How Long Was Venus Habitable? - <AUTHOR> https://eos.org/research-spotlights/how-long-was-venus-habitable#.XralmVMHBZM.twitter <comment><USER2> So there a few comments scattered around about this so I'll address those concerns here. Quite a few people are scoffing at the idea of colonizing Venus ("you'll get crushed, dude!") but the idea has had a lot of people put thought into it and it's not as impractical as you may think. Consider:

1\. Venus is easier to reach than Mars. The Delta-V is 0.4km/s and 0.7km/s respectively [1];

2\. Mars has practically no atmosphere and really low gravity. It's really not that much better than colonizing the Moon but a whole lot further away [2].

3\. You wouldn't live on surface of Venus, at least not initially. You'd live in the atmosphere [3].

4\. Energy will be plentiful on Venus, far more than on Mars or even the Earth, just from solar energy. [4]

5\. Venus has nearly Earthlike gravity.

So it's actually not as crazy as you might think and shouldn't be immediately dismissed.

[1]: [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2156/does-a- missio...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2156/does-a-mission-to- venus-orbit-require-less-propellant-than-a-similar-mission-to)

[2]: [https://qz.com/1105031/should-humans-colonize-mars-or-the- mo...](https://qz.com/1105031/should-humans-colonize-mars-or-the-moon-a- scientific-investigation/)

[3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI- old7YI4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I)

[4]: [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/196114-nasa-is- developin...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/196114-nasa-is-developing-a- plan-to-explore-venus-in-a-manned-solar-powered-ariship)

<comment><USER3> I enjoy Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel where he explores topics like colonizing Venus. Here's the video: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BI- old7YI4I](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I)

<comment><USER4> Goes to get a snack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone else feel the solution isn't figuring out how to create or find a new earth but move our consciousness to silicon so that it does not have such a fragile requirement to exist?

<comment><USER6> Assuming that's even possible (how are those simulated brains going? As far as I can tell, we're up to 0.15% of a rat's brain), is a human consciousness separated from its biological construct still a human consciousness?

We're well out of the realm of science into science fiction, but I feel it's a valid question to ask - all of our consciousnesses have developed in ape bodies adapted for the savanna, with a bunch of survival related traits and sub-processes.

If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?

<comment><USER7> It's really difficult to draw a line between being our "selves" and the alternatives though.

We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us.

Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%?

If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment)

If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).

So are we instead an _uninterrupted_ instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night.

It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.

<comment><USER8> > This really keeps me up at night.

Why? You're pretty close to the right answer:

> are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process?

No, for the reasons you described. What we are is thinking-processes with a coherent series of more-or-less-uninterrupted links to the past. When you undergo general anesthesia you wake up as the same person because you can _remember_ who you were before anesthesia, and you feel and act like that person.

The interesting case is not anesthesia (or sleep) but amnesia and traumatic brain injury or mental illness that changes your personality.

<comment><USER7> I understand where you're coming from, however I think that remembering the past is not a very helpful criterium since memories correspond to physical changes in the brain. In the thought experiment, the 1:1 molecular clone would have the same memories and think that he had lived through the same things as the original human for what it's worth. I'm not yet convinced that it is possible to define one self even though our (physiological) human experience definitely makes us feel like we were this clearly defined, independent, conscious thing.

But of course the conditions you mention are also very interesting and make it non-trivial to define the "true" essence of the person. Another interesting one would be dementia.

<comment><USER8> > In the thought experiment, the 1:1 molecular clone would have the same > memories and think that he had lived through the same things as the original > human for what it's worth.

That's right. Why is that a problem?

Imagine you had this done to you, and imagine that in order to clone your brain you have to be put under anesthesia (because the process takes time and you need to capture a coherent snapshot). When you wake up, how are you going to tell whether you are the clone or the original?

<comment><USER7> I don't see it as a problem per-se, it just defies the notion of having a somehow unique, identifiable _self_ which I understood as a condition for OP's question and which I suppose is how most people view themselves.

As far as I'm concerned we might very well be just processes that can in theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic processes in the body.

<comment><USER9> > As far as I'm concerned we might very well be just processes that can in > theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought > experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into > to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic > processes in the body.

This already happens, though before the formation of any memories. We call them identical twins.

The divergence is more limited than you might imagine. One striking experiment found that if you separate identical twins and give them the instructions "just draw whatever comes into your head", they are likely to draw the same things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More fun are the couple of comments in the article. I am still not sure if it is sarcasm or an actually half-decent theory.

<comment><USER11> I actually kinda like that retrograde moon hypothesis - it's heavy on inference and induction, but it largely meshes neatly with observed phenomena - although if you had had an alien biosphere come crashing into earth, you'd expect to see that in the tree of life, and afaik there isn't a sudden injection of completely novel phyla at 540ma - just evolution of what was there before.

<comment><AUTHOR> If an independently evolved biome were introduced, it'd be on a totally different tree, sharing very little with our own.

<comment><USER12> True unless we assume venusivian and terrestrial life both had a common origin

<comment><USER13> It would be insanely improbable for independent life to have formed separately in such close proximity. The odds of that are entirely dwarfed by the far more likely panspermia scenario.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any evidence of a panspermia?

<comment><USER12> No more than evidence of life forming on earth which is zero. I've thought about it semi professionally for long, and my bet would be on panspermia. Heck, my bet would be that all life in our galaxy is probably from the same origin; it seems fairly easy for at least some microbes to survive on rocks for really long periods of time, and my guess would be that once one form of life takes hold in a place other competing forms would probably get fully eliminated. Thus it stands to reason that panspermia is more probable. This is supported further by how quickly life seems to have appeared on earth the moment it was habitable (followed by how it took billions of years after that to evolve in any meaningful way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always thought that Venus is a better option than Mars for humans to colonize if you can cool it down by handling the greenhouse gasses.

Mars can't even retain water vapor.

<comment><USER15> First we should turn the Sahara into a lush green forest as an exercise. Terraforming a remote planet will be a million times more difficult.

Oh, wait, we can't even work together as humanity to contain a virus.

<comment><USER16> Better to experiment off earth than on it in such planet changing endeavors. You can afford less attention to (safety)detail in that scenario.

<comment><USER17> Or maybe not. Turning the Sahara into a forest would have a massive climate impact.

I am not a climate scientist but I'd imagine there would be significant changes to rainfall patterns over most of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East

Edit - sorry, reply was meant to be to parent

<comment><USER18> A fair amount of the phosphorus in the Amazon comes from dust storms originating in the Sahara.

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite- reveals-...](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how- much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants)

<comment><USER19> given that the Sahara is only a couple thousand years old does that mean the amazon is just as young?

<comment><USER20> An interesting article on how people shaped the Amazon.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its- now-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear- that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would think that Venus would have a lot of precious metals: gold, silver, platinum, titanium, etc. As well as rare earth metals.

It would be a great opportunity to one day build a strip mining colony on Venus, and ship those metals to Earth, and build future space colonies. But it might be easier to find some random floating asteroids that contain all those valuable metals.

I think the most important ingredient that Venus does have, is gravity, that's near similar to Earth. This means that humans can live on the ground, and not be subjected to mass and bone deterioration of living on Mars.

But first, we'll need to solve some engineering problems, like how to cool the place down. Maybe throw up some solar shades, and harvest the sun.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the minerals on Venus are at the bottom of a gravity well as deep as ours. Moon is a much better short term goal.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, even the Moon's gravity well is huge compared to metal-rich asteroids. They're the low-hanging fruit of space mining.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but the Moon's gravity makes a lot of industrial processes easier to adapt. Also, it's easier to keep a human crew around for repairs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To the skeptics, read Stapledon's _Last and First Men_.

