Open Source is Not About You - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 <comment><USER3> Though Rich is right, it pains me to read this because it is indicative of some disputes in the clojure community. I might be mistaken, but it seems that Rich is reacting to Chas Emericks' twitter post ([https://twitter.com/cemerick/status/1067111260611850240](https://twitter.com/cemerick/status/1067111260611850240)). In his comments he has stated: "Finally, from a practical perspective, my core-level contributions always came from some source of pressing need in an actual, present, needs-to-work project. If I know a problem isn't going to be triaged for months and solved for years, then I'm out."

So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well. So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.

<comment><USER4> > Though Rich is right, it pains me to read this because it is indicative of > some disputes in the clojure community.

I am genuinely curious why you, or anyone else, would think he is right. I can see why people would agree or why he wants to do things a certain way, but to be right you have to have arguments backing up what you are saying. I don't see that in this post. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> > I am genuinely curious why you, or anyone else, would think he is right.

Because Rich has the rights to do what he wants with his time and money. (Like everybody else.) It is completely within his rights to establish his own governance and contribution model for his version of Clojure. At the very least, I don't see an argument why it's NOT within his rights to do so.

Of course, there are several corollaries. The first is that nobody is forced to use or contribute to Clojure. The second is that, given that Clojure is Free Software, it's possible for someone else to pick up the baton, make a fork, and run it their own way. (egcs and XEmacs both come to mind as examples where someone did this and it wound up improving the original.... so there _is_ precedent.)

I wouldn't feel terribly bad if someone made this fork, but I'm not going to do it myself. Unlike Rich, I'm not willing at the moment to make the personal sacrifices that'd be required to make this sort of contribution. Neither, apparently, is anyone else.

So Rich gets to make the rules. Because he (and Cognitect) have paid the dues. Whether that's good for Clojure in the long run remains to be seen. (But honestly, my semi-informed take on the ecosystem is that it needs library maintenance much more than it does core language improvements. The core language has been an excellent choice for many purposes for years.)

<comment><USER6> > _Because Rich has the rights to do what he wants with his time and money. > (Like everybody else.)_

This feels like a non sequitur. Having a _right_ to do something is completely orthogonal to whether you _should_ do that thing.

<comment><USER5> > Having a right to do something is completely orthogonal to whether you > should do that thing.

Yeah... there are really several conversations that could be had:

1\. Rich deserves credit and respect for personally taking on a cost that ranges into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund Clojure. Very few people do this, and even fewer bring the taste and judgement Rich brought to Clojure.

2\. Rich/Cognitect currently own the Clojure governance model and they can do with it what they want.

3\. Maybe the current governance model isn't what's going to bring Clojure the next 20-30 years of viability.

My take on it essentially this:

1\. Yes. I wouldn't/couldn't do it myself. (And I've started down the path at least once.)

2\. Yup. Maybe it will be what the platform needs to grow and thrive. Maybe not. Maybe it will be attractive to users and developers. Maybe not.

3\. At some point, this will probably be true. Given the history of companies and projects, this shouldn't be a surprise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them.

>I am grateful for the contributions of the community. Every Clojure release incorporates many contributions. [...] Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such.

>The time to re-examine preconceptions about open source is right now. Morale erosion amongst creators is a real thing.

Sad that it has to be said. I think as a creator you need to brace yourself for the reality of what it means to offer something to the world. There is a sort of normal distribution of consumers and some can be surprisingly toxic.

<comment><USER8> Interestingly, this isn't just isolated to open source. I've heard similar sentiments expressed by artists of popular works, including but not limited to:

\- Game developers

\- Authors of popular novels that have yet to finish ("GRRM is not your bitch")

\- Star Wars

<comment><USER9> As a game developer: Amen!

I had been doing that a long time when one of my producers (on his first game) wanted to be on the forums to interact with "fans". I think he was excited and thought it would be satisfying to interact with people who were playing the game we developed. I remember thinking it would be like that when I started. Don't get me wrong, most gamers, like most people, are terrific. But they get drowned out by the disgruntled.

<comment><USER10> Then you better stick to that classical sales model that seems to be on the way out. The minute you sell the full package of an unfinished products, people will feel entitled to what they expect it to be (rightfully, imo). So you'd should avoid Pre-Purchase, Season Pass and some degree Early Access. I'm torn about the latter, since it is supposed to be sold "as is" with no expectations, but don't think this is was most actually do.

Also how do you think about post launch updates to fix bugs? Those seem to be generally expected as well, now.

<comment><USER11> > Also how do you think about post launch updates to fix bugs? Those seem to > be generally expected as well, now.

Personally, I'd say the consumers are entitled to those, too. Your comment made me think of various games where I think that wasn't the case -- and that's mainly because those games were _finished_ (and polished) before release.

I never expected any bugfixes for Games such as Starfox 64, Zeldas, Super Marios, and various others out of my old SNES and N64 cartriges. Because they worked. They were finished. Funny enough: Super Mario Odyssey had some a-ha moment for me because it also worked just fine literally out of the box, which is something I'm not seeing often enough anymore.

But honestly, launches nowadays are usually far more on the side of Games like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion than those examples.

Imagine a regular software engineer in $MARKET going "ugh, all these people we've sold buggy software to at full price now think they're entitled to bugfixes."

OTOH, there are of course some games where the effort put in by the developers far exceeds what any customer could reasonably expect. Terraria would be a great example for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an excellent depiction of the distinction between "free software" and "open source" as ideological frameworks. As licensing schemes, they're the same - but open source ends at the licensing scheme, as the author correctly points out. If you want to use it for a side project, great. If you want to use it to make money, great. If you want to use it to commoditize the operating system for your worldwide advertising infrastructure, great. If you want to embed it in your iOS app or in iOS itself (and the license permits doing so), great.

The free software movement, however, says things like this (from [https://www.debian.org/social_contract](https://www.debian.org/social_contract) ):

 _Our priorities are our users and free software._

 _We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities._

 _We will give back to the free software community._

In other words, free software _is_ about you.

I would quibble with the claim that the open-source process is what produced Clojure in the first place. The open source movement has benefited from sailing in the same direction as the free software movement and using the same tailwinds. Without the free software ethos (which was behind GNU as well as a lot of the Lisp work at MIT), would Clojure have been able to stand on the same shoulders, and would it have attracted the community of users and the ecosystem of libraries it has?

<comment><USER13> I disagree. Software projects that claim to be free-software instead of opensource (plus use a "contagious" license such as GPL) don't owe you more community management than the ones with an MIT license.

<comment><USER14> Most high profile project that explicitly claim to be free software in fact do not do any kind of community management at all and do not tend to actively seek outside code contributions.

In fact the community involvement in development as exemplified by GitHub (and SourceForge before that) is to a large extent invention of the same group that started using the term open source (for what is otherwise mostly the same thing as free software).

<comment><USER15> The software that allows the GitHub style (light-forking) environment is called git, created by Linus. He's a great example of a person who doesn't care about free software ideologies, but cares about open sourcing code a lot.

<comment><USER16> And still, both his main projects (Linux and git) are under the most "ideological" license, the GPL. And the troubles he's gone to, in order to keep this state of things in the face of commercial pressures on Linux, are almost biblical.

Linus cares a great deal, he just doesn't want to be cornered as an FSF zealot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Rich Hickey has given so much to the world of software and systems design. The value exchange has most likely not been reciprocal. Nor has it been sufficiently respectful, based on this message. People like Rich that give so much are rare. And people that understand how to respectfully recognize that seem to be becoming more rare.

Of course, one can remember that life is not fair, and people are often shitty even without being conscious of it, and that Rich has freely chosen to pursue this path.

But this leads me to a few questions: If you agree with what I have written above, and what Rich has written in this message, then how can we tip the scales just a little bit further towards respect and reciprocation? What kind of gestures, gifts, and generosities do you think are appropriate? What improved efforts to educate consumers of open source software would be effective? Further still, what kind of culture do we want?

<comment><USER18> It seems strange to me that you're so concerned with how we should try to be more respectful to Rich given the querulous and disdainful tone of _his_ post.

<comment><USER19> He wrote the software, he gets to have whatever attitude and tone he feels like. If you don't like it, don't use his software.

<comment><USER18> I took what I see as a moderate position lightly criticizing his tone, but because you're going way farther than that and asserting that he can be as much of a jerk as he wants, let's address that argument.

I think it's nonsense. Rich is probably among the most brilliant software engineers on the planet but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether he needs to be polite and show human empathy and decency like everyone else does. You can be toxic and hostile and people will put up with it if you're useful enough (c.f. Linus) but we shouldn't be lining up, comment after comment after comment, to cheer that kind of behavior on.

Again, I don't think this is a big deal. I think that his rant is just a small indiscretion and we're all human, but I'm dismayed to see such an outpouring of support for exactly the position that you're putting forward. What I'm saying isn't "nauseating PC culture" as one GitHub commenter put it; it's just _not being an asshole_.

