Ask HN: Is Canada a good place to move to? - <AUTHOR>

Is Canada a good country to move to and raise a family? How vibrant is the startup scene? What are some of the good cities to consider in terms of friendly people, prospects, weather, lifestyle, and startup culture? From what I have gathered, the startup scene is flourishing in Canada, but I would like some detailed analysis from fellow HNers. <comment><USER3> Yes, of course it is. You don't consistently rank at that top of surveys just for being nice.

I'm Canadian, so I'll give you a one off overview. I'm assuming you are American, so revise this if you are not.

If you are high on lifestyle and lean left in your politics and feel weird when there is no snow on Christmas, you'll more than likely love Canada. Nothing up here will compare to the startup scenes in the SV and such, but if you stick with the bigger cities (Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal) you'll most likely find enough for you to live with. There are other tech centres like Ottawa, Waterloo and Calgary, but these would be smaller, albeit with the pluses of a smaller city as well.

In general, you need to accept snow and cold in the winter. Places like Toronto can be 50/50 and a lot like say, NYC or Chicago, but Montreal and god forbid the Parries are a guaranteed frozen for 4 months of the year at least. The only real respite from this is the BC coast, but instead of snow you will see 4 months of rain.

You might feel taxed a little bit, but that should only last until you realize that those taxes include all those Health care expenses you no longer need to worry about.

You'll need to accept that Canada is very accepting of its immigrants - <USER2> too much so - and it will be expected that you are as well. Strong Christian right views that compose half of the spectrum in the US will often just not be tolerated here. This is probably the biggest difference between the two countries - your religion and beliefs are personal matters. You will quickly learn about all other countries and cultures from Canada, as there are large communities from the East, Europe, and the Middle East that are encouraged to engage and build the country but to also retain their own differences.

Canada can be VERY different depending on what area you choose to live in, so I'd strongly suggest you look at a few areas and then visit first. Montreal and Vancouver may look similar in size and economy, but they are ridiculously different in many more important ways. Much more so than say Boston compared to Seattle. Pay a lot of attention to this.

I've lived in 4 provinces and visited all the provinces and territories spare the Maritimes. I'll reply if you need any more information about a particular area.

Good luck to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Could you shed some more light on the tech aspects? Job market, access to VCs, startup community, events, meetups, hacker culture, etc.

<comment><USER3> Here is a good resource for you:

<http://startupindex.ca/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I moved to Canada some 12 years ago,lived in the big cities and visited every province (except Nunawut, the new north east territory). Can't say that I have any regrets.

The tech scene is decent in the big cities with some strong universities and tech centers. The investment community is definitely weaker than the US (not in volume/assets but in talent: the archetypical US VC partner is a former entrepreneur while her Canadian counterpart is more likely to be a former pension fund manager). It has improved over the years though.

A surprising discovery (for me), was that the most leftist province (Quebec) has by far the most support for tech companies: All the usual Canadian programs such as getting 60-80% of your tech expenses back in tax credits but also some really neat stuff such as a "tax holiday" for foreign developers (that would be you: no income tax for almost 5 years). Oh, and one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America (coming in around 27% right now).

Tech business aside, Canada is a nice place. A lot less of the steep socio- politico-economic gradient that has become so common in the US. Definitely a good place to raise kids.

The winters are unpleasant though if you are used to the Valley (I cry a little bit inside whenever I go back to SF).

</comment><comment><USER5> Culturally, there's little to find too jarring about Canada if you're coming from the US, we watch the same TV shows and movies - you just might see more stuff like hockey and French TV; though Canadians spend a great deal of time cultivating an identity as non-Americans...

As far as tech, it's roughly comparable to the US, just on a different scale (we've got 1/11th the people!) - most of the buzz is centred on a few cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) but there are good start-ups pretty much everywhere.

Canada is vast, rugged (mostly frozen) landscape and the people reflect it - we're helpful and friendly but enjoy nature and adventure too.

The two big complaints I've had from Americans moving here are: a) our telecom service (cell, TV, etc.) is stupidly expensive b) our liquor-laws are draconian (arguably this is uniquely Ontarian)

Whether Canada is a good place for your start-up depends a great deal on the nature of your business - if you're looking at industry (especially primary industry) there's no better place on Earth to set-up shop.

I'm a Canadian, but was partially educated and have worked a great deal in the US (the coasts, mostly) and have lived in five Canadian cities and visited every province and territory - I grew up in rural BC.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't know how active the start-up community is here, but Toronto and Vancouver would be your best bets. As for a country, Canada is the best.

Toronto is cold during the winter, people are friendly, pretty laid back culture, which can be a bad thing when people don't get angry about the BS that goes on here sometimes. Taxes are high, but its probably worth it in the long run.

Canada is the best.

</comment><comment><USER7> I lived in Canada for the first 30 years of my life and recently moved. Culturally and socially, it's a great place to live...this, no one can deny.

Startup/tech? In my experience, people who say the scene is really hot haven't been exposed to anything else. As far ahead as Toronto and Vancouver are than say Ottawa or Edmonton, Seattle and Austin are as far ahead of Toronto and Vancouver. It isn't even in the same ballpark.

If you do move to Canada, I'd say Vancouver is the only sane bet (which is not where I'm from). First, it puts you relatively close to Seattle, Portland, California and Austin. Second, by Canadian standards, it has a good tech scene. Finally, by world standards, it has a great quality of life (though not a cheap one).

</comment><comment><USER8> Actually, Montreal is worth checking out as well - from both a quality of life and start up point of view. Culturally, it's a remarkable place to live, and in terms of starting a company, there is a wide base of both talent and angel/seed/VC money at play here. Other areas I would consider are Waterloo (more suburban but close to UWaterloo and RIM, which are Canada's two best talent pools) and Ottawa (also a great place to live and experience Canada at its best).

<comment><USER9> I can vouch for Waterloo. Talking to friends in Toronto, the tech scene seems to be tighter and more helpful.

Vancouver is amazing for the lifestyle.</comment></comment>


Troll tales: catching up with weev in Beirut - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/11/21/troll-tales-catching-up-with-weev-in-beirut/

<comment><USER2> Christ, what an asshole.</comment>


Physicists simulate critical 'reheating' period that kickstarted the Big Bang - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-physicists-simulate-critical-reheating-period.html <comment><USER2> The article appears to be confusingly written, making reference to a time "before" the Big Bang:

 _Just before the Big Bang launched the universe onto its ever-expanding course, physicists believe, there was another, more explosive phase of the early universe at play: cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second._

But cosmic inflation was _part_ of the Big Bang, not something that happened "before" it. According to the current understanding, the Big Bang included the beginning of time itself—in more technical terms, the Universe has no boundary in time (or space)—so asking what happened "before" the Big Bang is akin to asking what's north of the North Pole.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the Big Bang only observable as the Cosmic Microwave Background? The Big Bang is the oldest event we can observe, but that doesn't mean nothing was happening before it. It just means we can't observe what was happening.

The travel time for light from that event doesn't seem to tell us very much about how old the Universe is as an n-dimensional space. It only tells us how far back we can observe. We can choose t_0 to be the point in time at which that farthest emitted light was emitted. That doesn't mean there isn't a t_-1, it only means that our axis of positive time starts there because that's all we can observe right now. We know some event happened and before that event we can make no observations, while after that event we can make observations. So everything observable follows from that event. But absence of observations is not evidence of absence.

It's actually sensible to ask what's north of the North Pole because it reveals something about the geometry of the coordinate space. You're considering the North Pole as a fixed boundary where all lines end, whereas the asker considers it as a point that all lines pass through(this is a more correct interpretation). In our polar coordinate system going to that point would result in being somewhere south of north but on the other half of the semicircle. Whether it's sensible to ask that about the universe seems like an open question to me.

The sensible thing to me is to wonder at the question while recognizing that we aren't currently able to answer it sensibly. Maybe we never do.

<comment><USER4> We can't observe things before recombination, a couple hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when electrons bound to nuclei and photons stopped being constantly scattered.

<comment><USER5> I believe there's some hope they may be able to see past this point using the new gravitational astronomy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The team found this extreme transformation would have been even faster and > more efficient if quantum effects modified the way that matter responded to > gravity at very high energies, deviating from the way Einstein's theory of > general relativity predicts matter and gravity should interact.

> all with known physics

Um... I'd like to see their "known" theory of quantum-modified general relativity...