</comment><comment><USER24> The comments on that article are very entertaining</comment>


Ask HN: Are people still developing new SOAP APIs? - <AUTHOR> Last I encountered a SOAP based service was during my internship in a financial firm in 2013. That was the time when I started my career in IT. I remember having some study material about SOAP in one of my engineering course. Outside of that, I haven't used SOAP much during my career.
I am asking this since the question of "Difference between SOAP and REST" came in one of my recent interviews. From what I know (and what I found on Google) SOAP is a protocol with tight coupling between client and server for information interchange which is closely related to business logic. Whereas REST is more flexible stateless architecture for data transfer.
Can someone please correct me if I am wrong about this difference between SOAP and REST? Also, what is the present-day significance of SOAP? <comment><USER2> SOAP became very slippery and got washed down the drain.

Seriously, SOAP is based on a number of rather heavy-weight standards: WS-*. In recent times, I have only seen it used in the context of Java based systems running on enterprise frameworks. Given the choice, I much rather use REST with JSON (instead of XML and its baggage).</comment>


Nvidia: Accelerating Standard C++ with GPUs Using stdpar - <AUTHOR> https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/accelerating-standard-c-with-gpus-using-stdpar/ <comment><AUTHOR> > the first compiler to support GPU-accelerated Standard C++ with no language > extensions, pragmas, directives, or non-standard libraries. You can write > Standard C++, which is portable to other compilers and systems, and use > NVC++ to automatically accelerate it with high-performance NVIDIA GPUs.</comment>


Http status 418 at overstock.com - <AUTHOR> I've been shopping at overstock.com and for some reasons it starts throwing an error page.  Upon investigation, the server is return http status 418 (I'm a teapot).  Since I was using Firefox, I switched over to Chrome and it's working there.  I cleared cookie on Firefox and try again and it's still giving me error code 418.  Any idea? <comment><AUTHOR> It's still happening and it's unrelated to cookie... Looks like a problem at the overstock.com side.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clearing cookie 2nd time was OK... it's so weird.</comment>


FreedomPop's Free Wireless Would Be Cool If It Wasn't So Shady - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2013/06/05/freedompops-free-wireless-would-be-cool-if-it-wasnt-so-shady/

<comment><USER2> I tried to cancel my membership, but there's no way to do it online without giving them a call. They won't pick up if you call, you have to press 1 and 1 again to get a callback.

Shady and left a bad taste in my mouth. Would not try again.

<comment><USER3> CLEAR wireless is the same way -- I signed up online, used it for two months, and attempted to cancel. I couldn't cancel online (even though I signed up online), and I couldn't reach anyone when I called -- after waiting on hold 20-25 minutes each time. I finally called my bank and they cancelled my card and blocked CLEAR from charging my card; I'm not sure if that's something that's available for you to do so, but, that's how I needed to resolve a similar situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking for a cheap wireless internet carrier for my mother. Is there a decent one? I was thinking of getting a T-Mobile SIM and data plan</comment>


The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-seeking-is-too-damn-high/ <comment><USER2> It's generally good to have a barber that knows how to cut hair and can shave you with a razor without injuring you. Those aren't things that can be done by an unskilled person.

Furthermore, it would suck to find out your barber can't hack it by getting a bad haircut from them.

<comment><USER3> And it sucks to get a bad meal at a restaurant, or poor quality customer service. So we have yelp and google reviews for businesses to try and avoid these situations. We don't need government licensing protect us from every having a bad experience with a business.

Liability should be motivation enough for any business to not let unskilled barbers handle a straight razor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the case of barbershops, it's important that they know how to properly clean the stuff that'll be touching hair, as otherwise there are various nasty infestations that can be transferred from person to person.

<comment><USER5> Sure. A four hour class would be reasonable.

<comment><USER6> For four hours you could not learn how to sharpen a straight razor properly. But a month seems reasonable. Two years is too much.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Vesting, equity, salaries, etc. - <AUTHOR>

I'm preparing a startup and I'm hoping to learn how others have structured their equity sharing deals so I can consider my options intelligently.  I can imagine one of the founders 'slacking off' once the business starts generating substantial income and I think it would be a mistake to give a person like this too much equity in the beginning, but ...
How do you decide how much equity and how much salary to give other founders, and when they should receive these benefits?
Does it make sense to share equity (in the beginning) based on the number of hours each has contributed to the project in advance?
Does it make sense to base the future equity sharing on hours worked after the company is started, so that if we end up with slackers they get no more than they earn -- and so those of us who do most of the work get nearly all the equity?  Or is this more of a salary issue than an equity issue?
I'm particularly interested in how other companies have structured their equity and salary arrangements, especially when they work well and are appreciated by everyone involved:
- How is your equity sharing arrangement structured? - Who gets what percentages and why? - How much equity is reserved for future investors, etc? - How much equity did you receive from the start? - How much more do you get as the business grows? - What determines the amount of stock you own? - Do you receive more stock for more time on the job? - How does vesting work in your company?
Someone once suggested that I keep most of the equity myself and only give out a small single-digit percentage to each of the other founders.  This seems too greedy to me, but he also said my equity would be the portion that gets diluted in a round of future funding so I had better keep most of it myself.  I have no idea if he knows what he's talking about.
In fact, I have no idea how long each founder should be required to work before they are 'vested', and perhaps even the issue of vesting should be approached as an incremental benefit rather than something that happens all at once.
Basically I'm looking for any insights or examples you can share that might give me some reasonable ideas for structuring our equity sharing arrangement.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> It really depends how critical the team are and how much they are giving up to join you. In my case, I agreed with my co-founder (engineering leader) to just do it as up front equity rather than vesting and we agreed 20% plus a nominal salary (before dilution in funding rounds). IMO Don't be too greedy and try to retain too much yourself, your founders will be key to your success or failure.

And then for the others who joined after we did it as share options, up to 4%. A way to calculate is to use sweat equity.. what would they/you normally get working for a large company for that time against the valuation of the company you work out.</comment>


Kill the Indian First - <AUTHOR> https://openthemagazine.com/art-culture/kill-the-indian-first/ <comment><USER2> Horrible article. Its deeply internalized racism. I know many of the criticisms are true, and as a statistical generalization I might agree that an Indian is more likely to e.g seek a way to circumvent the system than someone else. An outsider looking at Indians as a homogeneous group and seeing those patterns might make negative inferences about all Indians.

But when a person who does not embody those flaws blames himself for the ones that do - its because he has become accustomed to seeing himself as an outsider does, as an interchangeable member of a group called "Indian" instead of as an INDIVIDUAL. Being stereotyped is simply not your fault.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the first site you visit each morning? - <AUTHOR>

... for me first I check my email then HN, Twitter, Dribbble, Google+ <comment><USER2> 1\. Stock portfolio, news, charts 2\. Hacker news (new & best) 3\. Digg 4\. Techcrunch 5\. Mashable 6\. Gmail 7\. Facebook

</comment><comment><USER3> Gmail</comment>


Why British geeks just can't bear to look a TSB gift horse in the mouth - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/04/09/why-british-geeks-just-cant-bare-to-look-a-tsb-gift-horse-in-the-mouth/

<comment><USER2> I have a sneaking suspicion they voted for the Liberal Democrats because of the Lib Dems' promise to break up Labour's ID card, database state and DEA missteps - and instead, they just jumped into bed with the Tories.

So, it's a big case of collective cognitive dissonance and more than a little dose of healthy skepticism at the idea that a British bank would actually want to offer a _grant,_ and not a loan - because that goes against their usual track record.</comment>


A/B Testing vs MAB algorithms - It's complicated - <AUTHOR> http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/09/ab-testing-vs-mab-algorithms-its.html <comment><USER3> I really want to tell you all to read this.

The reality is (as it points out in the text) the overwhelming majority of you don't A/B test. If you don't A/B test already you should stop reading about A/B testing and start A/B testing. It will be the most important thing you do today. It will probably be the most important single thing you do in quite a while.

For the overwhelming majority of people A/B testing, this is similarly not really a priority for you today. You're fine doing what you're doing. (But... test more.)

