Why Decentralized Identity Matters - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/131622514215/why-decentralized-identity-matters-githubs <comment><USER2> Identity does not require consensus, naming does.

If you want to have a decentralized DNS, a blockchain might make sense. However, a global consensus on who controls what name isn't as relevant as one would think. As more and more interactions are initiated online, the SSH model of accepting the key on the first connection becomes better suited.

How do I know I am connecting to my bank's website and not some phishing website? Because it presents me with a proof that it controls the identity of the website where I initially opened my account.

My point is that decentralized identity does not require a blockchain. This is the result of people thinking: "hey, what can I do with a blockchain?" rather than "How do I build a decentralized identity system".

The supreme irony is that Satoshi Nakamoto is the perfect proof that a secure online identity needs not depend on a central authority, or a blockchain.

<comment><USER3> Decentralized identity _revocation_ requires a blockchain. It's easy enough to give people statements that you control a given public key. It's hard for them to know whether they should still trust that key. Blockchains are the only systems that are censorship-resistant enough for us to rely on for this purpose.

Sure, lots of people have done lots of thought experiments about what to use blockchains for, some of which weren't the best. However, if you haven't gone through that period yourself, your blockchain use cases are probably too narrow.

<comment><USER2> Anyone can get Edward Snowden's public key on the Internet, so no, Blockchains clearly aren't the only system which is censorship resistant enough to achieve this goal.

I've been thinking about blockchain use cases pretty extensively for the past two years and written extensively both personally and pseudonymously on the topic. That doesn't mean I have to be right, but if I'm wrong, it's not for a lack of reflection on the matter.

<comment><USER3> I said things about key revocation. You said nothing about key revocation. How is that a retort?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think BlockchainID is a step in the right direction but is it even alive still? The only specification I know of is a draft that's now 9 months old and leaves the question of security up to users having a strong password. Beyond that I thought it was just proof of concepts.

As someone building an identity system on Ethereum, I'd like to remain interoperable, but I don't know where I would find info unless I dig through blog posts.

<comment><USER5> Very much alive :-)

Checkout: [https://github.com/blockstack](https://github.com/blockstack)

for implementation of different software components and protocol documentation!

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I did not notice the repo with the wiki, tho I'm still not sure if this constitutes a spec or a user manual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, the linked BlockchainID, publicly stores all secrets in an encrypted format. Why would that be good, and even necessary for a decentralized identity?

It is trying to solve key storage and public identity at the same time. How could it possibly be a good idea to store secrets publicly?

</comment><comment><USER7> Such a system exists for years and is called OpenID. You can use your own openid provider, or choose from an established provider —which is precisely what you do every time you login to a site with google or github for example.

Alas it doesn't use bitcoin...

<comment><USER8> OpenID has some fundamental problems that Mozilla tried to address somewhat with its Persona API, and was marginally successful until they decided to stop working on it, sadly. The fact that it doesn't use Bitcoin has almost nothing to do with OpenIDs flaws, though.

<comment><USER9> I've heard vague mentions of OpenIDs fundamental problems, but is there a breakdown somewhere? I've had a hard time finding a detailed technical description of why OpenID failed.

I do understand that it confused the hell out of users that they had to login in with a URL, but that seems like branding and education more than a technical flaw.

<comment><USER10> I have always thought that OpenID would be wildly more successful if:

1\. User puts in their email address

2\. Website does a lookup on DNS for the email to find an OpenID endpoint (via SRV or TXT or whatever else)

3\. If OpenID connector is found, user gets redirected to authenticate

4\. If not, generic create account method.

<comment><USER11> I think that's essentially Persona, except they do some extra work to avoid informing the Authentication endpoint about the sites you're logging in to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest thing I see standing in the way of this vision of the future is that it seems to actively go against IT best practices that medium/big orgs have in place.

For instance, the github example in the article is cool but it seems like every company over ~100 employees switches to github enterprise or a similar self-hosted tool where every employee has an isolated account and it's only accessible on the corporate network/VPN.

I've looked around out of curiosity and I haven't really found any good information about building a secure IT organization while taking advantage of modern SAAS products (e.g. github, slack, circleci, docker hub, whatever else). It's basically taken as a given that if you want to be secure you'll have a corporate network in your physical office and all your important internal tools will be on that network (or an even more tightly locked down subnet). I'd love to read any resources to the contrary.

<comment><USER13> Medium and large organizations should just run their own services that parse the blockchain and turn the data embedded in to Bitcoin transactions in to the state of names and owners. This service would read from the public network and but could itself be only accessible on the corporate network/VPN.

This applies to all sorts of Bitcoin metadata protocols beyond just Blockshain ID, such as Open Assets, Blockcast, and Open Publish.

All of these systems use the public key infrastructure of native Bitcoin wallets for identification and authorization so it's in the ballpark of SSH, a proven approach in corporate settings.

<comment><USER6> There's a big gap in parsing the bitcoin blockchain vs parsing a local database.

The blockchain is a public ledger so any (encrypted or not) information you store there can be retrieved by anyone. Downloading it is very slow, and parsing it in a reliable way, i.e. using bitcoind's rpc, is even slower. So you'll want to build an index from it, which you'll happen to store in a local database. So after all that you end up with a local database and public information that anyone can access.

How is that useful for this purpose?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most companies will, understandably, shy away from letting you take your Salesforce info with you. Closed systems are beneficial to employers. Telling companies to throw away some of their competitive advantages (e.g. distribution lists, best customers, etc...) in the name of open-source, decentralized identity is, I believe, an impossible sell.

<comment><USER8> Agree. But what if the concept is too important to be allowed to be owned by a company? What if TCP/IP were AOL/IP? Would we even be here now? I doubt it.

<comment><USER15> See PUP [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_Universal_Packet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_Universal_Packet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with decentralized _anything_ is gainging traction.

To gain traction, you need to explain it to people, and not just techies.

And most people (even most techies) either don't get 1. why it matters or 2. what the heck it means.

It's usually also offered with a loss coherent and more confusing user- experience than the centralized options.

I'd love for more decentralized systems taking hold, but I'm not optimistic enough to believe in it yet.