<comment><USER7> Isn't there a linearized gravity that you can quantize? Like in these lecture notes: [http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/erice02.pd...](http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/erice02.pdf)?

<comment><USER6> I think so. But can you (validly) linearize gravity in the circumstances that were thought to exist at the time we're talking about?

<comment><USER7> I tried looking at the paper and some of its references, and answering this question is well outside my area of competence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a bit of conflation of "observable universe" with "universe". The "observable universe" (as observed now) would be absolutely tiny, but the overall universe may be large even pre inflation, we simply don't see anything outside our tiny cone.

</comment><comment><USER9> The more we learn about the Big Bang and the way it may have happened, the less intriguing, or put another way, the less satisfying a theory it becomes for me. It just makes me more curious about what happened before the Big Bang, or at least, it makes what happened before the Big Bang seem more important to understanding the origins of the universe.

<comment><USER10> One possibility is infinite Big Bangs. Universe expands until it reaches a point where it begins retracting, then reaches point where big bang happens and then it repeats all over again for infinity. Basically can result in our lives being repeated for infinity. All the events reoccur to make earth exactly as before and where all forces proceed forward the same as before. Similar the forces could occur slightly different but if this is happening for infinity. I'm assuming irritations would repeat.

<comment> reading-at-work This activates my existential dread pretty hard. The idea of never existing again after I die and there being no afterlife is pretty scary by itself, but the idea of this life repeating infinitely is somehow even worse. Though I guess each individual experience in the infinite continuum would be isolated so it's not like I'm remembering all of my past lives, in which case I guess it doesn't matter either way. It's a weird mental rabbit hole to go down.

<comment><USER11> I've thought about these things a lot. There are so many logical problems with an afterlife. Heaven/Utopia doesn't make sense because it would have to be based on your current life. (do you arrive old or young in heaven etc) Reincarnation is problematic because you would have to stand in a queue while waiting for your soul to be assigned to a new body. My theory with the least amount of logical flaws is assuming that there is a global soul which is reading the "standard input" from all philosophical zombies simultaneously or it only selects one philosophical zombie.

None of this really matters because only depressed people worry about the "meaning" of life, primarily because they have been denied all other sources of "meaning" and therefore cling to the one thing everyone (including themselves) has: a life. It's only human to grow attached to things and our lives are our most priced possessions after all.

<comment><USER10> > My theory with the least amount of logical flaws is assuming that there is a > global soul which is reading the "standard input" from all philosophical > zombies simultaneously or it only selects one philosophical zombie.

Can you expand on the only selects one philosophical zombie? I don't really understand what you're attempting to express.

I think all people "think" about existence at some point. Maybe sad people think about it more than others.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In defense of Experts Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://andyada.ms/blog/in-defense-of-experts-exchange/ <comment><USER3> There's this sort of idea that I can't wrap my head around, which is that if there's this fact A, and you don't like it, you can somehow make it not true by... explaining in detail why it is true. OK, so EE has its reasons for doing what developers didn't like... the end result is still that developers didn't like it. You explained that fact quite well, but I'm at a loss as to how that's supposed to translate into a negation of what you just explained.

I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> So the fact A is that developers didn't like EE. I don't dispute that. What I'm arguing is that sometimes it's worthwhile to take a nuanced view of something that goes deeper than the surface level.

In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.

<comment><USER3> I don't care about their internal motivations. Why should I? It's not as if what you said is even all that different than what we thought anyhow.

Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper level than that. _Why_ should I care about their internal motivations? EE chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.

You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get what you're saying, but haven't you ever made a judgement on someone only to later learn more about the circumstances around them and then modify your judgement?

To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion. EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that happens all the time. But in that case, there was already a judgment about someone and then I got to know them and then realized that what was said about them was either gossip, or the person changed.

The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an answer.

Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't be forgotten.

<comment><AUTHOR> Admittedly, they generated plenty of frustration for me, as well. SO has changed everything, but it's kinda funny to me that when we encounter content that isn't free, we have a visceral reaction against it. Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn. Thanks for your comments.

<comment> qu4z-2 > Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn.

Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I joined Stack Overflow about 4.5 years ago and I was one of the top 10 all time users on Stack Overflow for a couple years or so, so I have seen my fair share of SO/EE arguments on the web. What's interesting is that not a single time I'd seen EE defended by anyone but its current or former employees.

Also, the blog post mentions "I think their public, negative campaign against Experts Exchange was excessive, mean-spirited, and at the very least immature and silly. Admittedly, it worked – they've achieved their goal, and "death to EE" became the rallying cry." I don't really get this. Aside some joke-like mentions in the podcast or blog entries, Stack Overflow did not really do anything to harm EE specifically. They were just a better QnA platform and much closer to what users wanted. No one rallied against EE just to kill EE; whatever was done was to build a better QnA system and _that_ succeeded. Experts Exchange is just something users don't want and it never reacted to the presence of Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow eventually ate their lunch in its entirety. Stack Overflow's mission was to become the wikipedia of programming questions, which meant EE-like sites would eventually die should SO becomes successful, but EE was never a specific target of a tactic or anything beyond joke-like verbal _attacks_. It was, however, a good model of "how not to do things"; something you'd learn from.

<comment><USER6> My impression from reading Atwood's writings on the origins of SO was that being Not Experts Exchange was a primary initial goal.

<comment><USER5> I know that was what he said, but I believe that sentence was just a simple way to communicate their vision like using "XYZ done right" to describe a company. He did not particularly care about Experts Exchange IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What did EE do that was worth of scorn?

Wasted our fucking time: I want to know how to do X, if you want me to pay for that knowledge fine but don't do some shitty thing like cloaking the site so people would get tricked into paying while at the same time gaming Google to get these higher results.

Manipulated people into paying for the site: It's high up on Google so it must have the answer right? OK I guess I'm going to have to pay or else my ass gets fired.

But don't pretend like what EE did was "OK" because some Matt Cutts video said it was. Obviously it was not because it got hit and sank in rankings. SO wasn't what killed EE with it's "negative campaign," it was already well hated before SO came onto the scene.

Good riddance.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd probably make a similar decision.

At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so angry over? Not in my mind.

Clearly you disagree, and that's fine. I think your mind is made up and I don't have hopes to change it.

<comment><USER8> > If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on > Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd > probably make a similar decision.

Google doesn't click on the links it shows, your customers do. What google says is "OK" for them, is not always going to be "OK" for your potential customers.

Try giving this recent submission a read: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6399494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6399494)

Also, what does running a company with 50+ employees have to do with making a similar decision? You'd think with more employees you'd be more likely to find the guy that stands up and says "this is fucking retarded what are you thinking"

> At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to > users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the > page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth > getting so angry over? Not in my mind.

I don't know about you but when I have no idea how to fix a mission critical bug and need a fix ASAP and I search google but all I get is pages and pages of links to your site which "doesn't give me the answer" i get pretty pissed off, especially because you're giving google the answer in order to clutter up all those results pages and rank relevant.

And I say "doesn't give me the answer" because, just so you know, I never knew there was answers at the bottom of the page until jeff pointed it out.

Look, I get it questions and answers are just metrics on a screen to you, but questions and answers to the users are MUCH much more. You broke google, fucking with us when we least needed a fucking with. And to me, that is worth getting angry over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _What great evil did Experts Exchange do?_

The very question that is asked is a straw man argument. Nobody is saying that Experts Exchange did some great evil (ex: genocide). What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody. Then to preserve that unsustainable business model, they used various underhanded search engine manipulations.

To me, they were jerks. When Google came out with the ability to filter domains from your personal results, they were the first (and only) domain I added.

Even to this day, they will show you the answer if you scroll through 5 pages of gunk. They didn't do any "great evil". They're just slimy and I get a bad taste in my mouth anytime I think about them. But at least they added that hyphen to their name at some point because for a while I couldn't NOT see it as ExpertSexChange.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and > giving to nobody

I'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really well, and nobody is forcing them to answer. Nobody forces EE's customers to pay for access to their content, either. Behind the curtain they actually have a lot of happy customers (and question answerers).

They didn't fit the "open source" model programmers like, but for the people who need advanced help with Cisco routers or for the experts winning trips around the world, they're actually not such a slimy company. Thanks for your comments.