But for the sliver of a sliver of people who really need to care about moving the state of the art in conversion optimization forward, this essay is _very important_. If I had an A/BatSignal I would be shining it on this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Over the last few years, some people have started to work on a problem that has been described as "pure exploration" in multi-armed bandits [1,2]. The objective in this problem is, roughly speaking, to maximize the rate at which you become certain about whether or not you've correctly identified the best bandit arm (or, more generally, the top _n_ arms). This solves some of the more common complaints about classic MAB algorithms in that, when run for a finite number of trials, the resulting sampling of the arms produces a far more confident decision than either the regret-minimizing policies followed by standard MAB algorithms or the uniform allocation policies typically used in A/B testing.

The original article mentions problems in MAB algorithms dealing with delayed feedback. Such issues are largely ameliorated by the use of algorithms related to "Thompson sampling" [3], which induces stochastic trial allocation policies rather than the deterministic policies induced by UCB's selection process. It's definitely possible to develop Thompson-like methods for the exploration- oriented MAB problem, and such methods can rapidly distinguish the best among a rather large set of options, as might be required in applications like MVT (see note below).

Note: I'm currently doing academic research in this area and, if anyone's particularly interested, I could share some of the (simulated) empirical data and algorithmic details pertinent to what I said above.

[1]: Multi-Bandit Best Arm Identification, Gabillon et. al, NIPS 2011

[2]: PAC Subset Selection in Multi-Armed Bandits, Kalyanakrishnan and Stone, ICML 2012

[3]: An Empirical Evaluation of Thompson Sampling, Chappelle and Li, NIPS 2011

</comment><comment><USER5> At the end of the day, I think A/B testing is utilized more just because it is easier to understand & implement. I would love to utilize something like unbounce for MAB testing, but I haven't seen good MAB frameworks that are ready for the average marketer to use.

It would be nice to have a MAB framework that utilizes MVT so that you could preload 100s of alternates (c2a, headline, copy, images, placement) and see let it go to town.

<comment><AUTHOR> You make good points. However the ultra-simple MAB for home pages is a solvable problem. Noel at Myna has been responsive to me. If you give him feedback on how he can target that market segment, particularly if you're willing to be a paying customer, he'll likely be responsive.

MVT is inherently more complex. I guarantee you that there are MAB based systems that do MVT on problems of insane complexity. I pointed at one system at Yahoo that likely is an example. And the potential win isn't small. Yahoo claims a 300% increase in clicks on their home page module since implementing it.

But I haven't noticed anything like that publicly available. (I have seen companies that do it behind the scenes - but the one that first comes to mind hides that detail and tries to be priced on a pay for performance model.) Of course a company that already does MAB could build a custom solution. Or you can try to build your own if you think there is money in it. My personal life does not currently permit me the time commitment that a startup would require. But if you or someone else wants to build it, I'd be willing to consult on how to make it work.

<comment><USER5> My first piece of advice is that screenshots & videos are good.

Picture is 1,000 words. A video is 30,000 words a second.

I dream of a MAB/MVT combo solution. I have a project coming up that I might try this out on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this - since I can now cross of the "Write something comparing bandit & a/b" item from my to do list and point people to your post instead :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the real distinction here is stationary verses non-stationary distributions. Many of the arguments made in this article hinge on the fact that the responses to the same input change over time (nights are different then daytime, which is different than the weekends). By continuously running the A/B testing, you are looking at a small window in time, which you assume is stationary so you can do your t-tests or whatever statistical test.

But, to be clear, this is a heuristic in A/B testing. If you have a window of time over which you know your distributions are stationary, you should always use a logarithmic regret MAB algorithm because it is theoretically better.

I think the best way to frame this argument is that because the domain does not match the assumptions of MAB, A/B testing has been shown to be robust and easy to modify for non-stationary domains, while logarithmic regret algorithms are somewhat more fragile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correction.

A/B testing does not need to assume that it is testing over a small window in time that has stationary conversion rates. In fact in practice tests run for a long window of time over which you have good evidence that the distribution is _not_ stationary. For example in the middle of running a long test that eventually found a small lift, I've often run and rolled out a second test that generated a much stronger lift.

The weaker assumption that you need is that the preference between versions is stable across your fluctuations. Then because the mix of versions is time independent, that non-stationary fluctuation is not statistically different between the slice that was put into A and the slice that was put into B. And therefore the variation between different samples becomes just another unknown random factor that does not interfere with your statistical analysis of whether there is a difference.

This is an advantage between A/B testing and the current state of the art in MAB algorithms. When this came up before, Noel (at Myna) and I privately did an admittedly brief search of the literature for discussion of this point with regards to MAB algorithms. We turned up a number of things that would work in the long run, but none that directly addressed the problem.

But in discussion we did manage to come up with effective MAB algorithms, whose regret is only a constant factor worse than standard MAB algorithms, that accurately will identify stable preferences in the face of constantly fluctuating conversion rates. To the best of my knowledge nobody, including Noel, has yet implemented such algorithms in practice. But in principle it can be done.

However even if you do it, several of my other points still apply as real differences.

<comment><USER7> Wait.

I am slightly confused and this may demonstrate my ignorance, but I was under the impression that A/B testing worked by allocating two different approach to the users and then scoring the response. This provides a sampling from the population of users as to how effective A or B is. You can then run some statistical test on the averages of the scores for each test to determine which one is the winner.

If what I said is true, these statistical tests almost always assume that the distribution that is being drawn from is stationary. So, the only way things work out is if you have an underlying stationary distribution. Otherwise, your statistical test might indicate the wrong thing.

I freely admit that many of your points are still valid, but I don't see how A/B is a more powerful algorithm that has less assumptions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps stepping back can clarify.

The necessary, reasonable, and much weaker assumption needed for A/B testing is that users are independent of each other, and arrive by some Poisson process. Meaning that at any given point in time there is some average rate that users arrive, but each user's arrival is independent of all other arrivals. (More mathematically precisely, the number of people who will arrive in any specified time period follows a Poisson distribution. Poisson processes accurately model everything from nuclear decay counts to emergency room arrivals.) If you randomly divide a group of people who arrived by a Poisson process into two subgroups in a fixed ratio (say, evenly), those subgroups will also turn out to be generated by a Poisson process.

Now we're going to take those subgroups, and feed them into our versions. Let's focus on what happens with version A. Depending on when a user arrived, that user will have some chance of converting to a success, and some chance of not doing so. If we look at a random user that arrived and ignore when they arrived, their probability of converting will be the average of their probability of converting, weighted by the rate of arrival. Furthermore our assumption that users are arriving from a Poisson process means that each user is statistically independent from all of the others. Now it is true that if we pay attention to the fact that certain users arrived close to others, there are likely correlations to be found between those specifically users. But if you sample two random users from all of the users who could have arrived, they will be independent and have an identical probability of conversion, which is that average. (This flows out of the assumption that the initial population came from a Poisson process.)

This same analysis can be done for A and for B. Now we don't know the actual conversion rates over our trial. But suppose that we did know them, and it happened to be that the conversion rate for B is better at every time than for A. Then it it is easy to show that the average conversion rate (weighted by arrival rate of course) over the whole interval for B would be better than for A.

Therefore if we assume that there is a consistent preference, statistical evidence over the sample that B converts better than A is valid statistical evidence that B is actually the better version at any given point in time. This holds even if the difference between their conversion rate is much lower than the fluctuation of the conversion rates of both over the interval we sampled from.

(Very helpfully for A/B test practitioners, this math works whether or not you happen to understand it. As long as you're not adjusting sampling rates, A/B tests are statistically valid.)

Now take a traditional MAB algorithm. The whole analysis that I just did falls apart. The fact that we send traffic to the versions at different rates at different points of time means that the average for random people in the two versions is weighted differently over the interval. This opens up the possibility that the average conversion rate of the whole sample for B can be better than for A, yet A might at every point in time have had a better conversion rate than B.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox> if that seems impossible to you. If you've read that and understand how being better in the sample that a MAB algorithm collected is not statistical evidence that you're actually better, then you may want to re-read this post to understand why an A/B test is still statistically valid.

