The Web We Have to Save - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 <comment><USER3> I really hope the current centralization of the web is an evolutionary step. At first, the web was decentralized with newsgroups as open as NNTP provided. Then, the lack of controlling features killed the decentralized protocols and medium: namely the inability to control spam and the inability to have participants pay for the cost of the medium.

Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good _reading_ platform, which is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned. GReader, not G+, was Google's best weapon against Facebook (with proper development, not stagnant as it was).

It is easier to add features to centralized architectures, but it does not mean the death of distributed protocols. I do believe a distributed publishing platform will be born sometime in the future. It is unthinkable that Facebook will still be the top destination, say, 20 years from now.

<comment><USER4> Centralization is a law of nature. It allows for more efficiency through economies of scale.

It's not unthinkable that Facebook will be the top destination 20 years from now if they are (1) successful with internet.org and (2) first-to-market with a viable virtual reality product.

<comment><USER5> > if they are (1) successful with internet.org

no self-respecting third-world intellectual is going to be satisfied by a catered whitelist of websites they can access. to me this seems like an attempt to repeat what we did with confusing "the web" with "the internet" by having third world people confuse "facebook" with "the web"

<comment><USER4> _Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn't use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. "It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook," he concluded._ [1]

It doesn't matter what intellectuals are satisfied with, the internet (like TV and Radio) will be driven by what the mass-market consumer wants. If they can get all they need from Facebook for free (running a business & talking to friends and family), then why pay more to develop a network that they don't want?

[1] [http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no- ide...](http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre- using-the-internet/)

<comment><USER6> This is even true with SE Asian web developers - if there isn't an active Facebook community, a technology can't get traction there

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really interesting and spot-on article, I really liked this insight, though:

> But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a > departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. (...) When I > log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to > scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current > affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of > course self-playing videos.

Never had thought about it that way.

<comment><USER8> I think the sheer volume of content plays a part too. In the early days of blogging (2000 to, say, 2005) there weren't many bloggers, and while they didn't quite all know each other they crosslinked from sidebar to sidebar into communities. There wasn't much content, it was all generally high quality, the discovery process worked well as a result, and few people were monetising it.

Now we have to ask an awkward question: do people actually _want_ quality, as we define it? Does the undiscriminating mass consumer result in a low quality market, or is it the other way round? To what extent is media there to support identity/belonging needs rather than informational ones?

<comment><USER9> There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.

I think it's clear there's a huge demographic with no interest in anything beyond celebrity trivia.

There's also a HN demographic, and there may even be some overlap (probably not much...) between both.

The useful question is whether or not there's a demographic willing to support the content _you_ want to create, and if so, how do you find it/them?

There's always been a subculture of niche print/book publishing which squeaks by on a subscription model, and the web hasn't killed that. I keep finding sites that work in that way. So I don't think the web is killing that model.

Obviously Buzzfeed does a lot better, and it's adorable. [tm]

As for monetisation - a lot of personal blogs are there to support a professional portfolio, especially in tech. I'm just fine with that.

But there are also new opportunities. I was talking to someone last week about their teenager, who runs a mini-business on Instagram. She has 300k followers, and people pay her to promote their work.

She's fifteen. The site is an art site. It's not quite super-abstract conceptual gallery art, but it's not low quality cheese either.

All kinds of things are possible now that weren't possible before.

<comment><USER10> >There's no such thing as people. There are demographics, and they all have different interests.

Ouch! Your comment literally hurt me. I upvoted you anyway, as I think the rest of your comment is excellent.

But I want to address that first line. I know where you're coming from and it is the reality we find ourselves in nowadays. But.

In my opinion, we are at the cusp of having the technology to break that mindset. Demographics are an antiquated way of dealing with the "there are too many people to deal with!" problem, so we put them into buckets. But here's the rub: privacy.

To break the idea of demographics we would have to be even more intrusive on how we track and profile individual users. Or maybe not...

Going back to the original article, maybe it is centralisation that sucks. If I want one place to give me want it thinks I need, or even what I really need, then yes, privacy suffers. But how about if I just have the tools to find what I like, and not have them all under the same umbrella? The way it was a long time ago, where I could be involved in various different communities, and there was no link between them except for my own list of links.

/rant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good points and well written, however it all depends on perspective. Most of us don't have the same investment as someone imprisoned for speaking out.

The author bemoans the demise of blogging and the rise of decentralization, I remember bemoaning the rise of blogging bringing about the end of Usenet. It's always sad when you see your favorite niche of the internet disappear but it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want.

My kids think of YouTube as the empowering platform and free streaming music as their birthright. If I tried to get them excited about Usenet or gopher they would call me out as the old fart I am.

<comment><USER12> Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at television as an example.) You can't just write it off every time when someone notices the decline.

Also, centralization is objectively there. Google, Twitter, Facebook. It was obvious where this was going years ago, but instead of warning us, technologist sung odes to Web 2.0. Great. Now, Web 3.0 is shitty phone apps.

 _it also smacks of elitism when you complain endlessly about what the masses want_

When you don't complain about things simply because masses want them it's groupthink.

<comment><USER13> > _Nostalgia is one thing, but sometimes things just get worse. (Look at > television as an example.) You can 't just write it off every time when > someone notices the decline._

People point to old time complaints about decline as if they prove that decline was never real ("People also complained about the advent of books or the radio, so surely anyone complaining today is wrong").

The forget that there are other, also logically consistent, explanations:

1) Decline is a constant: e.g. people who complained about the radio bring some kind of decline were as correct as people complaining about Twitter now.

2) Decline is always present but not absolute: there's always something missed in sophistication, freedom, etc from previous technologies (e.g. the use of the imagination in radio-theatricals as opposed to being fed images in TV, or the freedom to be the fuck alone for a while as opposed to constantly obligated to be available with mobile phones), but there is also positive change, and what's the total balance depends on what you value.

3) Decline is sometimes true (a thing is totally worse than another it replaces), and othertimes not, and some people in the past were right about claiming decline in some transition, where others were wrong.

<comment><USER12> All of what you wrote is true. Sometimes decline in mass media is relative. We loose some radio to get some TV. But I think it is sometimes fair to say that we trade something of value for something superficial.

Right now, we have unparalleled levels of global surveillance and media centralization plays a key role in it.

In the past TV channels and publishers competed with one another. Right now every large website is an unchallenged emperor of its niche. The emperor dies and we get a new one, but it's hardly a free market system.

Finally, there are phenomena like Twitter/Reddit hate mobs. The principle is not entirely new, but the scale, pettiness and randomness are unparalleled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article makes lots of good points.

The wikipedia page about him has a lot of back-story about his arrest: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan)

And serves as a good reminder that if you speak truthfully and candidly about the leaders of certain nations you would do well to avoid going there in person.

The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it is probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that has the power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when you're some insecure dictator.

<comment><USER15> His article was kind of skirting around where you're going now.

> _The internet is super powerful and a lot of global leaders realize that it > is probably the most concrete challenge to their authority, anything that > has the power to stir up the masses is something to be properly feared when > you 're some insecure dictator._

It's not just when you're "some insecure dictator".

The free exchange of ideas and information is a threat to _any ruler_ anywhere, because the longer and more widely it goes on, the more likely a random person gets exposed to ideas like: _" heyyy if we had a choice, we probably wouldn't fund wars or fight in them! -what's in it for us?!"_ or _" how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?"_.

That's why they're stamping down on free speech everywhere, and that's why they monitor everything they possibly can. They want to establish a modern, _lasting_ , technology-based police state before it's too late because too many people have woken up and become authority-atheists.

Think it can't happen where ever you live? Think again: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150705/18174231556/spain...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150705/18174231556/spain- government-goes-full-police-state-enacts-law-forbidding-dissent-unauthorized- photography-law-enforcement.shtml)

( I wonder if I'm shadow-banned already )

<comment><USER14> Plenty of people believe that taxes are a necessary evil. Also, you're not shadowbanned so 'they' apparently aren't all that powerful yet.

As for the funding of wars, plenty of people are prepared to fund them as long as they and their relatives don't end up fighting in them. And with drones getting better every day all-out robotic warfare is a matter of time.

<comment><USER15> Of course they believe that. If they saw taxation for the extortion it is, they wouldn't be happy with having rulers either.

They have shadowbanned me several times already, with different accounts.

Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff, because it simply never occurs to them what's going on. That doesn't mean everything is alright, nor that people would accept how their taxes are used if they ever really _thought_ about it.

Drone warfare? The much more worrying threat is drone-enforced tyranny. That's where they're going, of course. Think Kim Jong Un might like to have his own robot army? -So would any other ruler.

