QA? We don't need no stinking QA - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/qa_qa_we_don_39_t_need_no_stinking_qa <comment><USER2> I have been working in QA for a few years now and have made several observations.

* The people who are good at QA usually have the skills to work as a developer. QA is generally not as desirable as development to a young developer, so why do it?

* Many QA people are almost completely useless and exist just to generate paperwork so that the company can cover its ass. Warning signs for bad QA people seem to be certifications and fear of anything that does not strictly adhere to classic waterfall development. The bulk of all defects are found by a small number of people on my team.

* Most developers are horrible at testing and writing unit tests. We have thousands of unit tests and the main thing that they catch is that someone did not update the test after refactoring code.

<comment><USER3> It is unfortunate how true these statements are. I followed to standard path of starting in QA and moving to development. While I do not think it's a bad path of itself, I think it is unfortunate that a lot of really great QA analysts hang up their QA title in order to develop. I think one of the core problems is that QA is treated as entry level; which is odd, because as you point out, most devs are practically incapable of testing effectively.

Even though most orgs do not officially treat the positions as an entry level (QA), and a mid-level (junior dev) - I think the general unspoken understanding is that devs are higher on the food chain. The two positions need to be established as more distinct and less like rungs in the same ladder.

<comment><USER4> If it's hard to find good QA guys when there's a career path, it's even harder when there's a wall between dev and QA. QA is considered entry level in most companies because the jobs are entry level. Most companies barely value the monkeys-on-keyboards style of QA, much less the more skilled and better paying QA roles that would tempt smart people to stick with a career in QA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the other hand, I've seen QA groups who do no QA at all. Instead, they do frameworks.

"We need a test framework" are terrifying words to me. It means that I (the dev) will have no one at my back. It means that tests will be written by junior QA engineers (the senior ones are off writing and maintaining the framework, right?). It means that I am responsible for my own tests, because /no one/ else besides the customer will be testing my code.

That's generally all right; I think I do a good job. But not everyone does; some devs think they can toss code over the fence to a group that will tell them if it worked or not.

Everyone is responsible for quality; Devs must do unit tests, but they have blind spots and that is what QA is for, namely higher-level assurance that things are working as intended.

<comment><USER6> _It means that I (the dev) will have no one at my back._

Everyone should always code and test their code like that, right?

<comment><USER7> Eh, there's a difference between testing code you just wrote, and actual QA. I know my code, and I'll be testing for specific things, and I'll know what not to do. Our QA guy has no idea what I just did - so he's likely to uncover things I didn't think to check for.

<comment><USER6> _Eh, there's a difference between testing code you just wrote, and actual QA_

That's what I'm challenging. I think the whole "developers can't test their own code" business is a myth.

There really is something to the idea of the "curse of knowledge" and there really is a different mindset when you're trying to make something work and trying to make something break, but isn't switching between contexts and mindsets and levels of abstraction a core part of being a developer?

Developers can get lazy and don't bother testing their own code. Developers can get sloppy and don't bother thinking through corner cases. Developers can be short-sighted and write poorly-encapsulated code that is brittle and creates side-effects.

<comment><USER7> > isn't switching between contexts and mindsets and levels of abstraction a > core part of being a developer?

Sure, but you can only do that so rapidly. Why not just let me stay in the flow, and test the changes I expect, and pump out more code and bugfixes, and let the QA look at things I might not catch?

I'd rather do a quick test of my code and send it off to QA than spend two hours second-guessing myself as to whether I've tested everything in-depth enough.

<comment><USER6> I think the throughput you get of pumping out more code (without really testing it) may be a micro-optimization.

I only bring this up because I once worked at a place with a really strong, borderline omniscient, QA Department and I felt myself getting sloppy and checking in things that I knew were probably wrong, but I knew that QA would find it and tell me how it was wrong. It appeared to be optimal for me as a developer, I got lots of code pumped out, but as far as the whole organization or product, it was a net loss.

Subsequently, I've worked on a few projects with no dedicated QA people, and my overall "getting good software shipped to users in the real world" effectiveness hasn't decreased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I could not agree more. And not only should all projects include QA, but they should include QA by an actual quality assurance analyst or team. QA performed by minimum wage (or low payed) temps or short-term services tends to be next to worthless. Also, don't even think about using a spreadsheet to track issues.

QA needs to be done, and it needs to be funded. Everything you put into will return in less development time (overall, not necessarily in the short term), and more satisfied users.

</comment><comment><USER8> I mostly agree.

That MMO that is getting away with using customers as QA, and only fixing bugs that NEED fixing? I bet they're making a nice profit. I'm sure the customers are annoyed, but in my experience, gamers won't quit playing over bugs. Bad customer service, price hikes, etc... Sure. But not bugs. Even if they stick around for years.

However, business applications are a different story. Businesses can't afford to be stopped from doing what they need to. And a QA person makes all the difference in the world there.

For those that don't understand why, a programmer can't find their own bugs because they've already done their utmost to find bugs in the code. They've already stretched themselves to the limit before they sent the code to QA. You can train, coddle, beat, or otherwise influence them and only get a few more bugs found by programmers. It's much better for everyone's sanity and wallets if you just pay for proper QA.

<comment><USER9> "However, business applications are a different story."

You've sure got that right. Our application conducts real-time purchasing events (reverse auctions) where bidders are ranked based on a couple of different configurable algorithms. An error in calculation means incorrect ranking, which means the entire outcome is invalidated. Considering that it can take weeks to put together a purchasing event of this type means that there is a _lot_ riding on that single series of calculations.

Simply releasing and finding bugs in production would be financial suicide. QA isn't even a question in our business. Everything is tested thoroughly when it goes out the door.

<comment><USER10> I write software for clinical trial data collection, so I'm in the same boat. Not only is every product tested, but QA must thoroughly document their tests. At the end of the day, yeah, it slow the process down, but the software is significantly more robust when it heads into field.

Having worked at many companies that didn't believe in QA at all, I think having a team of testers is beneficial not only for software quality, but also filtering potential bug reports from the field. When a client reports a potential, QA does the initial leg work in duplicating the issue, then passes it off to engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One financial services company I worked at a long time ago was getting caught up in the Lean hype. We did process maps of nearly everything including our dev process. They put a big red circle around the QA piece noting that it was a candidate for elimination since it was not value-add.

That is parts like coding and deployment were necessary because they actually were important and helped move business ideas to the customer. QA to them was a redundant step. This coming from a shop that avoided automated testing because it was too expensive.

I was disappoint. QA to me is insurance against being human (which we all are). The ended up not getting rid of QA but the fact that they seriously considered it was shocking.

<comment><USER12> If the team considers automated testing waste then they truly are missing the point of Lean. I disagree with you on the fact that having a QA step could be considered waste. Note that this isn't the same as calling QA waste.

IMO QA is something that should be included throughout the task lifecycle. Sure, after a task is marked as complete there should be some sort of usability testing, but that isn't the sole job of QA. They should be working before tasks are even started by defining the exit criteria and writing integration tests. Giving QA its own step is wasteful because its effectively pigeonholing the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> quoting Linus: "There really are only two acceptable models of development: 'think and analyze' or 'years and years of testing on thousands of machines'"[1]

i would never say that "we don't need no stinking QA", but i do believe that teams who live by "think and analyse" need QA a lot less than teams who don't.

[1] [http://www.dustingetz.com/linus-think-and-analyze- motherfuck...](http://www.dustingetz.com/linus-think-and-analyze-motherfucker)

<comment><USER14> Actually, Linus seems to be saying: we have tested the crap out of this, and the patch broke something, and instead of playing guessing games, revert to the thoroughly tested version and think more closely about the problem before you submit stuff that _hasn't_ been tested on thousands of machines, and will likely break one of them (because you didn't understand the whole problem). This exchange doesn't really cast any light on whether you need _less_ QA. Instead, it seems to say: we rely on past tests to benchmark quality.

I have had my own problems with incompetent QA "engineers," but I do think an excellent QA team helps create an excellent product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For startups you usually don't have enough people to have QA team. Therefore you have to take a more lean approach: Build Quality In.

On the other hand, when you are building your MVP, progress is not built features, but validated learning. So QA tasks takes more of an approach of building measuring tools (which have to be done by the people building the MVP).

Even on a later stage startup, QA takes a whole new role, specially when you start doing continuous deployment and start developing immune systems. These can get quite complicated (think of Netflix Chaos Monkey[1]), and having a dedicated team can be beneficial.

What we don't need is a 20th century waterfallish QA. But ensuring the quality of a product[2] has never been more important.

[1] [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the- ch...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos- monkey.html)

[2] [http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the- pro...](http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-product/)

<comment><USER6> _Build Quality In_ isn't just something you do when you don't have the luxury of a QA department. It's something that you can do to prevent having to have a distinct QA department at all.

