Introducing the Google Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if I like implications of a web-centric OS, especially when its producer is as rich and powerful as Google. I see the market for it, and I think it will be a huge benefit for the average user. However, I see the transition from desktop-based software to web-based as a loss of user control. Today, when governments decide that mp3 sharing, porn, articles of political dissent, or news from non-national sources should be eliminated, they quickly realize, if they don't already know, that elimination is impossible, because no agency can track down and deal with every user who has decided to install software allowing him/her to do these things. When software moves to the web, I think it will likely end up existing on the servers of one of an oligopoly of computing providers, who will be much easier to influence because of their small number, and because they will have no choice but to abide by legislation if they wish to remain in business.

This may not seem like an issue right now, because there is still choice. But with Google pushing a web-centric OS, I think within a decade, many people will have a hard time choosing something else, much the same way they had a hard time choosing something other than windows until the last five years.

Maybe I'm just a Big Brother fearing nut, but I don't like where we're heading.

<comment><USER3> I concur. I've become more and more aware of the looming Google benevolent giant, but one day that giant's going to get angry and by that point it may be too late.

That being said, I still use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Analytics, and other services. So I'm not exactly avoiding the apocalypse here.

<comment> bjelkeman-again What I think is interesting is that having a hard time choosing something other than Windows may have been quite benevolent in comparison with a Google- situation which turns ugly. What if there is an organisation that has all your email, all your documents, all your appointments and all your conversations and can follow the majority of your surfing via ads. What if this resource suddenly is too tempting to keep hands away from for "fighting terrorism" or something such.

Being forced to use Windows at work could be considered nice in comparison.

I don't think that anyone at Google set out to be evil. But power corrupts and the legal systems and governments have not exactly struck up a fight for privacy for the individual the last couple of years.

<comment><USER2> Yes! Thank you for capturing more of what I could feel in my gut, but could not bring to words when composing my comment.

 _I don't think that anyone at Google set out to be evil. But power corrupts and the legal systems and governments have not exactly struck up a fight for privacy for the individual the last couple of years._

I also see scenarios where Google never becomes corrupted by power, but by government mandate a la Patriot Act is forced to reveal content. I don't like that there appear to be many plausible ways where the whole situation could end up generally bad.

<comment><USER3> Indeed Google may never turn to the dark side, but to have that much information under one corporate entity's control is terrifying to say the least.

Unfortunately in the digital age, it is hard to achieve any semblance true security for your personal information without acting on what lay-people perceive as paranoia.

<comment><USER4> This is what really bothers me about it. If it weren't Google, it would be someone else.

What we probably have to worry about is that the base level of privacy that is easy to achieve is in freefall. The incentives for any individual organization are too strong, because of the level of service (to consumers or advertisers or whatever) can be so much stronger. It seems to me that compounding this is the fact that the 'digital age' makes monopolies natural in alot of places, even if only for a short time.

We're already rapidly adjusting to a loss of privacy, and maybe it's a necessary progression and privacy advocates will one day be a quaint historical footnote.

Even so, I'm definitely in the paranoid camp, and if we don't make a conscious effort to have a more active cultural attitude towards privacy, we might not be able to preserve any of it if we have a collective 'oh shit' moment down the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If ARM and x86 are targeted, this means no Flash (not surprising, given how poorly it runs on Linux), which presumably means YouTube will be operating in full-on HTML 5 video mode by the time these devices launch.

If netbooks continue their meteoric ascent, and if Chrome OS grabs a significant share of the market, we may finally see the realization of the mythical Year of Linux On the Desktop. The ironic aspect, of course, is that even though a large number of non-technical users will finally be running on a fully open-source platform, they will use it to run applications whose workings are even more opaque than traditional closed-source, client-side apps.

I wonder what role, if any, Native Client will play on these devices. I understand Native Client to target only x86, but I find it difficult to imagine Chrome OS -- Google's first direct challenge to Windows -- not being able to run Native Client applications.

<comment><USER6> Adobe are working on full Flash 10 for ARM-based linux on netbooks and smartphone platforms, due for next year.

Whether Google wants or needs it is another question.

<comment><USER7> Given the way that Flash performs on OSX I don't see any reason to think their ARM port will be at all acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So effectively your PC becomes a Google ThinClient.

Got all the Office Applications with Google Apps. Email/Communication with Gmail. The rest of the web. Multimedia with YouTube/Hulu/etc. Sounds like what majority of the people need. Even for work environments, would be pretty good (you can offer your proprietary application in the form of a web application).

<comment><USER9> I'd enjoy replacing the "instant-on OS" partition on my notebook with this.

<comment><USER10> What I want is a good enough "instant-on" that it's my only partition, and I no longer have to worry about hibernation or sleep mode ever again. Have orthogonal persistence for everything, so I never even have to save. Just open the clamshell, or hit the on button. Something comes along to distract me, I snap it shut, take care of whatever it is, then open it up again, wait a half second and continue on where I left off.

The ideal laptop/internet pad would behave like the Nintendo DS, if the DS could hibernate, and not just sleep when you close it.

<comment><USER11> the ideal laptop / internet pad would behave like an animated piece of paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Key Data Point:

> _The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new > windowing system on top of a Linux kernel._

<comment><USER13> If their approach to Android is any guide, much of the work will consist of eliminating any GNU or GPL components from the (userspace) runtime environment.

<comment><USER14> This denies that Android runs on top of Linux, which is licensed under the gpl. Or that the Google search appliance runs on a ton of gpl'd code, all mirrored off of code.google.com...

<comment><USER13> You must be talking about some other comment, because I don't mean to deny any of that. I was merely pointing out that on Google's largest (public) OS project to date (Android), Google evinced a strong desire for a copyleft-free userspace and succeeded in building a non-GNU Linux distro. This is clearly a different project with different goals, so we'll see how it turns out.

<comment><USER6> The stated reason for that was that Carriers and Telcos wanted to build on Android and were put off by the GPL. (Though obviously not put off enough that they'd reject the GPL'd Linux that runs beneath it)

Google's approach to licences is far more nuanced than blind adherance or avoidance of any particular licence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I personally would never trust google with something as important and all encompassing as my OS. I value my privacy far too much for that, and seeing as how google collects usage data for just about every action you perform on services they offer, I'm not sure i'll ever go the google way on desktop software.

<comment><USER16> Google knows who my friends are (Contacts), what I'm saying to them (Gchat/Gmail), where I'm going (Gmaps), what I'm reading (Reader), what I'm writing (Docs) and what I'm looking for (Search).

As far as I'm concerned, operating systems are pretty interchangeable. The things I care about are already all going through Google. Does anyone besides Google offer a similar suite of apps? The only one I can think of is Apple's MobileMe.

<comment><USER15> How about Outlook/Thunderbird/Facebook (contacts) + Yahoo (mail) + OpenStreetMap (maps) + Sage/Friendfeed (RSS) + Zoho (Docs) + Bing (Search)?

While no-one may be offering a similar _suite_ of applications, if you want to use them you can find different services that do.

Also currently even if google does know all that information about you, it doesn't know what files you have on your hard drive. In my opinion, giving carte blanche on data on my hard drives to google is a big no for a company that doesn't give two hoots about the privacy of their users.

<comment><USER16> The value of Google's services, at least for me, is that they all work together. I can login from an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere and have all my contacts in my email program, the same ones synced to my iPhone.

I don't know if I buy the claim that Google doesn't give "two hoots" about your privacy, as long as you don't count selling contextual ads as over the line. But anyway, my point is that the "files" I care about protecting are already with Google. For true protection of your local files, on any operating system, encryption is your only answer.

<comment><USER15> I believe with facebook connect, you can maybe hack those different services to work together (firefox extension?). Maybe, I should take a look at that idea.

And if google did care about my privacy why read all my mails, and keep track of every webpage i visit from their search engine. I don't buy the "we'll only take a peep, just for advertising" logic.

Also, google already having all the files you care about would be more an exception than the norm. I would presume a majority of people keep their files stored on their hard drives.

In my opinion, keeping track of my actions in any way goes against google's self stated "don't be evil" policy. Or did Paul Buchheit take that policy with him to friendfeed???

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The key to supremacy in the enterprise market is to seize control of the entry point.

IBM did it in the 1960s and 1970s with the entry point being a highly skilled personalized sales force in an era where relationships established the trust needed for enterprises to commit to large systems.

Microsoft did it in the 1980s and 1990s with the entry point being its proprietary API for its desktop OS which, with the help of OEM hardware partners, it used to choke out anyone who sought to compete with it in the desktop applications market. It then tried (and failed) to use its desktop monopoly as a vehicle by which to dominate the back-end of enterprise computing.

Google now seeks to gain similar supremacy with the entry point being superior _proprietary_ products ultimately derived from or at least capitalizing upon Open Source in a web-centric computing environment. What form this will take, I don't know. But it will take a form by which Google tries to seize and maintain control of the entry point and ultimately bend the world's primary computing environments to its proprietary advantage. The Chrome OS is one piece of this effort.

The question is one of which company will become the ultimate gatekeeper to all or most of enterprise computing, which is where the money is. Google wants that role and that is where its fight with Microsoft will lie.

As they say, "The law of human nature - it ain't been repealed yet."