<comment><USER14> Taxation is used for things that I agree with and plenty of things that I disagree with. It's not extortion because I have the ability to (1) leave the country for one where the taxes are more to my liking and (2) I can lower and raise them as much as I want to by working more or less.

> Plenty of people don't care about funding wars or other harmful stuff, > because it simply never occurs to them what's going on.

It may be true but I suspect that more people are aware of what is going on that you give them credit for.

As for individual rulers setting their drone army against their own people, that's definitely a possibility but to date we have not seen that so it should not cloud your judgment about the present day situation.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's not extortion because I have the ability to (1) leave the country for > one where the taxes are more to my liking_

So I guess a mafia's extortion is not actually extortion either, because you can leave one mafia and go get extorted by another whose extortion is more to your liking?

> _(2) I can lower and raise them as much as I want to by working more or > less._

I don't even need to tell you that this is disingenuous.

> _that 's definitely a possibility but to date we have not seen that so it > should not cloud your judgment about the present day situation_

How exactly is the possibility clouding my judgment?

<comment><USER16> >>>>> _how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we 're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?_

If the mafia takes away 20% of your income (and also the people around you), and then comes back to you 2 years later to report what they did with the money: " _Your money and the one from your friends helped me buy this new house on the lake, and this private jet. I had to use some to pay the workers because I 'm not enslaving people_"

If a country takes the same amount of money and comes back to you 2 years later: " _Your money was used to build this new road to improve the local economy, also we were able to save 3 persons from a fire thanks to this new fire truck, and treat 2 people at the hospital. Feel free to use that new road, and don 't worry if your house gets on fire, the firetruck will be there in a few minutes_"

Do you see the difference? The taxes were here trying to help you and the citizens of the country you live in. They also spent that money buying 2 fighter jets and tanks? That's unfortunate, that would be useful if there was some way to make your voice heard. That new house and jet the mafia built, you will never have any benefits from it.

So: how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?

A: One of them, in essence, is _trying_ to help you, the other one does not care about you.

<comment><USER15> Come on.

It's more like: _" I took some of your money for myself, gave some to my cronies so that I'll get their bribes in the future too, and a part of it was used to run all kinds of pointless bureauracy. Oh, and we provided you with shitty health-care services you still didn't need"_.

If a McDonald's starts forcefully taking a cut of your income every month, but delivers you a few Big Macs "in return", is that alright? You're getting "services" so it's all good?

> _A: One of them, in essence, is trying to help you, the other one does not > care about you._

No. Actually, they take your money _by force_ exactly because they're _not_ trying to help you. Otherwise you'd just be paying for the goods and services _you_ want to pay for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So this man talks about saving the "old Web", and then he forces everybody to Sign in with facebook, twitter or Google just for writing comments.

You should walk the talk. If you want to promote decentralization, you should decentralize yourself, not channel everything you do through social media.

About less and less text on the web, that is a normal thing to happen. Just look at the presidents of the US. First ones were great at writing because dominant mass media was newspapers, then came great orators because of radio, then Kennedy with images and television(staged images and footage), ending with Obama(public speaking live on video).

As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great. Of course, you could feel bad if past technology limitations made you special, like silent film actors did when they lost their stardom.

<comment><USER18> >As technology improves, communication becomes more human, and this is great.

I actually would say the opposite, there is nothing human about internet or videos or social networks or most technologies. They give us an impression of social contact without any of the actual benefits, it's creating a society of lonely people who are connected to thousands of others but are more isolated than ever.

We have health professionals warning us about this, that loneliness and associated feeling are a major health concern[1] and we should remedy to it as technology isolates us more and more from our peers and social circles which are essential to the survival of our specie.

[1][http://time.com/3747784/loneliness- mortality/](http://time.com/3747784/loneliness-mortality/)

<comment><USER19> It's very much in the eye of the beholder, I personally feel way more connected with friends and family and much less lonely with social media than when the technology was more primitive.

This whole "technology alienates us from each other" narrative seems to me like a misguided reaction to social change, nostalgia for a time that never existed - where people were never lonely because they were always face to face or on the phone. (Oh except the geeks interested in boring things like math or science fiction, fuck them.)

Perhaps this depends on whether you've lived in many places or travel a lot, and have friends spread throughout the world. Or if you have peculiar interests and meet friends through those shared interests - hard to do if you're in a small town, easy to do online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm at a tech conference this week and I was talking to some coders last night about how the internet has changed. Remember back when people would live- stream their entire lives? Not necessarily to be a eyeball-grabber, but just because they wanted to live in the open. That lasted for a little while, but then people realized that by inviting ten thousand people into their lives, it wasn't just sharing -- it was something else entirely. People started making demands.

This is not the internet we were promised.

Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it. We would hook up our computers to each other, open up the pipes, and the free exchange of honest information would result in Good Things Happening (tm). We never were really told what all these good things would be. I suppose it meant more free people in the world, or rapid advancement of the sciences, or more folks becoming friends.

Instead it's countries building great firewalls, science publishers holding on to their data and using the legal system to enforce it -- and more little niches where like-minded people talk to each other in an echo room.

Web pages, which were just one way of many to go see printed content that somebody had stored, have turned into some weird kind of real-estate. Long gone from most toolkits are Gopher, Telnet, FTP, and the rest. Instead, everything is a web page. Long gone are people owning their own computers, which amazes me to no end. Instead, somehow in many cases we're ending up licensing our own stuff. Walled garden providers "help" us by deciding who can speak to whom. Everybody wants to "help" us now -- and it's all with trade- offs that most consumers fail to fully fathom.

I miss the old internet.

<comment><USER21> _Back in the day, the internet had a Utopian feel to it._

I think the peak of this was when P2P filesharing took off, and everyone started sharing almost _everything_. Books, music, video, software, anything that could be digitised was uploaded and shared. It really felt like a massively distributed global library that anyone could access, for only the price of an Internet connection. Too bad most of it was killed off by antipiracy interests...

<comment><USER22> It's still there, just not as easily accessible.

bib, wcd, ptp and so on…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Lovely piece. I liked this bit:

> the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the > past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today's social > networks

In a crowd environment or mob mentality (which is driven by social media) people can often refrain from airing an opinion that might be divergent.

From observing friends, less and less are interested in reading beyond "140 characters" or whatever is considered byte size.

But even more concerning is people are too quick to "like" or "me too" something without considering source or veracity, or taking due consideration.

Personal investigation or research into an issue, before dishing out invective is becoming rare.

<comment><USER24> HN is a perfect example. It tries very hard, and in some ways it succeeds. And yet the attention half-life for a given conversation is measured in _hours_ and long replies often simply aren't read, let alone upvoted. While a sufficient number of people who downvote for disapproval results in stilted, shallow, uninteresting conversations more often than not.

And HN is ahead of the game compared to, say, reddit or, guh, facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This deserves a much longer reply than this, but it'll have to do for now. There's very much a different tone and structure to content on the internet today than when it was younger. Much of that has been a transition toward more commercial content and more "bite-sized" content, a lot of which has been encouraged by the tools we've come to use to interact with the internet. Social networks, mobile devices, etc. Each of which reward or encourage a shallower level of interaction on shorter timescales. I remember using usenet and forums where a conversation would typically last for days and sometimes for weeks or months. And where it wasn't unusual for a single reply to be several paragraphs of text and perhaps have involved several hours of work and/or research on the part of the poster. And on the web there was much that was similar. Blogs and personal sites full of essays. Blogs having conversations with one another via essay, and so on.

That sort of thing still exists in pockets here and there but it does seem much less common. And it doesn't feel as though the younger generations coming online have a predilection toward that mode of communicating. And too all of the communications tools we use from day to day tend to discourage such individualistic content. There's a sharper dichotomy between content producer and content consumer than there used to be. But you see people chaffing at the separation. You see people posting 20 part tweets, or posting an essay in image form to their facebook wall.

I don't fear that individualistic content will disappear from the web, but I fear that it is becoming less common, and is being actively discouraged by the tools and platforms we've come to rely on. Part of it comes back to the ad supported nature of much of the web. Just as in all other ad supported media to date there's always a pressure towards shallowness and laziness. Shallow content is cheaper and easier to make, and when you're just counting eyeballs it's often seemingly just as profitable.

