Go 1.3.2 is released – fixes tls security bug - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/eeOHNw_shwU

<comment><AUTHOR> Andre Gerrand:

      Hi gophers,

      We've just released Go version 1.3.2, a minor point release.

      This release includes bug fixes to cgo and the crypto/tls package.
          https://golang.org/doc/devel/release.html#go1.3.minor

      The crpyto/tls fix addresses a security bug that affects programs that use crypto/tls to implement a TLS server from Go 1.1 onwards. If the server enables TLS client authentication using certificates (this is rare) and explicitly sets SessionTicketsDisabled to true in the tls.Config, then a malicious client can falsely assert ownership of any client certificate it wishes. This issue was discovered internally and there is no evidence of exploitation.

      You can download binary and source distributions from the Go web site:
          https://golang.org/dl/

      To compile from source using a Mercurial checkout, update to the release with "hg update release" and build as usual.

      Thanks to everyone who contributed to the release.

      Andrew</comment>


Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part One - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/11/04/getting-a-new-product-off-the-ground-part-one/ <comment><USER2> Hmm. I'm sort of considering blogging on a fairly frequent basis this month, so while I appreciate to no end that folks find my blog interesting, can I ask that anyone considering submitting this series in the future exercise discretion? I would dislike being on the front page twice a week.

That said, if folks have any questions, shoot.

<comment><USER3>
        In particular, I'm starting to devote my free cycles at lunch into thinking
        about scalable content generation strategies for organic SEO, which is the
        form of marketing that I've had the best results with in the past.

For situations where organic SEO is not really an option (or for which I lack imagination), what other strategies would you recommend to get an app from 10 uniques/day to a hundred or so? I'd especially be interested in your opinion on how to attract visitors to a site like delicious/reddit/digg.

Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Seed it with your friends, act as sockpuppets for a while, and engage with whatever community latches on. It's funny, you guys envy my ability to spin up thousands of pages and sell stuff, and I envy the whole viral loop dynamic.

Also, everybody who is not in walled garden, and most of those who are, can and should have an organic SEO strategy. It's insanely powerful, and has very attractive characteristics for startups in that it rewards technical savvy, close interaction with your community, and agility in execution, and does not necessarily require a whole lot of money to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Happiness does not write code" is an awesome quote.

</comment><comment><USER5> Patrick, what service are you planning to use for billing (presumably recurring)?

<comment><USER2> Spreedly + Paypal.

<comment><USER6> I noticed you use Paypal for bingocardcreator.com too - aren't you concerned they will kill your account? They seem to do so a lot.

<comment><USER2> I think this is a cognitive bias caused by, e.g., me not rushing to the front page fifty times in the last four years saying "Guys WTF Paypal just paid me a thousand dollars on time with no hassles."

<comment><USER7> I hope you won't mind me lifting that line and repeating it as my own in the future with no attribution ;) It spells out exactly what I want to say every time I hear the "WTF PayPal suxx" debate.

<comment><USER2> Go for it. I've got lots more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nothing beats a solid TODO list. I keep mine in a file called TODO.txt with sketches on my grid notepad. (Makes designing html pages much easier.)

When you have a solid framework (I use Perl + CGI::App) the CRUD code/modules become the easiest to code.

It's the damn interface that takes a good while (especially without a good designer.)

What I like to do is use Blueprint CSS and make my pages jQuery themeable. This gives me good fonts and padding along with a standard look when working with the jQuery UI plugins.

I can't even fathom the idea of starting a business, there is so much to do when creating a decent app that adding the business part just adds to the headache.

Another hurdle I've come across is documentation. Even writing a good description for your app can be hard.

I envy products that take only a couple of months and are able to turn a profit. I've been working on my project for over a year now and just barely getting close to a release month.</comment>


Zoea: A composable inductive programming language - <AUTHOR> https://www.zoea.co.uk/ <comment><AUTHOR> I happened to stumble on a link to this somewhere on reddit. This seems to be a new programming language with an interesting central idea: you provide sample inputs and outputs, and the system figures out the program you're looking for. [1] It looks like a paper with more information was published just this past November [2] but the language itself is not publicly available yet. PLT is not my forte - I'm curious to know what HN thinks!

[1] [https://www.zoea.co.uk/language/examples.html](https://www.zoea.co.uk/language/examples.html)

[2] [https://www.zoea.co.uk/onewebmedia/docs/zoea_composable_indu...](https://www.zoea.co.uk/onewebmedia/docs/zoea_composable_inductive_programming.pdf)

<comment><USER2> It reminds me of Erlang's pattern matching idiom: if the input looks like this then do that, if it looks like this other thing, do that other thing, and so on.</comment></comment>


The Stack Overflow Disease - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/developers-writing/the-stack-overflow-disease-other-related-illnesses-a1dfd48d86b1

<comment><USER2> Stack Overflow Disease: This question is closed by the moderator because users are discussing it.</comment>


Nathan Myhrvold unveils massive cookbook for science geeks - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/08/former_microsoft_cto_nathan_myhrvold_unveils_massive_cookbook.html

<comment><USER2> If someone is thinking "what could I get 'tptacek for Christmas for all his helpful comments", know that I can't justify dropping $500 for a book, but I soooooo want to. ;)

McGee and Ferran Adria both say this set of books is going to change cooking. McGee wrote basically the bible of culinary science (On Food And Cooking, which you should buy even if you don't cook much, it's just a great, great book to open to any page and thumb through); Ferran Adria is one of cooking's greatest innovators.

<comment><USER3> On Food And Cooking is AMAZING. McGee used to live in Palo Alto too.

I just bought the Thomas Keller Sous Vide book. I'll probably buy the myrhvold book too.

You know what I've found terribly useful lately? The Flavor Bible.

On the other hand, somebody got me the recent Herve This book on molecular gastronomy and didn't really get much out of it.

<comment><USER2> The Flavor Bible is also fun to flip to an arbitrary page in and read in either direction, but it _really_ wants to be a web app, doesn't it? (There's obviously a bunch of web apps that try, but they don't have the curation that the book has).

I don't know if you've been following Myrhvold's cooking stuff, but my understand is that there's a fair bit of mythbusting going on too; he gave a talk recently where he claimed to debunk the notion that you have to poach duck in fat to confit it, for instance (lies! all lies!). My cofounder Dave is a cooking school grad and he's sure that this book is going to be hugely important, even if you already have McGee.

But, $500 for a book!

<comment><USER3> Oh, totally. Do you know about foodsubs.com?

should we just set up a HN instance for cooking, or what?

I just bought the polyscience smoke injector thing. This weekend's going to be tasty.

<comment><USER2> I have an actual smoker in my garage, but my partner Dave just built his own smoke gun out of $15 bucks worth of parts. Write something up about your smoke injector thingy so we can all talk about smoked food next!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I interviewed Nathan for my book (Cooking for Geeks, O'Reilly 2010) and will be posting the interview online in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, to those that complain about the price, I would guess-but do not know-that it is probably being sold at printing cost. Nathan did not write this book to make money; he wrote it to advance the field of culinary arts in ways that only someone with his resources can.

-Jeff

<comment><USER5> > I would guess-but do not know-that it is probably being > sold at printing > cost

You sound more experienced in these matters than me, but this seems very unlikely. I presume the book will be excellent, but Myrvhold has never been shy about making money. Do you have more evidence back this up?

I haven't seen this book, but in general I've always been astonished by how _low_ printing costs are even for full color hardbacks. A cost this high for printing alone would seem extraordinary for anything but print-on-demand.

<comment><USER4> "Printing cost" is probably too loosy-goosey a term. Perhaps the better sentence would have been: "I would guess—but do not know—that he will not make much of a profit off the sales of the book itself."

What surprised me with my book was just how much distribution and storage costs add up. Without getting into exact numbers, the printing costs themselves can be less than those costs, not even factoring in amortized costs. The comments that look at the per-page printing cost (2,400 / 400 = $0.16 / page) leave that out.

What would make more sense to me in this case would be the potential intellectual property (patents) that could come about from doing the research for such a book. Regardless, from my conversation from him, it's clear he loves the topic (as do I) and looks at it as a way to contribute to the world. In his case, it just happens to be a business expense as well.

Fwiw, authors really don't make that much money on books, excluding the very few at the top of the bestseller list. Nathan put it best: "How to make a small fortune writing a book: First, you start with a large fortune, then..." Having been through the process myself, I'd have to agree with the sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A $600 cookbook? Well it has at least one thing going for it: it differentiates itself from most alternative products in the category by being so damn expensive that it could be seen as an ultra premium brand that only the rich could afford.