<comment><USER18> Microsoft's success was based almost entirely on lock-in: they made everyone depend on something that only they could provide. The equivalent strategy for Google would obviously be to hoard the world's data in their private silos, which they are arguably already doing. I would find that scenario more plausible if it weren't for Wave.

Wave, by its nature, will obsolete or radically transform, many of Google's existing web apps: gmail, docs, blogger, picasa, calendar.. anything related to communication or collaboration. Yet, it seems as though they've gone to great lengths to make Wave decentralized, even as far as open sourcing their server implementation. They've done this even though a silo style Wave app would likely be a huge success anyway. I can't fathom why they would allow Wave to exist if they were hoping to control everyone's data, as it clearly represents a threat to the control they already have.

I'm not dropping my guard, but at this point my best guess is that Google is just trying to create an open and fair web ecosystem, in which they will compete based on their momentum and massive resources, and in which their major competitors lose their existing advantage. Either that, or they don't have much of a plan at all and the company is really just a bunch of smart people doing cool stuff with a huge pile of money that fell from the sky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't help thinking about the crunchpad when I read this.

Slap this on a tablet with a hybrid display and you might have something very interesting.

<comment><USER20> Slap a Pixel Qi [1] screen and a capacitive (iPhone) touchscreen on a Crunchpad and I at least will line up for one.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc&feature=related)

<comment><USER21> I thought it already was planned to be capacitive: [http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/10/crunchpad.apr....](http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/10/crunchpad.apr.2009.update/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if there is possibility their new window system is going to replace the bloated X window system in other distributions.

<comment><USER23> The barrier to replacing X is not replacing X, it is the significant rewriting of software that uses X.

<comment><USER24> And the first massive hump there is getting the replacement good enough to even bother _thinking_ about rewrites.

Google has a chance to leap past that, because they've contrived a situation where they not only don't need X, they don't need to port X apps.

<comment><USER23> Well, yeah, but you're not talking about _replacing_ X anymore (which is what the GP post was talking about).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some may remember the Forbes ASAP article, excerpted from Gilder's book, touted with the cover, "George Gilder Thinks This Kid Can Topple Bill Gates":

<http://www.gilder.com/public/telecosm_series/software.html>

It's taken 14 long years -- and it's Google-Chrome-plus-Javascript rather than Netscape-Navigator-plus-HotJava -- but the browser has finally become a complete alternative to a desktop OS.

The article's final sentence: "In the age of the hollowed-out computer, the king of the desktop rules an emigrating empire."

<comment><USER26> The _only_ way Google can make good on their promises of it just working, being virus free etc, is if they lock it down more than Apple did the iPhone.

General purpose computing device, or a Google Terminal? That's your choice.

<comment><USER25> What if one device has a switch on the side: 'locked-down terminal' or 'open general purpose computer'? And via virtualization, the two sides are sealed from each other, but instantly switchable? Why not the best of both worlds?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Im convinced it's not a coincidence that this week they also announced dropping a load of beta tags, hid the free apps sign up page a little more and made a number of other tweaks.

I get the impression they are trying to repackage their cloud services together: it would make sense if the plan for Chrome OS is to ultimately tie it all together.

</comment><comment><USER28> Let's hope this also means that a Linux version of Chrome is around the corner.

<comment><USER14> If you haven't tried out the chromium nightly desktop builds, they're actually quite nice. The team is still nailing down the plugins, but the browser itself is wicked fast and pretty stable (given its alpha nature)

<comment><USER29> If you're a Mac user, you can also download the latest nightly build here:

[http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel- ma...](http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-mac/) (scroll all the way down to the latest build directory)

And yes, it is _wicked fast_. On my system, it doesn't even _bounce_ in the dock before opening. It just opens. Plugins aren't supported yet, but I just open any sites that require Flash in Safari.

<comment><USER30> It's so fast OS X is unable to register it as a recently launched application for the magic folder in the dock...

Anyone knows why?

<comment><USER31> Just a guess, but maybe the weird process-per-tab thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm glad Google has identified a need for something like this, but I don't really trust that Google has the right talent to build an operating system. They have serious problems with user experience and interface design (see: Doug Bowman). The mere idea that they are attempting to encroach on an aspect of experience as large as the operating system is to me somewhat scary.

I do hope they prove me wrong. But based on their past performance, I am not holding my breath.

Also: Google, if you're reading this, please at least make the typography render properly in this OS. You've already failed at this with Chrome, which has some of the worst antialiasing I have seen in a browser (surpassed in crappiness only by IE).

<comment><USER33> As I said below (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693339>): you've not got what they're thinking of as the OS. The browser is the operating system, and the apps are all web apps. The core of the OS is Linux, but the interface is all browser -- you don't install apps, you just type in their URL. There's hardly any OS UI they need to invent that we haven't already seen as part of Chrome itself.

<comment><USER32> Not really. You still have to be able to log in, store data, set up parental controls, deal with power management and screen savers and wifi networks, choose desktop backgrounds (assuming they don't force you to use a single tabbed window), choose keyboard/language/sticky keys, define trackpad gestures, accessibility settings, etc...

I am curious to see how they deal with this stuff.

<comment><USER19> My guess is that you will be in a single tabbed window, with special tabs for things like wifi, login, file browser, settings, etc (like Firefox's about:config).

At least that is how I'd do it. Just type config:wifi in your location bar to change your wifi settings. Visit config:files to browse your local files, etc. Of course, all of these can be bookmarked by default so the end user can click rather than type.

Chrome already does stuff like this with about:memory, about:network, etc.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About:_URI_scheme#Google_Chrome...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About:_URI_scheme#Google_Chrome- specific_about:_addresses)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting. The one missing piece--a RAD development environment that's as efficient as Visual Studio is at producing fat clients. The business world will only embrace the webcentric model when it becomes as efficient to code in as .net click-once fat clients. The idea of simple, cheap, rugged hardware is very appealing. But programmer time is the #1 cost--businesses go for easy drag/drop fat client apps. Software written for 5 users has to be thrown together pretty fast or it never pays back...

<comment><USER35> Can you clarify your statements a bit more?

I don't think that Google Chrome OS would be suitable for most corporate shops that are generally Microsoft centric (and have been for quite some time). I think this free OS will be geared towards light users that primarily use their computer for surfing the web and checking their email.

<comment><USER36> RAD = rapid application development, the business term for "drag-n-drop GUI builders" that we all know and hate. Not having one for the Web is a valid criticism, but if GWT can handle Swing API input then we DO have one.

<comment><USER35> I'm familiar with RAD, although at least for my employer it's more than just drag-and-drop GUI builders.

It sounds to me like jeffspost is over generalizing and suggesting that Google Chrome OS will only succeed if it's embraced by large corporations. The software hasn't even launched and jeffspost has already figured out it's "one missing piece".

<comment><USER37> And generalising that it will need to replace Windows.

They are launching it as a netbook OS for a reason. Netbooks is a loose term. I'm not exactly sure what the line is, but one definition might be a small laptop that doesn't replace your main computer.

I daresay that whoever buys this will either have another computer or have no need for corporate apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder just how Google Native Client will fit into this, especially extended with things like USB support and OpenGL.

There's games, obviously, but what about a NaCL port of iTunes? It's not _that_ far-fetched.

<comment><USER38> Google has already indirectly "extended" Native Client with native 3D graphics using their O3D API (<http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/>). It's just a matter of time until someone codes up a library to expose that API through JS interop in Native Client.

I think we can expect very close integration of Native Client into the Chrome OS as soon as or right after it goes public. To the level of accessing hardware ports to control external devices right from your Native Client web- app.

Imagine drivers that get loaded and updated on-the-fly. Of course, Google will have to implement a smart security mechanism (along the lines of RSA authentication for dynamic device/driver coupling) and provide a way for device manufacturers to register their driver's public keys with Chrome OS.

<comment><USER39> But will Native Client work on ARM?

<comment><USER38> Yes: [http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native- clien...](http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-client- technology-for-running.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think this is great. Most people don't know what a browser is anyway, so for them it probably won't make much of a difference. It will be interesting to see how much of an OS you can strip away.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't see that anyone has mentioned Apple in any of this. They certainly aren't just going to roll over and let Google take this entire space. They will launch a netbook at some point with the iPhone OS, some storage, the app store to get everything you want, a superior user experience and industrial design, and oh yeah, the browser to also run all these other apps...And it will be this kind of weird hybrid old model vs. new all over again.

</comment><comment><USER42> I could develop a new netbook OS over a weekend.

(Joke. Please don't downvote me again, I'm already at -5.)

<comment><USER37> promise to be good?

<comment><USER42> But I though that "Mel" sounded "ghastly". Shirley that's unforgivable? :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think Google will continue to "win" and we will use their applications/reader/ecc until they will have the dominant search engine. If you look at what they offer (with the exception, maybe, of excel-like webapp), they are not killer application. We are using them because our online-life is Google-centric. So we should remeber that everything else they do is buld on their search engine dominance (think to the omnibox)... For the webos is the same. It's fine, for a netbook IF Google will remain Google.

If you look at what people do with a Mac, they do far more than just using web application. Far Far more.

</comment><comment><USER44> The danger is and always has been centralized control (and not just in software). No one should own the web OS — the web is ours.

Stallman & Co. foresaw this (at least) a decade ago. He's right to be worried. The real issue is: what are rights in the digital age? Who has control of what?

