Opera moves to WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2013/02/13/webkit <comment><USER2> Smart move.

I don't know a single web dev who tests on Opera anymore. I personally stopped worrying about it for any of my products when it hit 1.6% market share, and that was five years ago. They're essentially not supported by anybody, and haven't been for a long time.

... But that's never mattered, since they have always known it. And they went out of their way to make sure they rendered exactly like the dominant browser. For the longest time, they'd match Internet Explorer quirk for quirk, so if you supported that you supported Opera.

Now they see that Chrome is going to win, so they're switching to copying Chrome instead. And since Chrome has a nice drop-in "Chrome in a box" rendering engine they can use, it's going to be a lot easier to pull off this time around.

They'll continue to be the browser that nobody cares about (aside from six people who are no doubt here in this thread somewhere), but your site will probably render fine on it.

 _EDIT: Looks like those aforementioned Opera devotees have arrived. This comment went from 6 points and the top slot down to 1 point in the last ten minutes. Funny, since it's not actually an anti-Opera comment (or of course the sort of thing that down-votes here are usually reserved for)._

<comment><USER3> You don't have to test for it if you are in a market where it has 1.6% share. There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As for the second paragraph, Opera was actually strict pro-standard.. sometimes for their own bad.

Third paragraph is total bullshit. If anything, Chrome is the one copying from Opera. Webkit isn't "Chrome in a box" either. And pull of what this time?

As mentioned in my first paragraph, Opera has and had users, just not in your market probably. I written several times why Opera has users in certain markets, so just tl;dr: Opera was the best browser but was paid. Anything East from Germany didn't really care for paying for software (since it was insanely expensive), so they used the best browser out there. When FF was born, west switched to it (since it was better than IE). Opera went free too late, but managed to hold quite a big user-base in certain areas despite Google pouring billions into advertisement and producing chrome-only features. (another big contributor is Turbo and slow internet speeds, but I think it was a secondary factor).

ad EDIT: cry me a river. While I don't feel the need to downvote you, your comment did sound pricky enough to convince someone to do so.

<comment><USER4> > There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

<comment><USER3> As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.

<comment><USER5> Those are all immature web markets. By the time the majority of web users in those countries spend a significant amount of money online, they probably wont be using Opera anymore. If you're looking for more file-sharing users, sure, target these markets. But if you want to make money today then don't waste your time. (I've lived in, started/run businesses, and produced web products in Eastern Europe).

<comment><USER6> The European mobile web market is 'immature'. #shithnsays

<comment><USER5> Not what I meant at all. I just meant that in my experience, the counties listed have relatively low median disposable incomes, and are generally not inclined to pay for web products.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever heard about ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked for Opera the summer of 2010 and I've also been using the browser the last couple of years.

Compared to Google, Apple, Microsoft - it is important to understand that Opera is a small, very small, company.

I'm very happy to see their resources better used to innovating and improve their exiting product, rather than trying to catching up to the other browsers.

A big loss for the general state of rendering platforms though, with now only Webkit, Trident and Gecko as serious contenders.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's a loss, I wouldn't mind if every browser switched to Webkit. Problems with cross-browser rendering differences would be gone, all browsers would use the same newest technologies and the engine would evolve much faster.

<comment><USER10> Doing this would mean being forever stuck in single-threaded land for rendering (e.g. nothing like Mozilla's Servo project could ever happen).

People have tried to parallelize WebKit and failed: too entangled, too much code making too many assumptions... Parallelism is one of those things that's just incredibly hard to bolt on after the fact.

So if you want browsers to never really scale well to large number of cores, by all means try to get them to all switch to WebKit.

<comment><USER11> Are you implying Presto is multi-threaded?

<comment><USER10> No (though it will in fact do layout in parallel with JS execution by time- slicing its JS, last I checked, unlike other UAs).

My point is that it's bad if all browsers switch to WebKit and web sites absolutely require WebKit to work correctly, which is what the parent of my comment was suggesting should happen. This point is somewhat independent of what happens with Presto per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mixed emotions here. I think it makes every sense for Opera to do this. The cost of maintaining their own rendering engine must have been huge and the advantages it brought were slender.

It's also good to have another major player contributing to webkit.

On the other hand it's a step closer to an unhealthy monoculture in rendering engines. It's already the case for the mobile web that people are starting to define standards as 'whatever webkit does'.

<comment><USER13> Is a monoculture as bad as it might seem though? Front end web development is a clusterfuck. Webkit is open source, unlike the almost monoculture that ie6 represented. It can be forked and evolution can continue. Ditch -webkit -mos and -o. Like when the dinosaurs experienced a mass extinction event and mammals bloomed from a shrew into cats and humans.

<comment><USER14> _It can be forked and evolution can continue._

Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.

<comment><USER15> > _Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates._

Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished.

This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team).

Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".

<comment><USER14> _Some species DO get extinguished._

Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

 _If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine_

Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

This is stopping evolution, not helping it.

<comment><USER15> > _Some species DO get extinguished.

>>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run._

I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future".

> _Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is > no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do > "whatever WebKit does"._

We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact.

Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".

> _A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any > renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own > engine sucked._

Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.

<comment><USER14> _I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future"._

Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as opposed to the global one).

 _Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary"._

You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear. Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a contributing factor to Opera's decision.

Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to standardize the API, which precludes future competition.

The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who has used Opera for over ten years - probably 15 - and still does, Opera has become an awful browser over the last year or so.

Opera used to be superior to other browsers, because it offered a full feature solution - a perfect alternative to Firefox - and it is still the only browser with native tab stacking.

It _also_ used to be the fastest browser for people with an assload of active tabs (hell, the only working browser to that end), and a browser with a decent syncing system. Both of those two are no longer the case; the browser is sluggish as hell - I even have to shut it down now and then, because it hogs so much bandwidth - and the Sync feature is awful (just as it is on Chrome).

There was a time where the link.opera.com website didn't work for something like two or three years(!), and I still can't sync between my Windows desktop and MacBook Air running Mountain lion. A good sync feature is one of the biggest feature that could literally make me switch to just about any web browser. As Chrome's is no better than Opera's - managing the bookmarks locally is an awful experience on Chrome - and porting will be a pain, I am not in a rush to switch.

Opera feels great to use in many ways - it just has so many great shortcuts, and the support for rel="next" on paginated sites is still _huge_.

Opera keeps innovating and will always do, but it paradoxically keeps ruining its core value proposition in favour of an update schedule that breaks more than it fixes. Don't ask me, just look at community forums where people are sticking with Opera in spite of what it actually is now.

I don't know why it's gotten so bad. Maybe the employees are just tired of working on Opera. It's just such a crying shame for those of us who've used it for for over a decade.

And Chrome still isn't good enough to tide us over.

<comment><USER17> Not that I disagree with your post, especially the rel="next" part, but I wonder what the problem with syncing is when using chrome & signed into a google account? ... it does the job well for me over 4 or so devices.

<comment><USER16> It switches between not pushing the syncing at all (I never managed to get bookmark sync working on iOS) and garbling my bookmarks in all sorts of folder and file tree permutations.

It's entirely possible that I have lost bookmarks to this, but I wouldn't know from the utter clusterfuck of it all.

Speaking of rel="next", it is an incredibly sad state of affairs that sites such as Daring Fireball can't even be bothered to use it, just because other browsers aren't using what is so obviously a treasure to web browsing. Opera even wanted to use this for swipe left-right navigation on touch-based devices as evidenced in a presentation years old now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's one thing I can't stand in many of these comments: The blithe assumption that just because something is open-source, it -- and any fork of it -- could be maintained. I can't emphasise enough how wrong this is.

Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the packages play nicely with each other.

Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by _many_ people, each of which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which attract much help may be of very poor quality.

</comment><comment><USER19> As far as I hate monopoly and the things that happened years ago with IE6, I'm a bit afraid of what's going on here. I really appreciate the fact that coding a website with webkit bugs in mind will automatically include support of Opera browser now, but does this mean that the whole web will start to code exclusively for webkit engine? This doesn't feel good. I'm afraid webkit will start to dictate features and their bugs-workarounds such as [1] will remain untouched for years.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or- misu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14773587/possible-or-misused- feature-overflowhidden-weirdness/14773817#14773817)

<comment><USER20> Besides the fact that I think Firefox is now actually a really great piece of software, this is a primary reason why I continue to use Firefox while everyone else in the office uses chrome.

<comment><USER19> Yes, you are right, I really love to hear that. But as a webdeveloper my first task after I write some code is to test it in a webkit browser. Webkit is everywhere iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Safari, ( now Opera ). I think __bad developers __will start to exclude other engines support if percentage of non- webkit browsers goes very low. And since a lot of websites are coded from amateurs ( there's nothing wrong to this ) there will be more and more webkit- optimized content. That's sad!

<comment><USER10> It's not just amateurs.

The "mobile" sites out there are overwhelmingly WebKit-only. We're talking sites from Google, Disney, Apple, various news sites, etc, not sites done by amateurs.

And they're not accidentally WebKit-only in many cases, but deliberately so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After reading some comments here I come to the conclusion that (too) many web developers are just a bunch of opportunistic ignorant hypocrites. On the one hand they repeatedly state that constantly expanding variety of HTML9 technologies[1] is _THE best thing that could have ever happen to the Internet_ and that there is _nothing worse than mono culture_. On the other hand they do not seem to be willing to even consider testing their web _apps_ with a browser with a market share below 10%, because it's just not that important, and embrace the overall greatness of Chrome/Webkit and that it should be _the only browser we should develop for/with_.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5206211>

<comment><USER22> Yup! After all, web developers are individual people with their own opinions, not a monoculture. It's not hypocritical when different members of a group hold contradictory opinions.

But if you open your mind a little, you'll also see that the two opinions can also be totally compatible, just dependent on the context. For example, expanding "HTML9" (ha!) can be great for _exploring, prototyping, experimenting_ , where a monoculture is bad and harms innovation. While only >10%-share browsers can be worth _commercially developing for_ , because of resource constraints.

In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation, that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards. Of course, that's hard to establish and maintain in practice, but you can see how they're just different perspectives.

<comment><USER21>
        While only >10%-share browsers can be worth commercially developing for

That's one problem: many web developers program for _browsers_ , not _standards_.

        In other words, ideally, there would be a "polyculture" in innovation and experimentation,
        that would constantly funnel into a "monoculture" in actual final standards.

Yes, and IMHO that is what happens to browser rendering engines atm. Everyone agrees/complies to one technology and by doing so it becomes a de facto standard. Then new approaches for new problems can be taken from there, without reinventing the wheel. But this also creates room for alternatives to rise, so we are back to multiculturism. :)

E.g. replacing JS with some other language would be such a new alternative. Open-Source-Lua-Presto, imagine that! ;)

<comment><USER11> You seriously underestimate the development time it takes to pull off such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In an email to the WebKit development mailing list[1] Håkon Wium Lie, the Opera CTO, mentioned that they've had engineers working on WebKit for a while now, and they'll soon be contributing their work on multi-column layout to the WebKit project.

[1]: [https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-February/...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit- dev/2013-February/023820.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> And their first contribution is already attached to <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15553>!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> And then there were three.

Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

<comment><USER24> High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be.

[1] <https://github.com/mozilla/servo>

[2] <http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2>

<comment><AUTHOR> WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has been used by Safari since v5.1.

<comment><USER24> Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

<comment><USER14> Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.

<comment><USER25> Firefox for Android no longer does this, and hasn't since the "Native Fennec" launch.

<comment><USER26> You two should hug this out in #mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Opera users were bullied by Google for years. Even when some Google's site would work perfectly in Opera when the Opera would identify itself as IE or Firefox, Google would sometimes even reject user's attempt to access some of their sites. To the users of Opera, it was obvious that it was done intentionally -- on Google scale, they were bullying up to 300 million users who mostly selected Opera exactly because it runs _better_ on the less CPU- powerful hardware.

I write this on the Sony notebook made in 2002, which has very slow processor for today's standards but I had the pleasure to enjoy the hi-res 1400x1050 IPS screen during all the years when you were only able to buy TN on the notebooks <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8MO-XaCZ_8> Opera was my savior through the years.

</comment><comment> andrewl-hn Opera value preposition was in that they provided a complete solution (rendering engine, network stack, filesystem integration, security, customizable UI, etc.) People and companies often picked up WebKit for their hardware platform without realizing how much stuff is there besides the renderer itself. As a result, they had to spend more time on porting the rest of the stack and were late to market. That's, for example, what happened to Nokia with Symbian Webkit and their clone of Mini.

Opera provided SDK and offered custom development services around their platform for a good price. Honestly, I don't think that their business model would suffer much because of the switch.

The primary benefit of Presto are very modest hardware requirements. It can run on almost every hardware platform (even something that doesn't have a proper port of Linux core and GCC). That used to be pretty important in 1999, in 2005 and even in 2009, but in recent years it gets a lot cheaper to grab a good enough ARM core for your device, slap either a small Linux kernel, or even Android on top of it; rather than having a dedicated team of engineers struggling with something that barely runs an odd build of Watcom C compiler.

Opera was always moving against the mainstream. They optimized for worst hardware while it was getting better. They optimized for limited bandwidth with Mini while network speeds were rapidly increasing. They optimized for memory consumption with Futhark while Mozilla and Google were busy breaking JavaScript speed records.

None of that were bad moves per se, but this company is very different from its competitors. Maybe that's the main reason why it survived and has been moderately successful during all these years.

As a result, their userbase also moved over time. They got popular in Easter Europe in late 90s, moved to South East Asia and South America in the middle of 00th, and now are very popular in Africa. They used to be pretty big on desktop, then moved to mobile, and now to embedded and devices market.

I remember seeing a number of blog posts where web developers dismissed the importance of Opera, saying that only Russians and people from Africa are using it and they are not the ones who click on ads and make purchases. Wbedevs criticized poor developer tools, poor graphic performance, weird bugs. Google always tried to persuade Opera users to switch ([http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and- th...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/google-browser-sniffing-and-the-open- web)), Yahoo pulled it from their Grade Browser Support (<http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/10/16/gbs-update-2009q4/>), John Resig's slide got picked up by masses (<http://ejohn.org/images/cost-benefit.png>).

One thing where Opera shines is a UI innovations. When Chome was released I counted about 30 big and small things that they wisely borrowed from Opera UI. That was almost five years ago and Opera was moving fast, too. Mouse gestures, broad customizability, passionate users and some of the greatest people working in the company. I'm pretty certain that Opera's future is bright and shiny!

\---- Former Opera employee and devoted user, speaking for myself, obviously.

<comment><USER28> This is a really cool comment. Is there anywhere I can read more about the UI innovations Chrome took from Opera (or web browser UI innovations in general)?

<comment><USER7> Opera borrowed Opera's Speed Dial, they placed the tabs at the top (above the address bar) like Opera did (and people kept bashing it for that), etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Opera is for people who appreciate choice, and we are going to make it even easier to choose Opera in the future."

That's a nice spin. Less rendering engines, more choice!

<comment><USER30> Yes and no. Less work for frontend guys I believe. More choice for you, because you can get the same decent looking pages (theoretically) with a different UI of the browser.