Back to my ultra cheap and healthy rice that does not require any cookbooks to make...

<comment><USER2> This isn't a cookbook. It's TAOCP, every volume, including the unfinished-but- planned ones, for cooking. It is fully expected to knock pro chefs on their asses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the pictures at <http://modernistcuisine.com/> , I see a strong sense of precision and symmetry.

Reading about the volumes, I see sentences like _new ingredients such as gelling and thickening agents, emulsifiers, and foams have found their way into every corner of Modernist cuisine._

 _Ever want to infuse liquid smoke into lettuce or noodles?_ Ehm, no, not really!

 _using prehydrated starches and hydrocolloids to thicken hot and cold liquids; making edible films_

I won't touch this pretentious book with a ten-foot pole. Cooking is an art, a lore, not science or mathematics. And I want something more than "edible films" on my plates.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore- Kitchen/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore- Kitchen/dp/0684800012) is a good book that discusses culinary science, and it costs a lot less than $450.

<comment><USER2> You should absolutely buy this book; it's fantastic and extremely readable. Flip to a random page: oh look, it's every herb used in mainstream and ethnic cooking in the west, broken down by key volatile compounds!

McGee's column in the NY Times is also required reading. McGee "broke the story" on gelatin consommes, for example (which by the way one of the coolest tricks ever: simmer _anything_ in water for a few hours, strain, pour in 1/4 packet of gelatin, cool it, freeze it, and then let it thaw in a strainer in the fridge; the gelatin does for the broth what a raft does for a classic consomme --- just read the article; teaser: perfectly clear chocolate consomme ---

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/dining/05curi.html>

<comment><USER9> I have the book and was disappointed, my experience was "OK let's learn about X" I search to find mention in the book, and I get something like "mostly harmless." Or something with much less information than in the first few lines of the wikipedia article about X. I still don't know where's any good stuff in that book. Anybody cares to explain?

<comment><USER10> McGee is very much a compromise book. For any given topic, be it science, practical cooking techniques or food history and anthropology there are several better books out there. But if you only want one book that briefly touches on all those things then McGee is a good introduction to many topics. Look at On Food and Cooking as a starting place to get inspiration for further research, not as a final destination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon link to book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science- Cooking/...](http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science- Cooking/dp/0982761007/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Gah. I hate saying it, but 600$ for 6 books?!

Im sorry, but i'm poor. He deserves money for his accomplishments but i'll wait for a torrent to be published. Then, I can at least read what he's doing and be awed. And then ii'll stick with my goodwill 2$ cookbooks and written down recipes.

<comment><USER2> Where to start?

* It's not $600; it's $425.

* That's not far from what TAOCP costs per-volume.

* The production quality (and costs) of these books dwarf TAOCP's; TAOCP isn't also a set of coffee-table books.

* They're vitally important to cooking as a profession; moreso because there are so few key books (McGee, New Pro Chef, La Guide) in cooking, especially compared to computing.

* Myrvhold poured a huge, vast, mind-boggling amount of research into these books; they aren't a get rich quick scheme.

* If $500 is too much (and it's too much for me!), you aren't the audience; you want Cooks Illustrated instead.

* "Waiting for a torrent": classy.

<comment><USER12> Where for me to start?

* Lost my job

* Sued for medical bills because insurance didn't cover what they said they would.

* Dumped my fiancé after horrendous fights and my emotional stability.

* Apartment complex broke my contract by letting her out of lease while holding me liable for the whole contract.

* Finally evicted and living in a spare room of good friends out of the goodness of their hearts.

* 3 month wait on unemployment in Indiana because employer disputed it.

* School is paid for, but due to medical condition when I failed school, they refuse me admittance calling it an academic issue - oxycontin, perocet, and hydrocodone = finals fail.

* My right arm can only bend in certain areas but load bearing above my head is less than 5lbs. Disabled enough for free schooling, but not enough for SS disability.

* 10% unemployment in this area.

So yes, maybe i'm "classy". However, you have no idea of my circumstances. Its not like I could afford it anyway. The lawsuits for garnishment for my medical bills have netted 0$. Cant get work. And im relying on my friends for food even, until food stamps are granted.

So go ahead, heap on the criticism.

<comment><USER2> Given your circumstances, why do you even have an opinion about $500 professional cooking books?

Sorry you got dumped on --- I'm really just commenting to point out that this is priced along the lines of TAOCP --- but really why are you even thinking about this stuff?

I meant what I said. Cooks Illustrated is excellent, and they publish so many books every year that you can get (absolutely great) older editions for ultra cheap.

And also, I meant it: don't torrent books.

<comment><USER12> So because Im poor, I shouldn't keep reading about all sorts of things on the forefront of technology, or at least form some sort of an opinion? And money is hardly an indicator of intelligence.

Yeah, my situation sucks. Really sucks. However, I will still keep learning and doing, even if I have to skirt the law here and there to do as such. And if your point of not using torrents is because it's "bad", guess that makes me bad. I've downloaded all sorts of material, quite a bit which is not offered in any format.

And yes, when I was better off, I did buy stuff that I could easily have gotten for free. But your high and mighty attitude would never excuse it for any reason, an attitude I despise.

<comment><USER13> When I was broke I read lots of books but certainly didn't care about what a patent trolling dong from Microsoft thought about Sous Vide (still don't). Maybe that's what t.ptacek meant?

<comment><USER2> Patent troll or not, you (probably --- I don't have the books) have to respect the effort. The guy has a zillion dollars and has chosen to spend some of it to make the largest possible impact on cooking. That's pretty cool.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure it's cool but it's a topic I have no interest in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this the same guy who makes money patenting obvious things in programming and computer science and then collecting taxes on others' hard work? I'll pass thanks.</comment>


Don't Mistake Ambition for Entitlement - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=573 <comment><USER2> As the curmudgeons say: pride goeth before the fall.

I'm not saying that Matt is wrong, or that the WSJ is right, but this essay was just a bit too... _precious_...for my tastes.

I don't have the answers, and I don't have much confidence in anything, outside of myself. That said, if I _know_ one fact about the world, it's that very few of the self-confident 22-year-olds that I meet are going to get rich from their big brains and hard work. If history teaches us anything, it's that most smart people will fail -- repeatedly and painfully. So, while it's not the right time for the adults to shake their walkers at the children for running on the lawn, perhaps it would be prudent for the kids to hold back on the self-congratulatory essays, in anticipation of the day when it all goes pear-shaped?

I'm not much older than Matt, but even I can detect a distinct generational shift in attitude toward work; I know where the WSJ editorial is coming from, even if I don't agree with its conclusions. And while I'm sure that the brash 20-somethings that I know _believe_ that self-investment and autonomy are the keys to avoiding their parents' fate, that probably has more to do with the abject failure of all previous models of work, than the proven success of this one.

In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be. Which brings me to another thing that the curmudgeons say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youth and arrogance are eternal companions.

<comment><USER3> > In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you > -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be.

So why spend 60 hours a week in a suit under fluorescent lights in an 8' x 8' cube either way?

<comment><USER4> One word: Security.

When you get married and have kids, you'll see how much more important that word becomes.

<comment><USER5> You treat it like a foregone conclusion that sooner or later we'll all be married with children. I personally cannot think of a single logical reason for bringing another human being into this world. Sounds like an easy way to ruin a perfectly fun life.

<comment><USER4> I didn't think so either in my early to mid twenties.

I'm not saying that everyone will have kids, but this whole discussion is about generalities, and the consensus is that most people will have kids.

It doesn't get any wilder than the boomers, and more of them had kids than any other generation previously.

<comment><USER6> You should look into the Bulverism Fallacy.

<comment><USER4> You'd need to see negative TFR's (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate>)(<http://indexmundi.com/united_states/birth_rate.html>) to even suggest that most people aren't having kids.

Sometimes, the obvious is exactly that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _It's also largely intellectual activity, which is considerably more fatiguing than routine physical tasks. Jobs in information technology might look a lot easier than manual labor to an outside observer, but they're not. Burnout sets in much faster..._

Has Matt ever worked full-time in a factory or as a cashier at a busy grocery store? Nobody is disputing that intellectual work is challenging, but most physical labor involves a level of soul-sucking tedium and repetition that I'd suspect anyone with a college-to-cubicle story can't even imagine.

I'd add that my experience is that these environments are also often ruled with a totalitarianism that makes the worst office job look positively cozy.

<comment><USER8> I was a cashier for two years at two different places, then was a checkout supervisor for one. Ran a meat counter, worked the floor at a Sam's club and a Home Depot, and ran a restaurant, all before the age of 22.

I'm no stranger to menial labor.