<comment><USER20> I found the original rational, useful and straight-forward. It's not an "indiscretion".

So, yeah, your comments are approaching "nauseating PC culture" because you can't read something like the original without being offended some how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Context, I think: [https://gist.github.com/halgari/c17f378718cbd2fd82324002133e...](https://gist.github.com/halgari/c17f378718cbd2fd82324002133ef678)

Associated Reddit thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0lalh/timothy_and...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0lalh/timothy_and_stu_on_why_its_hard_to_contribute_to/)

<comment><USER22> I think this also fits nicely with the backdoor thread posted earlier today. There is an immense amount of pressure and expectations put on folks who open- source things.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The other side of this is that open source projects are not entitled to users, or relevance. If they aspire to those things, then being responsive to their users and making something amazing that strangers want to use is part of the process.

Neither side has any particular obligation, but open source creates the most benefit when users and developers make an effort to be considerate towards each other.

<comment><USER24> Completely agree.

I don't know why more people aren't pointing this out. It's almost as though people don't realize how much the value of Clojure comes from the community. Or aren't aware that many of the most helpful and constructive members of that community are burning out and leaving.

<comment><USER25> I've yet to see a non harmonious relationship between constructive and helpful community members and the core team.

I'm also not that sure the community contributes as much as you think. I use Clojure for work, and 95% of all value is from the core team only. I'm not trying to say the community is bad, I'm part of it, mostly trying to point out that it actually is quite disproportionate in relation to the core team, and I don't think we can criticize them until we (the community) actually step up and start being a lot more helpful and constructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Imagine belonging to an expert, seasoned team that masters a given technique. Literally the worldwide top 1% for that technique works under your roof.

You don't take feature development lightly: each feature will be discussed and polished patiently within your team. And then you release it, for free.

Then semi-random people from the internet want to continue the discussions that were settled privately long ago, while also demonstrating this entitlement.

I guess that can be a maddening, constant stream of noise. One that cannot be dismissed harshly - you may be an expert, but definitely don't want to scare people off.

Kudos to the Clojure core team for resisting the stream in a classy, illuminating manner.

<comment><USER12> > _Imagine belonging to an expert, seasoned team that masters a given > technique. Literally the worldwide top 1% for that technique works under > your roof._

That would worry me immensely. What sorts of things are we not realizing because we're not exposed to other ways of thinking? What sort of talent are we not training up because we don't know how to recognize it? And what do we do when some of the people under our roof retire?

Have you ever hired someone who worked at Google? They're quite probably in the worldwide top 1% for software engineering talent, and still they come out of Google expecting everything to work in a Google way. And conversely there are folks at my company - skilled software engineers - who I wish would go work at Google for at least a few months, because they've been here for probably ten years and while they're very good they've never seen how other people do things. They're skilled, but they simply have not had opportunities to learn deeply from the outside world, and in a field moving as fast as software, no single organization can keep up.

This is _why open source exists in the first place_. Whether or not you think there's an ethical imperative to share software, the whole idea of open source is that different companies can share source code to produce better results than in-house development and buying licenses to closed-source software would achieve. At some point, if you're on an expert team that works under one roof, you're going to stop being the experts in the thing, because the other 99% of people interested in the subject can all learn from each other, can try the things you dismissed privately long ago, can experiment at scales you simply couldn't imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I haven't used Clojure much but what I hear is mostly great. And I love this rant, its always refreshing when people speak their minds.

But.... Rich is pushing things a little too far I believe.

On the front page of the Clojure web site, under the section 'Rationale", his very first 6 words are:

> "Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments [...]"

Those words do not sit well with (from the rant):

> "[..] you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled > to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the > attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your > complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."

I get it, Rich is making a point, and its a fair and unarguable one - if he indeed has no loyalty or feeling whatsoever towards said Customers and Stakeholders.

But in the real world, we want our work to be valued by others, and I'll bet that the stewards of Clojure feel just the same and maybe shudder just a little.

<comment> another-one-off Rich Hickey stands for good design. That means saying "no" to a lot if ideas that are good, but not part of the vision, and it means not running experiments on your users in the main releases. Whether he reaches that ideal, I dunno, but he lays out the vision pretty clearly when he speaks. It isn't the only way, but it is Clojure's way.

When he talks about customers and stakeholders, he is talking about people who have bought in to that design. It is very easy to support his position here. Rich knows exactly how he wants to program and the man is a visionary of data- driven programming and thinking. If you don't like that vision, maybe don't use Clojure and find a different lisp.

Great design is a very foreign idea to a lot of mainstream software developers - most of them, sooner or later, go for the "big rewrite" because they didn't get the design right to start with. Things like Python 2 -> 3 spring to mind (breaking changes to print! whoever thought that was a good idea didn't respect the language users). With that rational, he is promising not to do exactly what the Python people did.

<comment><USER28> There is a big difference between design and bug fixes. There are many small tickets with bug fixes already written that have not been merged into Clojure citing Rich's time. Sometimes months or years go by, even when the Jira thread includes supporting comments from Alex Miller at Cognitect. Small fixes that improve the language without altering its design, making core functions more stable with edges cases, and they never make it into the language.

<comment><USER29> quoting _halgari from June 2016(on clojure)[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884028)]:

> Something that is often very hard to understand (it took me years to do so). > Is that maintaining a language is insanely hard. Everything has a cost. Let > me give a good example: A few years back someone submitted a patch that > improved the error messages in Clojure. Worked great, just a single extra > "if" and a message. It was committed to master. Then people's code got way > slower. Why? Well this was a often used function and that single if blew the > JVM inline budget causing that function to never be inlined. And that > improvement had to he yanked out.

<comment><USER28> That's a new feature. I am talking about _bug fixes_... I reiterate: big difference.

<comment><USER29> a code change is still a code change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I kind of wish people complaining about Clojure's development process (and of other open source projects) would just create a fork and implement their own ideas.

This way, everyone could benefit from the experimentation and likely some of their ideas would get rolled into the root project once they have proven themselves.

<comment><USER31> Be careful what you wish for... you just might get it.

Forks are not particularly fun from the user's standpoint.

<comment><USER32> They mostly don't matter to users, because most forks fizzle out due to lack of interest, unless there's a really good reason for the fork. If the original maintainers aren't doing something weird like re-licensing under a more restrictive license or closing off development and refusing good patches from the community, it's very unlikely a fork will gain enough traction to end up on the radar of most users.

We've had a few forks of our projects over the years...most often, there's just one initial commit with a few minor changes and some big words about how cool it'll be when the community can steer the ship...and, then nothing, forever. The thing about forking a big project is that it takes a lot of time and effort to make it better, or even significantly different, from the project you're forking. "Do not fork lightly" is good advice, but mostly because it's gonna be a waste of time in most cases.

<comment><USER33> This is why I've never worried about anyone stealing my ideas or code. The set of people who could both actually have the ability to pull off forking something and running the project, and have the motivation to see it through, is so vanishingly small as to be non-existent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > To be honest, I could use that money in my retirement account, having > depleted it to make Clojure in the first place.

A perfect example of the significant cost and personal risks people take on for the benefit of producing open source. I'm as glad Rich is saying this as I am he made Clojure (and open sourced it!) in the first place.

Thank you, Rich.

</comment><comment><USER34> I run a few OSS projects, among which one with 10k+ github stars that has a decent size community. While I recognize my own personality in Rich's post ("if you don't like my direction.. there's the door") for some reason I ended up running this project with the attitude that everyone I am interacting with their time, insights, and needs are just as important as mine. It's been very refreshing. It makes people very eager to contribute, and there's close to 0 hostile behavior in the community. It really works magic.

I have no doubt that Rich's time and his direction of Clojure are endlessly more important than the average community member, as a fact. But you CAN'T communicate this way! Interacting with someone where before you start there is the assumption that someone is way more important cannot result in a good interaction. Even if it is a fact, even if both people involved know it, you will be much better off if you act like it doesn't exist for the purpose of communication.

Of course, time is limited, but I find there is an art to giving short reactions that are still respectful in this way. And it is not like Cognitect entirely does NOT want there to be community interaction (like Rich himself says), so it is just a question of optimizing these interactions.

</comment><comment><USER28> It still boggles me that Jira tickets with small bug fixes to real problems confirmed by other members of Cognitect have never been merged, due to Rich's time. Simple fixes to core functions that make the language more stable for edge cases without breaking design or backwards compatibility. Fixes that the Jira threads reveal others at Cognitect support patching and for which patches have already been written. Tiny fixes with little code involved. I understand being conservative on new features but isn't it in everyone's interest, including Rich and Cognitect's, to fix actual bugs?

The answer tends to be that if the bug doesn't affect Rich personally then it does not get attention. That doesn't seem healthy for the language.