And, IMO, here is where Opera wins - their UI is superior to Chrome's and Safari's.

<comment><USER3> Its ability to configure basically anything from user interface is far above any other browser. Chrome is a browser that I recommend to parents. It has dumbed down interface, zero options - perfect for average majority. It is still powerful when combined with dozens of extensions, but it still can't compete with Opera in this area.

It's like KDE vs Gnome3 if that makes more sense for someone.

<comment><USER31> I like Chrome's UI. There's almost nothing it doesn't do that I'd want. I could totally do without extensions if I had to, but they are nice to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there any talk of open-sourcing the presto engine?

Even if it were not to be actively developed by engineers; just having the code out there would be good for academic purposes or "This is another way of how it was done" archiving.

It would be a crying shame for the presto code to fade into properietary obscurity

</comment><comment><USER33> Their move is understandable, but it'll be something of a pity if this affects Opera's performance. From personal experience I can say that Opera is pretty much the only current browser that can deliver a combination of acceptable speed and rendering quality on really outdated x86 hardware.

I have tested it on a ThinkPad T23 with a Pentium III-M CPU and 1024 MB RAM running Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an early Pentium 4-M Windows XP-equipped laptop we needed to set up as a kind of an info kiosk at work. Opera felt way more responsive than Firefox, Chromium or even Midori on both. If Opera switching to WebKit makes it no longer reasonably usable on this hardware it would mean replacing those machines sooner rather than later. It's not that big of a deal, but the costs can build up with volume and I'm sure we aren't going to be the only ones affected.

Edit: rephrased for clarity.

</comment><comment><USER34> While I agree that webkit is a great piece of software, what happens when everybody switches to webkit? Will Google/Apple/developers simply ignore other engines and let it become the new IE of the decade?

</comment><comment><USER30> At last. Opera used to be my favorite browser, thanks to their sophisticated UI. But I gave it up when HTML5 started coming in. I believe it had problems with Javascripts too.

Is mobile Opera very different from the desktop one? I see many Android users using it and being happy.

<comment><USER35> The great irony is that Opera has started the HTML5 effort:

<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2005-09-01/>

back then it was called Web Forms 2 and Web Applications 1.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This thread feels like people didn't learn from all the best viewed in netscape or best viewed in IE terrible sites from early 2000s.

[BEST VIEWED IN WEBKIT] or [BEST VIEWED IN GECKO] would suck.

</comment><comment><USER37> In contrast to what developers might think, this is bad for the Open Web which is based on several competing and thriving implementations.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow, that's a huge step. Being the #4 rendering engine was really hurting Opera though. Most people use WebKit or Gecko during development and then make it work in IE as well, but never get to Opera. One of the main reasons I stopped using Opera for browsing was that, despite having some great features (always loved their gestures), so many sites just didn't work properly.

I hope this will only make them contribute more to pushing the web forward, as they have always done.

</comment><comment><USER39> To all who want to compare webkit being dominant with IE: don't. IE was closed source, and most important of all: it was not developed for a long time after IE6. WebKit development is very active, there are several companies involved and there is still a lot of work they are willing to do in bringing it forward.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, as I remember IE6 was actually a pretty good browser when it came out. I believe the real problem was it didn't get updated often enough, and even when it did get updated you couldn't count on users to take the updates, so we got stuck with it for years when everything else was making progress. WebKit gets updated all the time and at least on the desktop you can count on users to get updates to their browsers pretty quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Here's a scenario: _As a network provider I wish to subsidise the hardware on my tariffs further still. I can shape traffic, sell advertising and analytic's to achieve this. Now if only I could get a capable proxy service compatible with the common browsers on iOS and Android._

Is Opera's core proposition a browser or a service? What differentiates them from their competitors? I read this announcement as a candid admission that they can compete better with their proxy service than with their browser.

I suspect the future of Opera is as a SaaS proxy that happens to have a client ready too. A proxy for shaping or sniffing (mobile) traffic has many advantages to those in emerging markets and those who wish to push advertising down our throats _cough_ _cough_ Facebook and Google.

</comment><comment><USER42> WebKit was the reason why I started using other browsers -- I'm very excited to see it in Opera!

I wonder what'll happen to Dragonfly, their integrated development platform? It was a neat project, although arguably inferior to Firebug/Chrome Dev Tools in many areas.

Good luck Opera!

<comment><USER43> I was wondering that too. I assume Dragonfly will die and they will switch to WebKit/Chromium's dev tools instead. If that happens, I very much hope that they will rebuild Dragonfly's unique bits for WebKit's dev tools and submit them as patches, so nothing of value is lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is how it works - open source quality created by enthusiastic community wins proprietary crap produced by wage coders counting hours and lines of code.

This is how the end of the era of proprietary software (NOK, MSFT, ORCL, SAP, even AAPL) will look like.

<comment><USER45> Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.

<comment><USER44> This is complicated. Google tries to create (or emulate) something like community of individual engineers which rests on principles like "do no evil" or whatever. An order of some kind. It works. So, we could say that contributions are of individuals, not of Google. Even if contributors get paid for full-time, it is their own intention in the first place. At least it is what they want things to look like.

As for Apple, there are probably just programmers on a payroll. Apple has a different culture. It is a Steve's workshop, where they "invent" things, or whatever they think these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Great news for Opera. Unfortunately this is another reason for developers to ignore other browsers and use proprietary webkit prefixes.

<comment><USER20> I'd generally agree. But my impression is that Opera had small enough market share that people overwhelmingly ignored it anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'll admit to being ignorant of Opera for far too long, and only really considering it by including an -o- variant in my css vendor prefixes.

But (rightly or wrongly) this news does mean I'll give Opera some serious consideration. If it's Webkit, I can use it with confidence and if Opera's developer tools are better than Chrome or Safari, then it will become my browser of choice.

I doubt I'm the only person thinking this way. So that's one more reason this could be a great move for Opera.

</comment><comment><USER48> I see this as a win for open source software. (Or "free software". I never know.)

Opera never open-sourced its rendering engine Presto, keeping it as a jewel of sorts. On the other hand, Apple always shared the WebKit code, so Google could come, fork it and make it better.

Opera thought that keeping Presto proprietary will give them advantage in the market. Instead, it made it obsolete and irrelevant.

<comment> dylan-m I totally agree with you here, but I just need to correct you on something. Webkit is based on KHTML, which was available with the LGPL license. Of course, it's much more Webkit than KHTML at this point, but it isn't so much that Apple shared the Webkit code as they wisely forked a mature open source project and followed its license ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A win for web developers, in my humble opinion, as the rendering engines converge. With open source projects like WebKit, why do we need so many proprietary engines competing with each other? It creates more target environments for all the web developers and designers around the world to repetitively test.

This is a great example of how platforms, when open sourced, can beat proprietary silos which fuel the engine of capitalism. While the competition between proprietary silos, together with the copyright + patent protections they require, does drive innovation forward, it does it at great cost (in the amount of litigation required to protect the IP, in the lack of interoperability, and the increased cost for everyone producing for multiple platforms). By contrast, an open source project can develop much more similar targets that have incentive to interoperate and accept contributions from others. For example Linux variants, and now WebKit and its derivatives.

</comment><comment><USER50> From a designer's perspective -

I used to be a hardcore Opera user (as a regular consumer) till Opera 10, mainly because of the beautiful inbuilt download manager and the smoothness of their usability.

However, for professional work and testing - The only three browsers I use for testing these days are Chrome, Firefox and IE 9+.

I never used to consider Opera because, for MY website, the traffic from opera would be really negligible to make it worth the effort getting something right on their browser, though Opera would 99% of the times be almost as perfect as chrome, unlike IE.