<comment><USER9> One day I was having a discussion with a cashier in my neighborhoord. A kind woman in her fifties, who started this job before I was born. She used to be always cheerful and serviable, but not on that particular day. The conversation went like this :

"- What's going on ?"

"- I had an awful streak of horrible clients today, it really got me down"

"- Ah... Yes, I know what you're talking about, I used to be a cashier myself at X last year and some clients were just unbearable, I understand your pain."

"- Sure, but I'm not quitting my job in 6 months."

"- ..."

I just read your bio on a poker site. I saw that The Big Lebowski is your favorite movie. As someone a bit younger than you and who had his fair share of dirty jobs as well, I suggest you to rewatch another Cohen brothers classic : Barton Fink. Hell is not Hell when you're only a guest.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to know whether you're going to be a guest or not. Also, the cashier you reference chose to be a permanent cashier. She's nothing more than the product of her own decisions in response to the environment around her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This essay is just silly. It makes it sound as if our generation is the first to invent entrepreneurship. Millions of our parents' generation own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship isn't a new discovery. My dad started a software company in the 70s. He didn't have hacker news and y combinator. He wasn't even in silicon valley. And guess what, he did have access to information. Maybe he wasn't inundated by it like we are today, but sometimes I question the value of spending so much time everyday consuming internet "wisdom".

Matt advocates working for oneself is an undisputed ideal, as if it would be better to be an independent owner of a pizza shop than an early (or even not so early) employee of Google.

I think it's likely our generation will have to work harder than our parents and for much less rewards. We have quite a mess to clean up. We'll have to pay for a 10 trillion dollar debt, endless wars, and a generation of retired baby boomers to support in social security and medicare. All this with a declining manufacturing industry and a totally dysfunctional financial system. Contrary to Matt's conclusions, our parents have had it relatively easy.

Starting your own company is an awesome thing to do but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're privileged geniuses for doing so.

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone at the older end of the Millenial generation, and someone who grew up in Europe and now lives in North America, I could only read the WSJ article - and all the comments - with some amusement.

What I really read - underneath the "durn kids" feeling - was a generation waking up to the fact that having some of the lowest vacation time in the industrialized world ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country)) might not be such a great idea, and a generation of older employers not being happy about it.

</comment><comment><USER13> While I definitely agree with the general sentiment in the post and here on HN (in fact, I recently tried to quit my job and they had to entice me with better work and more money, and the CFO actually tried on a few lines like the ones in the WSJ article), but I'm afraid we might be looking at this through the lens of privilege.

A lot of our peers, whether through lack of work, ability, ambition etc, don't have the same options we do (lots of money, lots of jobs, interesting work), but are still very much stuck in the old-style world.

This doesn't mean you didn't work hard to be in this position, just that our sentiments are probably limited to the top end of our generation and wouldn't make much sense to a lot of other people.

<comment><USER14> This comment reminds me of two friends I've got:

One finished a graduate degree in English last spring. She is now working as an admin assistant for $28k a year. People told her that she had too much of a sense of entitlement, when all she wants is a job doing what she's now very qualified to do: write. She is getting a teaching certification because public schools hire English majors and apparently no one else does.

The other has three degrees in business (two associates and a bachelors). He wants to be a manager, so he's applying for jobs as a manager. He has no experience (he worked as a sacker in a grocery store for about five years, but that's it), no skills (other than supposedly "management"), but since he has a degree in management, he thinks he can just jump right into it. Of course, this hasn't worked out for him so far, so he's working phone support for an ISP and living with his parents, rather than take a job beneath him (I've actually gotten him a higher-paying job at my company, and he didn't even show up for the interview).

One of these people has a pretty large sense of entitlement, the other one just doesn't want to use her masters degree as a secretary.

<comment><USER15> > the other one just doesn't want to use her masters degree as a secretary.

Why not? Is it the kind of writing that she'd be doing (many secretaries write a lot) or is it that she doesn't want to be a subordinate?

I'm beginning to think that the difference between them is that you think that she's entitled to what she wants and he isn't.

After all, one could say that he just doesn't want to use his management degrees to be an individual contributor.

<comment><USER14> If you'll think about it, there is actually a huge difference.

The comment I replied to was talking about how as (mostly) programmers, we have a skewed perspective on the job market. Most people in our age range don't get the kinds of job offers we do, and are badly underemployed.

She took a job she was overqualified for anyway, because there was nothing else available, and hates it. He decided to _mooch off his parents_ because he was entitled to a management job (he makes a small amount of money, but spends it all on entertainment).

Being underemployed, and realizing it, is not a sense of entitlement. Asking for handouts because you can't get the job you want (when others are available) is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm an Xer (75). Let me just say that based on my experience, which includes a few years in management, the WSJ article is an accurate and fair description of the millennial generation (from a purely stereotypical pov).

Now, that's not to say I disagree with Matt. He does however use many counter arguments that are more applicable to Xers than millenials (Yers). Yer's have never seen much of economic downturn, and the "meager, middle class lifestyles" they been living are have showered them with seemingly endless material wealth.

I think Matt has misread most of the WSJ article, to be honest.

<comment><USER16> I think both matt and the wsj are off. It's not about a sense of entitlement or superior productivity (which I don't believe for a minute). The wsj "brat" characterization doesn't match the "lazy" characterization I've more commonly seen.

The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has. They know they won't see a dime of their substantial FICA withholdings. They know they will not ride another bull market to retirement and collect government checks. Perhaps at some level they have even sensed the precarious state of the dollar and the potential futility of trying to squirrel away wealth. Why work hard when the government will tax or inflate most of it away, and you're unlikely to get good compensation in the first place?

The older generations are too invested in the system to reach similar conclusions. (Though it's interesting that doctors and lawyers are leaving the professions in droves.) It's the psychology of sunk costs. Asking around about social security is highly illustrative. A large fraction of young people will come right out and say SS is probably going to collapse in coming years. Very few people in their 40s will admit to this obvious truth.

This pattern where the younger generation senses the jig is up and gives up the struggle before their elders can admit it is not rare. You can see the same thing in Japan. You saw it in the Soviet Union before the fall.

<comment><USER17> _The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has._

Pundits said exactly that about Generation X in the 90s. They turned out to be mistaken, as you are.

<comment><USER16> I don't see too many X-ers cruising towards a comfortable retirement at 65 like their parents...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't mistake Entitlement for Ambition either. Ambition isn't walking into a company and expecting to be well-paid with a lax dress code and ample time off. Ambition is starting your own company and making something you know will be awesome. I'm 28, and I've worked with some of these millenials. They talk a big game, but they have no follow-through. All I hear is about how awesome they are and how they grew up with technology and are so productive compared to the crusty older generations. But all I see are a bunch of kids waxing rhapsodic in a mirror lined echo chamber while the rest of us get something done.

<comment><USER19> _Ambition isn't walking into a company and expecting to be well-paid with a lax dress code and ample time off._

What I've noticed about "my generation" is approximately the following:

The best have a strong desire to work-- to be productive, to keep improving their skills, and to develop their careers at a rapid rate. They're willing to do grunt work, but only if they learn from it (and hopefully, can automate it so that they don't have to do it in the future). They have no loyalty to institutions and very little to individuals aside from close friends; their loyalty is to their projects and education.

The worst of our generation are lazy and yet have the same prima donna attitude. They're annoying. On the other hand, their most damaging trait is their laziness rather than arrogance, and our generation doesn't seem to have fewer or more lazy people than any other. So this isn't really a flaw that is particular to any specific generation.

People like the WSJ are angry about the former set of people: talented people who value growth and productivity over playing nice and paying dues. In essence, they're angry that they can't find the hot girl who thinks she's ugly.

<comment><USER18> Your best share the traits of the best of every generation. Because they don't fit even for whatever reason.

Your worst is your vast majority. And it is the arrogance that breed the laziness. They already know they are awesome and deserve all this stuff, so why aren't people just giving it to them already. Not to mention, the WSJ article seems to imply that there is a high reward/low risk expectation from these people.

And what you say about "talented people who value growth and productivity over playing nice and paying dues" is nearly the same traits that made up the stereotypical "arrogant computer person".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bravo Matt Maroon! Bravo! That was the _PERFECT_ rebuttle to the WSJ article in every way, strong, accurate and pointed. I felt great reading this, every sentence or two I found myself nodding my head in agreement.

<comment><USER21> I agreed with the article too, but I feel like it was because it was flattering, not because I could tell that it was necessarily correct.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, the article has too much self congratulation. I do think matt's right about our capabilities, but the whole attitude doesn't help things. We need to keep our ambition and drive, but drop the sense that people need to bow to our whims. It is much more effective to learn our work environments and how the system works, and work that to our advantage.

