment><USER20> I too would like to know this.

I recently switched from Django (I was also using Clojure, but switched back to Python for web stuff because nobody around here knows Clojure...) to web2py and love it. I've been using the integrated editor out of lazyness, but will be ramping up my web development effort soon so could do with a good IDE. I've tried and liked WingIDE in the past, but am open to alternatives too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wing works the best for me. It is the most "Pythonic IDE" I have come across.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm also a huge fan of PyCharm. Has made all Python devving tons more fun (Django + AppEngine is what I do). Can't recommend it enough, and I've tried PyDev & Komodo wanting to like them.

<comment><USER23> Komodo IDE? What makes PyCharm better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a Linux user the biggest turn-off thing for me is the horrible font rendering of Swing applications on Linux. This has kept me from using JetBrains products and Netbeans altogether.

<comment><USER25> Depending on a lot of version numbers, you may have to pass

              -Dswing.aatext=true
              -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on

to your JVM. I don't know why the default is "ugly 1990s-style", but those settings made Netbeans usable for me (for long enough to discover I still prefer Eclipse, except for the profiler).

<comment><USER26> AFAIK There is a setting in editor->Appearance->Use Anti Aliased Fonts and, as other commenter said Oracle JRE may have better font rendering than Open JDK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is it at running locally and working with files on a server? Does it find imported files and functions on the server?

</comment><comment><USER27> Code completion . . . I am so there!</comment>


Meeting Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/live/meeting-steve-jobs-264661.php

<comment><USER2> Gizmodo really repaid Steve for his kind words with the stolen iPhone 4 saga.</comment>


Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/11/17/which-tech-companies-back-sopa-microsoft-apple-and-27-others?

<comment><USER2> This post is from November. And borders on disingenuous given its call to action, due to the fact that BSA members very quickly made clear their objections to SOPA to the BSA.

Also, I would note that there's quite a difference from being a BSA member and the BSA making a boneheaded decision, vs GoDaddy directly supporting SOPA.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please use the original title (in this case "Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others") rather than rewrite it to suit your personal agenda. In some cases, an article title is ambiguous and needs rewriting, this is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Flagging as deliberate FUD.

1\. The BSA supported SOPA. You cannot infer from that the position of any particular one of its members on SOPA. Organizations often take positions that are not unanimous among their members.

2\. The BSA changed its mind. This indicates in fact that many of its members are against SOPA.

3\. The very first line of the article notes this change.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you boycotted every single company on that list, we'd be stuck using AMD, Linux, and Gimp.

That may work for some people, but not everyone. But more seriously, I doubt that every one of these companies supports SOPA. More digging needs to be done. If someone represents a group of people and makes a statement, that doesn't mean I'm in agreeance to said statement.

<comment><USER6> Maybe if more people used AMD, Linux and GIMP we wouldn't be stuck with SOPA.

<comment><USER7> Care to ellaborate why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57330078-281/surprise- micr...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57330078-281/surprise-microsoft- quietly-opposes-sopa-copyright-bill/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Also worth highlighting (and boycotting) Microsoft, Dell, and Intel.

</comment><comment><USER10> Best to hold off on boycotts as it's coming out that the committee and other groups have been claiming support they don't have.</comment>


Log-free email provider Posteo: 'You must log user IP addresses', court rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/log-free-email-provider-posteo-you-must-log-user-ip-addresses-court-rules/ <comment><USER2> isn't the solution then to make a database table that contain just the ip addresses and nothing else with no relations to anything therefor the ip addresses would be completely useless but still logged none the less.

<comment><USER3> The law is generally concerned with intent, not technicalities, so that likely wouldn't satisfy what they were asking.

> In 2016, a local court came to Posteo with a warrant, demanding all existing > and future data relating to the suspect's email account. Posteo implemented > surveillance of the account but told the cops that, as it doesn't log > traffic data, there was nothing on that front to share.

> Prosecutors complained that Posteo had the IP addresses and was discarding > them [...]

> The local court told Posteo to collect all future IP addresses. [...]

> Posteo's lack of users' IP addresses is not the result of "a lack of > available data", the court ruled, but rather because of its "decision to > hide this data from its internal system and to refrain from recording it due > to data-protection concerns". "Thus, the situation at hand was created > solely by the business and system model that was deliberately chosen by the > complainant," the court said.

So basically, they had a warrant to monitor all data on an account, but the court found they deliberately were not complying with the warrant by not logging some of the data they had.

They are not being asked to always log IP addresses, but rather to comply with the warrant.

> "To put it bluntly, we will not start logging the IP addresses of our > respectable customers," the post read. It went on to say [...] Posteo would > only gather IP addresses in relation to a mailbox that is subject to a > surveillance warrant.