Now, this move only makes designers' lives easier, needless to say. I'm just waiting for the day when Microsoft would put down their pride of using a stinky, inconsistent rendering engine and move to Webkit, just like Opera and that day would be the start of a new era - Where designers can focus on getting their designs right, than focusing on _how to_ get them right on various browsers.

Cheers Opera, Great move!

</comment><comment><USER51> Interesting... I wonder if they'd now consider opening up their browser engine as an open source project?

Not for any reason other than, if someone in the future wanted to. They could fork it and extend it and perhaps make something awesome. Nothing may actually happen, but you never know if you don't give it a chance to...

</comment><comment><USER52> We already had a monoculture; Opera not using Webkit wasn't preventing this because as you can see in the comments in this page, most non-Opera users considered its existence silly and never catered for it.

I love Opera. It's been my main browser since I started using the 'net (1996). But developers have always ignored it, always considered it not worth developing for because "there's no users". They didn't hold out against the monoculture, they just did their own thing for a while until they got _tired_ of it.

And I think they are tired. They're talking about _finally_ impacting the future of the web and being able to make widespread contributions. I think as a company they just love the Internet and want to be able to make it as awesome as possible for as many people as possible, and Presto wasn't allowing them to do that.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't understand why people are so outraged by this... Webkit has proven itself as a worthy browser engine, as a web developer Webkit is responsible for bringing back the fun into web development (for me at least) and lets face it how many developers even test their sites in Opera any more with exception of a few? This is great news because lets face it, Webkit is one of the best engines out there, period.

That's not to say that Opera is a bad browser, it was ahead of its time in many aspects. Optimised for lower hardware specs, optimised for limited bandwidth, mouse gestures and a really nice & clean user interface. But you have to know when to cut your loses and, "if you can't beat them, join them".

<comment><USER54> WebKit is not a "browser engine".

<comment><USER53> Layout engine, browser engine. Same thing to me. No need to nitpick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Three weeks ago, they let clues out:

[http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new- webkit-b...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/49375/opera-ice-new-webkit- browser)

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off- ne...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3892646/opera-shows-off-new-webkit- based-ice-mobile-browser)

(those were posted here but didn't get any discussion so I won't bother linking)

</comment><comment><USER56> That's going to make them less competitive in my opinion, although it's an understandable move considering their size. I am wondering about the timing though - now that HTML5 is finally a standard and browser developers can stabilize their rendering instead of playing catch-up with the latest draft features, it's a bit late to switch. They would have benefited more by switching 2-3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER57> Great.

Opera was my primary browser before Google Chrome. I tried sticking to it but it was always left behind. Then as I dived into Google's services more and more, it was clear that Opera wasn't a consideration for Google.

Want to Drag and Drop something in GMail, not possible! Any other cool features on many other websites, no!

Now that they are switching to Webkit, I hope Opera gets support for all these features.

</comment><comment><USER58> Interesting move, but I guess it was pretty much inevitable considering how much WebKit has been surging ahead the last couple of years.

This might be wishful thinking, but I hope they'll expand the desktop team and spend more resources on UI and UX now that the UI basically is the only killer feature on the desktop. I'd love to see Opera on the innovation forefront once again!

</comment><comment><USER59> Can anyone help me understand that 300 million number?

Taking a rough estimate of 2% market share from here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>, if all 7 billion people in the world used the internet, it still only works out at 140 million people.

</comment><comment><USER60> Dragonfly is in my opinion better than Webkits inspector. I love using it.

Does anyone know what will happen to Dragonfly after the switch?

<comment><USER61> Dragonfly is tightly bound to Presto, so it's going away unless they rewrite it. And so far, according to the tweets, it looks like it's going away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd like to know what the pros and cons of Opera switching to WebKit instead of Gecko are. Was Gecko ever a possibility?

<comment><USER63> Opera makes most of its revenue on mobile, and these days, mobile web = webkit.

I don't think gecko was ever a serious choice for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Now it's time for IE to switch to WebKit as well. Also, they should make it available for all versions of Windows.

<comment><USER65> Well, it's MSHTML rendering engine is used by many other apps too, for one thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Apple and Google managed to do what Microsoft never could and make it unprofitable to create a commercial web browser.

A sad day.

</comment><comment><USER67> <https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/301725620172386304>:

 _New hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts complaining about Opera adopting WebKit and finding -webkit prefixes without -o equivalents._

<comment> dylan-m My new hobby: Inspecting the source of blog posts that act like prefixed CSS styles are healthy standards that must be conformed to, and finding -o and -webkit prefixes without -dylans-browser equivalents.

Less sarcastic version: This is only a problem if the developer neglects to include an unprefixed version, and even that is perfectly excusable if the syntax remains up in the air (like box-shadow was for a while). As soon as the style is in a standard, it works in the version of Opera that supports that standard.

There is absolutely no reason a web developer should be expected to implement nonstandard code for a specific browser, and when it happens one must keep in mind: the standard isn't finished, it could break some day, and it needs to be closely watched and regularly tested. If you are using prefixed styles without testing each of them, you're considerably worse than the person who isn't using them at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is a major change in Belarus! [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why- is...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/why-is-belarus- the-only-country-where-opera-is-the-most-popular-browser/265406/)

</comment><comment><USER69> Welcome monoculture.

It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.

<comment><USER70> IE and Firefox still exist.

<comment><USER10> IE does not exist on mobile (though they're trying).

Firefox is working on it, but it's an uphill battle.

"mobile" sites are overwhelmingly coded to be WebKit-only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Sounds like great news. Hopefully those extra resources can go into returning the GUI to the best in the business and at that point, I look forward to returning. In the meantime, Chrome will keep me warm.

</comment><comment><USER72> Is there any benefit to still having multiple rendering engines out there? Should IE move to webkit? Firefox? Should prefixes now be -ms-webkit and -opera-webkit so browser makers can still innovate?

</comment><comment><USER73> It was about time. Webkit is becoming the de facto browser engine. People will say that this kills competition, but competition is just good when brings better alternatives, Opera is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER74> I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a far superior job in regards to standards.

</comment><comment><USER75> As someone who has been using Opera since the 90's, this makes me sad.

</comment><comment><USER76> Here's the real link: [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and- move-to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to- webkit)

</comment><comment><USER77> As I stated on the other thread: It's a wise move for Opera. Now they can hire webkit-engineers from anywere without heavy training on their own private model.

</comment><comment><USER78> If they are using WebKit, Chromium, and V8 -- what areas can they add uniqueness to so that it's not just a Opera-branded version of Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER79> It's always good to have choices, however I still cannot understand the advantages of Opera over it's open source siblings...

</comment><comment><USER80> Seems a great news but I can't really understand the benefits and differents between Gecko and Webkit, can someone say?

<comment><USER81> For the normal user it does not matter.

It just matters that there are competing engines. As long as there are multiple implementations, we will have a formal standard for HTML and Co. If e.g. everybody (Microsoft,Mozilla) would adopt WebKit, then nobody would bother to extend the HTML standard. Just implement it in WebKit. Soon, HTML will be a mess like Office Open XML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I drive past opera software every morning, if it wasn't for the sign on their building I'd never think about them. They were popular a long while back, but now? Does anyone still use opera. If so why? It was behind in tech and for any serious web development it didn't matter, chrome, Firefox were the two that get used. Safari obviously but mainly for iOS platforms.

The number of comments here surprises me, I would have thought this irrelevant news.

</comment><comment><USER83> Does this mean they'll be using V8 too?

<comment><USER30> I'm curious too! I think Javascript in Opera was a bigger problem than HTML.