In short, both generations make the same mistake. Both treat their management like parents, and are dependent on them. Consequently, they both use children's strategies to get their way. One goes the goody two shoes route and the other goes the pouty route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's up with this "war of the generations" you have in the US? It seems to me you have terms for every possible obscure group or phenomenon related to cultural differences between parents and their kids. Everyone blames everyone for something: being ungrateful, snobby, fickle, controlling, etc, etc. It's worse than anything I have ever seen. Seriously, why?

It's paradoxical that some of your age groups blames a younger group for things _they themselves did_ when they were younger. How can you complain about the work ethics of your grandkids when you spent five years high, wandering around at rock festivals?

American culture baffles me in so many ways. Someone should write a book about all the major cultural directions and conflicts in the US, but it would probably be a massive read.

</comment><comment><USER24> (Building) Architecture may be an anomaly to Matt's belief that the new generation is better, but I've noticed a precipitous decline in ability of graduating architecture students over the last decade. Its so bad now that I simply can't afford to hire anyone right out of school because the cost to my firm of both extensive training and loss from mistakes is so high. The problem I see is architecture schools focusing on trends in aesthetics such as deconstruction rather than teaching students how to actually build a building. This is probably different than CS schools in that the deconstruction philosophy necessitates divorcing building from reality, which hopefully there are no parallels for in CS programs.

<comment><USER25> Architecture has been in awful state for the past 80 years. Just compare buildings built in the 20th century to those in the 19th century. My girlfriend is getting her masters in architecture now and it's an awful waste of money. She's learned a lot about "aura" and generating weird building designs from algorithms, but precious little about how to create buildings people would enjoy living in. The schools should be shut down and boarded up before they do any more damage, and the architecture profession should return to an apprenticeship system.

<comment><USER24> The new trend in using algorithms to design buildings is a fancy way to divorce the building design from the problem at hand - a classic principle of deconstruction.

As far as the state of architecture in general over the last 80(!) years, I disagree with you. The current philosophical trend is deconstruction which is making some architects adhering to that philosophy quite trendy and famous, but there are many other architects who could care less about the latest trend and pursue their own work with a different core philosophy (myself included).

<comment><USER25> In most cities or college campuses the older buildings are all more beautiful than buildings built after 1940, at least to my eye. The worst are the brutalist and modernist buildings of the 50's and 60's.

<comment><USER24> "Beautiful" is a concept completely lost in Architecture in trends dating back many decades. I am a big fan of the beautiful, as are some other architects, but the general trend has been to not even consider the idea for quite a while. The most trendy thing now is sustainable building - also having nothing to do with the beautiful and in many cases detrimental to the idea.

Another way to look at this is as long as it's trendy to make art that ignores the beautiful, so too will architecture ignore the beautiful. It has to do with culture and philosophy, and fortunately there are still some people who desire beauty in their buildings and demand it from their architects, but not nearly enough.

<comment><USER25> Indeed, sustainability is the new trend. However, recently I came across a random blog comment that noted that 19th century buildings were far more energy efficient:

 _But look at lower Manhattan and all the traditional pre-war New York skyscrapers . . . in fact, look at any great pre-war building . . . they are all 10x more energy efficient than any modernist structure.

They tended to have thick masonary walls and windows that opened. (That's why people had paperweights). They were also more slender and indented than the sheer glass slabs that the "less is more" crowd have forced on us.

Traditionalists like Ernest Flagg and Sanford White were building for natural ventilation and energy conservation because there was no alternative. And they managed to solve this problem with soul-soaring art that was funtional and profitable.

Thom Mayne is attempting to invent something that had already been perfected generations ago but discarded in the name of "progress." But isn't that so often the case. If he weren't so self-absorbed he might have learned something from his elders._

Source: [http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/03/san_francisco_d.h...](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/03/san_francisco_d.html)

<comment><USER24> I agree that the new SF Federal Building is really hideous looking, but it has some state of the art sustainability features that far surpass the good old days. Could this have been an attractive building with those same features? Sure, but the trend followers want it this way - ugly.

<comment><USER25> Btw, if you're interested, here is a good comment thread on the intellectual origins of modern architecture: [http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/03/dear_national_t.h...](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/03/dear_national_t.html)

An excerpt:

 _FvB is on the right track, I think. It is not the style itself, but the interaction between the style, the culture and the political system, that created the problem._

 _Perhaps modernism is so successful because it's so hard to do well. It's a classic academic fuck-you: create an unsolvable problem and then solve it. Can you build a beautiful building out of flat, bare concrete? I can. Guess my SAT must be higher than yours. Pity about that, poor chap._

 _It's pretty easy to see how this essentially repellent attitude can thrive in a New Class world, where academic accomplishment is the only legitimate form of social status. It's also easy to see how the emperor's new clothes syndrome developed, and so many second-rate buildings, in which the subtle elegance was so subtle as to be nonexistent, got built._

 _Innovative architecture doesn't have to mean ugly architecture - just as innovative furniture doesn't (always) mean ugly furniture. But as long as architectural decisionmakers are juries and committees rather than eccentric, Randish corporate tycoons, Dilbert is here to stay. Playing by the New Class rules gives us New Class buildings - the architecture we deserve._

An extreme theory, but after spending a lot of time hanging around academia, I'm inclined to agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems to me the people who promote these sweeping negative generational generalizations are usually those who have a vested interest in promoting them - this article being a prime example. Hmmm let's see, the WSJ article's arguments were based on:

1.The opinions of a few consultants (who no doubt make at least part of their living offering seminars for the poor managers on how to deal with these 'millenials' as well as seminars for the millenials on how to be effective with their new bosses).

2.Anecdotal evidence from a couple HR people and a couple managers, one "study" by Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MonsterTrak, an online careers site (they did a study - it must be true!)

3.A survey by another career site where even by its own metrics only two dimensions showed a clear majority opinion (higher pay and flexible work schedules - something the workplace has been trending toward for years anyway).

Every generation has been negatively characterized one way or another (the 60's hippies turned into the 70's/80's yuppies, generation "X" aka "the slackers", and now the "millenials" aka "the entitled". Somehow all the generations previous and present did fine and I suspect the same will be of future generations as well.

<comment><USER27> Could you not indent lists? It makes them preformatted text, without line breaks, which has messed up the whole formatting of the page.

Just have numbered paragraphs, like:

1.) First item.

2.) Second item.

<comment><USER8> Why has this bug not been fixed yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> While this is a great defense of Matt and people like him, the people described by the WSJ absolutely exist.

<comment><USER29> Yes they do exist. They exist because those people are us. Nobody argues that the WSJ was wrong about the data they collected, but they were horribly wrong with their conclusions and assignment of blame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I agree with the general sentiment (no point in having company loyalty, longer hours without a purpose and suit/strict work environment _not_ leading to greater productivity), but the people posting on news.y.c are slightly different from Gen Y'ers as a whole.

First most of us are technology professionals who by the time they started their first job out of college had already had work experience (contracting while in college and in my case, also working while a high school student during the dot-com boom).

We however, tend to gravitate towards Internet and specifically web. Outside of these industries, even in software, there is very little chance to work in the sort of relaxed environment that we work in.

For example, several of my friends studied Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering as undergraduates: they want to do work that is more hardware and algorithm related, to put their education to a use. Nonetheless most of these companies (e.g. Intel) are very much "be there at 8:30, or we'll have a chat" sort of places, where starting salaries are low and advancement is slow.

In the end there are people who are forced to choose between a more relaxed environment and a chance to put their education to a use and work on problems they find really interesting.

Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and ambitious professionals who would _love_ to use their skills in a less rigid environment. Start something other than a web application company and capitalize on this.

(Same holds true for financial companies - many high end finance geeks are now getting layed-off in mass droves -- again, feature, not a bug)

<comment><USER27> > Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and > ambitious professionals who would love to use their skills in a less rigid > environment. Start something other than a web application company and > capitalize on this.

A lot of this is because of the structure of the industries. Software is as pure intellectual capital as it can get, outside of tenured professorships. As a result, the firm's entire capital base exists in the minds of its employees, and this gives them enormous bargaining power.

Hardware companies take significant physical capital to start, so employees can't just leave and do their own thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious youngsters going into hardware. _They can't_ \- not without venture capital and a network of suppliers.

Same goes for financial companies - sorta. In finance, the primary capital base of a firm is its reputation and network of dealmakers. When you're just starting out, you have nothing here, which is why newbie I-bankers work 16 hour days and only get paid in the high 5-figures. But once you've been at it for a couple years, you've built up a network, and those clients are _yours_ , which is why experienced I-bankers rake in the dough and have nice working conditions. They simply have more bargaining power.