I might not back everything he's done. And he sometimes dismisses technical issues as trivial over political ones unnecessarily. But he is having the conversation at the right level of abstraction.

We'll keep facing the pitfalls of centralized power until we collectively decide to kill that beast permanently.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've an AA1 running Linpus, which is buggy and slower than I anticipated. It's bloated down with superfluous software that I don't need, and that you have to follow a series of complex guides to remove. (Even then you risk screwing up parts of Linpus which are dependant on it.)

All I use it for is browsing and light coding on the move. Windows, and the likes of Ubuntu Netbook Remix are all too 'big' for that.

It sounds like the Google Chrome OS is exactly what my netbook needs.

<comment><USER46> I get the impression that the only native application it will run is Chrome. So how are you going to edit your source code, push/pull your changes, test it, run it?

I've seen web-based ssh clients, and someone might be able to write a web- based vnc / remote desktop client, but I can't see it being useful for offline coding.

<comment><USER45> You're grossly over-complicating my needs.

None of my websites (that I would edit on the netbook) are business critical / make money / have any real world importance whatsoever. I can log in via cpanel, roll out some coding amends live and worry about breaking things as and when it happens.

<comment><USER46> Ah, right, I misinterpreted what you meant by "light coding".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is this any different than someone else taking Ubuntu/Firefox and calling that the Firefox OS? Chrome isn't an operating system, linux is. This is a distribution and pre-installed browser. How is this anything different that what we currently have in the netbook market.

The real player in the future of netbooks is very likely Apple, not Google, because any netbook running OSX will also be able to not only run all the usual OSX apps but Chrome too...

<comment><USER48> 2 years ago I made cl33n, a Linux live CD that boots Linux, connects to the net, runs the Matchbox window manager and launches Firefox- that's all it does. ChromeOS is "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." cl33n is "Mozilla Firefox running within a little-used windowing system on top of a Linux kernel". cl33n isn't unique, Webconverger and other great live CDs do a similar "make it easy for anyone to browse safely" job.

Google cancelled cl33n's AdSense account 8 days ago, right before they were due to make their first payment. The site and its small traffic & AdSense revenue hasn't changed for 2 years (am working on an update now, I got kinda busy with a startup ;)). If cl33n did Bad Things then it's been doing them for 2 years now. I wonder if Google will refund the money to the advertisers?

I've appealed but have not received a response from Google. I still don't know what cl33n did to incur Google's wrath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> _For application developers, the web is the platform._... _Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems._

Does this mean an operating system that runs chrome and little else or an operating system that runs mostly chrome?

</comment><comment><USER49> Using Google Chrome OS, means that we throw Windows and OSX away. Windows or OSX (Desktop-application) are not good, flexible because they are dektop applications, but because they have dozen of years of user experience. Throwing this user experience away, means we are starting the OS history again, which is a lose of time and money. In my opinion!

</comment><comment><USER50> It is also interesting to think about this news in the context of FaceBook buying Parakey (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parakey>), though it is a _web- based_ OS. IMO, given Google's array of applications, they are better suited to write a _web-centric_ OS than FaceBook.

</comment><comment><USER51> _we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google_

This is the kind of competition that I would like to enjoy (i.e. between products that both belong to me). I wonder if it actually will work out for them, and if so, how I could use that strategy myself.

</comment><comment><USER52> I switched back to Firefox for security reasons and because Chrome turned out to be _really_ slow re-rendering tabs that haven't been visited for awhile. Not too enthused about a whole OS but I suppose that might be one answer to the security problems.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can't wait to try an actual version of this in a virtualbox. Betas should be available for geeks way before the netbook manufacturers get to installing it on their devices in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's going to be interesting to see how committed Google is to this project. Google seems like a company these days with more ambition than substance sometimes. They have some really good services but they also have a lot of services that have seen very few, if any, significant improvements lately. It does remind me a bit of Microsoft when they had to get their fingers into every category of software even if they weren't offering a particularly good product. It was more about being in that space than actually being the best at it. I hope Google is not trying to go this route because it almost always ends up in mediocrity.

</comment><comment><USER55> I hope someone will wrap it as an application on Windows.

That would be fantastic to have a OS to handle all web related activities for general users.

</comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone have any guesses on how this might be different from Android?

<comment><USER57> See the comments about Android in the Google Blog post.

Android: Aimed at small-screen, low-power devices (handhelds, set-top boxes, MIDs, netbooks). Java-based application development. Touchscreen-oriented UI.

Chrome OS: Aimed at netbooks, laptops, desktops. Web-based application development. Browser-based UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I don't see the point, Android is using a Chrome version, so if you'll take Android remove Dalvik then you're getting a new OS?

By that definition I can remove all my apps from my Vista laptop except the browser and what do I get, an IE OS?

That's silly!!!

</comment><comment><USER59> I still think that Opera OS would be a better idea :)

</comment><comment><USER60> A browser is one thing. But an OS? I have my doubts.

<comment><USER33> You have to re-think what is meant by an "operating system".

What is Windows? It's that thing, in the background, that lets you run all the applications you want to run.

But what if all your applications were written in Javascript and HTML, and had URLs instead of .exe files? With all the extra power built into Chrome, they could still write to file systems, store data, work offline, do sophisticated graphics and parallel processing -- these are not hypotheticals, this is what Chrome can do _right now_. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what an app written from Chrome can do.

Chrome can be an OS, for some value of "OS".

<comment><USER61> When the iphone was first released, development was going to be via javascript and safari. That didn't go too well with neither users nor developers. Isn't this going to be the same thing? And for the so called windowing system I would not hold my breath and except anything like quartz. Its probably going to be just enough framebuffer code to drop X11 so the browser window can run in fullscreen. The window manager will then be implemented in javascript. Wee!

<comment><USER6> That's a common misconception.

When the iPhone was first released, development was restricted to web apps and they didn't have access to any API. The fact that it was javascript and HTML was mostly tangential to the complaints of people who wanted to install (and sell) local apps, with access to the unique hardware, though obviously existing Cocoa coders, 3D game programmers and anyone needing to get close to the metal weren't going to be happy even if these other elements were taken care of.

On the other hand "fart apps" and things that are basically light wrappers round existing web apps have no such problem.

See the Palm Pre for someone taking this to it's logical extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I wonder if Chrome OS is the same as, or a derivative of, Goobuntu:

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Goobuntu>

</comment><comment><USER63> Just another Linux distribution.

If they want to do something useful, make me a command-line that supports images, links, etc and gives me an easy way to process XML.

</comment><comment><USER64> They will probably build something like fbdev wrapper to run their browser along with Native Client and GPU-accelerated (even on ARM) ffmpeg's codecs for html5 support, and it could be a real deal. They will reuse 80% and build 20% as usual.

</comment><comment><USER65> Yet another Unix clone. Yawn.

</comment><comment><USER66> Checkmate.

</comment><comment><USER67> Is this a response to bing? If you go after my market, I'll go after yours.

It's not only the Chrome OS thing. Google Apps out of beta could mean that Google is serious about competing in the groupware segment.</comment>


Most popular relational databases – 2016 edition - <AUTHOR> https://plumbr.eu/blog/io/most-popular-relational-databases-2016-edition <comment><USER2> Worth noting this is from Plumbr's (monitoring) data, so profile of company using their solution may be different than Internet at large. Additionally, any comparison I see of database/language/etc would be more useful if it filtered out what I'd call passive installations (for instance MySQL and PHP when running Wordpress) vs active development.</comment>


Comparing taste in films using pairwise vector comparisons - <AUTHOR> http://blog.goodfil.ms/blog/2012/04/20/project-ingen/

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested in reading a more general blog article about their theory behind using "quality" and "rewatchability" as their key user rating. It sounds reasonable at first, but when I think more deeply about it, I wonder what "quality" is supposed to be interpreted as. Is it "how much I enjoyed the _first_ viewing of the film," something more specific like "how skillful was the camera work" or "how good was the acting," or something more meta like "how good I think _critics_ or movie buffs would think the film is?"

I've gone through stages of armchair film criticism, so I've thought about personal ratings a lot. I even drafted a web app to track my viewings and watchlist, and the rating idea I've liked the most is a stupidly simple boolean rating. You could call it almost anything: "Like/Dislike," "Good/Bad," "Enjoyed/Didn't Enjoy," or even something a bit different like "I'm glad I watched it/I wish I hadn't watched it."

<comment><USER3> Check out this post on the topic: [http://blog.goodfil.ms/blog/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to- rate-...](http://blog.goodfil.ms/blog/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to-rate-films/)

'Quality' is intended to be a more objective score of the craft of the film. Quality of writing, directing, acting; originality of the idea; how influential it is.

'Rewatchability' is where your enjoyment gets factored in. We think it's important to consider 'watching it again' rather than enjoyment first time because it separates out films better. For example, the film Avatar is quite enjoyable the first time round, but IMO not particularly worth rewatching.

Btw, I'm the author of both posts :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply. I've thought about this sort of thing a lot. I made a super-basic personal web app a few years ago for recording the movies I've watched and keeping a queue of movies I want to watch. I never added multiuser support or rating, but I gave ratings a lot of thought. My main problem is that a lot of words end up being tied together semantically: "good," "enjoyable," etc. really just end up meaning personal preference. I experimented with the whole gamut of ratings: from the most granular (rating camerawork, acting, humor, effects, etc.) to the least granular ("good" or "not good").