<comment><USER25> Is this true? I've never personally been affected by a bug, and every new versions has a list of bugfixes that were merged in.

I think most of those fixes you mention are actually semantic altering and thus possibly backwards incompatible.

<comment> village-idiot We actually never got our bugs solved. My particular favorite was CLJ-1741, which made reloading code with Cursive basically not work in our code base. Opened in 2015, effectively abandoned to its fate in 2016.

<comment><USER25> Well, I mean, it's still open. I'm sure if it got more votes on it, it would be better prioritized. That said, I guess this is a good example of a possibly starving issue where the core team can't scale to address the most minor issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I see Github playing a big role in bringing about this situation. The collaboration model focuses on the "who" of software development and not the "what". It used to be people were concerned about making a piece of software that did something interesting. Now it's all about how many stars, forks and followers you can get. Github made it _too_ easy to "collaborate" and now you see any number of non-developer interlopers pushing project owners around. There needs to be a new model that's not so focused on the social but is focused on the tech and just the tech.

</comment><comment><USER36> He is correct that open source developers don't "owe" anyone anything. But this is kinda missing the point.

The point is that if you have a bad development process, people are going to have issues. And these issues are real.

Even though you have no "obligation" to solve these problems that you have created for other people, you shouldn't be surprised if people bring them up, or perhaps even fork the project with a bunch of other people who also have problems with you.

Sure, the community does not own your time, but neither do you own the community. A community is fully within it right to do something else with their time, or convince other people to contribute to a _different_ project.

<comment><USER37> I believe your last two paragraphs are exactly what he's suggesting: complainers are free to fork and work on a better process if they're so inclined.

<comment><USER36> In his post he stated as follow:

> But kindly don't burn the community down on your way out, with self-serving > proclamations

This is him complaining about what the community is doing. The community is free to do what it wants, and he is making some sort of statement as if he owns the community in some way, and therefore can decide what is or is not "burning it down".

Convincing other people to leave the closure community (IE, burning it down) is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if there really are problems with it.

Complaining about what the community is doing, is him making the same mistake that he is complaining about other people doing.

<comment><USER38> By this logic you are making the same mistake as both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Fyi... his post today seems to be related to a previous reddit post that HN also discussed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632)

(Downvoters: Did I read his essay incorrectly? The reddit post from 1 year ago and the github post today seem be the same theme of managing the community expectations of Cognitec.)

<comment><USER40> Broadly yes, but I'm guessing this one was sparked by this thread [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojure/2GQQpxNcDlM/St3Can2x...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojure/2GQQpxNcDlM/St3Can2xAgAJ) and the indignation that spilled out elsewhere. We get these little brouhahas every couple months o_O

Rich put it well that Clojure is not closed, it is conservative. He made it to solve the problems he encountered in the industry, which were large multithreaded proprietary systems. It is a business first language (cognitect is a consultancy, after all). The fact that so many hobbyists like me ended up using it was kind of a happy accident.

These two audiences don't have completely opposed interests, but they do have different priorities. Businesses care about stability; they don't care much about whether the language accepts PRs on Github or conducts twitter polls. I accepted that a long time ago, and I'm still using it six years later.

<comment><USER39> _> Broadly yes, but I'm guessing this one was sparked by this thread_

Ok, I see the possible confusion. I wasn't trying to say they were related to the same event. I was trying to point out they were related _themes_.

When I read today's post, I had an immediate sense of _déjà vu_. No wonder, he used the word _" entitlement"_ repeatedly in both posts a year apart. (Counted 11 times in today's post and 4 times in October 2017.) He also mentioned personal sacrifices of losing money on Clojure in both posts. (The "retirement money" in today's post and "$200k" in last year's post.)

I don't follow Clojure closely but the meta question/observation is that there seems to be a profoundly broken misunderstanding and recurring pattern of negative interaction between the Clojure community and Cognitec that causes Rich Hickey to express his frustration in way that other folks Ruby's Matz, Rust's Hoare, didn't have to express. (Maybe Hoare left years before the Rust community could turn on him and accuse Mozilla of holding back progress in the language (and therefore Rich's predicament is inevitable if one stays involved long enough) -- I dunno.)

Yes, different specific triggers but the same type of frustrated response. I thought they were over a year apart but you're saying the frustrations are unleashed every couple of months so that's news to me.

<comment><USER41> > Maybe Hoare left years before the Rust community could turn on him and > accuse Mozilla of holding back progress in the language

Yes, this is the case. (As far as I can tell.)

<comment><USER42> You're downvoted, but I think that's a bit unfair.

Graydon did leave pretty early, so there wasn't this kind of pressure yet, really. However, after he left, we moved to a "core team" model, which meant that a few people (I among them) were the decision makers for everything. This eventually lead to complaints and pressure, and we opened it up further from there, adding all the other teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would argue that if you release an open source project, you do have a responsibility to communicate enough about your intentions that potential users can base their expectations accordingly.

That doesn't have to be at any particular level. But if a project is unmaintained... why not tell people? If you are sharing a project in case it's useful to someone but don't really intend to deal with any external bug reports or feature requests at all... why not just clearly advertise that?

<comment><USER44> Nope, you're not entitled to anything. A license is just a license. You're free to use the code. If the releaser gives you no communication about expectations, then it's your choice to use it or not. They're obligated to give you anything, not even the time of day. Enjoy your free code, or don't.

<comment><USER43> And yet, _most_ people have some interest in treating other people respectfully. Which is the only reason the open source ecosystem works at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This post is absolutely correct. All your entitled to (if anything) is the code, as is.

You're not entitled to:

* Community engagement

* Bug fixes

* Timely pull requests

* Anything else

You get the code as it has been released. Whatever you do with it is up to you. The finished product you build using the code you have found is your responsibility and yours alone.

</comment><comment><USER46> Although there is of course no warranty, I think it's fair that when projects have marketing websites saying how great they are and encouraging widespread use, users can complain when the software isn't fit for use.

If you're going to be strict about how you don't owe anyone anything, it might be a good idea not to undermine that message in your marketing. Better to tell people all the reasons why they _shouldn 't_ use your code. Not for production! There may be bugs that you have to fix yourself!

And then work with developers who don't scare easily.

</comment><comment><USER47> My personal favorites:

> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift

> Morale erosion amongst creators is a real thing.

It reminds me of a project called aurman [1] (a great AUR-Client for Arch Linux). Due to the 'feedback' from the community, the main author went from loving to work on his project to hating it. In the end, he stopped the public development to protect himself from the negativity.

[1] [https://github.com/polygamma/aurman](https://github.com/polygamma/aurman)

</comment><comment><USER48> I think there's a time though when an open source project becomes so dominant in its field, that alternatives become few or untenable. In these cases were all at the mercy of the market for having consolidated on a set of choices. The mindshare around the project gives maintainers a tremendous amount of power over others.

Many mainstream projects fit into this. It's not feasible from a business perspective to get to fork Linux or MySQL. There's alternatives, but if they don't work not everyone can spend startup funding to build a NoSQL database.

In these cases committers have a tremendous amount of power and often get disconnected from practitioners.

<comment><USER49> Android runs on billions of devices and is a fork of Linux. There's two or three commercial forks of MySQL, I think Percona started before Sun bought MySQL, but I can't remember for sure anymore.

<comment><USER48> Yeah and it takes a company the scale of Google to maintain it. Not feasible for pretty much anyone else.

<comment><USER50> Few small companies can maintain a full OS, regardless of the open source alternatives. Yet FreeBSD, OpenBSD and SmartOS are all still living projects, and none have a Google behind them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> People are inherently selfish. Everyone is looking to better their own self- interests, seek validation, and seek attention in life. A community - <USER2> community - is made entirely of these people.

An effective leader is one who can play to the strength of this fact rather than fighting it. You have thousands of people willing to spend their time for you. How can you make their interests align with your own? How can you convince them that your self-interest is their self-interest?

Funny, but I don't think calling people entitled is the answer to this.

<comment><USER52> I maintain a few open source projects that many developers use (along with many more projects that no one uses) and I get like one PR a month. It seems like some developer's entire workflows depend on some of the tools and libs I maintain, but I don't even use the damn things myself.

That seems like the perfect case for self interest: make this thing you use all the time work better for you. The code is usually fairly clean and the contribution process documented. And yet all the help wanted issues just sit there.

How have other maintainers been able to encourage more valuable community contributions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm not a member of the Clojure community, and have no idea what context may have driven this but...

...I agree with his point 100%, and it's certainly relevant to other communities.

<comment><USER54> Check these other comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538267)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538298)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Although I appreaciate almost all opinion articles and videos posted by Rich, what I read here is that Rich seems to see his project about himself which fits his previous behave as Clojure's Dictator For Life. In other words, he could never remove himself from the equation or make clojure an independent long standing self directed project.