<comment><USER30> | Hardware companies take significant physical capital to | start, so employees can't just leave and do their own | thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious | youngsters going into hardware. They can't - not with | venture capital and a network of suppliers.

I suppose you meant 'not without'. This is still largely true, but there are also FPGAs and HDLs and simulators: you can do your R&D and prototyping with fairly low costs (and take VC funding by the time you're ready to market and manufacture a product).

You still have a significant point in this respect, however, and what I meant was more along the lines of entrepreneurs could do something to address the problem of "I didn't spend 4-6 years studying engineering to write PHP, MySQL and Javascript" -- ideas that appeal to those who want to solve harder problems (and perhaps problems related to hardware, but solved in software). If you look at openings at places like Intel you'll see they also employ a great deal of people in software functions (from compilers to data mining/machine learning (for manufacturing)).

There are lot of problems outside of social networking / advertising / web content (not that these are bad problems to solve, no offense intended to anyone) that take low capital to get into yet are complex enough to attract a pool of talent that has fewer options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I couldn't tell whether this entry was satire or not. It started getting a little over-the-top at "If we seem to have high self-esteem, it's because we're better."

Regardless, I don't see why the original article merits a response. There will _always_ be people who don't like you, think you have it too easy, and are willing to paint a whole generation with that brush. Ignore them. There's little you can say that'll make them change their minds, and usually they'll just take your rebuttal as evidence of entitlement or arrogance anyway. Actions speak louder than words.

</comment><comment><USER25> _The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions._

The decline of the unions had much more to do with 1) competition from the American south, Mexico, and Asia, and 2) the rise of an American tribute empire, where America's primary export is debt that then gets inflated away. This enriched those connected to the debt creation ( Wall St, government workers at all levels, licensed occupations, people in real estate) but devastated manufacturing.

<comment><USER8> You should read more Krugman. It started with Reagan.

<comment><USER25> I've read plenty of both Krugman and others like him that make the same point. I find it entirely very unconvincing. For instance, take the city of New Haven, where I went to college. In the 1950's the city had a thriving industrial base and tens of thousands of high paying union jobs. Over the next few decades many of these businesses collapsed due to competition from lower priced manufacturing in the South and West. Manufacturing jobs went from 43% of New Haven employment to 20% by 1973. The famous Winchester factory went from an employment of 10,000 to around 700 by 1979. In that year there was a massive strike. The strike caused the factory to hemorrhage money and corporate actually ended up selling it for peanuts to the employees. But even as an employee owned enterprise, it failed to make money, and eventually it closed completely. Today Winchester rifles are manufactured on a multinational basis, with some parts being made in Utah and others in Portugal. This same story was repeated across the rust belt, from Detroit to Philadelphia. None of this fits Krugman's story. The unions were strong, they were just asking for more money than the market would pay them (although the market was rigged, as I note below).

If your interested in reading more, I highly recommend Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and its End. Here is an except from Google books that talks about the decline of manufacturing in New Haven: [http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&...](http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&id=Ve0MPmi2LgoC&dq=city+douglas+rae&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&sig=ACfU3U1vA2iQgGfgwl8_0h0lFC9r4_bjJw&q=winchester#PPA363,M1)

A lot of the worst downsizing did indeed happen during the Reagan presidency. But that had a lot more to do with Volcker's strong dollar policies, high interest rates, and the resulting rise in the trade deficit, than it had anything to do with Reagan's policies. For the past thirty years, foreign governments and investors have been selling the U.S. cheap manufactured goods and then buying our financial securities. This has decimated our manufacturing sector as domestic producers have been unable to compete with manufactures in countries with an artificially weak currency. But its been a windfall to everyone in the U.S. who borrows money - from leveraged buyout firms to the government itself.

<comment><USER8> There seems to be much more to it than just that though. From Krugman:

"Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize."

You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?

<comment><USER25> Unions in some sectors are more powerful than ever. Nurse unions in particular are very strong, much more so than they were fifty years ago. The education sector, construction, and government employees at all levels, have very strong unions. If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?

Also, to a large extent occupational licensing has replaced unionization. See this paper for instance: <http://ftp.iza.org/dp3675.pdf> Excerpts: "During the early 1950s, less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force was covered by licensing laws at the state level (Council of State Governments, 1952). That grew to almost 18 percent by the 1980s with an even larger number if federal, city and county occupational licensing is included. By 2000, the percent of the workforce in occupations licensed by states was at least 20 percent, according to data gathered from the Department of Labor and the 2000 Census. ...Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions - that is about 15 percent..."

It's hard to unionize a hair salon, because anyone can open a competing hair salon and undercut the prices. So instead, the hair dressers lobby the legislature to pass occupational licensing laws which create barriers to entry, thus raising the pay.

 _Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized._

Were they? Places like Sears or Sandy's Drive-In were not unionized in the 1970's. Which service and retail jobs were unionized in the 70's that are not today?

One theory is that its hard to establish unions in industries that are mobile and have low costs to entry. If Walmart employees unionized, it wouldn't be long before a Target moved in and undercut their prices by using non-union workers. Pre-1950, factories were only profitable near rail lines and ports. The rise of the highway system and power lines made factories much more mobile. This allowed factories to move to locations where unions were not so powerful. This is the Doug Rae theory from the book I recommended above. I don't really buy it though.

More likely, I think the high unionization rates of the 1950's were a result of New Deal and World War II corporatism. As the giant "organization man" corporations created by the New Deal gradually declined, so did unionization.

I'm curious. You run a company. If you were interviewing a potential employee, and he announced to you that he might strategically refuse to come to work at some point in order to extract a higher wage, would this make you think twice about hiring him? Do you think the government should make it illegal for you to hold the candidate's comment against him in the hiring process?

<comment><USER31> _If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?_

I think it's mainly just because politicians don't want to shit where they live.

I'm in the capital city of my country, ~50% of the jobs here are public, you can't turn around here without bumping into a government department. As slow and plodding as any public bureaucracy is, if the politicians were to start attacking the public service union, they can say goodbye to any hope of getting anything done, and they know it.

In my country, the early to mid 70's was probably the peak of the left-wing socialist ideal prevailing as the popular paradigm. This scared the hell out of conservatives (of both major parties) and they've been doing their damn best for the last 30 odd years to pull the political spectrum so far to the right that even the left-wing isn't very left-wing anymore. Curtailing the power of unions was part of their strategy. It wasn't just an unintended byproduct of ostensibly peripheral phenomena. And you know, I'd actually have a lot more respect for those guys if they just came out and said: "Yup, we don't like unions and we're trying to gut them for reasons X, Y and Z."

I'm not trying to argue the all in, pro-union line either, but lets call a spade a spade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Some meager, middle-class lifestyle_

Spoken like an arrogant suburban raised kid. Do you know that literally _BILLIONS_ would love to have that "meager middle-class lifestyle"? Did you ever pause to consider the luxuries afforded by a middle class lifestyle. By all sane metrics we live like fucking kings.

<comment><USER19> The American poor/peasants (75+%) have crappy health coverage, no economic security, overpriced and ugly houses built from makeshift materials, food loaded with hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup, a suburbanized lifestyle that fosters alienation while destroying the environment, and menial, servile jobs with low autonomy, inflexible work schedules, and a meager two weeks' vacation allowance... but a Fucking Shitload of consumer trinkets.

<comment><USER32> no one forces these people to waste their income on shiny baubles. many MANY people could get by working less if they cut their consumption.

you act as if health coverage, economic security, underpriced nice houses, a healthy diet, complete social adjustment, and happy fulfilling jobs with lots of vacation are an inherent right.

Yeah, i wish we lived in a world of unlimited resources too. But we don't.

I read this as you being so out of touch with reality that you don't think that middle class or hell even lower class suburban living is a life of ease compared to the world average. when you compare it to history it's even better. You have so few worries that you're able to worry about the future (security, health, diet). That in itself is a luxury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Has there ever been a generation which hasn't claimed "This time, things will be different!"? If you'll look back on what was written caustically about (and in rebuttal by) the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, I'm not seeing much difference now.

There are going to be a few of us in each generation which set out to be entrepreneurs and will tenaciously stick by that world-view our entire lives. The readers of this board are a self-selecting group (and aren't necessarily representative of the latest set of graduates) but many will still end up employee grist for the cubicle mill after their first dozen major setbacks.

<comment><USER8> The boomers have had a tremendous effect on society. If you don't believe me, go visit a Whole Foods or read Bobos in Paradise.

They said things would be different and they are. Marijuana may not be legal yet (in most states) but a lot has changed.

