Beyond Intelligent Machines: Just Do It (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/93-03/93-03.html <comment><USER2> Thanks Don for that mention of the old paper, which is still on the right track. My new paper appeared on line Friday and will be temporarily freely accessible:

> Shneiderman, Ben (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, > Safe & Trustworthy, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction,36, > 6 (Published Online March 27, 2020). > [https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118](https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118)

I have spent a year developing these ideas, but the evolution was dramatic, based on thoughtful feedback from the 25+ people mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Speaking at U-W, Stanford, UBC, NSF & ONR and elsewhere helped repeatedly reshape my arguments. All that commentary added to the journal editors' confidence that this was an important paper, so they fast tracked reviews & production and gave it priority in the publication queue. Please send this link around to your colleagues, where appropriate.

Feedback welcome... Stay healthy... Ben

<comment><USER3> Woops, due to obscure formatting syntax issues, the link you included didn't get hypertextified, because the line was indented, so it formatted it as code without links. (Principle of Least Astonishment Violation!)

What a great coincidence that you just happened to publish a new version of this paper, and thank you for dropping by and sharing it!

Here's a clickable version of that link:

Shneiderman, Ben (2020). Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction,36, 6 (Published Online March 27, 2020).

[https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118](https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1741118)

<comment><USER4> (I've fixed the formatting in the GP now.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love this article! I worked with Ben Shneiderman at HCIL, and when he sent me a copy of this article to review, I was inspired by the "Dynamic Queries" of his "Dynamic Home Finder" demo, to implement something like that for SimCity (the Frob-O-Matic window). [Video and transcript below.]

Here are some of the main points of his article:

Don't label machines as "intelligent".

It limits the imagination. We should have greater ambitions.

Enable humans to accomplish tasks that weren't before possible, instead of trying to enable machines to accomplish tasks people can already do.

Predictability and control are desirable qualities. Give users the feeling of mastery, competence, and understanding, sense of accomplishment.

The "intelligent machine" label limits or even eliminates human responsibility.

If you treat machines like people, you're likely to end up treating people like machines.

Ben Shneiderman called his lab HCIL instead of CHIL, to explicitly put Humans before Computers.

Here's his description of "Dynamic Queries" and the "Dynamic Home Finder":

>Dynamic Queries. These animations let you rapidly adjust query parameters and immediately display updated result sets, which makes them very effective when a visual environment like a map, calendar, or schematic diagram is available. The immediate display of results lets users more easily develop intuitions, discover patterns, spot trends, find exceptions, and see anomalies.

>Figure 2 shows a screen from Dynamic HomeFinder, a prototype interface for real-estate agents that uses dynamic queries, written by Christopher Williamson of UM. Users can adjust the cost, number of bedrooms, and location of the A and B markers, among other characteristics, and points of light appear on a map to indicate a home that matches their specifications. Clicking on a point of light brings up a home description or image.

>Users of Dynamic HomeFinder can execute up to 100 queries per second (rather than one query per 100 seconds as is typical in a database query language), producing a revealing animated view of where high- or low-price homes are found-and there are no syntax errors.

>Our empirical study of 18 users showed Dynamic HomeFinder to be more effective than a natural-language interface using Q&A from Symantec (C. WIlliamson and B. Shneiderman, The Dynamic HomeFinder: Evaluating Dynamic Queries in a Real-Estate Information Exploration System," Proc. SIG Information Retrieval, ACM Press, 1992, pp. 338-346).

[https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/papers/Williamson1992dynami...](https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/papers/Williamson1992dynamic.pdf)

That inspired me to implement a version of the "Dynamic Home Finder" in SimCity:

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux (Dynamic Home Finder / Frob-O-Matic demo at 3:35).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=3m35s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=3m35s)

Transcript:

Here's an interesting thing inspired by Ben Shneiderman.

We can look at the ... This is the "Dynamic Zone Filter".

So we are going to set this to be dynamic.

Now it's going to show all the zones, but it's not going to show the ones that don't pass this filter.

So this filter is currently all the way open.

Now we're going to change population density.

This is a two-ended slider.

This is the segment of the population density, from zero to 81.

So everything else will disappear.

Say I'm looking for a home. I want low population density. But I want high rate of growth.

And now, these are the places that have low population density and high rate of growth.

And then you can just interactivally ... So each of these filters out some of the places.

So you can look at ... I don't want high traffic density. I don't want any pollution. I don't want any crime. I want land value to be high.

I'm getting pretty picky. So maybe I'll deal with more people. Lower rate of growth. I'm too picky about pollution. I'm too picky about land value. That's it.

So basically, Ben Shneiderman demonstrated this as the "Dynamic Home Finder", and I realized that SimCity has all these layers of information that it can draw on, as fictitious as they are, to do that kind of real time, interactive, smooth database query.

It's just a much higher bandwidth way to query a database than is conventionally used.

Anyway, that was the dynamic zone finder.

Also: Here's some email I wrote to Ben about this article, after re-reading the article again in 2009:

Date: 28/02/2009 18:51 Subject: Re-reading "Beyond Intelligent Machines"

A long time ago, you sent us (me, Brad Myers, Jack Callahan and Mark Weiser) a preview of your IEEE Software article "Beyond Intelligent Machines", which I ran across and have re-read.

It's still delightful, inspiring and relevant today.

Speech synthesis and recognition has come a long way, to the point where the "talking car" scenario is quite common (TomToms that speak and recognize street names and addresses).

But I think the development of user-customizable user interfaces has been dreadfully stalled since HyperCard died.

An "Interactive Learning Environment" is a great description of what I'm developing SimCity into.

Remember when you visited CMU and I showed you the version of SimCity with the dynamic query feature, an "homage" to your Dynamic Home Finder? You could dial a series of filters on spatial properties like population density, pollution, traffic, land value, police coverage, etc. That code is now open source, and I'm redeveloping it!

It's now very easy to write Python code to dynamically query and filter the map and data layers, and visualize with transparent colored tiles and pixel overlays, depending on arbitrary Python functions over the state of the map and its data layers.

And it's also possible to script agents in Python!

Here's a picture of SimCity with the traffic overlay enabled (showing yellow/orange/red haze over high traffic areas), with some PacMan agents, which are programmed to follow roads, go towards high traffic and eat the cars! Notice the clear road behind each PacMan!

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCityPacMan.png](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/SimCityPacMan.png)

        -Don

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE)

A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins.

Source Code: [https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis](https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis)

HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk- trans...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript- constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> pdf of the original magazine article: [https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Shneiderman1993Beyond.pdf](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Shneiderman1993Beyond.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing. This is awesome-</comment>


A prescient footnote - <AUTHOR> http://blog.oddhead.com/2010/07/15/most-prescient-footnote-ever/

<comment><USER2> Those footnotes have a mix of prescience and just plain wrong. For instance, there's one about how a good open source browser can fundamentally change the industry; and Firefox has in that time gained much ground and helped spur innovation in IE and across the web (as have WebKit and Chrome). However, Firefox was already underway by the time he wrote this, so that prediction isn't necessarily so forward looking.

His opposition to client-side software, though, is less prescient. He says that JavaScript may not be available when you can browse the web on your phone; but JavaScript support is now one of the distinguishing features of new smartphones. He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong. Mostly, Java applets themselves were a bad technology, but client side code that integrates with the Web is a popular idea, in the form of Flash and JavaScript.

So yeah, there's one prescient quote in there, but some more that are wrong. And many people were hoping for an Apple iPod/phone for quite a while; see, for example, <http://technologizer.com/2009/12/28/iphone-rumors/> (the first list of collected iPhone rumors I found in a google search).