A year ago I worked on an app with heavy JS frontend and frontend guys told that they can't make it work properly on Opera.

<comment><USER84> Yeah, I think they're actually switching for V8 more than anything. Their HTML layout engine was/is pretty much fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> At [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move- to-...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit) they state they're switching because they feel it is a waste of resources to maintain their own rendering engine. I'd be surprised if the JavaScript engine was a big factor in their decision. The vast majority of "JavaScript" problems encountered by web developers are either problems with the DOM implementation in general. A smaller portion are in the binding between the DOM implementation and the JavaScript language, and fewer still are in the JavaScript engine itself.

<comment><USER84> I tend to believe my own opinions rather than press releases :)

I'm sort of including dom<>js relations as part of the js problem tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Are they going to open source Presto?

</comment><comment><USER86> This is great news!

I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering engine.

</comment><comment><USER87> I hope Firefox and IE do the same..Atleast in HTML5 we have common engine...

</comment><comment><USER88> Now we just have to wait for Firefox to adopt WebKit, and...Lynx?

</comment><comment><USER89> Now if only Microsoft would do the same with Internet Explorer!

</comment><comment><USER90> Does this not create a webkit monoculture? Find a security flaw in website and suddenly two thirds of browsers are vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER91> makes sense

</comment><comment><USER92> All I can say is "Woohoo!".

</comment><comment><USER93> I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR TOO LONG. Sorry but I literary have screamed in front of pc.

</comment><comment><USER94> Question: Where are the HN moderators? They are quick to hellban users but allow Opera to get the top 3 positions on HN's front page?

Opera is a browser and a company not to be trusted IMO. Never do mission- critical work with this sketchy software. I've given Opera plenty of chances and its always flaked out on me in the weirdest ways.

This browser also had the habit of mysteriously becoming my default browser without me actually doing it. That's when I could no longer even allow it to be installed on my system.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I had to share this in case anyone wants a different perspective.

<comment><USER95> I agree.

We should delete all posts about software astrojoy doesn't like. That's what mods are for.</comment></comment>


Is Julian Assange still in the embassy? - <AUTHOR> https://isassangestillintheembassy.me

<comment><USER2> Is this hard coded or is there any kind of smart object / processing involved in that ? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> just hard coded at the momemnt, though I think I should make it self-updating, maybe by twitter trends.</comment></comment>


VCs to avoid taking money from - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupcfo.ca/2013/01/who-not-to-take-money-from/ <comment><USER2> Must we really go around calling a bunch of random people 'douche bags' for behavior that in some cases, isn't even remotely problematic?

One of the most astute VCs I know and have worked with came from money and knows his way around a regatta. Hell, I've even seen him with a pastel sweater around his shoulders.

According to this random CFO guy I've never heard of, that makes my VC a 'douche bag' - but if I was raising money again, I would have that VC involved again in a second.

Sometimes criticism teaches you more about the criticizer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I once had a "potential investor" (worth $80m) who wanted a meeting with my patent attorney. So, I made the arranged for us to meet him at our usual meeting place - the coffee shop.

We walked in and the "potential investor" said: "we haven't got time for a coffee", I replied: "well, this is where we are having the meeting"... "what HERE? doesn't he have an office? This is a very bad start."

In walked my patent attorney wearing a cagoule and a rucksack. The "potential investor" made it perfectly clear that he was not impressed (he did not even get up to shake his hand). He interrogated him for half an hour before saying: "good, you can now drink your coffee".

I realised that day, that money, is only a small part of being a great VC.

<comment><USER4> This happens a lot and tech is not without its elitists, but that doesn't excuse rude behaviour. I have found this happens a lot, but a lot less than in England. Fortunately we have people like Zuck in a hoodie and Brin on the subway, both with more money than god to thank for leveling the playing field a little.

Next time, don't wait for the VC to let you drink your coffee. You could be American about it and pander to his/her ego, or you could be British (since you use both word forms I am assuming you're also a transplant) about it and tell him to go fuck himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my own experience:

 _The cattle farmer:_

Goes to pitch events to pick startups to invest to. Watches every pitch as if it was cattle on the auction block.

 _The Bro:_

Only invests because he thinks you are cool. No interest whatsoever in seeing you succeed.

 _The mother:_

Wants people to know that he gave birth to your idea.

 _The loan shark:_

Calls every week to ask you about his money.

 _The infomercial:_

Only talks about how awesome your life/starup would be if you did X (something they came up with).

<comment><USER6> I could do with a Bro for my site

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a loser's game to bitch about inexperienced bankers or laugh about celebrities.

Winners do whatever necessary to engage their business idea. That may or may not include taking money from anyone in that list.

<comment><USER8> Wonder how you'd choose to marry someone...

Winners marry for money! Only the game matters!

I wonder if you're actually trolling or just incredibly naive.

<comment><USER9> I don't think he was talking about success in any area of life except raising venture capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about avoiding VCs in general. Unfortunately, that's not how things are done these days.

<comment><USER11> Raising VC is kind of like buying a car. If your destination is decently far away, it makes a lot of sense.

The problem is that a lot of these folks don't know how far they're actually going. They end up buying a car to drive around the corner or just down the block. And now they have to deal with parking, gas, insurance, etc.

Even worse, they're usually going in the wrong direction initially. It's a much better strategy to start on foot, go for a quick walk, and then get a bicycle. When the bike's tires are bald, then it's time to think about buying a car.

If you've driven there before (or somewhere very similar) either alone or in the passenger seat, then maybe you can skip straight to buying a car. But then again, it's a different time of day and traffic is unpredictable.

And once you're driving, don't be afraid to pull over and ask for directions!

<comment><USER12> I sort of wish this wasn't in a sub-comment, because it's a valuable contribution that may get buried.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "VCs from whom you should avoid taking money"

</comment><comment><USER14> I seem to have developed an aversion beyond words can convey, about people who shamelessly rip-off the svbtle layout. This is simply wrong on so many levels.

And you've just made it look uglier with those noob-ish buttons.

</comment><comment><USER15> Do people in SV really have the luxury of picking and choosing their VC's like this? Man that sure hasn't been my experience.

<comment><USER16> A lot of startup articles need to come with a disclaimer: "FOR SILICON VALLEY ONLY."

I really don't think they appreciate just how unique their situation is over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there anybody left?!?

<comment><USER17> Yes, Mark MacLeod.

<comment><USER9> I had a look at his LinkedIn profile, and this is what I found:

1\. A finance guy

2\. A name dropper of numerous corporations... Mind you, this _is_ LinkedIn... But I seem to see that in a lot of places...

3\. A director on 4 boards

4\. A snappy dresser: <http://about.me/markmacleod>

Ok, I'm being harsh here. I'm sure he's fine, but if you followed his own advise, you'd have to rule him out!

<comment><USER18> I've taken money from Mark and can say quite honestly that he's provided a ridiculous amount of value to our company since coming on board. He's an operator and a realist who really is "founder friendly"

<comment><USER9> I've no doubt about that. I'm merely pointing out that his own list removes him from the pool of VCs that he speaks of. I just don't think his post was well thought through, to be honest. I don't know anything at all about Mark, I'm glad to see that he is top quality!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the title is somewhat misleading.

"Types of VCs to avoid taking money from" would be better. It sounds like he's going to name actual people to avoid, rather than general VC archetypes.

</comment><comment><USER8> _> On a similar note, it's pretty fashionable these days to see party rounds with lots of investors each putting in a small amount of money. Mark Suster calls this collecting logos._

Collecting logos - now that's a new one. I used to call that "buying trophies" :)

Another saying that I have about Silicon Valley is that it's "Wall Street with jeans".