<comment><USER9> _I 'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really well_

From Wikipedia:

 _At Experts-Exchange, users are awarded points for answering questions_

Out of curiosity, what is the exchange rate between Experts Exchange points and reddit karma?

Wikipedia goes on...

 _Experts (those who have reached 10,000 points overall and maintain at least 3,000 points per month)[15] and subscribers get the benefit of using the site 's search engine without limitations and no ads are shown._

What's the hourly rate on this work? Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well". Because it seems to me these people are doing work worth in the neighborhood of $100 per hour. You tell me how much they're actually making.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I understand your point. You seem to be thinking that people answering questions deserve to be paid - as if they're being forced into answering at all. Experts on EE are answering questions for the same reason users on SO are.

> Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well"

If you're a top contributor to EE, you get flown to really nice places and are treated like a VIP by EE. Not everyone reaches this level, but those who do get a really nice perk, in addition to the benefits of answering questions in general.

<comment><USER9> _You seem to be thinking that people answering questions deserve to be paid_

If I may first pay you a compliment, you are very adept at twisting words and building up straw man arguments.

What I actually said was:

 _What [Experts Exchange] did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody_

Your response was then:

 _EE treats those answering questions really well_

But we both know this isn't true. It pays the vast, vast, vast majority of question answerers in worthless or near worthless points. The average question answerer, including the ones that get flown places and "treated like a VIP" is probably actually getting less than minimum wage for their work. That's hardly being treated "really well".

So we come back to my original statement. Experts Exchange built their business on taking from many and giving to nobody. If you want me to add an exception of, "giving to nobody except giving scraps to the very top of people whose time they were taking to build their business on" I would be amenable to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> My friend, I do not intentionally twist words. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how you can be upset that:

\- EE isn't paying people money for the answers they provide

 _when_

\- those persons answering questions are doing so with no expectation of being paid in anything but points.

It's no different than Stack Overflow, but you seem to think otherwise. Just trying to figure out what you're getting at.

<comment><USER9> _It 's no different than Stack Overflow_

You're being consciously or subconsciously obtuse.

With Experts Exchange:

1\. People answer questions for free

2\. People pay for the answers

3\. Google and other search engines are gamed

The only thing that is the "just like Stack Overflow" is #1. The other two items are absolutely nothing like Stack Overflow. As I said, Experts Exchange takes from many and gives to nobody. Stack Exchange takes from many and gives to all. You really can't possibly not see the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where's the defense? "Experts Exchange were dicks to users, but it was to make money!" isn't a defense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being "dicks to users" is based on what, exactly? My point is that for EE to not be "dicks to users" in the eyes of the tech community would mean to stop charging for their content.

I linked a video of Google's Matt Cutts explaining that EE wasn't violating their guidelines. So their infraction was hiding content below the fold. Hardly an evil infraction, and not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company.

EE added real value, and their longevity is evidence that some people are willing to pay for that value.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately it's really hard to get any reasoned discussion about Experts- Exchange on Hacker News. Ideologies are difficult to discuss. I'm reminded of this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)

It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to access.

Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they know will get positive feedback/karma.

edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.

<comment><USER12> > "exposes itself in search results"

'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I blocked EE in my google search results.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I didn't intend to play semantic games here. I don't think anyone has disagreed that they gamed search results. I meant only to call out the difference between sites that explicitly don't end up in search results (because they don't want to) versus those that actively try to get indexed.

Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for Experts-Exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me, EE being gone is good riddance, I HATED THEM, HATE HATE HATE HATE.

Most people might wonder: "why?"

It is because ANYTHING I searched on Google resulted into 3 pages of their links, sometimes sorta hidden (ie: sites that republished their links for example), and it resulted in:

When it started, I wasted lots of time visiting their links, seeing the stupid paywall, and getting pissed off with the wasted time.

As I learned to not click on their links, then I clicked on other sites that republished their links.

As I learned to filter those out, I had to expend time looking carefully several pages of google results searching for what I really wanted.

So I hated them, because not only they provided nothing for me (I was not willing to pay for whatever crap they were selling, I never saw a answer on their site, since I never noticed the "below the fold" or whatever that means, thus I still don't have a clue on the quality of whatever was their answers, so to me it was just a scam), they also wasted my time, they made me lose my valuable time working around their shady SEO tricks.

When they were gone from google, and thus made me stop wasting my time, I was really happy.

And if a employee or ex-employee come complain that I want the demise of their employer, all I can say is: "Don't work for people that do evil stuff." (this also apply to anyone working for cigarrete manufacturer, US intel and DoD, US private army contractors, some certain divisions of game publishers, some banks, and so on...)

<comment><USER14> Man, this comment went from "fair frustration" to "crazy train" mighty quick.

Blanket statements like "don't work for [entire industry X]" generally make you come off as a little tin-foil-hattish, just FYI. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> EE isn't the only company to have faced this conundrum (either you give away the content for free, in which case it shows up in search results and you get lots of search traffic, or you put it behind a paywall, in which case it doesn't show up in search results and you get no search traffic).

In fact, pretty much any company whose primary asset is content faces a version of this problem.

My take on it? This falls into the category of "3\. Come up with a totally new business model":

I've often thought that it would be useful to have a search engine that indexes paid content and then allows users to filter it out.

So, suppose you're searching for the answer to a particularly difficult programming question.

You might start out with the filter on: "Only show me free results."

And then if your search turns up nothing, you might turn the filter off, and maybe you'd discover that for a couple of bucks, you can get access to the answer to your question.

So maybe EE, or some other enterprising company, could build a search engine that fits their monetization model, rather than relying on a bunch of search engines that don't.

<comment> mkr-hn The trouble with this is that everyone with the answer has an incentive to answer for free on an open site. The incentive is that others will do the same if they feel like they got value for their time.

How does a paid site compete with something like Stack Exchange? SE has most of the answers. People appreciate finding the answer they needed. Many of them will turn around and pay it forward by answering questions or improving other answers. It's the same reason Wikipedia killed paid encyclopedias.

<comment><USER15> Actually, anyone who actually wants to get compensated for their expertise or research has an incentive to answer on a paid site, rather than a free site.

I think we're now starting to realize the repercussions of this emphasis on free, free, free content online.

Look at newspapers. Nobody wants to pay for news anymore, and consequently, the journalism industry is in shambles. And that's a real shame, because in decades past, a robust metro newspaper used to be one of the best checks and balances against government corruption and slimey business practices.

The model you propose -- freely sharing information so that everyone benefits -- has its merits, but it's no way to make a living, and consequently the pool of contributors gets whittled down to those who can afford to contribute without any expectation of compensation. But what if the person who has the expertise to answer a tough question isn't in that pool?

<comment><USER16> If the person that has the expertise doesn't want to answer the question for free ... then the free market will deem access to that knowledge more valuable, and his consulting fees will increase. Everything is an ebb and flow. When the "value" of some knowledge goes down due to what some might call oversupply, the value of other knowledge will go up because it is not shared freely; those who need that knowledge or service will then be willing to pay a premium for it since they could not find it elsewhere.

You're right that some things that were great ways to make a living are starting to become less-so. The answer is to simply to not try to make a living at that thing that is undervalued by the market. If enough providers of that service leave the supply pool, then the value will increase and compel the supply to return.

The market doesn't have an obligation to support journalists ... if no one wants to pay them because they can get information on twitter, reddit, and facebook ... well, that's how it is :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's far from the worst atrocity that EE committed. What sent me over the edge with Expert's Exchange is the fact that to sign up for a "free trial", you had to enter in credit card information. That kept me away from the site for a long time, until one day when I was desperate for an answer and it appeared that EE might have one. I bit the bullet and quickly signed up, not reading over the fine print. Next month, lo and behold, I see a charge on my credit card for a full membership rate at EE.

Shame on me for not assuming this would happen when I signed up, but shame on EE for implementing this scammy business practice in the first place. What percent of EE's revenue model came from unwitting free trial memberships that rolled over into "VIP" memberships?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was under the impression that pretty much any company that took CCs on signups assumed you would stay signed up until you explicitly cancelled...there are tons of examples of beloved companies doing this, so I don't agree that this was so bad. I suppose they could've made it clearer...

<comment><USER18> And that impression is completely wrong.

Gods, how I wish I had enough karma to downvote on HN...

