The Period Is Pissed - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-punctuation-mark-has-become-sign-anger <comment><USER2> Comments here currently call this strange. I personally thought this was common knowledge, and it's not a new thing, either. I own a large video game IRC community and we've used periods for this purpose as long as I can remember (since ~2001? it's a bit fuzzy...) "fine." is about as passive- aggressive as it gets. TFA is spot on about line breaks being the new periods, as well.

It's also a bit odd when people use capitalization beyond "I"\--one of the best ways to tell newer users from older users.

I feel so weird dropping by, say, freenode, where the customs are so different.

(EDIT: Since people here are mentioning age, for the record, I am soon to be 26)

<comment><USER3> I feel so old now. I always capitalize every IM or SMS I write and I try to make the punctuation as correct as possible. By that I mean that I don't stop at using the full stop as required, but also worry about commas, colons, semi- colons and even dashes. I'm also "guilty" of having read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss and agreeing with it.

It's not fair that being almost 35 I should feel so old, is it? ;-)

<comment><USER4> It's a mistake to think of "correct punctuation" as some sort of abstract goal to attain. Communication is about making yourself understood, and punctuation is a means to that end. When people expect a period to mean one thing because most people use a period in that fashion then what do you accomplish by defecting from that common usage?

In meatspace you can rely on nonverbal cues, online you cannot. So if we can overload the semantics of a period and of capital letters to help compensate for the lack of nonverbal communication, all the better. Full sentences and proper grammar don't go away -- they just take on a different meaning. Clear communication is hard enough as is, why complicate matters further by limiting yourself to perfect sentences and lose out on the extra nuance?

<comment><USER5> > why complicate matters further by limiting yourself to perfect sentences and > lose out on the extra nuance?

My problem with that, and I'm sympathetic to both situations, but it seems as though the rules of proper grammar have been replaced with new rules that are _less_ expressive than the old rules.

Sure, if the community infers a period as hostile, then clearly, one attempting to avoid seeming hostile would be wise to avoid using periods. However, why is that the case? How did it get there in the first place?

Yes, I know it's been this way for awhile, but the editor in my soul won't allow me to craft broken sentences, even where I know that they'll be more effective at communicating. Yes, I acknowledge that's a problem of mine, but I would argue that the bigger problem is that people are looking for more expressiveness by arbitrarily assigning connotation to things that otherwise bear none, while completely disregarding that there are ways to be more expressive through regular old English.

<comment><USER4> 1\. NO.

2\. No.

3\. no.

4\. No

5\. no

Only number 2 is correct grammatically. You can expand the list with other versions of no (nope, no-no) and with other punctuation (exclamation mark, ellipsis). There are easily 20 different versions of "no" I can think of from the top of my head. Clearly being able to pick the "no" that fits best is an expressive advantage. I agree that there are ways to express yourself precisely in correct/formal English, but it's a lot more verbose.

Language is really pliable. It's quite strange that "fuck no" offends only puritans but "uhm... no." can set off fireworks with nearly anybody. I guess we all just have to adapt.

<comment><USER6> > Language is really pliable. It's quite strange that "fuck no" offends only > puritans but "uhm... no." can set off fireworks with nearly anybody.

I'd be more offended by the former than the latter, though I wouldn't be all that offended in either case.

> I guess we all just have to adapt.

I agree, if by adapt you mean we can all just chill out a little and be better listeners. I think the graph of grammatical and punctuation expectations is growing a longer tail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I interpret the lack of capitalization and correct punctuation as a sociopathic desire to undermine the very foundation of modern civilization--by destroying written language as a medium of communication. So in a way, I am pissed when I end a sentence with a period: I'm pissed at all the people who can't be bothered to use one. And when I use colons and em dashes, that should be interpreted as hate crimes.

<comment><USER8> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I distinguish between chat/non-chat writing, and I don't use periods in chats. For example, I'll usually say things like this:

      me> i'm gonna give up on GTA IV
      me> just can't get into it
      me> especially after playing V

Non-chat, this would look like:

      I'm gonna give up on GTA IV; I just can't get into it, especially after playing V.

I guess I find "chat writing" (period-less) more amenable to quick, back-and- forth conversation.

<comment><USER10> > I'm gonna give up on GTA IV; I just can't get into it, especially after > playing V.

You know, I've always attributed the increased frequency of semicolons in the writing of coders (my own included) to their commonness in programming languages, but I wonder if period-aversion among the tech savvy is a factor as well.

There's nothing wrong with using a period in that line instead of a semicolon, yet I would probably punctuate it the same way if I were writing it. Periods feel monotonous and final, and that can't be attributed to C-style languages alone.

<comment><USER11> A semicolon is different than a period in that it carries the connotation that the adjacent clause is a continuation or modification of the idea introduced by its immediate predecessor, not a separate thought (regarding the same topic, lest a new paragraph begin).

I don't think it has much to do with the commonality of the glyph in code, where ; usually represents a conclusion, not a continuation. It may simply be that coders and/or internet-savvy readers have more exposure to writing that utilizes semicolons and they obtain the habit by osmosis.

<comment><USER12> "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." \--Kurt Vonnegut

<comment><USER11> Yes, I've heard this before. But I do find use for semicolons, and I appreciate their use in works by other authors. Kurt Vonnegut is (was) not obligated to use them.

And I've never been to college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article mentions it only briefly, but the usage of ellipses (or just long strings of periods) in chat is even more fascinating to me. I once had a freelance client whose mood I could gauge by the number of dots in her Skype messages. Read this and try not to cringe:

        no... that's not what we agreed to.......

It almost felt manipulative. I always imagined her sitting across the table from me, forcing an awkward silence in an attempt to make me renege.

So imagine my consternation when a friend of mine started using tons of periods in her text messages:

        hey.... let's get a drink tonight..........

Interestingly, in her case, the extra periods apparently didn't mean anything. As she later explained, "that's just how I text...... not sure why.."

Amazing how much emotional weight a simple dot can carry, even when it's not intentional.

<comment><USER14> I've wondered about the use of ellipsis in Hacker News comments, e.g. "That's quite... unusual". I guess it's supposed to indicate that the writer had to stop and think hard to find the right word, but I feel like there's some semantic meaning I'm missing. Has anyone else noticed this?

<comment><USER15> I do this... sometimes.

I use it (I think) to indicate not only that I had to stop and think about what word to use, but also to indicate that what I'm saying is my opinion or thoughts on the matter.

When I'm stating something factually I never do it, but when you ask if I want Pizza or Burgers, I'd say, hmmm.... Pizza sounds good :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord I honestly had no idea this was a phenomenon and I'm part of the demographic which is ostensibly supposed to be aware of these new nuances in texted language.

I have a very inconsistent typing style when on IM or IRC, but I've never really seen anyone respond differently because of subtle punctuation differences like adding or omitting periods from the end of a sentence.

I don't deny that this is a real occurrence, but it seems quite ridiculous. The "because [noun]" thing at least has practical use in conveying implicit meaning through brevity.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apparently, I'm strange in this (meaning HackerNews) group of people. I've been an avid instant messenger for several years; and, while I consistently try to have correct, or at least almost-correct punctuation in my instant messages, as well as a love for the semi-colon, I tend to finish my instant messages without a period.

I finish posts on message boards like this one with them; but, when I'm using an IM client, then period follows this article's alleged usage of meaning irritation or annoyance. Notably, this only applies to the last sentence in a message and only when the messages are between 0 and 1 paragraph. I haven't analyzed my own chat-style writing beyond a single paragraph, so I have no comment around anything beyond that.

The people I know tend to be the same, as far as I know, ending sentences without a period. We do often end them with things other than a period, though, like exclamation points, question marks or a few other group-specific symbols, such as emoticons, to make sure that it's known the message is ended and it is of a particular tone. The period is just one of those tones and that tone is almost always perceived as a sharp one, unless it is one of the group that has a rabid dedication to the period-is-end-of-sentence style.