<comment><USER15> Agree. Having a seperate department can be helpful for large organizations, so that you can have one team supporting many products. However, if you prefer to hire generalists[1][2], then you can do away with it. Which is also a great away to mitigate Conway's Law[3]

[1] <http://jessicamah.com/the-ceos-job-part-2>

[2] [http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/12/5-myths-to-building- awesome-...](http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/12/5-myths-to-building-awesome- mobile-team.html)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing also needs to be mentioned, is that supportability of features also needs to be something that has to be addressed early on. The unintended consequence of continuing to support every single combination of every single option makes your support matrix, as well as your QA effort, enormous, and your code incredible unmaintainable.

I work at a company where they have a 5 year old product, and the mentality at the time was "Yes I know it doesn't make sense but if the user does X, then it could cause the server to crash, so let's do Y." This grew to a series of matrices that has now turned the act of adding 1 single feature into a 3 pages worth of "If A then B, otherwise C". This has made the QA effort in terms of testing incredibly complex, and even developers get confused as to what is supported and what isn't.

For example, there is an instance where copying a directory takes a different code path than copying a single file. Why? Because they wanted to "special case" this situation. It makes the functionality and behavior utterly unpredictable.

The takeaway that comes with experience is don't spend too much time trying to prevent your users from doing stupid things. If they want to do stupid things and the system crashes, it's okay to say "Don't do it, otherwise it will crash." This keeps your feature set, your code, and your QA effort much cleaner and more maintainable over the long haul.

</comment><comment><USER17> I worked with the Windows QA of XBox for a while and it was totally awesome to have super detailed information on bugs, where they occured and how often, with core dumps and stacks in case of crashes.

Users and bosses thinks they have done more than their duty when they said you that "it doesn't work", "nothing work" without more details. You have to run after them to get more context and detailed information.

I love QA.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm really glad to be working for a company that has the QA team involved from requirements to production (& maintenance thereafter).

One of the major problems can be keeping the newer people & graduates interested in the testing & QA process. There can be a lot of 'grinding' through test cases and I guess it takes a certain mentality to get through it on some days.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometime one must experience both side of the fences in the software development process.

I've been a QA, QA Developer, Developer, and Integrator during my internships.

QA is often the less honoured role of all. This creates a stigma that QA is some sort of crappy role to be in.

Being second class citizen requires more support than ever to work at the top day to day. Unfortunately, most people are not built that way so quality degrades because QA was treated like crap.

This leads to less advancement in the QA community because it's not a good role to be in. You only see a few books and a few noted experts in the QA community that continue to push better practices.

At the end of the day, it's a loss for all of us.

I wish there's none or minimum differences between QA and Developer as I agree with one of the comments here that if you do that, there will be more jobs created and IT professionals can experience different roles within our world.

My opinion is that QA should have a wide range of skills from load/performance testings (that means knowing the tools and statistics), automation testings (that means if DEV created hard-dependency issue that is not easily testable, QA should step in and teach DEV the patterns and best practices to avoid such situation), QA should understand business practices to beat up stupid Business Analysts.

More importantly, QA should keep track deficiencies and ineffectiveness during the development and potentially offer solution (or can be done through group discussions).

Unfortunately, that's not how the world works. Telling someone that he's not efficient or pointing out where the most bugs occurred when the team lead is the one whose responsible for the feature isn't desirable.

Not to mention that certain type of companies don't necessarily get the most ROI from having QA (if your typical Web 2.0 social networking tagging machine had a few issues, users probably complain but everyone will move on).

</comment><comment><USER20> Ugh. I worked QA years ago and swore to never do it again. Management hates you because you're telling them the product is not ready to ship. Developers hate you because you're pointing out their errors. No one has your back, and everyone wants to blame you.

The company had literally fired the whole testing department previously for saying the product wasn't ready. With those annoying testers out of the way, out the door it went. And promptly had multiple emergency point releases the following week to fix showstoppers cropping up at the customer sites.

That got them to create a testing department again - but it was still without honor in the company. And firing the whole group again was often discussed, as they were _still_ delaying releases by finding bugs!

I departed. They got eaten in a merger several months later.

<comment><USER21> Ugh indeed. And it's not like this issue hasn't been mentioned a time or two before now. Joel Spolsky in 2000: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html>

...and again in 2010: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/01/26.html>

...(with more than a couple of other mentions in between). I've worked at ISO 900x shops that worked to the letter of the law, so to speak, without actually understanding what software QA was all about. A really good tester is "chaotic neutral", and the best we can come up with as testers of our own work is "lawful evil".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Relevant: why QA jobs are more fun than developer jobs [http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/09/19/why-i-prefer-testing- over...](http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/09/19/why-i-prefer-testing-over-coding/)

</comment><comment><USER23> QA is the wrong solution to this particular problem. The problem is that in Java you can call methods on uninitialized objects. If Foo can "foo" and Bar can "bar", Foo can't "bar". But if you have "null", then suddenly it can "foo" and "bar" even though it's not a subtype of anything that can do that, and it doesn't implement those methods itself. Does that sound fucked up? Well, that's because it is.

QA is nice, but it's a finite resource that you should save for things that actually matter, not stupid things that a computer can fix for you in 30 seconds.

<comment><USER24> > If Foo can "foo" and Bar can "bar", Foo can't "bar". But if you have "null", > then suddenly it can "foo" and "bar" even though it's not a subtype of > anything that can do that, and it doesn't implement those methods itself.

Can't believe I'm defending Java's type system but I'm pretty sure you can only call bar on a null Foo (Foo f = null) if you cast it to a Bar first. Otherwise it'll fail to type check. What Java does allow you to do is call foo on a null Foo and in that case you get a null pointer exception at runtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would have liked to see a more realistic discussion of when QA helps the bottom line and when it doesn't. Plenty of software is sold and tolerated by users despite having bugs. If Microsoft waited until the bug count in Windows was 0, they would never ship, and would go out of business. In other words, this blog post is telling us that the correct amount of QA is higher than "no QA", but it is not helping us determine what the right amount of QA is.

<comment><USER26> As a former QA myself, we never insisted on the bug count being 0, instead we focused on the "critical" bug count being 0 and the "major" bug count being as close to 0 as possible before shipping the product. Often it comes down to a negotiation between QA, dev and product but a good company will give QA a great deal of input in when a product is ready to ship.

<comment><USER2> This strategy backfires when managers want the release out so they fight to lower the severity for every defect that is entered. Then they generate a report showing no high severity defects and release the software. Another common problem is a high number of low severity defects that make the software annoying to use.

I am not claiming that a bug count of zero is possible with most software, but testing quality in at the end is the wrong approach. Nothing affects quality as much as the skill level of the developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While I agree we need QA (today), I would like to see different expectations.. Expectations that over time we will need less and less QA work.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't have much to add to the discussion. I just want to vent a bit of frustration. I came in this morning and found out that 7 of my co-workers were just laid off. We are a 30 people company so thats quite a big deal. And some of my good co-workers in QA were axed. I guess some management guy thought QA was unnecessary. Oh this seems to start to look like 2008 all over again!

<comment><USER29> Sorry to hear that! Sounds like time to look for a new job as the best of days are behind you now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the big thing that confuses people is that at a lot of companies with QA, QA is really "testing and QA" testing can (and IMO should) be done by the developers, and when people have seen QA as primarily being testing, they think they can do without if the developers take on testing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Question:

When you're doing QA on a product, do you worry about border cases? I found quite a few bugs related to time syncing and inadequate safeguards in a project I worked on - but they were difficult to reproduce without a macro.

I'm still not sure whether people were happy or angry with me, for reporting all those bugs.

<comment><USER32> The good devs would be happy because those rare bugs you found could take them months (literally) to track down from user reports.

One company I worked at had both buffer overflow and timing problems and didn't dedicate the time to fixing either properly so easily half the bugs we found were the same giant ones (and thus always ignored even if crash-level). This slowed us incredibly as you can imagine. The timing bugs could cause really anything and the buffer overflows prevented us from stuffing commands properly which kept us from ever reliably reproducing the timing bugs.

Eventually one of the lead devs fought through the backlog and implemented scripting into the product itself and we were able to get a much better handle on things through more intensive and repeatable testing.

These days I expect the developer has written specs for their code at the unit level. How else do they know what they claim to be delivering? So the job of QA (or, as I'd prefer - just another developer playing QA) focuses more on testing the stuff the weird stuff, edge cases, etc.

Automate everything. Writing a system to parse screenshots to decide if your windows drew properly is cheaper, and sooner than you think, than manual testing. Especially if you count the cost of bugs you miss through inattention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I used to run a QA department for a large e-commerce company and love what this article has to say. Nothing gets executive attention like putting a dollar value on downtime (like $1k per minute on a slow day).

</comment><comment><USER33> I question how much good QA did for his project (Delta Graph), because it was so buggy it was nearly unusable.