<comment><AUTHOR> I just went through a list of companies that I personally use or have considered using that take CC information on signup. All but one assume that you'll be continuing unless you explicitly cancel. I don't think my impression is so far off the mark, but eh, I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really didn't care much about the google spamming if by some magic they managed to get me right answers. The only problem with EE is that I couldn't get anything from their spam, only links to pay for the answer.

SO solved this problem by making it free. You could ask questions for free as well. I don't know if SO tries to game google, but their answers are pretty close to the top results most of the time. I don't mind, because they are usually relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depending on when you visited, you'd probably need to scroll to the bottom of the page to get the answer and/or visit the cached version of the page. Annoying, yes. Worthy of scorn? That's up for debate.

SO ate EE's lunch on the SEO front, to be sure. And I agree with Google that SO offers better experience for searchers, so I'm glad they're winning that battle.

<comment><USER20> You keep saying that they weren't really worthy of scorn, and yet they were fairly scorned industry wide BEFORE stackoverflow came into existed. So, yeah, obviously they did things that people disliked. I never saw a "kill EE" campaign. Yes, SO wanted to "not be EE," because everyone hated EE. I don't think a lot of people decided to hate EE because SO said to, they hated EE because of EE's practices. Did EE change their practices? Perhaps, but it was too soo, too late. And I never found out, because I blocked them as soon as I could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From personal experience, I can tell you why I detest EE - their dark pattern practices. I did sign up and pay for a subscription, and it was not a ripoff. However - when I went to cancel it, I had to SEND A FAX (or use snail mail, IIRC) to stop payments. That's right, you could not cancel online. See ya later!

</comment><comment><USER22> > Imagine you're running EE in 2009 [...] You also have a new competitor who > is doing everything for free. You have a few options, as I see it

This makes it sound like EE resorted in gray hat SEO at least in part as a response to SO. A quick Googling found they were doing this from at least 2006 [1]

[1] [http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=11974](http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=11974)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the core point being made is that Experts Exchange was not _evil_. They were _annoying_.

They had a business model that was never great, but worked okay until someone came along with a better one. At which point they messily exploded because nobody (with the exception of a few employees and top contributors) actually liked them. They kept popping up in google results, but when they clicked on them it never actually solved your problem. Their web design was annoying, the cloaking was frustrating, and the actual content was often terrible. It often read like a transcript of a tier 1 tech support call that had been conducted in another language then translated into yours via google translate, and it was rife with errors or the classic "I have a problem with X...nevermind, I fixed it!", which is the sort of thing which fills everyone who finds it later because they're having the same problem with RAGE. Did our friendly sexchange experts deserve that rage? Not really, but it _was_ their fault. EE was setup such that the average user saw tons of poor quality answers; SO was setup such that the average user saw good quality answers. Ultimately that comes right back to the door of the devs and designers.

I'd sum the blog post up as "Hey, Experts Exchange was annoying, mostly useless, and vaguely scummy, but it was staffed with good people doing the best they could, and it wasn't outright evil!" And he's right. Evil is a high bar; EE never even approached it.

What they were was incompetent. And SO called them out on it, and Andy is hurt by it. He has every right to be, but it doesn't change the fact that EE was is effectively gone, and deservedly so. And 99.99% of the people who ever tried to use EE will be pleased.

</comment><comment><USER24> Experts Exchange was and is adversarial to _its own users_. Not Google, its own users. By charging for freely available content, they are making their own users suckers. That's enough to avoid using it, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER25> What needs to be considered is what EE was good at. EE's speciality, as I recall, was not tutorials, but quick problem solving advice. And it was very Google friendly. It usually looked like it had a good answer whenever it showed up.

That being said, when a person is looking for advice on how to fix a problem, they are probably frustrated, stressed, or both.

So imagine going to Google for help to see a really promising link appear in the results (not in the advertising section), and the content is hidden behind a pay-wall. Almost like seeing an oasis in the desert only to realize it is a mirage.

I don't know about other users, but I'd rather not see a link. From my perspective, all EE did was make Google less effective.

Some might say that "there is no such thing as pad publicity." I would argue that isn't true at all. The above describes my first and only reaction to hearing about EE. And due to not being able to see the content, I lack any personal positive stories on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a particular XKCD comic that used to constantly reflect my experience while searching for the solutions to technical problems in one particular area of expertise ([http://xkcd.com/979/](http://xkcd.com/979/)).

Seeing EE answers gumming up the search results (especially if you didn't know the trick) was at least an order of magnitude more frustrating.

I'm glad EE treated its employees well, but the way a company treats its employees can be completely unrelated to the way a company treats its competitors, or its potential or actual employee base. And it seems pretty clear that EE treated its potential customer base so poorly that Stack Overflow was able to tap into latent frustration and anger and quickly corner the market on community technical Q&A. The hatred for EE grew up organically, and I doubt Joel's campaign did much more than giving direction and a voice to pre-existing resentment.

<comment><USER27> Oh man. The alt text. I want that _so much_ now. When I think of how much more useful support forums would be if the first post in the thread were basically a wiki...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One thing I wish the article pointed out was that Stack Exchange isn't profitable whereas Experts Exchange is (this was true earlier this year; SE may be profitable now). In general, it's difficult for a bootstrapped company selling a service to compete with VC-funded free services, and choices have to be made.

<comment><USER5> Note that Stack Overflow itself was not VC funded for a good amount of time. They only raised VC funding when they wanted to push StackExchange towards other areas outside programming. They certainly were not VC funded from the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is Experts Exchange, the company, and then there's experts-exchange.com. The majority of folks complaining have had a bad experience with the latter, while you are defending the former.

A reasonable person should be able to separate the two, and so it's nice to hear more about the people behind the website. But that doesn't make the user experience on the website any better than it is on StackOverflow, and it is unlikely to change the fact that most folks memory of experts-exchange.com before StackOverflow existed is one of disappointment and deception, which is why it was so effective for Jeff and Joel to rally users around the notion of being the anti-experts-exchange. (I think they themselves made a distinction between the site and the people behind it at least once, and talked about having a conversation with an experts exchange employee or two. And it's worth remembering that that was only one of the few ways they desscribed their vision: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing- stackov...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing- stackoverflow-com.html))

So if you want to humanize your friends, keep writing about them, and I'm sure you'll get readers. It sounds like an interesting story. But it seems mistaken to expect that alone to counteract people's impression of the site itself. If you want to hear people say nicer things about experts-exchange, either listen to the folks who are happily using it and ignore the hate, or genuinely listen to complaints, find a way to make more people happy.

</comment><comment><USER30> When experts exchange first launched, it seemed like a clever concept to me, in the abstract; a way to get paid for your expertise (although you couldn't buy anything with it except answers to other questions). And they take a wee percentage (but they're not greedy).

However, in practice, I only ever asked one question (they gave a free $50 credit at launch, worth 5 questions or something). I got a great answer - <USER2> think better, and more insightful than I'd get on SO. But it was a horrific experience, and I never used it again after that.

I guess, in the bigger picture, they were trying to monetize people's goodwill in helping each other. Helping feels more valuable when done purely out of goodwill; money can devalue. Not sure how big that factors in their failure - but to the extent it created a competitor, it's a real factor. Your customers disliking you is serious business problem.

Although it's the way of the world, there's something hollow and unsatisfying about being motivated primarily by money. Most entrepreneurs - e.g. Elon Musk - have visions bigger than themselves and their riches. Many of the best developers, like many academics, believe everything should be free, or at cost.

I'm inclined to think the above is the root problem, and the SEO tactics etc are just a symptom. But hard to say.

<comment><USER11> Out of curiosity, how was asking a question and getting a great answer a horrible experience? Or more specific, what made you not want to ask more questions?

<comment><USER30> In general, I always felt a bit nervous about money being involved - additional importance, security issues, etc. A certain seriousness, a complication distracting from the actual technical issue.

But specifically, I couldn't log back into my account to mark the answer as correct. The help people gave me a new password a couple of times, but they didn't work. I eventually realized it was hopeless, and gave up. Later, I tried again to find the question and reward the person (this time paying out of my own pocket), but couldn't find it after intensive searching, many keywords etc. It seems that my question and the answers had been lost.

I feel that the initial problem was to do with money being involved - additional security around logging in, because mistakes with money are so serious. Maybe combined with teething troubles. It was very very strange and bizarre.

In contrast, I haven't had such problems with StackOverflow (or reddit or HN etc), so other purchases online.