All of that said, the people I tend to speak with also tend to have strong pet-peeves around they're/their/there, than/then and other commonly misrepresented words. They also tend to demand that people spell out whole words rather than using r for are and u for you, unless you're being ironic. Punctuation is very important to us, we have just redefined the terminating mark.

Language is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is another phenomena that appears related to this. Younger americans are adopting an interrogative tone for sentences that are supposed to be statements. I really enjoyed that restaurant? The salmon was really good?

I really noticed this in my German class. There are students from various countries, and one of the students was an American girl in her early 20s. She was a nice person, but you could really see people going through the "are you telling me or asking?" confusion all the time. I think there's something deeper going on here. I don't want to wax philosophical too much, but our current culture appears suspicious of statements. As if uttering them is crass in some way. I don't claim to understand why.

<comment><USER18> that is just girls with valley girl accents. (sometimes guys) but it definitely isnt all, or even most, young americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do not use short Internet "slangs." I type as correct as I can --which can be difficult while using english, as it is not my mother tongue. The lack of proper capitalization and punctuation irks me, it does not matter the medium.

My teenager child follows my path.

<comment><USER20> 1\. [http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16722/why-does- tywi...](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16722/why-does-tywin- correct-arya-on-usage-of-mlord-and-my-lord)

Arya Stark: My mother served Lady Dustive for many years, my Lord. She taught me how to speak proper--properly.

2\. "English" is capitalized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, that is strange. I must be old, but I sometimes interpret the exact opposite: a sentence without a period must have a twinge of... bitterness? sarcasm? lack of care?

It can seem very passive aggressive.

<comment><USER22> not realy

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Penny Arcade have been running a public information campaign on punctuation for a few years now...

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/07/07](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2003/07/07)

(and [http://www.penny- arcade.com/archive/results/search&keywords=...](http://www.penny- arcade.com/archive/results/search&keywords=mr+period/) )

<comment><USER24> My personal favorite has always been:

[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/02](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2005/09/02)

Definitely a pissed-off period.

<comment><USER16> above link is NSFW

Did not know that when clicked.

<comment><USER24> apologies

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The period is not aggressive. The period implies a complete thought.

<comment><USER26> You're confusing a spec with real-life implementation. The article is discussing the latter. The study of linguistics is separate from the study of language and grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is this surprising? Punctuation's usage, rules, and meaning have always had a history of differing based on context. The most obvious and similar is the effect of punctuation in poetry.

[http://www.brigitsflame.com/litlib/stylistic- suggestions/rie...](http://www.brigitsflame.com/litlib/stylistic- suggestions/riesiel-punctuate-end.php)

</comment><comment><USER28> What I have noticed is that the period assumes a meaning, despite the traditional syntactical one, depending on the situation.

On the article's example a period means an non-friendly way to answer (like being 'pissed'). In other cases I've noticed that the period assumes the meaning of talking seriously (since it's more formal to use it). In other cases I've also seen having the meaning of sureness (like when we end a sentence with the word 'period').

In a nutshell: the period has a meaning of _completeness_ ; what I've said ended just there. In a informal conversation, where period is not required or it's not traditionally used, using it acquires a meaning. And this meaning is completely dependent on the people and the subject involved.

I love these subtle differences in the way we communicate. I'm not only not against it, as many people are, but I also nourish it. It's more fun, more clever to do this way. Why not to say it: more humane.

I love language hacking...

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't think this is necessarily accurate -- you really need to have context and history with a person to determine how they use punctuation to signify tone. For instance, the person I most frequently text always uses punctuation, while I rarely do. I think it also depends on how you were introduced to messaging/texting.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does the progress bar on the top of this page, which only shows up when you are 75%+ through the article, bug anybody else?

<comment><USER22> It's super pointless, it's just there 'because the web designer can' \- the mouse follower and blinking gifs of our time, so to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've always felt that the English language is somewhat ambivalent, but the construction of the language via writing is not ambivalent. To complete the idea, imagine how language is used. Certainly, we don't think in punctuation- able sentences at all times - we think in streams.

However, when constructing a logical presentation of ideas, we would think in more grammatically anatomically correct forms.

The implications of the writing are a form of protocol in my opinion, and as any good protocol requires, must be interpreted to some standard. Unfortunately, the complexity of the standard for the English language is far and above the complexity for a given programming language, and we unfortunately don't really have a linter for conversation.

Hyperbole, perhaps; but it's true at its core: people only receive meaning if they have some sort of roadmap for the symbol and the symbolized.

</comment><comment><USER32> Without the clarity of being able to hear someone's voice and see someone's facial expression the mind finds ways of over interpreting what's written. On top of that, there are individuals who interpret every little thing in your text as a clue to your emotion and intent as if you had painstakingly crafted each individual letter. Sometimes I use periods when I text, some times I don't. Sometimes I spread a thought across multiple texts, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I use emoticons when I text, sometimes I don't.

You can't count on any of these non-verbal and non-muscular artifacts as reliable emotional or intentional clues. But you can certainly count on yourself to find meaning in the meaningless.

None of this is to say that sometimes it doesn't happen, but sometimes it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find this to be more true when using short phrased, singular thoughts. With shorthand being more common in IMs and texts, a single period may be a misinterpreted that they intend the entire conversation to end, not just one message.

"k." being the worst offender imo.

</comment><comment><USER34> The context might change when using proper capitalization. A sentence that changes one convention might change another.

A counter-example are the McDonalds billboards that have shown up over the last year. They don't use capitalization, but still end with periods.

</comment><comment><USER35> Interestingly enough, French diplomats use ./. (dot-slash-dot) as the period character, when writing official notes or messages [1].

[1] [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(signe)#Le_point_diplomat...](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_\(signe\)#Le_point_diplomatique_..2F%2E)

</comment><comment><USER36> related: times roman font has announced a shortage of periods as reported by steve martin.

[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/06/09/1997_06_09_110_T...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/06/09/1997_06_09_110_TNY_CARDS_000378543)

</comment><comment><USER37> 42 years old with an English degree. I. am. so. fscked.

</comment><comment><USER38> The word is "addictive".

</comment><comment><USER39> Not always pissed.

Sometimes. just. emphatic.

</comment><comment><USER40> no.</comment>


Google Trends for JavaScript libraries - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=vue.js%2C%20react.js%2C%20meteor.js%2C%20angular.js%2C%20ember.js&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5 <comment><AUTHOR> Note that each search is for the ".js" variant to try and keep it consistent across each term and limited exclusively to the library.

All in all, this seems to confirm the general feeling* among web developers: Ember has been on a long downward slide, Meteor has struggled to gain traction, Vue is in full hype mode, React hit its hype peak and is now stabilizing, and Angular has been rapidly declining in popularity since React stole its thunder (but is still up there).

* from my personal observations while trying to keep a pulse on things - I don't think it would be difficult to find people who would disagree for any of these observations</comment>


What Broke the Magic Online Economy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-broke-the-magic-online-economy/ <comment><USER3> Planet Money on NPR did a piece recently on how WotC avoided some of these issues and made the card game such a success twenty plus years ago.

There's also some interesting anecdotes regarding the Hasbro buy out.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episode-609-the- curse-of-the-black-lotus)

<comment><USER4> That was not well researched though, if at all - it's by complete outsiders with little actual knowledge of what happened. Even the person they talk to (Skaff Elias IIRC) gives them a dubious offhand anecdote. It's a Malcolm Gladwell level story.

<comment><USER3> The stories about the Hasbro buyout I was thinking of were actually from Peter Adkison's blog, read that just after hearing the NPR piece and got them mixed up:

[http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the- coas...](http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coast-equity- distributions-part-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've played online now and then for about 10 years. For me, the biggest difference was the addition of phantom events. Unlike normal online tournements, where you have to buy some packs to paticipate, with phantom events you just pay a price. In return you don't get to keep the cards you play with.