> So would what Posteo is proposing satisfy the courts? According to Carlo > Piltz, an information privacy lawyer with Reusch Law in Berlin, it probably > would.

It seems to me this is very different than being required to always log IP addresses of every account.</comment></comment>


Amazon Invests in Rivian, a Tesla Rival in Electric Vehicles - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/business/rivian-amazon.html <comment><USER2> Speculation from Tuesday: 90+ comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19148976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19148976)</comment>


Do what you love mirage - <AUTHOR> http://devcomponents.com/blog/?p=633

<comment><USER2> Do what you love.

There, a financially insecure person just told you to do that. If you have to pay the bills then yes, do what it takes, but you should always be striving to work on something that makes you happy.

<comment><USER3> I love to eat with a roof over my head, and I love to sleep in a warm bed.

<comment><USER4> The vast majority of jobs will give you food a roof and a bed.

People start doing the jobs they don't want because they want a large house, two model-of-the-year cars (leased of course), the 40+ inch HD tv, etc etc etc.

Doing what you love is easy to say but most people choose to forgo doing what they love to own (or at least use temporarily) what they want.

<comment><USER5> This perspective may be correct for well educated upper middle class and above. But thats a small part of the U.S. and an even smaller part of the world. The vast majority do not have jobs they love and have little choice in the matter and also do not have a large house, cars, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who actually knows what they love to do? I think there's a rampant myth that there are all sorts of people who know what they love to do but aren't doing it... Figure out what you love to do and chances are you'll naturally end up doing it.

IMO figuring out what you love to do takes a lot of work, because you generally don't know if you love it until you've made a significant investment, and that investment itself potentially makes you love it.

<comment><USER7> I think you're right that as you learn about something, you feel invested and find more interest in it. I also think that as you learn about one thing you may find other areas or topics that you can learn about - so "what you love" may actually be a moving target.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much. I think it's a genetic thing with our species to always want more. Grass is greener etc.

<comment><USER8> I wish this lesson was pounded into my brain at an earlier age. I spent too much of my younger years waiting for that AHA! moment where I'd realize my calling in life. It just doesn't work that way for a good chunk of civilization. Finding out what you love takes work because we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Life is about compromise. When you have a family to support you often can't afford to dabble with a startup or to quit your job at a whim. "Do what you love" isn't meant to encourage people in this situation to recklessly drop everything to search for perfect job satisfaction.

The "do what you love" mantra to me means making conscious decisions that improve the likelihood that you get to do what you love for a living, instead of optimizing for other metrics such as money, or prestige. Or the worst option of all: just winging it.

The mind boggling thing is that many people make no conscious decisions about their life at all if they can avoid it. In the spirit of the underpants meme:

        1. Graduate high school
        2. Graduate bachelor & master
        3. ???
        4. Happiness / Fulfillment

Not only do people often go through both (1) and (2) without really thinking about it (e.g. study Law because "laywers are rich" or French Lit because "I like French books"), there often is no plan for (3). None at all. So people end up doing a PhD as a form of life procrastination, or take a job working with technology that will suck the life out of them (or will seriously limit future job prospects) for marginally better pay.

So when you see "do what you love", read "plan your life such that you get to do what you love". And I don't think this can be repeated enough.

<comment><USER10> I agree wholeheartedly, so many friends of mine are at step 2. Again, some of my friends with jobs doing what they 'love', developing or design – isn't actually enjoying every bit of it, but somehow seem satisfied with getting payed for doing something they know.

I think you should strive for getting payed to do the things you love, not giving up half way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see how the two philosophies are necessarily contrary. Nobody is saying that doing what you love must comprise one's "day job". I think the idea behind the saying is that, generally speaking, one must love (or at least like) what they do in order to maintain the drive needed to become world class.

There are already enough obstacles out there that one must overcome to become the best at what they do. Why arbitrarily add another by picking something you don't even like?

<comment><USER12> I don't think many people really _are_ doing jobs they don't like. When you genuinely don't like _the work_ , you quit. Even people who are making a primarily economic decision simply do not stay in jobs they hate.

I've yet to hear someone say they hate their job and then discover that they actually dislike the work itself. Rather, what they hate are corporate pressures, co-workers and other external forces that impede their ability to do their job.

When people feel they have control over those factors, they minimize them. When they _don't_ , it creates the stress that leads to 'I hate my job'.