</comment><comment><USER17> Salesforce actually does use a multi-organization identity model for SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ).

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3051088/elasticity/relateiq- sales...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3051088/elasticity/relateiq- salesforces-390-million-siri-for-business-grows-up)</comment>


Sublime Text 3 Updated - <AUTHOR> http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16696&sid=17192023051cb99eb52ebf3f9e3c6824 <comment><USER2> I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

In 2002 the investors behind Blender launched the "Free Blender" campaign. They asked for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee for open sourcing it. At the time the project was dying as a proprietary product. The investors got the money and today Blender is a healthy open source project.

I would love to see something similar with Sublime Text. The author seems uninterested in continuing with its development while many users want to see it moving forward. I believe it can raise much more money than Blender at the time.

<comment><USER3> > _I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled._

Stalled? It just had an update.

It's also in the 3rd version, under development, which came just a couple of months after the 2nd version had been released. He could just have released ST2 and keep it at that version for 3-4 years.

Instead he immediately started development ST3, which had frenetic development in the first months, and has been completely stable for a year or more (I know, I use it everyday, along with several plugins).

And in the forum he even mentioned ST4 base libs he is preparing a month or so ago.

<comment><USER4> > and has been completely stable for a year or more

If this is true, why are the releases still labelled 'dev' releases?

How is anyone supposed to know that it's actually a stable release they should be using? Research it on HN comment threads?

<comment><USER3> > _If this is true, why are the releases still labelled 'dev' releases?_

Because it's an arbitrary label.

Or because John wants to hook something additional up or polish something before giving it his "3.0" blessing.

Or because it crashes on Linux and needs to fix that too...

But not because there's any issue with it on OS X, at least not for me, and I'm a heavy (8-10 hours per day) user.

<comment><USER4> Or because other people in this thread insist that in fact it's not stable, and there are numerous bugs on multiple platforms.

Regardless, if you want people to know that a release is ready for use by people who want a stable release, you label it a final release, right? Presumably the developer(s) do not believe it is ready for wide use. Whether they are being overly conservative or not is I suppose another question.

But it seems silly to suggest that everyone should do research on their own to discover something labelled 'beta' or 'dev' should really be considered the latest stable release.

<comment><USER3> > _Or because other people in this thread insist that in fact it 's not > stable, and there are numerous bugs on multiple platforms._

I don't know what plugins those people use. They might have thrown in the kitchen sink of unstable plugins. Lots of people using ST3 in the forums without issues. Plus I know my personal experience on my platform of choice.

> _Regardless, if you want people to know that a release is ready for use by > people who want a stable release, you label it a final release, right?_

Well, some projects prefer the perpetual beta designation. Heck, even Google did that for years for stuff like Gmail etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please note that this is a dev build of Sublime Text 3. You can only get it by manually downloading or checking for updates using a dev build. The most recent stable build of ST3 is from December of 2013.[1]

Dev builds are alpha-quality and generally unsuitable for everyday use. The current build will change permissions on any file you save.[2]

1\. [http://www.sublimetext.com/3](http://www.sublimetext.com/3)

2\. [http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16696&s...](http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16696&sid=17192023051cb99eb52ebf3f9e3c6824#p62854)

<comment><USER6> He says he'll fix it in the next build..

Which I assume, will be released in 6 to 36 months. Yay!

<comment><USER7> Patience is a great virtue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've almost given up with Sublime Text. I have a bug with the Linux version on xubuntu which causes the application window to shudder when I scroll. It's something to do with smooth scrolling.

I can't register at their forums as it requires a keyword which you can only get by emailing email@example.com - I've tried three times and each time I've been ignored. I've also tried email the other ST employee, but been ignored also.

Very frustrating when I've paid for a licence.

<comment><USER9> xyzzy3

edit: before anyone gives me shit for doing this it isn't exactly a big secret, it is a pretty poor way of 'securing' the forum. Just stick a captcha on it for gods sake.

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

I agree - it's the shittest, most user-unfriendly method of securing something against spam I've ever encountered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's kind of sad that this project has become so dead that an update to a dev build is news worthy.

<comment><USER11> Not sure I subscribe to the idea that ST is "dead". The base editor is stable enough for day to day use ("dev" build be damned) and all the extra functionality (i.e. new features) is provided by plugins anyways.

ST could never see another update and would remain a competitive editor for daily use due to its plugin ecosystem.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't consider ST3 to be stable or usable under Linux since it just wrecks file permissions.

<comment><USER13> Neither do the Sublime Text developers; even the main release of Sublime Text 3 is listed as beta, and the download link on the front page of their website is still Sublime Text 2.

<comment><USER14> But do they still update the stable version of ST2? From what I gather "beta" is his way of describing the fact that he's actively developing it

<comment><USER13> The last release of Sublime Text 2 was over a year ago. And the post I was responding to was claiming Sublime Text 3 was already stable.

<comment><USER14> My point is that the "released" version has been abandoned. He's not supporting previous versions at all, you pay for access to an actual beta build, but if you happened to buy the full product you're SOL

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article doesn't link directly to the list of changes which are as follows:

Improved quote auto pairing logic

Selected group is now stored in the session

Fixed a crash triggered by Goto Anything cloning views

Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe

OSX: Added 'New Window' entry to dock menu

Posix: Using correct permissions for newly created files and folders

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand why these new releases are called 'dev' builds, and there isn't an official non-dev ST3 build yet.

Are most people using ST3 anyway, despite the releases being labelled dev builds? Are they in fact pretty stable? Are most widely used plugins updated for ST3 (and maybe no longer supported for ST2?)

Should I just go ahead and switch ST3 "dev"?

All multiple years of 'dev' releases gets you is confusion, if this is what most people are using and most plugin developers are targetting, i wish the developer would just call it a release.

<comment><USER16> There are actually non-dev builds of ST3, and those are somewhat stable and what most people use.

Dev builds:

[http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev](http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev)

'Stable' builds

[http://www.sublimetext.com/3](http://www.sublimetext.com/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sublimetext 3 beta is really stable and fast as hell. I don't know what black magic they use under osx but it is even smoother than [http://chocolatapp.com](http://chocolatapp.com) which is a native cocoa based editor with nice builtin code completions for many languages.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. That's why we all love Sublime Text and why we are so pissed off that we can find the pulse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone have a clue as to what were supposed to be able to do with this "Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe". I'm guessing it's mainly for a shorter exe name to add to your path when launching sublime from the command line, but maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER19> It's just to launch the editor from the command-line.