</comment><comment><USER25> The story of the persecuted Christians falling asleep in the cave is also known in Christianity as "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus" or "The Seven Holy Youths of Ephesus"[1]. Their feast day in the Orthodox church is tomorrow[2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers)

[2] [http://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=152&type=...](http://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=152&type=saints)

Edit: I found this article extremely insightful, but have nothing insightful of my own to offer in response except for this bit of trivia. :)

</comment><comment><USER26> This article makes me wonder if what the author is calling for is even possible. The web, to me, seems subject to exactly the same phenomenons of growth as all other human enterprises. It starts off with auspicious beginnings where everyone involved knows almost everyone else involved. It grows slowly and retains that old familiar feeling during the honeymoon of its existence. Then, when it really catches steam and starts growing, everyone from the original cohort gets excited about how it's going to change the lives of all the newcomers in the same way it changed theirs. In actuality, there's a saturation point that gets reached where there's so many people using this system that structure inevitably grows out of it/gets applied to it.

It's the difference between the city hall in a town of 200 versus the US Congress presiding over 300+ million. When things grow, they become systemic.

</comment><comment><USER27> > The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier > for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed my > account, because I wasn't able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a > backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server.

He published this article on Medium? Isn't that a huge contradiction?

<comment><USER28> > Isn't that a huge contradiction?

Try counting web devs who are pro-privacy but implement Google Analytics in their work. You'll get close to 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great article, I share the sentiment. But we have to remember what killed blogging more than Facebook itself: webspam. The cost of posting a blog post is a flood of spam comments and trackbacks. Even with Akismet, the time it would take to review for ham, etc was substantial. When you make a Facebook post you get nothing but pure self-validation! Their anti-spam team was effective from the start and besides the scourge of game invites, the experience is relatively positive all around. Yes it is full of ads, but generally they are not about penis pills.

Spam has killed off most of the decentralized web. Any future solution to corporate controlled media needs to have a great answer to spam.

</comment><comment><USER30> >> Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening? <<

Yes, unavoidably, as the internet gains popularity and prevalence.

Early adopters are by their nature more erudite than those that follow. Early internet was was filled with people with big ideas promoted on complex platforms. Their ideas couldn't be expressed in 140 characters or a funny picture, and often they had to learn HTML and server management to express them.

But the numbers of users grow, we're going to have a dumbing down of the majority of the content. Like television, we'll need the "Hee-Haws" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" as entertainment for the masses. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of humanity.

There will always be blogs and good ideas to be found, just like you have PBS on TV. It's just going to be in it's little corner the world. It's not going to be popular beyond a select group.

So I don't think you need to save that part of the internet - it will always exist. But it will lose its power and relevance in a sea of mediocrity.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is one of the reasons I've become, lately, a big supporter of the IPFS - Internet Permanent File System - [http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/)

I think its very important for us to engineer ways to perpetuate human culture as expressed on the web. Having been privileged to witness the birth of the Internet and the subsequent explosion in human expression as described by the Web, I'm very concerned that we are losing so much with every new site update, every change/refactor of existing communities, every death of a blog. I remember so many wonderful, enriching things happening in the early days of the Web, which are all gone now .. being replaced with terrible instruments of cultural devolution. With tech like IPFS, I hope we are able to construct a less neurotic corpus of human information - that the truly valuable stuff sticks around longer than the current attention span, and remains available for years to come. I'm of course, explicitly not referring to cat pics.

<comment><USER32> IPFS means "InterPlanetary File System"

source: [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for the posting. The article is dead-on but it misses one important contributing factor- the rise and mass acceptance of the "disrupt" culture. It's become acceptable, desirable, even lucrative to use Internet technology to jump into lives, right into people's faces.

If most people had realized what they were signing up for when they first slipped in a phone in their pocket- that every greedhead who could figure out an HTML tag would eventually be able to use that phone to interrupt any part of their lives- I think most consumers would have thought twice. Now, they're all addicted to the endorphin buzz of "likes" and are quickly losing the ability to seek for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER34> All and all, it's just another sign that the internet is becoming less a tool of individual communication or expression, and more an impression of cable TV. Besides, y'know, all that surveillance and all.

Another free medium bites the dust.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's why I wrote my Magna Carta For The Web: [http://blog.higg.so/2015/07/31/a-magna-carta-for-the- web/](http://blog.higg.so/2015/07/31/a-magna-carta-for-the-web/) There is an emphasis on Advertising in this article but it overlooks the meta grand overview of the web which I go into. The topology, and the tendency towards centralized systems is not talked about here. Also if Advertising works for now, then I am going to milk it for all it is worth. Unless decent standards for publishers are put in place like Mozilla's Subscribe2Web, or hosting and domain renewals become free, then we are stuck with that business model. Also, we just got a digital Magna Carta voted in: [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/15/magna- carta-d...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/15/magna-carta- digital-rights-vote-censorship-freedom-of-speech)

In terms of how the web is progressing, things like Ethereum look very exciting: [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/) And the IETF are in full force now with many protocols being redesigned from the ground up with security and privacy being baked in.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like this article and the author makes a lot of great points. However I also disagree with the main thesis that the internet has become worse or dumbed down.

> I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and > bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days > when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, > without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when > nobody cared about likes and reshares.

My disagreement is on two main levels. One, the internet of yore, that the author describes in this quote, is not gone. It still exists. Trivial proof lies in the existence of this post and it's ability to shoot to the top of HN. The internet has only expanded, to include different types of content and different communities. The "book internet" still exists and yes a "tv internet", which some might describe as worse, also exists.

And the expansion of the internet to include new forms of content brings me to the second reason I think the "new internet" is not worse: it is more accessible. The mainstream has come and joined the whole internet thing. And yes, while it might be decried by those who enjoyed it the way it was before, there are a lot more people other than them who are enjoying it now. And I think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER37> > The "book internet" still exists

Amanda Palmer recently wrote this about her and Neil Gaiman:

 _neil and i, and many other bloggers, have discussed this with more and more worry lately. we used to have blogs, on our websites. we 'd link to them. people read them. LOTS of people read them. this was in the days before twitter, bookface, instagram, tumblr, etc. it was when you woke up in the morning and read people's blogs and posted thoughtful comments and it felt like the internet was ripe with possibility and freedom. it's going away. even though we both have far larger fanbases than we did ten years ago, our blog readerships have been halved, quartered, more._

I don't have any reliable statistics, but that would suggest that the "book internet" may be shrinking.

<comment><USER38> Traffic is certainly shifting from desktop to mobile e.g. [https://twitter.com/lukew/status/626792657684029440](https://twitter.com/lukew/status/626792657684029440) \- a mobile only generation is upcoming while millennials find themselves addicted to Facebook. So we may indeed have a decline in the "book Internet"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Previous (albeit shorter) discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887040)

<comment><USER40> It's quite interesting that the exact same submission with same title didn't get much visibility. I can't find the time of posting of the previous thread but this one seems to have been posted when the east coast woke up. Is that mere correlation or is it causation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The main problem is that the Web as originally conceived has should has nothing in common with the Web as application platform.

The convergence was because of necessity, but further development should really be done in two different branches.

Keeping both aspects together perpetuates the bloating of the "document" web and abysmal tooling of the "application platform" web (and yes, the tooling is abysmal; please don't fool yourself).

</comment><comment><USER42> This artwork in this article is amazing. Does anybody know who did it?

<comment><USER43> Illustrations by Tim McDonagh :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I enjoyed the article. I think the general sentiment here is that one needs to take the good with the bad.

I also think that the ongoing changes have made for a different web that is less important on the mobile devices. In watching some videos about mobile we get that people are excited about new ways of interacting with computers, perhaps with the camera, perhaps with the microphone, or perhaps with the GPS... Sometimes the web just does not feature in those trends.

The web has changed a lot since Obama first won the Presidency. His site with donations, the network effect directing traffic to his campaign site and so on... Now there are these "Streams" on mobile, I'm not sure how those could be shared with a community that was sometimes anonymous and decentralized, like you say...

Now it's like people want to drink bottled water of a certain brand instead of sharing the water in the lake (web). It doesn't seem to scale. And companies and governments are just too forceful to avoid competition and so on to allow for a thousand flowers to bloom like it may have been possible in the past.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm not usually a fan of the full-screen art on medium posts - something about having to scroll a full page before being able to actually read anything - <USER2> that one is really well done. There's actual substance to it, and it doesn't have the 'pull something pseudo-relevant from stock photos' that most of them do (even when they're not stock).

</comment><comment><USER46> To decentralize something, you need the right software and protocols.

Email is decentralized. Imagine if you needed to connect to email.com in order to communicate with the person next door?

That is the reality for people on a cruise ship, in villages around the world, etc. where the connection is bad. What's the reason the signal has to travel to Facebook's headquarters and back in order to share photos? Economies of scale, and the profit motive.