</comment><comment><USER34> A quibble: Although I have never doubted the importance of QA in the web development process (it can save your bacon), in most cases I do find it rather absurd and bit of a mockery when those who practice QA in a web environment are allowed to have the word 'engineer' in their job title. Does anyone else agree?

<comment><USER35> Ask a _real_ engineer.

And by "real engineer", I mean one whose "engineer" is preceded by one of: agricultural, chemical, civil, electrical, environmental, industrial, mechanical, nuclear, or petroleum, and who is in possession of a state-issued license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I worked at a QA-heavy financial organisation.

The only reason they needed QA is the software was a giant toilet-clogging turd. There were no formal unit or integration test cases so it was used to catch regressions against massive test plans knocked up in Excel, Word and god-knows what else.</comment>


Google Cloud Dev Advocate Jailed at SXSW - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/francesc/status/708962573685641216 <comment><USER2> Before we turn into an angry mob, can we try to wait until more facts come out about this? Remember what you have heard so far is only one guy's side of the story.

In a different tweet the author said that it was for public intoxication. Austin is a big college town and throwing young guys into the drunk tank for public intoxication is a pretty common thing in these type of towns. And I am willing to bet that most people who are thrown into the drunk tank think they "did nothing wrong".

A reasonable explanation is this guy got a little tipsy and the police thought he was drunker than he was, threw him into a drunk tank to sober up, put a spit mask over his head in case (or because) he was being belligerent or he might puke, then released him once he was clearly sober.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is fair treatment. But for anyone who has spent years living in a college town populated by tens of thousands of drunk 20 somethings, it is at least understandable why the citizenry would want police to respond this way. It is also far from a sign that the US is racists as a whole or an (extra) reason we should be afraid of Trump which the author seemed to suggest in other tweets.

<comment><USER3> If anybody is acting rashly here, I think it's probably the police officers who profiled him, threw him in jail, put a bag over his head, and then charged him (after 2 drinks) with "public intoxication", because " we're racist" isn't an official charge.

But please keep calm, internet, I'm sure the police were in the right.

<comment><USER4> People shouldn't stay calm. Every time anyone accuses the police of anything we should immediately believe them and start shouting about injustice on the internet.

Nobody who has been arrested has ever been guilty, and filling up every public forum with accusations of injustice the instant we hear any rumor is a mature and effective way to fix the problems in the world.

It is completely reasonable for you to condemn the the police and assume they are guilty of near criminal behavior and bigotry based on the unsupported story someone you don't know personally is posting to Twitter. Most of the time people who just got out of jail are telling the truth, and we should just assume whatever they say is true and start calling for people to lose their jobs.

In fact, every time anyone is arrested then later say they are not guilty, all the police in the entire world are automatically racists.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly the problem. The police are obviously not always in the wrong, but when people automatically assume that, regardless of what victims say, the police are in the right, that's why nothing changes. Nobody is calling for anyone to lose their jobs based on a tweet, we're calling for people to pay attention, listen to the victims, and make sure this sort of behavior is investigated and that people are held accountable.

<comment><USER4> You said yourself in the comment I replied to that these police profiled him because they are racist, and that he did nothing wrong.

Since you don't know the person that was arrested (I assume), and you don't know the police who arrested him, you must have some more general way to know that the police here are racists that are profiling him, right? Maybe you know that they are racists because you know all police are racists? Or is it just police in this Country or this State or this City? Maybe 'all police on the night shift' are racist? I don't know how you knew they were racists, but you said it, so I assume you are reasonable to believe it, and there must be a logical way that you figured it out from information you know is true.

As for how you knew this person was innocent, well, since you don't know him, didn't witness any of the events, and only know 'a person was arrested and said it wasn't their fault', the logic from above must apply. You must have made a logical inference that he is innocent. How do you know it?

How do you know that the police here are racists that profiled this person who did nothing wrong? If it is based entirely on the evidence that this person said they did nothing wrong, and that the person tweeted that they were arrested for no reason because the police are racist, well then you must believe everyone who says they didn't do it and that police are racist (or at least the ones that work for Google? or that use Twitter? I'm not sure how you were able to solve this, please let us know.) In that case it would imply that all police are racists, since all police arrest people who later claim to be innocent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been locked up over 20 times in my life.

Everytime I've been to jail, there are newbies in the holding cells that cry "I didn't do anything" and can't believe how horrible and mean all the CO's are.

And everytime, if and when I go to First Appearance with them, it turns out they very much did something quite illegal that got them arrested in the first place, and its almost always something then did not want to discuss while they were whining in the holding cell.

If your are new to jail, every fucking _hour_ seems like an entire day and the powerlessness of the situation seems beyond comprehension.

BTW, it designed like that so, you know, you don't ever want to come back. That's the whole point.

<comment><USER6> > BTW, it designed like that so, you know, you don't ever want to come back. > That's the whole point.

Seems to contradict

> I have been locked up over 20 times in my life.

Now going on the assumption that you did not _want_ to go back it looks as if that alone is not enough to stop it from happening.

<comment><USER5> Well you know, lifelong addiction is a real bitch, and every instance of jail was due to it in one form or another.

It took me 25 years and utterly wrecked relationships with my brother, closest old friends, and my lovely ex-wife to start to begin to see the light.

None of them really talk to me anymore, even though I've been pretty much clean for years now.

I drove for 18 years on a suspended license that I was unable to get reinstated for 5 years at time because I spent the ticket money on dope. Many of my arrests were due to driving issues, but certainly not all.

It's been a real mess, and I'm tired. Maybe someone going down that path will read this and think about what I'm saying.

<comment><USER6> Holy crap that's a tough one. My dad was a serious alcoholic, I've seen from the front row what addiction can do to you and your relationships with others and if anything that taught me in the harshest way imaginable to a young kid to stay away from stuff that I'm not equipped to deal with even in moderation. My dads funeral was a 'small' affair. As in, the only people present there were two friends from his student days, his wife and my sister, me and my eldest. Everybody else either didn't want to come or was told to stay away by his wife. For someone who got to be 69 (in spite of all the booze) you'd expect a few more people to show up but his relationships with the rest of the world were so bad that he died quite lonely.

It looks - by your writing - as though you've come out the other end of this and are on your way to a better life, congratulations, it must have been extremely hard to get to where you are today, I don't think my dad would have been able to achieve what you have done no matter how much time he would have had.

<comment><USER5> I am sorry to hear about your Dad, and its very ironic in a way...both of my grown sons are super careful about substances so I think I get what you are saying.

I often think the only silver lining to the wreck-that-is-my-life is that I left such an ugly imprint on them both that neither of them really touch anything "evil", and I am incredibly proud of both of them, as I am sure your Dad was of you.

Yeah whew...thank you very much for your kind words BTW. To tell the truth the hard part isn't staying totally sober these days, the hard part is trying to find a place in society for a 50yo man who has none of the obvious material trappings of a successful life and a whole shitstorm of dirty laundry that is only a Google search away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone's story about 'why they just got arrested' is probably not one you can really take at face value.

People who did nothing will usually say they did nothing.

People who committed a crime or were very unruly or unsafely intoxicated will also usually say they did nothing.

Let's not start sharpening the pitchforks quite yet.

This could be a ridiculous and completely unjust situation!

However, it could also be that this person got very drunk while partying and did something stupid, and either remembers it incorrectly (see 'drunk') or is terrified of losing their job and wants to set the narrative.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I don't know what happened at SXSW, but this Twitter conversation is a disaster in itself.

        Mr Spandex @Manfeelings90  12h12 hours ago

        @strobist He was treated EXACTLY how he wants his
        opponents treated. He helped create this Culture of
        fear over "harassment"

        0 retweets 0 likes

\--

        Be Just & Fear Not @SuperNerdMike  21h21 hours ago
        .@francesc Did you try spitting on the cops by chance?
        0 retweets 3 likes
        Reply   Retweet

        Brussel Sprout @TheIxxer  21h21 hours ago
        @SuperNerdMike can I take bets that he got drunk, belligerent. Police came,
        he called them bigots and spat at them. Now he cries oppression.
        1 retweet 5 likes

        Be Just & Fear Not @SuperNerdMike  21h21 hours ago
        @TheIxxer Let's make a pool.
        0 retweets 4 likes

        Caffeine Commissar @CaffComm  21h21 hours ago
        My money is not on trusting the guy who made his profile picture look like
        he has a halo.
        @SuperNerdMike @TheIxxer

... that's rough. Do these people know something I don't? Or is this really what Twitter gets like once you get exposure?

<comment><USER8> > ... that's rough. Do these people know something I don't? Or is this really > what Twitter gets like once you get exposure?

It is what Twitter is like when you get some exposure unfortunately. Trolls, racists, etc. come out of the woodwork.

<comment><USER9> You could apply this to almost any amount of popularity look at what people say about Donald Trump.