Should "quality" be affected by your film preferences, or is it meant to be an objective (and testable) hypothesis about what some group of people (critics, film bloggers, etc.) would report? If the latter, then I think the quality/rewatchability metric potentially misses information about "first viewing enjoyability," which is what I personally think is much more important than rewatchability.

In the end, I still have trouble with the "quality" metric. If it's meant to be objective, why use user input rather than some aggregation of real data (e.g. Metacritic or Rottentomatoes)? If "quality" is meant to be subjective, then it doesn't seem much different than "first viewing enjoyability," since "enjoyability" and "personal opinion of quality" seem by definition equivalent.

<comment><USER4> Another thought is that there may be some ratio between quality and rewatability that signifies the first-time (but not repeated) watchability of a film.

For example, 5 stars for quality and 0 for rewatachability doesn't tell me I should watch the film if I haven't already. But maybe 2 stars for rewatability/subjective enjoyment is enough justification to watch it to appreciate the quality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this better than a normalized cosine similarity? The vector being arbitrary, but in this case being a normalized value on quality and rewatchability.

Cosine similarity would also let you express pairwise similarity as a single normalized value, instead of a 9-way comparison.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting read. Vector Victor sounds like a linear correlation algorithm. I wonder what coefficient they're using under the hood...

<comment><USER3> It's not actually linear correlation, since we effectively normalise the pairwise scores to [-1,0,1],[-1,0,1] (nine possible combos). We're exploring blending in a few other signals along the way, but we wanted to see how far we could get by discretising the pairwise comparisons in this way.

Once we've collapsed all pairs down to a Vector Victor, we treat matching Vector Victors as a thumbs up and non-matching as a thumbs down, take the square root of both then take the lower bound of the Wilson interval as our ranking function.

More questions? Shoot!

<comment><USER4> I assume each vector has its own weight? So better in "Better in both respects" is a stronger sign of similarity than just "Higher quality but same rewatchability."

So say.. "Same in both dimensions" = 0 "Same quality but more rewatchable." = +1 "Same quality but less rewatchable." = -1 "Higher quality but less rewatchable." = +2 "Higher quality but same rewatchability." = +3 "Better in both respects." = +4 etc..

Then you could pass those to a coefficient like Pearson's R.

x = [0, 1, 2, -1, -3, 4, -4] y = [0, 1, 1, 2, -1, -2, 0]

It'd be an interesting experiment to see what results that gives vs. your current algorithm.

<comment><USER3> That's something we haven't tested, but my gut tells me contrasting Vector Victors (like better in both dimensions) is 'worth' more than similar Vector Victors.

The really significant change would be that agreeing in one dimension (yes A is better quality than B, but we disagree on which is more rewatchable) still contributes to your correlation with someone. We're not doing that at the moment, because it felt like pairwise partial agreement would weaken the signal - I wanted _real_ agreement (in both dimensions) to stand out.

While there might be a way to capture that with a linear function, I've favoured solutions that reflect that our ratings are two-dimensional.

<comment><USER4> Also, if you avoid the normalisation step you could easily factor in the degree at which user A liked the quality vs. user B, instead of just a 'more' or 'less' question.

If you factor your vector weights by the scale of your quality rating (0 - 10?) then if user A liked the quality film X vs. film Y +6 more points than user B's +1, this would give you a more accurate correlation.

Anyway, food for thought. A very fun problem to be working on!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's cool they're taking a new approach. I wonder if there aren't scientific papers on this stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't be surprised if there were. If anyone knows of any, please share here.

Glen is bringing a lot of what he learned doing transport modeling and advertising analysis to the project - but we don't have any reference material specific to what we're doing now.</comment></comment>


Hurricane Matthew Visualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.ventusky.com/?p=26.33;-79.10;6&l=gust&t=20161007/08&w=0xIAb9A9A <comment><USER2> This looks like a van gogh painting if you zoom all the way out. Regardless, great work! This is really important.

<comment><USER3> [https://vimeo.com/36466564](https://vimeo.com/36466564)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've never used Ventusky before. Wow. I am very impressed.

Panning out creates a Starry Night effect. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little confused by the swirling pattern. It doesn't represent the eye, it seems to merely by a pattern to denote the highest wind speeds, not the spiral of a hurricane.

The reason I say this is in the lower right there are three models in the lower right and the center of the pattern moves around when you select each one. Also, with one of the options, it puts the center on the coast at Fort Pierce as I write this, however it's off the coast of Palm Beach and hasn't made landfall anywhere.

<comment><USER6> I also notice that the size of the eye changes depending on your zoom level. There are a number of ways you could explain that, but it's not clear what's actually going on.

</comment></comment><comment> cha-cho Another option: [https://www.windytv.com/?25.314,-76.003,6](https://www.windytv.com/?25.314,-76.003,6)

<comment><USER7> [https://earth.nullschool.net/](https://earth.nullschool.net/)

This is the oldest of this kind of map that I know of. It includes source on the About page.

<comment><USER8> This one seems much more efficient, at least on Safari. In contrast, the OP link pegs CPU to 100%.

<comment><USER9> It's using your laptop fan to simulate the sounds of the hurricane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> also, [https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...](https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-67.74,22.87,1458/loc=-78.222,26.812)

source: [https://github.com/cambecc/earth](https://github.com/cambecc/earth)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting stuff.

I wish you could change the color map, though; jet is Considered Harmful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU)

<comment><USER12> Link to the paper cited by the video regarding effectiveness of colormaps: [https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8667395/evaluati...](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8667395/evaluation_of_artery.pdf)

<comment><USER13> The paper doesn't seem to support the idea that rainbow visualization is harmful for 2D visualizations.

Diagram: [http://i.imgur.com/E7aNLuM.png](http://i.imgur.com/E7aNLuM.png)

 _We observed no statistically significant effects of color scheme on any of the participants ' subjective responses._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a giant center of rotation parked over the North Atlantic, just off Greenland. The wind speeds are only moderate but it's huge.

<comment><USER15> The size may be due to the map projection.

I like the front passing through the middle of the US just west of Chicago. Wind direction changes abruptly along that one.

<comment><USER16> It's actually pretty large even looking at an orthographic projection:

[https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...](https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-49.11,50.72,732)

You can see it form if you go back a couple of hours. I'm assuming it's some form of extratropical cyclone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing that strikes me is how far apart the weather models are on a thing that's happening RIGHT NOW.

Also, [https://www.windytv.com/?29.334,-81.156,6](https://www.windytv.com/?29.334,-81.156,6) gives way more information (eg, ocean swell / wave height) and forecast for the next five days.

</comment><comment><USER18> a bit cleaner: [https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...](https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-85.29,38.28,640)

I presume it works off the same source data.

<comment><USER19> For what it's worth, here's the thread about that visualization tool: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415488)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are there any public online webcams in the area?

<comment><USER21> Here is a list of beach cams. Most don't seem to be operational this morning. [http://www.mybeachcams.com/florida/east- central/](http://www.mybeachcams.com/florida/east-central/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Had light showers in Tampa. Thankfully it isn't expected to reach us.

A natural calamity makes us realize that we aren't really in control.

</comment><comment><USER23> Feeling it here in Sarasota, FL, mildly. It's forecast to do a strange loop, heading north and spiraling back to approximately where it presently is, but a bit N/E. It will be interesting if it does. And Nicole is right on its tail.

<comment><USER24> Watching my trees here in Tampa, the kids school getting canceled and having to change our plans for the day is about the biggest impact we've felt here.

Ohh and the roads were wide open when we went out for breakfast.

<comment><USER23> Little more than grey skies and a little sea-side chop here today. A relative in the St Augustine area, however, has reported loss of the _entire_ garden, vicious winds and sustained power outage. Trees were expected to come down, as of a few hours ago.

"Wide open" roads in Tampa is difficult to imagine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Something seems off...Isnt the eye of the storm supposed to be calm, it shows high speeds at the center.

<comment><USER26> You have to click "Wind Speed" to see that simulated. By default it seems to be "Wind Gusts".

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r Wow, glad I took my trip out of Port Canaveral _last_ week!

This really is a fantastic visualization, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it heading up to Virginia? Wondering if AWS us-east problems might be on the cards

<comment><USER28> Nope. Latest projected path from the National Hurricane Center has it hitting the coasts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina before heading back out to sea:

[http://i.imgur.com/4zGAx1R.gif](http://i.imgur.com/4zGAx1R.gif)

<comment><USER29> And then it is likely to (weakened) head back over the Bahamas and possibly southern Florida.</comment></comment></comment>


Nexus phones now identify suspected spam callers - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+Nexus/posts/PLsxmDRUd4K <comment><USER2> Every time I get a call from a number I don't recognize I do this ridiculous dance where I try to _Google the number_ (usually on my phone) before the ringing stops. If it shows up on enough spam caller sites (whocallsme, etc), I don't answer and add the number to my "SPAM" contact that currently contains about a billion phone numbers.

It's ridiculous that it took Google so long to implement such a basic feature on their phones.

<comment><USER3> I find Googling phone numbers to return nothing but junk sites trying to leach ad revenue off of those queries, with little in the way of actual information.