I still feel bad about this, after 10 years. :(

<comment><USER11> Very interesting, thanks for clarifying!

<comment><USER30> Just a quick thought: the help I got on EE was different from SO, so maybe there's a niche for EE. Let me describe the help:

I'd been stuck, and pretty much given up. A friend wondered if there was someone I could ask - but it was virgin territory, no one had done it before, and so no one would know. I only tried EE because what the hell. I didn't get a _specific_ answer, but _" X does that - why don't you see how X does it?"_ This was a clever, insightful, lateral point of view. I didn't think I'd be able to use X's technique - but amazingly, it turned out I could! The suggestion might seem obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't to me. It was just what I needed to hear - a great answer.

I'd describe this as "micro-consultation" or "micro-mentoring", which differs from SO's aim of specific concrete answers to specific concrete questions. I think the money-motivation of EE helped encourage someone to spend a few moments creative thought on my question. It's the kind of insight you get from having many contributors to an open-source project - but who's going to bother, for the case where only one person benefits?

So... I do think this _kind_ of service, sort of halfway between SO and full- on consultancy, is valuable and has a role - but micro, like Amazon's mechanical turk. I think Google Answers tried this (now defunct). A little bit like that logo design site SO used ([http://99designs.com.au/logo- design/contests/logo-stackoverf...](http://99designs.com.au/logo- design/contests/logo-stackoverflow-6774)) - a sort of eBay for consultancy, but a micro version.

Because consultancy is very question-specific, they'd be almost no question reuse (unlike SO), which also fits with a money motive (i.e. people love karma/fame; but if not available, fortune is OK). So I'm suggesting a micro- consultancy facilitation site, where the _asker pays the answerer_ and EE takes a wee percentage (a similar amount to crowd-sourcing sites). A different niche from SO.

Maybe I should try EE again next time I'm stuck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Fact is that Experts Exchange is a parasitic organism. It games Google search results, then, when people click their links, they're confronted with an infamous paywall instead of anything useful. If Expert Exchange had any self-respect at all, they would survive by way of advertising alongside freely available content, as their successful competitors do.

I've been filtering all Experts Exchange content from browsing results for years now, and as time goes by, the justification only gets stronger.

</comment><comment><USER32> "San Luis Obispo is an extremely desirable place to live and there are only a handful of tech jobs in the area."

This is definitely not true anymore (the handful of jobs part).

Shameless plug: I work in SLO for Mindbody and we're hiring. [https://www.mindbodyonline.com/company/careers](https://www.mindbodyonline.com/company/careers)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's better than an amateur sex-change...

</comment><comment><USER34> One thing I've always wanted is to be able set a browser switch to delete any returns from EE. There probably is a way that I've been too distracted to find. BTW, my only reason for such dislike is the 'Ooh ooh---we've got the answer' behind our paywall. Just don't like paywalls...</comment>


Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf

<comment><USER2> You should still skim the paper (the answer to the title question is in section 4), but here's a one-sentence summary so you're not going in blind:

"As a scammer, saying you're from Nigeria drives off all but the most gullible (ergo, profitable) marks, allowing you to spend less time on ultimately failed scams."</comment>


Zemblanity - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-zem1.htm <comment><USER2> Are the etymological variants zemblanous and zemblanification coming into modern use as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Doubtful, as the original word remains obscure.

Incidentally, I discovered the word by Googling "opposite of serendipity" after coming to realize that I experienced a chain of unfortunate black swan events in my life, with the planets aligning (metaphorically, of course) in order to screw me over.</comment></comment>


GitHub & StickyGram trial Instagram subscription printing service - <AUTHOR> http://stickygram.tumblr.com/post/10442889552/world-first-instagram-printing-by-subscription

<comment><USER2> What are the reservations in making this service public?

Also, did the github employees know that their IGs were going to be made into magnets or was it a surprise?

<comment><USER3> Hi there. We decided to put it out as a little experiment. If there's enough interest we'd definitely consider putting in the time to make it open to the public.

The GitHub folks approached us with the idea and gave full consent for the images to be printed.</comment></comment>


How to create your own personal static site generator - <AUTHOR> http://masa331.github.io/new_posts/create_your_own_static_site_generator.html <comment><USER2> > _Because then you won 't have a hard time remembering how it works!_

Hah, I wish...

Still, it's a fun exercise to do so, easy to get started and can have interesting challenges if you want to make it more complicated.</comment>


Frama-C: Function Contracts and Static Analysis for the C Language - <AUTHOR> http://frama-c.com/index.html <comment><USER2> I think the era of focus on static analysis tools has begun. I think all languages are moving in this direction. We have the new C++ Core Guidelines which will eventually be compiler-enforced, there is Rust with its program- proving compiler, and there are these neat tools for C, and no doubt more will flourish in coming years. It is going to be interesting to see where it all goes.

<comment><USER3> The sad thing is that lint was created in 1979, already when C unsafety was clear.

However in the early days, only C was being ported outside UNIX (parts of it actually) and lint became something that only the ultimate versions (to use a more modern expression) had.

There was also the issue of false positives.

So very few bothered buying it.

<comment><USER2> I wonder also if that possibility of unsafety just doesn't matter much to a lot of people. After all, lisps have been around forever and even today JS and Clojure are popular when the possibility of doing unsafe things is extremely easy in a language where there are no type checks. So perhaps many developers just don't worry so much about compiler checks and instead enjoy the flexibility of "weak" or "no" typing, at the possible expense of safety. And maybe all of that is gradually changing. I really really love Clojure, but find static typing very useful; but also, it's great to throw it away when you feel confident enough to do so, and perhaps a lot of developers just like this, shall I call it "cowboy", style?

<comment><USER3> All languages allow unsafe things,if you think in terms of logic errors.

But C's unsafety leads to memory corruption as well, even for very skilled developers.

Only matched by programming in straight Assembly.

Yes that was the expression we used in 90's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tutorial: [http://frama-c.com/download/acsl- tutorial.pdf](http://frama-c.com/download/acsl-tutorial.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Or, if you like the web: [http://frama-c.com/acsl_tutorial_index.html](http://frama-c.com/acsl_tutorial_index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how it stacks up against Microsoft's SAL annotations. So far I've only used SAL annotation, with the compiler's /Analyze flag, but the amount of checking done is limited, and the system itself is far from perfect, sometimes pointing to logical errors that are clearly not there. However it is still very useful.

Maybe Frama-C is better?

</comment><comment><USER6> Could this be considered a more elaborate Valgrind?

<comment><USER7> Frama-C can be used in "interpreter mode" where it acts like a checking C interpreter. It then catches a superset of the bugs that would be caught by Valgrind / ASan / UBSan. On the other hand it is slower and harder to use than those tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, any experience reports?

I can recommend [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/09/07/provers.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/09/07/provers.html).

Personally, I tried to prove that a fairly simple program I had written a few years prior was free of undefined behavior. Frama-C was tantalizingly capable - it was easy to tell Frama-C what I wanted to prove, and it managed to propagate possible values and control flow through the program pretty accurately, even with minimal assistance. Although I disliked the absence of a usable text-mode integration (vim?), the GUI presented the results clearly. The Frama-C manuals were extensive, mostly up-to-date, and managed to explain even complicated concepts in a pretty clear way. (Fair warning: although I have zero background in formal methods, I have quite a lot of mathematical training and like language lawyering.)

Unfortunately, Frama-C did not grok malloc() at the time. My program consisted of I/O into malloc()'ed buffers plus some processing. Teaching Frama-C about malloc() was clearly beyond my skill. Worse, I really wanted to prove that my program output was some suitably processed form of its input data, and I didn't look forward to trying to model read()/write() - so I stopped the experiment, and planned to revisit Frama-C in a couple years.

Actual experts can apparently get much better results: Frama-C was used to prove that chunks of PolarSSL were free of certain undefined behavior ([http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1261](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1261), or the actual report at [http://trust-in- soft.com/polarSSL_demo.pdf](http://trust-in-soft.com/polarSSL_demo.pdf)). This is a limited result: huge chunks of code are out-of-bounds. Also, "PolarSSL is memory-safe" is _very_ far from "PolarSSL is a secure SSL library". Still, I'm impressed.