IT's nothing new - sublime text 2 (at least on OS X) had the "subl" command so you could launch an edit session from the cli.. I assumed the rest had the same.

It's certainly not a new feature or anything to celebrate.

<comment><USER20> It is new on Windows.

<comment><USER21> not so much, you could always do sublime somedirectory and it will open it. It appears the novelty is the --help option and more importantly the --wait option, so you could include sublime in a script workflow (as a git commit editor ?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> People talk about the "bus factor", and how OSS would have been a better option.

But far more often I've been beaten from the:

1) "Yeah, core devs moved on now, and nobody cares to maintain this OSS software".

2) "Yeah, core devs decided to rewrite everything from scratch and change APIs and ABIs".

<comment><USER22> Because that doesn't happen outside of the OSS world?

<comment><USER3> Don't know, haven't seen it as often.

Money and existing customers depending on you and you depending on them provides a good motive to not do (1) and to avoid (2).

Also a lot of no-OSS software, especially of the desktop variety, is unpolished and un-finished, usually a moving target, so (1 -- the owners moving on and nobody picking it up) is more damaging for its user compared to some proprietary software being abandoned which he can still use for ages as is.

For example Microsoft is legendary for avoiding (2) at almost all costs, to the point were 20 year old Windows 98 programs still run as is on a modern OS. Heck, people still use VB6 which was superceded like 13 years ago... If you pick a software with a good following, chances are they will continue to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> hardly a noteworthy update.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sad to see there is still no word on an ARM build.

<comment><USER23> At this rate, it's best you forget it and revisit the idea in the next few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Glad to see the project is still alive :)

<comment><USER7> It's hardly still _alive_. These aren't even _cosmetic_ changes, honestly!

<comment><USER26> Why does it need cosmetic changes? There are a few actual bugs to sort out first.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, my point was that it's a dead project as new updates don't even have cosmetic changes. I bought a license, I really like it, but just like Intype and E on Windows and Kod and TextMate on Mac, the fate of Sublime Text is pretty clear.

<comment><USER27> but textmate is alive and new builds are released quite often! [https://github.com/textmate/textmate/](https://github.com/textmate/textmate/)

<comment><USER7> True, TextMate's agony is at a lower pace than Sublime Text, but it's still not having the metabolic rate of Atom and the likes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, another update (3064)!

</comment><comment><USER29> I read up on this editor a little bit, but the thing that gets me is: what's wrong with emacs? I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.

<comment><USER4> emacs? The thing that gets me about you emacs users is, what's wrong with vim?

<comment><USER29> it's easier to extend the editor with emacs-lisp than vimscript is the main advantage. But yes, vim isn't bad as a text editor either. I use both.</comment></comment></comment>


Crafting a high-performance TV user interface using React - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2017/01/crafting-high-performance-tv-user.html <comment><USER2> Interface performance is one of the strangest problems to have in this age of crazy processing power but it is extremely common.

Some of the delay is just plain silly and avoidable, like having long and synchronous _opening_ animations in response to an action, which only serve to waste the user's time. (Oh how I love being on a web site like AT&T and watching their JavaScript poorly zoom open a blank box from the center of the page for 2 whole seconds, when I KNOW they could just show me the damned page already.)

In other cases, the source of the slowdown is less clear. Is a physical device just not delivering its signals any sooner?

I've played games where you have to walk to a _very_ precise spot, hit a button, and wait literally _one whole second_ before _ANY_ response is visible onscreen or in audio. (And if it turns out you didn't really take the action you thought you did, you have to walk in circles to try a slightly different spot, and wait again). Why should that ever be the case? How can a super-fast console not immediately display _something_ or play _some_ sound to show that you took the action?

<comment><USER3> Especially the lag that you see on some brand new cars, only BMW and Audi seem to have lag free interface, but anything else that involves touch interface is just horrid! I've recently sat in my friend's brand new Honda SUV and the interface lag is just plain silly, for a car that costs $30,000+. Why is that?

<comment><USER4> I found this advertisement from Mercedes interesting: [https://i.redd.it/wwxk8nqh88ex.gif](https://i.redd.it/wwxk8nqh88ex.gif)

I can't speak for the quality of Mercedes interface (and this is obviously marketing for non-programmers) but LOC seems like an odd thing to be emphasising.

<comment><USER5> Everyone needs to hit 100,000 LOC this week to hit our target from marketing

<comment><USER6> Here is one line of code to solve all of their software problems:

rm -rf /

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I built my early career entirely around CRO / testing and moved over time into product / ux / app optimization.

Huge, crazy, insane amounts of time are WASTED by humans dickering around with interfaces that they don't understand and that are not personally optimized.

One of the things I don't hear many people talk about, but I am particularly interested in, is the coming and continued improvement of adaptive & personal interface design.

A challenge that any single interface has is that it's difficult to set-up and qualify a test on a small cohort group level (men over 70 years old that wear glasses are homeowners, drink wine, and live in California is an actual target class we can easily devise from current ad tech for instance).

It's challenging because - NOT ENOUGH DATA - eg very hard to run experiments and achieve statistical significance, let alone biforcate your alreadly limited resources to drive to that level of granularity.

But imagine an adaptive UX or set of UX preferences.

EG - Take the same inputs -> eye tracking / natural language feedback (speech!) / interface observation / time to goal / etc <\- and then let a flush ML / AI come up with a set of experiments and pathway.

Key to not completely confuse and blow users off path will be some kind of throttling mechanism - adaptations that settle you into the UX like your body's settling into the couch cushions.

<comment><USER8> I disagree there, thinking back to the days of when Office 'customized' it's UI to how you used the product (constantly moving menu items, shudder!), I'd rather have a consistent UX that didn't exactly fit my patterns than an adaptive one.

The problem with many interfaces, especially on consumer products, is that they're not discoverable, and oftentimes hide things behind inane levels of menu. Interface isn't a competitive advantage (although it should be!) so manufacturers don't invest in it.