I just don't answer the call. If I don't know who you are, and you can't be bothered to leave a message … why should I care?

Empirically, half of upstate New York seems to think my number is the one they're looking for. Back before I stopped answering calls, I had to _repeatedly_ tell one unknown number over SMS that this wasn't the number they were looking for. _Over SMS._ I hope that that number didn't have a smartphone, as my reply of "This isn't the number you're looking for." would quite probably have been right there on the screen as he typed in the next message, again to the wrong number.

I actually have a few of the more common wrong numbers in my contacts list, and some of them still call regularly. (Never leaving a message.)

<comment><USER4> Frequently, I'll be told after an appointment (doctor, accountant, etc.) to expect a call from someone, but won't be told what number they'll be calling from. Since whatever information they want to tell me is Confidential™, they won't bother to leave me a voicemail with a single distinguishing detail, either, instead just saying "Please call us back at [number], we have important information to discuss." Which is... exactly the same message the telemarketers leave.

<comment><USER5> This is important for some people in vulnerable situations who don't want someone else to know they're going to a doctor. "Significant others" screening calls and googling the numbers (even w/o answering the phone) could lead to a bad situation.

<comment><USER6> There must be a better solution, this can't be working well for most of their customers and sounds more the sort of nonfunctional process a lawyer would come up with.

I understand that there are people in vulnerable situations, but that is not the norm. Perhaps a check-box on the HIPAA form that indicates they need "confidential voicemail and SMS messages" would be a better solution.

<comment><USER7> Agreed upon code words in the message. I had a friend who was told that if she received a call regarding a particular sensitive matter, the person on the phone would start the call (whether she answered or not) with "Hey, it's Jenny" If someone was listening in to the call/message, it'd be easy to just say "Sorry, I think you have the wrong number."

Trouble is, sometimes people feel uncomfortable bringing up the subject, so it takes the professional who is calling bringing it up to see any benefit.

I do not think that a checkbox is appropriate - at any point, you might become concerned with the privacy of a matter, or you might not realize that privacy is a concern for you. For instance, consider someone who accidentally listens to a message stating that they are now pregnant, at work. Their employer now has advanced notice of a pregnancy, but no knowledge of the employee's intentions with regard to work. That is going to change the dynamic of the workplace, even if the employer does not intend anything nefarious. I really think the only graceful solution to this is agreed code words.

<comment><USER6> We can only expect so much from the people who work at these offices. It's probably a bad idea to listen to voicemail messages at work via speakerphone; if someone does do this I think it's on them to deal with the repercussions... It doesn't strike me as reasonable to put the onus on the person leaving the message. Voicemail is tied to a phone or requires a PIN number and this seems to meet the bare minimum security requirements.

I agree that code words may be more effective than simply checking a box, but I maintain my position that it should be opt-in. I don't want to have to remember which code words mean what, or which office use code words, etc. I use my phone and email in a secure and responsible manner; explanatory text is my preference.

<comment><USER7> It certainly would seem like it's your fault if someone overhears a sensitive message, if you know it's a sensitive message. But what if you don't know it's sensitive? What if you thought your last message was something you wanted to share? Or, what if your doctor transposes your number, and calls and leaves the message on someone else's phone? Even if you've opted in to have information exposed on your voicemail, you'd still have a case for a HIPAA violation, in that case.

You're right, of course, that it's your information, and if you want to have it treated less sensitively, that's your decision. But your doctor will likely want no part in that, and will probably prefer wholeheartedly that you do what you want with that information once it is in your possession.

What would be interesting is establishing a secure communication channel for medical information like this. For instance, some sort of encrypted email, where HIPAA violations were not so much of a concern, because you could reasonably assume that no one could easily accidentally send the information to the wrong client, and that the client had sole access to the information. Such things come with their own concerns, though.

There is probably a better way of doing things, but I don't think it's all that hard to remember a code word. Especially since you can leave a callback number, preventing the client from needing to know who the code word was from.

<comment><USER6> I think I agree with you to some point. There have been a couple of suggestions and it's unfair of me to attribute them to you.

My concern is with a physician's office (or a bank, etc.) calling from a phone that does not provide Caller ID information and leaving a message that goes something like: "This is a message for you, please call us back at your earliest convenience." This would result in a call that I would ignore, followed by a voicemail that I would also ignore. Effectively it would mean that there would be no phone communication between myself and this office, bank, etc.

In my opinion, when you provide a bank or physician's office with your cell phone number and authorize them to contact you via that method, you are agreeing to let them leave the minimum required information. In my opinion, I need to know (1) who is leaving the message and (2) is it important. In a pinch, I will settle for (1). Without either, it may as well be static on the phone for all of the information it conveys. I disagree that I am allowing these offices to treat my information "less sensitively". On the contrary, it's my responsibility to treat my end of the communication channel sensitively.

A code word is an interesting idea, but people are pretty poor at remembering arbitrary information (on the whole). It's common for many people to use the same password for every website, since they have trouble memorizing more than a couple at a time. Code words, I fear, would have the same issue. People who don't need a code workd would forget it and they'd just be confused with the message; I think it would need to be opt-in for those who cannot secure their own side of the communication channel (voicemail, email, etc.)

Some of the electronic medical record (EMR) systems that have a public facing web interface do provide a more secure method of communicating with clinician or their office. In my experience these often mimic email and are secured via SSL, they require the typical username and password (or PIN) combination. These will probably become more popular, but I expect clinicians will still fall back to phone calls if the information is time sensitive.

For those who insist on listening to voicemail via speakerphone, it seems like the smart move is to ask the physician to contact them only through a secure website or email and never via cell phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.

Right now with Google Voice I get a dozen hang up calls per day, it's always from a different number. When I don't answer, Ive got a dozen 2 second long voice mails. I used to spend a lot of time setting these to spam or being blocked, but between Google Voice and Hangouts simply asinine and beyond incompetent integration where some calls show up in Google Voice but not Hangouts and vice versa, I'm losing interest.

So recently I just decided to make the default behavior for the Google Voice number not ring any of my phones or Hangouts, but set up contact groups where friends and family should ring through. Well that's not working, I'm still getting spam and hangup calls, and some friends ring through, others don't, and client calls don't.

It's really craptastic.

<comment><USER9> It's because other manufacturers replace the Nexus dialer with their own app.

But you can download the Nexus dialer from the Play Store now: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.dialer&hl=en)

<comment><USER10> The app is only available to Nexus devices. If you try to load that page on a non-Nexus phone, the page will show an error indicating that it is "not compatible" with your device.

<comment><USER11> It shows as compatible with my Note 4 and installed fine.

<comment><USER12> Not compatible with my S6

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honest question: are spam calls common in the US? I don't remember when / if I got any in Spain, Netherlands or UK (places I've lived and had cellphones for a prolonged time), I do remember, however, that when I managed to score a US number with Google Voice I'd regularly get weird spammy voicemails.

If that is the case, I wonder why that is!

<comment><USER14> I get PPI and ambulance chasing car insurance calls all the time in the UK.

<comment><USER15> I've had the same UK mobile number for... 16 years, and I get perhaps one spam call per year.

As far as I know, numbers aren't recycled, so maybe the number is in such an old range that spammers don't bother calling it. I'm careful about who I give the number to, but I do share it.

<comment><USER14> I've had mine 20 years.I probably get 1-2 calls a month, some of which I dodge using True Caller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Turning the ringer off also works.

I don't get talking on the phone. It's the lowest quality form of communication - it's ephemeral, and unlike actual face-to-face communications, all nuance and body language goes out the window. Not to mention the all-too- often piss-poor audio quality, mics that don't work half the time, and the "Can you hear me now? What was the last thing you heard?" and "Sorry, I was on mute" dances.

<comment><USER17> Some things are too long to type.

<comment><USER16> I've yet to see anything that can't be more clearly, unambiguously, and quickly expressed in text or perhaps with a picture.

If it's taking too long to type, my suggestion would be to get better at typing, or distill out the wheat from the chaff of what you're trying to say. That's what really drives me up the wall with speech - the information density is typically incredibly low, and too often people let noises tumble out of their face-holes without trying to piece together a coherent thought. I realize that's harsh, but I've lost patience for rambling, stream-of- conscience external monologues. Which promptly dissolve back into the hot air from whence they came, since there is not a readily reviewable, indexed, searchable record created automatically in the process of such bloviation.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure speaking that response vs. typing that would have taken a lot less time. ;)

<comment><USER19> A few minutes of "um, uh, ... _rustling papers_ yes, I need uh, 20 of uhhhhh" vs a simple written message that's short, sweet and straight to the point?

Most phone conversations seem to be more of the former.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I get 'em all. Almost never answer, and block every number. I've tracked the origin of a few of them down. Found the personal cell phone of the CEO of one of the companies that was behind one daily call that changed numbers everyday. That was a fu conversation, and it did stop the call, but hopefully if both Google and Apple implement this (as is planned in iOS10) it'll end this avenue of abuse.

<comment><USER21> Can you explain how you got the CEO's cell phone number? That sounds pretty amusing, honestly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Phone spam has all but killed phones. Pervasive surveillance has done the rest.

Maybe not for everyone. Yet.

But where a phone was for a time a liberating device, it's become what many of its early (and I'm talking about late 19c and early 20c critics said, not late 20/early 21) critics claimed: an insistant, rude, inconsiderate, and noxious nuisance.