<comment><USER3> Hold on a second.

 _He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong_

What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And indeed the prediction turned out correct, if not so prescient as to be newsworthy years later.

Assuming I'm guessing correctly, that brings us to 3 correct predictions vs. 1 incorrect one, quite a bit better a record than you're implying.

Edit: Also, since you allude to "some more that were wrong": care to say what they were?

<comment><USER2> "In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the technology everyone was going to use to develop server-base applications. Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea. Download programs to run on the client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been lured into this tar pit. Few seem to have escaped alive."

p. 227, from scrolling around a bit from the Google Books links in the original post: [http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&pg=PA228&#...](http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=ipod+cell)

Also, pp. 228-229:

"I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they'll even support it."

Note that this is just from reading a few of the footnotes from that link; I haven't read the rest of the book, so I can't speak much on it. All I'm saying is that he got some things right, some wrong, and that other people were talking about an iPhone before he did.

And I should have said "a few prescient quotes, and a few that are wrong." The "one prescient quote" that I wrote was a mistake on my part, as I had just discussed two prescient quotes (iPhone and open-source browser innovation); not sure why I wrote "one."

<comment><USER4> >I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they'll even support it.

I read this as being advice for the then-present, not a prediction. "Javascript isn't necessary, doesn't work well, and it's not guaranteed that it will work in future."

<comment><USER2> The part about "when you start to be able to browse actual web pages" sure sounded like a prediction; and by the time mobile web browsers caught up to the point where you could reasonably browse the open web on them, they were perfectly capable of running JavaScript just as well as desktop browsers.

This book was published in 2004, the same year that Gmail was released making heavy use of JavaScript to provide a much better webmail experience than previous competitors. So, it wasn't even that great a description of the present, other than the fact that he probably actually wrote it before the release of Gmail.

My main point is just that if you look at the one quote about an Apple phone with a web browser, out of context, he does look fairly prescient; but if you look at the rest of them, and the history of iPhone rumors, he has about as good a track record as anyone reasonably bright and paying attention to the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a 9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone.

My _favorite_ one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called _The Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way_ , which explains, as it says on the tin, how to go about producing a hit record without any money or musical talent.

One of the most impressive things about this book is this bit, from the section on coming up with a good catchy chorus for your smash hit, something people will remember:

 _Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7" single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over - the Number One position was guaranteed:

"I'm never going to give you up"

It says it all. It's what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

"I'm never gonna let you down I'm never going to fool around or upset you"

GENIUS._

Amazing. By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll.

<comment><USER6> _By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll._

No. The people who bought the single in 1987 were responding to the song very differently from the people who turned it into an internet meme 20 years later. The passage you quote describes the former; it doesn't predict the latter.

<comment><USER5> True, but if the song weren't as singularly, brilliantly catchy as it is it probably wouldn't have legs as a meme.

<comment><USER7> I thought it has become a meme because it is so annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very impressive. In 1994 (I think, I can't be sure of the date anymore), I wrote an article in MacWorld France where I said the combination of Apple's GUI with the Unix kernel had a promising future.

I didn't know it would take another 10 years...

<comment><USER9> Something to that effect had been around for a while by then: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX>

Apple has a wealth of fascinating abandoned projects.

<comment><USER10> When they fail, they fail with style.

I'd love to have an A/UX box.

Edit: didn't think of it this way when writing the above, but a unix kernel with an actual, Apple designed, Mac GUI on top was actually a failure... Go figure.

<comment><USER11> I've got an IIsi with A/UX on it. It's pretty neat, though a bit slow--9M of RAM isn't quite enough. I'd love to give you a hand setting up your own machine, let me know. :)

<comment><USER10> Sadly, I have no MMU-equipped 68K Mac. A/UX required one. :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In hindsight if you do enough searching you can always find people who predicted, or appeared to predict, future events.

<comment><USER13> It depends how specific the predictions are. Anyone can make some vague Nostradamus type prediction. Whereas I actually take pride in my spring '07 analysis of why cell phone software was broken:

[http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_soft.html)

(Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it can only be proven or disproven by future events.)

The funny thing is that the post sounds completely banal today, but at the time there were several hundred comments about how wrong I was and all sorts of industry insiders calling me dumb.

<comment><USER14> A lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell what I'm doing while I fiddle with my phone).

You also say that "the next generation of WiFi will make your product obsolete in two years anyway." Well, it's been three years, and the next generation of WiFi hasn't made anything obsolete.

You also say this: "Cell phones don't fit into girl's pants. Remember how the women you asked said they would only use your software if it had a vibrate mode? Oops." I don't know if this is a prophecy that women won't use cell phones or what exactly it is.

<comment><USER13> The WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry. But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for the thing about women, women used to store their cell phones in their purses and not in their pants until phones like the iPhone and the razor came along. Without this shift it would have been very, very difficult for services like twitter to have taken off.

<comment><USER15> > the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes

Uh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ha, this made me search the web for things PG said recently. I didn't find anything _that_ specific although I wonder what he thinks of Google/Facebook or Android/iPhone standoffs

Come to think of it, I wonder what is going to happen to Microsoft? Something is obviously coming (they won't just fade into background), but what would it be?

People say that oh, don't worry Microsoft will become just like IBM, but I don't buy it. IBM does a lot of different things, and it did even more in the past but stopped. Microsoft, on the other hand, really does just one thing well: Windows/Office and, assuming those _are_ going to fade away, what does it leave them with? That's why I believe there's going to be a major shift/transition in Microsoft business model.

<comment><USER6> The closest record of his current predictions would presumably be the YC roster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> PG also made this statement in May 2009 (iPad released April 2010):

What would be your dream setup?

 _I'd like it if the Air was about half the size. I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone..._

Source: <http://paul.graham.usesthis.com>

<comment><USER18> That's what he looks like? I don't know why I imagined PG to look a lot more like a bearded Unix-type ...?

<comment><USER19> pg is not the UNIX-type. He avoids systems-level stuff like the plague, as far as I can tell. rtm and tlb did the UNIX work at Viaweb and, I believe, rtm does the UNIX stuff for HN. pg is a smug lisp weenie (and I mean that in the best possible way). He's also a serious Apple fanboy, which the right and proper UNIX beards tend not to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Heh, I made the same prediction one year before Apple released the iPhone. <http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/> Oddly enough, it was the last post I made on my blog. Wish I could have capitalized on my foresight.

<comment><USER14> Your blog post reads more like a wish than a prediction. "I want my Apple iPod to make phone calls for me, play video's for me, play J2ME games for me, be WiFi enabled so it can login to my corporate network and check my email on Exchange, take 5MP pictures for me, allow me to IM people and surf the net, and play MP3's all in an iPod-like fit and finish. Why is this so hard?"

<comment><USER20> Read a little further: "Once Apple figures this out, their record iPod sales from 2005 will pale in comparison." and "I'd rather carry one sleek iPod-ish device that does everything for me."

You see wishes do come true!

<comment><USER21> There had been talk of "convergence" for years, where the digital camera, digital music player, digital phone, PDA, etc. would be combined into one device.

However, that's not exactly an earthshaking prediction. I mean, really, did anyone think that this wouldn't eventually happen? It's more of a question of when. In fact, when I read your quote, you're not predicting something, you're asking for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?

<comment><USER23> Sell the stock of its competitors short.

<comment><USER24> What happens when the entire market segment balloons? APPL might beat out MSFT, but if everyone is more profitable, your short failed.

<comment><USER25> Are there publicly-available financial instruments that account for this?