<comment><USER33> Every generation has had a tremendous effect on society.

Has there ever been a "Meh, fuck it." generation?

<comment><USER8> There have been some (like X) that were too small to cause large change due to much larger numbers of the previous generation still being in the work force.

<comment><USER33> Haven't the X'ers been the ones to create the technologies and found the companies you folks are so eager to emulate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Frankly, I don't get this attitude. Who is fighting Matt and his generation? Life is at is always has been, business and ambition is as it always has been.

If you want to strike it out your way, then do so, it's not a fight and nobody will battle to stop you. Just do it in silence, calmy and as if it is perfectly normal, because it is.

The battle is in your head. You see everyone working in cubicles, so your mind is telling you that that is where you should be, but your heart is telling you something else. The struggle is inside you, outside, nothing and nobody really cares what you do with yourself.

</comment><comment><USER35> Boy, "better educated than previous generations"? Give me a bloomin' break.

There hasn't been any seriously good education in this country (except at a few places like Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA and the two St. John's campuses) since about 1880 when the good Dr. Conant (president of Harvard) decided that science trumps all, and started heavily diluting what was a fairly decent liberal arts education.

<comment><USER36> Perhaps "better educated" in the sense that if I want to learn how something works, I can do so - I am not limited by whether or not I am in college, or what is available to learn at my college, or the quality of professors - I am limited only by my desire to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like neoteny (rapid learning and childishness) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_humans>

I wonder if the ability to absorb new technology has driven neoteny in us, since our beginning?

Maybe the next generation is always evolutionarily _fitter_ than the previous generation, due to being able to absorb new technology more easily because (1). uncluttered and unconfused by the old technology, and (2). immature humans are simply better at learning (the immature young of many species have more plastic brains - they soak up patterns like sponges).

Within that next generation, those who are better at absorbing technology (i.e. ways of doing things), and those that stay in that immature-stage of rapid learning for longer, will be more successful at surviving and passing on their genes. They don't have to be _great_ at it, just _better_ at it than others who can't absorb it as well (or for as many years).

</comment><comment><USER38> i guarantee Matt will cringe when he reads this in years to come. some valid critiques of the worker-bee lifestyle, but a completely off the mark sense of true utility, value and cross-generation contribution to such. any small amount of serious study of historical "effort" would cause an about face hear. there is little else to say.

<comment><USER39> I wrote one of those "advice for college graduates" articles after only working for 2 years -- 1 year in a cube farm where you were a thing, not a person, and another in larger company that gave people offices, windows, had wellness programs -- basically gave a shit. People have told me that I would "regret my writing X s/months/years from now" but I still don't.

I (still) wouldn't willingly work in a cube farm. If they're so pressed/cheap for space, I'll gladly work from home instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> matt, really well done, right or wrong the points are strong and presented in a very interesting manner. I've read a lot of your blogs here on yc news and have rarely agreed with you, in Maroon vs. WSJ article, I'm all in on Maroon.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ya'll made me feel old today :-) I thought it was us Xers who were the rambunctious "zomg, how will they ever function in the work place!" hyper- ambitious folk making the boomers shake their heads...

Love it!

<comment><USER42> exactly

instead of "entitlement" they should said "acting like a 23 year old"

;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Replies to this particular entry are a demographic study on their own. Thanks everyone! :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Welcome to the echo chamber.

</comment><comment><USER45> sounds like entitlement to me.</comment>


China, World's Biggest Polluter, Hits Carbon Goals – 12 Years Early - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/china-worlds-biggest-polluter-hits-carbon-goals12-years-early <comment><USER2> To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three Gorges because you don't care about the people jumping up and down saying "No". You can also mandate the use of solar and wind energy in a way that you just can't mandate things in other nations. You don't care about the other branches of the energy sector that might be hurt by your policy of "playing favorites". You can swing a pen and hundreds of thousands in carbon heavy sectors are, all of a sudden, out of work. It doesn't matter to you, because you don't have to win elections.

I don't doubt that China is ahead of schedule. In fact, I'd be shocked if China was _not_ in the lead globally on adjusting our energy generation mix. They'll have really clean looking dispatch stacks long before we do in the US, but at what cost? (And I'm not just talking about financial costs here.)

That's what we have to keep in mind. The fact is that addressing climate change is usually much more than a technology problem. How easy those non- technology aspects of the problem are to overcome greatly depend on what you are willing to tolerate from the authorities charged with addressing the climate change issue.

<comment><USER3> So USA is not smart enough to get this going.

Ok

<comment><USER4> not that its not smart enough, just that it has to listen to alternative groups. Nuclear power would be one way current technology could drastically reduce C02 Emissions, yet well intentioned, intelligent actors oppose the proliferation of such plants. While China could simply ignore those groups, the US is required to give them a voice in the political process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nobody bothers to read TFA before making snarky remarks?

"That's the conclusion reached by scientists who looked at the country's estimated carbon output between 2007 and 2016, as the country's rapid industrialization slowed and its consumption of coal declined. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience"

The research was done at the "University of East Anglia in Britain" \-- it's not merely some report out of China...

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this completely based on 2016 numbers? 2017 saw an increase from China:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon- iea/global-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global- carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB)

[https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions- se...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to- rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau)

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI, this is based on a paper published in Nature : [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_na...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_name=subjects_energy- supply-and-demand) , and not a government announcement. I don't have access to see what they're using as their data sources, so I'm curious how much they relied on official Chinese government data.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it a coincidence this report appears a month after it was revealed that China was the source of massive amounts of the banned chemical CFC-11? [https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-44738952](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952)

</comment><comment><USER9> Boy do I have a bridge to sell you!

Forecast for today haze with extra smog in SE China.

</comment><comment><USER10> What would be the Chinese incentive to lie about this? How hard is it to check the validity of their claims?

<comment><USER11> "Their claims"? I'm not saying ya didn't read the article, but you might have missed this:

 _" Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Guan and his colleagues estimate..."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I bet local and provincial officials have reported resounding success!</comment>


A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-i-still-use-shorthand-and-a-smartpen/373281/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Just a side point from the last line of this article: shorthand (and "cursive") is specifically adapted to the fountain pen: the strokes are continuous and drawn (i.e. you never push the pen, only pull it). Even with a pencil or ball point/byro if you pull rather than push you end up with a much more readable handwriting.

And a 10% improvement is _YUGE_ when you have to write everything by hand and there are no copiers!

<comment><USER3> You do push the pen. Otherwise how would you write an O? like ()? Similarly there are upward strokes in h, b, d, k, m, n, r...

I would say that cursive ("joined up handwriting" as I know it) _prefers_ downward strokes, and I don't think it ever begins a letter with an upward stroke.

<comment><USER4> We were taught to begin all cursive letters with an upward stroke, with even a preceding tail on letters like a and o, as shown here -- [http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive- writing/](http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive-writing/).

<comment><USER5> That was a bad idea. Much better: graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, briem.net, italic-handwriting.org, studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, BFHhandwriting.com, handwritingsuccess.com, Lexercise.com, HandwritingThatWorks.com, freehandwriting.net/educational.html

<comment><USER6> Briem has been criticised for creating "zig zag" handwriting that's hard to read if the writer writes at speed.

And you need to include the [http://](http://) if you want those to be links.

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED- WRITING.1.pdf)

[http://briem.net](http://briem.net)

[http://italic-handwriting.org](http://italic-handwriting.org)

[http://studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html](http://studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html)

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

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

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

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

[http://freehandwriting.net/educational.html](http://freehandwriting.net/educational.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shorthand is a fantastic skill to learn, and I really need to learn it.

People get annoyed when you are taking notes on a laptop in meetings. It's just a human psychology thing. You seem otherwise engaged. Even if you're fully engaged in the conversation. There's just some hardwired human aversion to believing you're paying attention when you're pecking away.

So being able to attend meetings the old fashioned way, with a pen and paper, is a really good tactic. Bonus: it actually stands out now, and in a good way. You come across as more serious and diligent for whatever reason.

<comment><USER8> The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner.

(How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)

<comment><USER9> This is a fascinating challenge. I feel like it's probably possible to enter and edit equations as easily with the keyboard as with a pen; certainly you can do so for numerical expressions, using RPN.

I wrote a quick hack at [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn- edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1...](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn- edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1_1_292_/_+_/_+_/_+_/_+) that almost does a reasonable job; I think that, although it doesn't quite reach being a usable equation editor, among other things because it doesn't have "=", it shows that one is possible.)

I wrote another related quick hack at [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/) with a slightly different take on the problem, where the objects you calculate with are continuous functions of _x_ rather than pure numbers.