<comment><USER8> Yes. It isn't twitter specific but to be fair, Donald Trump engages in alot of behavior that encourages that.

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/opinion-trump-latest- pied...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/opinion-trump-latest-pied-piper- dog-whistle-politics-n397326)

<comment><USER9> Are you victim blaming?

<comment><USER8> If you say blatantly racist things, you aren't a victim.

<comment><USER9> If they are blatantly racist you wouldnt have any trouble quoting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i was hit by a cop in his car in austin walking home from dinner with my so

he slammed on his brakes the moment he realised and the first thing out of his mouth was, 'sir! back up onto the curb!(to my so) sir! sir, have you been drinking?'

my so and i replied, 'WHAT?! you hit me, there is still 10 seconds on the walk clock!' pointing at the crosswalk clock for our direction.. the cop ran his red light

the next second three other cop cars sped onto the scene blocking the traffic in three directions

all of their officers got out of their vehicles and rushed over to the officer who hit me and asked him, 'what's going on here?'

then he walked them out of earshot and was gesturing wildly with his hands and pointed at us

i walked over to their kafka'esque huddle and stated, 'why are you asking him? he's the one who struck me with his vehicle'

they asked for 'my version' of the story then if i needed an ambulance to come and take me to the er, and i said i would be unable to afford an ambulance and hospital stay so they said, 'well, then everything is fine here' and all four officers got in their cars and drove off

leaving my so and i in the middle of the intersection of 7th and melina confused and infuriated

if i was alone i'm sure i would have been bagged as well for following the rules of road but finding myself under the bumper of a red light running cop

the fact that this was during sxsw 2014 had previously been uninteresting to me

..edit, said 'last year' but i lived in austin in 2014, yup, time flies

</comment><comment><USER11> I've never known anyone who acted reasonably have a spit mask put over their face. Only place I was arrested. I was off the charts drunk and treated 100% fairly. Long hair and all. Just because some John Oliver show etc, doesn't mean Texas is all the same. Nor can you take the behavior of one volunteer and extrapolate to the rest of Texas. I honestly expect higher discourse from this news aggregator site.

</comment><comment><USER12> SXSW also refused to give a US Olympian her badge until she removed her hijab: [https://twitter.com/IbtihajMuhammad/status/70872225098001203...](https://twitter.com/IbtihajMuhammad/status/708722250980012034?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

<comment><USER11> It was one volunteer. How stupid can you be? It was not "SXSW".

<comment><USER13> Go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be helpful if the story had any details, to know what to provide useful comment on...

</comment><comment><USER15> That is really fucked up. The threshold for chucking someone in a cell needs to be higher than hearsay.

<comment><USER16> I would look at this from a different point of view -- give people recourse against this kind of nonsense. Reduce the barrier for people to rightly protect themselves and help them wherever necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about withholding judgment until more facts are known, please.

</comment><comment><USER6> With a bag on his head? WTF?

<comment><USER18> _> It seems what they used to cover my head was a spit mask..._

[https://twitter.com/francesc/status/709161902631424004](https://twitter.com/francesc/status/709161902631424004)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Finally got out of the Austin police station for no

> apparent reason other than "public intoxication"

> I had 2 glass of bourbon

> Thanks, Texas!

I've been drunk in Austin myself, and it's pretty scary to think that I could have been detained. Probably won't visit again.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder who pointed him out and why

</comment><comment><USER20> There is far more to this story. Wait for it to come out before you jump to conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER13> AKA, "why I don't miss the US after leaving 8 years ago." They'll lock you up for breathing the wrong way there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Speaks foreign language, has a beard, and Texas.

Sounds about right.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I think it's because of the beard.

I have myself similar problems but for different reasons.

<comment><USER23> I can't imagine a place which has less tolerance for beards than Austin, Texas.

<comment><USER22> The opposite is true in Iran.

<comment><USER24> ZZ Top intersects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought this is what we wanted it? The ability to point at someone claim they're a harasser/suspicious and get them bagged and tagged? Have I missed the memo were that's not the modus operandi of recent efforts for combating harassment?

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is this crap making it to the top of ycombinator? I am perfectly happy seeing SXSW not screw with Austin for a week. This guy was probably detained for suspicion of a crime. Austin cops have their problems but are not particularly bad in any regard. Austin is a very safe city and one of the few to not have any "mass shootings" in recent history. Austin's big problem is the gentrification brought on by class conscious geeks constantly moving there.

<comment><USER26> There have been a number of mass shootings in Austin, with many fatalities. A quick google search will find details. Also, safe is an arbitrary thing.

<comment><USER27> > Also, safe is an arbitrary thing.

What does that even mean?

If you're saying that dividing cities into "safe" and "not safe" requires an arbitrary threshold, then yes, it's arbitrary where you set the threshold. But even then, you can non-arbitrarily label cities as "safer" and "less safe" when compared to each other.

But if you mean that the _concept_ of "safe" is arbitrary: Safe means that there's a lower chance ( _not_ zero!) that I'll be on the receiving end of crime. Less chance that I'll be put in the hospital (or in the ground) or have my stuff stolen. That translates into less worry and less attention that I have to pay to keeping myself safe. (It does _not_ mean that I can pay no attention!) That "less worry" and "less chance of being injured or killed" are not arbitrary. They make a real, concrete difference in my life.

<comment><USER26> I was more hinting at the idea that places that are "safe" for one group of people (often white middle-class people) are incredibly unsafe for other groups of people.

If safe/unsafe is dependant on who you are, then calling a place "safe" or even "safer" needs lots of provisos.

Anyway, bad choice of words. In retrospect "safe is a relative thing" gets closer to what I mean.

<comment><USER27> Ah. I hadn't thought about _who_ is safe. Good point.

And I agree that "safe is a relative thing".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We found over 10000 bugs in various open source projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0421/ <comment><USER2> I just love this one: [http://www.viva64.com/en/examples/V504/](http://www.viva64.com/en/examples/V504/)

      void GlyphComboBox::update(SPFont* spfont)
      {
        if (!spfont) return // <=
      //TODO: figure out why do we need to append("")
      // before clearing items properly...

      //Gtk is refusing to clear the combobox
      //when I comment out this line
        this->append("");
        this->remove_all();
      }

Gee, why do you need the dummy append? It's because you put in so many TODO comments that you concealed the missing semicolon that you otherwise might have found ...

This is arguably not a bug; the developer tested the code, massaged it into working as expected, using what look like well-defined constructs, and documented their surprise at certain aspects of the code, leaving this issue easy to find with a grep for TODO.

On another note, what is surprising here is that they didn't catch it with their compiler. Look, the function returns void. GCC has a diagnostic for this, something like "return with expression in a function returning void". I think that still kicks in even if that expression has void type.

<comment><USER3> Gcc will not issue diagnostic if you return a "void expression" because doing so is valid in C++.

<comment><USER2> It could still be a warning, since doing so is dubious in C++ even if it is allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I take from this: computer languages (C++ especially, but also systems built in C) are too complex for the average mind

No, I'm not significantly smarter than the average programmer

That's what needs to be addressed.

While C++ facilitates things, it is complex. While C is very simple it makes mistakes easier by requiring things to be done manually

IDEs don't help. Code completion is helpful but it is of limited help

And we keep repeating ourselves every time we write a for loop

<comment><USER5> >computer languages (C++ especially, but also systems built in C) are too complex for the average mind

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but have you looked at the source code [1] of the Apollo Guidance computer [2]? This software was shipped to production 50 years ago. It literally implements a "self-driving space rocket." It is staggering that this was completed in such a short time and actually worked.

The code is written entirely in the "Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) Assembly" language. The hardware that it was written for had to be invented in at the same time, and was the world's first computer to use Integrated Circuits ("chips"). They also implemented a Real-Time Operating System with a multi- task priority scheduler, as well as a virtual machine and assembly interpreter within the software.

This was mission and life safety critical code, the risk involved boggles the mind. And yet the software was incredibly reliable. It was so reliable that it even saved the Apollo 11 crew and mission during the lunar descent by famously recovering from a peripheral hardware bug.

I honestly do not know how this feat was even humanly possible, but I do know that these programmers did not rely on "code completion."

[1] [https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer)

<comment><USER6> >I honestly do not know how this feat was even humanly possible

The Apollo program, fixed for inflation, was something like $130 billion dollars. That's buys you a lot of talent, testing, etc. Its also worth noting that the program wasn't without its screw ups. The Apollo 1 deaths. The radar control on Apollo 11 eating up all the CPU during lunar landing. Apollo 13's famous O2 tank explosion.

I think you may be glamorizing something that was well done, but falls within the realm of 'you get what you pay for' and the occasional human error, which in the case of Apollo 1, turned out to be fatal. I wouldn't call a program with three deaths and an aborted lunar insert to be infallible.