To avoid this trap, what you need to do in the MAB algorithm is either subsample or scale data (subsampling is provably more robust but not much so, scaling is simpler and converges faster) so that the statistical decision that you're basing your MAB choices on avoids this pitfall, at least in the limit. But as I said before, a detailed discussion of how to make this work and the necessary trade-offs would get fairly involved.

<comment><USER7> I don't know how we got onto arrival rates of our visitors. I would just like to state that Simpson's paradox is exactly why we shouldn't compare percent conversions. They are meaningless. However, many of the statistical tests like Student's t-test compensate for this paradox by including the number of samples in the tests. See : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t- test#Unequal_samp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t- test#Unequal_sample_sizes.2C_unequal_variance)

I think you said one thing that are at the heart of the issue. We assume that the E[conversion of B] > E[conversion of A] for the entire period sampled.

I think all of the details about Poisson processes are not required if you just assume that each person is drawn IID from the population.

I just don't think you are answering the right questions here.

Let's assume that each person arrives IID from the infinite population. Then, we have a Bernoulli process for each A or B query. A "conversion" results in a 1, a failure results in a 0. Since, these people are arriving IID, we can select a sub-sample which is also IID. We would now like to estimate the parameters for each process and/or compare the two processes. We can do this using t-test. This will give us the statistical significance that the one group had a higher "conversion rate" than the other group. Note: rate does not factor into this problem at all because we assume the participants were IID, so the t-test (used correctly accounting for different number of samples) will tell us which test is larger.

My question is now what happens when the parameters of your queries for A or B change over time. Still under the assumption that E[B] > E[A], it now matters greatly in which order you use your samples.

I think the only reason you brought the Poisson model into the discussion is to weight the more recent samples higher and down weight the earlier samples in your basket of samples. This is a heuristic for considering a fixed interval in which the samples are stationary. It effectively considers a window that slides with the time of arrival.

<comment><AUTHOR> First let me mention that you should not try to use the Student's t-test. One of the first assumptions of the Student's t-test is that _Each of the two populations being compared should follow a normal distribution._ In A/B tests this assumption is almost never true, and therefore the Student's t-test is an inappropriate statistical assumption.

OK, now to what I said about Poisson distributions. Assuming that people arrive on a Poisson distribution allows us to conclude 2 key facts:

1\. The statistics will behave exactly like it would if each person arrives IID from an infinite population.

2\. Simpson's paradox will not apply to the theoretical distribution of the samples for A and B.

Assuming #1 without #2 does not get you very far. But having facts #1 and #2 allows us to use statistics.

I have no idea why you would speculate that I am attempting to weight recent samples higher and downweight earlier samples. All samples are, in fact, weighted exactly the same. This fact notwithstanding, different times of arrival are not weighted the same. That is because the sample rate fluctuates over time depending on factors such as traffic levels on your webserver. But it fluctuates in an identical way for the two versions. (This fact is critical in being able to conclude point #2.)

Does this help?

<comment><USER7> First, I was using Student t-test as a stand-in for whatever test or statistical measure you would like to use. I believe the popular one is Hoeffding's inequality in the bandit literature, hence the log term in the MAB algorithms. I agree this was a poor choice of example.

Second, I believe I am getting hung up on the fact that different arrival times are "weighted" differently. I think you are claiming that the Poisson assumption gives us equal numbers of A and B trials, so we can combined the statistics (counts) and avoid Simpson's paradox. This is fine, but why would you say "different times of arrival are not weighted the same". Does this mean you are somehow weighting periods of heavy traffic down and weighting low traffic up?

So, what happens when trial A becomes less favorable over time or is less favorable for brief periods? This means that the underlying random variable's mean is changing over time. Most statistical bounds cannot handle this situation.

I am not saying that A/B testing is not something we should do in general. I am saying that it is a good heuristic with very few provable properties compared with logarithmic regret MAB algorithms.

<comment><AUTHOR> _This is fine, but why would you say "different times of arrival are not weighted the same". Does this mean you are somehow weighting periods of heavy traffic down and weighting low traffic up?_

You keep on reversing the exact point that I keep on making, and then fail to understand what I said. So I guess that I'll keep repeating the same point in different ways and hope that at some point you'll get it.

Why do I say reversing? Because the weight a time period gets is directly proportional to the expected traffic. Therefore each observation is weighted the same, and periods of heavy traffic are the ones that are weighted most heavily.

Anyways, let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that from 2 AM to 3 AM observations arrive at an average rate of 1 every 10 minutes. Suppose that from 8 AM to 9 AM that they arrive at an average rate of one per minute.

Then, on average, we expect to have 6 observations from the hour in the middle of the night, and 60 observations from the hour from 8 AM to 9 AM.

Thus when we calculate average returns across the entire interval, on average we'll have 10x as many observations from 8 AM to 9 AM. Therefore on average the latter time period will have 10x the impact on the final results.

The conclusion is that different time periods are naturally weighted differently. However the weighting is the same across the two different versions.

If you want to get more mathematical about it, suppose that r(t) is the average rate at which observations are arriving in our subgroups. (So r(t) is the same for versions A and B.) Suppose that cA(t) is the rate at which version A converts, and suppose that cB(t) is the rate at which version B converts.

Here is what I claim:

Average conversion of A = integral(r(t) * cA(t)) / integral(r(t))

Average conversion of B = integral(r(t) * cB(t)) / integral(r(t))

Therefore if at all points cA(t) < cB(t) then the difference between their conversion rates is:

integral(r(t) * cB(t)) / integral(r(t)) - integral(r(t) * cA(t)) / integral(r(t)) = integral(r(t) * cB(t) - r(t) * cA(t)) / integral(r(t))

which is always positive. (It should be noted that this analysis remains the same whether we're looking for a binary convert/no convert, or whether we're looking at a more complex signal, such as amount paid. If we add the complication that people entering the test may convert to payments at one or multiple later points, the analysis becomes more complicated, but the result remains the same.)

 _So, what happens when trial A becomes less favorable over time or is less favorable for brief periods? This means that the underlying random variable's mean is changing over time. Most statistical bounds cannot handle this situation._

As long as there is a consistent preference between A and B, fluctuations in either or both do not alter the validity of the statistical analysis. If the preference is not consistent then, of course, A/B testing stops being valid.

 _I am not saying that A/B testing is not something we should do in general. I am saying that it is a good heuristic with very few provable properties compared with logarithmic regret MAB algorithms._

The fact that you are not following this proof does not mean that the proof I am offering you is invalid. In fact A/B testing has provable properties that, in a common real-world situation, are _much_ better than current state of the art logarithmic regret MAB algorithms.

I am also claiming (without proof) that this deficiency in current MAB algorithms is fixable, at the cost of a constant factor worse regret in the ideal situation where conversion rates do not change.

<comment><USER7> Ok, you are making a point about sampling. In periods of high traffic you have more samples that will bias the calculation. But, since the number of samples will be consistent between A and B, everything is fine. Fine.

I believe further discussion will not be productive. But, I suggest if you have a proof about A/B testing as it relates to the MAB problem or even if you have a proof about A/B testing in general that drops the normally distributed assumption or tells you exactly when to switch from exploring to exploiting, I suggest you write it up and publish it on arXv.

Thanks for your time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was indeed making a point about sampling. Hopefully we're on the same page now.

But here is an honest question for you. Why do you think that it would make sense for me to try to write up and publish a paper on arXv?

My view is that doing so would take a considerable amount of work. And the real-world constraints that matter to my clients don't seem to be in a direction that academics care much about, so I can't see them getting particularly interested in it. So it does not seem like it positively impacts my life.

I say this as someone who has several publications to my name. This fact has only once mattered to me. That once was when I needed to get sign-off from my current employer to have something I did before they hired me get published. Unfortunately my employer at the moment was eBay, they had just purchased Skype, and the paper that I was publishing among other things implied that Skype was unlikely to be worth what eBay had paid for it. This was..not fun.