<comment><USER24> A put order would work well for this, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bad reasoning: Remember the hits, forget the misses.

<comment><USER27> The hits are impressive nonetheless. I think that there is a lesson to take away over here; perhaps pg is good at this because he has the combination of common sense, practical knowledge and experience?

It's quite easy to detract from/criticize something, but to learn something from it is everything.

<comment><USER28> A given prediction can only be considered impressive in relation to the predictor's track record. If pg's made a thousand similar public predictions and this is the only one to come true, then it's not impressive. There is insufficient evidence presented in TFA to judge whether or not this prediction was "particularly prescient" or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What about the 2nd comment on the post, by "Sean O"?

Javascript/Ajax has been fundamental to "new-age" tech giants. See Google's Gmail.

<comment><USER30> A lot of JS on the web does still break all the time, to be fair. It's not like he predicted it would never improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm pretty sure PG bought a lot of Apple stock in 2001-2003

</comment><comment><USER32> A conversation several jobs ago, well before the iPhone:

Engineering Manager: Well, mobile is obviously a next big thing.

Me: You know what would be hot? If you could be listening to your MP3, then you get a call and the music fades out into your call. Then when the call ends, it fades back in. That would sell like hotcakes.

Engineering Manager: [Looks at me like I'm an idiot]

</comment><comment><USER33> So, the key to being seen as prescient is to make sure you get it in writing. John Doe of Hoboken could have said the same thing, but it wouldn't be possible to quote him on it since he only told his barber. Good reason to start blogging, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER34> Perhaps Apple reads pg, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...

<comment><USER35> Does Apple read Hacker News?

If Apple gives me a free iPhone 4, Microsoft will be in big trouble...

<comment><USER36> Nowadays, they probably care more about Google than Microsoft. Nice try though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Everybody has opinions. Some of them become true, most don't.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, no disrespect to Graham, but oatmeal-against-the-wall....</comment></comment>


Why Pre-Order Food Then Wait in Line - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-pre-order-food-then-wait-in-line-i-do-not-want-to-seem-like-an-ass-1525272972 <comment><USER2> I have had to send cash to my sister a handful of times recently. Because her bank (Bank of America) stopped allowing cash deposits to any account other than your own, the most convenient and inexpensive way to do this was through Walmart, which has its own money transfer service. You can arrange the transfer through an app, then you go to an express line at a Walmart store and complete the whole transaction in under a minute.

The problem is that Walmart underestimated just how angry its typical customer would get by seeing someone skip the line (even though there is a special line for app-based transactions). Of the three times I have done this, once I was called expletives by a couple of the people in line, and a second time a woman simply decided to come up at the same time I was called up and insist that it was her turn, not mine. Only after the cashier threatened to call security did she go wait her turn.

It turns out that the typical Walmart customer tends to already be stepped on by the rest of the world a lot during their normal lives, and being slighted in a Walmart seems to be a bridge too far for most of them. So while I enjoy the convenience of skipping the line, I won't be doing it again. Stores that offer features like this need to consider how their clientele will react to others skipping the line, and engineer the experience in such a way that normal customers don't feel slighted.

<comment><USER3> >I have had to send cash to my sister a handful of times recently. Because her bank (Bank of America) stopped allowing cash deposits to any account other than your own, the most convenient and inexpensive way to do this was through Walmart, which has its own money transfer service. You can arrange the transfer through an app, then you go to an express line at a Walmart store and complete the whole transaction in under a minute.

The fact that you can't just send money from your online banking to another person absolutely baffles me.

<comment><USER2> Zelle is supposed to be the magic bullet for this, but it isn't supported by all banks (including mine). I could technically send her a wire online, but I think my bank would charge me $30 to send it and then her bank would deduct $25 or so to receive it. Compare that $55 to the $8 that Walmart charges.

I could get myself a bank account at BofA for the specific purpose of sending her money, but I just refuse to give them a dime of my money because they suck.

<comment><USER4> > Compare that $55 to the $8 that Walmart charges.

Compare that to €5 to SEPA transfers in the EU between banks in two countries, or to €0 between banks in the same country.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of SEPA is that they aren't allowed to charge more for a SEPA payment out of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Starbucks designs their stores' flow to have cashiers near an ingress point and the orders are usually delivered at the far end of the counter from where queuing starts. Starbucks has signage indicating "mobile order pickup here" and it's usually in the same location that normal orders are delivered. I would probably wait in line at other stores but at Starbucks, I can see my order waiting for me with my name written on it. I don't feel like I'm jumping the queue -- most folks probably can't distinguish my order from one that was placed at the cashier.

</comment><comment><USER7> Of course the reason is that the stores are not set up to accommodate pre- orders. The design of the stores themselves imply a particular relationship with the cashiers and other customers. It ought to be easy to fix for new construction and renovation if it's part of the plan. But it's a risk of pasting new business models onto existing infrastructure.

<comment><USER8> Panera has a really good model (Rapid Pickup) whereby preorders are name- tagged and shelved on a self-service, grab-and-go counter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> maybe its a "thing" for some of us, but if you are in a queue you can feel like a prole, when somebody bypasses you to be served before you. Sure: they paid and ordered first, but the emotion in the queue is very disempowering.

breeding resentment is usually bad.

I think if the 'pick up here' was a hole in the wall outside the store, it would be more like drive-through with MacDonalds where everyone understands its a distinct queue.

The way these pre-order lines work, it can feel like you've been put into the second-class citizen box.

Queueing at Airline desks is often similar btw. I have high status, but its a walk of shame to inact it sometimes. People in economy, 100+ deep, resenting my ability to get quick service because the airline doesn't pre-empt my queue to service them, in slack times. (some do, many dont)

</comment><comment><USER10> Very similar to CLEAR. I love the idea of expediting security at the airport but I hate the way the agent moves them to the front of the line. It is very awkward.

<comment><USER11> that's just a not-so-subtle marketing tactic.

<comment><USER12> Why do government agencies need to market services?

Why are there slow lanes for people with less money in a government situation?

Can you pay extra to skip the line at the DMV? (actually, you can in California, by having a AAA membership)

<comment><USER13> Clear is a private company though? I assume they have just negotiated a deal with the airport and the TSA.

To the question for government agencies to market they services, I absolutely think they should. Often marketing it's just informing people that something exist, so if they government wants people to use some service or change their behavior, they should do marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is how it is at Jersey Mikes. They'll give you a discount to preorder, but you still wait in line and during lunch it can take 15 mins. without the online code i don't know why you'd order online and have your sandwich sit there for 15 minutes.

<comment><USER15> There's a sandwich place near my house that works like this. The line often takes 15-20 minutes during lunch times, but I call just as I step into the line. I can literally see the cashier way up at the front pause the whole line to take my call. By the time I get up to pay my sandwich is ready while the people before me are still standing around cramped against the counter for another 10 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just use the drive-through and you'll skip everyone.

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://archive.is/XgyGw](http://archive.is/XgyGw)

<comment><USER18> I believe that another method to bypass the paywall is to copy the link and post it on facebook and then click it again, preferably in incognito mode.

<comment><USER19> There is also the web link under the story

<comment><USER20> The web link for WSJ articles haven't worked for me in a long time (even if opened in an incognito window). The Facebook trick still works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The best way I've found to circumvent the paywall is to simply edit the URL by putting "full" before "wjs" so this link would be [https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/why-pre-order-food-then- wai...](https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/why-pre-order-food-then-wait-in-line- i-do-not-want-to-seem-like-an-ass-1525272972)

It redirects through Facebook so you'll need a FB account.