There's a lot of money, and a lot of power sloshing around. It's not all fairytales and lollipops. When you get here prepare to get fucked. Repeatedly.

Before dealing with anyone always ask yourself this question:

 _> "How are they fucking me?"_

It's a line I stole from Jim Messina - Obama's reelection campaign manager. It's proven quite useful.

Oh and one last important heuristic: never trust a suit. Engineers can be pretty bad at fucking each other when they become founders - but then again by then they're just suits.

An even better heuristic: trust no one.

PS - watch this video and get your cynicism on: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzNRUkl9BoY>

<comment><USER20> Also see George Carlin's rants about business men (and women with shoulder pads who repeat the worst mistakes of men) ^^

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _But unless a potential investor is listing people he plans to intro you to, > you shouldn't be hearing names._

But remember: Anyone that he lists does not work for you. Odds are high that your company will fail, and that person knows where his next meal ticket is coming from.

</comment><comment><USER22> Although I agree with most of the "groups" mentioned, most of the time, beggars can't be choosers.

It's a shame so many investors talk about which types of people not to take money from but never give names. It's high school all over again.

</comment><comment><USER23> Probably not a popular place to talk about that, given the audience :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like you could use some VC money to keep your blog online :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish the title wasn't changed. The original was more vague and matched the stereotype based list.

</comment><comment><USER26> Might want to avoid saving your female pronouns for titles like "The Blabbermouth".

<comment><USER27> He also used female pronouns for "The Generalist", and used "he or she" for "The dude on 20 boards".

My guess is that he was thinking of specific people when he wrote each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> On a totally unrelated note, is it me only who found this site's hiding of svbtle theme disclaimer disturbing?

<comment><USER29> Yup, just you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm really interested who this yacht guy is :)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you know similar essays to Paul Graham's? - <AUTHOR> Remember that feeling when you read Paul Graham? Did you have that same feeling reading something else? What was it? Please share. <comment><USER2> Gwern has some very interesting writing on various subjects: [https://www.gwern.net/index](https://www.gwern.net/index)

Although his site is probably best known because of this longform article on Silk Road: [https://www.gwern.net/Silk-Road](https://www.gwern.net/Silk-Road)

</comment><comment><USER3> Taylor Pearson - [http://taylorpearson.me](http://taylorpearson.me)

</comment><comment><USER4> I found Aaron Swartz's weblog _fantastic;_ at times exceeding Gram by more than a bit.

<comment><USER5> I'd second this. To use a fairly bad baseball analogy, PG hits triples most of the time, Aaron has a number of home runs and the rest are doubles.

<comment><USER4> And Aaron just has _so much more._ If I'm remembering correctly, he wrote an essay every day for a year at one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Feld Thoughts is probably closest in tenor. TechStars and YC probably started around the same time circa 2007

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

</comment><comment><USER7> PG is unique, but at times I have similar feelings when reading [https://www.stilldrinking.org](https://www.stilldrinking.org).

</comment><comment><USER8> To me Paul Graham is completely unique. He is really a master of words, and at times also a beautiful writer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another one which is close to it is this: [https://sivers.org/](https://sivers.org/)</comment>


SfCube launches to seed fledgling startups - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/14/sfcube-launches-to-seed-fledgling-startups/

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone should check the copy on these guys' website. The investors page has a few grammatical errors in first 5 lines.

Verdict: I'll pass.</comment>


The UK's "emergency" DRIP surveillance law is now a done deal - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/the-uks-emergency-drip-surveillance-law-is-now-a-done-deal/ <comment><USER2> And when there will be abuses - and oh, there will be _tons_ of abuses - they'll just say "but it's all legal!".

The so called "democratic" governments are getting out of control. A single vote every 4 years is not nearly enough to control what the governments do in power. We need an overhaul of our political systems, one that makes them much closer to the population having more control over the voting of laws.

I'd look to Switzerland, Finland and Germany for inspiration there, but I'd go much further than that. I'd use their ideas for referendums only as a _starting point_ for reforming the government systems of the world.</comment>


Inside a Restaurant Startup - <AUTHOR> http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/introducing-start-up-chronicle-are-you-nuts/

<comment><USER2> "Are you nuts?

Probably."

Being an entrepreneur, this is my favorite line because the people who say that an idea is "CRAZY" are usually the ones who become part of the loyal following. The lesson that we all need to learn from this article is a simple quote from Dr. Suess, "Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant comment:

"The Southampton Planning Board has taught me more about Buddhism by accident than the Dalai Lama did on purpose."</comment>


Our Open-Plan Office Failed, So We're Moving to a Towering Panopticon - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-open-plan-office-failed-so-were-moving-to-a-towering-panopticon <comment><USER2> There are probably jobs where there's someone watching a split-screen display showing the webcam images of all their subordinates.

(IoT idea: Desktop USB activated food reward dispenser. Boss-controlled.)

(Just checked. It's available. Pavlov Treat Dispenser $69.95 [1])

[1] [http://pavlovdogmonitor.com/treat-dispenser/pavlov-treat- dis...](http://pavlovdogmonitor.com/treat-dispenser/pavlov-treat-dispenser))

<comment><USER3> _There are probably jobs where there 's someone watching a split-screen display showing the webcam images of all their subordinates._

A whole lot of daycares do this. A proper security system will keep the footage for a month.

At least the treat dispenser is advertised for use with the dog, but I bet if someone handed you this document cold with actual letterhead, it might take a bit of reading to realize the parody.

<comment><USER2> If someone handed you the device, you'd think it was for humans. It looks more like a desktop device than a dog feeder.

Maybe it was originally designed for the education market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know what is worse then the open office plan?

The fact that large numbers of people loathe it and yet do nothing about it except moan on the internet.

People don't organize themselves and their coworkers to even ask for better things.

<comment><USER5> Open office is bad for general productivity of all, but organizing against it is bad specifically for your own career and salary. Good negotiators tend to go for their own salaries, interesting projects, better positions etc etc etc while pushing against open office (or other popular corporate must have) makes their position for the above weaker. Anonymous venting is safer and feels good.

Now you know.

<comment><USER6> "Good negotiators tend to go for their own salaries, interesting projects" is a general rule in life too right?

I can work in an open office plan when i set my own hours and work remotely or in a private space (i'll be using this space for 4 hours every day seems to work for me)

As long as you establish this upfront and it is written down into your contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This one would be pretty vile, but I bet we have folks who seen just as bad.

I once worked at a place that once powered their campus by an oil burning generator. They stored the oil in a large underground bunker. The bunker was a concrete affair. Eventually the oil plant was decommissioned and the bunker was cleaned up.

Some [censored] person decided they needed more office space and this bunker would be great. They completed the tunnel from a nearby building (they had a large underground) and proceeded to build a false floor and put in a box for offices. Now, concrete will "bleed" oil for a while even if sealed, so the solution to that was install fans that would push fresh air between the office area wall and the concrete wall. Inside their new space, they put a cube farm. Sadly, cellphones and radios didn't work in the new space as it was underground with a nice reinforced (rebar) concrete roof. Having a constant wind noise in a cube underground is a bit surreal.

</comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I think I'd prefer the physical structure of a Panopticon to the "Warehouse" style open offices that exist today (it would certainly be quieter).

Some of these were actually built - here's a neat overview of some in Cuba - [http://weburbanist.com/2014/05/15/real-life-panopticons- dese...](http://weburbanist.com/2014/05/15/real-life-panopticons-deserted- dystopian-prisons-in-cuba/)

<comment><USER8> Weirdly it feels like it would be more embarrassing sitting in the tower rather than one of the cells.