For people just looking to play, not to compete or build a collection, phantom events make way more sense. I have to imagine their popularity has also depressed the secondary value of packs.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, if they just had a flat monthly fee for infinite phantom drafts, I would love that. Although having played on beta servers, infinite would probably be the wrong number as everyone just drops at the first sign of trouble.

<comment><USER7> Maybe infinite drafts + some ELO that people care about. Or Hearthstone style where you don't have to face the opponents you just drafted against.

<comment><USER8> Not facing who you just drafted against would be absolutely horrible. Magic sets are designed with draft in mind, and the draft tournament structure takes advantage of the rotating aspect of the draft portion. When you see your 14 potential picks, you know that a number of them are coming back to you and you get to pick another one later. You also know that every card you don't pick is potentially going to be in one of your opponent's decks.

Being aware of what's opened in a draft as well as what's being passed has an impact on how you pick (for example: tons of red cards keep going by - <USER2> isn't into red, so you can A) wheel red cards easier, and B) bank on not running into a hyper aggressive deck and build accordingly). If you were thrown into a match against someone who didn't draft at your table, they might have a deck that wasn't supported by the collective pool opened at your table and you'll be caught completely off guard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The main reason the MTGO economy is broken is simple: MTGO is incredibly shoddily designed and coded. It crashes all the time and has so many memory leaks they still plague users ten years after it was built.

All of the issues lead to a LOT of refunds, essentially doubling the product (tickets and cards) in circulation.

Recently, the game moved over to "4.0" which was even worse than 3.0 which has, in part, exacerbated the problem.

This actually has a knock on effect on the paper magic markets where card redemption (can turn digital cards into paper cards) has a big impact on prices. There are countless articles on MTGPrice.com about this.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've actually taken the opportunity while the economy is "broken" to get into the online game versus the paper game. I've quite enjoyed being able to draft for about half the price it is on paper in order to get practice, as well as build a smallish online collection. Seemed like the perfect time to jump into the economy.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in analysis with some actual data of the MTGO world, this site has a few folks who follow it rabidly: [http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program- june-12th-2015](http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-june-12th-2015)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article is using 'fancy' graphs, economic 101 and a long analysis to hide the fact that he is basing most of his theory on gut feeling. There are several points at which he states this himself, but fails to mention that these become crucial to the whole analysis.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do players think it's acceptable to have an "economy" for trading virtual gamepieces? Why don't they walk away and play game/culture that charges a flat fee or a time/usage-based subscription?

<comment><USER13> In short, because Magic is one of the best games ever designed, and this is the only sanctioned way to play the full game online. Magic online was created a long, long time ago before more modern concepts of game monetization (freemium / mtx based) were developed. It's ended up as something more akin to an online poker room than a gaming server.

<comment><USER14> I've tried other games that are similar to Magic, such as Hearthstone, but I always go back to Magic because there is nothing like it.

<comment><USER15> Hearthstone is _very_ well designed for what it is--an online-only Magic the Gathering that is accessible in a casual way.

I simply won't spend on Magic Online since I can't exit. In addition, why should I spend hundreds of dollars on something whose value can plunge drastically?

If you have actual physical cards, you can sell them. Powerful modern cards hold their value reasonably well.

<comment><USER16> You can exit from MTGO pretty easily? There are automated bots that will buy your cards for tickets, and those same companies will give you cash for those tickets (95 cents per ticket right now, not a terrible rate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Again, I have no data to back this up, just a sense of this trend."

<comment><USER18> That statement just doesn't fit well with what is being said - what the author meant was something more like "my hypothesis is that constructed popularity goes down over time but since Wizards doesn't release data on this we cannot know for sure". This really should have been caught by the editor ( _cough_ Andy... _cough_ ) and clarified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole concept of collectable cards feels like a scam, right alongside the freemium pay-for-virtual-clothing hustle.

<comment><USER20> When all my friends got into MtG back in high school I said, "I'll play but I'm going to make my own cards. I don't want to buy them from the store." But no one would go for it. I never understood. I used to say, "But there are no actual wizards at Wizards of the Coast."

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that was a thing for us too circa 1996. It ended with there being two groups of players: "Poor" players that printed cards and had access to the entire card catalog and could build insane cheese, and "rich" players who didn't and didn't.

Then there were the my-dad-owns-a-textile-mill types who would learn a cheese from the print-it-yourselfers, spend millions of lire on cards, and replicate the cheese with the people who played with the official cards.

<comment><USER22> It seems making it "pay a lot to win" isn't that much better than straight pay-to-win. I never understood how these players could tolerate broken mechanics in such an expensive game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hearthstone.

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like there's a great MtGox joke to be made here, but it's not coming to me.</comment>


Ask HN: What are successful projects that started as prototyped hypotheses? - <AUTHOR> As I see it, there are 2 main ends of a spectrum when it comes to releasing projects that aim to solve problems:<p>- top-down approach: you state your problem, think it through, consider all related work in this problem space, think very hard, come up with multiple possible solutions, evaluate their trade-offs and implement the best one (a-la Hammock-Driven Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc&t=1816s)<p>- rapid prototyping: you state your problem, come up with the easiest possible solution, test it, repeat (a-la Lean Development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development)<p>I know some great examples of the first approach (Clojure, Datomic, maybe Git?), but I don't know that many successes of the second approach. Furthermore, my personal work experience leads me to believe that the second approach, at least in practice, leads to a lot of wasted effort, so I'm interested to know whether it is so or not. <comment><USER2> I get the feeling that the "wasted effort" in the second approach is about rewriting code.

Rewriting code is _good_ in my experience. It's always better the second time around (or third, or fourth). It's not that my first attempt was rubbish, it's that I didn't understand the problem as well as I did the second time (and so on).

Lean is also about avoiding premature optimisation. Which is hard because it cuts against the grain of our engineer sensibilities. Doing something "good enough for now" is tough, when you know that with just a few more days' effort you could make it bulletproof. But I've had to delete "bulletproof" code so many times, because it turns out the product didn't need that feature, or it needed to work differently.

In the long term, Lean avoids more wasted effort, in my experience.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between Lean and Instant Legacy Code. The key difference is focus on simplicity including cyclomatic, compositional etc. Simple is not the same as simplistic. Lean as a methodology is meant to remove obstructions and waste in manufacturing. Effort is not a thing that can be wasted. Excess code is the waste. Fixing bugs is wasted time compared to not having them.

"Good enough for now" is a great excuse to keep hacks around and letting them accumulate to the point where code is unmaintainable. Meaning too much code, meaning waste. Even better is "it works now, do not touch" especially when current code base is untested.

Programmers are typically lazy and do not bulletproof anything ever. Thus rampant security issues.

The alleged wasted effort is from the point of view of some manager who doesn't get to tick boxes quicker. (And disregards later massive drop in development velocity while presumably demanding same results.) This means spotted issues are pushed towards never unless a customer reports them. Which they won't or even can't so you get your software brand recognized as buggy trash - with workarounds being commonly peddled among users and devops.

<comment><USER2> This is probably out of place, but are you OK? I burnt out about a decade ago, and would have agreed with a lot of what you're saying back then. It took me years to get back into a happy place with tech.

Dysfunctional teams and organisations produce this kind of cynical rage, not Lean.

<comment><USER3> Dysfunctional companies produce buzzword laden or metric based management. (As opposed to good software.)

Lean is not a software development methodology. It is made for factories and production lines, a terrible fit for most kinds of software. The only salvageable parts from it is iteration and listening to frontline workers to get process improvements. "Autonomation"/Poke Yoke as in automated tests. Which is not enough of a methodology.

The "Lean for software" page gives contradictory definition of waste - you're supposed to minimize defects while at the same time minimizing rework. I'd like a crystal ball that enables it. Plus you cannot apply it without absolute control over the whole development process. Any place that is a black box (say, both set of features and deadlines are given) the process. Thus it fails in corporate environment.