In general terms of OS project, I think the first premise is already flawed. What if there were open source projects meant to satisfy their users or public? Or just iwth very different goals than yours? Do you even think that software is just finished when it is released? that fanbase should be allowed? What if Rich itself is the main bottle neck for his own masterpiece?

       The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to
       work are people who run projects, and the scope of their
       entitlement extends only to their own projects.

Now, he should answer this own questions and make his own logic for his own project. I personally always saw open source as complex as a society is; as complex as an MMO game game can be. (including actors such fanbase, devs, sponsors, investors), etc.

<comment><USER56> Well the code is free but the clojure trademark is his.

> What if Rich itself is the main bottle neck for his own masterpiece?

Then whoever thinks would do it better could just fork it and call it 'klosure' for sure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> For those asking about context, or what brought this on, I imagine it wasn't any single complaint or event.

I witnessed one such event recently, and I feel pretty confident in saying that person was just having a bad day. Or bad moment, whatever.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's painful how many people don't seem to think this way. If you've ever contributed a patch to an open source project, do you think you should be obligated to maintain this patch for the foreseeable future? If the answer to that is 'no,' then why would a greater contribution, such as an entire project, be held to such obligations? It's disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER59> A decade ago I found Rich's way of communication tough to swallow and borderline abusive, but re-examining it with the acceptance the years of using probably the most expressive and versatile language on the planet I find it refreshingly clear and to the point. And he's absolutely right of course, his time is just that, his time.

</comment><comment><USER60> Arguably the best and most important thing an open source author can do is engineering their code the way as easy to understand and extend (this doesn't mean an over-engineered architecture, quite the opposite) as possible so whoever wants something particular could really easily add/change it with an extension or by forking and editing the core code. This done you can really legitimately direct those asking for what you don't feel like doing to do it themselves. Another great idea, IMHO, is hosting issue tracking on GitHub and making it the only accepted channel for feature requests and bug reports.

<comment><USER61> Making github _the only_ accepted channel for anything is hardly a great idea. Perhaps if you used "an additional" instead of "the only" in that sentence...

<comment><USER60> I believe this way people are more likely to be reasonably self-moderating and specific and less likely to engage in personally emotional argument with you than if you use e-mail. It will also give people convenience of filing a bug/suggestion without having to register on yet another bug tracker given they already have a GitHib account (who hasn't?). Needless to say using a single bug tracking system and input channel is much more convenient for everybody than if there were many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "If the way Clojure works isn't for you, a process which produced Clojure in the first place, paradoxically, so be it"

The best conclusion :)

</comment><comment><USER63> > We take some of what we earn, money that could e.g. go into our retirement > savings and instead use it to hire people to work on Clojure and community > outreach, some full-time. To be honest, I could use that money in my > retirement account, having depleted it to make Clojure in the first place. > But I love working with the team on Clojure, and am proud of the work we do.

... and then this...

> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should > recognize it as such.

Is control of the closure project part of lead dev's business model, and the part about dipping into retirement just an "open-washing" of "I decided to start a business?"

Otherwise this sounds like an extremely unhealthy and unwise "gift" on which to spend one's retirement savings.

<comment><USER64> Aren't gifts _usually_ at the giver's expense? Anything else is a transaction, surely.

I think the only point being made there was that this gift is expensive but he's happy to give it. The way I read it, he's happy to give out free iPhones, but asking/demanding a battery-charging case and extra Lightning cable on top might be pushing his generosity.

<comment><USER63> > Aren't gifts _usually_ at the giver's expense? Anything else is a > transaction, surely.

Usually with open source the "gift" is the author/maintainer's time. "Gift" in quotes because there is usually immense pleasure in creating and controlling a project.

If the author/maintainer is ranting about the sacrifices they make for the project, that usually means something has broken in project development process. And I've never heard of another project where the author dipped into their retirement savings _and_ built up less savings than they should have to support their authorship of a project. That's a problem that should never happen, not ammunition for rationalizing the pecking in a project.

The iPhone example doesn't work. I can't send a patch to ostensibly improve the hardware (or even software) of an iPhone. The audience the author was addressing was other developers presumably complaining about low patch acceptance and long wait times. In that light, process conservatism and generally low patch quality are persuasive arguments for the status quo. "I'm sinking my retirement into this" and "community-driven development is a myth" are not.

<comment><USER64> > there is usually immense pleasure in creating and controlling a project

I think this is the part of a larger myth against which the writer rallies.

The joy is not in maintenance and control. The joy is in working with like- minded peers who share a vision, the joy is in designing and implementing an outcome that does what one wants it to do, the joy is in being able to share it.

The mundane activities associated with that are not joy. That's just work, not pleasure. Those aspects of project management are means to an end, not the actual end.

> I can't send a patch to ostensibly improve the hardware (or even software) > of an iPhone. [...] developers presumably complaining about low patch > acceptance and long wait times

Rich said that the sorts of patches people were submitting were of low quality and didn't fit the overall project vision. Then people were getting upset because their amazing patches weren't being accepted there and then. Frankly, that's not a community I'd want to foster nor be in charge of. Nobody should want that.

I don't see any conflict at all with a statement along the lines "I am the leader of this project, this is my baby, and I have sunk a lot of my time and resources into it" next to "I'm not accepting your pull requests and patches willy-nilly just because you complain a lot".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> What's the context here?

</comment><comment><USER66> Could it be that people who use your OSS think you have an obligation to them, because you marketed your software in a nice and pretty gift wrap package (eg. web page) and they chose yours over and alternative (ie chose to invest their time and effort on it)? They chose to "fall" for your marketing over that of another project.

Maybe they feel that by choosing your software over an alternative, they're also helping you (since it's your project after all) and they atypically expect some things of you?

P.S. I'm not taking sides. This is just a shower thought.

</comment><comment><USER67> Customer service is hard. When you aren't paid for it, it is very frustrating. It often manifests as anger from open source contributors.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm thankful for Clojure; it's brought a lot of joy into programming for me personally.

</comment><comment><USER69> If I'm forced at work to work with mediocre FOSS stack without support culture (even for paid tiers), it is about me. I'm not choosing to work with a subpar farce of a technology like npm, it's forced upon me.

<comment><USER50> That has nothing to do with open source, but with your relationship with your employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Oh look, a philosophical essay disguised as a series of self-evident truths.

"All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community- driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology..."

Reminds me of Margaret Thatcher saying "There's nos such thing as society." [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret- th...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher- quotes)

Now if only they can get someone to keep repeating it, it'll be _true_.

</comment><comment><USER71> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538614)

</comment><comment><USER72> Do not agitate. Open Source is only part of the business model.

</comment><comment><USER73> Seems relevant to the event-stream fiasco from yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm not a user of Clojure, but I'm a user of other FOSS tools (Docker) for which I've had complaints.

Though I have potential issues here, I think it is important that this be said. It highlights missed expectations. This open source thing is a weird new(ish) world, and we need to be on the same page. It's been a few decades, but perhaps we haven't quite adjusted yet. Or maybe this hippie thing actually doesn't work, which would be a real shame.

The fact is that we rely on it. And I think that this really is an alternate mode of creation. I could be wrong but I don't think the idea of "community development" is something that was recently made up. It's part of the Free Software ethos. Perhaps what is new here is a notion that there not be a party at the top of each fork who has ultimate responsibility.

A pure gift, take it or leave it, no strings attached in either direction, is fine, and should be appreciated. But it's useless to users who need to _rely_ on what you've produced. If the project is not subject to the demands of its users (which includes contributors, to the extent that they are users with demands that they are willing to fulfil themselves) then it's got a serious disadvantage over commercial software without a free distribution model. It's not akin to a serious tool for sale. And _if that doesn't meet expectations_, people are within reason to push back.

The other side of it is that there have to be limits, of course. There has to be respect for the producer, their time, their preferred mode of management, the limit of the scope of the project, etc. There have to be judgement calls made, just like commercial software without a free distribution model, as to what does and doesn't make it into the project. For all these reasons I can see that it's important that a producer pushed back here.

But if the producer doesn't voluntarily take on some level of responsibility as part of running the project, whatever the terms may be, then at the end of the day the project can't be relied on within the economy. This is not a demand on the author of this post. He is entitled to treating Clojure under whatever terms he wants. But somebody has to, for it to work in our system.

I think the solution is just better messaging of expectations. What this project is. What expectations should you have as a user. What expectations should you have as a contributor. Now we can all look at it as a reference point, and decide: Do we want to rely on this? Do we want to spend our time working on this? Do we have a basis for complaint?

Really, this is the same set of questions that are answered in any business arrangement. Perhaps there needs to be a SOCIAL_CONTRACT file next to LICENSE, README, etc.