That said, NASA/JPL publish code standards, although I imagine most tech companies would balk at giving up their toys and hot languages/frameworks to do fairly tedious work like this.

[http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/](http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/)

<comment><USER7> >That said, NASA/JPL publish code standards, although I imagine most tech companies would balk at giving up their toys and hot languages/frameworks to do fairly tedious work like this.

For most companies developing non-critical software, applying such harsh coding standards will not be cost effective after all. The cost of you browser crashing is not nearly as high as the cost of a crashing rocket...

Besides, even NASA sometimes makes mistakes: [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0416/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0416/)

<comment><USER6> Agreed, there are reasons why we do certain things a certain way. But in the age of ransomware and endless cyberwars and nation state spoofing maybe the idea that browsers and other internet facing applications should be barely- shippable shit code is antiquated.

<comment><USER7> You can't protect everything, but I'm sure they have a secure browser at NSA )

<comment><USER8> NSA just uses isolation approach in air gaps or hypervisors like these:

The high-assurance community in academia and commercial sectors keep building secure browsers, though. One, OP browser, was inspiration for Chrome security model. They severely weakened it for performance. IBOS is probably most interesting. There's links at the comment below.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9969961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9969961)

Quark kernel is one that's not in that comment for some reason:

[http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/](http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/)

<comment><USER8> I just realized I forgot the link with their hypervisors. It doesn't matter because most of them suck. You're better off not seeing it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many of the errors are just coding irregularities. Half are really good catches; but half are of the 'lint' sort. Still worth reviewing in case an actual mistake was made.

<comment><USER10> Right, and so I've developed the view that the most interesting quality of a static analysis tool is not "how many bugs does it find" but "how many of the things it points out are false positives" and (if you want to be really tough) "how many of the things it points out are likely to cause problems for a real user or be actually exploitable by an attacker". Most software projects already have a huge list of bugs they haven't fixed yet, so a tool that identifies 10 easy to fix real bugs is great, but a tool that mixes those 10 real bugs in with a hundred false positives is much less useful, simply because of the time it takes somebody to sift through the list...

<comment><USER8> Yes. I initially promoted all kinds of static analysis. These days, I'm firmly convinced the friction aspect means the tool needs to be plug-n-play with almost no false positives. Ideally no false positives at all. That maximizes uptake and knocks out many bugs even if more remain.

Another thing I think advocates need to do with lists of such tools is always mention that each one might see errors another won't. This needs to be a refrain that instantly is in people's minds when they wonder about using such tools. Reason is that many make the mistakes of thinking one tool not finding anything means (a) tools don't find stuff in general or (b) there's nothing to find. That implication is even on SQLlite testing page where they applied Clang's analyzer then implied a weaker tool finding nothing in a good codebase meant static analysis itself had nothing to offer (?!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here are the classes of bugs: [http://www.viva64.com/en/examples/](http://www.viva64.com/en/examples/)

I'm no expert, but it looks like most of these would be caught by the Rust compiler at the time they were typed in.

<comment><USER12> Yes. That's why they don't like rust: [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/)

<comment><USER13> That ... is pretty jarring. Their arguments boil down to:

a) No one wants to use a "minor" language, so it will never get traction

b) It's slow (citation: the Benchmarks Game)

c) Static and dynamic analysis can find anything anyways, so what's the point?

First off, anyone who is seriously citing the Benchmarks Game as to making a definitive declaration of whether a language is slow or fast is intellectually dishonest. It's a game (as its name illustrates), so it reflects more the effort that people put in to try to optimize code rather than a comparison of "idiomatic" code. A case in point: the fastest program in C uses SSE intrinsics for its implementation.

Given that they're selling a static analyzer, I would expect them to make the case for analysis. However, it's worth addressing the limitations. Almost no project has 100% test coverage, and even having test coverage isn't necessarily a cure for having no problems (IOC still found undefined overflows in SQLite, which is the only open source project I know of to have 100% line and branch coverage in their test suite). To my knowledge, there still exists no tools that can identify strict-aliasing violations or ODR violations. It's also worth minding Dijkstra's aphorism: testing cannot prove the absence of bugs, only their presence. Static analysis in C/C++ has to face the additional problem of the inability to write a precise pointer analysis--something that Rust's type-safety would fix.

<comment><USER14> > First off, anyone who is seriously citing the Benchmarks Game as to making a > definitive declaration of whether a language is slow or fast is > intellectually dishonest.

But Rust is actually significantly slower than C++, that's for sure. You're welcome to test it by yourself.

<comment><USER15>
      >  You're welcome to test it by yourself.

If this is true, please file bugs. They're treated as such.

<comment><USER16> A Rust k-nucleotide program based on std::collections::hash_map would be welcome.

Edit (2017-02-09):

Here are Rust k-nucleotide programs -

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=knucleotide&lang=rust&id=1)

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=knucleotide&lang=rust&id=2)

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=knucleotide&lang=rust&id=3)

<comment><USER15> I don't know the history here, but

[https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame- rs/blob/master/src...](https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame- rs/blob/master/src/k_nucleotide.rs)

[https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame- rs/issues/34](https://github.com/TeXitoi/benchmarksgame-rs/issues/34) (though some things have changed since these comments...)

<comment><USER16> k_nucleotide.rs implements it's own hash table, and that is no longer accepted: k-nucleotide programs that do that have been removed.

Hence --

        k-nucleotide

        source 	secs 	KB 	gz 	cpu 	cpu load
      	    No program 	contribute your program

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/rust.html)

<comment><USER15> What about languages that do not include their own hash tables? C is allowed to, but Rust is not?

<comment><USER16> No, the C programs are not allowed to implement their own hash table -- and as a consequence no C k-nucleotide program was shown for a couple of months.

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/knucleotide- des...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/knucleotide- description.html#knucleotide)

Rust std::collections provides hash table implementations, it's just a matter of using them.

<comment><USER15>
      > some use a third-party hash table library.

This is what I'm getting at. Since C doesn't provide a built-in hash table, they get to choose one that's good on this benchmark, but other languages can't. That's not great.

(I actually have no idea if the std::collections hashmap is deficient in some way, I care about this in the abstract, not specifically.)

<comment><USER16> No, they don't "get to choose one that's good on this benchmark".

They get to use a third-party library that was _not invented for this benchmark_ \-- that would be the point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't know what tone the article title is going for. Is it meant to imply that open source software is somehow buggier than closed source? Or simply that they made open source software better by finding these bugs.

If the former, it's worth noting that these are 10,000 bugs that are visible _because_ the software is FOSS. Closed source software uses code analyzers/linters too. I worked on a piece of proprietary software where we had a giant spreadsheet for the several hundred bugs and other minor issues that flawfinder found on our software. Those will never get disclosed to the public.

<comment><USER18> > I don't know what tone the article title is going for.

Did you really not? Then you have not read enough articles in the viva64 blog. :-)

The tone is always "Static analysis with PVS-Studio is a great way to find bugs in projects and it would be a good way to use PVS-Studio for your projects, too".

<comment><USER19> Of course this is marketing, that is obvious from the title alone. The open source projects give them a means to post a high numbers of bugs found by their magical product. For a high number they just have to scan more products, they can even decide to omit the projects that didn't trigger much bugs. They can't post the results from paying customers in a marketing stunt like this.

They mention that they let the developers of the open source projects know about the issues they find. I am wondering how much time the developers get to patch up before they post their results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sad but not surprising.

</comment><comment><USER21> Now I challenge you to find 10000 software contributors.

<comment><USER22> You can find tons of tickets from PVS-Studio in many bug-trackers :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In other news: people who do things in their spare time often make mistakes and do slipshod work.

<comment><USER24> Projects like Chromium and ChakraCore are not being written in anyone's "spare time." It would be nice if people would stop conflating Open Source with unpaid hobby work. The projects analyzed in this story represent billions in paid labor.

<comment><USER23> In other news: people who have to focus on detail oriented tasks often make mistakes.

Happy now? Sheesh.

<comment><USER24> _people who have to focus on detail oriented tasks often make mistakes_

Whether they're paid well or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> People shouldn't be writing code at all. A lot of testing and small code corrections should be automated at the very least. We have the iron, lets put it to work.

<comment><USER26> So who writes the automation, then?

<comment><USER27> Isn't that like asking "So who builds the assembly lines, then?" way back when?</comment></comment></comment>


Google Accused of Creating Spy Tool to Squelch Worker Dissent - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-23/google-accused-of-creating-spy-tool-to-squelch-worker-dissent <comment><USER2> >A representative for Alphabet Inc.'s Google said, "These claims about the operation and purpose of this extension are categorically false. This is a pop-up reminder that asks people to be mindful before auto-adding a meeting to the calendars of large numbers of employees."

This sounds a lot more plausible than Google creating a chrome extension to access data they already own. This article is nonsense.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 Bloomberg has been making lots of dumb tech articles lately...