Likewise, general agile methodologies are easily perverted into what I just described - by skipping refactoring and redesign parts in service of deadlines. That model works only if you throw things away like startups do or the project is small and self-contained.

Usually small projects are low value or grow big. C.f. Twitter or YouTube when it started and now. Even worse if you get to interact with quickly changing parts controlled by another team you do not control in even a medium sized project.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I agree with everything you said, but I must point out that Lean comes from Toyota. While most people know about the production system, which is indeed applied to factories, Toyota applies this to the product development too. Product development is much closer to what software development is. Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation on the topic, but there is a very good book, called "Toyota Product Development System", which describes how Lean is applied there. There is an insane amount of valuable information in there, every software company should be at least aware of those engineering practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twitter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Creation_and_initial_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Creation_and_initial_reaction)

Airbnb: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9525267/Airbnb-T...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9525267/Airbnb- The-story-behind-the-1.3bn-room-letting-website.html)

Facebook: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash)

Yahoo: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo)!

<comment><USER5> Maybe the OP needs to clarify what type of "problems" exactly he is referring to..the examples he gives point to problems requiring significant engineering efforts, which is very different from the examples you note above.

<comment><USER4> The difference is how well defined the problem is. Clojure, Datomic, and Git all benefited from predecessors that were used extensively and had definable shortcomings with a clear enough technical solution.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I would say people or teams which developed solutions that look as if they "just appeared out of careful consideration" did not -- they simply learned from others and took in that prior world knowledge. The solution space for most problems is not "one global optimum" \-- use cases have to be taken into account (which is why great projects like Clojure are not used for everything).

I would go so far to say there isn't actually a dichotomy here -- you should be swapping between launching something with a hypothesis (in lean mode) then gathering feedback and considering alternatives as you are proven correct/incorrect (hammock mode). I think Galls Law [1] is also relevant here:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

If all you do is think and think, then you open yourself to mis-timing a solution, feature and scope creep, and risking "unknown unknowns". If all you do is launch and incrementally iterate you'll be stuck solving very narrow problems.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_\(author\)#Gall's_law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Top-down generally only works for a well-understood problem domain, and even then it only holds up for focused projects where you have the power to declare what is in scope and out of scope in a very strong fashion. This works better for dev tools, libraries, middleware or other projects that are abstract and not tied too closely to a specific business or end-user goal. In other words, the more abstract the tool and the more technical the audience, the more likely that you can drive massive impact while maintaining a simple vision and avoiding all kinds of edge cases and incidental complexity.

Rapid prototyping is more optimal for any end-user product or any new domain, because it's a faster way to discover the unknown unknowns, both in terms of user features as well as well as technical challenges you may not have anticipated.

</comment><comment><USER8> I believe Git to be actually part of the 2nd than the first group.

Linus built the working prototype/self-hosted in 3 days mixing a lot of his learnings from bit-keeper and his knowledge of disk management [1].

To me, that's rapid prototyping. It's enough domain knowledge to make it work for himself well. He didn't spend a bunch of time thinking nor coming up with solution since he was actively building Linux at the time. The key is he employed the help of others to build Git and eventually take it over since he wanted to focus on Linux.

This all comes with a huge caveat in that Linus's 3 days == 1000 of mine. His 'just enough' knowledge is near expert level.

As others have asked, what are you trying to build? A technical solution or an end-user solution.

Technical solutions do require a lot more domain knowledge than a twitter/airbnb (at the early stages).

In the end, I believe in rapid prototyping and failing fast[2]. Learn just enough, whether technical or end-consumer to launch fast.

The thing I agree 100% is though, don't break user-space [3]. I believe this applies to end users of products, whether developers or customers. Once people start consuming something, don't break it. Doesn't matter whether you believe it to be 'correct' or a 'bug'. Expectation management of slow and easy depreciation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History) [2] [http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) [3] [https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75](https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75)

<comment><USER9> Linus's three days of coding effort was probably preceded by months/years of thinking abut the essence of version control for a large distributed development project (a la the Linux kernel). It's difficult to just stumble on what became the internal structure of git in just a few days if you just started thinking about version control systems.

So, for me the distinction between the two approaches (prototyping -vs- hammock driven) is lately about whether you are solving a largely known/understood problem (equivalent to having domain expertise, in an _absolute_ sense) -vs- solving problems to which you don't know the answers. In the latter case, there is no shortcut getting around thinking time.

Or, as they say: "A month in the laboratory could save an hour in the library"

</comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu I feel like the question is mixing 2 things.

One is using a top-down approach versus an iterative approach. The other is about the nature of your problem: do you have product risk or market risk?

The lean approach is about eliminating waste, which, in the context of startups, often means building something small and talking to users. But that's only because most startups have market risk. If you have product risk, you should still iterate on your solution instead of building it in one go.

I feel like you are asking for examples where the market-risk was addressed. The most interesting companies would be those where the first test was a total miss and they solved a totally different problem in the end.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think your dichotomy is valid.

Git definitely doesn't fit the first approach. Not sure why you would state that.

Maybe the core of Clojure, with the persistent data structures, fits the first approach, but I doubt the rest of it does (speaking as an outsider to th eproject).

"Implement the best one" belies a lot of sweat and places where it could have gone wrong. In other words, the initial thinking is not even addressing half of the problem or doing half the work.

The philosophy of Clojure itself is very much based on iteration and interactive programming. You need a lot of action, feedback, and iteratino in addition to the "think very hard" part.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wouldn't Lisp count for the top-down approach? Only that most of the thinking was done without thought spent on an actual implementation, and the actual implementation was done by different people who recognised the practicality of it?

</comment><comment><USER12> Dark ([https://darklang.com](https://darklang.com)) was a bit of both. I spent several years thinking about the problem, and once I had a solution and decided to work on it, went into rapid prototyping to figure out if it could work. To a certain extent, we're still in that phase, just with a much bigger team now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Two examples of rapid prototyping spring to mind:

* Twitch, started as one guy streaming his life then they realised lots of gamers were watching, and that they'd like to be able to stream [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBOLk9s9Ci4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBOLk9s9Ci4)

* Segment, started as a thumbs up/down tool for professors in lectures to work out when students are getting confused. They realised everyone just went to Facebook instead, then they wondered why they couldn't tell this when they were remote! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-vfn97QTr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-vfn97QTr0)

</comment><comment><USER14> One of HN favourites (?) DropBox : [https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox- minimal-viable-pro...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal- viable-product/)

<comment><USER15> have you ever seen an early write up of the technology that powered that demo. I know it was all written in python but I was curious how they were doing it early on.

<comment><USER16> They used rsync afaik.

<comment><USER17> Dropbox is a wrapper on rsync.. amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The reality often is a mixture.

If you don't know your problem there is nothing to prototype, no minimal viable product. Nothing.

If you spend years analysing and planning you get nowhere.

You need to have an idea, a problem which has to be solved, but should not be lost in the forest.

</comment><comment><USER19> At a strategy level, which one of the two points you end up doing depends on who commissions and evaluates the work. If someone hands you a spec and then disappears, only to come back 5 years later and expect to receive a finished project, you'll be working "top-down". If you're trying to solve someone's immediate problem with software, and are in regular contact with that someone, you'll be working in "rapid prototyping". All projects, software or otherwise, are spread around the spectrum between the two endpoints. Where exactly depends on specifics, but if you're starting a new project, the consensus is that you should aim to be closer to the "rapid prototyping" end.

At a tactical level, feature level, you mix both. You state your problem (or get it stated to you), you think it through, hopefully considering at least some related work and doing some hard thinking, come up with multiple possible solutions and evaluate their trade-offs... by implementing their prototypes as fast as possible, because that's the only real way to discover the trade-offs. Depending on how much in a hurry you are, you might pick the first prototype that isn't a total disaster and build your feature from it, then test it, and repeat.