<comment><USER13> exactly, its' not necessarily the work, it's everything that surrounds the work that makes doing quality work impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's an interesting idea but I think the major problem is many people are in jobs too far from what they are really interested in or enjoy. They've made safe choices based on the fact that they need money to live. Although pouring all their efforts into whatever they are already doing may be better than tuning out completely, I tend to wonder why they don't just put that effort into finding what they really want to do and making it a reality. Once you're committed to the effort it's not as unrealistic as the author suggests.

</comment><comment><USER15> and what it is that I love most?

in my experience: I like the work I can do well.

then it is to find out what one does well... I can tell my abilities about that work I have been with long enough to withstand the initial bootstrap. Long enough to find out how the routine would look like. Always dependent on workplace, co-workers, topics, software/hardware, money, future opportunities...

<comment><USER16> I agree with the sentiment. There are many ways of 'doing what you love'. You can love the tools and languages you get to play with, you can love doing a good job, you can love being part of a really cool project, you can love being challenged and forced to learn and improve your skills, you can love working with really intelligent people. The list goes on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's also possible to "do what you can tolerate" as a day job and "do what you love" as a fulfilling hobby.

</comment><comment><USER18> Assessing the truth of a claim by who says it is an unreliable guide, to tell what pjhyett has shown.

Note: it's not "do what you like", but "do what you love". It's not about pleasure, but _meaning_ \- to do what you believe is worthwhile and meaningful. It's a quest, a sacrifice.

But also, in line with the article, there's the idea of "love is a verb", meaning that love is not a feeling, but it is what you actually do. To sacrifice for something, to do the actions of caring for something, comes first, and the feeling of love follows. Personally, I think you need a bit of both: a feeling of love and the actions of love.

</comment><comment><USER19> Basic premise: Unless you win the lottery, doing what you love isn't an option. In lieu of that, force yourself to work as hard as possible so that you can be successful at what you must do (and learn to love the success).

</comment><comment><USER20> _Any time we do quality work we are deeply satisfied with it. Whether it is writing code, fixing a car or cooking, when done well it makes us happy. Good, quality work is always unmistakable._

Most people don't even get to do that. They're expected to "get it done" within deadlines, constraints, and business decisions that make mediocre or even shitty work the best that's possible.

People would be much happier and more productive if they had the resources, support, and (by far, most importantly) creative freedom necessary to do excellent work, but the reality of the business world is that most people don't.</comment>


FAA Releases App for Drone Flyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/FAA-Releases-App-For-Drone-Flyers-225486-1.html <comment><AUTHOR> I downloaded the app just for giggles.

The entire DC area, and much of the Eastern US, is a no fly zone. Between DC having a 30 mile no-fly zone, and every heliport (which included most hospitals and many police stations) and airport getting a mini-no-fly, it's hard to find an area to legally fly.

I imagine most casual drone users will simply delete the app and pretend the FAA doesn't exist. What a mess.</comment>


Ask HN: How valuable is a position as Academic Research Fellow? - <AUTHOR> I try to keep this long story very short. Note: I am right now living in Middle Europe and I am in my late 20s.
Basically I was gonna change job in these months and as soon as I wrote on Linkedin that I closed my position with my previous employer, the university Professor with which I made my dissertation for my bachelor degree some years ago informed me they want to offer me a position as Research Fellow.
It is well paid (not industry level "well paid" but it's good enough and it's 3 days a week remote work + flexible hours and I get _A_LOT_ of tax deductions that I usually would not get... basically I should not pay a single euro of taxes. Also they promise to improve it year over year) and they offered me to "sponsorize" my master degree + eventually a phd because they have a lot of research projects right now (especially related to blockchains projects + virtual reality + augmented reality) and not enough researchers.
Note that since some weeks ago I was working as web/mobile developer, so this is a very different skillset.
Now, I don't really know if I am interested in a phd, but the master degree seems a good opportunity.
What I don't know, at all, is: how well is seen in the eyes of the industry and HR-people a position as researcher in academy? I mean, do I risk to go back in a sw dev position in the next years and see my salary/perceived_value/expected_skill downgraded? Do you have any experience, stories, knowledge about this?
Thank you a lot. <comment><USER2> If you're working on a really hot research topic, you can come back to industry with a much better resumé + probably pay check. I know for ML research if you want to ever 'make it big' you basically need to do a phd at a top university.

I would look into the specific field you're doing a research project and then see if that field looks promising ~3-5 years out. For instance, if Coinbase and Ethereum are huge in 3 years, I'd imagine they'd love to talk if you've done important foundational work on blockchain related tech. AWS also released their quantum ledger DB suggesting they're interested in blockchain-related ideas.