<comment><USER9> Yup, it's also important to be able to walk over to your friend's machine and help them do something.

<comment><USER10> I spend a good amount of time doing support. I still play around with plugins, tools, and interfaces, but I try really hard to stick with defaults. One thing I do often do is remap Caps Lock to CTRL and it surprised me how often this catches people (and drives me nuts when I'm using their computer).

I have a Logitech Harmony 700 (a very mainstream universal remote), I don't care for it but it's the best I could find, because I use a receiver and Apple TV. Whenever I have guests it's always a mystery for them how to use it.

<comment><USER11> This alone is why I wouldn't consider DVORAK. If we have to live in a top-down driven world, I'd at least be open to standards being driven that waay

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Netflix's A/B testing has really screwed me in the past in terms of performance, so much so that I reached out to support to ask if there was a way to manually remove me from the testing group at that time. I'd log in, and the "new" interface throttled my 13 inch retina Macbook's CPU immediately to 100% (or more).

Last time it was so bad that I stopped using Netflix on my computer until the testing stopped.

That said, the "normal" Netflix player is great and I've always been impressed with its performance and responsiveness for such a large application handling video streaming.

<comment><USER13> You can opt out of A/B testing. Head to netflix.com, go to your account settings > Test Participation > Include me in tests and previews, and switch it off.

<comment><USER14> I had to do that after I got put in a group where there was no way to view the description or episode list without also starting to play the selection (in browser). On a console app the other day it would start playing an audio preview of anything selected making scrolling through my options extremely annoying. I quit the app almost immediately. I don't mind being in the testing group but I would definitely like the option to quit a test group. Wouldn't that feedback be valuable to them?

<comment><USER15> > Wouldn't that feedback be valuable to them?

The feedback is generally implicit in that if it causes problems for a lot of people then the test fails because you stop watching Netflix with that device.

That being said, if you call in to customer service they can remove you from the test if it turns out that's actually the problem (sometimes the problem is that you are in two conflicting tests for example) and they do mark that down as feedback. But they want you to call in so they can better understand and record the failure mode.

You don't even have to call, you can do it via chat, if you're not the kind of person who like to talk on a phone. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope someone from amazon is reading this. Their new app on the roku is unbelievably slow, 5+ seconds for transitions.

<comment><USER17> I don't work in that group, but I'll forward this link over. Thanks for the note and sorry for the bad experience.

<comment><USER18> Any chance you could recommend someone to finally get us different logins for the different profiles? It's kind of ridiculous to have parental controls when they can just change the profile to watch whatever they want. I also don't really like sharing a main account password with kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why is it so hard to just say, "precompile your code?" Just in time means having to take the same code, and do the same transformations to it, parse and reparse the code, every time you start the app. Yes, React may be a nice templating engine, but why make everyone go through the same process over and over again when you can copy once and not have to worry about it anymore?

<comment><USER20> This is the idea behind Svelte: [https://svelte.technology/](https://svelte.technology/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Link is down for me, so I'm reacting to the title. I don't have an issue with the performance of the Netflix UI on my PS4. I have a huge problem with the design of the UI. First, there is no reason we can't have more configuration flexibility. I don't ever want a program to auto play and I have no use for the video loops that auto play when I hover over a program. Let me disable these features. I don't want "my programs" to move. Stop moving it so I have to scroll over promotional content to locate it. In general, the UI should just be my "my programs", "continue watching", and access to searching. Netflix is trying to hard to make the UI something we don't need. KISS.

<comment><USER22> Agreed! I was just looking over their web interface, under Playback settings, they at least now have a way to disable Auto Play

<comment><USER21> That's not the same thing. That setting enables/disables the playing of the next episode after you complete watching an episode. Even with that setting disabled, when you click on a series Netflix starts playing the next episode, or if it's not a series, the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mildly unrelated - does anyone else get frustrated with the ui/ux for HBO now/go? The menu switches from the right side of the screen to the left, the scrolling is wonky, etc.

Man their content is good, but the app sucks.

<comment><USER24> Netflix is on another level with the care that goes into designing their streaming product. I didn't truly appreciate the Netflix app until also subscribing to HBO Now and using their Roku app.

HBO is missing the most basic UX features like discoverability, recommending the next episode of shows you've been watching, ratings, etc. Great content, but basically no effort in their apps that consume their content.

Netflix is a tech company that got into content, and HBO is a content company that got into tech.

<comment><USER25> I actually find the Netflix UX frustrating. First they removed the straightforward ability to simply say that I never want to watch a show, and then hide it from me. Beyond that I can rate a show 2 stars and yet it continues to come up in recommendations. This gives me the feeling that it doesn't really matter how I rate shows because they are going to shove whatever they want at me regardless.

The only competitor I can compare it to is Amazon. In that regard I agree that Netflix obviously puts more into the interface. Amazon's splitting shows into seasons and not even grouping them together is maddening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For folks who really care about performance, the easiest win is just switching to Inferno or Preact. You can pretty much leave your React code unmodified and get massive performance gains.

<comment><USER27> Easiest win for me was trying out re-frame[1]. Not only do you get the best performance out of react, to the point where the actual virtual-dom implementation doesn't matter, but you also gain productivity and since it forces you to build apps made out of 95% pure functions and immutable data, reasoning even at scale is still incredibly easier than anything else I've ever tried to build GUIs with.

[1]: [https://github.com/Day8/re-frame](https://github.com/Day8/re-frame)

<comment><USER28> I've maintained a ~20k LoC re-frame app for a year and a half. The performance of Clojure's persistent datastructures with pervasive sCU gives you generally good performance but it's not panacea. I've debugged a hundreds-of- milliseconds freeze on laptops from a poorly written hierarchical menu and I get pauses of 70-100ms if enough data comes in on our main view.

Using it with cljs-time and storing times in the app state is a really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot perf-wise since that's based on closure's date object and two equal date objects are not identical. This fails the fast identity check but will pass the structural equality check so no vdom gets generated but the check is not that much cheaper than a diff.