Money was recently decentralized with bitcoin.

But social is still not decentralized effectively. You can see this because e.g. GitHub is centralized even though the underlying technology, git, is not. That's because all the profiles, stars, followers/watchers, security, hasn't been done yet in a way that can automatically reconstruct the social graph and enforce privacy across many domains.

Well, that's what we're been working on for the last four years. It's now up to version 0.8:

[http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com)

Feedback welcome!

<comment><USER47> I don't agree that email is decentralized.[1] It's interoperable and universal, but that's not the same thing. You can use a single address for mail from arbitrary sources, and all email addresses, regardless of client or mailserver, can talk to each other. But once you've chosen a mailserver for any given address, you've put all of your eggs in that one basket. Now, it's easier to switch clients, but let's be realistic, when's the last time you did that? And both the list of popular mailservers ([http://www.mailradar.com/mailstat/](http://www.mailradar.com/mailstat/)) and clients ([https://emailclientmarketshare.com/](https://emailclientmarketshare.com/)) is quite short.

Honest feedback: as far as I can tell from a quick onceover, qbix is just an aggregator for existing services. That doesn't really solve the problem, and arguably, by positioning yourself as a single point of failure for negotiations between different APIs (facebook, email, sms, etc), you're actually creating a system that is substantially more centralized, not less. And you're covered by a patent (or at least an application), so potential competitors can't interoperate without a licensing agreement. If you're trying to be a decentralized, universal platform, you've just shot yourself in the foot.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a similar problem, but I'm doing it as an abstraction layer between transport (TCP/IP, bluetooth mesh, anything with a reliable bytestream) and application. That allows you to do some really cool things, like communicating between people (or services or whatever), regardless of device or physical network topology. [https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse](https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse)

[1] That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I think that email is a great example of a very successful hybrid (both centralized and decentralized) system -- it allows users to choose between centralized providers with minimal switching cost. Centralization with zero node lock isn't necessarily bad.

<comment><USER46> I'm not sure what you mean by "aggregator for existing services". Qbix is a social app platform. Let's say New York University wants to install the Qbix platform for its community. People can sign up and make accounts. Then, let's say other organizations, such as Columbia University also run a network. People sign up there as well. You want a system which seamlessly and transparently handles all the social integrations. If I have an account with NYU and then sign up on Columbia's social network, I should be able to find my friends (but only the ones that want to be found) automatically and see their user names because they are in my contact list. Columbia would host various "social apps" on this platform, which would all have a common way to deal with users, data, privacy etc. Let's say one of those apps is Chess, and another is Presentations. I can invite friends to play chess on the Columbia servers or edit a presentation hosted there. If we want, any one of us can start our own network and invite friends. And they wouldn't have to tell each other, "I am XYZ123 on the Columbia network", it would just all link up. Privacy, contacts, etc. it would all work across all the domains. That's what I'm talking about.

Where do you see such a system? It took us four years to build this platform. But it liberates your accounts from the silos since you can create an account anywhere and choose to tell some people that XYZ123 on Columbia is ABC456 on NYC -- and not tell others. Everything would be personalized according to who is logged in where and viewing what. And it would "just work". So app developers for Chess and Presentations could simply implement the part responsible for playing chess or editing/viewing presentations, and the rest would all be standard -- user signup, forgot password, invites, privacy, history, contacts, social, etc.

THAT IS WHAT I MEAN. Here are some diagrams:

[http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-old- sty...](http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams-diagramm-02-old-style_04.png)

[http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams- diagramm-02-2015-02...](http://qbix.com/investors/images/streams- diagramm-02-2015-02.png)

PS: By the way, your project seems really cool, we should link up. Ultimately we are missing the network layer for our stuff, but what we'd really like to do is have our platform also power apps on local networks, e.g. cruise ships or ad hoc mesh networking. We are deferring that to a couple years down the line, but that's where we want to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> >The rich, diverse, free web that I loved ... is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

I'm not sure it is dying. The total number of blogs for example has gone from around 78 million when the writer was jailed to something of the order of 250 million now. [0][1]

Fair enough there is competition for eyeballs from blander more controlled media like Facebook but diverse free stuff continues, it's just some people would rather watch cat videos. I don't know if you can stop that - it's a free world, people can watch/read what they like.

[0] [http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in- the-...](http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the- blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

<comment><USER49> >That's the web we have to save.

Literally the next words on the page:

>Log in to Medium and "recommend" this story. >Follow Matter on Twitter | Like us on Facebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> _When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples' comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television._

Isn't that how AOL was in the 90's or Yahoo.com a decade ago but with much less community interaction? AOL had a screen with 20 options, I remember. You go to a homepage that has most of everything you need, which saves time. I don't really see the problem.

</comment><comment><USER51> The Stream is modeled after The Inbox, which, despite long-standing calls to kill email, is a component of the most powerful and effective communication tool The Internet has given rise to.

The underlying philosophical tenants of this article are spot on. And all in all, it's an excellent story.

There seems to be, on HN especially, a lament for the web of yore. I imagine this has more to do with us first (and 2nd?) generation web builders getting old. Anyone who spends time with geezers knows it's par for the course to lament the way things have changed, to long for the good old days.

I'd encourage people to trust in the next-generation. Just as they would have wished their parents (and the establishment) to trust in them when they were just starting out in the world.

</comment><comment><USER52> Ironic that the article ended with a "recommend" heart button.

</comment><comment><USER53> I hope he finds out about the Indie Web movement:

[https://indiewebcamp.com/why](https://indiewebcamp.com/why)

Quote:

> Whatever the reason, you're done with sharecropping your content, your > identity, and your self.

> Our online content and identites are becoming more important and sometimes > even critical to our lives. Neither are secure in the hands of random > ephemeral startups or big silos. We should be the holders of our online > presence.

A good introductory article on the Indie Web movement appeared in Wired:

[http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/](http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie- web/)

People working on this include Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki, c2.com.

<comment><USER54> indeed and agreed. the Internet, or that subset of it which you frequent, will simply reflect the views and actions of those that built it. in the early days, the majority of the internet was built by folks who valued community, transparency, openness, diversity, etc. today, it is largely built by businesses with mandates to generate profit. but, there is also the Indie Web, et al.

personal opinion: big business is building a consumer/non-techie friendly web. builders of the Indie Web, we should compete not only on content and principals, but on this point too. example. i think many would switch away from gmail, and pay a nominal amount to do so, if there was a one click solution. why in the world is there no easy to use, secure, resilient, distributed competitor to skype. that technology is old as bones. please don't understand that to mean that i'd think it an easy task, it most certainly would not be easy. i mean, the competition is well funded, well staffed, well motivated. but, it'd be worth it.

<comment><USER55> There is a one-click solution: [https://withknown.com/](https://withknown.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Interesting point, but it's a largely superficial one. It basically is all a matter of perspective. 6 years ago all of the same tools and consumption methods have existed. I.e. RSS feed aggregators, Google Reader & content websites a la Fark, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, etc. They have simply morphed into the likes of Twitter/FaceBook/etc and in the process have become much easier to use by the general public. It sounds to me that the author is lamenting the fact that it's a lot harder to be a superstar blogger, which it is. There is a lot more competition for content these days because of streamlined delivery. Tough, but that's what it is.

</comment><comment><USER57> Very powerful. I read this article at the same time as this one [1] this morning, about the powers and limitations of content platforms. Both say the same thing to me: many people think the web today is inherently broken by middlemen, like the music industry was up until very recently. But as of yet, there is no solution to middlemen, because they are where the audience is, therefore,where the money is.

[1][http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no- charts](http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-charts)

<comment><USER14> We already had the solution: a decentralized web. But do note that the author used 'medium' rather than to use his own platform and so effectively adds to the value of the medium content-silo.

<comment><USER58> Is there an implementation method for the decentralized web that doesn't require individuals to become web administrators (with concerns about security, SEO and "proper standards-compliant page architecture", storage and bandwidth costs, etc.)?

If not, I'm afraid it's a non-starter. The centralized solutions are winning precisely because the average user just wants to get their signal out; they don't want to be forced to become even an amateur web admin to do it. So long as that's true, you'll find an ecosystem of dedicated individuals and small- count co-ops outside the centralized web platforms, but they'll never become large enough to draw consumer eyeballs away from those platforms.

<comment><USER59> I don't know about "they'll never." If excellent tools are developed and freely distributed and improved, why couldn't there be a kind of co-op renaissance? Certainly there are lots of people who aren't interested in systems administration but who still see the problems with centralized services, and more importantly are getting bored and exhausted with the ad- ridden, spying, proprietary networks they're using.