A phone can ring at any time, from a call initiated anywhere in the world. Low (or zero) costs mean the caller has very little reason _not_ to call, and even a very slight probability of a positive financial return can support all measure of spam.

The fact that carrying a phone subjects you to sub-minute location tracking, puts an always-on microphone in your pocket, and leaks your identity, location, habits, and interests to the highest bidder (or marginally competent hacker) makes _that_ a non-starter.

For the past several years, I've simply _not_ carried a phone when I could possibly manage to, and the liberation is tremendous. (The trauma of having been on-call for years may or may not have contributed to my intense distaste for the devices.)

There are other options -- virtually _any_ modern electronic kit has multiple messaging capabilities, from email to IRC to various messaging applications to full VOIP and voice/video messaging. Carrying a non-phone Android tablet affords some utility without the tremendous disutilities of a phone.

But, and this speaks to recent pain, the device (a Samsung Tab A 9.7" WiFi- only) is itself locked down -- not rootable, bootloader locked, and so far as I can tell, no CyanogenMod images available for it. I'd bought it whilst travelling under some duress, as an affordable and, so far as I could tell, least-bad option.

But without the ability to actually control the system, I'm still subject to spam, crud, poor management tools (simply being able to allocate and manage storage rationally appears beyonds its meagre capabilities), etc.

What Google are offering is very little, very late. And the fact that other telcos are failing to step up and address the massive disutilities of their projects is another immense failing of the market. Realising these are the same unspeakable idiots who'll be shoving Internet of Shit devices down our every orifice makes me cry for the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tipping point for me last week: I now receive more spam phone calls than I do spam email.

<comment><USER24> Same here, does anyone know what the heck is going on? Why has there been such a surge in the past year or two?

My uncle was an early supporter of Ooma and my parents have a box that provides their landline number that they've had for 25+ years, and they don't pay anything in terms of a monthly fee.

In spite of how great of a deal it is, the spam calls have gotten to be so bad that my parents are considering getting rid of it. It's not worth the hassle, even when it's essentially free. At least half the calls that come in are spam.

(Quick aside: Ooma deserves praise for their product. I hope they succeed and can pivot properly to other products as telephones naturally die. They contribute back to the FOSS Asterisk project and their products are reliable.

Here's a cool blog post I've come across where someone hooks their Ooma box into a local server running Asterisk. You could probably do some really cool home-automation with this: [http://www.adrianandgenese.com/blogger/2010/04/23/how-to- set...](http://www.adrianandgenese.com/blogger/2010/04/23/how-to-setup- asterisk-with-ooma-voip-and-a-linksys-spa-3102/) )

<comment><USER25> The Do Not Call list at some point simply stopped working. I file several complaints a week, and haven't even gotten a response in months.

<comment><USER26> The DNC list is only effective against legitimate organizations because the only weapon it has are fines. Most of the spam calls I get are credit card scams, free cruise scams, etc. These people are already committing fraud, so DNC fines aren't going to deter them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The function existed in Chinese phone/ROMs for quite some time now. Some of the intercepters will display which type of spam, place it originates and the exact business entity name of the caller.

<comment><USER28> That doesn't work (well, not reliably) in the USA because the name/number presented in the caller ID can have little relation to the actual name/number of the caller.

I wonder if Google is doing anything beyond simply crowdsourcing spam reports based on CallerID, at least for Google Voice numbers since they own that network so may have access to some data (ANI?) that's not normally available on regular phone lines?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's the procedure for removing yourself from the suspected spam caller database if you're incorrectly placed on it?

<comment><USER30> I'd take a 1 in 10 false postive ratio over a questionable 'pay for removal' system.

<comment><USER29> Would you take a 1/100 if you were guaranteed to be initially marked as a spammer?

<comment><USER31> yes. I dont make outgoing calls to people i dont know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.truecaller...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.truecaller&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER33> Isn't Truecaller doing this and more on all Android/WP phones for years?

<comment><USER28> But that means giving yet another company access to all of your phone call and SMS data. Since Google already has that information, I'd rather that they provide this service rather than letting a 3rd party scan my calls and SMS's.

<comment><USER34> > Since Google already has that information

Sure?

<comment><USER28> Yes, quite sure since I use Google Voice so all of my calls and SMS's go through their infrastructure. And even if I didn't use GV, I use their dialer, SMS, and contacts app, so they already can already see all of my calls, SMS's, and contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone know more on how this works? The original post references that "Caller ID must be enabled".

Is this feature going to send all my incoming phone call numbers to Google - to compare it against a list of "known/suspected spammers"?

Will this only work in the United States or will it work internationally?

<comment><USER36> Called ID looks up phone numbers and replaces them with the names of businesses. It does send the phone number to Google to look it up, and it does work internationally. I've lived in both Australia and Vietnam with great results.

The feature has been available for a long time and is fantastic in my opinion. When an unknown number dials it gets replaced on the screen in ~1-2 seconds with the business name, which is really useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This means your incoming call data goes to Google. Previously, only the carrier saw it. Now they can use that info for marketing purposes.

</comment><comment><USER38> Spam calling seems to be a big deal in the US. Not at all where I live. Is it because of different features of the network or because there are cheap English speakers in other countries?

<comment><USER39> It's because the relevant regulatory apparatus has been captured by the to-be- regulated industry in the USA. There's no technological gap that prevents us from dropping a smart bomb on telemarketers within minutes of their first spam call. We just don't care.

<comment><USER8> I got a call from someone who told me I had a virus and had to install some software so they could fix it. I told him he should find a new job instead of trying to steal other people's money. He repeated his script. I repeated mine. And after the third time he went off script and asked me, "can you tell me where I can find a better job?"

So there you go. Money making good people do bad things again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My Windows Phone already does this!

<comment><USER41> From a quick Googling it seems Windows phones allow you to block calls from a particular number : [http://www.windowscentral.com/how-to-block-calls-nokia- lumia](http://www.windowscentral.com/how-to-block-calls-nokia-lumia)

Google's implementation also warns you about potential spam callers. Google maintains a list of spam callers and you can report phone numbers to this list.

<comment><USER40> Windows Phone identifies spam callers and lets you report numbers as spam. Like I said, my Windows Phone already does this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you are an Android user and you like programming you MUST install Automagic. It is, by far, the most useful app in my phone. You can automate pretty much any task on your droid, like say: if number from incoming call is in whitelist send me alert, if not hang and reply with sms "Send name and number I will call back".

</comment><comment><USER43> sonic.net uses nomorobo to filter out spam callers and it seems to be pretty effective.

[https://www.nomorobo.com/](https://www.nomorobo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I use Extreme Call Blocker for Android. Best three dollars I ever spent in my life. My phone doesn't make any noise or visual interruptions unless the number is in my contacts list. Additionally, it answers the phone and immediately hangs it up, which prevents the number from going to voicemail. I _adore_ knowing that strange numbers are essentially calling a sinkhole when they dial my number.

<comment><USER45> Until some stranger attempts to call you to tell you your kid cycled under bus #9 and is on the way to the hospital.

<comment><USER44> I guess that'll teach my imaginary kid to look both ways before crossing the street.

<comment><USER45> Unless you're an orphan with no known family feel free to substitute any other relative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Caller ID can be spoofed rather easily. This will only lead to more spoofing.

And are political calls and surveys considered spam? I certainly consider them spam.

<comment><USER47> They are, but only if they are not paying the spam detection service. It's kind of like the BBB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Caller ID info ought to appear with a data quality indicator. The trust value of the least-trusted SS7 node in the chain is the data quality.

</comment><comment><USER48> Will this include unsolicited google adwords calls?

</comment><comment><USER49> In Australia, I've signed up my numbers to the Do Not Call Register[1] and it's actually been pretty effective. I actually couldn't tell you the last time I had an unsolicited call like that.

[1] [https://www.donotcall.gov.au/](https://www.donotcall.gov.au/)

</comment><comment><USER50> In Switzerland this has been possible for quite some time now on both iOS and Android by installing the local.ch app - [http://tel.local.ch/en/advertising- calls](http://tel.local.ch/en/advertising-calls)

</comment><comment><USER51> Of course, it's not hard for them to use a different caller ID for each call they make...

<comment><USER52> And this raises the question on what's happens if Google suspects you to be a spammer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think iOS 10 does this as well. The funny thing is, a lot of the time I get spam phone calls that are in Spanish (I don't speak Spanish much) or when I pick up the phone, they just cut off the line. So they waste my time and theirs.

<comment><USER8> I think these are demographic specific scams, and you aren't the target demographic. Scams that target women, old people, or maybe even it's a pre- scam where it's just trying to find out if there's a human on the other end of the call and these numbers get more money when sold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why is it so hard for the phone company to provide accurate caller id data? I can understand the need to block outgoing caller id info and I have no problem with that. But I also have the right to not answer anonymous calls.

</comment><comment><USER55> iOS 10 brings functionality similar to this. [0]

[0]: [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/relea...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewIniOS/Articles/iOS10.html)

> CallKit. CallKit also introduces app extensions that enable call blocking > and caller identification. You can create an app extension that can > associate a phone number with a name or tell the system when a number should > be blocked.