This is also a B2B app where we have no demand for mobile use so I haven't had to do load time or mobile perf optimization. If I did, the first thing I'd be concerned about is the bundle size since the cljs runtime plus React represents a fairly sizeable amount of overhead.

Not to say that reagent+re-frame is bad, it's just not so amazing you don't have to care about perf. I think Reagent would run particularly well on top of Inferno since the library provides lifecycle events to function components and I did experiments back in April and June on Inferno with persistent datastructures to good results. I just don't want to maintain it.

<comment><USER27> I tend to abuse the fact that subscriptions can compose in re-frame to lower the work needed in order to react to app-db changes. The fact that you can namespace keywords make it easy to scale as well.

Its also easy to optimize if you integrate day8/re-frame-tracer. I've lowered the number of views touched by updates quite a bit using it. I barely put any pressure on React anymore.

The bundle size usually isn't that bad with full optimizations enabled. An empty cljs project strips the entire cljs runtime for one, minus one defonce. You can also pass a compilation constant to react to strip its debugging features; that's saving you a few dozen kilobytes as well.

I'm currently building a small app to display Twitch chat as a personal side project and it handles GamesDoneQuick's chat effortlessly. Performance has been great so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I assume that HTML Dom would be fastest. Statically generated.

And that working w/ DOM/CSS would make it easier for team's designers to be more engaged.

<comment><USER27> Its quite easy to do server-side rendering of react pages, then only mount the dynamic views once in the browser.

<comment><USER30> I often hear that approach mentioned. But it seems so counter to my experience - that computers are plenty fast to run even complex display logic and that I'd never notice the difference. Is there really a benefit for well-written code? Or is this just an easy workaround for poor code?

<comment><USER31> Well, sometimes is not much that it's poor code but a lot of data to render. For example, imagine rendering a form with 100 elements. If it takes 0.1 second to render that on a average computer, you can make that 0.01 by rendering it on the server instead.

<comment><USER30> But your server has to render it for the thousands of visitors to you site. I still don't get the rationale.

<comment><USER19> Smart rendering would involve using a mostly static template that's updated with the relatively few dynamic elements as the page is being readied to be sent over the wire. If 90% of your dynamic content is the same, why put that through your app processes at all?

<comment><USER30> Static stuff is static at either end, and doesn't add to rendering time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Disheartening that A/B testing and user feedback led to video previews. One of those "features" that's so annoying you wonder how it ever made it past the brainstorming stage.

<comment><USER33> Still worse is auto starting the program when your trying to figure out what to watch. They have my money already why do they need to inflate their view numbers?

<comment><USER32> That's what they call "video previews." Sounds so innocuous huh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Semi-OT, but does anyone know how to make the new Netflix high-performance React-based TV UI stop playing selections automatically while scrolling through them, when you pause on one for more than 3 seconds?

What possible reason(s) would they have for doing this? Doesn't initiating playback of a title cost them money for bandwidth and/or license fees? It's just plain infuriating, in a first-world-problem kind of way.

</comment><comment><USER35> Different kind of TV interface, but still: I have a Sony 46HX853 and it really bugs me that after turning it on _from standby_ it still takes many seconds before it will respond to the input select button on the remote. UI responsiveness from startup will definitely be on my list of things to test the next time I buy a TV.

<comment><USER36> My TV controls the standby LED from software, thus it takes a 5-6 second wait to determine if you actually turned it on

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm still waiting for them to support Firefox and Linux. Their support says they are working on it, but I am positive that is a lie. At least I can work around it by masking my user-agent string as Chrome (DRM needs to be enabled).

<comment><USER38> Netflix works on Firefox. I don't remember about Linux. ~3 years ago yes Netflix wouldn't work on Linux without plugins, but I thought they fixed it or provided a workaround.

[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/08/firefox-49-linux- netflix-...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/08/firefox-49-linux-netflix- google-widevine-cdm)

<comment><USER37> Nope, you have to do a user agent string to get around it. From what I can tell Netflix is filtering it. But I may be wrong, I'm not sure how this stuff works. But I can do it on Firefox and Linux as long as I have DRM enabled (the change in FF49+) and change my user agent string to Linux Chrome (see image [http://i.imgur.com/twjpXgv.png](http://i.imgur.com/twjpXgv.png)). It WILL NOT work without changing the user agent string.

Talking to their support Netflix says it is FF's problem. From what I can tell it isn't actually FF's problem anymore (because this wouldn't work, right?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone know if this TV interface can be set up on a HTPC?

The Netflix experience on a Windows HTPC is quite frankly, abysmal (whether it's the Windows Store app or through the web browser).

</comment><comment><USER40> On which TV's does this interface run? Or how can i check it? I didnt know it was HTML on TV interfaces.

<comment><USER41> As far as I am aware, most modern ones.

Panasonic, LG etc..

Whilst the Netflix UI is great compared to a huge number of apps, I do find it has actually deteriorated over the past couple of years, in terms of interface speed.

Nowadays, when I launch the app on my 2013 Panasonic TV, it stalls at the profile selection screen for about 5 seconds, and once again once a profile is loading.

It never used to do this, and I presume it has a lot to do with precaching data; it is highly annoying as it consumes keypresses during this stall, meaning you can quite accidentally start watching something you never intended to.

</comment></comment><comment> philipp-spiess I'd really love to see more high quality posts like this on React. Thank you for sharing the knowledge!

</comment><comment><USER42> If you want to have performance why use a 90k Javascript library?

</comment><comment><USER43> What do you use to measure Key Input Responsiveness !?

</comment><comment><USER44> How many people still use TVs these days? Everyone I know don't even own one anymore, though my friends circle might not be that representative of society as a whole.

<comment><USER45> Practically every UK household.

I know some people without a TV but that's because they choose not to consume mass media, we've done it in the past.

Where do you live? Presumably your circle still consume mainstream media but do so via laptop/desktop/handhelds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What's with everyone's obsession with React recently? All I see is a template engine and not a particularly good one. You're still left with the same problem mixing your HTML into JavaScript.

<comment><USER47> I don't think I could write a comment that's a stronger explanation than what Guillermo Rauch wrote:

[https://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui](https://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui)

TL;DR: It's not about the HTML in Javascript; it's about being able to declare all the states of your UI in a stateless way. The result is that React components are like pure functions: you pass them inputs and you get predictable outputs.