<comment><USER58> Unfortunately, I want to believe but I strongly doubt (based on personal observation of how the web ecosystem is evolving) that there are enough people to form a strong, healthy co-op ecosystem, for a few reasons.

1) Sysadmining is still hard, thankless, and tedious enough (outside the ecosystem of services that are paying sysadmins to do the heavy-lifting for the end-user) that you're looking at a very select clientele, even among the people who have become sufficiently fed up with the status quo to want to dive into that space. I'm capable of hosting my own blog, but I host it on Blogger because I don't want to deal with having to security-patch my tool of choice every week. Any popular toolchain monoculture is a target for security attacks, and any popular toolchain heteroculture (i.e. "tool that is flexible enough that no two installations look alike enough to allow for security attacks") introduces complications that diminish the adoption rate of the tool. The development of excellent tools freely distributed and improved is not at all a given; the bar to success is _extremely_ high, even if someone comes along to foot the bill (which would be necessary, because if we could expect those tools to spring up for free, the web is old enough that we'd have already seen it happen).

2) Any small co-op that is successful enough either becomes a Facebook or gets bought by a Facebook. Blogger used to be independent. So was Tumblr. So was Livejournal. The monocultures have the money to acquire real competition, and it's hoping too much to pretend the central human owners of such co-ops (or even the entire co-op, if it really is structured as a cooperative) won't just sell the farm for a half-million dollars.

So I don't see independent blogs ever becoming more than a fringe exercise on the modern web (hell, even the original author's reference to Blogger is a service fully owned and operated by Google, which can at a whim change what content is allowed on that network [[https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/googles- blogger-drops-plan-bloc...](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/googles-blogger- drops-plan-block-nude-pics-amid-220802499.html\])).

<comment><USER59> I agree about these difficulties, but remain incurably optimistic. Actually I've been thinking about piracy as an example of resilient networks run by volunteers. For example, every little student dorm I lived in had its own DC++ server, run by dorky volunteers. Of course that's different from a blog platform with mass appeal, but it's something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think he is on to something ... EACEA, PIRLS and PISA (standard tests for schools) has shown a steady decline in reading comprehension from year 2000. And it's starting to look a bit alarming, as it currently states: 1/5 teenagers today can't even comprehend the simplest of texts.

We can all contribute to stop this trend though, if you have kids, sit down and read books with them!

<comment><USER61> > And it's starting to look a bit alarming, as it currently states: 1/5 > teenagers today can't even comprehend the simplest of texts.

I'd like a citation for this, if you don't mind. I tried and failed to find anything to corroborate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Isn't that blog itself a huge counter-argument to the whole "blogs are dying" point? And yes, as more and more of "general public" go to internet, their percentage in internet audience rise, and so does the percentage of PC-like content. Do blogs really perceive less attention now? Or may be just a less percentage of overall attention?

</comment><comment><USER33> Idiocracy rules! See [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)

And of course Idiots Rule. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUUd-30Bzw

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm surprised, no mention of Reddit?

<comment><USER64> I'm surprised too. Reddit and HN are much more valuable to me than Google Reader ever was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Podcasts. They're the indie web that has long been forgotten.

<comment><USER14> No, podcasts are also audio/visual media. The web was text only in the beginning.

<comment><USER24> I think a/v vs text is the wrong dichotomy. I think it's more about passive content and "commercial" content vs. active content and individualistic content. The web used to be about conversations, it used to be about individual passions. Some of that still exists, but it's being pushed to the margin as click bait, memes, sharable bite-sized content, and "hands off" content has risen to the fore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think they may be getting at something, but at least partly it reads as someone who lost their popularity after several years and is upset about it.

</comment><comment><USER67> The answer to why the web sucks in 2015 was given by DJ Shadow in 1996: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2VG53RIJ50)

The irony is that before I could listen to that 45 second track I had to watch an ad, underlining the point.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think a large part of it is just a change about who is online. There's still plenty of blog type things as much as Facebook wants to chip away at it, but my 13 y/o niece never would have been reading his blogs in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER54> is there a "Facebook Boycott"? if not, there should be. if you'd like to support the Indie Web, do not link to Facebook or other such centralized walled-gardens, and explain to your users why you've made that decision.

</comment><comment><USER69> My tweets rarely get favorited. The web is broken!

</comment><comment><USER70> Posted on Medium.

</comment><comment><USER33> Greedy advertisers + good Javascript libraries used by bad Javascript developers= end of the Internet we loved

</comment><comment><USER71> The web is not compatible with the current economic system in place in the US and growing throughout the world. Strong property rights are in direct opposition to decentralization. Unless additional policies similar to net neutrality are implemented the web with end up an afterthought in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Why is nobody stopping it?

Why does this generation assume someone else is going to fix the problems they see?

</comment><comment><USER72> While well articulated, this post is bloated with alarming entitlement and a lot of misunderstandings. In short, he largely claims to know what's better for people than the market (i.e., themselves) while lamenting his loss of power and importance through moral rationalizations and judgment.

Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are vast improvements over a world where bloggers would seriously claim, "I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted." Social media merely democratized and disseminated that power to the masses. No amount of rationalizations or FUD over a "television-internet" will reverse that positive trend. The elitist condescension that his links, comments or conversations are implicitly superior to the likes, shares or up-votes of the populace is more than a little sad, and I think he's missing the point; social media thrives because it gives people more of what they want, and who is anyone to decide that but themselves?

That said, he makes a good few points with invalid conclusions, mostly regarding centralization. The loss of ownership over our own content has severe implications for the internet, most specifically in our ability to control its dissemination and protect it from loss and privacy. Protection from loss is easy with the rise of web-exposed storage APIs like Dropbox, and eventually I think we'll see more and more cloud-storage-backed SaSS platforms, starting first in the enterprise and trickling down into the consumer market.

Regarding our ability to control our own data and the corresponding loss of privacy, it will take a lot longer, which is a real problem because the government treats the "privacy" of SaSS as a public square; You are entitled to none. We'll probably need a technological or cultural innovation here. Culturally, people would need to revert, which is unlikely. Technologically, something like a content-owner controlled database would need to be developed, and upon maturity, laws passed to require its use. Such a database would enable the revoking of permissions to cause all reference entries to be removed, and disallow the denormalization of any personal data. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, so we're consequently headed for some major cultural conflicts.

Lastly, the author scapegoats and disparages our focus on newness and popularity. First, humanity's focus on newly discovered information has existed for some time: gossip, newspapers, magazines, tv, movie theaters, et. al. Every edition has only ever contained the newest information or opinions along with the occasional reprint. Second, popularity is but one vector for relevance, as were hyperlinks. Yes, a poorly implemented Stream that interprets likes as votes creates a false-feedback-loop, but it's a widely known flaw, and exists primarily only in the nearly obsolete Facebook.

Once you clear away all the rationalizations he uses to justify why things were better when he was in power, you realize, it's mostly just whining intermixed with a decent social commentary on and summary of the evolution of internet media.

</comment><comment><USER73> The government is no longer a threat. 1984 is here and...it's us.

Look at all of the people bullied into submission where their personal lives are disrupted and careers are ruined.

The ex-Mozilla CEO resigned after he was bullied by a community of people that didn't agree with his politics.

The ex-Reddit CEO resigned after so many people, without even getting all of the facts, decided she did something wrong.

Even the hunter that killed Cecil the lion. The facts weren't even out yet. I saw many conflicting stories..which probably all had varying levels of inaccuracy. But it didn't matter, he needed to be punished because he did something we didn't like. So his business gets closed, his yelp pages are destroyed (even though it really has nothing to do with his business).

Everyone seems to be fine with this accepted form of bullying..until it comes around to someone they don't want to be bullied. Then it's too late and people like me don't listen anymore.

</comment><comment><USER74> Imagine if you could host Facebook that runs only on your friends computers out of reach by motivated parties interested in tracking you for a variety of self benefit. Imagine if Youtube ran on everybody's computers, DMCA ignored, every single content imaginable is available.

That is where we are going. Anonymous, fault tolerant, ephemeral nodes hosting web services that can't be cracked or spied on. Internet for the people by the people, literally.

Pretty soon we'll have mesh networking that will support this as well. ISP in bed with the government? Guess you will have to tap in to the pool of devices running a node for your favorite web service. DMCA notices? Legal threats and take downs against all million devices scattered throughout the world hosting your web service? Arrest that public servant for incompetence!