If some research mathematician particularly wanted to sit down, pick my brains, and try to formalize the real-world constraints I've observed in my clients, that would be fine by me. It would only be fair in that case for me to be listed as a co-author. But unless that happens, I'm not going to try to publish a formal paper.

<comment><USER7> I was encouraging you to write down your mathematical evidence of better performing algorithms, because I know from my experience that when I try to write down proofs, my assumptions and reasoning become clearer. And often a step in the proof or logic that seems trivial becomes less trivial once you actually try to lay out the proof.

I believe that one of two things will arise when you go to write up a mathematical proof. One, you will be dependent on a statistical test that makes a normal distribution assumption implicitly or explicitly. Two, you will dependent on a bound that only applies in the limit. There is a third possibility, which is the most interesting to me, which is that you are dependent on a period of stationarity in your data, in other words, the distribution you are measuring must be stationary.

The proofs in the MAB papers are not intentionally obtuse or ignoring mainstream statistical ideas. They are written that way to say very explicit things under well defined assumptions. Locking down assumptions and being very precise is what writing down a mathematical proof is all about.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, after disbelieving what I said about A/B testing only to find out that I was right, you might have adjusted your expectations of me. I've written formal proofs before. I have published papers in mathematics. I know what's involved. Please spare me the lecture.

In this case none of the three possibilities that you stated are correct. I have an algorithm about which the following statement is true:

Suppose that users arrive according to a Poisson process. Suppose further that the random reward function of putting them in to different versions is variable but satisfies the following properties:

1\. There is a static upper bound on the expected value of each version.

2\. There is a static upper bound on the variance of each version.

3\. The cumulative distribution of the reward function is integrable. (We don't even need continuity!)

4\. One of the versions at all times has an expected return that is at least epsilon greater than all other versions

Then I have a MAB algorithm which achieves logarithmic regret in the long run. It is only worse by a constant factor than MAB algorithms for the case with fixed returns. That factor is likely to be somewhere in the neighborhood of sqrt(2), but I can't guarantee that.

Those are limit statements, but you can get more concrete bounds in the finite case. In principle it should be possible to derive an explicit formula - <USER2> tell me the bounds on expected value and variance for the versions, and the size of epsilon, and I can put an explicit bound on the odds that the best version is winning after N observations.

The principle behind the proof is exactly what it was for the A/B test case. The assumption of Poisson processes allows us to subselect equal samples from the versions for the purposes of statistical inference, and make provable statistical statements about how the behavior of the statistical sample allows us to make inferences about which version is best, even though actual conversion behavior is constantly changing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for writing this Ben. It's a very fair and balanced assessment of both techniques.</comment>


Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business - <AUTHOR> http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Hagoromo-president-explains-why-he-closed-down-his-beloved-chalk-business <comment><USER2> I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here's a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like " _So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think._ " I am now a fan of Hagoromo.

It was rather refreshing at a time when I can't stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.

<comment><USER3> Not awkward, the sentence you call out. Beautiful, rather, and whether it is an artifact of translation or not, no matter. You didn't mean awkward in a pejorative sense; this is just an affirmation.

<comment><USER2> Of course! What makes this letter effective and relatable are all those little things that wouldn't have passed the ordinary editorial, legal, or PR filters, if it were written by a typical corporate CEO. If I was teaching at business school, I'd have my students read this as a model of effective stakeholder communications. I think Mr. Watanabe is a shokunin (you know, in the Jiro Ono sense) of the chalk business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough.

It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities/individuals.

I also think that it's somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in "brainy" jobs it's pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I'm pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can't change their mind.

Maybe they were just "too big" and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.

<comment><USER5> > It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US > demand.

I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh).

<comment><USER6> > I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most > don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly > executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for > decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then > wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh).

The Japanese domestic consumer market is so enormous that many Japanese companies are simply not interested in selling their goods internationally, because they don't need to. They can make plenty of money without dealing with the complications of selling their products in other countries. Many are small businesses and are content with making enough money to cover payroll.

<comment><USER7> Same in Germany. And the reason why so many smaller German companies existed in pretty much the same way for the past millenium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality."

High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.

<comment><USER9> I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN:

> The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction > systems.

While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good in a very localized and easy to measure sense (cheap), but lacks an understanding of other economical signals.

<comment><USER10> If you instruct a machine to optimize for the cheapest price; it will do that. The failure is in the instructions given, not the introduction of machines.

<comment><USER9> That much should be clear, my (unfortunately) implicit question is: how can we instruct a machine to optimize for the very intangible things everybody seems to love so much about this chalk? What about the more subtle economic things (like signals of economic climate and value of quality).

<comment><USER11> optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.

<comment><USER12> Regardless of what metric you choose, Arrow's Paradox will bite you. Single- objective optimization will always force you to ignore good alternatives.

<comment><USER13> I do not understand the reference to Arrow's Paradox in a discussion of procurement policy (almost certainly related to my lack of knowledge). Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER12> Sure --- there's a neat paper by Franssen (2006) that demonstrates the formal equivalence between optimization problems and the social policy problems Arrow was concerned with. Basically, Arrow says that some constituents will always lose out under any social policy. Franssen showed that you can swap out "composite cost metric" for social policy and "components of the cost metric" for constituents, and the same arguments apply.

<comment><USER13> It must be too early for me. I can not find the franssen citation. Title?

<comment><USER12> Here's the full citation. Turns out I misremembered the year (2005).

Franssen M (2005) Arrow's theorem, multi-criteria decision problems and multi- attribute preferences in engineering design. Research in Engineering Design 16(1):42–56

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.

<comment><USER15> Yes, this is what I wanted to say. Quantify what makes them great. After reading the article and the comments, I still have no understanding of why or what makes them so great.

<comment><USER16> Thicker sticks. Coating on the outside of the chalk. Different formulation to make it smoother and less dusty.

Basically, the chalk seems to be optimized for writing Kanji strokes which need to vary in thickness and weight.

And, yes, he did miss the boat in the US. I have never heard of this stuff before they went under (not completely true: my Japanese teacher complained about the quality of American chalk all the time--I should have twigged in). I would have bought _crates_ of this stuff when I was teaching.

Hopefully the Korean company he sold the machines to won't be quite so insular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> OPEN SOURCE THE MAGIC CHALK RECIPE AND MACHINE PLANS

<comment><USER8> I don't think there is any concise secret formula that one could just copy to paper and readapt.

The article gives the impression there was a specific highly custom production system where the materials were selected for the machines and the machines were fit for the materials. And the machines were apparently jury rigged adaptations which probably lack detailed blueprints. Sounds a bit hard to formalize, after the fact, without quite a laborious effort.

<comment><USER18> I'd bet that, if he made some Youtube videos explaining the recipe, and the way it changes based on the local situation (and manufacturing equipment), as well as some videos giving a tour of the manufacturing equipment, some enterprising Makers would find a way to whip up a "Make your own Chalk" machine.

While it wouldn't be perfect, such a machine could be standardized or improved, and quality could be iterated on by people who care about it until they could make their own chalk that was better than what they can easily buy.

Heck, just the recipe might be sufficient for people to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Two passages stood out.

 _At first, we considered selling the whole company, enabling the Hagoromo brand to survive and helping overall chalk sales. But we could not find the right deal for the company._

 _I 'm sad that I have been forced to close down my company. But I am pleased I have been able to contribute to education by providing high-quality chalk over the last 50 years._

Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. Very touching note.

<comment><USER20> > Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough.

How is it "not enough"? He ran a successful business that brought joy and utility to millions for 50 years. Sure, it ends on a sad note - but such is life. That is success if I ever saw it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Chalk makes me feel weird when I use it. Tactically it just rubs me the wrong way and gives me the same chills I get from fingernails on a chalkboard. Just thinking about it bothers me :\

However, it is nice to read about people who have a passion for what they do, and this man seems to have passion in spades.