<comment><USER46> If it's about state I feel like ExtJS is a better alternative especially with the way it handles Controllers, Events, and "Components" with state.

<comment><USER48> We use ExtJS a _lot_. But I think the exact opposite is the case. With ExtJS, you have the usual double-binding, e.g. if you set this property of that Model somewhere in your view hierarchy some little snippet of HTML are inserted/removed from the DOM. It's basically side effects only.

If I understood it correctly, one can think of react app/page as a pure function taking data and producing a DOM.

Reasoning and testing pure functions should be much easier than a set of components which partly rely on side effects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brendan Eich (JS inventor, Mozilla CTO) on stage at dotJS in Paris, Dec 2nd - <AUTHOR> http://dotjs.eu/ <comment><USER2> Ah yes, the guy who donated $1000 to Proposition 8. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3793012)

<comment><USER3> I think this may be relevant for the people who may want to attend. Why the down-vote?

<comment><USER4> In what possible way is it relevant? Why would it even be something anyone attending would care about? The conference is about programming, not gayness.

Good on him for standing up for what he believes in, and putting his money where his mouth is. If only more did the same.

<comment><USER5> >Good on him for standing up for what he believes in, and putting his money where his mouth is. If only more did the same.

I don't actually think it's good that people donate money on advancing discriminatory policies, even if they believe in them.

<comment><USER4> Is the word "waitress" discriminatory and sexist as well? Should we campaign to get that word redefined so it includes men?

People who say yes to the above are the ones sapping all the fun and enjoyment out of the world in the name of their crazy political correctness bullshit.

I don't think it's fruitful to get into such an argument here, so lets just agree to disagree.

<comment><USER6> Gay marriage and the word waitress.

One of them is a human rights issue, the other is a word for people with a certain job and, like many other words for people who have a certain job, changes depending on the gender of the person. This is a useful distinction and is really just a matter of words, however denying gay people the right to marry obviously is not.

<comment><USER4> The majority of people against redefining the word marriage to include same sex unions, aren't against it because they want to deny anyone any rights.

      Waitress - a woman who waits on people
      Marriage - The union of one man and one woman

Either both words are sexist and discriminatory, or neither is, or you do not accept the common meaning of the word 'marriage'.

As Stephen Fry said, give them all the same rights, just call it something else. "Civil Union" or something.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion having marriage and civil union is worse than waiter and waitress. The former makes a civil union feel inferior - there is a weight to the word marriage. I also see no problem with changing the definition of marriage to include gay couples.

Are you suggesting Eich was dontating to stop the misuse of a word as opposed to stopping gay people having equality?

<comment><USER4> Why not change it to include interspecies marriage next? Man+sheep+frog. What about inanimate objects! A man and a lamp? May as well allow people to marry trees while we're at it.

I am suggesting that yes.

<comment><USER6> Because lamps, for example, cannot give consent and have no concept of a union/marriage/tax arrangement between two things. If you do not understand this then you should have no part in this conversation.

Likening gay marriage to interspecies marriage is demeaning and offensive. I would appreciate it if you would stop.

<comment><USER4> demeaning and offensive? Don't you think animals or other possible future species should have rights too? Shame on you.

"It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?" \- Stephen Fry

I'm done here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow.

That is one packed conference with people who have created some powerful software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that is what we strive for :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to see some Dart discussion with Lars Bak.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is he "inventor of..." and the others are just "creator of..."

Personally, I think using "inventor" when related to writing software is a little over the top.

Still, not as irritating as when people call Crockford "inventor of JSON" I guess...

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually used the same wording as his official bio: [https://blog.mozilla.org/press/bios/brendan- eich/](https://blog.mozilla.org/press/bios/brendan-eich/)

I do agree that "inventor" is much stronger than "creator" but in the case of something as huge as JavaScript itself, I think he deserves it :)

<comment><USER9> It's just plain wrong to use "invent" that way in English. He designed JavaScript, he didn't "invent" it. Designing and inventing are two very different activities.

You wouldn't invent a specific language, but maybe the concept of "programming language" itself or specific language features. Lovelace invented the program, Zuse invented he programming language, and someone invented classes (probably Scandinavian) and first-order functions (probably a mathematician).

<comment><USER10> invent: create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.

So invent and design are near synonyms. There are subtle differences, of course. For example, I don't think it would be right to accuse you of designing the distinction you're making here. ;)

<comment><USER4> Disagree.

You wouldn't say "Wow you invented a lovely picture of a house" to your kid would you. They drew a picture. Just like a programmer writes a program.

<comment><USER11> Incidentally, you also wouldn't say "you designed a lovely picture of a house." So the parent's point stands.

<comment><USER9> Just because create and design are not synonyms doesn't make invent and create synonyms. Invented can be used as a pretentious form of create I guess, but it just makes the subject look like a tool. Edison invented the light bulb is ok, there weren't any economically viable light bulbs before. Eich invented JavaScript just makes Eich look bad though, there were plenty of PLs existing before that Eich borrowed from in his design.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you that 'designed' is the word he probably ought to use and that 'invented' is pretentious, ... but I don't think it's wrong.

<comment><USER9> It is not black and white, just not the right shade of gray.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Self driving car project to spin out of Alphabet - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/12/7/13875208/google-x-self-driving-spinout-alphabet <comment><AUTHOR> Does this imply that they are preparing for a general release? What is known about the status of the project?

<comment><USER2> It implies it yes. Which is the point. Google Self-Driving Cars are not practical and will not work in consumer hands. The entire system is based on a dead-end solution that cannot scale to nationwide use, much less global. They are not even on the same level as a Tesla or Comma.ai technology. Roads need to be excessively and precisely imaged with incredibly more detailed mapping technology that Google Maps/Street View normally uses before they can work, and any time anything changes on that road it needs to be re-done.

Google Self-Driving Cars are a really well-designed marketing scam. And "implying" they are making progress by reorganizing the company is the best way they know to keep themselves in the news.