<comment><USER75> o/~ Imagine there's no Facebook. I wonder if you can. No need for Snapchat or Twitter, A Diaspora of pods. Imagine all the people, Sharing their content...

You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, And the world will peer-to-peer. o/~

It seems like web freedom is nearly within our grasp. The only problem is a critical mass of adoption.

<comment><USER74> It should feature:

\- Peer-to-peer proxy mesh network, no internet required.

\- Automatically discover nearby nodes and connect directly via wifi, bluetooth, internet.

\- Nodes run in memory, no writing to disk. Constantly discovering and caching indexes of common nodes.

\- A way to store data fully distributed across the network. You only get a 'piece' of the data, you need to hit more than a certain threshold of nodes to get full piecture.

\- A self policing of nodes from a ledger of some sort that is distributed and shared by everyone. Bad ones are not punished, they are grouped in their own 'neighborhoods'. Spammers end up spamming each other.

\- Fully anonymous and risk free. You never hold more than a encrypted piece of the puzzle which alone have no meaning. Only with a certain threshold of nodes can you access that data. The data is constantly shifting across nodes.

\- While a node is online, it's broadcasting it's piece of the puzzle to other nodes randomly so that if it goes down, the backup is held by another node.

I don't know I'm just writing some random ideas so obviously these will need additional work.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: TimeZen, common meeting times across many timezones - <AUTHOR> http://timezen.com/ <comment><USER2> very nice. would have been helpful to me on many occasions when working on distributed teams.</comment>


Watch my Neural Network learn to shoot a target - <AUTHOR> I'm still working on creating fun little games to run on the browser. Halfway trough creating a clone of Bang Bang (windows classic) I realized I needed a good artificial intelligence to play against the player. So I forked my halfway done game into this experiment and trained my neural network (custom written) to learn to shoot targets.
The ideia is that at each level the player plays against a neural network that has been trained for longer periods of time. As you can see on the video, after twenty minutes it got really good.
I'll be posting the source code soon, for now, here's the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FB92OOYqPI <comment><AUTHOR> The red bar indicates the strength of the projectile. The games consists in two cannons facing each other and trying to hit one another. Level destruction is a big part of the game, I'll try to implement that also.</comment>


Boffins NN can work out from your speech whether youll develop psychosis - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/18/ai_algorithms_psychosis/ <comment><USER2> > We note that transcripts of video-taped conversations were taken from NAPLS > for the training and evaluation sets, whereas the Reddit dataset includes > entirely typed-in forum messages. People express themselves online in ways > they wouldn't in face-to-face encounters, we reckon, so take this comparison > of the two with a pinch of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, it's a little bit weak. Also the number of training and validating instances is somehow low... BUT anyhow interesting that it seems as if there are enough features for prediction of mental illnesses in text. And it's a great approach to develop quantitative instruments for diagnosis of this "soft illnesses".</comment></comment>


Portable device that painlessly causes people to stop talking - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/speechjammer-silences-speakers/21686/ <comment><USER2> ...and there I was thinking "smartphone" until I RTFA...</comment>


Consumer Reports wants Tesla to disable "autopilot" - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumerreports.org/tesla/tesla-autopilot-too-much-autonomy-too-soon/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Consumer Reports calls for Tesla to do the following:

\- Disable Autosteer until it can be reprogrammed to require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel

\- Stop referring to the system as "Autopilot" as it is misleading and potentially dangerous

\- Issue clearer guidance to owners on how the system should be used and its limitations

\- Test all safety-critical systems fully before public deployment; no more beta releases".</comment>


Show HN: BusinessLeads.com - Earn Cash Bounties For Who You Know - <AUTHOR> https://businessleads.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedback most appreciated. We've been building a while and are eager to hear what you think of it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Definitely useful site.</comment>


2010 Google Trends for python, ruby, and php   - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2C%20ruby%2C%20php&cmpt=q

<comment><USER2> The graphs change a lot searching for "PHP array" VS "Python array" VS "Ruby array":

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20array%2Cruby%20array%2Cphp%20array&cmpt=q)

Possibly comparing a search that is about what a real user could type into the search engine is more accurate, and filters out other stuff like all the search for "Python" as animal.

Edit: btw using "hash" instead of "array" changes the results a lot: [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20hash%2Cruby%20hash&cmpt=q)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20list%2Cruby%20list%2Cphp%20array&cmpt=q) \- in Python "arrays" are called lists...

<comment><USER2> Thanks amix, not in Ruby so the final link could be this:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20list%2Cruby%20array%2Cphp%20array&cmpt=q)

<comment><USER4> Actually, since a PHP array is more like a combination of a python list and a python dictionary or a ruby hash and a ruby array, this is the best comparison: [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20list%20%2B%20python%20dictionary%2Cruby%20array%20%2B%20ruby%20hash%2Cphp%20array&cmpt=q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pointless graph. Ignores the way people look for info on their language. PHP is well documented so PHP users just go to php.net and know the docs will be there. I like the feel of Python and Ruby more than PHP but you don't have to look at Google Trends to know that PHP is far, _far_ more popular than Python and Ruby combined.

<comment><USER6> Python is well documented so Python users just go to <http://docs.python.org/> . Don't know about Ruby, but I suspect you could make that argument about any language.

<comment><USER5> Yes Python also has great docs. Ruby not so much. There's a command line tool for viewing Ruby docs called ri that I imagine many Rubyists use more than ruby-lang.org.

(Ruby's docs improved when Programming Ruby was first written but since then I haven't noticed any significant effort to further improve them. I reach for one of my Programming Ruby books or PDFs before going to <http://ruby- lang.org> , might just be me but I doubt it!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "ruby on rails" vs "django" has a much different take:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=django%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=django%2Cruby%20on%20rails&cmpt=q)

I always wondered why Python consistently ranks higher than Ruby outside of the webapp sphere. Could it be the scientific/academic community's interest in Python's superior number crunching?

<comment><USER8> Libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the numbers in these charts are relative to the total number searches on Google, then it could just mean that the ratio of programming searches to non- programming searches is decreasing, (i.e. if more non-programmers are using Google, or if people don't use their phones to search for programming-related concepts on Google.)

<comment><USER10> I think you're absolutely right. I've been thinking the same ever since I started to look at programming language usage on google trends and found that almost all of them are going down most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I learned from this that Cuba is creating a secret army of rubyless programmers that it will at some point unleash upon the world.

</comment><comment><USER12> See this "TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2009": [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

It ranks the top 20 languages. Subtitle: "December Headline: All time highs for C#, Objective-C and ActionScript"

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%2...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=python%20developer%2Cruby%20developer%2Cphp%20developer%2Cjava%20developer&cmpt=q)

"foo developer"

Look at how Java is in decline. Also, check the map to see where most queries for Java and PHP come from.

<comment><USER14> Peter Norvig points out elsewhere that some apparent "declines" can be explained away by a growing population of non-technical web searchers.</comment></comment>


Predicting When P=NP Is Resolved - <AUTHOR> https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2019/12/22/predicting-when-pnp-is-resolved/ <comment><USER2> My pure amateur, possibly muddled understanding is that P=!NP is rather different from most open conjectures.

A) It's extremely general or even "foundational" in the sense that it's asking whether any algorithm at all exists to solve an extremely general sort of problem in polynomial time.

B) All of the standard methods used to solve problems of this sort have at least been pronounced exhausted at this point.

C) Very few theorems that inherently limit the speed of a class of problems actually have ever been proven. Very few methods for proving these constraints are known.

D) A lot of famous theorems have yielded results through being embedded in a larger, different field where they are just one result of many proved with a new machinery (Fermet most prominently). But given P=!NP is so general it can't really embedded in a larger, tractible space - lots of things are equivalent to it but all these things are kind of the same.

<comment><USER3> Great post. Here are a few things pointers if you want more information about your points:

B) The situation is actually worse than exhausted. We know (have proven) that the regular methods simply won't work (check up "the reletaivzation barrier" and "natural proofs" and "algebrization")

C) We actually can construct problems which take at least a certain amount of time to solve (though admittedly many of them are kind of unnatural). Search up "time hierarchy theorem". This is probably one of the theorems you mention. However, you're right, as far as natural problems go, it appears to be extreme difficult to prove most natural problems takes at least linear time ([https://mathoverflow.net/questions/4953/super-linear-time- co...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/4953/super-linear-time-complexity- lower-bounds-for-any-natural-problem-in-np)). Note the log*... factor grows extremely slowly.