<comment><USER17> That doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER22> use outline.com</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft new business model - get royalties for Google freebies - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2011/microsoft-inks-patent-deal-with-wistron-over-android-or-chrome

<comment><USER2> They really live up to the borg ethics...</comment>


Don't be fooled, instagram didn't change shit - <AUTHOR> http://faizanaziz.com/post/51635810324/dont-be-fooled-instagram-didnt-change-shit

<comment><USER2> Great job. We need to overcome our fear for charging for our products and services.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


How to lead by first principles - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mmccue/the-most-powerful-lesson-i-ve-ever-learned-in-business-4d89e95ab250#.mqqole6ib <comment><USER3> Even assuming that there are such things that may be called "first principles", there usually is an awful amount of movement (leeway) around them which may not be always admitted openly and which makes the object of politics. (The problem in the example given, about a company faced with an important decision about how to respond to an external force, is an omnipresent problem that independent tribes, city-states, or nations had/have, and is nothing but a political decision - "do we fight or do we surrender?")

Read again this: _" Were we really destined to be a profitable company that nobody really cared about except for a few carriers? Is this what our team signed up for?"_ and say it's not a political rhetoric in every way? For the same situation different people can lead their audience to totally different "obvious" conclusions depending on how will they construct the decision rationale (what will they take into account or emphasize and what will they ignore or downplay). The real craft/trick here is how to appear like an impartial judge (i.e. neutral) in the process.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apparently, the first "first principle" he reached for was the one that shone immediate light on the situation. If that's true, he got amazingly lucky. Reasoning solely from established facts is wonderful when you can do it; but I don't think this article is painting a realistic picture of the difficulties involved. Such reasoning may take time, with many false starts, and it may not get you all the way to the conclusion you need.

<comment><USER4> Actually, on re-reading the piece, the author isn't claiming he thought up this argument on the spur of the moment. I got confused because of the dramatic narrative, which started with the meeting already going on before the author started talking about his thought process. I now think the author is saying this "first-principles" reasoning is a good way to credibly explain strategic decisions, which makes a lot more sense than using it to deduce strategic decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are not "first principles". First principles are fundamental and universal. All the things the author is calling "first principles" are actually "facts". Instead of "arguing from first principles" the author is "using logic".

<comment><USER6> I quite liked the article but I agree with you that these are not really "first principles". Seem like the story was shoe-horned to fit the analogy. The author could have taken the same story and used it to illustrate the power of open questions such as "what do I know to be true" instead of first principles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rather than first principles, I've seen this work better when a company decides what their core principles are. These are not decided at a time of crisis or are a big decision, but early in the company's development. When you decide exactly what you are doing, why, and what your goals are. And you use those principles to drive your decisions, strategies, and plans from then on.

Of course, at first glance, startups would seem to be against this kind of definition of principles, because they "pivot" to find a market - but that in itself is a core principle. You are not defined by your product, but by your final goal - large revenue and growth matter more than details of the product.

The way to get to your core principles is to ask yourself what aspects of your company are so critical to its integrity that you would rather shut down the company than break those principles.

Answer that, let those answers guide you, let those answers be known when hiring your team, and you will build a company that makes decisions easier, and with less internal conflict.

<comment><USER3> I hate to be cynical, but I somehow feel a duty to help (seemingly enlightened) people like you, so... _" The way to get to your core principles is to ask yourself what aspects of your company are so critical to its integrity that you would rather shut down the company than break those principles."_ How would anyone know the quality of the principles obtained through such a rationale - that those principles aren't far-fetched, or don't impose unnecessary hurdles that may hurt the company and everyone in it, or are too unsubstantiated to mean anything, and so on? On the individual level such principles have at least the animal nature to start with - survive (which is not a choice) and replicate, and pretty much everything we do will contribute in some way or another to those two. But how can one come up with similar a reason for a company, the existence of which is in itself optional to start with? For companies I haven't found yet any hard principles (other than companies being a form of group effort to address in the end the same individual survival and replication, which as a goal isn't that often reflected in the actual organizational behavior).

<comment><USER7> That isn't being cynical, it is a legitimate discussion to figure out what is too abstract, and what is helpful.

But when you start off with having "a duty to help seemingly enlightened people like me", you turned what could have been a productive point into a patronizing insult, so I'm not inclined to even have that discussion.

<comment><USER3> _«But when you start off with having "a duty to help seemingly enlightened people like me", you turned what could have been a productive point into a patronizing insult, so I'm not inclined to even have that discussion.»_

A positive person would rather have taken/considered the compliment from my words. Sorry to offend you.

<comment><USER7> Hey, it is the internet - no tone of voice or facial expressions to read, so sometimes communication isn't so smooth. And you may be right, I don't default to assuming positive intent from discussions online. That may be a personal flaw with me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are not first principles. These are premises used to establish the logic that follows.

As long as you can question the premise and dig deeper you are not reasoning from first principle.

I don't even think it really applies to language but instead to science and means something very different.

<comment><USER9> > These are not first principles. These are premises used to establish the > logic that follows.

Aren't those the same thing?

It seems the author is referring to core beliefs or premises that the business was found on, as well as relationships in the team. The point is to get to 'truths' everyone agrees upon. Not unlike first principles in physics - <USER2> just assume because of the amount of evidence, that say, thermodynamic laws are true, and everyone can agree on that.

<comment><USER8> Well the difference is the solidity of the premise.

Scientific first principles are not necessarily objectively true but they are the best we know of. I.e. as far as we collectively know this is the first principle.

This vs. I believe this and I am going to reason from here. Which is much more likely to be subjective.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I suppose I agree. Given the lack of scientifically proven first principles in management, psychology or social sciences, perhaps going to 'truth' agreed upon in the group is the best we can do in order to use this reasoning tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well if you use first principles to an extreme, you might decide that work is pointless (or even bad) and you'll decide to live in a small cabin instead like Ted Kaczynski. People who claim to use first principle are usually dishonest about it and have many assumptions they can't justify.

</comment><comment><USER11>
      "I think its important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy." -- Elon Musk

Maybe this guy is the next Elon Musk?

Jokes aside, isn't reasoning from first principles about going deeper and deeper to understand the root causes of problems, before working back from them? This seems foundational to problem-solving, but not necessarily an element of leadership.

<comment><USER12> > _Maybe this guy is the next Elon Musk?_

More likely, this guy read the same quote by Elon Musk.

<comment><USER13> Hey, I think it was a pretty obvious idea. In high school, preparing for physics exams, rather than memorising all the formulas, I worked on figuring them out based on some root principles, on the fly. So every exam I spent the first 10 minutes reading the exam and deriving all the formulas I gathered I needed on the back of the answer booklet. It was a lot more effective than memorising which type of questions needed which formula.

Like maybe 15 years ago my dad wanted to teach me maths and he kept repeating the importance of learning the 'first principles'. I didn't get a word he was saying at the time, but looking back, he had the idea too.

<comment><USER14> This is standard physics pedagogy, and has been for generations.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I agree and it's unreasonable to attribute it to Elon Musk every time someone brings the idea up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is from wikipedia: "A first principle is a basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption."

"We must pick one or risk failing at both" How is this first principle? Google cannot say we will do search and not android. Are these first principles unique to his business?

</comment><comment><USER16> I've noticed lawyers are good at this. They have a mastery of deductive logic and ask you to agree with what appear to be obvious statements. Then from those obvious statements they deduce an airtight conclusion. It's a brilliant move.

<comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11161388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11161388) (in this page)

It's not only lawyer's trick, it's actually something pretty basic in persuasion's toolkit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what are the other arguments from his 2 advisers. They had a clear competitive advantage, and question should have been posted by both advisers as they have been described to be very qualified. So, what else do they know to be true?