<comment><AUTHOR> but some people will be able to make money out of the buzz...</comment></comment></comment>


Subcompact Publishing - <AUTHOR> http://craigmod.com/journal/subcompact_publishing/ <comment><USER2> All these words about how publishers need to jettison the legacy baggage of their print mindsets, and make the simplest thing that could possibly work, and how _The Magazine_ is the canonical example of someone who has accomplished that feat.

And yet both the essay and _The Magazine_ (which folded last year: [http://the-magazine.com/faq](http://the-magazine.com/faq)) organized themselves around the idea that content is best organized as _articles_ bundled into _issues_ , which is a completely print-centric notion!

Why do articles have to be bundled into issues? The only reason for that bundling is because the economics of print require it. But the economics of online publishing are completely different. So why take it as written that "issues" have to be a thing?

For that matter, why do _articles_ have to be a thing? If we're really trying to get back to first principles, maybe the idea of corralling facts into a narrative structure that's a certain number of words long should be challenged, too. Maybe content is best delivered online like a stock ticker instead, brief bursts of new material completely unmoored from each other, with the reader left to tie them together however she wants to.

(Hey, we just invented Twitter!)

I don't want to bag on TFA too much, it was written in 2012 and it's easy to take predictions from a few years back and poke holes in them with the information we have that the predictor didn't. But it does feel like it's part of a broader problem in publishing, which is people _thinking_ they're making bold decisions and burning the bridges that connect them to the past, when in fact they're still carting around tons of legacy baggage that they don't _realize_ is legacy baggage because they've lived with it for so long they just take it to be part of the environment. Which is why so many of publishing's Great Big Online Experiments (such as, ahem, _The Magazine_ ) end up feeling more like hedges against the future than daring attempts to seize control of it.

<comment><USER3> "Why do articles have to be bundled into issues? The only reason for that bundling is because the economics of print require it."

Not at all. An important function of magazines for readers is to hedge the risk. When you buy a copy of _Popular Science_ or _Ellery Queen 's Mystery Magazine_ or _Good Housekeeping_ , you know pretty well what kind of content you're going to get. Even if you don't like every article or story, the chances are you're going to enjoy most of them (assuming you're a fan of the magazine to begin with).

Granted, there's still _some_ risk. Magazines do decline or change focus. The risk is still smaller than what you'd get with an unknown author. Also the price is usually less than you'd pay for a stand-alone work.

For the writers, the magazine exposes their work to an audience that might not have heard of them before.

We're actually seeing a mini-boom in magazine-like entities in the indy publishing world. Often they're called "bundles", but they're really not much different than a classic magazine -- except that you don't need expensive Manhattan real estate, printers, paper, postage, or any of the other factors that have put so many traditional magazines on the skids.</comment></comment>


The Billion Dollar Startup Club - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/#2015 <comment><USER2> @patel0phone asked if i'd share the thought process behind the visual. challenge was to find an arresting way to bring users into the data within the limitations of a browser. (we removed the viz on mobile)

i went through several iterations of charting forms -- treemap, bubbles, bars, scatterplot w.different metrics as well as looking at a collection of graphics that i find visually interesting.

we landed with this bar chart arrayed around a circle.

a lot of what i try to do with my work is to push traditional charting forms into fresh presentation. if you're new to dataviz i'd recommend you learn the traditional charting forms first and understand those deeply before you try this at home.

it important to note this chart lives in context of all of the data -- including a straight bar chart within the table.

hope this helps. best of luck to you all!

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a really interesting way to display that trend. I'd love to hear about the thought process that led to using that semi-circle visual. Any WSJ designers/devs lurking HN? Also, has anyone seen something like this used with other data sets?

When we built our own infographic to highlight "The Rise of Coding Bootcamps" there was much debate on the best way to visualize this information. While I'm happy with the result[1], there's definitely much room for improvement.

[1][http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic](http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic)

<comment><USER4> As a frequent critic of arbitrary & misleading data visualizations... I love it. It's a nice, compact way of showing off the data:

\- it shows a 40x+ range without transformations that might muddle the story

\- it captures the long, flat tail (partly an artifact of the artificial $1B floor), which compacts nicely

\- the "focus" of the data is on the top quartile, which is permitted to dominate the visual

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kabam is worth a billion? Their business model is buy good underground games, then squeeze every last cent out by making it pay2win. There is no good on this earth.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you guys seriously redefine what startup means ? Eg. Flipkart started ~8 years ago, employs 15,000+ employees. What/How can it be called a startup ? If acquisition of funds is the only definition of startup then all companies are startups as at some point they all needed to raise funds.

<comment><USER7> these are venture funded companies that haven't gone public.. the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre- ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.

<comment><USER8> > the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that > might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in > vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.

There are 300k brokers in the US. [1] WSJ has 2.5 million daily subscribers. [2]

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and- fina...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and-financial- services-sales-agents.htm) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain to me how Theranos is worth $9 billion? Everytime I hear about them, their "technology" sounds so sketchy that it's hard to think it is not a scam. Is there so much promise behind closed doors that I'm just missing something that's worth that much?

<comment><USER10> While the tech looks sketchy, the company looks even sketchier. Look at the About Us page - [https://www.theranos.com/our- company](https://www.theranos.com/our-company)

One employee listed and a whopping sized board of directors, most of which come from the government or the military. Smells like something straight from the military industrial complex.

<comment><USER11> It really looks like their biggest malady is a junior web PR team. A lot of the web site looks and reads like someone had a lot of good ideas but hadn't really run/written for large projects (like a major corporate web site) before.

<comment><USER12> They use the word "actionable" right at the very beginning

Classic rookie copywriter mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm getting flashbacks of the Kevin Rose $60 million BusinessWeek cover.

<comment><USER12> To be fair to BusinessWeek, Rose did get a $200 million offer from Google. That $60 million wasn't wrong; Rose was.

To be even more fair, Digg collapsed because it made mistakes, but the field it pioneered - crowd-curated news - is now a multi-billion dollar business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do companies with documented shady ethics like JustFab continue to excel?

<comment><USER15> Capitalism doesn't discourage dirty tricks.

<comment><USER16> Yes it does. One very large factor in people trading with other people is reputation. Whether we're talking 1910 or 2015. See: eBay (or a dozen other obvious examples).