The person in the tower can only look at a few cells at a time but hundreds of people in the cells will be staring at the tower all the time.

<comment><USER9> >The person in the tower can only look at a few cells at a time but hundreds of people in the cells will be staring at the tower all the time.

Naah, it was taken care of, of course in the new project, and it's not a tower anymore, it's the Nest:

>Will I be able to see you in Nest, watching me work? No. Nest will be coated in one-way mirrored glass. And we are not "watching you," we are compassionately evaluating your flow state. Mr. Bentham was very clear that, for objectivity, team members shouldn't know when they are being evaluated by "the all-seeing, hundred-eyed giant."

<comment><USER10> > Will I be able to see you in Nest, watching me work? > No. Nest will be > coated in one-way mirrored glass.

With polarised filters you can see through such glasses. How do you make it polarfilter-proof?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Probably would actually be marginally less destructive to productivity than open floor plan offices. But still a childish fit to throw just to avoid saving mountains of money by cancelling the office lease and having everyone work from home.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's a good way to make an open office more tolerable? My lab is a large rectangular room filled with desks and computers. I don't really have enough space to make cubicles, and I can't get more space. I'd love to improve the work space for my researchers.

Right now my lab is basically 3 rows of desks in an open office plan, with probably 6 people there on average, but closer to 10 during summers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Poor Daniel Finch.

</comment><comment><USER14> >So Synergon is really better than the current open-plan office?

Sadly, it really is.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for posting this! What a great and fun read!

</comment><comment><USER16> Our Incredibly Self-Regarding Smugness Is Also Available In Dead Tree Format In A Way That Looks Like An Inheritance Being Burned.</comment>


15 Great Google Web Fonts Demonstrated By The Best Steve Jobs Quotes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shareaholic.com/2012/04/google-web-fonts/ <comment><USER2> Why not use use html since the point of the fonts is for web use - load time's be damned?

The white text on near-neon background is tough on my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah I don't know about some of those fonts...

And negative contrast, please.</comment>


Show HN: An example GraphQL server written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lucperkins/rust-graphql-juniper-actix-diesel-postgres <comment><USER2> pretty cool. almost indistinguishable from implementation in higher level languages

<comment><USER3> I don't see how Rust is low-level. It allows easy access to low-level stuff, but it has quite powerful high-level features.

<comment><USER2> Excuse me - compiled, vmless, and gcless language

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw "actix-web" and I thought to myself...

"That odd, that project is dead now. Why release something dependent on it?"

But then I went to the actix-web git repo and low and behold it is not dead.

Then scratching my head, I re-read this post from my history:

[https://words.steveklabnik.com/a-sad-day-for- rust](https://words.steveklabnik.com/a-sad-day-for-rust)

Clearly stating the actix-web project was dead and I recall going to the link in the article to: [https://github.com/actix/actix- web](https://github.com/actix/actix-web) that had a post from the maintainer stating that the project was dead.

Anyone know what is going on with this project?

<comment><USER5> I don't even use Rust and I reacted like the bitconnect guy, "Mmmm No no no".

<comment><USER6> Damn. Thank you. This comment had my dying in a restaurant earlier. I really enjoy writing rust and I was sad when Steve was sad. I had a similar thought, "why when actix is dead?" I'm glad actix is back.

I was coming to SHOW HN a rust tool I made when, boom, front-page: actix is dead.

Every journey has its obstacles.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple under fire for approving 'gay cure' app - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconrepublic.com/new-media/item/20993-apple-under-fire-for-approv <comment><USER2> This highlights the problem with Apple's decision to play the part of the gatekeeper in their app store, and seriously calls into question their claim of not allowing offensive content.

Apple does need to be careful here - the GLBT population tends to skew towards Apple products, at least based on my experience, and I doubt they want to alienate this segment of their user base.

</comment><comment><USER3> I went and looked this up on the App Store. The title of the app is "Exodus International." The categories in the bottom menu are "Home", "Latest News", "Events", "Video", and "More." The "More" section includes links to Twitter, Facebook, testimonials, podcasts, a blog, FAQs, some kind of question-answer page, a fact sheet, and "featured resources."

Presumably somewhere in there is the video or text that talks about curing homosexuality, but this app appears to fall into the category of restating whatever happens to be available on the publisher's website...kind of like ESPN or my bank. It's not a single-purpose issue app like the Manhattan Declaration app that was rejected.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great. First they were under fire for censoring apps, now they're taking heat for not censoring apps.

<comment><USER2> And understandably so. Apple claims that their approval process is supposed to keep out low quality apps and objectionable content, to the extent that they've rejected applications that simply display content easily reachable using their own browser. Now they've approved an application that is clearly offensive to many people - and one that makes claims to do something that medical and psychological experts agree can't be done.

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking this is a highly political issue I'd rather not see Apple wade in on.

I value freedom of expression over any particular political party or political/religious belief (including this particular inanity). Do I think fake ass religiously oriented programs don't work should be published? No. Do I think it's apple's role to choose whether to publish them? No, I do not.

Objectionable content is about keeping the store safe for kids. Honestly, many parents would consider things around gay dating (<http://www.grindr.com>) objectionable. Definitely enough people do to qualify for "many people" to be an apt description. Should apple remove that app? Oh look, now that it's an app you agree with, you don't want them to censor it.

Freedom of Expression > Pretty much everything else.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, but claiming to reject "Objectionable" material that they classify themselves opened them up to a "political" issue.

While I find this app sad, I don't have any issue with it being there... Except when compared to some of the apps that have been rejected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this offensive content? I'm all for gay rights and know a few men and women with homosexual inclinations (and I'm not bothered by it one bit), BUT freedom of expression is as much a right as the ability to choose your own religion or sexual inclination. This app probably provides valuable content to someone out there, and as such should be permitted to do so.

I'd be more worried of an Apple that blocks all apps that deal with content they don't agree with than an Apple that allows apps that might might strike the activist nerve in the sector of the population that loves to throw rocks and close streets to protest whatever they perceive to be a threat against affirmative action.

<comment><USER8> "Curing" other peoples sexual inclination is just as offensive as "curing" their religious inclination. You are not really free to choose your own religion (or sexual orientation) if you are constantly ostracized by the community for your choice. Ostracization removes choice, i.e. freedom. So to ensure freedom of expression (for other people than yourself), there must be some limitations so people with non-mainstream choices are not ostracized.

An effective method to ostracize other people is to provide a lot of "help" to "cure" them for their "choice". This creates a common perception that some choices are less valuable than others, and that people choosing those less valuable choices are less worth and it's ok to beat them up. And this method is particulary surviveable as it can hide behind "freedom of expression".

<comment><USER7> Then again that would mean that I have to get offended every time I get a visit from a Jehova's witness that wants to 'cure' my atheism. Believing I'm wrong for not having the same religious believes is their prerogative (an there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), but being offensive is not telling me they think I'm wrong, it's telling me that it doesn't matter what I think because there is only one correct religion to follow without letting express my point of view.

Freedom of speech comes with dangers and responsibilities that lean on your shoulders. If you're gay, it's your choice to come out or not. When you do so you automagically earn the right to defend your position when being confronted with an opposing point, and you also get the danger of being ostracized from a specific social group. That's not the opposing party's fault, nor is it yours, it's just the way the world works wether we like it or not. I might get kicked out of the basketball court cause I'm white, or banned from a church because I'm an atheist, which is for all purposes not fair (in the grand scheme of things), but the same way I'm being given the choice to choose who I am and who I socialize with, a social group has the right to exclude people that don't match their qualifications.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that it sucks and it's definitely not fair for certain parties, but look at it this way: If you're a popular kid in high school and you want to hang out with the cool people, it's your right to exclude the people that are not cool as long as you don't violate their rights. If you're playing tennis at a private club at which you're not actually a member and the authorities that manage said place want you to leave, it's their prerogative to kick you out.