<comment><USER8> I defy anyone to reproduce a chalkboard full of eqvations, diagrams, arrows, etc., with a laptop and keep up with the professor.

Besides, my spiral notebook's battery never gives out, it's light, it's $.79, nobody is going to steal it, it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't distract anyone behind me, it won't break when I drop it, etc. Besides, no notes are complete unless you have a coffee cup ring on it.

Disco is music's greatest achievement, too.

<comment><USER9> You raise some good points, and many of them are related to why I take most of my own notes on paper. However, laptops far excel spiral notebooks at their ability to produce coffee rings on your notes; with the latest algorithms, you can produce many such rings per second!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some time ago I wrote an English -> Gregg Shorthand converter: [https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/an- introduction...](https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/an-introduction- to-gregg-shorthand-and-an-attempted-english-to-shorthand-converter/)

It's not very good, but I'd like to see if anyone can make a better one. It's a shame that shorthand is lost to time and mostly replaced by technology like audio recorders.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty cool. If one were inclined to take it to the next level of absurd awesomeness, one could employ machine learning:

      1. Feed all the examples from the Gregg dictionary into a neural network.
      2. Generate all the possible positionings for a word.
      3. Have the trained NN pick the best one.

That said, I think doing the opposite conversion, from Gregg to English, would be marginally more useful (and a lot harder, I assume).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385)

Top comment starts "While Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much use for anything technical", which was a timely intervention to stop me running off and implementing a drop-in replacement for the Android keyboard!

<comment><USER13> This might interest you instead: [http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm](http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm)

Relies entirely on phonetic representations, so it can represent just about anything.

<comment><USER14> You mean just about anything as long as it's in English.

<comment><USER15> If you want a fully generalizable script, use IPA; if you want something designed to be fast for a particular language, use a method designed for that language. Quikscript is great for mid-century Received Pronunciation, but if you want something that's fast for Spanish, you'll likely want to change things a bit.

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

<comment><USER16> I don't find the Spanish version of Gregg shorthand too different from what I saw for English.

[http://zonaforo.meristation.com/topic/2185985/](http://zonaforo.meristation.com/topic/2185985/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the main reasons I write in Gregg is that I can take critical notes during meetings that I'd rather nobody else be able to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Now client is being a bitch."

<comment><USER17> Heheh, close enough. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A couple years ago, I learned to read/write Quikscript, which was indirectly inspired by shorthand systems (George Bernard Shaw knew phoneticist Henry Sweet and Pitman shorthand, and endowed an effort at script reform in his will). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript)

It's harder than you might think to read English in a different script; we have learned through great effort how to read and write the conventional orthography. Writing—and especially deciphering the writing—is laborious and slow without a lot, a lot, of practice. Plus, writing phonemically made my spelling worse ;)

<comment><USER15> Are you up to as-fast-as-Orthodox (en-Latn) for either reading or writing yet?

<comment><USER18> No, I don't actually handwrite things frequently, and didn't get much practice. More trouble than it was worth, for keeping notes and stuff in. Maybe I'll pick it up again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How often do you need to write down _exactly_ what was said?

Studies[0] show that when students use laptops to take notes, they remember less than when they use a pen and paper. The suggested mechanism by the latter improves retention is that it forces you to understand and summarize the content due to limited output speed (thereby processing it more deeply); when you are able to produce output at near the speed of input you can simply transfer words with little processing. It seems likely that this would be a shortcoming of shorthand as well as laptops. If you're taking notes in a meeting for your own use, it seems as though "longhand" may actually be the better choice (excepting of course those situations in which it's important to know exactly which words were said).

[0] [http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/095679761452...](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581.abstract)

<comment><USER20> I do quite a few interviews and find that its easier to record exactly what was said mechanically because at another level, I'm also understanding and responding to it. This way, I keep a record of what happened for later without much thought to summarizing it at that time, and instead am able to take the conversation where i want it to. later, i look at the raw notes and re- visualize the conversation and THEN draw conclusions.

So yes, IMO, there's place for exact notes when you're both the scribe and active participant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I once spent a bit of time learning Teeline Shorthand. Teeline is the form of shorthand that British journalists are expected to learn. It's easier to learn, but less efficient, than Gregg or Pitman.

But I reached the conclusion that there was little to be gained from it. Keyboards are so much faster that the only real advantage to using shorthand is obfuscation.

</comment><comment><USER22> You could 'roll your own' with Dutton Speedwords and some selfchosen vocabulary, it also works with plain alphanumeric keyboard entry. If you realy want to enter text query Plover stenotype on youtube or our fav search engine

</comment><comment><USER23> The article misses out the rather fascinating battle between Pitman, Gregg and then new Stenography that was going on in the 1910s. The stenographers competed in all those speed competitions until they comprehensively won one of the early ones. This was so disruptive that the competition paused for some years and when it came back was pen system only.

Pitman / Gregg gave rise to outrageous claims on both sides and religious discussions much like "Windows or Mac".

Given the bandwidth possible I've wondered why no one has tried a stenotype like keyboard on a computer.

<comment><USER9> You will probably be interested in Plover, which is open-source and CrowdSupply-crowdfunded: [http://www.openstenoproject.org/](http://www.openstenoproject.org/) [http://plover.stenoknight.com/](http://plover.stenoknight.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You can still get Gregg standard steno books.[1][2] They're sized for lap use, not for use on a desk.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Steno-Books-Inches- Sheets/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Steno-Books-Inches- Sheets/dp/B004ZKXM0Q) [2] [http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/945722/TOPS- Steno-Book...](http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/945722/TOPS-Steno- Books-6-x-9/)

</comment><comment><USER25> > But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced > consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: "bed" is written as > "b-d"; "act" as "a-k"; "done" as "d-n".

Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.

<comment><USER26> It does lead to collisions, context is usually enough to disambiguate, or there are many specialized abbreviations. I never played with it long enough to get the details, though.

<comment><USER27> So it's like chinese. One word can have several meaning depending on context. And they seem to be able to figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Did shorthand used to be more popular? I remember reading in The Westing Game as a child unfamiliar with English, and had to infer the meaning of the word. The book seemed to assume that its readers (mainly teens) knew the word.

<comment><USER29> From the article:

> For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As > recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. > Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified > shorthand courses. But Gregg's decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg > Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg's death. [...] The real death > knell for Gregg, though, was the arrival of the personal computer in the > 1980s. Even high-level executives no longer dictated letters to their > secretaries; they wrote them themselves on their desktop computers. > Companies that used to have scores of skilled shorthand writers eliminated > their steno pools entirely.

<comment><USER30> Another theory for the decline was the it was mostly women, and smart women, who were working as shorthand writers. As women's lib progressed, those women had much better job oppertunities, and left the field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Should include 2014 in the title.</comment>


Twitter Killing Its Mac App - <AUTHOR> https://512pixels.net/2018/02/twitter-killing-its-mac-app/ <comment><USER3> It seems like this has been a while coming. The Mac app still hadn't been updated to support 280 characters when I finally ditched it a couple weeks ago (in favor of Tweetbot). If they couldn't push out a change like that in 3 months, the app has probably not been maintained for quite a while.

<comment> rkuykendall-com I also ditched a few weeks ago for Tweetbot. The official Twitter app still uses square avatars and, the real killer bug, no longer supports pictures. pic.twitter.com links just send you to the tweet recursively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a latecomer to macOS, Tweetie feels like a bygone era back when the default didn't seem to be Electron and web views.

I want to believe in online apps, but god, they all just suck so much, if not at launch, then a few years down the line.

<comment><USER5> Given the sociopathic aspects of Twitter, maybe this is a good time to kiss it off. Maybe this is just the nudge we need.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Twitter as a campaign/marketing vehicle pretty much enabled the outcome of our last Presidential election.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also strange: on the iOS app, you can add multiple accounts. On the web version not.

Tweetdeck doesnt feel snappy at all.

Twitter is, very broken - for a very long time now.

<comment><USER8> I use Firefox container tabs to get around this

<comment><USER9> It's this built in to Firefox? I use session box in Chrome for a similar effect.

<comment><USER10> Container API is built into Firefox, but for now you need to install a Mozilla add-on to actually use the feature:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi- account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account- containers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we channel all the anger and frustration this has caused into switching to Mastodon/GNU Social?

Open standards, run your own if you want, nobody deprecating or discontinuing anything.

<comment><USER12> I tried Twitter a long time ago, and never enjoyed it.

I've been quite active on Mastodon (@email@example.com) for the last several months, and enjoying it a lot.

It's not perfect, but it gives me more satisfaction than Twitter ever could.