This one, "the big hack" fiasco, and another one like 2 weeks ago I can't remember the title of...

</comment><comment> brown9-2 I find it hard to believe that Google would build a custom Chrome extension for this - they already own Google Calendar and all of the data in employee's calendars.

<comment><USER3> So why bother with an extension then?

As you point out, they own Calendar, they could just add it there.

<comment> brown9-2 As the spokesperson says in the article, they might genuinely want to nag people who create excessive meeting invites. Perhaps someone thought there was no need to bake this into the Calendar application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like the lesson here is really, "if you're organizing a big group to hurt some other party, do it where they're not watching". Want to hold a meeting to talk about how you and 300 other people are unhappy with working conditions at Google? Why are you organizing it in Google Calendar in the first place? _Why are you doing it on your work computer?_

<comment><USER5> Some workplaces are really open and support their employees. I know cynics will say that can't be trusted, but as someone who has worked for FAANG companies, I did see a lot of employees venting anything and everything without fear of management.

<comment><USER6> >Some workplaces are really open and support their employees.

Which is why they colluded to suppress wages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The allegation here is pretty weak. They just report large meetings, which can have many purposes.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://archive.is/ZbJnx](http://archive.is/ZbJnx)

</comment><comment><USER9> You can't have a union organization relying on employer resources.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a general mitigation for Google spying attempts, I'd encourage Google employees to switch to Firefox.

Also, why is this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just use means of communicating outside of the Corp network already.

Personal email list, slack, discord, blind, etc.</comment>


Introducing Trusted Contacts - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/introducing-trusted-contacts/10151362774980766

<comment><USER2> What if one of my "friends" masks as me? Or worse, what if they form clique against me?</comment>


New look for StartPage - <AUTHOR> https://new.startpage.com/ <comment><USER2> I nearly had a heart attack today when there was a sidebar banner image about this that I mistook for a banner ad.

As punishment for scaring me, I blocked it with uBlock.</comment>


Airbnb Burglary Victim Says Company Tried to Quiet Her - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/airbnb-robbery-victim-says-company-tried-to-quiet-her/2011/07/29/gIQA7R03gI_blog.html

<comment><USER2> From <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

        Please submit the original source. If a blog post
        reports on something they found on another site,
        submit the latter.

This article seems to add nothing that isn't already in the original blog post, submitted and discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820615>

If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate some indication as to what this article adds, because I've missed it.

</comment><comment>==

ADDED IN EDIT: I remain completely perplexed by down-votes on this sort of comment. I see I get them, but I just don't understand. The submission is just duplicating something already submitted, it contravenes the explicit site guidelines, and it risks splitting and therefore replicating discussion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't you?

I would most certainly at least try to get the user to remove the blog post or update it.</comment>


Pokemon Go Is Already in Decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-22/these-charts-show-that-pokemon-go-is-already-in-decline <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12343890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12343890)

</comment><comment><USER3> The analysis seems a bit off, I'd attribute the reduced interest in Pokemon Go almost entirely to game implementation specific gaffes, and lack of depth in the particular game rather than any sort of indicator regarding augmented reality.

</comment><comment><USER4> already? about time I say ;)</comment>


How to check if 100 computers are serviceable? - <AUTHOR> I am a bit overwhelmed. I have tunnel vision, and I just need an outside opinion. I have 150 thinclient computers, that I need to check if they a.) work b.) have working memory/CPU. I want to first see which ones would work. You all have any ideas? They are not on a network, they are in a storage closet. <comment><USER2> That's roughly 12-16 hours work assuming 5-10 minutes per machine. Worst case, first pass. And you can improve on it pretty easy. If it were me, I would do a first pass check: "who has a heart beat?" Just blast through them and eliminate the obvious duds.

Round up a couple, maybe few light, cheap monitors, some longer cables, and lug the whole mess into a room with some floor space.

Get a friend or two, setup some power strips, line 'em up, and plug them in. Do batches. Maybe 5 to 10 a pop.

Will they do anything useful on power up, even if that's to display some kind of status screen?

Best case is you plug monitor in and see that. Worst case, is you plug monitor and keyboard in and have to smack a key or something to see if they've got a heart beat.

This kind of first pass sort can potentially save you a lot of time. Put your focus into the functional ones and a better setup.

You can get this done in a day. Even if it's just you, maybe they only need a few minutes each, and you can overlap some of that by working in groups of several machines.

Get pizza, coffee, whatever and just bust it out. That isn't the whole task, but will give you the lay of the land.

While doing that work, formulate how to setup a more functional test bed. Offload that onto someone, or chip away at it for a couple hours each day. Or, bust that out too.

Have you got a deadline, or is this just a PITA?

If deadline, do the math and get help from somewhere, maybe from whoever stuck you with a pile of thin clients! And if it's you, well?

Just do it. Quick, dirty. Get it over with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this. Motivated. Get it over with.

<comment><USER2> Seriously. It's almost always the best way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea man. I wish I had cooler stuff to do, but its gotta get done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems odd that thin clients wouldnt be "networkable", a pixe boot server on a network would probably be the fastest way to test them. Hopefully they have a verbose post setting in the bios otherwise I suppose you could make a few live usb sticks to test them. Then its just a matter of swapping parts on the ones that wont boot till you find the problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are network capable. It's just they are not on the network. I would need to set up a PXE server and connect them. I figured there might be another way besides that, but after thinking about it, I will probably do something like dis.</comment></comment>


Pitching Sequoia? Here's the big question you'll need to answer - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/20/sequoias-why-now/

<comment><USER2> Now that was a good PandoDaily article. Short, succinct, but valuable. I wish we got more of this kind of article on HN!

Personally, I've spent a lot of time thinking about various "important questions" that I've gleaned from sources like: watching videos of pg doing office hours, reading pg essays, reading VC blogs, reading Steve Blank's material, etc. Also my $DAYJOB boss, acoliver, is big on harping on the question "what problem does this solve?" (a pg favorite) and "who can the business owner fire if they acquire your solution"?

And despite all that, I'd never encountered this question before, at least not in this form. It certainly isn't one of "the questions" I try to have an answer to. It will be now.

Of course, it isn't about Sequoia, or any other specific firm... it's a good, solid question that helps you focus on important aspects of your business. Is it a technology thing? Is it a market thing? Is it a public opinion or demographics thing? Something regulatory? Whatever "it" is, you should probably know about it if you have really figured out your market, your technology, etc.

I'm looking forward to digging deep on this vis-a-vis Fogbeam Labs, but here's quick, off the cuff answer for us:

"Because the world is moving towards Open Source software and we believe that most important self-hosted enterprise software is going to be OSS in the future. Additionally, computing power and scalability necessary to do the complex machine learning operations that we need, are now widely available and affordable. And finally, because improving internal knowledge transfer and process efficiency is one of the few remaining areas to gain a sustainable competitive advantage".

(Aside: for anybody who doesn't know what we're working on, it's OSS software that works at the intersection of Knowledge Management, Information Retrieval, Social Networking and BPM. Think "Facebook for the Enterprise" (kinda like Jive or Yammer) but with a much deeper level of integration into business process and workflows.)

<comment><USER3> _the world is moving towards Open Source software..._

I'm not so sure, and if it is, it's happening slooowly.

I've read other (insightful) comments of yours about Flogbeam Labs and you sure are passionate. So much so you might be seeing trends that aren't there.

All I'm saying is beware of that cognitive bias.

<comment><USER2> _I'm not so sure, and if it is, it's happening slooowly._

Oh, absolutely. But this isn't _entirely_ a case of wishful thinking with no foundation. I'd have to stop and spend time to dig up the links, but there have been more than a few analyst reports and what-not, including by the big boys like Gartner and so-on, saying the same thing.

We've also heard this from customers. Just to give one example... we sat down with some people from a major bank (they're in the Fortune 250) and asked them some of these questions. What we heard was "5 years ago, OSS would have been a non-starter. Now, we're actively looking to use more OSS because we believe it delivers better value".

That said, we're not saying that Oracle is going to go away anytime soon, but there are a lot of signs there. Going back to Oracle for a minute, their acquisition of MySQL says something. And Red Hat breaking the billion dollar mark in revenue last year is also an encouraging sign.

 _All I'm saying is beware of that cognitive bias._

Well said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is actually one of the most important questions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Skipping the cruft, the question is "Why now?"

</comment><comment><USER6> This question seems important if the startup is the first to move into a specific area, but ones that improve execution IMO dont really answer this well. For example, what would the answer have been for Google?