</comment><comment><USER75> I think if you are doing an excellent job with your project, noone has time for you[dev] , as they are too busy enjoying your project. its like when granpa tries to get in on the basement gamefest with the kids. let them play, your best contribution is to make more toys for them to play with and let come to you and ask for more.

</comment><comment><USER76> I like this reddit post by rhickey regarding entitlement: [https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...](https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/do1olag/)

It gets pretty tiring on HN/reddit to watch people demand so much shit for free, namely other people's time. If you've ever run a project with users (most people haven't), you've experienced these demands first-hand.

It's nice to read these sorts of posts when it's getting you down.

For me it was the recent outrage at Elm's creator. Random people on HN/reddit basically acting like they were some disgruntled paying customer. You can see a common thread with Rich's defense of Clojure.

<comment><USER77> Would you mind giving a bit more context/link to the HN discussion(s) about Elm's creator? I've seen the JS event-stream kerfuffle stuff posted all over the internet today, but I havn't heard about the Elm thing.

<comment><USER53> Elm is a very locked down ecosystem, heavily influenced by a single lead developer (Evan Czaplicki) with a very small team of assistants. Development is slow, and focused heavily on what Evan thinks is best; features he doesn't use or doesn't think are working out can (and have) been removed. If he doesn't think a bug is critical, it will be ignored. If Evan decides that the way a chunk of the Elm ecosystem works isn't really in line with his vision, then he'll rewrite it. If that's a breaking change, so be it. If maybe Elm goes a release or two with an important feature not working because Evan is halfway through rethinking something, then sure, that's a thing that happens. The Elm dev team is small, their resources are limited, and they're focused on moving the project forward.

Some people see this and go "okay, I'm fine with this, I like Evan's vision and I want to see where this is going"; many of them use Elm in production and accept the occasional bumps in the road.

Others are interested, and happy to watch from afar, but are waiting for Elm to hit some form of 1.0 release or otherwise announce that it's ready to be used in production before making the jump. (I'm in this camp; Elm is clearly not suitable for me today, and that's fine!)

And some take the entire thing as a personal affront. Entitlement is an issue across all of open source, but Elm has some characteristics that makes it especially prone to driving a certain type of user wild. How _dare_ Evan change Elm internals in a way that breaks the way they were using Elm?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> core-questions I'm guessing that this is a response to the current trend towards Codes of Conduct, which are best understood as part of the Long March through the Institutions, a politicization of things that aren't inherently political.

<comment><USER78> It's not, it's about the entitlement of many users of open source projects.

<comment><USER64> Although, there's something to be said for some potential overlap here. A lot of Codes of Conducts are basically being demanded by people who're not a part of the project.

Rich's point stands up well in response to that sort of thing: if you want it so damn much, fork it, do it yourself, and leave me to do what I do best.

That's the true beauty of open source, that you can just fork, do it yourself, and there we are. If your project is so much better than the original, people will flock to it. If not, well, at least you could still do what you did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Rich Hickey needs to stop poking people in the eye with a stick.

> You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to > having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this > explanation.

This could be handled much more diplomatically. What he's saying here is "fuck you and your needs". Opportunity cost waits for nobody, but taking a second to not provoke people is a good idea.

> We at Cognitect have to show up to work, every day, to make a living. We get > no royalties of any kind from Clojure.

Ditto for the people who wrote open source libraries, some that are critical for Clojure's adoption. In fact they typically did this _after_ working a 9-5, rather than during it.

> To be honest, I could use that money in my retirement account, having > depleted it to make Clojure in the first place.

"Look how much I've suffered for you!" is about as effective for leadership as it is for parenting.

> But kindly don't burn the community down on your way out, with self-serving > proclamations.

That's a nice "fuck you" to frustrated developers. "Shut up with your complaints and go away" is a bad community management technique.

</comment><comment><USER79> Yeah, Rich is obviously right. Concerning Clojure, or any Lisp variant for that matter, I came to realize that the cost of the unusual prefix notation -- which does cause inconvenience to people trained on using infix -- needs to be offset by the usefulness of defmacro, i.e. the possibility of using macros. Paul Graham insists that it is surely worth it, but unfortunately, he does not show convincing examples. So, I keep sitting on the fence. I am ready to be convinced, though, with compelling examples of a problem that I cannot possibly solve with defun and for which I would need defmacro.

<comment><USER71> > _that I cannot possibly solve with defun and for which I would need > defmacro_

Well, _defun_ is a macro: [http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defun.htm](http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defun.htm)

The parenthesized prefix notation is advantageous because it is unambiguous and easy to format. People trained on infix still make mistakes due to associativity and precedence: mistakes in understanding an expression and in writing the correct expression which matches their intent. Their skill does not translate into unfamiliar languages that have unfamiliar operators with unfamiliar precedence and associativity rules.

The user of a Lisp benefits from the development which has gone into the language/implementation. That development is lubricated by the structure of the code. The Lisp programmer does not only write new macros, but uses existing ones, either in the language/implementation or third party libraries.

There is no problem you cannot _possibly_ solve with _defun_ (plus escape hatches to access any aspect of the host environment), because _defun_ gives you access to a Turing -complete computation model.

This is simply not a genuinely honest way to evaluate tools. Gee, I'm not convinced that there is a text editing problem I can't _possibly_ solve with _ed_ if I bash at the keyboard long enough; so for now I will keep sitting on the fence.

 _possibly_ isn't _easily_ , _efficiently_ , _maintainably_ , and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> What's next, people who sell cars aren't responsible for making sure they're safe? People who sell food aren't responsible for whether it gives people food poisoning?

If you release a product then _at the minimum_ it's your responsibility to make sure it's not going to harm others. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be releasing open source software.

Adding a disclaimer at the bottom doesn't absolve you of gross negligence.

<comment><USER81> "Sell" is a pretty important word there. There are laws and regulations for those, and neither comes with an explicit license saying something like "disclaims all warranties and conditions, express and implied, including warranties or conditions of title and non-infringement, and implied warranties or conditions of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose."

<comment><USER80> > neither comes with an explicit license saying something like "disclaims all > warranties and conditions, express and implied, including warranties or > conditions of title and non-infringement, and implied warranties or > conditions of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose."

Because they obviously would be not legally binding. Again, you can't absolve yourself of gross negligence any more than you can sell yourself into slavery. And legally speaking, selling something almost always includes giving that thing away for free. (Except for in a few cases where gifts are specifically exempted, like for some low-level drug crimes at the state level.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> While the message is partially kind of correct, the delivery lacks everything that's humane.

> The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people > who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their > own projects.

If this is the case, why open source or publish it in the first place? If you want people to read the code, but not interact with you, why not write that into the license? Why not use something like CC-SA?

> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything > at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to > features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not > entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled > to this explanation.

Looking at that last sentence, then, why not STFU, Mr. Hickey? Assuming the "users" are Clojure programmers, if they're entitled merely to nil, why bother with this angsty rant?

> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get > the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social > impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven- > development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in > how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack > of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense > of communal entitlement.

This is completely wrong. The reason we have open source in the first place is years long, decades long, determined community effort. Mr. Hickey is not entitled to change the definition of F/OSS.

<comment><USER83> You're conflating "Open Source" with FOSS.

FOSS is the mantra of a particular community-oriented software-development zeitgeist, where things are developed _by_ a community, without a project maintainership per se—i.e. where "the project" refers to whatever the most active fork of the project is, rather than to the project as maintained by some particular BDFL.

FOSS projects are usually maintained under the aegis of one or more software foundations, like GNU or the ASF.

"Open source", on the other hand, means exactly what it says. Microsoft does Open Source. Apple does Open Source. Oracle does Open Source. It means exactly as little as the image conjured in your head by that list.

<comment><USER84> It's not that simple. Open source projects, including Clojure, benefit from the community through bug reports, documentation, free user support, articles, etc.

To make it as simple as you suggest, there should be a code repository and nothing more. I don't think that's the case in the majority of open source projects or even what Clojure desires.

That being said, if you're not contributing back to a project (in any sensible way, not just code) maybe you should tone down your demands. I completely sympathise with author but things are a bit more complex in reality. Ignoring the benefits of these interactions/contributions is not fair to the rest of the community that is contributing. Maybe the author does that feel that's currently enough? I can totally relate.</comment></comment></comment>


China's GFW now automatically learns, blocks VPNs - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/LinkinAnonymous/status/279142148148973569/photo/1 <comment><USER2> It's good that China does this, because it motivates people to find out how to circumvent it.</comment>


Yahoo's Flickr Takes on Google's YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.business2.com/beta/2007/05/yahoos_flickr_t.html <comment><USER2> Not surprised, heard this a couple of weeks ago listening to Caterina Fakes talk on ITConversation (The History of Flickr) where Fake didn't rule flickr out for hosting video ~ <http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1755.html>

Wonder how this is going to be executed and it's effects on flickr?</comment>


T-Mobile makes free tablet data offer: 200MB monthly for the life of your device - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/4947704/t-mobile-makes-free-ipad-data-offer-official

<comment><USER2> Tmobile just stabbed wifi-only devices in the heart. The slow painful death of wifi only starts today. Soon LTE will be as standard as a Wifi

<comment><USER3> I sure hope there are no hoops I need to jump through to get easy LTE...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> that was my headline:

"T-Mobile to Offer Free Data Service for Tablets with LTE"

or

"Buy the new iPad Mini retina or iPad Air from T-Mobile, get 200MB of free data every month"</comment>


How the heart influences what we perceive and fear - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-your-heart-influences-what-you-perceive-and-fear-20200706/ <comment><USER2> My heart brought me a solid anxiety disorder. I have ventricular extrasystoles, been to a couple of different cardiologists, done longtime ecg monitoring, echocardiograms and everyone told me my heart is fine, and I should chill.