See how "top-down" and "rapid prototyping" is interwoven here. This approach can be expressed as: think before you do, but remember that you only learn the true scope of a problem by attempting to solve it.

</comment><comment><USER20> My personal avalanche detection project [https://avanor.se](https://avanor.se) (I haven't started the image uploads for this season yet), seems to fit the second model. It's very simple and small, but is successful in terms of being a prescribed tool for professional avalanche forecasting in Sweden.

I think it's on it's third rewrite or something right now, and runs circles around the only other service in this space regarding bang for the bucks (guess my budget, its smaller than that).

</comment><comment><USER21> Just because you build a project with the second approach, it doesn't mean you haven't thought about alternative solutions or design like defined in the first.

A lot of times it's useful building products by rapidly iterating because you see flaws, holes in your thinking, and get feedback immediately from people who are going to use it.

Immediate (or shorter term) feedback can be very helpful.

But to answer your question, YC talks a lot about Twitch being an example of the second approach.

</comment><comment><USER22> I like and have successfully used the Business Model Canvas approach. You fill in all assumptions. Test the riskiest one in the simplest manner, then move on. E.g. if you're not sure you can find the right partnerships, look for that first. If you're not sure the value proposition would work, interview some people, make some mockup PowerPoint slides, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER23> A large working system must evolve from a small working system. There's no way to start large.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Django is a reasonable example of the second approach.

</comment><comment><USER25> Human powered flight.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are you thinking of this as a value driven approach?

</comment><comment><USER27> solve a problem you have, it might now scale or spread, but you received some benefit for it.

</comment><comment><USER28> PageRank

</comment><comment><USER23> The United States

</comment><comment><USER29> Both approaches are wasteful but they waste different things.

<comment><USER30> Can you expand on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Internet

</comment><comment><USER23> religion

</comment><comment><USER23> biological life</comment>


Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/community_building_101_for_the_bootstrapped_startu.php <comment><USER2> I call BS on this article.

Fact: Tipd has shown very strong growth. This is true. <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipd.com/?metric=uv>

Claim: This growth can be traced to their great "community features" like an inviter, a top domains page, a top ambassadors page and "maintaining focus on community and continuously delivering tools to help them sort through the noise that has become an unfortunate side effect of today's information age."

Problem: If Tipd is so great at community building, why are there only 6 comments across the 15 stories on their front page? And all 6 of these comments are either Techcrunch style "Awesome article!" comments or spam comments promoting some other site.

Community = comments/discussion and they appear to be struggling mightily on that front.

What's more likely is that Tipd is powered by autosubmission scripts scraping feeds they like. That their traffic is all organic, attracted by the financial keywords. And that their comments are left by their own sock puppet accounts as well as financial blog spammers.

I run a social news site myself. These approaches are all very easy and tempting to take to boost traffic and activity. If someone does it, fine, but then don't pitch a phony story to Read Write Web, chalking your growth up to other factors. It hurts the cause by putting false information out there.

<comment><USER3> I run a social financial news site. Although my vision for my site is slightly different than Tip'd, I do admire their ability to promote the site.

I also kind of wonder about how social the site really is, when front page articles have titles such as "6 Easy Steps to Make money from Cash Reward Credit Cards or Point Rewards Credit Cards" with 21 votes and no comments. Someone is likely gaming the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets, social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community building. The rest of the article is a giant ad for Tip'd.

If you're really trying to build a community, why not emulate Hacker News? Curate your content, encourage intelligent conversation, and define & enforce your community's culture. I feel like those ideas stretch farther than social news sites and, so far, it has worked.

<comment><USER5> Now wait a second... Hacker News works for all the reasons you listed but also for another, very important reason that you left out: it isn't trying to sell us _anything_. Not to defend the article but you just can't blatantly say, "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!" It's not that easy. There are different types of communities, different expectations of users, etc. There is no One Size Fits All in this arena.

<comment><USER4> > "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!"

I never meant to imply this. Building communities online is an incredibly hard thing to do, there is no secret sauce. I meant only to suggest that using those rough guidelines, instead of the buzzword-happy guidelines the article suggests, might be a better way to go. I know of several communities that are following those guidelines + domain specific value adds to build great communities.

> it isn't trying to sell us anything

I'd say this is something that works specifically for HN, but isn't applicable to the general case. For instance, Mp3car.com is building an awesome community around car modding and is building their business on selling directly to users. They have great content (a lot of it user-generated), they keep the conversation on topic, and they stick to what they're about - car-modding.

In their case, selling to their users makes perfect sense - power users generate the content ( more time & skill to write guides ), motivated lurkers consume the content and follow the guides, and lazy lurkers ( more money than time ) just buy the parts from mp3car.com and have someone install it.</comment></comment></comment>


Google matches Amazon price change - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/google-matches-amazons-price-change/ <comment><USER2> AWS wasn't first with per second billing. As the GCP blog states, GCP Persistent Disks had it since 2013.

(I work for Google)</comment>


Lyft will require face masks for riders and drivers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/07/lyft-now-requires-face-masks-for-riders-and-drivers/ <comment><USER2> A sensible federal policy by a competent administration would have consisted of nearly immediate mandatory mask usage in all public places. Bring up the issue with congress and have them pass a federal law with an expiration date so that police officers can enforce if you have to.

That competent administration would have used the already-existing six day a week delivery service reaching every mailbox in America (USPS) to distribute reusable cloth masks to every citizen in the country, along with clear instructions for use and maybe even some educational material.

That would have perhaps been achieved by invocation of the defense powers act: get a list of all mass production facilities that can sew cloth and divvy up the US addresses to them, telling them to drop ship the masks and compensating them directly.

I don't think this is hindsight being 20/20, I recall the the CDC response in the beginning was infuriating, basically telling us that masks maybe don't even work that well. They don't have to work that well for them to be better than nothing!</comment>


Apple iPhone X Demand Limited, Wall Street Analysts Say - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/12/25/apple-iphone-x-demand/ <comment><USER4> The iphone X is very overpriced when viewed as a utility object, because it doesn't provide 4x the utility of a $250 phone. But it is very reasonable when viewed as a fashion accessory. A $1000 phone to go inside a $2000 purse is not crazy at all.

People keep looking at apple as a tech company and struggling to understand them, but if you view them as a luxury/fashion company who happens to specialize in technology they make a lot of sense. Nobody complains ferraris are overpriced for the mileage they get and the amount of trunk space, because utility is not the point of a ferrari.

I expect the iphone X to sell really well, to the crowd that buys luxury. The question is whether that is a big enough market to sustain the volume.

<comment><USER5> >>> it doesn't provide 4x the utility of a $250 phone

That is not correct. Try taking a photo of a text document with a $250 phone, the text is not readable because the camera and the software is terrible. A better phone would allow you to not have a dedicated scanner.

<comment><USER6> Motorola G Plus[0] is 184$ with a 12Mp back camera. You won't catch a cat jumping in pixel perfect beauty, but that's plenty enough to scan a text document.

Same for your mail, maps, browsing, messaging, light gaming. It won't be blazingly fast under the latest OS, but will do any important task with decent performance.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N6NTIRH/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N6NTIRH/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1514329936&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=motorola+phone&dpPl=1&dpID=51DjUO0f4PL&ref=plSrch)

<comment><USER5> The number of pixels has zero relevance to the quality of a photo.

The world is filled with cheap phones that will make a blurry picture if there isn't perfect lighting or if you move by a single millimeter when you press the button.

<comment><USER6> Of course. I found it interesting that scanning a document is the exact best case scenario: exposure can be adjusted with the flash, and the document hopefully doesn't move (I had the previous Motorola G, hand shaking would need to be pretty bad to make it blur when using the flash)

<comment><USER5> On the contrary I take it as an example of bad case scenario. Texts and annotations can be very small, a tad of blurriness and it's unreadable. The blurriness might not be apparent on the phone screen but it's very noticeable on a computer or TV.