<comment><USER4> Actually Google would have had one of the clearest answers: that the web is growing to the point where (a) search matters a lot and (b) ranking results based on textual similarity is no longer enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This a typical example of VC rationalization, built on a sandy foundation of survivor's bias. YouTube's 'Why now?' might more accurately be answered, "because we just made people a ton of money on PayPal and there's a lot of venture capital sloshing around looking for a credible home." The company lost money for five years, so without the Google buyout, 'now' might not have turned out to be such a great time. Just ask MySpace, the number 2 video- sharing site when YouTube got snapped up. Good thing Moritz was on the Google board at the time of the investment. I wonder how many times Hurley and Chen had to rehearse to pitch to Sequoia?</comment>


The Company Behind the Super Bowl Coin Toss - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-super-bowl-coin-toss/ <comment><USER2> This is the most interesting story I've read in the build-up to the Super Bowl. Much more interesting than all the fluff pieces about an obscure, special teams player.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link currently appears to be boofed.</comment>


A Starter Theme for WordPress by Automattic - <AUTHOR> http://underscores.me/

<comment><USER2> TL;DR: underscores is a GPL Wordpress theme that makes a good base for building your own Wordpress theme.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried to use _s for a project and it was very bloated. This looks much better although what the generator only does is to rename the theme.

Hopefully this becomes the official starter theme with a much more powerful generator to support it.

<comment><USER4> It's actually the exact same thing ;) the generator simply takes care of all the search and replace you have to do to get started with _s, nothing more, nothing less :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that Toolbox (also from Automattic) is the best minimalist theme that you can use for building a theme from scratch.

<http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/toolbox>

<comment><USER6> _s is actually a fork of Toolbox. Ref: [https://github.com/Automattic/_s/commit/edfeccc2557e899cf0b8...](https://github.com/Automattic/_s/commit/edfeccc2557e899cf0b8297e9c5304725c862818)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> sigh... css reset, once again.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that being less popular than normalize is worth of a sigh. A reset is still better than nothing.

<comment><USER7> I completely disagree with that. I will take a standard empty css file over a reset any day. Resets will end up adding so much more work.</comment></comment></comment>


UK IP Review - Final Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf

<comment><USER2> There's some good news on patents at least:

"In Europe, in contrast to Japan and the US, there are restrictions laid down by the EPC on how far computer programs may be patented. Programs considered to make a "technical contribution" – such as controlling a robot, or making the internal operation of a computer more efficient – can be patented; general application programs – such as word processing software – cannot."

...

"In this case, the Review believes the balance of evidence lies in continuing to withhold patent recognition of non-technical computer programs as part of a sustained effort to deal with the growing and dangerous problem of thickets. The UK should seek to convince its European partners of the force of this case.

Similar considerations apply to the patenting of business methods (for example, particular pricing and marketing schemes) which are also allowed in the US but not in Europe – and unlike in the computer program area, there is no sizeable European lobby arguing for their patenting. Here, the correct course is clear: Europe should continue to resist the patenting of business methods."

<comment><USER3> _"Recommendation: Patent thickets and other obstructions to innovation.

In order to limit the effects of these barriers to innovation, the Government should:

• take a leading role in promoting international efforts to cut backlogs and manage the boom in patent applications by further extending "work sharing" with patent offices in other countries;

• work to ensure patents are not extended into sectors, such as non-technical computer programs and business methods, which they do not currently cover, without clear evidence of benefit;

• investigate ways of limiting adverse consequences of patent thickets, including by working with international partners to establish a patent fee structure set by reference to innovation and growth goals rather than solely by reference to patent office running costs. The structure of patent renewal fees might be adjusted to encourage patentees to assess more carefully the value of maintaining lower value patents, so reducing the density of patent thickets."_

Let's hope Vince Cable and the rest of the government take these recommendations seriously and are not looking across the atlantic through rose tinted spectacles (as many of the Conservatives seem to be doing w.r.t. some other areas of economic policy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The section on patents is definitely worth a read.

Quote:

 _A higher total volume of patents leads to increasing transaction costs, particularly in markets which are patent intensive. The cost/benefit trade-off of the patent system may shift away from the socially optimal position – i.e. where innovation incentive benefits outweigh transaction costs by the largest margin._

And (sequential here refers to innovation that gradually build on past innovation, with computer programs specifically mentioned as a case of that):

 _This means that while for non-sequential inventions, such as a new drug or medical treatment, having a patent system generally yields higher welfare than not having one; in a fully sequential case, higher welfare and more innovation may be more likely to result from the absence of patenting opportunities. Over time, as digital technology becomes pervasive across the economy, this represents a serious concern._

At least they have a very good understanding of the problem of software patents.

</comment><comment><USER5> You might want to change the title of the post. For a while there, I thought it was about hte United Kingdom Independance Party (UKIP).

Maybe that's just me, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Alas, I fear that this review (like Gowers before it) will be respected only to the extent that it suits special interest groups. As the report itself notes on many occasions, it is important for policy in this sort of area to be evidence-led, and this has often not been the case to date.

The report itself seems like a fairly realistic assessment of the current situation and at least advocates some steps in the right direction for the future, though, so let's hope it does better than other recent efforts.</comment>


Ask HN: Was Mark Zuckerberg wrong to call All Lives Matter employees malicious? - <AUTHOR> I'm posting this from a throwaway account because of the stigma and taboo of having non-mainstream opinions toward sensitive topics like diversity.  Obviously I agree that many aspects of diversity are underrepresented in the tech world: diversity by race, gender, age, culture, and even geography.
Given his position, Zuck's response is understandable, but at the same time I find it distasteful to refer to employees writing "All Lives Matter" as "malicious".  What they are saying is valid and accurate.  I do not see it as insulting at all, but rather a broadening of the statement to be fully encompassing and supporting of all people (isn't that what embracing diversity is really about?!).
It's hard to understand being lashed out against for arguing that all people matter equally.
For context, see this recent post:
"Zuckerberg Asks Employees to Stop Crossing Out "Black Lives Matter" at FB HQ (techcrunch.com)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176467 <comment><USER2> First, I hope no one flags this question again but it's both (1) relevant to the mission statement of HN, and (2) perfectly civil.

That said -- "malicious" might not have been the best word for him to use. Even though one is offended by (otherwise sees harm in) the actions of others, one shouldn't always presume _malice_. You do have a point there.

But otherwise -- and more importantly -- look, you need to realize that, basically the ALM movement is pretty darn insensitive and clueless. The main reason people take offense at the ALM slogan is that it seems belittling of the (very serious, and more to the point, _seriously unequal_ ) threats to their physical safety that blacks (and other minority groups) have to deal with on a daily basis.

As the other poster so eloquently put it -- yes, some people _do_ have more right to complain. It's just the way the world is, at present. If you don't like this state of affairs... either (1) try to do something about the underlying phenomena which _causes_ these people to complain more in the first place, or (2) at least lift your head up, and recognize that however imperfectly stated, their complaints _are not about you_ , and as such, in no way meant to be something you should get offended about.

So in sum, yes, the ALM slogan isn't necessarily malicious, per se. But it is clueless and juvenile.

<comment><USER3> "The main reason people take offense at the ALM slogan is that it seems belittling of the (very serious, and more to the point, seriously unequal) threats to their physical safety that blacks (and other minority groups) have to deal with on a daily basis."

Do you have proof of this? The few cases we see in the media nearly all involved criminals fighting or antagonizing the police.

I have yet to see a case where a minority was minding their own business and the cops came and decided to shoot them dead.

The real issue is minority -> minority homicide rates. It's astronomical compared to pretty much any other statistic. Yet, it's not hip or cool to talk about.

The main problem I see is that all of these groups are separating us even more by race, to gain power.

Just look at all of these groups on college campuses that only allow minorities to participate (whites need not apply).

It's the exact same type of racist bullshit that happened during the 50s and 60s in this country, but because the shoe is on the other foot, it's somehow justified.

All lives do matter. Until we can accept this, we will never have equality.

<comment><USER2> _I have yet to see a case where a minority was minding their own business and the cops came and decided to shoot them dead._

What usually happens is they see some guy minding his own business. And then panic because he's, you know, black.

<comment><USER4> bobby_9x has a point, though. If black lives matter, they matter whether the black was shot by a cop or by a criminal.

<comment><USER2> The bigger points that when people put the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, they do so out of perfectly well-meaning intentions.

And scribbling over it is just inflammatory and childish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All lives matter. This is clearly true, and goes back at least to Jefferson. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident...")

Black Lives Matter is saying something else, however. _In practice, out on the street,_ blacks are dying far more frequently than whites. While we can argue about the causes of that[1], there is still a problem that is worth calling attention to. Replying that "all lives matter" is true, but is also diverting attention from the horrific body count, which makes it somewhat less likely that anything useful will be done.

[1] I have heard that, if you adjust for severity of the interaction with the police, blacks are shot _less_ frequently per severe encounter. ("Severity" means "a murder bust is more likely to go bad than a traffic ticket".) I cannot cite a reference for this at the moment, however.