</comment><comment><USER18> The art, the magic, is knowing which questions to ask.</comment>


How Apple lost the next iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5520438/

<comment><USER2> Tacky.</comment>


Ask HN:  How much ownership is reasonable for a technical co-founder? - <AUTHOR>

Typical scenario: I am potentially about to partner with 2 other gents who will be the "business" half of our proposed startup while I will be tasked with building and launching the actual app.  How much ownership is reasonable here? <comment><USER2> If it's 3 people contributing 100% of their time to the project then it should be 33% for each. If you don't think they will contribute enough to the project for their 33% then perhaps you should be looking for other founders/partners.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is along the lines of what I was thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why do you need the business types to be co-founders? Why do they get shares at all? Why not hire them as employees (or temporary contractors)? Is your prototype done? If not, why do you need business-types now? What value do they add?

You should retain majority if not 100% of the shares. That way you have more shares left in the pool with which to recruit engineers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: What was Usenet's ultimate demise? - <AUTHOR> It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP's dropping USENET support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it's tough for the government to control what people say on USENET? <comment><USER2> Old usenet-head here (on it regularly from 1991, first met it 1986) ...

First problem: there's no identity authentication mechanism in NNTP. So spam is a problem, forged moderation headers are a problem, general abuse is a problem. (A modern syndicated forum system with OAuth or some successor model would be a lot easier to ride herd on.)

Second problem: storage demands expand faster than the user base. Because it's a flood-fill store-and-forward system, each server node tries to replicate the entire feed. Consequently news admins tended to put a short expiry on posts in binary groups so they'd be deleted fairly promptly ... but if you do that, the lusers can't find what they're looking for so they ask their friends to repost the bloody things, ad nauseam.

Third problem: etiquette. Yeah, yeah, I am coming over all elitist here, but the original usenet mindset was exactly that. These days we're used to being overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to look at Facebook, but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet more or less got along because the users were university staff and students (who could be held accountable to some extent) and computer industry folks. Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall _before_ he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had _killfiles_.) Anyway, a side-effect of this was that when web browsers began to show up, the response was to double-down on the high-powered CURSES-based or pure command-line clients rather than to try and figure out how to put an easy-to-use interface on top of a news spool. Upshot: usenet clients remained rooted in the early 1990s at best.

These days much of the functionality of usenet (minus the binaries) is provided by Reddit. Usenet itself turned into a half-assed space-hogging brain dead file sharing network. And we know what ISPs think of space-hogging half- assed stuff that doesn't make them money and risks getting them sued.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a piece thinking about why nobody ever did write a good web interface for NNTP: [http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html](http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html)

my thesis: the atom of NNTP is the message, the atom of web forums is the thread.

(Commenters on that are mostly old BOFHnetters you may still recognise.)

<comment><USER4> There were a few web interfaces, but apart from the hatred the old Usenet users had for web users, there were technical difficultiers that were never overcome.

The biggest one was probably charsets. Back then it wasn't really possible to detect the proper charset for what the user entered into your text field, as far as I was told.

But it was only so bad because users were unreasonable: de.*, for example, really frowned upon UTF-8 and demanded Latin-1 or Latin-15. Minimal coding, of course, so if you used the Euro sign you had to use Latin-15, if there was no Euro sign in your posting, you had to use Latin-1.

And there were even extremists who declared everything apart from 7 bit ASCII illegal...

<comment><USER5> > There were a few web interfaces, but apart from the hatred the old Usenet > users had for web users, there were technical difficultiers that were never > overcome.

To expand upon this a bit it wasn't all just knee jerk elitism. Some web clients were terrible and did terrible things.

WebTV in particular would add animated gif backgrounds and MIDI music. Since Usenet was a text medium those messages would have the gif and midi encoded as text (UUENCODEd?) and added to the post, with a bunch of raw HTML as well. Other users got huge amounts of HTML and uuencoded "stuff" or they got animated backgrounds and MIDI music - either one was pretty awful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (Background: I'm a Usenet user from the late 80's to early naughties, did outsourcing at netaxs as newsread.com, then ran readnews.com from 2004-1024).

Usenet is still around but mostly for binaries. The market's of pretty stable size, dominated by a few large wholesale players.

My take on what happened with text groups is that the S/N ratio just went to hell. In the 90s the problem was spam, but in the 2000s the problem was too many loudmouths who wanted to hear themselves talk drowning out the useful experts.

Like some of the other folks commenting, I've been pissed as hell at the PHPBB/vbulleting monstrosities. My original plan with readnews was to try to build a great web UI for discussion, but we got distracted by wholesale customers wanting service - and front-end is not my area of expertise.

For folks looking for something modern with promise, the news is good with discourse and a few others coming up. Would love to see something distributed, but if really distributed I suspect we'd see binaries and/or commercial spam and/or people with nothing interesting to say dominate - just like Usenet...

<comment><USER7> Wow a shout out for our Discourse project from Avi. This made my day, thank you!

And yeah, distributed discussions are moon-shot hard, unfortunately.

<comment><USER6> We'll loop detect to end the mutual admiration society, but thanks from you makes my day :) I just tweeted a pointer to "Doing Terrible Things" and suggested people read all of the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe". I want "Falsehoods as a Service" \- outsourced paranoia.

And yes, distributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow eliminating crap is definitely moon-shot hard.

<comment><USER8> _distributed discussions that preserve free speech and allow eliminating crap is definitely moon-shot hard._

The way you just defined the problem, it's not moon shot hard; it's a logical impossibility. "Free speech" and "eliminating crap" are complete opposites. You can't have one with the other. If you want a high quality of discussions, some people are going to have to be deprived of their voice to make that happen, either through moderation or selective membership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given Here is a more interesting question:

How would you _reinvent_ Usenet?

What Usenet did well was that it was completely decentralised, had zero cost of engagement (despite 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars'), and was everywhere.

What Usenet did badly was that there was a complete absence of identity management or access controls, which meant no accountability, which meant widespread abuse; and no intelligence about transmitting messages, which meant that every server had to have a copy of the entire distributed database, which meant it wouldn't scale.

It's a tough problem. You need some way to propagate good messages while penalising bad messages in an environment where you cannot algorithmically determine what good or bad is, or have a single unified view of all messages, all users, or even all servers. And how do you deal with bad actor servers? You _know_ that somewhere, there's a Santor and Ciegel who are trying to game the system in order to spam everyone with the next Green Card Lottery...

<comment><USER9> I think reddit is the reinvention of USENET. It is mod-heavy and has enough critical mass of users to provide excellent results from its upvoting system. And many subreddits are extremely well maintained with a very high signal to noise ratio.

It even has its equivalent of alt.binaries.pics.* if one is so inclined.

<comment><USER7> Sort of, voting rearranging the chronological stream of conversation makes it significantly different IMO. There is also the phenomenon of funniest image tending to win the votes, too. (Barring excellent moderation, but Reddit does very little to make moderation easy, or even set goals for moderation.)

That's not great for discussion, but then Reddit was always designed as more of a system of briefly commenting on URLs than actual discussion.

<comment><USER9> This is only true for the front page and for things like /r/AdviceAnimals. The front page is in and of itself a separate phenomenon than the rest of the subreddits, in my opinion.

For many subreddits, there are truly fantastic discussions that are very relevant to the subreddit topic. /r/askHistorians or /r/askScience, for example, has an extremely high signal to noise ratio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Binary groups were huge and users expected them for free. And users would download huge amounts of stuff. So it's pretty much a cost sink, and ISPs who tried to start charging (for this service that had dramatically increased costs) were faced with vigorous campaigns. At some point it's easier to just cancel and tell disattisfied customers to get a new ISP if they're unhappy.