I speak from experience with a cheap phone, having to take 6 photos not moving by a iota hoping one will be good enough. Same shit next month when I will have to take a newer proof of address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think market analysts continue to miss the mark on this story.

What I keep hearing over and over are variations of "people are turned off by the $1,000 price tag." I think this is a complete misread. People don't pay $1k for an iPhone because it's the practical thing to do. If practicality is the #1 priority for phone shoppers, they will simply buy a 7 or 8. I don't think this comprises the top of the market, though, and the top of the market is Apple's wheelhouse.

Practicality has nothing to do with why people buy the X. People buy the X because it's a status symbol and they want to be seen with it. With consumer spending up pretty much across the board, I will be very surprised if Apple misses on earnings next month or reduces guidance. I think comparisons to the release of the 6 are misguided as well, since this phone was in shorter supply to begin with, carried a 50% higher price point, and was released alongside two other models.

<comment><USER8> >People buy the X because it's a status symbol and they want to be seen with it.

I find this aspect of the tech industry so gross that I'm considering changing careers. Building a new tool that makes people's lives better is great, but much of the time it just becomes a status symbol. No one should feel bad for owning a machine that's a few years old but does everything they need. I'm not convinced that consumer gadgets fill a real need any more rather than just being new and shiny for the sake of being new and shiny.

Unless we as a society can get over showing off by buying things we don't need, I think we're in trouble.

<comment><USER7> I don't disagree with you about what people should do, but the reality is that consumers have been this way for a long time, the only thing that changed is that phones shifted from commodities people bought for performance to fashion accessories. People pay more for cars, bags, clothing, etc. to elevate their feeling of status, now we can add phones to that list. Perhaps this has been Apple's greatest contribution to the hardware industry.

<comment><USER9> The part that irritates me is, I am actively punished for being someone who doesn't behave this way.

It used to just be the hidden surcharges that phone companies tacked onto my bill to cover the cost of the "free" phone, calculated from the assumption that I'd get a new phone each year.

Those surcharges are now gone. But they have been replaced with constant nagging to update the OS to a version that will harm the performance or battery life (or both) of a >2yo phone. They have been replaced with apps that will eventually refuse to stop working if I don't upgrade to a version that doesn't run on the older version of the OS that I used to use. They have been replaced with mobile sites that flat-out don't work on my older device's smaller screen.

<comment><USER10> Those updates are always optional, and also keep your 2+ year old phone secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> iPhones are technological marvels, masterpieces of engineering. But Apple software is getting worse and worse.

I have recently started playing with my Mom's phone which is some cheap Huawei Android and surprise - I can do the same on this phone as on iPhone - <USER2> Maps, Google Photos, Google Inbox, Google Search, Google Allo, Google Drive, Firefox, bank applications, Spotify, MS Outlook - everything works OK.

The feeling is liberating like discovering Linux after years of thinking that Windows is the only choice.

I have stoped using Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Photos, Apple Mail app, iCloud etc because they are all half-baked and frustrating. At least Google is trying harder with their software.

So what is the reason - excluding vanity - to pay 1000$ for a phone when I can have the same functionality for 100 - 200$. I will spend the difference on books, coffee and really good headphones.

<comment><USER12> Some areas iPhones excel in:

        - LTS Updates
        - HW quality
        - Relatively consistent UX elements
        - Foolproof-ish App store
        - Less features
            ie no App drawer, just homescreens
        - Forefront of security & privacy technology

The 5s was released Oct 2013, and still received iOS 11. It was also the first(?) phone with a Secure-Enclave device for fingerprint reading.

If iOS doesn't limit your glass-brick usage patterns, it's a very simple OS, with features that were thought about and picked for a reason. Or maybe more importantly, left out for a reason. This of course gets frustrating if you disagree with what Apple's designers have prescribed you.

But to a lot of people; Android phones these days feel creepy to be around, with the amount of Google-integration that requires much hoop-jumping and ignoring-of-gentle-pushes, just to get peace of mind over your data not being vacuumed from whatever crevices Google can find. And there are a lot of crevices on your personal smart phone.

If you're installing + maintaining LineageOS or something then you can get par with iPhones for the features that a lot of people in the HN crowd might care about, especially if you subsect for DDG-users.

<comment><USER11> I agree on hardware quality.

Security to me seems like a sales pitch - Apple is just as sensitive information greedy as Google. And I deal in this area with Google as well as I do with Apple.

But the inferior software quality is terrible drag for Apple.

Photos - their syncing with iCloud is out of control. There are bugs that haven't been eliminated for years. I gave up when after deleting 50 GB of RAW photos Apple re-created then and synced back to mu Mac.

Google Photos is not only more open but also smarter and better at improving picture quality.

Apple Music - I gave up after a month of getting recommended Heavy Metal albums and playlusts everyday. Nothing in my Library, listening and followed artist suggested that I might like Metal. What kind of company can't write simple recommender?

iCloud - Google Drive is just superior, more open, integrates and exchanges files with almost everything, Google Backup just works. iCloud backup is really inferior and again out of control for user.

Apple Mail stoped beeing developed and there are well documented frustrating bugs and quirks if you use IMAP accounts.

Maps - despite Tim Cook's promise to users it never got on par with Google Maps. The quality difers wildly from country to country but recently I have re-installed Maps, used them for a week in my hometown and got so frustrated that I have deleted Maps and went back to using Google Maps.

Oh should I mention that touch interface is full of bugs. Try selecting a piece of text in iOS...

<comment><USER13> > Apple is just as sensitive information greedy as Google

As in Apple stores the information on their servers, forever? A lot of the sensitive information like a fingerprint or face scan is saved solely on the phone, as is a lot of the ML based features like content detection within a photo. Apple doesn't use a server farm to tell you there's a dog in your photo, it uses your phone.

There aren't good excuses for some of the bugs on iOS (the most recent iOS has been out for months and they still can't fix the emoji keyboard size issue, when this issue didn't exist in previous iOS versions?) but I trust Apple significantly more than Google with my data, in part because I know Apple's money isn't from my data, it's from the sale of their phone. This isn't true for Google and it will likely always be true that Google makes its money from advertising and user data. I also trust Apple to actually do some semblance of due diligence and make sure their app store isn't full of malware, something Google seems unable to do reliably.

<comment><USER11> I agree that Google is evil regarding data collection. I have no illusions about Google. But I am dealing with it through blocking Google calling home mostly via DNS, firewall and some custom extensions in Chrome or using Firefox Focus and on the go via Raspberry Pi router and my private VPN.

Apple however is calling home no less then Google and is quite secretive about why and what information is transferred so I am blocking most of it same as Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you generate an Apple IP blocklist while still permitting access to App Store, security updates, mail, etc?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good. The phone is too damn expensive.

My middle school son has a $64 BLU phone. It was subsidized by Amazon in return for ads on the lock screen. Non-subsidized price is around $100. Last week we went to a theme park with a lot of waiting for rides. He played plants vs zombies and YouTube videos non-stop while we waited for rides. I occasionally surfed the web on my $1049 iPhone X.

By 3 PM my iPhone battery was dead. His battery ... 64%. I'm hard pressed to justify the $1000 price tag of my phone after seeing his in action. Yea it takes better pictures and the screen it a little better. But is that worth $1000 premium? Oh yea, my Son's phone is over a year old. So compared to an iPhone 7 the differences are even less.

<comment><USER15> I hope you won't stay complacent about the battery issue. I would have 70-80% left in your scenario. Is it possible that sweat was leaking into your pocket and keeping the screen active?

<comment><USER16> Could you describe the sweat more? The screen is always active, that's how the tap to wake works.

<comment><USER15> Listening for touch events but not displaying anything. If your pocket is wet, it records touches from your leg (or just the water?) and keeps the screen on. I've had this happen on other phones; the home button would get pressed in the pocket and then sweat would keep the screen on, draining the battery. Just something to look into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What do people buy $1000 smartphones for? For gaming I can get a pretty good gaming PC for that amount, or Xbox One X with a VR headset.