The biggest problem with Mastodon at the moment is discoverability. It takes some effort finding the right people to follow but I've found a reasonable group of people who are interested in things like Emacs, Lisp etc.

<comment><USER13> I am really interested in how you found people too.

<comment><USER12> I joined an instance which focuses on the things I'm interested in, and look at the local timeline. That timeline contains original posts (i.e. not replies) posted from that instance. I'd follow pretty much anyone posting anything remotely interesting.

A lot of people tend to boost interesting posts, and following people whose posts gets boosted allows you to grow your follow list with interesting posts.

Unfollowing people that keeps posting uninteresting things is also important of course.

<comment><USER13> Can you mention your instance or how you went about finding it? Sorry for more questions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, alternatives? I have Twitter on the side next to my browser. Using Twitter in a separate window doesn't work because Twitter for the web isn't mobile friendly and mobile.twitter.com doesn't refresh if the window isn't in focus.

<comment><USER15> I'm working on a desktop client for Twitter, FB, Slack etc.

It's pretty snappy and weighs only 90 KB (!)

[https://eul.im](https://eul.im)

Twitter support is coming later this month.

<comment><USER16> I'm calling bullshit on you, your shenanigans and all of the blind idiots.

1\. I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...

2\. You have no github and hn history besides spamming the shit of eul and I can't trust no proprietary third party shit.

4\. Do you really think you can open source something that could bite your ass legally (whatsapp)? Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what? If so say it instead of "ye ye I will open source it".

5\. Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?

<comment><USER17> Ok, I'll bite.

After checking out the guy and his project, it seems like he's really truly passionate about making minimal, fast software. I love it: I do a similar thing myself (I made the smallest, fastest CSS framework.) I can tell it in his comments and the effort he's put into this. It's a totally unique project, and as far as I can google, it's the only one of its kind. In a world of massive, bloated apps that eat gigs of RAM for breakfast it's a refreshing change.

The audience for something this minimal is fairly niche, and HN probably has the densest concentration of people for it. He's been mentioning it not very often, and only when it's relevant, which seems fair to me.

He's also clearly a very talented developer and put a ton of work into it. I have a feeling he'd like to make some money off it. I've been in a similar position myself, years ago: not sure whether to open-source or not because of the perpetual doubt in the back of your mind. I don't blame him: he's getting $11/month off Patreon.

The past versions thing doesn't matter IMO - after checking the Github, he says they don't work anymore. And the previous versions downloaded _half_ a gigabyte, apparently now it only downloads a few megabytes. Personally, the biggest thing that concerns me is the source: I'd have to see the source before I used it for anything.

Alex, if you'd like to talk about the world of FOSS, fast, minimal software, open-sourcing, and how to make money, feel free to send me an email - it's in my profile :)

<comment><USER18> As far as I can tell from the issues, previous versions of his software loaded the chat service in question's website in a browser, and then either applied a custom stylesheet to the webpage or attempted to extract portions of the HTML content for display.

eul.im literally never was minimal. He can keep saying it's minimal software, but until he produces something that both consistently works and doesn't consume orders of magnitude more storage than claimed, his words mean nothing. Again, current, literal reality is an issues page documenting myriad problems from crashes, blank screens, mangled displays, absence of advertised features, and claims of updated versions that _still_ have not arrived.

<comment><USER17> Look, it's an issues page, and it's one-man free software. He's a few days late with the update for a free piece of software, so what? The dude's earning $11 a month on Patreon. Give him a damn break.

Not to be grumpy to you, but I'd like to defend him. He's got an extremely noble goal. Those that "get it" really get it, and those that don't don't. I'm fed up with using several different shitty closed source apps that take up gigs of ram at a time, and I've tried to write my own version of what he's done, and I've failed at it. It's incredibly hard. Particularly because the companies are locked in a neverending cat and mouse trying to stop apps like this.

Also, based on everything I've seen off of RAM/CPU usage while running there's absolutely no way he's using an embedded webpage. I'd be happy to be corrected here though.

<comment><USER18> I am quite familiar with one person free software projects. I use quite a few, and have released one myself. The variety and severity of problems in eul.im over such a short period of time is aberrant.

He claimed Discord support since 15/09/2017 - two months later, Discord support still wasn't available. He's been claiming since 28/09/2017 that he'd submit his app to Homebrew. As of four hours ago, he never said a peep to his mailing list about progress on the new version.

The app _definitely_ used an embedded browser for authentication. That isn't speculation. He says the new version is rewritten to be a native app, _as oppposed to what it was before._ My assertion that the app used the browser for displaying content _is_ speculation, but it is consistent with both the previous known behavior and the app's dysfunctions. The cool thing about software is that you can just examine the software to see what it does; too bad none of us will ever definitively know what his software did since he is deliberately hiding the previous versions from new eyes.

His history _at best_ demonstrates incompetence. If the thing he is trying to do indeed is hard, than he is incompetent at doing a hard thing. One's reach exceeding his grasp is fine and necessary for personal growth - but in that case, _do not lie_ and say you are delivering something you cannot deliver. If you are learning, say as much. Perhaps ask for help, perhaps keep previous attempts public so they can be analyzed by people trying something similar and by those with more experience. Perhaps upload your source code for the same reason. _Do not_ put download links on your homepage that launch a popup saying there is no download.

<comment><USER15> It was not a native app because I was using OpenGL to render content, not a browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm slightly curious what this means about the condition of Twitter as a business if an organization of their size doesn't want to spend the time/resources on maintaining this.

I would guess that the kinds of people who 1. use Macs and 2. decide to download the app are probably among some of Twitter's more engaged and higher- income users.

<comment><USER20> Why does it matter if the users are high income? Twitter can still serve ads to low income users.

<comment><USER21> Ads are there to convert (sell stuff). Low income users buy less stuff. Also less expensive stuff. Ads catering to high income users tend to budget more for ads because they can be more lax with cost per user acquisition - <USER2> product has the margin to support it. All this leads to more income for twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using TweetDeck on Mac until it started crashing I guess after High Sierra update. Scrolling also works in somewhat weird way compared to other apps. The Twitter web app is a mess, it displays lots of tweets liked by others that usually is just clickbaity noise, not something I want to see in my feed even though cat pictures can be funny indeed.

Also notifications used to show actually relevant notifications but nowadays it just displays retweets and tweets liked by others just like in my main feed and I haven't found a way to disable that.

<comment><USER23> I thought they killed the TweetDeck app for all platforms. Mac must have survived the cut. You can still use it on the web, but I don't know how it compares to the apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Twitterrific is on sale right now in the Mac App Store for eight bucks. Both it and Tweetbot are great native Mac Twitter apps and are so much better than the web interface.

</comment><comment><USER25> Where do I go to add my "this is a dumb decision, Twitter should fix its botting/fake account problem" take?

<comment><USER26> Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe this is a good thing. My current Mac app will remain a "pure" Twitter app and I won't have to worry about it updating to include promotions, suggested tweets, and needless features (unless "stop supporting" means they're shutting off the API).

<comment><USER28> That is surely what it will come to at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if the Russian money they sucked in during the 2016 elections wasn't enough to keep the app?

</comment><comment><USER30> This allows the following to happen:

1\. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge for it!

2\. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to play around or pay a little more for a pro client

<comment><USER31> Building on twitter is like trusting that any new Google product will be around in a few years, a huge developer risk.

Twitter killed off third party developers as ruthlessly as Nintendo killed third parties back in NES days.

<comment><USER32> Yea, the whole FalconPro thing still has users angry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The commentary on this is off base - maybe twitter is pulling people off this project to put them on fake accounts / nazis? Certainly maintaining a mac app doesn't help there.

<comment><USER34> All the fake accounts, Nazis, racists, alright, tea party, and other right- wingers have boycotted Twitter mostly and went here [http://gab.ai/](http://gab.ai/) instead.

Those left on Twitter are either bots or puppet/troll accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Related question.

Suggest a Twitter client that...

is not Electron based

shows tweets horizontally, maximizing number of tweets, minimizing scrolling

hides crap like images and video

shows replies as threads

Windows

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER36> More moeny for tweetbot

</comment><comment><USER37> Because of జ్ఞా ?

<comment><USER38> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?

<comment><USER40> Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions?

I don't want to use Twitter in a tab.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer's problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?

<comment><USER41> Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?

<comment><USER32> I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Will everyone on HN just stop complaining when a random _free_ service doesn't give you exactly what you want?

You are not Twitter's customer. You are Twitter's _product_.

If you don't like that situation, tune out.

</comment><comment><USER43> Finally, show the way Twitter! Open web for the win!</comment>