The amount of groups distributing images of child sexual abuse created some risk (not every ISP is in the US) and things like stealth binary groups distributing porn put a bunch of people in oppressive regimes in tricky situations.

[http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/misplacedbin.html](http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/misplacedbin.html)

ISPs could have dropped binaries and only carried text groups. But this means putting up with groups of people who strongly held but conflicting opinions:

1) be a dumb pipe and provide everything

2) be a dumb pipe but filter spam with a Breidbart index of something or other.

3) make the news server operate to rules laid out in the ISP's ToS. (Young people may not realise but a lot of effort on the early Internet was spent on "what do we do if our users go on the Internet and start swearing?" Many ISPs had rules forbidding swearing. (At least, they did in europe))

Then www forums sprung up and they had some advantages: avatars, mods, etc.

<comment><USER10> I don't recognize the bit about "dumb pipes". News is a service, not a pipe. Very few servers carry _all_ groups. Some didn't even carry the alt groups, _that_ wasn't fun.

The ISPs I worked at in the late 90s did not carry the binaries groups, becuase of the outrageous storage requirements. I think that was quite common.

<comment><USER5> No provider would carry all groups, and when you looked at particular groups most providers would not carry all posts.

But you still had some people saying that providers should do zero filtering at all, ever, and that doing so was evil censorship of the worst North Korean kind. Filtering was strictly something for users to do.

That's impossible for providers to do when people are using groups to distribute images of child sexual abuse.

Many customers were happy that sporge was filtered. Most customers wanted some kind of spam filtering, even using the very tight definition of Breidbart Index.

So there were conflicts in the userbase, which got pushed onto ISP support. Since ISPs were already paying for huge storage requirements I can totally understand this being part of the consideration to cut usenet.

<comment><USER10> Not carrying all groups is not the same as filtering. I'm sure the reasoning you describe exists, but it wasn't a very mainstream view. As a tiny data point, none of the ISPs I worked at saw this as a support problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I skimmed the comments here, and never saw the real answer (to what I understand the question to be). Even though it was public knowledge, I had some extra insight from working for a large Usenet provider.

The New York Attorney General started a campaign against child porn groups on Usenet. In the end, his office identified a small number of groups they said were used for child porn -- I think it was less than 100 groups. Many ISP's jumped on the opportunity to stop paying for Usenet service.

In the 90's it was just assumed that an ISP service would include Usenet. With the growth of binaries groups, the quality of service declined. I remember retention would be a day or two, with about 50% completion. So, for most ISP's, the service was unusable, and only a small number of subscribers knew or cared about it. The others paid quite a bit for service from a third party, like my employer. I don't know why they didn't shut down service earlier, but once the NYAG campaign started, they could cancel Usenet, saving themselves money, and getting good press for fighting child porn.

<comment><USER12> 100 groups does not sound like a small number.

<comment><USER5> Out of fifty thousand?

And we don't know the numbers of people posting to those groups, nor how often they posted, nor how many people were downloading from those groups.

Mechanisms were around for providers to filter out groups used to distribute images of child sexual abuse, so that was one option.

I think (bicbw) that the legal situation for providers was unclear in the 90s and they weren't sure if they were responsible or not.

<comment><USER12> I would intuitively expect murder to be more common than child sexual abuse, but perhaps I am being naive.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what you mean.

Do you mean "more people are murdered than are sexually abused"? That's trivially disproved, although the numbers are tricky.

One in twenty children are sexually abused. [http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services- and-resources/research-and-...](http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and- resources/research-and-resources/child-abuse-and-neglect-in-the-uk-today/)

Or 27% of women and 16% of men were sexually abused as children. (Abstract doesn't give a country). [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01452134909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0145213490900777)

In 2013/2014 there were less than 600 homicides recorded.

In a population of 60m 1 in 20 is 3,000,000

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "User interface woes" is my guess.

I found USENET and associated newsgroups to be better than the WWW, especially for discussions of software. I once even promoted the use of internal newsgroups w/in a corporate environment, where a history of topics (discussions, problems, and decisions) would have IMO proven extremely useful.

But the idea never got traction: people were unwilling to participate because newsreaders were too different from the browser and they'd had enough trouble learning to navigate the WWW. Once blogs and browser-based "newsgroups" and forums began showing up, the handwriting was on the wall. In the end, the WWW browser's low bar to entry ate USENET.

I still value the treasure trove of information stored in the archives. And some people still actively participate in USENET and other newsgroups, just as some still participate in IRC (Internet Relay Chat, which also is fading). I think these are valuable tools with a lot of greybeard expertise held in reserve.

There's a sort of Gresham's law of the Internet: "The browser drives out every other interface."

<comment><USER14> I have to mention, the D Programming language has forums that can be accessed both by a newsreader and from a web browser[1]. It is coded in a framework called Vibe.d[2] for the NNTP protocol and HTTP[3], which I think is fascinating. My only complaint is that due to the somewhat dying out of USENET for discussion reasons, and mostly it just being used for piracy (if you do a bit of research it's still just about as active as torrenting, except it's a lot more automated, used to use USENET, I rather stick to legal alternatives and avoid the paranoia), the old clients while they still work, could still use some touching up which probably wont happen.

I enjoy the idea that if all discussions in a support forum are on the NNTP protocol, I can archive them all, so I hardly have to open up a browser to search through years (decades?) of threads to see if anyone else has had the same issues as me. Imagine something like Stack Overflow all of a sudden at your finger tips without any internet access. It's a really nice thing, sometimes the internet just dies on you when you need it most.

As for IRC, people are willing to use it, if you put something useful on there (support for a project, or a community that people are interested in). If you want adoption from users who are just browsing the internet, maybe a web client / desktop client combination that makes IRC a lot less seamless to the average "I don't know" type of user.

[1]: [http://forum.dlang.org/](http://forum.dlang.org/) [2]: [http://vibed.org/](http://vibed.org/) [3]: [https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews](https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/vibenews)

<comment><USER15> Yes a webforum with an NNTP gateway would be very nice. I remember vBulletin had some functionality like this and I hope Discourse will implement it. NNTP is very nice for archiving and it's distributed. Maybe we should do twitter and discussions over blockchains... when NNTP servers get out of vogue. There is a stackoverflow dump for local use by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> USENET has always been used for porn and piracy, since at least the early 90s. Of course, most of the great newsgroups were discussions-based, but probably most of the bandwidth was porn and piracy.

When I was in college, I remember someone on my floor had written a program in Pascal that automatically downloaded porn off USENET. He would leave his computer running all the time, connected to the college's internet connection via modem, and we would occasionally see a flash of a porn pic on his screen and ask "What was that?". This was before the days of integrated TCP/IP stacks in the OS, so if I remember correctly he had to dial in via modem and then use something called Slurp or something like that, I can't remember exactly now.

This continued all through the 90s. A bunch of my friends had Airnews accounts and downloaded mp3s and porn 24x7, during what we called the "Golden Age" of piracy, when Napster was starting up in 97 up until the early 2000s, when the bust hit.

At some point, the medium for discussions moved off of USENET and went to more user friendly places like email mailing lists, google groups, yahoo groups, reddit, etc. This left only piracy and porn on USENET, and I'm actually surprised that some ISPs still support USENET at this point.

<comment><USER8> In the age of bittorrent, I'm surprised people still use USENET for piracy and porn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It felt like Usenet died as a meaningful place for discussion in the mid-to- late '90s, for all the same reasons that most (or all?) electronic communities eventually die. Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse posters, which eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy for lack of a better term.