<comment><USER22> This chalk actually has a special coating that prevents that from happening.

This post from a while ago explains why "Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This man expresses such a passion for chalk...chalk of all things, and it's inspiring. I could see someone reading this and becoming an artisan chalk maker as a result(I kid, but its probably true). Even I kind of want to run a chalk business after reading it.

</comment><comment><USER24> From the article it looks like the buyer in South Korea will learn how to continue on with the chalk. I suspect we will see it on the market again.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's amazing that they had just one set of machines to make all their chalk. I hope the South Korean version would be successful.

</comment><comment><USER26> reading that made me think of the Byrd's song

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

<comment><USER27> That's not the original source though, FYI.

<comment><USER28> To go one level deeper: It's actually an old Pete Seeger folk song.

So the Byrds were covering a Pete Seeger song, who used lyrics by Ecclesiastes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm sorry for this man having so many health problems. But I can understand otherwise how to make chalk in the pacific japanese coast burning tons and tons of japanese oyster shells could be less profitable and much more dangerous since 2011. I wish him well.

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope he shares his recipe.

</comment><comment><USER31> When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk.

When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.

<comment><USER32> It's Japan though. Faxes in Japan aren't antiquated like in the USA.

<comment><USER33> The entire technology is antiquated. It doesn't matter how much shiny you wrap around it.

<comment><USER32> What I meant was that fax machines are still in widespread use by all demographics in Japan, so getting a lot of faxes doesn't indicate much about the age or aversion to progress of the senders.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice - <AUTHOR> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html <comment><USER3> I'm using firefox for another reason, it is the fastest, most secure, most memory efficient browser out there. Chrome doesn't even compare on benchmarks. They may have had the crown for a tiny split second a few years ago but not anymore firefox closed the distance a while ago and now they're ahead and the gap is growing.

<comment><USER4> Everything you said is absolutely true.

Firefox rocks my world for all those reasons and more.

Hell, I would use it just for the Tree-Style Tabs addon, which isn't available for Chrome.

But I use Chrome at least as often as Firefox for one reason alone: when everything doesn't go smoothly and a page does crash, it doesn't take the whole browser down with it.

When Firefox hangs and/or crashes, it's much more annoying because everything is interrupted to a greater degree.

Chrome: Oops! This tab crashed, just reload it or close it and move on.

Firefox: _Firefox has encountered an error and must be closed. Do you wish to debug?_

As someone who spends a third of the day on the web professionally, and always has 10-50 tabs open, it matters.

<comment><USER5> +1 switched to ffox primarily because of tree-style tabs.

<comment><USER6> Forever on Firefox because of tree-style tabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about". If everyone switched to Chrome, at worst Chrome would get complacent, as IE did, and at best, it would continue to be a great browser.

Use whatever browser you like best.

<comment><USER8> > This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted > at: "things I can't talk about"

The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.

<comment><USER9> Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla doesn't necessarily make one far more qualified to understand the vast array of potential implications of Google gaining monopoly power in a variety of web sectors.

<comment><USER10> No, but it might. I'm sure the author has spent vastly more time looking at web standards and trends than I have and as such, his opinion should carry more weight than your average person.

You've simply pulled out a variation on the old "correlation does not imply causation" retort.

<comment><USER9> No, I pulled a more wordy version of "that's an appeal to authority fallacy". And I believe my point still stands. The author is speaking of issues that are several orders of magnitude of complexity above "writing amazing web software at Mozilla" and also impacted by a variety of fields that are very different than software engineering. Thus he is only marginally more informed than your average HN user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since it was called Firebird, and I have to say that I'm on the cusp of switching away from it. It seems like every time I update, the UI breaks. With the latest update, for some reason my address bar is gigantic:

[https://i.imgur.com/2QlIZwo.png](https://i.imgur.com/2QlIZwo.png)

It also enabled address bar autocomplete, which I did not previously have enabled.

The previous update, Firefox 29, came with Australis, which left me with a completely unusable configuration and required me to fiddle with yet another "classic restorer" style addon. I now use:

      * "Classic theme restorer" to gut Australis
      * "oldbar" to get rid of the AwesomeBar
      * "Old default image style" to restore the old style for displaying raw images.
      * "Switch to tab no more" to cut off yet another head of the hydra that is AwesomeBar
      * "Undo close tab replacement" to restore the Recently closed tabs menu.

All to fight back against UI-breaking new features. I also had to muddle around with browser.urlbar settings in about:config to restore some kind of sane behavior to the address bar after AwesomeBar was introduced.

But what can I do? I obviously need security updates and the latest support for web standards, so I can't ignore new versions. But I'm tired of fighting a browser that I no longer recognize.

<comment><USER12> I used Firefox (more specifically Iceweasel) as my sole browser from roughly version 3 until somewhere in the late twenties.

Recently I started using Chromium off and on because FF just seems to be so damn slow if I have more than four tabs open. Reddit + RES is so slow that it's completely unusable. I'm talking a several second delay between each keystroke and the character appearing in the input boxes.

Also, FF's sync is quite a pain to set up, especially if you don't have another device with you.

I fear the recent UI changes may have been the last nail in the coffin for me. I had a very nice setup using pentadactyl with some select add-on icons on the statusline. Now, that isn't possible. I have to choose between a superfluous navigation bar or no icons.

<comment><USER13> Iceweasel is probably your issue. I don't use the Debian hack of firefox and have no problems, >50 tabs open all the time. Also, looks like the last release of pentadactyl was March 15, that is old by Internet standards. I don't think firefox is the issue here.

<comment><USER12> I had the same issues on vanilla FF on Windows 7 too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just wish they'd focus more on producing a great browser and less on random, wacky, side projects. Not that the side projects aren't interesting, but the browser is what I care about. Even this person, who is associated with Mozilla can't say anything more positive than "[w]e have a good browser...".

That said, he's right... `sudo apt-get install firefox`.

<comment><USER15> There are halo benefits to the side projects as well. Some experimental or otherwise "daring" functionality in a side project can become invaluable within the browser core at a future date. It's a bit like an external stimulus triggering a random mutation that proves to be beneficial.

Ex: Popup blocking required modification to the browser before it became a vital core feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > So if you want an Internet --- which means, in many ways, a world --- that > isn't controlled by Google, you must stop using Chrome now and encourage > others to do the same. If you don't, and Google wins, then in years to come > you'll wish you had a choice and have only yourself to blame for spurning it > now.

I sympathize with the general sentiment of the article, but this is just hyperbole. I used Firefox when it was the best browser (for me), and I'm using Chrome now because it's the best browser.

<comment><USER8> "I eat candy because it tastes better than vegetables".

It's an analogy, and hence imperfect, but might still be useful.

<comment><USER17> I strongly disagree with your analogy.

Chrome is not a superficially better browser—as a web developer I can attest that Chrome beats out Firefox in myriad ways. Candy has no value other than flavor, and is actually bad for you. The advent of Google's release of Chrome (and the collaboration between Google and Apple engineers on WebKit) has launched the web forward at a speed that Firefox has been struggling to keep up with. That INCLUDES security and openness, not just new prefixed CSS properties.

The browser war was Firefox's to lose, and they dropped the ball. They weren't ready for Chrome, and have yet to catch up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Deoesn't Mozilla get like 85% of its budget from Google? [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing)

<comment><USER19> Yup, to be the default search engine. I'm so glad they get that money.

aren't most biggish free(and open source) software projects in GSOC? [https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/g...](https://www.google- melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/gsoc2014) Should we stop using/trusting anything that get resources from Google, ever?

<comment><USER20> We shouldn't-- but I think the grandparent post is saying that "switch from Chrome to Firefox so as not to support Google" is not an entirely valid argument given the funding situation. Simply put, if you think "this is Google-related" is a reason to switch away from something, then maybe it becomes relevant that Google is funding a big portion of alternative sources?