Coupled with low blood potassium levels and increasing distrust in my heart, I developed a fear that I could get ventricular tachycardia, and basically die instantly. I'm 33.

I know it's slightly off topic, but just be happy if you don't feel your heart beating and it's doing its work without you noticing. In my case, my anxiety disorder and fear is increasing adrenalin, making my heart stumble even more. It's so annoying knowing all that, but the emotions are just overwhelming and it's really hard to fight this.

<comment><USER3> I have had this exact feeling regarding my heart for a year and a half and until now felt nobody understood.

For me it is constant chest pain that comes and goes essentially whenever it wants. It is quite varied and never fails to keep worrying me with its novelty. Sometimes burning, sometimes squeezing, sometimes stabbing. Been to the doctor and ER dozens of times. No diagnosis. And it isn't even correlated with anxiety as far as I can tell, although the anxiety only makes it worse. Sometimes NSAIDs make the pain unbearable. Sometimes they don't.

It doesn't even make sense because as far as I understand the heart isn't innervated, so why is the pain _always_ on the left side of my chest?

I went to urgent care and they reported my cholesterol levels, etc. were excellent.

It's so terrible because the heart is critically tied to our ability to continue living through unconscious action, and so anything regarding it feels completely out of control in the moment. Meaning your instant death is out of your control. Now have that on your mind for 365 days and see how it feels.

So after spending dozens of times trying to figure out if something's wrong with my body, seeing as it's probably trying to send some sort of signal, and completely failing to come up with an answer, what else is there left to do? Worry about dying every single day?

Early on I got so many palpitations I was sitting in bed holding a heart monitor on my chest until 3 in the morning. This was when I was 23 and started to regret all the life decisions I had made in college to feel this awful and scared about my health that young. Today if I get like three palpitations in the span of five minutes I'll be completely unable to keep focusing on work and go off trying to manage the anxiety in the hopes of not dying.

If anything it's pushed me to eat more vegetables and such, but I don't know if it will end up helping.

<comment><USER4> > Sometimes NSAIDs make the pain unbearable.

This sounds like an upper digestive tract issue. You should look into Roemheld Syndrome. [https://cara.care/digestive-disorders/upper- abdomen/roemheld...](https://cara.care/digestive-disorders/upper- abdomen/roemheld-syndrome/) I was having a lot of feelings of skipped heartbeats and my doc realized I was also having a lot of digestive issues so he told me that Roemheld seemed most likely. What I noticed is that skipped beats occurred around the time when I needed to burp. The burping releases pressure on the vagus nerve which goes to both the heart and the stomach. When I realized this my anxiety was much reduced.

In my case I found that I needed to limit chocolate consumption, sit up straighter and practice deep breathing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shootout eyes are probably just a western trope (I would guess "soft eyes" would be more effective) but if saccades are tied to the cardiac cycle [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027719303233) it would, in principle, be advantageous to draw during an opponent's saccade.

(compare the scramblers in _Blindsight_ )

</comment><comment><USER6> > Cardiac activity can be divided into two phases: systole, when the heart > muscle contracts and pumps out blood, followed by diastole, when it relaxes > and refills with blood.

Respiration, acting through the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system (breathing in) and the parasympathetic (feed and breed) nervous system (breathing out) also impacts the heart as measured through Heart Rate Variability. Like many systems in biology, I suspect there is a network of feedback loops at play and they act in both directions.

<comment><USER7> The way I understand it is that this is partly a mechanical property as well: the chest cavity expands/contracts while breathing, which impacts how much room organs have, which can then stimulate nerves etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit off-topic, but this has puzzled me for awhile: there are times when at night I will suddenly feel like my heart is beating ridiculously quickly and loudly. It subsides with deep slow breaths. The strange thing is that I've tried putting my hand over my heart during these episodes and physically it does not feel that my heart is beating abnormally. Any ideas what's happening?

<comment><USER9> Heart palpitations? I had a similar feeling when I got up in the night to urinate. I used a pulse oximeter to reassure myself that its okay and eventually over the weeks it stopped happening. I think there a lot of common causes as listed in the link below.

[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart- palpita...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart- palpitations/symptoms-causes/syc-20373196)

<comment><USER8> thanks, didn't know what to search. striking to me that it seems to be all mental. I suppose it's reassuring that this is somewhat common

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Heart has got its own brain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of a personal experience I had with general anesthesia and a remembered "dream" segment of calmly wondering if I had died of complications and the afterlife was just this void. The current theory of mechanism for anesthesia is that it stops nerves from carrying signals to the brain which would be consistent with the lack of fear in considering what would be a premise of horror short story.

</comment><comment><USER12> Q: Is the described effect moderated by blood pressure? In other words, if one's blood pressure is higher, does the systolic effect rise in intensity relevant to the neurological processes discussed in the article? I would guess so but the article doesn't really get into that.</comment>


Iteratees Step By Step - <AUTHOR> http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/iteratees-step-by-step-part-1/

<comment><USER2> This is a very nice article. It does assume a significant knowledge of Haskell -- more than the average HN reader has, I imagine. But for those who have it, this is the best introduction to iteratees that I have seen. (Somewhere, someone noted that dealing with the iteratee literature "requires a saving throw vs. confusion".)

Thanks for posting.</comment>


Top iOS Newsletters, Developers, Blogs, Companies and Resources to Follow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ajithrnayak/stayin-on-top-of-your-game-ios-newsletters-blogs-developers-companies-to-follow-527b859b3bb5 <comment><USER2> Out of the 110+ listed items, I'm curious which five are the most useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's very difficult. Good and interesting content can appear anywhere & anytime. I may not always read everything I follow but I try to have a glance. Interesting is subjective anyway. If I really had to pick, I'd chose \- iOS Dev Weekly newsletter \- Follow Natasha: a blog, a newsletter, a conference and active figure on Twitter \- Epic length tutorials on Ray Wenderlich. They have a great team. \- OSS by Artsy. Checkout their engineering blog. \- I'd follow some of iOS developers and their blogs. I believe that surrounding yourself with better people makes us better.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I asked because five items is about the level of curation I figure might be useful to get started. I'd expect the best sources to lead to other sources organically.</comment></comment></comment>


Exposing Digital Photography (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://digitalphotography.exposed/ <comment><USER2> For those interested in very hands-on advise on using artificial light, the Strobist [1] blog is amazing. David Hobby is a working photojournalist and does fantastic work on-site. It's one thing to control light in the studio, but quite another to bring your flashes to a random site and improvise.

Hobby used to have a DVD set for sale which was probably the best money I've ever spent on photography stuff, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available anymore. (It appears he's got some videos on Lynda.com, however.) I understand technical aspects of photography quite well but I learned a ton about creative, improvisational lighting from Hobby.

[1]: [http://strobist.blogspot.com/](http://strobist.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER3> I second this. David's site opened my eyes to the importance of colour correcting the light coming out of your (off-camera) flashes for artistic effect, and a rough understanding of colour theory is what helps give images that extra "pop"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds excellent. In essence, this course doesn't teach you photographing but rather, how to maximise what you get out of a digital photograph. Definitely taking it, such a short course anyway.

I wonder if the actual photographying is taught in any (free) online courses? I've enjoyed the little nugget called "FART for Fantastic Photos" [0] by Ken Rockwell, especially how it in its simplicity reminds one to focus on the subject, that's what matters in the picture. Kinda hope there would be courses that take the same idea but for 10 hours or so.

[0] [http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/fart.htm](http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/fart.htm)

<comment><USER5> Be aware, Ken Rockwell is kind of a joke [0] in photographic circles.

[0]: [http://anotherangle.eu/posts/why-ken-rockwell-is-bad-for- pho...](http://anotherangle.eu/posts/why-ken-rockwell-is-bad-for-photography/)

<comment><USER6> It's fashionable to hate on him, but a lot of his advice is very good. The blog post you link to is quite silly and petty, honestly. A lot of people don't like to be told that their $5000 equipment is only slightly superior in terms of image quality to much cheaper equipment, but it's true.