By the time most ISPs started dropping it, a vanishingly small percentage of most ISPs' users even knew what it was, and the binaries groups had turned it into a source of both cost and legal risk. The heavy users were people who incurred that cost and risk to the ISPs because they were using it for pirating software and porn. The icing on the cake would've been the fact that it's a terribly inefficient way to distribute those things and the ISPs have to store all that stuff locally on servers they own.

From an ISP's perspective, maintaining Usenet feeds became all downside and no upside.

Regarding government control, I would think that Usenet would've been far easier to monitor and censor than the web.

<comment><USER17> > _Bad posters drive away good posters and encourage even worse posters, which > eventually results in something akin to YouTube. Forum entropy for lack of a > better term._

I've heard it labeled "evaporative cooling", per [0].

[0] - [http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/)

<comment> david-given A little while back I went back to some of the newsgroups that I was a regular on, back in the 2000s. It was... a bit disturbing. I recognised a lot of the names, but the people and attitudes behind them had changed a lot: insular, cliquey, a bit xenophobic, a bit crazy.

I've seen the same attitude before in tiny SIGs: go take a look the what's left of the classic 16-bit micro (or early 32-bit micro) userbases and you'll see a lot of it. But it was very sad to see happen to people I knew and used to interact with on a daily basis.

<comment><USER18> I noticed that too, my hypothesis is one must be a little off to stay in those small, shrinking echo chamber communities for decades. In the instance I'm thinking of, some of the members did indeed have mental health issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP's dropping USENET > support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it's > tough for the government to control what people say on USENET?

No conspiracy theories needed here.

Copyright infringement is one angle; the other is that it costs ISPs a huge amount of resources for something few people use.

Once upon a time, a single server could easily mirror all of USENET for all users of an ISP, and almost every user expected it, so they'd treat it as an essential part of the service. Now, it would take far more storage to do so, and almost nobody expects it, so why should an ISP provide it? It's easier to let people get USENET from a third-party service, and it'd be a better experience for the people who actually want it, too.

If an ISP has resources to burn and wants to make their technical users happy, they'd get far better results for more users if they provided things like local Linux distribution mirrors instead. Far more users would make use of that than USENET.

And if they want to make the vast majority of users happy, and _save_ resources on their end in the process, they can provide local CDN nodes for YouTube, Netflix, and similar.

</comment><comment><USER20> Usenet isn't dead. I still use several Usenet groups via Thunderbird. Google Groups is a Usenet host/client, and many groups belong to both the Google and Usenet spaces. The Usenet interface is easier to use, has no ads, and doesn't require a Google account.

<comment><USER21> This. All these people commenting on the premise that usenet is dead, don't realize it is alive and kicking. As is IRC:)

<comment><USER22> I ran one of the biggest EFNet IRC hubs at Texas.Net up until we pulled the plug in '98 due to smurfing attacks. :)

Since then a bunch of friends and I have run a tiny multi-server network after we all moved off the public networks.

Started a new job this past February, and I asked my boss during the interview how we handled inter-person communication since we're scattered all over the country. "We have our own internal IRC server if you know what that is..." I said "THANK YOU JESUS!" and he cracked up.

IRC is definitely still out there and heavily used.

<comment><USER17> > _" We have our own internal IRC server if you know what that is..." I said > "THANK YOU JESUS!"_

That would be _exactly_ my own reaction if it would ever happen to me. But so far, unfortunately, it was always either Hipchat or Skype.

<comment><USER22> I had a 2-week temporary gig at another place (was going perm, but I got a much better offer from the current gig at the last minute).

They used Hipchat, and it was neat - my coworkers there greeted me with inline memes. Having to use a proprietary client sucked, though.

<comment><USER23> Actually just went through this exact situation last week. Temporary gig seeing if I made a good fit, didn't like the contract they wanted me to sign.

I just set up bitlbee to do XMPP in irssi. Hipchat is accessible via XMPP. Lots of little annoying quirks but it was better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ont thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it is essentially closed now. You can't just set up your own USENET server easily, because you have to pay someone $$$ to get federation (if at all possible). They will try to keep competitors out, because they sell access to newsgroups for a lot of money so people can download warez.

I _think_ it should be possible to get replicas of non-binary newsgroups, but a quick search hasn't found any free option.

</comment><comment><USER25> The single biggest issue was spam. Being largely unmoderated, it became flooded with garbage as the reach of the Internet expanded. Conversation moved to web based forums, which IMO had worse UI in il the early days, because there was more ability to moderate.

<comment><USER5> And not just traditional spam. There were active campaigns to "sporge" thousands of news groups with thousands of junk posts. Hipcrime is probably something that would return ghits.

<comment><USER26> Oh, man. This was pretty much the final straw for the couple of newsgroups that I loved dearly back in the day (rec.arts.books.tolkien and alt.fan.tolkien). The once-vibrant community was already atrophying (due largely to a lack of newcomers and the usual gradual attrition of old regulars), and then somewhere around 2006 or 2007 there was a massive sporge flood that got past spam filters and made the groups unusable for about half a year. Once that ended, very few people were left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Related: check out olduse.net for a real-time USENET feed on a 30-year delay (so it's currently showing the news of the day in 1985).

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder just how big a non-binaries feed is these days. A tiny engineering company I worked for in '98-99 had its own Usenet server with a no-bin feed going into a SPARCstation 2 (think 386-486-class x86, equivalent) and it kept up just fine.

A couple years earlier I'd been one of the senior admins at Texas.Net (now DataFoundry) and helped build out what eventually turned into GigaNews, which used multiple dual-proc Sun E450s.. I think they're still one of the "biggest" Usenet providers these days.

</comment><comment><USER27> USENET (the network) may be dying but NNTP is still going strong as a better interface to mailing lists. See for example [http://gmane.org/](http://gmane.org/) or the new GNU Mailman 3 gateway.

I am now subscribed to maybe 2 mailing lists, the rest (two dozens) I read via gmane.

</comment><comment><USER23> I still use usenet every day. There are, admittedly, only a few good groups left. But where there's a high barrier to entry there's a high reward. The discussion is of high quality. Higher than most mailing lists and reddit/HN, at least.

      sci.math, comp.misc, sci.electronics.*, comp.lang.*

<comment><USER28> I still read some comp.* newsgroups every day, in particular comp.arch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is a lot of history and useful knowledge archived in Usenet. A lot of that content (e.g., the early UNIX newsgroups) puts today's forums and blogs to shame.

Google acquired Deja News (if Usenet is wortheless, why?) and now all the archived Usenet messages are web-access only and fronted by Java and Javascript nonsense.

If the Usenet archives are no longer important or if everyone thinks Usenet is "dead", then why put these messages behind Javascript and try to prevent bulk downloads (which is how NNTP was designed to work)?

<comment><USER7> déjà news acquisition was in 2001, lifetimes ago in web time. And it does fit with Google's stated mission of putting everything online, in easily searchable format.

The "let's put a thin web veneer over X" approach has never been a great one, perhaps sufficient for Web 1.0, but not these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> When DejaNews made USENET searchable. You could actually nuke messages from DejaNews, but then Google bought DejaNews and suddenly every nuked message were made available again forever. Google killed USENET.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's expensive to keep binary groups online (bandwidth) and the text groups are all SPAM these days.

Edit: Forgot to say that the tech is fine; a member of my family operates a usenet server over in Switzerland for our family. Works well for that sort of thing and avoids facebook etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access (2008)

[http://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps- to...](http://www.cnet.com/news/n-y-attorney-general-forces-isps-to-curb- usenet-access/)

Thank Andrew Cuomo.