Obviously there are a few issues with the argument, but I think it brings up an important point.. and demands that the anti-Chrome/pro-Firefox argument matures a bit more.

<comment><USER21> Roc's point is specifically about Chrome, and letting a single player control how people access the Web. Using Firefox with DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whatever search engine you prefer is still better than using Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think half of the comments on this thread are missing the point - <USER2> paraphrase Richard Stallman, the link is arguing from _freedom_ , not convenience. Responding with "but Chrome is better" may be true or it may be false, but in both cases it is irrelevant.

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

</comment><comment><USER23> I have been a Firefox user from 0.93 or so, except for a year or so of Chrome usage on a USB disk when Firefox really was performing too badly in that case—but once that was fixed I gladly moved back to Firefox. I see how people use Chrome and wonder how they can possibly stand it, especially if they end up with more than twenty tabs in a window… Firefox is certainly _way_ better for tab management for me. I use Firefox both because I believe it is the best browser for me and for philosophical reasons. (I also have approved of almost every change to Firefox that I've seen; 4 was a great thing, Australis was a great thing, &c.)

I have also been gravely concerned, as the author is, by what I see at Google. Five years ago, had there been Google offices in Melbourne, I would have enjoyed working for them. In the three years since then I steadily became opposed to Google and I do not believe that I would be willing to be employed by them; they are now pushing the Chrome brand far too far, using a very significant marketing budget on it purely to get people to use it, and from their other web properties pushing Chrome constantly, almost always to my mind deceptively and far too often outright lying. Telling people to upgrade from IE6 was entirely understandable, and I could even forgive that they will push their own browser rather than merely pushing for a newer browser of whichever brand. But if I'm using Firefox, why would you go pestering me to "upgrade" to this browser with claims of its being faster _which are simply not true_? Four years ago they were true, to be sure; Firefox _was_ slower than Chrome. But that has long since been fixed and the two are competitive now, Chrome winning in some areas, Firefox winning in others. (Of course, I believe Firefox to be winning in more, but that can immediately be discounted as a biased and unreasoned view.)

I look at what punishment Microsoft got for its anticompetitive behaviour and I wonder how long it can be before Google is dealt with. Because as it is, they're just as great a threat as Microsoft ever was to the web, if not greater.

Google looks fair and feels foul.

<comment><USER24> _" I look at what punishment Microsoft got for its anticompetitive behaviour and I wonder how long it can be before Google is dealt with."_

That's a good point. The article says that Google is "writing contracts with Android OEMs forcing them to make Chrome the default browser". When Microsoft was doing that a while back with Internet Explorer, they were sued by the government and forced to unbundle IE from Windows.

<comment><USER25> It wasn't the bundling that was the problem, its the fact that the bundling was a mechanism for leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to displace competition in a different market. You can't leverage a monopoly when you don't have a monopoly to leverage.

<comment><USER26> Like using their search engine to promote Chrome?

<comment><USER25> No, promotion is nothing like mandatory tying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Im sad to say there is only one reason left that I continue to use firefox as my main browser- The most excellent security addon, noscript, by Giorgio Maone. (and before you say chrome can block javascript- understand noscript does much, much more than just block JS)

If he was to port that to chrome, I would be gone in a heartbeat. Chrome is (from my experiences browsing the web with both browsers), a better browser in almost every sense of the word. Faster updates, Feels much faster browsing and overall just a more enjoyable user experience.

If firefox wants to stay relevant, they will have a real battle on their hands.

This latest design update firefox did is especially infuriating. The steps firefox was making me take to revert my experience to what I knew was insulting. I understand you want me to use this new interface, but you are going to hardcode it so much that I have to read a 3 page doc and install random addons to revert it? This mentality seems to plague mozilla. A bunch of FOSS guys get to decide what the rest of end up with every release.

<comment><USER28> And how will that be better for you if you switch to chrome? Will google listen more to your UI wishes?

I also don't understand why you claim that Chrome has faster updates, since both browsers have a 6 weeks update cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also a very happy user of Aurora, the new dev tool features in r33 are making Firefox yet more wonderful to browse/work with. I was using Chrome exclusively for years until I began to realize the general ramifications of giving in to an 'all Google' internet. My only issue with Firefox is the still seemingly slower JS engine. I still feel SpiderMonkey isn't still as fast as V8.

</comment><comment><USER30> There are always going to be people that use a particular browser for a particular reason and it's that competition that encourages the organization behind the browser to improve.

Instead of using baseless FUD to try and win people over to your browser, work on making it the best from a usability and performance standpoint so people move over to it naturally. That's what Chrome did to me when it came out and what keeps me using it today.

<comment> dj-wonk Sure, competition is good, but Google vs. Mozilla isn't a fair fight. Google has more resources. As long as Google improves Chrome enough to keep users, they can simultaneously do things that are not good for the Web as a whole. They can, on average, get away with it if people don't complain or switch away due to the parts that are unsavory.

The article does not lay out a watertight argument, but I see what it is trying to say: pay attention to more than just the obvious features of a browser -- also pay attention to its implications in the market.

Smart people realize that it is not in your self-interest to simply buy the best (cheapest or fastest) product or service, if defined narrowly. If you care about reliability, longevity, and service, sometimes you pay more or accept some idiosyncrasies, because your goal is to support an organization that behaves in a way that you like.

It is naive to think that "choosing the best browser" is simply a matter of the browser itself. There is a bigger story, and if you don't at least recognize this, it might be time to take the blinders off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A bigger takeaway from this blog may be the centralization of information (regardless of the company that does it). I'd be less worried about my browser of choice, and more about my ability to retain ownership of my data.

FWIW, I've started self-hosting as much as possible of my 'critical' items, be it at home, or on a VPS. You don't need vast amounts of bandwidth, and it's become much easier to setup over time (OpenVPN, OwnCloud, gitlab, or even just using a NAS with such features).

Items that you want to share are a slightly different matter (size, bandwidth, server security, etc), but in general I dislike putting my entire life on social media anyway.

<comment><USER32> I friend of mine is making it more user friendly to "self-host" third party apps on hardware you have control over.

[https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> quote about Mike Shaver (mozilla co-founder, now at FB) from [http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver- thanks/](http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/)

> And he affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a > couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point, > thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology > landscape was – and he said to me: "Look, this is the world we wanted. And > this is the world we made." Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about > how enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make.

</comment><comment><USER34> Chose it years ago and was never really taken by Chrome, I usually install it to test against from time to time but I spend 95% of my browsing time within Nightly (daily browser for 9 years now!)

</comment><comment><USER35> I switched to Chromium back when they first started with the fast release system and kept breaking my plugins. I've thought about switching back but need Chromium's ability to run newer versions of Flash. So I want to run both, but I have a large bookmark collection I use all the time and have found no good way to either keep the 2 browsers bookmarks in sync or an external bookmark management program.

Anyone have a good solution to bookmarks? This would be for Debian.

<comment><USER36> I haven't used it, but Xmarks Sync is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that synchronizes your bookmarks. Xmarks Inc also maintains the popular LastPass add-on.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xmarks- sync/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xmarks-sync/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was using Firefox to keep the web free, but then they agreed to start supporting DRM and I figured out here is no point to do this any more. I use Chrome now.

<comment><USER38> Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You shouldn't use a product only because you're worried the competition will do something theoretical; you should use a product that provides you with the best value.

For me, right now, it's Chrome. Before Chrome it was Opera. Mozilla needs to focus on providing better value in their browser rather the current releases which seem to always contain odd half-assed features.

</comment><comment><USER40> I try to use FF every now and then, but unfortunately, Chrome is just a better browser in every respect, for my needs. My configuration is pretty simple, no flash, no java, no silverlight, no nothing. With FF I always get the feeling like I'm running a single threaded app, and where one tab can interfere with the performance of the other.