In fact, it is not known whether SAT requires more than linear time. Since SAT is NP-complete, we expect it to have no polynomial time algorithm... and yet here we are wondering whether it requires even more than linear time. If you are interested in this sort of thing, maybe look up fine-grained complexity. Also note that to solve P != NP, we will have to atleast shown P != PSPACE, since PSPACE contains NP. However, even this seemingly easier problem has had no progress and seems like it would require a huge breakthrough.

<comment><USER4> From this it seems that the question itself might have been hopelessly naive

Is there any evidence that P might be equal to NP? This seems different from other famous conjectures like Fermat's Last Theorem or Riemann's Theorem where what's hard is finding a counterexample that disproves the theory.

<comment><USER3> I think RJ Lipton (blog author) and Knuth believe it could be true. However, most complexity theorists don't (I think Fortnow does a survey of theorists on this every few years). Knuth says something like "well all it would take is a single algorithm for any of these hundreds of problems". A fine take for the godfather of algorithms. At the same time, there are many people who have in some sense tried to find such an algorithm, even non-explicitly (e.g. factoring would be in P if P = NP). Moreover, there is a lot of complexity theoretic work which makes it hard to believe it to be true (I think Scott Aaronson's blog has some presentable information about this)

<comment><USER5> [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT.m...](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT.mc_id=Author_Knuth_20Questions)

Note that Knuth does not believe that the constant factor on the P algorithm be will be less than the size of the entire Universe.

<comment><USER6> On the first P algorithm found, or _any_ P algorithm?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Should we even care for a mathematical proof that P=NP? We know that in practice we haven't been able to come up with algorithms that solve NP problems in polynomial time. Suppose we'll be told that this is possible (i.e. P=NP): will this help up us to invent such algorithms? I don't see how, unless the proof will be by construction.

<comment><USER2> Working programmers and even people concerned with producing useful algorithm probably shouldn't care about P=NP?. It seems very likely to be true and if it isn't true, it seems like a polynomial algorithm would be unwieldy indeed. Further, P!=NP is a theory entirely about worst case scenarios. Many NP complete problems are actually quite solvable in the average case and the worst case can have little relation to the average case (SAT solvers that are quite fast on average exist now, for example).

For logicians and mathematicians, a proof of N=NP? would be an incredible accomplishment simply because it's a problem that at this point no one know where to start on and so by definition, the proof would be a piece of remarkable and surprising mathematics giving people much to think on.

<comment><USER8> P=NP is very likely to be _true_? I would say it's very likely to be _false_.

Why do I say that? Because it's possible to construct, say, SAT3 problems such that it seems impossible to solve them in polynomial time. If _some_ problems can't be solved in polynomial time, then P!=NP.

Why do you think that it's "very likely" that P=NP?

<comment><USER9> Given the next sentence (...if it isn't true, it seems like a polynomial algorithm would be unwieldy indeed), I think the GP actually meant P!=NP to be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my mind I always regard P/NP in the same category as the Riemann Hypothesis^. That has been open since 1859 (160 years) and shows no signs of cracking. So in other words we may be in for a long wait.

^Perhaps because one of the hypothesized examples of a hard problem is the factoring of multiples of large primes (though not proved NP Complete). Or perhaps because they are both extremely famous open problems.

<comment><USER11> One of the things that slows scientific progress is the lack of cross- discipline learning. Every so often you hear about someone taking an old concept from another field and applying it. Quite a few breakout companies have combined interdisciplinary knowledge into one product and made a mint.

So many people are affected by NP complete problems that you'd think that someone would have a problem that appeared simpler on the surface and gave insights into a P solution, but either nobody has, or the right phrasing about it has caught nobody's attention.

There's an XKCD lamenting something pretty similar. You solved some unsolved problem but nobody will ever know because it's buried in a bug fix for your obscure little product.

<comment><USER12> [https://m.xkcd.com/664/](https://m.xkcd.com/664/)

<comment><USER4> I think Academia is more likely to criticize your technique because it doesn't generalize to any ring or you didn't prove a certain assumption you had.

Of course the real bug is in some IEEE 754 quirk you forgot to consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it possible to prove that a proof exists for either P=NP or P!=NP? Conversely, is it possible to prove that the conjecture is unprovable?

<comment><USER14> Since an algorithm for running NP-complete problems in P-time would be enough to prove whether P=NP, wouldn't the impossibility to prove it just prove that P!=NP?

<comment><USER15> Surprisingly, a theorem being unprovable does not mean that the theorem is untrue, even if you can prove its unprovability! This was shown by Goedel ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)). He showed that there exists no system powerful enough to express theorems about the natural numbers which can prove all facts about natural numbers _and_ be sound (ie not prove things that are untrue).

<comment><USER14> That's not exactly what I'm saying. What I am saying is that it's impossible for it to be true and unprovable. If it is true, it means a proof exists.

Also, I am talking about this specific problem.

<comment><USER5> Can you prove that?

"impossibility to prove" is different from "proven impossible" because hiding behind the loose English are different models of logics. That's what Godel theorems at e about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have no idea what will be proven nor when. (My uneducated guess is not any time soon.)

But I hope it isn't "here's a proof that P!=NP". That'd be just too _boring_... Much cooler possibilities would be "here's a non-constructive proof that P=NP" or "here's a proof that P=NP is independent of ZFC".

<comment><USER17> for me the most exciting would be "here's a constructive proof that P=NP. It uses polynomials of degree one million".

<comment><USER18> While Knuth has a different take on the P=?NP problem than most others, namely he believes P=NP, nonetheless, he is also saying that the degree won't ever be known and not even an upper bound will be known for it. [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT.m...](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT.mc_id=Author_Knuth_20Questions) Certainly "if P=NP it'll be a pure non-constructive proof with no practical consequence whatsoever" feels right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is the difference between solving and resolving an open problem?

</comment><comment><USER20> Next top story on HackerNews:

"Predicting when a new article will be published about how P=NP is not solved yet."

My prediction: Pretty soon :-(</comment>


Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/excuse-me-sir-your-higgs-doesnt-fit-in-my-model.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a physicist, but I feel "the desire to resolve conflicts between general relativity and quantum electrodynamics" is like trying to uncover a relationship between the various shapes of the letters of the alphabet and the meaning of the words they make up.</comment>


Document Structure Analysis Algorithms: A Literature Survey [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/files/archive/pub2003015.pdf <comment><USER2> Funny. I ran across this survey I had to write a document structure analysis step for a document analysis pipeline recently. I thought of this paper in particular when watching [https://vimeo.com/9270320](https://vimeo.com/9270320) ("What We Actually Know About Software Development"), which I ran across on the recent thread on tech talks.

Not a computer scientist (barely a scientist at all!), so I don't know if I'm being unreasonable or not, but I was a little dismayed at the literature here. Is this quality of publication common? Is it getting better? The lack of experimental methods and reproducibility seems abominable.

<comment><USER3> This specifically is a survey where it's uncommon to carry out your own "experiments". You use the numbers from the original papers and hope there's some overlap in the metrics they use.

Reproducibility is a problem, especially in the sense that source code was traditionally not published along with the paper. There are a few reasons for that, i.e.:

\- The publish in "publish or perish" isn't talking about github

\- The grad student wrote the code and it's 3000 lines of FORTRAN

\- The professor wrote the code and it's 6000 lines of ALGOL60 \- The university owns the copyright but there's no process for OSS releases \- The authors own the copyright and can't wait to turn this into a commercial spinoff.

\- It's 30 lines of python, inextricably linked to the internal domain- specific toolset that's 25GB including multiple copies of test data and a lot of external source code with unclear licenses.

\- The proof-of-concept is only about 20% of the work of a polished library that's fit to release

It's getting better now with some fields establishing standards for data analysis pipelines, and some large companies with product experience doing a lot of academic work (i. e. facebook/tensorflow). The AI/ML community is probably a shining example considering there are polished, ready-to-use implementations available for almost all publications.

<comment><USER2> >> This specifically is a survey where it's uncommon to carry out your own "experiments". You use the numbers from the original papers and hope there's some overlap in the metrics they use.

My comment was unclear. I wasn't criticizing the lit review, I was criticizing the literature it is reviewing. The lit surveyed does a poor job even defining metrics.

The rest is very interesting, and heartening. Thanks for the thoughtful response.</comment></comment></comment>


A Better Live Wiki: HackPad (YC W12) at SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/hackpad/

<comment><USER2> Looks a lot like etherpad but with a slicker UI, I already want to be able to interlink between this and Trello.

Well done Alex and crew!