I did not see a good way to integrate Frama-C in our development process. From reading and talking to some people, I am left with the distinct impression that keeping proofs up-to-date in living software is not a solved problem. Frama-C does allow you to annotate code with assertions (which, I expect, can act as hints to the provers). However, the workflow still seems to be oriented around Frama-C's interactive mode, which is very powerful but doesn't yield artifacts that can easily be reused. Also, mastering Frama-C is _hard_ \- it's not something that you can just expect a software developer to pick up.

(In contrast, the Coverity static analysis tool uses unsound analysis and can't guarantee anything. However, colleagues report that it does a decent job at finding _some_ bugs with a low false-positive rate, especially after you add a few annotations. Coverity offers ongoing scans to open-source projects; unfortunately, Coverity's scan servers appear to be backlogged at the moment. "Not a need-to-have, but something we could consider buying.")

<comment><USER9> I use Frama-C without the GUI. The annotations do take some effort, but once you get it, it's very intuitive. Start with adding assertions, for example checking that array indices don't go out of bound. Then start with simple function specifications, and improve on them over time.

I wouldn't use it everywhere, but in small, important functions, it's well worth it.

Here's the classic example of reading into a buffer: [https://github.com/eliteraspberries/ttyprompt/blob/master/ge...](https://github.com/eliteraspberries/ttyprompt/blob/master/getline.c) From those few annotations, Frama-C is able to determine that there are no buffer overflows there.</comment></comment>


MinION is the only portable, real-time device for DNA and RNA sequencing - <AUTHOR> https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion <comment><USER2> Are there any public forums with amateur scientists / bio-hackers that use these and document all of their research? I've been looking for a way to do genetic profiling truly "at home".</comment>


The Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood during the Great Depression - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/unions-opening-credits <comment><USER2> SAG and the WGA are great models for flexible, performance-based pay, while maintaining wage floors and good working conditions across employers. That's why the US government outlawed new unions from forming along similar lines (sector-wide bargaining) and forced everyone into the adversarial shop-vote model or independent contracting!

<comment><USER3> Can you recommend further reading on said outlawing?

<comment><USER2> This covers the history pretty well, although without specific reference to SAG and the WGA (who were grandfathered in by the legislation discussed):

[https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/taft-hartley-unions-right- to-...](https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/taft-hartley-unions-right-to-work)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone subscribed to Lapham's? What are your thoughts?

<comment><USER5> I have picked up copies periodically over the last few years and finally subscribed this year (print edition). I like it, there's a diverse set of articles centered around a common subject matter. It's easy to read a few articles at a time (I usually read it linearly, but that's just my habit for reading in general, you could easily bounce around). I don't think I've read every article in any issue I've picked up, but I have found a lot of interesting things. Even if it's just giving me a more global perspective or different historical perspective, being a more diverse set of authors than I have encountered in my usual reading which tends to be: contemporary news and analysis, science fiction, technical (usually software related, but often math as well).

If you're just curious about it, just go to your local bookshop or order an issue online and check it out. They're not cheap, but I think the list price is under $20 for an issue (around 200 pages of text and images).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They hadn't invented podcasts back then...</comment>


Show HN: FlightBot, a Messenger bot designed for pilots - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/FlightBot <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I'm a pilot and programmer. This is a project I did over a weekend as a way to learn about bots and sharpen my Node.js skills.

It hooks up to various databases to give pilots information about weather, FAA notices, runways, frequencies and other important info for ICAO airport codes.

The bot handles natural conversations pretty well. Here's an example:

Me: Hello

FlightBot: Hey!

Me: What's the METAR for KBFI?

FlightBot: The METAR for KBFI is...

Me: How about the forecast?

FlightBot: The TAF for KBFI is...

Me: What's the ATIS frequency there?

FlightBot: 127.75

Me: Are there any TFRs?

FlightBot: I'm not seeing any TFRs for KBFI.

Me: What's the travel time from BFI to PDX at 115 kts?</comment>


Show HN: My girlfriend needed a Secret Santa web app, so I built her one - <AUTHOR> http://www.memofromsanta.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I built this. Girlfriend needed this to organise her christmas party and we couldn't really find a nice one on the internet.. So I built it myself. Mostly for her and as an exercise for myself (I learnt the basics of Angular and NodeJS along the way), but then my designer friend came up with the design and we put it live. Hope you enjoy it.

<comment><USER2> What resources did you use to learn NodeJS?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been a long journey of playing around and never finishing small projects until I started this and then it suddenly clicked. I had a bit of PHP and Rails experience prior to this, but Node was pretty much new to me, except for the JS part. The whole async mindset got me in to trouble a couple of times on this project.

The courses on Codeschool helped me tremendously, and this was fun to play around with: [https://github.com/rvagg/learnyounode](https://github.com/rvagg/learnyounode). I read a lot of blogs and some books (will get links later if you want), but mostly it was just trying until it clicked.

<comment><USER2> Cool thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, now get an affiliate account at Amazon and make gift suggestions

<comment><USER4> This is a brilliant idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I tried this earlier with three people. Two of them were told to give presents to the same person, and one person was left present-free.

Not sure if you've fixed that already, but it seems like an important feature to get right...

<comment><USER6> With three people, wouldn't a valid Secret Santa solution have everyone knowing who's giving which present to who?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool but using Ghostery plugin on Chrome ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdfkolichcflejclcbmpeaniij)) reveals 16 different javascript trackers and advertising libraries used on this website. I know in the footer it states "Memo from Santa does not store e-mail addresses. We will not send you e-mails apart from the event e-mail, nor will we use your e-mail address for any other purpose." but as this being a free service it's kind of worrying. Should I be worried about giving the emails of all my relatives and friends?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect this is because of the addthis social services. Will dig into this later!

Edit: my Ghostery reveals just that: Addthis and Google Analytics. I could perhaps replace Addthis with just a Twitter/Facebook social button, but I liked the layout of the Addthis buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If someone tests this and their email goes to spam, would they be so kind to pastebin me the message headers/mime so I can try to solve that together with the Mailgun folks? Thanks a bunch.

<comment><USER9> How about creating a test email a\c by yourself to see if the email goes to spam or not? Your existing email a\c may also work.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't go to spam in my Gmail, which it did yesterday. However, some people are reporting the mail going to spam. This is why I'm asking, I can't test it myself on any account.

<comment><USER10> Another good test is [http://isnotspam.com/](http://isnotspam.com/). By sending an email from your app to firstname.lastname@example.com, you can get some good feedback on spam triggers.

<comment><USER11> I like [http://www.mail-tester.com/](http://www.mail-tester.com/) \-- that creates a unique address just for you, while isnotspam lets you search for anyone else's message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note; you should fix your SPF records, all mails end up in spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it? I checked this with Mailgun yesterday and they told me to send through the API instead of using SMTP. So I did, tested with Gmail today (where it was ending up in spam) and it arrived in the inbox.. I'll check with them again.

<comment><USER12> Still, if you send through their API you still need to list mailgun.org in your domain's SPF records (because you define ...@memofromsanta.com as the sender).

<comment><AUTHOR> Their 'Check Records' tool tells me my records are fine. I'm on the chat with them at the moment, trying to figure it out. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great job, this seems pretty fun. Plus, I'm sure your girlfriend really appreciates it, which is always awesome :)

Just one slight thing I noticed is that the "winsdom_scriptregular" font is quite hard to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

The font indeed is a bit hard to read. We were in doubt about using it for a while because of this, but in the end we liked the handwritten lettering.. so we went with it anyway. :)

<comment><USER14> What do you think about Lobster? [http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lobster](http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lobster)

Great idea for a web app by the way!

<comment><USER15> That font seems to still have the holly in it, and more readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> HN people might not care about this sort of thing (ending a sentence with a preposition), but it screams out at me:

"We'll make sure everyone knows for whom to buy a present!" vs. "We'll make sure everyone knows whom to buy a present for!"

Good job on the who vs. whom though..

<comment><USER17> This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

<comment><USER16> Winston? [http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html](http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html)

<comment><USER17> yep!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks great!!

Was just about to set up a Secret Santa on Elfster... was wondering how your site stacks up in terms of facilitating a gift exchange between friends/coworkers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know Elfster, but after a quick look it seems like they offer wishlists, gift exchange, etc?

We send out an e-mail to everyone on the list saying that Santa is busy and asking them to buy a present for person x. The rest is up to them. Not as advanced I guess :)

<comment><USER19> Surprised you didn't know about Elfster - I thought about making my own app too, until I saw Elfster.