</comment><comment><USER14> For those on a non-Nexus android phone, True Caller does this function pretty well for me in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Prank call" apps in the store do not help either.

</comment><comment><USER57> now if they could only get that camera to work ...

</comment><comment><USER58> Any unknown caller that starts his conversation with "Congratulations! ..." deserves public waterboarding.

<comment><USER8> Well, at least your advocacy of torture offers some transparency...</comment></comment>


SQL Trick: row_number() is to SELECT what dense_rank() is to SELECT DISTINCT - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jooq.org/2013/10/09/sql-trick-row_number-is-to-select-what-dense_rank-is-to-select-distinct/

<comment><USER2> I found out that a lot of devs found row_number() when they were looking for way to do pagination, but never come across rank and dense_rank functions. Nice article, it explain difference between these three functions in a much simplier way msdn and technet does.</comment>


VR Devs Pull Support for Oculus Rift Until Palmer Luckey Steps Down - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/vr-devs-pull-support-for-oculus-rift-until-palmer-luckey-steps-down <comment><USER2> At this point, I don't think any of this matters for the viability of Oculus (regardless of these being small devs anyway, it's not like their games make or break the platform, even in aggregate). It's dead, and here's why:

Facebook wants "regular people" to "hang out with each other" in VR. Facebook wants to own the movie theater, the mall, the billboards, the radio, and everything else, all at once, without having to buy real estate, so they can own 100% of global advertising, on the VR globe anyway. But regular people can't afford Facebook VR. Regular people make <$20,000/year (40% of American workers earn under 20k, and 45mil are on food stamps).

A hard plastic VR phone case with decent lenses is $10 and it's pretty damn convincing for that price.

The next cheapest VR is PS4, which is ~$700 all up, console and headset. Sony has a known name in the gaming space, a reputation for quality, and is the #1 console maker. People will buy this.

And then you have the PC VR, whether oculus or vive, $600-800 for the headset alone, and then over $1000 for a PC (because most people don't have a PC they can just plug a headset into, nor a PSU allowing them to just upgrade their GPU, etc, it requires a new unit for most.) -- and no killer apps.

So where are the devs going to go? Playstation has advanced graphics AND is difficult or impossible to pirate. Mobile has obscene penetration and people who don't play games and don't want to invest in gaming hardware have the ability to engage here.

I don't see Oculus having a good end regardless of decisions it can make.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why limit who you do business with based on who agrees with you politically? That will probably hurt you more than it does anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER4> The guy didn't even accomplish anything. He tried to solicit donations and involvement from Trump supporters online and they quickly told him to beat feet. In their own words, "memes are not for sale" because "meme magic is real".

Meanwhile, the NYTimes has a story about Hillary's real, operational, online propaganda machine: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary- clinto...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary-clinton- media-david-brock.html) I can't help but wonder if the Nimble America story is being pushed to bury this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder why FB didn't pull Luckey aside at company purchase time and say "ok you're worth a LOT of money now, time to delete the reddit account."

<comment><USER6> I wonder if this whole debacle is just FB throwing Luckey under the bus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It boggles my mind that people think this is okay, but when a business that doesn't agree with gay marriage and won't bake a cake, it needs government intervention (as long as they don't refuse a gay person from purchasing any cake, it should be well within their rights).

These developers are using bullying tactics to try to punish the Oculus developer for merely having an opinion. It only makes me want to vote for Trump even more.

It's pretty hypocritical to attempt to stop what you think is bigotry and exclusion by doing the exact same thing to the people you don't like.

With this line of thinking, our world will never change. We are better than this.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but I disagree. If someone refuses to bake a cake for gay people, I agree that is well within their rights. It is also my right to not buy a cake from them.

This is not a bullying tactic, this is people exercising the same freedoms that Palmer is by having and supporting his views.

<comment><USER9> People quickly forget that Palmer is a private citizen. He is free to have what ever political views he wants. I could some what understand if it was Oculus, but it is not. Oculus has nothing to do with Palmers political views.

<comment><USER10> CEOs/Founders of multi-billion dollar companies are more than private citizens. They are visionaries and metaphors for their vision. People associate the entire company with the idea of the person. Not always, but certainly in many cases. For the longest time, and especially before the Facebook acquisition in the minds of most people, Oculus == Palmer, and part of the incredible appeal of Oculus was that it wasn't the product of a multinational conglomerate but felt like it came out of some dude's backyard.

When people support a kickstarter/home-grown project they are supporting more than the idea - they are supporting the person behind the idea as well.

So you better believe that the political views of such people have an impact on the perception and success of their companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This liberal McCarthyism is getting a little scary.

Can't we just make cool shit and check the politics at the door?

<comment><USER12> If only. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, the question is if we'll live to see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > While everyone has a right to express his or her political opinion

We'll just try to blackmail your company into stifling political thought.

On the other hand, who would want to work with a company lead by a racist?

> "I absolutely support him doing whatever he wants politically if it's legal. > To take any other position is against American values."

Also disagree with this. Refusing to work with someone because of their politics may be a nasty thing to do, but it's equally valid speech.

All that said, i don't know if Palmer Lucky is a racist. I do think he's a young man with a high profile and based on things that have happened I think he should probably have someone working with him to help maintain a more professional online presence.

His GF is a trump supporter. Maybe he is too. So is Thiel. I think less of them all because of it, but ultimately who they are politically isn't a big deal to me. I just question what good Luckey thinks can come of funding "shitposters". Throwing a fundraiser, starting a super pac, endorsing trump, etc... those are all pretty standard political process things. This just seems ridiculous.

I'd also be especially careful given what happened to Eich. Yes, he gave money to a cause many view as oppressive (me included). Don't really see a big difference between that and Trump at this point.

<comment><USER14> +1 for sentiment, upvoted.

-1 for spelling (led is the past tense of lead). Not downvoted.</comment></comment>


Ethos Capital Announces Accountability Initiatives for .ORG - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200221005221/en/%C2%A0Ethos-Capital-Announces-Accountability-Initiatives-Secure-Strong <comment><USER2> "Ethos has voluntarily proposed to add an amendment" ...This language is hilarious to me, it suggests that there wasn't a good chance that they would get rejected otherwise.

The thing is, they're trying to add some protections, but I just don't think a private equity company should be able to own .ORG, and they have only provided the vaguest of ideas why I might want them to. "Value-added products and services" sounds like the stuff GoDaddy tries to tack on when I'm trying to check out. If you want me to believe you'll help the .ORG community, tell us your actual concrete plans (with prices).

At the end of the day, I feel like Ethos is now in "as long as we complete the acquisition, we can figure out how to peel back any additional restrictions later".

<comment><USER3> I completely agree. If I were them I'd do whatever is necessary to get the acquisition out of the spotlight and then claw back every promise over the next few years. I have very little doubt that this won't happen, unfortunately for .org and the internet...</comment></comment>


Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09ehrenreich.html?_r=1

<comment><USER2> This puts into words really well what's been stewing in my brain the past few years. Having spent the last few years traveling the world and seeing the many different ways people live, it's sometimes a bit of a shock to come back to the States and having to check if there's a nearby police officer before jaywalking across an empty street or enjoying a beer outside in the sun.

The more I leave and come back, the more it seems to me that, as this article states, we punish, ticket, fine, and incarcerate for the slightest of "offenses", things that in other places would be chalked up to "live and let live," or at worst, a verbal warning. There's the commonly cited statistic that we have more citizens in prison than China does. A country needs laws, but there's certainly a difference between laws that keep peace and laws that are petty and domineering.

All of it (among other factors, not least of which are health care and wild militarism) adds up to an environment that I'm increasingly less inclined to return to. For a country that prides itself on its freedoms, I'm constantly surprised at how successful here people are at imposing their desired behavior on others.

<comment><USER3> My ex is from the Philippines, she used to say "Why do you always say America is the land of the free? If you have a party that's too loud the cops come, you get tickets for parking anywhere, you get in trouble for crossing the street, you get fined for everything! Where is the freedom? Why are there so many laws dictating what you can do?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While most of the issues raised by the article are entirely valid, I did notice one point with which I have to take issue:

 _Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you're littering_

Cigarette butts are litter, and there's the only reason I can think of for treating them differently from other forms of litter is that they're often _burning_ when discarded and have the potential to start fires. Unlike many of the other behaviors cited as criminalizing poverty, this one is entirely voluntary. It is not, in any way a necessary consequence of being poor.

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in San Francisco, and I voted for the recent sit-lie ordinance. I would've have done so had I not recently been working in the civic center area, and come face to face with the dirty reality of homelessness. The sidewalks smell like urine, people are belligerent and drunk or passed out often. I was punched in the face while waiting for a bus outside of work. A lot of the opposition to sit lie used the rallying cry "Sidewalks are for people". I agree; they're for me too. And I don't want a bunch of drunks sleeping on my sidewalks; dirtying them up

<comment><USER6> So you want homeless people to be jailed, because you like a clean side-walk? I find that... Strange.

I walk by a typical homeless sleeping spot every morning, and while I do not enjoy the smell, my first reaction is to wonder: Why are these people out here, why do they have no home, why is there no toilette for them to use, etc, etc?

How about donating some money to groups like Glide and other organizations that help the homeless? That's what I do.