<comment><USER7> The point is that he just tells you everything is amazing and to please buy it from Amazon so he can support his ever growing family.

And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good.

And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.

<comment><USER8> He doesn't tell you everything is amazing. He usually seems skeptical, IMO, which is what one would expect from an old-timer in any profession (wish there was a little more of it in tech). Tells you that L lenses are nice, but he buys and uses non-L because it works equally fine for him (and yes, I know he primarily appears to use Nikon anyway :P). Says this about most expensive things.

I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance ( _not_ necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious.

Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was a bit surprised that the lesson on software tools focused on Photoshop instead of Lightroom. Photoshop is cream of the crop for precise image adjustments, but Lightroom is such a great photo management software plus visual editor.

Don't get me wrong - Photoshop is great. But Lightroom is one of the most user friendly digital asset managers (DAM).

</comment><comment><USER10> Related: Mark Levoy's digital photography course: [https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home](https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home)

</comment><comment><USER11> That TLD will make any domain look like click bait.

</comment><comment><USER12> This appears to be an (illegitimate?) republishing of a course that Dan Armendariz has taught at the Harvard Extension School since 2008. (The course number has since changed from CS E-7 to Digital Media E-10.) You can find the fall 2015 materials available online for free, better-organized and without advertising, at [http://digitalphotography.exposed](http://digitalphotography.exposed).

If you find these materials helpful, or want feedback on your work, consider enrolling in the course through the Extension School [0]! Part of your tuition inevitably supports the Harvard bureaucracy, but Dan and his teaching fellows's stipends are directly tied to the number of students who enroll in the course, and they've kindly made the entire course available for free. You can also apply that course credit to an Extension School degree, which is worth more than whatever certificate of completion Alison is providing.

[0]: [https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/courses/exposing...](https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/courses/exposing- digital-photography/24825)

Edit: I suppose I should note that the instructor for the current Extension School offering appears to have changed in the last year, so your mileage with the current version of the course will vary.

<comment><USER13> In response, someone posted a legitimate Stanford course:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5o350c/since_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5o350c/since_that_suspicious_harvard_course_got_so_much/)

I added it to my photography list on Github:

[https://github.com/melling/DesignNotes_MobileAndWebApps/blob...](https://github.com/melling/DesignNotes_MobileAndWebApps/blob/master/photography.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This particular site generated a lot of discussion in the /r/photography sub- reddit.

General consensus was that this site is a spammy wrapper/republishing of another course.

Here's a comment with more info and links to the legitimate/original course that this site is pertaining to provide:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5nxj2h/harvard...](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5nxj2h/harvard_has_released_a_free_12_module_online/)

Further, here's a link to another credible course (currently the top post in the /r/photography sub-reddit) should you wish to expand your options:

[https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/](https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/)

And to the discussion about said course:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5o350c/since_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5o350c/since_that_suspicious_harvard_course_got_so_much/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The site doesn't seem to be legit - there was a big reddit thread on r/photography yesterday: this post [0] sums it up, and actually links to the actual Harvard course.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5nxj2h/harvard...](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/5nxj2h/harvard_has_released_a_free_12_module_online/dcf6es6/)

<comment><USER16> Thanks, we updated the link to the real course page from [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/01/16/harvard- university-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/01/16/harvard-university- launches-free-online-photography-course/) which pointed to [https://alison.com/courses/Digital- Photography](https://alison.com/courses/Digital-Photography).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this really new? The course page [1] lists that it was published in 2013.

[1] [https://alison.com/courses/Digital- Photography](https://alison.com/courses/Digital-Photography)

</comment><comment><USER18> > "There's also a thirteenth module which serves as an assessment of all you > know. If you pass this with a score of 80 percent or higher, and you can get > yourself a diploma to print and hang on your wall."

Anyone know if it's a Harvard Diploma/Certificate that you get? I'm guessing it's probably not.

<comment><USER19> From their blurb: "To qualify for your official _ALISON_ Diploma, Certificate or PDF" (emphasis mine).

In their Knowledgebase [1], they acknowledge _" ALISON courses are not accredited or recognised by any institute"_

[1] [https://alison.com/knowledgebase/entry/44/](https://alison.com/knowledgebase/entry/44/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it just me that finds the constant panning and zooming really distracting?

</comment><comment><USER21> How did this garbage get to the top of HN?

The photographs, on average, aren't even that impressive. Only some are good.

</comment><comment><USER22> You should not expose digital photography.

At least not before it has been developed, or that would ruin the film.</comment>


Erlang - overhyped or underestimated? - <AUTHOR> http://sacharya.com/erlang-overhyped-or-underestimated/

<comment><USER2> This article reads like "yeah Erlang has a lot of cool features, but it's really scary to an OO programmer like me."

> I can't imagine how you can organize large code-bases in Erlang or even work > as team, and this doesn't feel right to any OO programmer.

Well, yeah, but neither would Clojure or Haskell or a host of other interesting and useful languages. Functional programming is a completely different paradigm, and if you come into with an OO mindset the results will not be good. But that's more a fault of the programmer than the language.

<comment><USER3> To quote Joe Armstrong: "As Erlang became popular we were often asked "Is Erlang OO" - well, of course the true answer was "No of course not" - but we didn't to say this out loud - so we invented a serious of ingenious ways of answering the question that were designed to give the impression that Erlang was (sort of) OO (If you waved your hands a lot) but not really (If you listened to what we actually said, and read the small print _carefully_ )."

<http://www.sics.se/~joe/bluetail/vol1/v1_oo.html>

Erlang is closer to original Smalltalk than most of current OO languages: there are processes (objects) which communicate by messages (messages).

I also should mention OOHaskell: <http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/> "In the second and major phase, we systematically substantiate that Haskell~98, with some common extensions, supports all the conventional OO features plus more advanced ones, including first-class lexically scoped classes, implicitly polymorphic classes, flexible multiple inheritance, safe downcasts and safe co-variant arguments. Haskell indeed can support width and depth, structural and nominal subtyping. We address the particular challenge to preserve Haskell's type inference even for objects and object-operating functions. Advanced type inference is a strength of Haskell that is worth preserving. Many of the features we get ``for free'': the type system of Haskell turns out to be a great help and a guide rather than a hindrance."

So everyone "can has" his OO everywhere, in case one needs it.

<comment><USER4> Don't really know Erlang, but having worked for Telecom industry earlier, I would guess Erlang is getting its concepts and messaging model from SDL [1] rather than from OO.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_and_Description_L...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification_and_Description_Language)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Feel the need to respond a bit since I've worked on an Erlang system of some significance.

1\. Erlang has a funky syntax; deal with it. If you can't or won't learn the language b/c of the syntax that is your loss. I'm sorry, but I can't really find this a valid argument as it basically sounds like "Erlang syntax scares me. Me no likey".

2\. Documentation on Erlang libraries is a bit weak in some areas, but all the source is there and since it is functional, the ability to decipher the methods is really great. However, if you are looking for a 'mysql tutorial' with a 1000 hits on Google to show you the way, you won't find it. Frankly, you will have to exert some effort with Erlang.

3\. This is wrong. I realize that this is 2008, but even in 2008 you had huge Erlang systems at Akamai, Mochi and many European telecoms. Since then (when I have picked it up) there is Basho, XMPP implementations, trading systems and, of course, Facebook chat.

4\. Again, fear basically. The code base likely will never grow as big as a .NET or JEE code base simply b/c the code is functional.

5\. The numbers are the numbers and they speak for themselves. You can't really understand the benefit you can get from Erlang until you try it for yourself on a multicore system and see it fly, watch it in a multi-noded system and watch it grow and see how it handles failures w/ ease. Traditional OO developers (.NET and Java) just won't "get it" until they try it.

6\. Red herring. Erlang is NOT a web language. But, since this article was written many have emerged. Chicago Boss, Nitrogen, Erlang-web. I still think of Erlang has mostly an way to (coupled with Webmachine) expose some endpoints as services for me to talk to.

7\. Yeah, this one is true. String manipulation sucks. Binary manipulation, however, is awesome. Tradeoffs. Remember what Erlang is good for and what it is not good for and you will be quite happy with it!

Erlang, in general, takes some time to learn. It is well worth the time if you need infrastructure that can scale massively.

Lastly, I would like to say this...functional programming in general is coming back in vogue at the moment and for good reason. Working on this system using Erlang has really reshaped my thoughts on programming in the past two years and I have to say that all my code is cleaner, my code base is smaller I have started to really take a critical look at my OO code as heavy weight and not worth the overhead in many cases. FP also seems to map better to my way of thinking....but that might just be me.

[EDIT] - Clarifying 6 a bit. I think that holding the web framework argument against Erlang is unjustified. Even so, web frameworks have emerged. I find they don't map very well and I feel there are better solutions than using Erlang web frameworks.