It probably wouldn't make the most sense to just go back to being a web developer at randomTechcorp after this, but you could have potentially even more interesting opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER3> That honestly sounds like an incredible deal. If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, try building them on your two days off. Just make sure the university doesn't automatically own them.</comment>


'Breathable' Electronics Pave the Way for More Functional Wearable Tech - <AUTHOR> https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/04/breathable-electronics/ <comment><USER2> A wonderful application for this would be diabetes accessories. Currently both insulin pumps and CGMs (continuous glucose monitors) are devices the sizes of pagers that patients must attach to their bodies and carry around, including while asleep.

<comment><USER3> Aren't there are already patches that do blood monitoring?

The insulin pump is something harder to miniaturize tho.

<comment><USER2> They're sort of like patches. There's still a plastic pod that sticks out with a Dexcom or FreeStyle Libre.

The smaller, the better as this is something that has to be worn 24-7, often a pump in addition to a CGM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonder how long till clothes with leds hit the market based on this tech assuming waterproof and can harness energy from body motion</comment>


BionicOpter - <AUTHOR> https://www.festo.com/group/en/cms/10224.htm <comment><USER2> This looks amazing a real technological accomplishment!</comment>


Ask HN: Best residential proxy provider to scrape web? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a provider with a high pool of residential proxies. Intended for scraping. Would love a discussion on finding the top one. <comment><USER2> It does depend on the actual task you are going for, but I have been using [https://smartproxy.io/](https://smartproxy.io/) for a while and they seem legit. High pool and does not limit nor threads nor activities. Suited my needs. Ah, and quite cheap actually.</comment>


Solving Sol - <AUTHOR> http://solvingsol.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey wow! Site author here, tons more solutions on Github than I've posted on the site: [https://github.com/wholepixel/solving- sol](https://github.com/wholepixel/solving-sol)

Sol LeWitt, and his cohort of generative conceptual artists, are really interesting to evaluate from a software engineering perspective, and I hope you'll take a look at what they're all about!

<comment><USER3> Are all of these solutions available anywhere?

They all seem to simply be html files, so github pages should be able to serve them, but I couldn't see anything.

<comment><USER2> I need to update the site - at the time I didn't build any automation from the repo to publishing on solvingsol.com

<comment><USER3> Are you thinking of doing that? I'd love to check back in once all the new drawings are available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of the description texts in heraldry.

For example, the coat of arms of Finland: "Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man's arm vambraced and embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper."

And somehow from this emerges a special lion with a sword through it's head: [https://satwcomic.com/coat-of-arms](https://satwcomic.com/coat-of-arms)

<comment><USER5> > Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in > base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man's arm vambraced and > embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper.

Translation:

Gules: Red

Semy: Background

Roses argent: Silver roses

A lion: A lion

Rampant: Standing

Crowned Or: With a literal golden crown on its head ("Or" meaning "gold")

trampling a saber: stepping on a saber

in base proper: the saber should be colored normally

his dexter foreleg: The right "arm"

in the form of a man's arm: the right "arm" should be a man's

vambraced: wearing armor about the forearm

and embowed: bent

argent: silver

garnished Or: decorated with gold ("Or" meaning "gold")

bearing aloft: carrying

a sword proper: a sword colored normally

So, in normal speech, this is a basically a technical specification for:

1\. The background should be red with silver roses

2\. The foreground should be a standing lion

3\. The lion should be wearing a golden crown

4\. The lion should be standing on a sword, colored normally

5\. The lion's right forearm should be a human's, armored

6\. The armor of the forearm should be silver with gold decoration

7\. The human-like right forearm should be bent and raised, carrying a sword

8\. The sword should be normally colored

Anyone who knew heraldry when it was important would be able to take that description and churn out a reasonable facsimile of the crest.

The lion isn't stabbing itself in the head any more than a "suicide king" is.

<comment><USER6> I remember when I was vectorizing flags (the simple geometric kind, though, since I've done it with a text editor and some scripting/templating) on Wikimedia Commons as a pastime years ago. I got reasonably well-versed in parsing heraldry as a side-effect and it was fun in a way, considering that it is indeed a fairly precise description syntax for coat of arms and flags.

And I got confused when GRRM started using proper heraldic descriptions for flags in ASoIaF with the third book, while the two before were basically just very simple English descriptions. Most readers probably never really noticed :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you draw seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular, some with green ink, and some with transparent?

And for bonus points, can one of them be in the shape of a kitten?

<comment><USER8> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg) for the confused :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really love this. The original art piece is just a set of instructions meant to be fed into our minds and generate an imaginary canvas. Now we use technology to just feed the same set of instructions into software to generate virtual canvases

</comment><comment><USER10> This is great, thanks for sharing! I wish I had known about Sol when I used to teach high school geometry; the fact that many of these constructions can be interpreted pretty openly would have produced a lot of different "answers" and opened up the floor for conversation about rigor.