</comment><comment><USER3> We use hackpad at sendhub all day, everyday. It's invaluable. I've used other wiki systems like atlassian and wiki media but this is the only that's stuck. Easy to use, updates in realtime and the founders have always been available to listen to and respond to our feedback.

</comment><comment><USER4> We've integrated hackpad's session notes in to our unofficial session guide for SXSW: <http://austin.lanyrd.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I use HackPad and really love it. Some things can still be improved, particularly around knowing what functionality is available. But overall this is super useful and i love the simplicity.

Founders, any new features you're planning on rolling out soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> We just rolled out code highlighting and (very alpha) inline LaTeX support! Learn about those here: [https://hackpad.com/o9ey5hjlyBQ#Hackpad-Code-Syntax- Hilighti...](https://hackpad.com/o9ey5hjlyBQ#Hackpad-Code-Syntax-Hilighting) and here: <https://hackpad.com/gcErGj2WsQr#Embedded-LaTeX>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was surprised to see my Google contacts in the autocomplete. I thought I'd just used it for login. I guess even I can't be trusted to read the OAuth notices. (Google should really turn theirs up a notch, but still...)

</comment><comment><USER7> Bug Report: The Mac app apparently keeps readding pads that have been unfollowed/removed.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, we'll take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats kofman!</comment>


Use this spreadsheet for churn, MRR and cohort analysis - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/2013/10/24/the-easiest-spreadsheet-for-churn-mrr-and-cohort-analysis-guest-post/

<comment><USER2> Loved this. Thanks for sharing. I'm also fascinated by retention analysis matrices. If you're interested in how to programmatically generate one using funnel queries on event data, here's a guide for how to do it!

[https://keen.io/blog/47823687779/how-to-do-a-retention- analy...](https://keen.io/blog/47823687779/how-to-do-a-retention-analysis/)</comment>


Beginning of series of how "Scientists can save the planet" - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week301.html

<comment><USER2> "You'll note there's lots of uncertainty, but a rough rule of thumb is that each doubling of carbon dioxide will raise the temperature around 3 degrees Celsius. Of course people love to argue about these things: you can find reasonable people who'll give a number anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 °C, and unreasonable people who say practically anything."

What is this scientific method you speak of?</comment>


For first time ever, researchers able to eliminate HIV from animal - <AUTHOR> https://www.unmc.edu/news.cfm?match=24114 <comment><USER2> This is very exciting, the novel application of crystalizing antiretroviral therapy is very useful on its own for preventing HIV replication in organs like the brain (where traditional ART therapy is less effective due to the blood/brain barrier).

Combined with an engineered virus to rewrite the DNA of HIV infected cells, this could potentially be useful against a whole bevy of viruses!</comment>


Ask HN: Do hackers (you) read books cover to cover? - <AUTHOR>

I realized today that I have purchased 9 books last one month. 8 are about technology and 9th one is "Viral loop".
But I realized that I haven't read any of these books from page 1 to page last.
Reading cover to cover would have been helpful but if I look at the trade-off between time spent and knowledge gained, I always like to read random chapters on need basis. It takes me a year to eventually go through every chapter.
Do you guys read the books same way ? <comment><USER2> Books that I read for pleasure, I tend to read all the way through. Fiction, or Malcolm Gladwell type stuff.

Everything else (technical books, what it sounds like you're talking about above...) I read until I find something useful and applicable. At that point, I ditch the book and try some stuff out. If that "stuff" works out, I follow the thread. If not, I either return to the book or pick up another one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've yelled at people for asking smarter questions than that. Some people read cover to cover, some will skim. Being a hacker has nothing to do with this, any more than being a chef would.

Anyway, personally, I almost always read books cover to cover. If it isn't a 'good' enough book to do that, I stop reading it and move on to a less shitty book. In my experience, authors basically never jabber like morons, then suddenly have something really important to say, then back to jabbering. Plus, any good book will progress, explaining concepts as they are introduced, so your assumptions about what a term means or what any implications are on chapter 20 might be completely out of whack and stupid, which you would realize if you had read chapters 1-19. (This just happened to me regarding a book on futures and options trading).

<comment><AUTHOR> >Anyway, personally, I almost always read books cover to cover. If it isn't a 'good' enough book to do that, I stop reading it and move on to a less shitty book.

You seem to be doing something different than most of the people here. No wonder you feel like yelling as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As you might guess, the answer is "it depends." I tend to read fiction cover to cover, and if it's short enough (the average Dean Koontz novel, for example) I often read it one sitting. A Stephen King novel like _Under The Dome_ might take 2-3 sittings.

Non-fiction is a different story. I tend to read business books cover to cover (relative to a span of time, like say a week or two), but I interleave reading multiple books so that, at any given time, I have 3-4 books I'm in the middle of reading. Which one I pick up to read a few pages of on any given evening when I have time to read just comes down to a whim.

Similar case with other non-fiction stuff... I have bookmarks stuffed in probably a couple of dozen books that are in some intermediate stage of being read. But sometimes one just catches my fancy and I knock it out in a few days (or whatever time-frame, depending on the length and difficulty.)

The big exception are books that are basically just reference. A tutorial'ish book like _Grails In Action_ I might go through _almost_ cover to cover, but at some point when I've learned enough to start "doing stuff" I tend to start skipping around. Books like that I often never technically "finish." Other reference books I pick up, skip to the section I care about, read that part, then put it aside and never touch it again. For example, I'm skipping around in _Mahout In Action_ now, focusing on the section on clustering.

Sometimes I read just the part I need _now_ then put the book in the "read this entire book later" pile. Then it just goes in the queue with all the other partially read books.

So, following this system the time span I spend on any given book might range from 6-7 hours (like the last Dean Koontz novel I read) to 20+ years ( I think I started Douglas Hofstadter's _Metamagical Themas_ at least that long ago, and it's still in the "come back and finish this later" pile.)

</comment><comment><USER5> The real answer is, "It depends."

It really depends on where you are with your learning. When I was younger and was getting into the industry, I would read books cover to cover b/c the various topics intrigued me (sql, databases, javascript, etc.) and I wanted to learn about them.

Today, my reading habits have changed. For just about anything, you can get a good primer (for free) online. Documentation for most products/projects are 10-fold better than what they were 5-10 years ago.

Sometimes books are still necessary, especially in regards to learning a new programming language. You'll get way more coverage and if you read several books on a particular language, you can learn several approaches.

I wouldn't recommend buying a ton of technology books at once as some of them may become outdated before you get to reading them.

Learn as much as you can, without buying a book, until it hurts. Then, go to your local book store and compare different books on the same subject (also compare reviews) and buy the one that you think will be the most beneficial. That's the approach I take.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are able to read random parts of a book on an as-needed basis, then it's probably a reference book. Of course you don't usually read something like that straight through.

Most books are difficult to read in random order, though. Maybe you aren't reading many non-reference books.

</comment><comment><USER7> It depends. For technical books, yes. For fiction books, I always read it cover-to-cover (skipping the forewords).

But there's one exception: I've read both books by Robert Love (Linux Kernel Development and Linux System Programming) from cover to cover.</comment>


Show HN: This was developed by two 17 year olds in 3 months  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrollr.co We'd love some feedback re. UI and overall design, it was a fun journey to develop and we're slowly getting there building a community. <comment><USER2> Nice, though I think our intro modal is a bit long (as in, too many pages to explain what you're doing).

Just give people the gist of it, and they'll learn the interface as they go, if you've captured their interest, and if you've got the UX right.

Speaking of UX, up and down arrows are not indicative up liking/not-liking something. Thumps up, stars, hearts, etc. have done the heavy part of training a user what they mean. Stick to something tried and true, as to not confuse the user.

I have to say, I'm not a fan of the horizontal scrolling. What was your logic in deciding on that, rather than vertical?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, a very good point re: thumbs up etc and something we're looking into changing.

Horizontal scrolling was an early call, it gets more content per inch of screen than scrolling down for most users (unless you have a vertical screen. We felt it was a more immersive experience and broke away from the obvious competitors. Feedback so far has been 80/20 love/hate, and we're considering changing it as we go live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, shoot me an email and I'll add you to two very active communities on FB for teen programmers like yourselves :)</comment>


Program that repairs programs: how to achieve 78.3% precision - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/program-repairs-programs-achieve-78-3-percent-precision-automated-program-repair/ <comment><USER2> I'm still waiting for github to release some machine learning api that suggests bug fixes or possible changes based on changes-sets derived from github issues. They are sitting on SO MUCH DATA...</comment>


Stuff Goes Bad: ERLANG IN ANGER - <AUTHOR> http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/

<comment><USER2> Pick up the thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330501)</comment>