<comment><USER6> > 1\. Erlang has a funky syntax; deal with it. If you can't or won't learn the > language b/c of the syntax that is your loss. I'm sorry, but I can't really > find this a valid argument as it basically sounds like "Erlang syntax scares > me. Me no likey".

And this is invalid, how?

A well designed syntax is a must for a good language.

If Erlang has a "funky syntax" (your words), then that is a real disadvantage that should raise concern. Syntax affects code readability, maintenance, etc.

<comment><USER7> "funky" basically means "not c style"

erlangs syntax is very well thought out, I would even agree it is ugly at times, but it very purposefully avoids any fancy contructs choosing readability every time, erlang (imo) is by far the most readable language around, it is very very hard to find a piece of erlang code that is hard to follow because it only has primitive constructs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Obliged to respond, even if this is from two years ago, as a lot of our work is in Erlang... 1) is completely wrong; Erlang doesn't have anything to do with Prolog, and the syntax is actually pretty straightforward. 2) is for the most part true, though the bigger problem is finding _one_ library that solves your problem (rather than choosing from two or more). 3) is mostly true (there are plenty of Erlang charlatans; try hiring for an Erlang position and see what manner of Erlang programmers you find). 4) is completely false; large (100K to 1M+ SLoC) Erlang codebases are manageable. 5) could be a good point, but might be said about any language; in the end, results speak for themselves. 6) might be a valid concern, but for the most part, Erlang code is behind the web layer, and some other application relays the requests to the back-end.7) is pretty much irrelevant.

At the end of the day, if you're happy with the results you're getting with Erlang (and you can get _great_ results), who cares if the rest of the world thinks Erlang has no fashion sense? Erlang is still beautiful.

<comment><USER9> Erlang was originally a Prolog dialect. To be specific an external dsl for concurrency implemented on top of a Prolog interpreter.

The language moved on and dropped some of the defining features of Prolog (such a backtracking), but the syntax still resembles Prolog.

<comment><USER10> In erlang's pattern matching syntax, arguments given at run time are matched successively against number and types of formal parameters in each ";" separated clause in a function definition (plus against any guard's specified values).

This is similar to the syntax in haskell, F# and ocaml, so it may look weird at the outset but it's not an isolated weirdness, and it quickly becomes a natural way to read code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "1. Today's mainstream developers who are used to C or Java like syntax wont find its Prolog-like syntax too friendly. Unless you started programming since the 80's & 90's and are used to languages of similar syntax, it will take quite some time before you get comfortable with Erlang's weird syntax. I never felt too comfortable with the syntax."

Huh? And...huh? It's not prolog like, and it's not like anything mainstream from the 80s and 90s. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER12> The syntax is absolutely based on Prolog, as evidenced by the significant capitalization and the mixed semicolons and periods.

<comment><USER8> This statement only reflects a poor understanding of what it means to be "based on Prolog". I know Prolog well, and use Erlang every day, and I can tell you that they share nothing in common beyond the most superficial of commonalities. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang- programmin...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang-programming- will-learning-prolog-help)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anybody looking for Erlang people? I passed on a job in Stockholm doing Erlang ten years ago because Erlang seemed like a very small niche, even if the platform does make some otherwise very difficult things easy.

It was kind of sad, actually, to hear Jonas Boner talk about Erlang at one of the Bay Area Scala group meetings. He said he fell in love with the language but realized it was too hard to get people to deploy Erlang so he's trying to build the same functionality in Scala with the Akka library.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm currently reading this Erlang and OTP in action [http://www.amazon.com/Erlang-OTP-Action-Martin- Logan/dp/1933...](http://www.amazon.com/Erlang-OTP-Action-Martin- Logan/dp/1933988789) and its pretty good so far, gets into the meat of Erlang quickly.

</comment><comment><USER15> We had adopted Erlang in the real-time trading system and it is online now. However I hope mnesia will break 2G limitation in the near future.

<comment><USER16> The limit is on disk-only tables (due to Dets using 32-bit file offsets). The limit of on-memory tables is 16 exabytes on 64-bit systems.

<comment><USER17> On-memory tables. But what would you do when you need to restart the program, or the entire system? Or can you persist the on-memory on disk somehow?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone in the comments mentioned Lisp Flavored Erlang (LFE) which seems interesting, and appears to live on (in relative obscurity) at <https://github.com/rvirding/lfe>

Friendlier macros is a win at the very least!

</comment><comment><USER19> This article was written in Nov 2008. Quite a lot has happened in the Erlang world since.

<comment><USER10> The Nov. 2008 release was R12-B5

Unfortunately, the release notes are enormous docs.

Fortunatley, each reflects a huge number of new features, bugfixes and enhancements.

Off top of my head:

\- continuing work on tools like Dialyzer, McErlang, quickCheck

<http://erlangotp.com/wiki/analysis/>

\- new SSL module

\- NIF's

\- Ericsson puts the repo onto github, starts pulling patches

\- "erl +native" / HiPE

\- schedulers for SMP processing

\- large shared data structures passed as messages:

\- from Basho: riak, rebar and Nitrogen

\- Oreilly and Manning books (Cesarini/Thompson an outstanding book; archaelus and Gerakines were writing books also,hope they get published)

\- learn you a erlang, erldocs.com,

<http://learnyousomeerlang.com/>

<http://erldocs.com/>

\- the community has _not_ changed. Beginner questions are still enthusiastically answered on IRC, the google group and stackoverflow (by Armstrong, Virding and the Ericsson core team, among others)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do get tired of the Erlang syntax complaints. Why should a language syntactically look like another language if the semantics are different? Erlang and Java are very different languages so why should they look the same? IMAO this will be even more confusing than having to learn a new syntax. When teaching Erlang we have problems with '=' and that though it _looks_ a assignment it is really a match with completely different semantics.

</comment><comment><USER21> '3. Only a few people have written production level codes and you rarely get to hear from them.'

Well thats just not true...

</comment><comment><USER22> a rebuttal already: [http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/12/response-to- erla...](http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/12/response-to-erlang- overhyped-or.html)</comment>


Samsung Galaxy S2 beats iPhone 4 to T3 gadget award - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/15254636

<comment><USER3> HTC Desire won last year.

It's worth pointing out that this is a UK award, so some things are different from the U.S. market e.g. iPhone is available on all networks, but it's easier to save money if you buy a less full featured phone, less people own Macs, both Nokia and Blackberry have strong (though fading) presences, texting was a social force before the US (and local calls generally weren't free) and this pushed mobile adoption amongst the young earlier compared to the US.

Also, I _think_ , this was based on tech-mag reader votes i.e. the slightly nerdy.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Gadget personality of the year: Mark Zuckerberg

Anyone know what this one was actually for? (ie. what did Zuckerberg to do get this award?)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Samsung Galaxy S2 was competing against the 16 month old iPhone 4 so I'm not surprised that the judges gave it the nod.

</comment><comment><USER6> Samsung has been putting some impressive gadgets out, and they seem to finally be "getting it." What's interesting is just how large that company is and how much control they can have over each individual component...would be interesting to see seamless integration between the different divisions though (monitors, tvs, phones, etc.) Probably too bureaucratic for that to happen though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not surprising, the Galaxy S2 is quite a nice phone, at least it was the Android phone I was considering as the follow-up to my iPhone 3GS.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well then, Samsung wins. Clearly.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure who reads T3 or takes their opinion seriously, but it's no one that I know.

<comment><USER10> Regarding the magazine you are right to an extent, in that it isn't a source for people who really want to understand the gadgets/tech that it covers. That said, it can serve as a decent way of bringing new products to your attention, which you can then look into online (that's why I read it, sometimes) - <USER2> there are plenty of less-technical people who want exactly what the magazine gives them, i.e. bitesize basic gadget-lust.

As to the T3 awards, completely different matter. The judges know their stuff (<http://awards.t3.com/judges> \- and my judgement is a mix of knowing them and/or knowing people who know them). And it's a big industry event, a lot of people are there - it's not just a magazine writing up their list, it's an actual awards show that happens to be branded by a magazine.

So whatever you think about the magazine (and I am with you to an extent), it isn't relevant to T3 Awards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tablet of the year: iPad 2. You don't say!

I was not aware that there was much competition in the tablet space, yet.

Feels lika a kind of random selection to me, though. But what did I expect.

<comment><USER12> The Xoom has been commercially available for a little over 8 months. Various Samsung Galaxy Tab models have been available for almost a year. Both have sold millions of units, the Tab reportedly well over 6 million units.

Perhaps not a random selection? Apple makes a good tablet.

<comment><USER13> Both have _shipped_ millions of units. AFAIK, no other tablet maker says how many are sold to consumers. And it's likely that HP is among the highest.</comment></comment></comment>