Maybe you're smarter when it comes to business than, say, Warren Buffett. His theory is that having a good reputation is immensely important in business.

Businesses suffer or die all the time in the free market due to poor reputations. You see those consequences at a small town level, and you see it at a very large level.

To easily test your theory: try setting up a business in a small town. Proceed to cheat or otherwise perform dirty tricks on all of your customers. See what happens.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Unfortunately, today's globalized world is very unlike a small town. So, a lot of crooks can scam a whole bunch of people before they are blacklisted as such.

<comment><USER18> On the other hand globalization has made it much harder to scam in many ways since information about scams spread instantly. Back in the days you could use any simple trick and people would buy it over and over again since they had never heard of it before. Nowadays the scammers need to be much more inventive.

<comment><USER19> Multi-level marketing scams beg to differ.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if I agree. MLM companies need to put some serious effort into combating all the bad press they get on the internet (efforts which are inventive indeed!). Without globalization it would be a walk in the park.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I especially enjoy all those 'valued at' companies with no product, no tech demo, but promises and ideas.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice graphic, but someone needs to update the valuation on Fab. I am sure they are not worth 1.3 billion anymore.

<comment><USER22> Also it's visually misleading, the area of these segments doesn't matter, it's only the radius in a linear fashion.

Assuming the perceived value is most commonly interpreted as area: the larger numbers look even bigger than they are by a magnitude since the area scales with r²/2 (circular sector area) while the actual value r is only growing linearly.

Simplified calculation (no doughnut, no offset):

           linear    area
       a   11     => 60 units
       b   46     => 1058 units
           difference in value b/a
           x4.2   => x17.6

<comment><USER23> There's a whole chapter on mathematically troublesome graphics in _How To Lie With Statistics_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Note the valuations for Snapchat[1] and Pinterest[2] may have both roughly doubled today, or at least soon will.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat- said-to-seek-up-to-19-billion-value-in-funding-round) [2] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion- valua...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion-valuation- with-new-funding-1424311549)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's always difficult for me to view Chinese companies as a fair competitor. The Chinese government plays favorites, and startups (more or less) have to have connections and be supported by the party. If they aren't supported, they wont be around very long.

Point being, it seems mildly disconcerting to me that Chinese companies are compared to U.S. counterparts.

</comment><comment><USER26> OK explain this: [http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar- club/?co=Fab](http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/?co=Fab)

Versus this: [http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion- valua...](http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-valuation- to-a-15-million-fire-sale/)

Who is right?

<comment><USER27> WSJ's table lists the valuation date to be June 1, 2013. The Quartz article is from Nov 2014. So you do the math.

<comment><USER26> Well their label shouldn't say "valuations as of Feb 2015" then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know why this exclusion exists?

        Excluded from this list are companies that were
        majority-controlled by an institutional investment
        firm at one point.

I presume this is why Supercell ($3B valuation) is not included, because they were at one point 51% owned by Softbank. But I can't understand why that matters.

</comment><comment><USER29> So is that the total list ? Is it possible that there is a company valued over 1b that they could have missed. I am seeing lots tech companies, but not much non tech companies.

<comment><USER30> The word "tech" has lost all its meaning now... basically if you do anything online your are considered a tech company.

<comment><USER31> It hasn't lost its meaning so much as its managed to find its way into _everything_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What happened to Zalando and Rocket Internet between September and October?

</comment><comment><USER33> Am I the only one really surprised to see Razer pop in there somewhere?

And really, how many of those are we still able to call 'startups', in my opinion almost all of these 'startups' have transcended the 'startup' phase and now are simply 'companies'.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thanks for horribly breaking my back button WSJ/Murdoch.

</comment><comment><USER35> Domo (Domo.com) should also be listed.</comment>


Facing the consequences of climate change - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/17572735

<comment><USER2> Here's the problem that I see that few people discuss. Why should China and India care? The vast majority of their combined population, about 30% of the world's total, live under miserable circumstances by western standards. Move 100 million people off the coastline? No big deal. More typhoons? Oh well, we'll just rebuild the shacks.

China has a far greater problem in balancing the needs and wants of the haves and have-nots and they are going to address those issues first. They have everything to gain by continuing to industrialize and I think that anyone who believes that they will actually cut their emissions is kidding themselves.

I think we could take a huge step towards energy independence by building nuclear plants and driving hydrogen cars. Instead of dozens of smaller problems to solve, we could focus on just one: what to do with nuclear waste.

<comment><USER3> Can't we just reprocess that nuclear waste like the French do?

<comment><USER2> Yes, we could make reactors much more efficient than they were in the past, but there still will be waste to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know you can't extrapolate from local isolated weather conditions, but it does strike me as slightly ironic that I'm reading this article about Global Warming after a day spent outside in the record early snowfalls and cold conditions here in Scotland.

Which after last years epic amounts of snow and cold is beginning to looks like a pattern.... (I hope).

<comment><USER5> The overall warming trend means there's more energy in the system, which means some patterns will change, and some patterns (like the Gulf Stream) are local warmings.

So, in some cases, consistently colder weather is evidence _for_ anthropogenic climate change.

<comment><USER4> I know I shouldn't, but the prospect of consistently colder and snowier winters makes me very happy.

<comment><USER6> There is a real possibility that you'll get too much of a good thing.

One of the open questions about global warming is whether the Gulf Stream will get shut off, causing your climate to look at lot like Alaska's. See <http://www.gulfstreamshutdown.com/> for links to lots of articles and research on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that by 2100, if the stated effects (which are certainly at the high end of what's realistic), it ought to be relatively easy to do some large- scale engineering to mitigate them. Either dig some new seas to soak up the water (Australia could use its own Mediterranean) or put mirrors in orbit to cool the planet.

<comment><USER8> Yes, large scale terraforming is both simple to understand, easy to do, and poses no political difficulties at all! I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong.

I mean, you realize that even if we could put giant space mirrors in orbit, it wouldn't solve all the biggest climate change problems, right? Reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface does nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 in the oceans, which means we might still devastate the ability of a few billion people to get sufficient protein to survive.</comment></comment>