It's not quite perfect and seems to barely hold itself together (am I signed in, do I have account or do I not?!, etc..), but my friends and I have gotten by. I was able to invite people, remind them to join before the deadline and set exclusions on matchups (I didn't want significant others to get each other as well as people who aren't good friends). People have wishlists, like you mentioned. It's served us well enough for a one time thing, I'm not really sure what else I would need or want.

I guess one could extend the concept and become a broker for the gigantic anonymous gift exchanges? Like the Reddit Secret Santa, except people order from you or send you the packages? I know of people who never got their present even though they had sent a present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I recently did Secret Santa app too, but it is frontend only (no server side, to be ran with all people present). I did it mostly to play with AngularJS, but it has some nice geeky features like using truly uniform shuffling and Fortuna PRNG for more unpredictability. It's in russian, but interface is pretty obvious, so feel free to try it :)

[http://evgeniuz.github.io/santa/](http://evgeniuz.github.io/santa/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha, looks nice! You could monetize this by letting everyone fill out a wish- list and offer affiliate-linked suggestions based on what is filled in? (Same as [http://namentrekken.be](http://namentrekken.be) does this; that wasn't an option for your gf? :)

<comment><USER21> Or [http://www.drawnames.com/](http://www.drawnames.com/) from the same company if you want it in English

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very cool, an inspiration. How long would you say it took you? (hours of work)

I ask as a young developer looking to gauge where he stands. Anyone have resources they could suggest for gauging fast/slow development for oneself?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't track time on this, but it took me 5-6 days to get it all done. I wasted a lot of time though: I didn't know much about NodeJS backends when I started this, and next to nothing about AngularJS. I did a couple of things three times until I got them right; I used to work as a front-end developer until I got fired last month, so now I'm trying some new things. I'm glad it's an inspiration for you.

<comment><USER23> Well best of luck! Of course I don't really know, but you're obviously motivated and have skills, so I would bet you're now on the upswing.

I am finishing something now that I hope to post to Show HN as well. Get some feedback, etc.

Edit: AKA derpson5, decided to change my username. Sorry HN DBs, wasted a record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> great idea! :) I've been using elfster for the last couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER25> Currently, when I fill out the form, I have no idea what's going out to the recipients - perhaps a mad libs-esque design would explain why each field, e.g. party title, is necessary :)

<comment><AUTHOR> May I ask what you mean with mad libs-esque? I did think about what you're saying while developing it but we kinda rushed things and didn't get to focus on the design much. Maybe for next year? :)

<comment><USER26> Hi ______(target user) ,

My name is ______(yourself) and this ____(verb) _______(noun)!

Hi Dinosaurs,

My names is atwebb and this is madlibs!

And you'd put the parens on the line, but I'm not sure of the markup for underlining here and feeling lazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Great suggestion, might even use that for something else I'm working on :) Thanks for explaining!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What platform did you use for deployment? When I dove into Node awhile back it seemed the most difficult part was finding a stable hosting solution...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm hosting this on a Digitalocean box, proxying Node through Nginx. Not sure if I did all that correctly, because that certainly was completely new to me, but it seems to work fine for now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's very pretty, what did you use to design the site visually? Just plain old html/css? A template? It's simple but good looking!

<comment><AUTHOR> My friend designed this, I did the front- and backend. It's just plain old HTML/CSS, using Jade for the views and Sass for the CSS, with some Bootstrap components. The grid especially was a great help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Minor annoyance: The "Amount of cash to spend" slide bar, needs to have its color inverted.

Otherwise, i think it looks great :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Diggin it. Already using Elfster though!

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice work! I built a similar site a few years ago and it's turned out to be pretty popular.

</comment><comment><USER31> Elfster works pretty well!

<comment><USER32> That may be true, I've never used Elfster, but the design of this landing page is far superior and more festive in my opinion. I probably wouldn't use Elfster after seeing this based on appearance alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> load page.

press "+"

visible error message

</comment><comment><USER34> So?</comment>


Runnable Documentation: Code for Humans - <AUTHOR> http://githubengineering.com/runnable-documentation/ <comment><USER2> I have to deal with an ugly legacy app for my job. Every once in awhile I'll have to do something that doesn't make sense to build into the app, so I'll come up with a procedure for doing it at a data level. Usually these are processes that run weekly / monthly / quarterly.

The first time I come up with a manual procedure. The second time I try to automate some of it. Then over the next few iterations I fix issues with the automation, as that step inevitably produces edge cases. They'll need special cases that I'll have to work into the tool.

Eventually this produces a command-line tool with appropriate help text and a README that outlines what the tool does, why, and what edge cases are present.

I used to wait until it was almost a finished product before writing the documentation, but as I get lazier and lazier, I just don't care to dive into the code I wrote last month, I just want a procedure for getting it done and going back to screwing around.

So the first time I have to do this, I take notes of all the manual steps I took to perform it in a markdown document. How did I massage the CSV, which fields did I add, so on and so forth. This has the side effect of making writing automation code way way easier the next time around. Next time I do it, I look at it and I'm like, "WTF Vince, why didn't you note that the date field can change formats?"

I, myself, am that person without domain knowledge, every single time I go back and do something I might have done even yesterday. I just don't care any more to maintain my own silos.

It also allows me to only be as ambitious as I feel like being. If I'm in the middle of refining a process and I lose interest, I can just wipe out my work, and do it the old way.

</comment><comment><USER3> In our experience, this is becoming expected behavior. Credit to Stripe here, theirs is the first implementation I remember. At Cronitor we had a bug in our inline documentation that didn't replace the examples. They were still valid, though not copy-paste runnable. The bug was introduced in a release before breakfast and we had bug reports about it by lunchtime.</comment>


Firefox 55: WebVR and more - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/firefox-55-supports-webvr/ <comment><USER2> > Dietrich Ayala has a Firefox profile with 1,691 open tabs. With Firefox 54, > starting up his instance of Firefox took 300 seconds and 2 GB of memory. > Today, with Firefox 55, it takes just 15 seconds and 0.5 GB of memory. This > improvement is primarily thanks to the tireless work of an external > contributor, Kevin Jones, who virtually eliminated the fixed costs > associated with restoring tabs.

This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.

<comment><USER3> Its not exciting at all, those are not "1,691 open tabs", those are 1,690 bookmarks/at very best suspended tabs.

Opera 12.xx could hold ~200 open/rendered/active/fully responsive tabs at ~2-3GB ram.

<comment><USER4> While Opera might have had some very impressive tricks (I should know, I used it for years), the reason it could do that at the time is because those tabs were not webapps or much fewer were webapps.

The browsers are a lot less bloated than people think they are. Sites on the other hand... we've moved from 800x600 images to 1920x1080 images and animations, tens of assets to hundreds, megabytes of Javascript, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved.

A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance.

I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed.

Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates.

I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.

<comment><USER6> The default number of content processes is already 4 in Nightly (57), they're just rolling it progressively in case things break :)

<comment><USER7> No, the number of processes is already at its intended value for the near future, as of Firefox 54. The default just varies for different hardware. If you look in the Firefox settings under General -> Performance, then it says there that it's optimized for your hardware, so I'm pretty sure that's the case and not just marketing fluff.

What I'm not entirely sure of, is how it's decided how many processes it uses. I think it's either largely dependent on the number of CPU cores or just straight-up that value. And then the vast majority of people has a quad-core, which is why it might seem like 4 is the default for everyone.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, you must be right about the _" optimized for your hardware"_, didn't know about that feature.

That being said, it's not just about CPU cores, there _is_ some fixed number of content processes, and it was increased during the last recent months; when e10s was in infancy it was set to 1, then bumped a few times. Source: developers blogposts, and [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes#Release_Plan) mentions Fx 55 is at 4 and expirements at [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e1...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e10s-multi_experiments) mention 8

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great to see FF continue to progress. I moved back to FF from Chrome when I ditched a Win7 install for Ubuntu after building a new computer. It hasn't been without issue, but I'm enjoying FF and very happy to see it evolve.

If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until- in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos.

[2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google's Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago.

[0] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917)

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154)

[2] [https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox- fights-...](https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-back- against-google-chrome/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm very glad they've drastically reduced the resources taken up by restored (but not activated) tabs. I tend to hoard tabs which I swear I'll organise into bookmarks "soon" but never quite get round to it.