I've never seen anybody do anything really cool with their phone - <USER3> browses the internet, checks the email, does chats/videochats, maps, take photos, and some silly mobile gaming. I do that all on my sub $200 phone.

<comment><USER18> JS-heavy sites are night-and-day faster on iOS, thanks primarily to faster CPUs (which is mostly due to better L2/L3 caches). The iPhone X has 8MB of L2 cache; your sub $200 phone likely has no L2 at all. Even high end Android phones have, at most, 1MB of L2 cache. This shows up pretty clearly in Speedometer scores.

[https://browser.geekbench.com/ios- benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks) [https://browser.geekbench.com/android- benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks)

<comment><USER14> Can you post a few links of websites that are painfully slow on low end machines? I would like to test with my Son's $64 Android vs my iPhone X.

<comment><USER19> Try browsing the web on your son's phone at all. You'll find that just about every website is slower to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been using a Xaiomi Mi4i for a couple of months and at the beginning it was great. The camera was awesome and it was worth the 200$ I paid for it. But after few months it became slow and the storage became a bottleneck. After that I've switch to an iPhone SE and never looked back. I've been using if for almost a year and it is smooth and perfect for my day-to-day work and not to mention it is worth every penny I've paid for it. I think I'm gonna stick with it for a couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good? I feel like these "analyst" reports are often completely wrong and generally not useful. Who knows what Apple's goal with the iPhone X is, but as an observer I see it as a low volume, premium product, that allows them to innovate. If you have a crazy high volume product you can't do anything risky...even if you could you'd run into volume issues (acquiring parts) and any bad choice would affect a majority of your profits for the year.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why doesn't anyone call out that these are Grade Z analysts? Come on, Sinolink and JL Warren?

<comment><USER23> I agree with this analyst analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Goodness. Everyone is speaking with such authority. I bought my X because I wanted to switch out of Android and because I only buy a phone once every three years it pays to buy the best phone I can buy. Why should I care that it's 1000$ when I buy a phone once every three years?

<comment><USER25> Because $1000 is a lot of money to most people.

<comment><USER26> That's true, but why should that color someone's decision on what they buy?

<comment><USER25> Because people who budget responsibly live within the constraints of that budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if these analysts actually get out in the world or just sit in cubicles closed off from the real world. Traveling this holiday season, I saw the characteristic notch all over the place. Rural areas of flyover country included, saw them everywhere. In the month prior while in NYC, I saw them being used by folks of virtually every division of socio-economic background. I've not traveled internationally yet since it was released, but it seems in the US anyway that the X marks the spot of a home run release for Apple to me.

<comment><USER28> I've been in NYC, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, SF, Los Angeles over the past few months. Haven't seen a single iPhone X yet.

<comment><USER29> If you haven't seen one in nyc, then you're either blind or don't know what the iPhone X looks like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think Apple might have missed the mark by not adding some kind of incentive for the wireless operators to continue offering subsidized phones. Wireless operators helped create the market when the $500+ iPhone was considered costly:

[http://fortune.com/2017/01/11/death-of-the-199-iphone- wirele...](http://fortune.com/2017/01/11/death-of-the-199-iphone-wireless- subsidy/)

Additionally, phone market is reaching maturity slowly. First few generations had real changes in terms of hardware and capability. Sure, there are new capabilities but none of them are in the category of "Must Have".

<comment> at-fates-hands > Additionally, phone market is reaching maturity slowly. First few > generations had real changes in terms of hardware and capability. Sure, > there are new capabilities but none of them are in the category of "Must > Have".

I've been saying this for years. I'm starting to see family and friends holding onto their phones for two, sometimes three years now. The prime movers to upgrade are slowly disappearing like you said.

<comment><USER31> Yup. I have been elegibe for an upgrade for 3 years, yet no current phone matches the featureset I have currently.

\- Removable battery (huge deal, i carry 2 spares, often away from chargers for days)

\- headphone jack (bt quality sucks, a lot, also battery and security issues keeping it on)

\- Physical function buttons

\- Waterproof/resistant, semi rugged. (Can I use it ouside in weather? Useless if not.)

\- Decent camera, and audio.

\- Gets regular security updates.

\- Removable mass storage

\- Makes and recieves phone calls without excessive dropouts.

\- Internet connectivity with email and very basic browser.

Most modern phones dont even check half the boxes. They all seem to be made for people who never leave their car or office.

<comment><USER32> > \- Removable battery (huge deal, i carry 2 spares, often away from chargers > for days)

I thought losing the removable battery would be a huge deal when I switched to the iPhone, but in practice, switching to using USB powerbanks was actually an improvement. Don't have to reboot when you swap out, and you can charge it at the same time as your phone without carrying an extra special charger. And you can get them in massive capacities, and share them with friends who are caught out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I swear this post seems to have suddenly dropped out of HN. I saw it on the phone. Than came to laptop only to find it no where. As it can be seen, some many comments were posted in last few minutes of this post.

Is there some moderation or something?

<comment><USER34> It seems like most articles about Apple are quickly flagged off the front page by a small cadre of haters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> People still believe the shit "analysts" say?

</comment><comment><USER35> The couple folks I know of who got the iPhone X were really keen on animojis, so Apple artificially limiting animojis to the X seems to be driving a few sales. There's no technical reason you can't do them on a regular old iPhone 8 since they only use the regular camera. It's purely a marketing limitation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Who am I suppose to believe "analysts" or Apple who gave revenue estimates that if they met, would be a record breaking quarter for them?

By the time they gave those estimates, they were already about a month in the first calendar quarter.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think a major mistake Apple made was assuming that it's iPhone base would be willing to accept change so quickly coupled with the fact that they charge 1000 dollars for the phone. I think psychologically , that number bothers people.

It would be interesting to see what age most iPhone users are. I know plenty of elderly people in their 70s and early 80s in the U.S., who have an iPhone because it is super simple to use. The iPhone X, with it's gestures, not so much, but what do I know.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is not surprising. Like PC sales a decade ago phone replacements were going to slow.

</comment><comment><USER31> Its a luxury, disposable income signalling device. I don't know many tech savvy people with iphones of any kind anymore. Its clearly image and exclusivity driving sales, not features.

I think many people see apple as a luxury brand more than a technology company now. Which might be better than the alternative. 'Anyone' can create tech, it takes years and billions to create a valuable brand.

<comment><USER39> This is bullshit. I just switched back from Android to an iPhone X and I'm loving it. More than half of the software engineers I work with have iPhones. None of us seem to be particularly interested in 'image and exclusivity'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The non-metal rear back plate, and the absence of a headphone jack are really stiff turn-offs considering the price. Also, it's kinda big and heavy in terms of the physical dimensions of the form factor, and besides, I'm just not that into photography.

Also, the whole thing with the batteries, and not so much the surreptitious performance throttling, but more the eternally non-swappable battery locked behind delicate ribbon leads inside the pentalobe-secured chasis.

So, sorted in preferential order (most desirable first), for an extra special _X_ model, I'd have enjoyed seeing:

      - the all metal, black gloss finish introduced with the iPhone 7 (yes i'll be clapping inside some stupid mil-spec plastic envelope because it's $1,000 but metal doesn't shatter into a gritty spider web on a bad drop)
      - normal wired headphones
      - USB-C replacing the lightning port, because one less dongle for my macbook pro
      - sane, toolless battery options, ...maybe a universal apple battery format? (yeah right)
      - maybe smaller and pocket friendly? i dunno... maybe the bigger screen is nice to have...
      - and whatever other extra crap they bundled in lately

Also, a watch without the weird red dot on the dial? Christ, almighty. Why the red dot? Why?</comment>


Film and audio of Apollo 11 descent and landing - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/4979892

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking this over with some friends today and most didn't know this footage existed. It's worth watching the whole piece, but for the impatient, skip to the 11 minute mark.</comment>


Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference - <AUTHOR> http://www.autodidactic.com/profiles/profiles.htm

<comment><USER2> It seems like a number of people on that list are authors and artists. Those are fields where university education has never really been of any significance. It would be more interesting to see a list with those and similar professions removed.