</comment><comment><USER41> Telling people to stop using a Google product, because it's a Google product... from a Google blog platform, hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have just one comment: Go mozilla, you rock.

</comment><comment><USER43> I was a huge proponent of Firefox for years (since Netscape 6), version 30 broke it so badly I had to move on to Chrome, two tabs open no plugins and it crashes on a machine with 16Gb of ram if left open over night, and the bug is trivial to reproduce. Updates haven't remedied the situation. When Google no longer monetizes Firefox via paying them to be the default search engine I don't see Firefox staying relevant, it's a shame I miss built in (no plugin needed) tab grouping, I miss having a search box that doesn't tell Google everything I'm typing as I'm typing it, and I certainly miss the smaller memory footprint. I just can't handle the constant crashing, the webpages that render as a completely black box (whether video acceleration is check marked or not) and the continued degradation in performance while they spend developer cycles on things like making it look like Chrome (a move I detested) or removing options power users and professionals use. Most of the time I can use about:config to restore functionality but should I have too? (echos of Gnome).

<comment><USER44> _When Google no longer monetizes Firefox via paying them to be the default search engine I don 't see Firefox staying relevant_

You think Microsoft would hesitate cutting a Bing deal?

<comment><USER45> Well, afaik they didn't break their bones to do so before. Also, if Google is gone, no matter how small amount MS would offer for defaulting Bing, Mozilla would have no choice but to accept it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Even if chrome does end up gaining a monopoly on browsers (or google in general is in a monopoly position), eventually they will cease to innovate and will be taken over by the underdog (or the newest/best solution).

<comment><USER47> I think the difference this time is that if Google controls the browser AND the biggest websites, then they'll be more confident introducing features that lock you into that browser (See the offline storage bit mentioned in the article). With those lockin features more common, people will be less willing to support other browsers in the future, because they wont be able to offer those exclusive features. With that large userbase that can use cool features like those, other large websites will take advantage of the proprietary API's (see, the issue with webkit css prefixes right now). Lack of possible support from users means most alternatives wouldn't be able to gain any traction, which is going to discourage any growth in that field.

A comparison I think is valid is if an

<comment><USER48> Google has very deep pockets, and is successfully executing an astonishingly vast integration play. Google can potentially own:

\- Your communications (Gmail, Hangouts, Voice)

\- Your working data (Drive, Docs)

\- Your footprint on the Web (Google Analytics, Ads)

\- Your footprint on the Internet (Fiber, Loon)

\- Your browser (Chrome)

\- Your operating system (ChromeOS, Android, GlassOS)

\- Your device (Chromebooks, Glass, Wear, Android phones and tablets)

\- Your movements and travel (Maps, Ingress, ITA)

\- Your robotic overlords (Boston Dynamics)

Not to mention the upcoming plays for home integration (Nest, Thread), your means of transportation (Android Auto, self-driving cars), and your activity and health data (Fit).

Each vertical success reinforces the Google Platform, and lends momentum to Google's efforts in other verticals. It presents one hell of a barrier for start-ups (unless you fancy share-cropping), decreases consumer choice, and ultimately, that amount of consolidated power just doesn't seem healthy for a functioning market or society.

Edit: All of that, and I somehow forgot YouTube. And G+. But we _all_ forgot G+, right?

<comment><USER49> And Twitch...sorta

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I just tried using Firefox again after reading this. I stopped after 2 minutes, when I realised installing the flash plugin was a pain. Apparently Adobe stopped supporting Flash for linux in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER51> Err... Didn't Internet Explorer have 90% browser share 10 years ago? (i.e. Microsoft achieved exactly what this post is warning against?)

And yet, somehow we aren't all living in a Microsoftian dystopia.

<comment><USER52> It did. But Microsoft disbanded the IE team after they won that marketshare, which gave other browsers years to catch up.

Things may have looked very different had they continued the heavy development pace after releasing IE6. IE had a fast and modern engine compared to contemporaries when IE6 was first released, but then it went five years without any major updates.

I'm undecided about Google's growing browser control, but in any case I don't see Google making the same mistakes as Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I use Firefox, but it would be easier to recommend if it had a sandbox.

<comment><USER26> Coming soon! [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> IE and Safari are always (for some reasonable definition of always) going to exist. Firefox is the browser whose entire revenue stream is based around hoping Google DOESN'T want a browser monoculture to develop. If Mr. O'Callahan wants to use Firefox as a way to stop Google from taking over the web, there's two things he as a Mozilla coder he could do that would be far more effective than histrionic blog posts that say "other bad things are happening that I can't even talk about" and expect me to be able to fill in the blanks:

1) Build a better browser than Chrome, and 2) Come up with a way to generate revenue that doesn't depend on Google's benevolence towards Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER55> Mozilla is not interested in enterprise users, so my employer chooses to only use chrome and internet explorer internally, and for supporting internal and external products.

</comment><comment><USER56> If the first thing you have to say about yourself is that you're "Christian", I don't know that I really care what else you have to say.

Are non Christians suppose to be offended ? Will I be able to ignore the fact that he may be a pro-lifer supporting attacks on abortion clinics? A tea- bagger...

Find it tasteless to present oneself this way, and it seems it's only Anglo- Saxon Christians who choose to do so. As if they're a persecuted minority coming out of the closet.

Did anyone ever see non Christians introducing themselves on their blog by their religion or belive system? Jon Doe, atheist? Jane Doe, Muslim?

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been using IE11 ever since Chrome caused BSODs on my custom build, and frankly I don't really notice the difference very much.

</comment><comment><USER58> Choose Opera Now, Opt-out of Chrome/Firefox fanboy slapfights.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm not going to switch because of some imaginary ideological reason I couldn't care less about. I'm not going to switch until Firefox is actually better (I use both on a daily basis when developing).

</comment><comment><USER60> Viva la resistance!

</comment><comment><USER61> But I like Opera.

</comment><comment><USER62> <3 Firefox

</comment><comment><USER63> Good. I hope Mozilla goes away. They think everything should be "web". They think everything should be "open". They don't respect native platforms and they want to keep the web duct-taped together the way it is instead of making something better that is actually an application platform. I disagree on all counts.

(Remember folks, don't down-vote just because you disagree! Sorry if it offends your sensibilities :)

</comment><comment><USER64> The End is Nigh!</comment>


Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/richardyoung00/browser-functions-a-new-serverless-platform-using-web-browser-execution-engines-fk5 <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be very memory inefficient? A browser "tab" isn't exactly a small amount of resource. And I remember there were quite a few problems with headless browser not being perfect ( Although I think that was quite a while ago so things might have improved )

However I do love the idea of Browser Function! It has been a long time since I have been excited with any Web Development tech. So I just need some time to sink in my excitement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrome seems to handle memory quite well in headless mode at any rate. The memory footprint isn't tiny, but it seems a fair bit smaller than the container based approaches used by other serverless systems.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this still wrapped in a container. I would assume a commercial deployment would need this isolation - after all chrome allows toggling feature flags, which could bleed across instances if not containerized.

The big benefit to this approach is the availability of WebApis in a Faas environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think you need the extra layer of isolation. Browser tabs are isolated pretty well if they are running different sites. Chrome's spectre mitigations will also help to isolate functions from one another [https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating- spectre-w...](https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-with- site-isolation.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds similar to how Cloudflare Workers work - using the V8 isolate technology built for Chrome to provide secure isolation of backend processes without the overhead of VMs or even containers.

<comment><USER5> Yes. This is something like Cloudflare Workers (except we built a deep embedding of V8 rather than relying on the browser infrastructure).

[https://workers.cloudflare.com/](https://workers.cloudflare.com/)

Plus we have a distributed KV store to go with the code execution environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main reason for relying on the full browser is to not be tied to a specific browser engine, and to be able to benefit from browser security updates really easily, but there are obviously some challenges to this approach.

<comment><USER5> Makes sense. Certainly not dissing your approach!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a brilliant idea... almost a Why Didn't I Think of That Idea!</comment>