There's more info on this here: [https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab- hoarder/](https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/)

<comment><USER10> It's a problem... I just ended up accepting who I am and gave up on bookmarks. I have a single bookmarks bar for frequently-visited websites like email, webcomics, aggregators, blogs, etc.

It's populated with just favicons, no labels. And then, spread between 4 virtual machines, I have Firefox instances that each contain on average 20-200 tabs at a time.

It takes me weeks to whittle these down only to have them drastically inflate again. On the rare occasion a bug / data corruption leads to losing my tabs on one of my machines, it's more relieving than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm really happy with Firefox these days. It is faster for my usage, except on Facebook and Google products, which I barely use these days.

<comment><USER12> I've been using it for the past 3 months as my primary browser. The mobile experience is superior to Chrome, in my opinion. (Particularly, the reader mode on mobile makes certain sites usable due to lack of JS, and proper font sizes.)

<comment><USER13> The mobile version is generally okay, but it takes way way much more than safari to start up, which absolutely sucks when you just when to quickly look something up.

<comment><USER14> You might be interested in Firefox Focus, which is purpose-built for the "I just want to quickly look something up" usecase.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/focus/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/focus/)

<comment><USER13> I do, actually. But I really like to keep a history so I can later recall what I looked up (or sometimes, the other way around: I need to look at my history).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Still no Linux love for WebVR :(

Since I have no intention of switching to Windows after 20+ years on Linux, I'm going to have to wait, as usual.

<comment><USER15> This wouldn't even be worth commenting on it's so normal, except that Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms before letting a release drop, so as much as I love VR, Mozilla, and Linux, I'm going to sit here and pout until I can do my thing on my tower. <3

<comment><USER16> > Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all > platforms

That mindset has been _starkly_ absent with WebVR. As in...

* "Mozilla Brings Virtual Reality to all Firefox Users" means "WebVR will ship on by default for all Windows users" [1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virt...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virtual-reality-to-all-firefox-users/)

* "Announcing WebVR on Mac via Firefox Nightly"[2] says "web developers can build and test content on their preferred platform, whether it's Windows, MacOS, or Linux (also available!)", where "available" means "crashes within seconds"[3] for almost a year, with no fix in sight. [2] [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/) [3] [https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83](https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83)

* The alleged blocker, "direct mode", is needed to get acceptable performance on Windows... but not on linux. [4] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_anyone_with_steam_running_fine_with/djugskl/)

Once upon a time, Microsoft would create Windows-only web extensions, to the detriment of the web. Nowadays, Mozilla does it for them.

A good rule of thumb for WebVR has been that there's always an unstated "on Windows", and anything said about non-Windows platforms working, is at best misleading. _Especially_ anything said by Mozilla - it's been very bizarre.

[https://webvr.rocks/](https://webvr.rocks/) doesn't even bother to have a linux column.

<comment> TD-Linux The issue without "Direct Mode" is latency, as your link says. You need to bypass both the browser compositor and the system compositor. On Linux, most compositors will implement something like Direct Mode (compositor bypass) when you go fullscreen, but it's a bit hit and miss with multimonitor setups. It might fly as a stopgap, though. Here's the tracking bug for WebVR on Linux, if you want to follow progress: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310655](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310655)

Something more directly analogous to "Direct Mode" on Windows are DRM leases, which give direct control over the scanout, rather than simply bypassing the compositor. This isn't possible on Linux at all yet, but Valve is working on it: [https://keithp.com/blogs/DRM-lease/](https://keithp.com/blogs/DRM-lease/)

<comment><USER16> Here is the DocOk/Vrui post on latency, _A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline_ (2014) [http://doc-ok.org/?p=1057](http://doc-ok.org/?p=1057) (from which the reddit-linked graphs came).

Highlights include:

> Under a non-compositing window manager, regular double-buffering under > OpenGL does not incur undue latency (and there is a window manager hint to > tell a compositing manager to grant pass-through to a window).

> At least using the Nvidia graphics driver [...] OpenGL can vsync to any > connected display, primary or secondary.

> OpenGL and X Windows allow applications to draw directly into a video > controller's frame buffer, allowing single-buffered rendering and racing the > video controller's scanout. [...] With front buffer rendering, display > latency on the Rift DK2 dropped to about 4.3ms

And from _Zero-latency Rendering_ (2015) [http://doc- ok.org/?p=1313](http://doc-ok.org/?p=1313)

> with some new rendering configuration options in Vrui 4.0 I can disable > vsync, and render directly into the display window's front buffer. In other > words, I can let these applications "race the beam."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've posted this some three years ago and it still blows my gourd [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag)

<comment><USER18> If only resolution wasn't an issue

<comment><USER19> Whilst more resolution would of course be nice, it's fairly low on my list of important advances I desire in VR. I use VR almost daily and my top 3 list is probably: 1. A wider FOV, 2. a lighter headset and 3. Wireless

In terms of encouraging broader adoption - cost and lower required specs for the GPU is probably top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Grabbed Firefox 55 just for the grid tool in the inspector as I just got into CSS grids and their awesomeness.

<comment><USER21> The out Firefox Nightly! [https://nightly.mozilla.org/](https://nightly.mozilla.org/) \-- we've made huge improvements to the Grid tool.

Details in Jen's video at [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest- features-o...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-of- the-css-grid-inspector-july-2017/)

<comment><USER21> That was supposed to be "Try out." :( I blame Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It hurts to lose 'Self-Destructing Cookies'. What a great piece of software!

It was marked as being incompatible with FF 55+ and e10s. See [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self- destruct...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing- cookies/)

Does anyone know an alternative?

<comment><USER6> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie- autode...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/) , feature-equivalent except for localstorage cleaning, pending an addition to a WebExtensions API: [https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie- AutoDelete/issues/44](https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie- AutoDelete/issues/44) / [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> IntersectionObserver looks like a nice alternative to the janky event handlers that many sites employ for style changes on scroll. Now we just have to wait 10 years for it to be implemented in Safari.

<comment><USER24> Use the polyfill from WICG - [https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh- pages/p...](https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh- pages/polyfill#browser-support)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anecdote time: I've been a lifelong supporter on Firefox (and Mozilla at a higher level), both as an end consumer, and philosophically: This is how to build a company around human beings and respecting their rights and privacy. Even had a Firefox download link on my blog footer for over half a decade (back in the days of footer images)!

In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages).

I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page.

Ffx dev team, You guys are awesome! :D

</comment><comment><USER26> Good to see firefox progressing, I've started using it again ever since the multi process work in 54 and been relatively happy with it.

Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.

</comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone got this working with the Oculus Rift DK2 on a Mac? When Mozilla first released their WebVR offering (I thought it was WebVR.com, now it seems to be gone) the WebVR build of Firefox supported it fine - but it doesn't appear to detect it now.

<comment><USER28> Oculus dropped Mac support a long time ago to focus on Windows so Firefox cannot interface with their hardware anymore. Besides, the DK2 is no longer officially supported by Oculus so it won't probably work on Windows either (I have not tried myself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So firefox is again using the marketing and PR machine to pretend it is relevant and not heading towards its demise due to ignoring their users and not delivering.

It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance.

We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.

<comment><USER30> WebVR is on Windows only because the valve components it relies on are in Beta on OSX and Linux. They (correctly) won't ship someone else's beta as their "stable". So you'll have to use beta or nightly for it.

As for the other stuff... I've been using Firefox beta as my daily driver for a year and a half, because it's WAY FASTER than chrome, has better bookmarks handling, better built in tracker killing. The speed is only getting better as more parts of Quantum make it to beta. It sucks that it has to be so slow, but they are rebuilding an airplane while in the air with a few million passengers.

Seems like the rest of your post is just upset about the move to Webextensions. Massive API rewrites are awful. But they also bring big benefits. It is better for them to make this shift while Firefox still has some market share, so there is pressure on developers to rewrite.

All told, FF is pretty aggressively moving ahead of the pack in terms of speed and standards compliance. They already are ahead of the pack on privacy. It's not inappropriate to have marketing that pushes that excitement.

<comment><USER31> Pretty sure SteamVR has been available out of beta for a while but I can't check because scrolling down on [http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=250820](http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=250820) doesn't actually load old news items...

Firefox's OpenVR support on Linux is enabled in nightly, but it doesn't actually work.</comment></comment></comment>