If you're gay and you come by an application to 'cure you with prayer' you have the right to NOT download it, as well as you have to right to express your disapproval as long as you're not violating anyone's rights. The same way that people that agree with the applications use have the right to download, use, and incite the use of said app - once again, without stepping over other peoples rights.

At the end of the day we all have the human right to make our own choices and live with the consequences of out actions. If an action is going to alienate me from a social group I have a choice. I have a choice to go ahead with whatever belief I might have, or I might value more the social interaction I might get excluded from. Gay people have two choices in this matter, if you agree with their point of view, you can download the app (a high schooler might need to get laid and drink booze to get into the crowd, illegal notwithstanding, he's free to make his own choice to either fit in or not). If you don't you can ignore it and then make a blog post about how you're unhappy with the apps existence. Every person has a right to dislike me and my beliefs, and that's fine. They, however, have no right to violate my rights while disliking me and my beliefs... and this app is not violating anyone's rights while preaching their beliefs through it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone get to work on creating an app to cure people of their heterosexuality through the use of pics of hot guys and alcohol.

</comment><comment><USER10> Trying to 'cure' gay people and recruit them into a religious organization and culture is not as offensive to me as the practice of a central big-brother type authorizing and deleting programs on a computer that I own.

If we don't fight this sort of thing one day we will wake up and all computers will be like cable TV. you can choose between high-quality stimulating channels, or "paths", but try to do something yourself, and you need millions of dollars to penetrate the red tape and get your application presented to more than a few people.

<comment><USER11> So basically you want to say that we should fight against censoring BUT not against gay-hatred?

Man I can't believe your priorities.

First rule should ALWAYS be: human rights.

<comment><USER5> He's saying asking for censorship of an idea you do not agree with is not the right way to go.

Use other attitudes to attack the app. Honestly, attacking the app any other number of ways that DIDN'T get it press would have been much more effective. It would have disappeared into the void of a quarter million apps.</comment></comment></comment>


California's dark, orange sky is the most unnerving sight I've ever woken up to - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/10/us-west-fire-season-california-oregon-climate-action <comment><USER2> The dark orange sky, reminiscent of descriptions of what nuclear winter would be like, the smell of smoke, the rain of small hunks of grey ash raining down, the warnings about going out of the house into small particle contaminated hell have become the new normal. There are said to be 20,000 firemen on the lines. Many friends (and others) have lost their houses and possessions. But worst of all, the fires are inserting more CO2 into the atmosphere and acerbating the global warming and climate change which has made the fires worse. Why have we not treated this as an critical emergency and used every possible resource to put out the fires and change our forest management policies to minimize greenhouse gas release which contribute to global warming.

What I see is a total failure of our society to meet the challenge of near- term existential events. Our leaders barely acknowledge the problem and most people ignore it.</comment>


Y Combinator applicant advice - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/289c58a2ca89

<comment><USER2> Thousands of groups applied for S13. Only 255 groups were selected for interviews. Only 53 companies ended up getting funded.

My advice: Stop worrying about perfecting your application or trying to game it. Stop worrying about trying to get into YC. Submit it, forget it. Go build a company. You don't need their validation, and you certainly don't need their permission.

Just go freaking make something people want.

<comment><USER3> As a 21 year old, "stopout/dropout" computer programmer that is living in Boston, competing with new grads with cs degrees and such, this advice is my exact mentality. Im not going to try to game my resume and cover letter, Im going to submit the application and make myself a better engineer day by day, I dont need a company's validation or permission to do so.

<comment><USER4> Don't worry about a thing. I have an Art/Advertising degree, and I'm an iOS engineer right now. I got here by programming my ass off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm so tired of the billion dollar bullshit. No one believes it. No one can predict it. But everyone seems to have to say it.

Spare me.

YC is investing $18k. If you build a $10 or $25 million business off that springboard, even with an angel round, that's awesome for all.

As software fills out the niches of the world, that's where the real wins are going to be.

So in short, saying your company will be worth a billion dollars isn't cool. It's just douchey.

</comment><comment><USER6> > don't say "if we capture 10% of this 100 billion dollar market, we'll be > making 10 billion dollars!"

> From this, based on the volume of repairs in San Francisco...we could be > operating at about $70k per day in just SF.

A bottom-up story can just be a top-down one in disguise. Capturing 10% of a market doesn't sound too hard until the word "billion" appears. Instead, we can capture 114% of one region. And $20 million per year is too big, so let's give it per day.

Just saying "the average dishwasher needs a $200 repair once every two years" tells me more than that entire paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I think one of the best ways to prepare is to look for common trends in other successful applications. I helped write a VentureBeat article on this very subject [1]. As part of that article, we (Lollipuff, YC W13) released our entire application [2], and of course YC provides plenty of application advice too [3].

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning- y-c...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/20/how-to-write-a-winning-y-combinator- application/)

[2] [https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator- ex...](https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/102/lollipuffs-ycombinator-experience)

[3] [http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html](http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)

<comment><USER8> I thoroughly enjoyed reading through some of the old applications. Here's Drew Houston's app for Dropbox back in 2007 - everything is plain and concise.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There should be a question in there "Did you continue building your company after getting rejected by YC? Which?"

</comment><comment><USER10> > Although, they also want to see how quickly you can execute. 2 years to > build an iPhone app is too long.

Why would they care about how quickly you can build something? If you took 2 years to build an iPhone app in your spare time, but that iPhone app ended up being Candy Crush, wouldn't that make that metric pretty meaningless?

<comment><USER11> Apps like candy crush are edge cases that make general comparisons meaningless.

Given most successful apps aren't anywhere near as popular as candy crush you're not comparing apples to apples.

The chances of building a successful anything are low. Even lower for the first attempt. So if you take 2 years to build something...you've stacked the odds so high against yourself you might as well not even try. And if you're the one paying the bills, 2 years is a long time to wait for a failure.

<comment><USER10> But we also know overnight successes don't really happen overnight. So I imagine you also don't want to be the person creating new apps every month because you're misguided about how hard it is to achieve success. So again, it doesn't seem like a useful metric.

<comment><USER12> You're overthinking it. The faster you can build, the more of a competitive advantage you have. It's that simple.

If it takes person A 1 month to build the same thing as person B in 2 months, all else being equal, person A has a better shot at succeeding.

<comment><USER4> It's never that simple - and making the product awesome and launching at 95% can introduce way more rewards than launching at 75 or 80%. I think the concept of an MVP is regarded as the word of law around here, and sometimes an MVP looks like shit and nobody will use it afterwards, so spend the extra two weeks making it absolutely awesome. I know that's not really what you were talking about, but I think people shouldn't shy away from taking a step back and just thinking about what you're building without being stupid-productive all of the time. It's all about balance.

<comment><USER13> > sometimes an MVP looks like shit and nobody will use it afterwards

Then it's not _viable_ , which is what the V stands for. So it's not an MVP at all, it's just shit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like lots of YC app advice posts think it's super important to have a .com. I always thought a .com wasn't that important, especially if you have to pay money for it that you could use towards development. Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER15> //This function has a 96% accuracy

public boolean yc_acceptance(String application){

       return false;

}

Still, applying though.</comment>


The Campaign Cash That Can Kill the Open Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/09/the-campaign-cash-that-can-kill-the-open-internet.html

<comment><AUTHOR> With the GOP in control of both the Senate and House, keeping net neutrality is an ongoing issue.</comment>