<comment><USER7> Why indeed. Where I live we have vacant free shelters where one can get a bed, a shower and a meal, and yet there are those who absolutely insist in pan handling for their next bottle. A sad picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you ever spent a night in a shelter?

More to the point, have you ever been mentally ill and spent weeks, months, or even years in shelters?

<comment><USER7> I haven't done any of those things. Yet I'd wage it would be better to live on a shelter than on the streets, unless one has some serious psychological demons, in which case an hospital with specialized care should be preferable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1) "Poverty" and "homelessness" are entirely different things. Conflating them is simply stupid.

2) There's actually a HUGELY valid point, here - in many jurisdictions around the country, it's basically illegal to be homeless for reasons described in this article.

People have to sleep, whether they can pay for a place or not. Protecting private property is one thing, but what do people expect the homeless to do if you chase them off of supposedly "public" land and carry out what amount to raids on homeless shelters?

<comment><USER9> Honestly? Die. Or, more realistically, stop being. Whether that means stop being homeless or stop being alive is entirely irrelivant.

I believe (Because I can't speak for them) that these laws come about because people judge the homeless and/or feel guilty about them. Either you see them and you feel angry that "They're messing up the park by sleeping there! They don't pay taxes!" or you feel guilty/uncomfortable (Because 'that could be me' or 'why doesn't someone help them?')

The only way to 'get rid' of the problem is to make them go away, and since killing them would be unacceptible, the next best thing is just make it illegal for them to be anywhere you have to encounter them being all homeless.

<comment><USER8> Or at least "not be where I can see them".

Of course, people won't admit when that's their thought process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing" (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail._

The utter insanity of this is astounding. There are so many actual criminals that law enforcement officials could expend their efforts on, but instead they're raiding homeless shelters in the middle of the night. Why?

Homeless shelters might house blue collar criminals, but in order to alleviate the "cost" of blue collar criminals, the law needs to be more aggressive in finding and stopping the white collar criminals. White collar criminals (Bernie Madoff, the NAR, etc.) are the usually the underlying cause of blue- collar crime. Blue collar crimes tend to be about survival; white collar crimes are about greed.

Disclaimer: I have been in a place where I've seen it up front and know not all homeless people are drunks or derelicts.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are unable to take care of yourself, then the state has a responsibility to take care of you.

However, with freedom comes responsibility, so if you cannot be responsible to take care of yourself then it follows that you should lose some freedoms too. They should not be free to mill around corners drinking and doing drugs, using the sidewalk and street as a toilet.

Here in San Francisco we have many street people and most of them are not capable of taking care of themselves. Most have mental illness, drinking and/or drug problems. It would be nice if someone could triage the ones who have potential to be rehabilitated. As for the ones who cannot be rehabilitated, they should be warehoused somewhere where they are not a danger to themselves or others. As of today, they are warehoused in the streets, and it is lose-lose for everyone. Everyone seems to blame Reagan for shutting down most of the mental hospitals. I do not know to what extent that is true.

Overall I fear that there are now too many people in the wagon and not enough pulling it.

<comment><USER12> Warehoused? How do we prevent them from leaving the warehouse? Maybe we need some fences and armed guards.

And now that we've prevented them from leaving, how do we keep them from fighting and misbehaving? Maybe we put them all in separate rooms so they can't get at each other.

Congratulations, we've just created a prison and made it a de facto crime to be homeless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How can this be hacked?

I'd suggest improving education, making it easier to get involved in politics, taking an approach in which different remedies for ($homelessness, $drug abuse, etc.) can be tested instead of assuming our legislatures or courts know best.</comment>


Flask: a micro web framework for Python - <AUTHOR> http://flask.pocoo.org/ <comment><USER2> Some really interesting ideas here, especially coming at it from a Django background.

Flask embraces thread locals - Django tends to pretend they aren't necessary at the user level, even though there are a few of them lurking in the core framework. Flask's request object is thread-safe global, and Flask encourages you to put your own per-request global instances (such as a database connection which is opened at the beginning of the request and closed at the end) on the special flask.g object. I've always disliked this kind of approach because it makes it hard to run your code outside of the context of a web request (e.g. in a cron script), but Flask deals with that by providing a clever test_request_context method:

        from flask import request

        with app.test_request_context('/hello', method='POST'):
            # now you can do something with the request until the
            # end of the with block, such as basic assertions:
            assert request.path == '/hello'
            assert request.method == 'POST'

Using the with statement here is very smart - Flask seems to get a lot of mileage out of both context managers and decorators.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Flask shapes up - it feels like a very modern attempt at a Python micro-framework, with some pleasantly unconventional ideas.

<comment><USER3> Armin has stated that he thinks that declaring URL routes with decorators is a bad idea. Has he warmed up to it or decided it bearable being a minimal framework?

I think they are a bad idea. I love urls.py being kind of a TOC for your application. Apart from that I can see a lot of good ideas in here. Solid template and HTTP layers, signed cookies, avoiding the ORM, short lived messaging, proper __html__, simplistic URL reversal. I love the simple request object API (args, form, files).

I can see additional libraries around this core. High level forms library at least.

<comment><USER4> You don't have to use decorators (they cause issues with circular dependencies as well, making it difficult to break up your views module). There is an add_url_rule method you can use to register views.

An ORM is tangental to Flask - there is some docs on how to use with SQLAlchemy (which also suggests WTForms for validation) but it's ORM/DB neutral, which is a good idea.

However I'm warming to the idea of avoiding an ORM completely in future projects - just use a thin layer around MySQLdb or DB of choice, like tornado.database or SQLAlchemy's query API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this was an April Fool's joke: <http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/4/3/april-1st-post-mortem>

edit: In response to the downvotes - it appears that it was an April Fool's joke, but because of the response he got, Armin decided to try it out for real. Yeesh.

</comment><comment><USER6> Since it's by the same author, this is probably inspired by or related to Armin's April Fools' Python micro web framework:

Denied: Python Micro-Framework (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1237412>)

April 1st Post Mortem (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1239438>)

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is trying to follow along with the Quickstart, a simple virtualenv + easy_install Flask didn't work for me -- I needed to install Werkzeug tip (easy_install Werkzeug==dev) and install Jinja2 from tip as well (hg clone <http://dev.pocoo.org/hg/jinja2-main> jinja2).

</comment><comment><USER8> Could this be Python's Sinatra?

<comment><USER9> Isn't web.py already Python's Sinatra?

examples here: <http://webpy.org/> <http://sinatrarb.com/>

(I really want to know - it seems very similar to Sinatra to me. What are the differences?).

<comment><USER10> Or itty: <http://github.com/toastdriven/itty>

Examples of mini-frameworks in various languages: <http://gist.github.com/353559>

<comment><USER11> Or Bottle: <http://bottle.paws.de/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also: Python web "framework" in 705 loc: <http://github.com/breily/juno>

</comment><comment><USER13> Will it work on Google App Engine?

<comment><USER8> Apparently, <http://flask.pocoo.org/deploying.html#cgi>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this better than bottle?

</comment><comment><USER15> Reading this the documentation is really easy to read and understand. Doesn't seem to have the restrictions of Django, you could build small distributed apps that communicate over sockets or REST.

Would also hope to see good support with document databases like mongodb.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not that Python needs more web frameworks (<http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks>), but it's good to see Python use its new poor-man's equivalent to Ruby's block syntax.

<comment><USER17> Which equivalent are you speaking of?

<comment><USER16> The 'with' syntax, which only allows execution of code on entrance and exit - no nearly as flexible as Ruby blocks.

(I'm not a Python hater, but I do like Ruby blocks.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not addressing Flask directly but the article made me think of something about small web frameworks. It strikes me as easier to come up with a new "big" web framework than it is with a new small one. Because after a certain point, its hard to come up with a framework where a Hello World web app can be expressed with any fewer lines of code. It's always possible to make a more verbose web app, it may be impossible past a certain point to make one more concise.

Perhaps Flash's angle could be not to shrink the minimum LOC needed, but to deliver more features per app LOC.</comment>


Working from home: tips on setting up your environment  - <AUTHOR> http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/04/10/workstation-setup-for-gamedevs/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm being needlessly grumpy, but I find it difficult to take advice about doing X from someone who is _about_ to do X.

Do X for 3 years, then give advice to others on how to do it.

<comment><USER3> I've done it for more than three years. The advice is good, but it's not specific to working at home - it applies to any work area, including corporate offices. IMHO the most important tip about working from home is to have a dedicated room with a door that closes, and educate members of the family to respect your work time and space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I switched from using dual monitors to using a single one. I found my productivity sky rocketed. With two monitors, my concentration was constantly being interrupted by switching between each monitor. With a single one (using Ubuntu, so multiple desktops) I'm able to use my keyboard entirely to navigate and work.

It really helps my concentration and productivity.

</comment><comment><USER5> I know it doesn't fit the article's focus on workstation setup, but I find that I also need regular, live interaction with other people.

A trip to the office for a couple hours a week or meeting up for lunch with a coworker has the effect of keeping me focused and interested in the work at hand.

<comment><USER6> Since I don't have a local office to go to, I try to attend a tech meetup once a week or so. Of course, that depends on your location.

I also feel like chatting in IRC with my coworkers helps a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is this doing on the homepage of hacker news? Seriously, this post is nothing more than common sense. From someone who doesn't even follow his own advice.</comment>