Secondly a couple of them are very dubious,for example Chuck Yeager didn't attend college, but calling him self educated is a bit of a stretch as it ignores all the training and education he got in the military.

<comment><USER3> What makes you say that? Of course college education is important to authors and artists. Of course, I would bet that it's easier to make it in those fields without a degree than in programming.

<comment><USER2> Obviously any educations is helpful, but getting published without a degree isn't anywhere near as impressive as getting a job as a lawyer or research scientist without a university degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of the people on that list at least went to college. It was a lot easier to get away with this back then, whereas today no one will even look at you unless you have a diploma of some kind (in most fields, at least). I am far more impressed with the ones who never even started, or who never even finished the equivalent of high school.

A good number of people on the list are entrepreneurs, too. Even today, you can get away with having far less formal education if you strike out on your own.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The very fact that Bill Gates and Paul Allen both attended Harvard meant that they got some of the benefit. They certainly weren't complete autodidacts -- they got some of the best secondary education in the country beforehand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a degree in theology from an unaccredited school, and I tell people that my "degree" is unaccredited any time I am interviewed, so as to avoid any possibility of being accused of fraud.

I make almost all my money in IT, for which I have had no formal training of any kind. I've done free-lance programming, unix administration, network installations, etc. Some was freelance contract work. At one point, I was an employee of one of the largest mortgage securitization companies (at the time), in charge of application packaging and distribution, laptop certification and 3rd tier hardware support of the same. I am now a CTO of a smaller company. I doubt my lack of an accredited degree would prevent me from getting a job almost anywhere in the field where I was qualified.

But I never trash someone who got a traditional degree. For most people, it is necessary to get past the gatekeepers.

</comment><comment><USER7> For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER8> 1600 - 1699: 2

1700 - 1799: 18

1800 - 1899: 79

1900 - 1999: 58

Still, given the population explosion, it's unlikely that there were fewer autodidacts in the 20th century than in the 19th.

Raw data: <http://pastie.org/783067>

<comment><USER9> Also consider the set of people born 1950 onward. They will not be included because they are on the cusp of being famous and haven't gone through their entire careers yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And the master himself says :

Terry Pratchett: "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did"

<comment><USER11> As an aspiring novelist, if Pratchett can do it without an A-level, surely I can do it with a moderate pass!

I'm personally eternally grateful that I reneged from going to university. In that time I've emigrated, got married and I've worked real jobs that have given me tons of worldly experience, all of which has helped my writing immensely. All of which would never have happened at university. I would have been the same super-geek I had in highschool who was afraid to talk to any girl I didn't know. Now, I'm no longer cliched and formulaic . . . which I suppose is a great place to be for any writer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The issue is not the instruction you get at an university, but the environment. If obesity is contagious, education is so much more so.

<comment><USER13> For those who need to be infected that may be true sometimes. But to go to university you have to endure 12 or 13 years of school where everything imaginable is done to stifle any interest you may have had before.

<comment><USER12> We're not ideal superhumans. For any one of us, being in a stimulating environment makes us better. And a library unfortunately doesn't provide it. Not that books aren't a good companion at any time.

<comment><USER13> You're implying that schools are a stimulating environment. For me they were the exact opposite and universities perpetuate the same mind numbing system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This misses one of the more important roles of a degree. The degree isn't to show _you_ that you know what you're doing, it's to show _everyone else_ that you know what you're doing.

Whether or not that ends up being true is something else, but I tend to believe that you get out of a good university what you put into it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep in mind that I say this as a person who's mostly self-educated. There _is_ an alternative point of view: [http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why- you-need-degree-to-w...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need- degree-to-work-for-bigco.html)

In this blog post, the argument is that bigger companies hire people with college degrees _precisely because_ it's a pointless hazing ritual. Granted, that isn't applicable to startups, but there _is_ a reason for a lot of companies to only hire people with college degrees.

</comment><comment><USER14> Related:

CEO's without college education <http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/766831.html>

Wanted: CEO, no Ivy required [http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover- ceos_x....](http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-04-06-cover-ceos_x.htm)

...seems like a bachelor's degree is a requirement for big company management.

<comment><USER15> "The only CEO of the top-50, whose education is listed as n/a is Martin J Sullivan, the CEO of AIG,"

Pretty funny if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There isn't much to learn from reading a list like this. Skip the list. Go make a difference.

<comment><USER3> Motivation to make a difference is a big help. Otherwise, people might believe that they're worthless simply because they don't have a piece of paper from a college.

<comment><USER16> The list doesn't tell you anything though. It's a pat on the back for making a decision irrespective of whether it is the right one for you, and it doesn't tell you anything about how any of those people actually achieved anything.

We all love identifying with famous people that we admire, but make no mistake: these people all lived very different lives, and each had a host of reasons why apparent lack of credentials did not get in the way of their notoriety which are unique to them. Reasons which you cannot conjure just by reading a list.

Some were born at the right time or to the right parents. Some had extraordinary luck. Some spent most of their lives languishing in obscurity, poverty, misery, or Actual Work. Some were in fact quite well-educated, if not college graduates. Joseph Campbell actually had an M.A. from Columbia. George Washington had family connections and owned slaves. Eric Hoffer spent his whole life doing manual labor. These things are relevant to framing the relationship between their self-education and notoriety.

You're not worthless without a degree, but neither are you Einstein, Faulkner, Hemmingway, Tesla, or Benjamin Franklin, and you won't become more like them by hearing about their accomplishments again. Maybe most people understand that, but I've fallen into that trap enough times over the years to want to post a warning where I can.

I had started to get into this in my comment but left it out for the sake of clarity, because my point, ultimately, is as I said: there isn't much to _learn_ from reading a list like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> NOTE: Most of the people in the list are before 1900. So that is old school :)

<comment><USER13> Yes, but count again in 100 years when those born after, say, 1970 have had a chance to become famous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent list, I was wondering if someone bothered to make it.

<comment><USER19> This is a valid use case for a semantic search engine, let's try: <http://powerset.com/explore/go/self%252Deducated-scientist>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've done a little reading over the years and thought about this some. I think this argument occurs in some form in every age. But when new fields are born, there is no place to go to get educated in it. You just have to make it up. And it is in the birth of those new things that people are more likely to be seen as "making a difference". Entrepreneurship also involves making it up as you go. I've read some things that indicate that finishing your education can be an impediment to making it as an entrepreneur. The two examples I usually refer to: Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs.

If you want to become a doctor, yes, you need all the credentials that society requires. But if you just want to help people get healthier, there are many paths to such a goal. I considered becoming a physical therapist when I was a teen. But I did an informational interview and concluded they didn't really do what I was imagining. A lot of people have fantasies about some career or other only to find it doesn't really do what they had imagined. Tragically, for many people this realization comes after investing a lot of time, money and effort into getting the requisite education, experience and credentials. At that point, a lot of people feel stuck: They have student loans to pay off and can't make enough money doing something else to pay them.

I was interested in this question (concerning credentials and success) in part because I homeschooled my kids. I always told them that they would have no king's stamp to make the gold good, therefore they actually had to be gold -- ie they have to be able to Bring It. They are fine with that.</comment>


A Goose That Lays Golden Eggs - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ylinedesign/a-goose-that-lays-golden-eggs?ref=home_popular

<comment><USER2> A unitasker ([http://unclutterer.com/tag/unitasker/](http://unclutterer.com/tag/unitasker/)), And not the first attempt to sell a gadget to scramble eggs in the shell.</comment>