Instead, I had my students construct the flag of Nepal (see [http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/np01000_.html](http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/np01000_.html) for the specification). Let's just say that most of the students were not as captivated by the idea as I was.

</comment><comment><USER11> Love it!

I implemented something similar in Mathematica: [http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt....](http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt.html)

My friend implemented it in Elm: [http://www.philipzucker.com/elm-eikonal-sol- lewitt/](http://www.philipzucker.com/elm-eikonal-sol-lewitt/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Such a cool project!

I'm going to be doing a similar exercise in an upcoming Generative Art workshop that I'm giving.[1]

I love how LeWitt's work seems so simple on paper, but can look so impressive on a larger scale and in a natural environment.

[1] [https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1052687485715836928?s=21](https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1052687485715836928?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, I don't have anything substantial to add. Just that I love Sol's art and got all giddy seeing this!

</comment><comment><USER14> I was expecting to see a Solitaire solver.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the point with #797 is that the artists for each line are different, and thus there is compounding error. As it is, each line is identical to the last except for color.

<comment><USER9> My first thought as well. It raises some interesting questions. Does the perfection of execution take away from the art? What if the meatbag artists were so highly skilled that they executed the same level of perfection? Does it mean different things?

<comment><USER16> it turns out someone else has explored this exact question:

[http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt....](http://blog.benwiener.com/programming/art/2017/08/24/lewitt.html)

As for what minimalist art "means", I think that's taking the wrong approach. It's more about how you feel when looking at it, what does it remind you of, what non verbal parts of your mind are activated?

<comment><USER11> Hey, that's me! Thanks for pointing it out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo's new terms of service are scary - <AUTHOR> PART 1 New Privacy and Terms
Yahoo is now part of Oath, the media and tech company behind today's top news, sports and entertainment sites and apps.
By choosing "I accept" below, you agree to Oath's new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Below is a summary of some of the key updates. To learn more about our approach to privacy, click here.
How we collect and use data.
We've updated some of the ways we collect and analyze user data in order to deliver services, content, relevant advertising and abuse protection.
This includes: analyzing content and information when you use our services (including emails, instant messages, posts, photos, attachments, and other communications), linking your activity on other sites and apps with information we have about you, and providing anonymized and/or aggregated reports to other parties regarding user trends.
Sharing Data with Verizon.
Oath and its affiliates may share the information we receive with Verizon. Learn more about Verizon's privacy practices.
Combining data.
We also combine data among our services and across your devices. This will provide you with better personalized services and features across your devices and Oath accounts. We've provided information about your choices with respect to your use of our services, and given you control in our Privacy Controls section. <comment><AUTHOR> Part 2

Key Points in Terms of Service

• We've added a mutual arbitration clause. Hopefully, disputes will never be an issue, but in the case of one, this allows a third-party arbitrator to help us resolve them. We've also added a class action waiver. These provisions are an important part of our relationship with you, so please read them carefully.

• We've specified the legal entity that provides each service to you. For some services, this may be a different entity than the entity that previously provided the service. We've also reserved the right to transfer the providing entity for each service in the future.

• General provisions that apply to billing, auto-renewal, and refunds have been added. Unless the additional terms for a service override the Terms of Service, these provisions apply to your use of our paid services.

• Applicability of Terms. If you are using our services on behalf of another account owner (e.g., as an administrator, consultant or analyst) or on behalf of a company, business or other entity, the Terms of Service apply to your activities and are binding on the account owner or entity.

• Indemnity for Non-Personal Use. If you are using our Services on behalf of a company, business or other entity, or if you are using our Services for commercial purposes, we've added an indemnity provision, which requires you and the entity to protect us against certain legal actions.

• We've updated our choice of law and forum provisions. New York law now governs and New York, New York is the designated forum. Business to Business. • The Oath Business-to-Business Privacy Policy applies when you use Flurry, Gemini, ONE by AOL, Convertro, BrightRoll or any other Oath business-to- business products. All other consumer-facing activities are covered by the Oath Privacy Policy.

<comment><USER2> They ARE scary. It means that no matter what Yahoo or OATH do to your account or any data in your account, they will not be held liable. And if there is any dispute between you and the company, you will be FORCED into arbitration, and forced to accept the arbitrator's decision. Your chances as a consumer for winning an arbitrated dispute resemble the set of numbers less than zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand how examples such as Yahoo are "good" or "bad".

The terms and conditions seem fairly laid out and transparent. It seems to be worded for a 5th or 6th grade English reading level.

They seem clear and concise. I can't imagine any better content for average users.</comment>