<comment><USER5> > blacks are shot less frequently per severe encounter

This sounds like another way of arguing that racial profiling is real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _I find it distasteful to refer to employees writing "All Lives Matter" as > "malicious"_

I parsed it as being about crossing out a message, not about writing another one. Not "you are malicious because you write a broader statement/remind people of a more encompassing position", but "you are malicious because you crossed out others speech, after we've told you we consider that as silencing others and that is not OK". There is a difference there, and it is quite carefully worded to limit the scope. (really, better than anything I would have expected from Facebook)

Now, I have no clue how the general conduct regarding those walls is and what happened before Zuckerberg's message, so it's hard to put it into precise context.

</comment><comment><USER7> "All Lives Matter" is just another way of saying "But what about me?". It's incredibly selfish and dismissive. It's a way for us to make it about ourselves instead of those being affected.

It's "blacklivesmatter" not "onlyblacklivesmatter", I don't know why people keep interpreting it as the latter. "blacklivesmatter" doesn't imply that all lives don't.

</comment><comment><USER8> Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!

The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That's the situation of the "black lives matter" movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn't work that way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn't want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That's not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it's generally not considered "news", while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don't treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don't pay as much attention to certain people's deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don't treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase "black lives matter" also has an implicit "too" at the end: it's saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying "all lives matter" is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It's a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means "only black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case. And so saying "all lives matter" as a direct response to "black lives matter" is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

From [https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du1qm/el...](https://np.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du1qm/eli5_why_is_it_so_controversial_when_someone_says/ct8pei1)

</comment><comment><USER9> His business, his rules. He is right on this one.</comment>


Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a video showing the system described in the paper playing various Atari games: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ)

<comment><USER2> It's incredible that it determined optimal ways to win

<comment><USER3> Yes I wonder what the criteria were - what defines "winning" in each game..

<comment><USER4> High score. All in the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's deep Q-learning implemented in a javascript demo: [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/rldemo...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/rldemo.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> A note -- if you're linking to arXiv, it's better to link to the abstract ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602)) rather than directly to the PDF. From the abstract, one can easily click through to the PDF; not so the reverse. And the abstract allows one to do things like see different versions of the paper, search for other things by the same authors, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google bought these guys out, didn't they?

<comment><USER8> Yes they did: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google- deepmind/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Greetings, Professor Falken!</comment>


Things I would love to see in iOS 5 - <AUTHOR> http://shorts.adityamukherjee.com/post/1635264081

<comment><USER2> That the author suggests that, since the iPad has a landscape homescreen, this could just be enabled for iPhone shows a lack of appreciation of Apple's design sensibilities that pervades this article. Just because the iPad has it doesn't mean it doesn't need designing for the iPhone.

Furthermore, the iPhone is primarily a portrait device. The iPad, not fitting easily in one hand, is as much a landscape device as it is a portrait one. I'd be surprised if Apple "enabled" a landscape home screen for iPhone in iOS 5.

<comment><USER3> I agree that I would prefer they don't add in landscape home page. As it is, most people have developed a certain flipping technique for rotating their phone in their hand, which is much harder to do with an iPad. And once you introduce a landscape home screen, then you can't use spatial memory to launch apps anymore. Personally, I would prefer that the iPad used a 4 x 4 set of icons for just this reason. Icons are always in different positions and I need to search rather than know where they are using memory. In contrast, My finger is on the correct icon instantaneously on the iPhone.

<comment><USER4> If the icons rotated in place, the icon positioning might not be too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I see the use of changeable text in icons, like the calendar app employs, why would anyone want to have animated icons? Perhaps it would be an "eye candy" thing to show off with for 10 seconds, but I'm sure it would be annoying in the long run. Any ideas for reasonable uses of animated icons?

<comment><USER6> Yes, Statsheet was denied putting 345 apps in the store for each college basketball team. If we are only allowed to have one app, then the user could choose which team is theirs, and then the front Icon would change to represent their team.

<comment><USER7> A static icon change would achieve the same thing. You don't need animated icons for that.

To OP of this thread: It was another idle comment. The crux of the request was in boldface.

<comment><USER6> Does the current version of iOS support static icon changes?

<comment><USER7> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In other words, "make iOS more like Android".

Just shortcut the entire process, [http://lifehacker.com/5693309/how-to- install-android-on-an-i...](http://lifehacker.com/5693309/how-to-install- android-on-an-iphone-in-six-easy-steps?skyline=true&s=i)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Dynamic Icons, API to fetch URLs in the background, Better Push Notifications, Wireless Sync" « none of these will happen unless Apple gets their hands on a much longer-lasting yet thinner and cheaper battery. Because unlike Android phones which comes with a removable battery and thus battery drain != a useless brick as long as a replacement battery is at hand, iOS design/feature-set has to be very careful about battery conservation given Apple's hardware design choices.

Having said that I fully expect, Apple, who has been in the business of making software for close to 35 years, which is a full 5 years more than "90% guy" Microsoft, already have these features either on their ToDo list or in prototype form just waiting/working for the battery tech to reach that threshold where they are confident of it holding up when used by the mass market.

In short, I don't expect iOS5 to have most or even all of these features but maybe by the time iOS6 rolls around, battery tech will have reached the point when these features would have become practical. For iOS5, the flagship feature( Steve calls them 'Tent-poles' )will be NFC, and joining this tent- pole on stage will be the usual hardware improvements, Game Center/Ping updates etc, but nothing of the sort that has the potential to 'leech away' the battery.

<comment><USER10> NFC = Near Field Communication, it is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Field_Communication>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> \- API to run some form of background task as needed \- Revamp notification, maybe notification centre \- API to change home screen icon. \- API for NFC as it is rumored to be in iPhone 5 hardware \- Spotlight API for app content searchable under spotlight \- AirPlay 2 - api to push screen to AppleTV and convert iphone/ipad as controller, make it easy to support this functionality in games \- API for social liking and following, Apple'own social networking build into iOS 5 and Lion \- Apple Messages/Chat, telco independent sms?

</comment><comment><USER12> A big feature conspicuously absent from iOS is a unified documents folder accessible by all apps, and some basic file management capabilities. It would preferably be mounted as a virtual mass storage device when you plug in the USB cable. Here's hoping this'll be one of the features of 5.0.

<comment><USER13> A unified documents folder just doesn't work as seen on OSX. Most filetypes are bound to a specific application anyway, so there's no point in a cluttered unified folder.

<comment><USER14> Why would it be cluttered? It could work just like Settings.

Apps with their own document type register as such with the OS. The "Documents" app shows a list of those apps and each one leads to a list of documents for that app. From this list, users can open, rename, delete, attach to an email, and so on. Apps would not be allowed to dump internal junk in their document folder, only stuff the user creates and knows exactly what it is.

As long as this model was _enforced_ by the OS and by app reviewers, it should be easy for anyone to understand. It would give iOS something fundamental that Android doesn't have at all, which it really needs because it's playing catch- up with most other features right now.

<comment><USER15> If documents are categorised by apps, why have a separate browser for them instead of keeping them in the app? If I want to view my Pages documents, I'd open Pages not Documents or whatever it might be called.p

<comment><USER14> Lots of great reasons:

1\. The user can manage all their stuff in one place with consistent functionality across all apps.

2\. The OS can implement generic file handling features like search, share, backup, sync, etc.

3\. It paves the way for standard file types that can be handled by multiple apps, or apps that can work with any type of file, like Dropbox.

The power of filesystems is well understood and I'm sure Apple could create one instilled with their magical UX and just-worksiness. But they won't do it because I think they are afraid of 3rd party apps becoming _too_ useful. They don't want anyone else creating an ecosystem that they don't control. But Google and RIM are happy to do that and I hope they establish a higher standard of utility that Apple is forced to live up to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Better Push Notifications: Apple should just straight out copy Android's Cloud-to-Device API. That's it."

Or, you could try my app, Jumping URL (<http://www.jumpingurl.com>), instead.

<comment><USER17> hey buddy, i like your thing but umm your app won't download in the app store. it says that it is no longer available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > API to fetch URLs in the background

Oh yes please, that would get rid of the overly complicated workaround of using PUSH-Notifications for that.

</comment><comment><USER19> New API to handle calls inside an app and access call data such as history.</comment>


Facebook Now Has 750 Million Users - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/23/facebook-750-million-users/

<comment><USER2> So facebook is huge. But what are your thoughts on longevity? Personally I think facebook chat is its biggest flaw. They need to headhunt the team that created gchat and mimic it exactly including video capability. In terms of longevity, I think facebook has to make it easier for websites to integrate with it. For instance, the login with facebook feature is next to impossible to implement without being an experienced coder. Seems like they need to focus on what is already working instead of mediocre tangents like the marketplace and the new group feature.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Facebook is rolling out a new Lightbox plugin (rolled back after refresh, no screen)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I expect more to "leak" as we move towards its IPO</comment>