</comment><comment> T-A I thought it was just limited interest. First web hosting prices came down so much that anyone could run a forum, then WordPress made free blogging with ancillary comments accessible to anyone with a browser. So the masses went to forums and blogs (and then Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and whatever chat app is popular this week) and only geeks who cared enough to find and install a newsreader were left.

</comment><comment><USER33> For ISPs there simply wasn't enough customer usage of NNTP servers to justify their continued existance. 5 years ago when I was working at a mid-sized ISP only about 2% of our customers used our NNTP servers. We carried binary groups and offered pretty good retention/completion but by then even the pirates had mostly ditched NNTP for torrents. At the time we estimated that we had maybe about a dozen customers accessing the server for non-binary / piracy use.

Going back further to why NNTP became irrelevant for discussion I'd say it was a combination of difficult setup for the average user and the lack of good free NNTP clients. Early web forums could offer discussion for free without the difficulty / expense of a NNTP client. As NNTP groups became more insular the miserable trolls were able to take over and ruin it for everyone. Almost every group I was active in during the late 90s deteriorated in this way. Just one mentally ill and/or very lonely person posting 50+ times per day could very effectively destroy a group.

</comment><comment><USER34> No good clients? I loved Forte Agent, it was awesome. As well as it was one of the most bug free programs I've ever encountered. It just worked. [http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php](http://www.forteinc.com/agent/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER35> 'tptacek gave an interesting answer some weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874525)

</comment><comment><USER36> Usenet still runs. It's just much less traffic than it used to be.

ISPs could not necessarily tell that NNTP service made them money, it's rather arcane and binaries really were a piracy sink.

I have dozens of old Usenet contacts on Facebook, and none of them really know why they left, other than possibly their ISP dropping the service.

</comment><comment><USER37> I imagine Binary groups being a great big cost sink would be the main thing.

It's sad, because the most barebones mid 1990's 3-panel Usenet client is still an infinitely better reading experience for discussion than all current web forums.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wish I was old enough to use USENET when it was popular. The closest I got was using XDCC on IRC but even then, USENET sounds like such an interesting thing to use. I miss anonymity.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would definitely believe the reason being piracy. That's a massive portion of the bandwidth I'd almost guarantee it. It was a safe haven for a long while.

</comment><comment><USER40> USENET, was in my opinion, one of the best features/protocol of the initial internet. I loved USENET ever since I discovered it (91/92) and I still use today a news reader through gmane, looking down at forums (just like this one) like a _sad_ evolution.

Having an USENET server provided by your ISP used to be a _standard_ part of the package. They would probably not carry alt.bin, but in the end it didn't matter.

A truly P2P, _open_ , messaging network, of the likes that you'll never see developed again due to commercial exploitation. USENET had "flaws", but honestly they're minor.

The store and forward protocol required quite some disk space at the time. This resulted in several nodes to drop bin/alt.bin from the network (which in my opinion was always a hack providing nothing really useful, with yencoding/par and the like). But by today standards, you could probably run a node carrying the entire network with just maybe a bit more than regular consumer hardware, since it's just text in the end, and the server is _very_ simple: I used to run one server locally just for me.

How big a today's network could be? See for yourself: [http://gmane.org/stats.php](http://gmane.org/stats.php) Or: not big for any ISP to carry in full with just one sysadmin.

The network relied on "control" messages to create/delete groups automatically (as opposed to manual subscription), which due to the lack of authentication/encryption in the protocol, were very easy to spoof. A gpg- signing mechanism was later put into place, so that nodes peering with each other could establish a chain of trust by themselves. This was pretty nice in retrospect (and awesome by today standards), but the main problem is that creating new groups was a slow and painful approval-based process: people often wanted small groups just for themselves, and mailing lists offered the "same" without any approval required.

Having a large open network started to become a big attractor for SPAM, and managing SPAM in a P2P network without authentication is a harder problem to solve than a locally managed mailing list. For the same reason, trolls could be a nuisance at time.

 _Some_ people claim that USENET became 1) too big 2) a receptacle for copyright infringement. Both claims are bullshit: by excluding binary groups (which was _ubiquitous_ by 91/92 when I joined already), the network started in a consistent volume decline already in the late 90ies, so it _cannot_ be that hosting a node in 1998 became impossible in 2005.

Here's what happened: running a local server became so easy and cheap, that running mailing list offered local control and almost zero overhead. People that had niche groups started to create mailing lists with open access, and people migrated in flock. Why share your discussions in comp.programming.functional where you could create a mailing list just for your new fancy language? (it's pretty sad, because I _loved_ the breadth of the discussions).

Discussions on general groups became less frequent as most of the interesting ones were on dedicated mailing lists. The trend worsened significantly as forums started to appear, which lowered the barrier to entry to people that didn't know how to use a mail client properly.

The sad truth is that now most of the general discussions aren't openly shared anymore, and happen either on local websites (like this) or local mailing lists.

I've been using gmane.org to subscribe all open-access lists that I ever participated into. Most of the time, the list I'm looking for is already there.

In a certain sense, gmane.org offers the best of NNTP with the best of mailing lists: you can create your own lists without approval processes, and you can read any other list without having 1) to subscribe directly 2) having to store messages locally 3) see instantly the archive [as far as retention goes]. The mailing list administrator has still ultimate veto on what goes on the list, so that local authority is never undermined. On the other hand, NNTP clients are _built_ to read massive volumes of messages, that would make reading reddit a breeze.

What gmane.org lacks though is the peering. One of the central NNTP features of the time was definitely killed.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hijacking: how do I read Usenet for free, if there is such a thing? I'm only interested in non-binary content.

</comment><comment><USER42> USENET still exists, so 'ultimate demise' is premature.

Still I think OP is closer than many other posts here, most of which are about its long decline rather than demise. When ISPs have stopped stop carrying USENET, it will just be a niche service with a very few providers, or only Google Groups will be left.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think people create too many fables around old tools. It's just that 20-25 years younger people than you will think your tools are uncool. So they make their own tools, that basically do the same as your tools, then everybody uses the new tools. That's all.

</comment><comment><USER44> How is it more difficult to control what people say on USENET than on the internet at large?

<comment><USER45> Although I don't think the decline of USENET was caused by worries about the inability of governments to control it, I can answer your question.

USENET has no central point of control (or at least it had none 15 years ago when I lost interest in USENET). The basic infrastructure is designed so that any news server can get a copy of all the USENET articles being stored by any other news server, and anyone with sufficient bandwidth and sysadmin skills can set up a news server. Consequently, there's no single organization that has the power to remove an article from USENET unless perhaps it is an organization that has arisen since I lost interest in USENET 15 years ago that is central to the control of USENET spam. (I mention spam because 15 years ago, spam was the only potential reason or problem an effective alliance of server owners might recognize as a legitimate reason to remove a message from USENET.) It would have to be an organization that every significant news server relies on for telling spam from non-spam. But I get the impression that spam is out of control on USENET, which is a strong sign that such a universally-consulted spam-control organization does not exist.

Anyway, I hope that you get the idea of what the OP was on about with his implication that pro-censorship forces killed USENET because government could not control speech on USENET (which, again, probably does not have any basis in reality because IMHO USENET was never popular enough with readers to worry pro-censorship forces).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Spam mostly, and other forms of abuse. But mostly spam.

</comment><comment><USER3> But hey, slrn finally reached version 1.0!

</comment><comment><USER47> Usenet is a way for the ordinary person to be able to talk unfettered to other ordinary people - without a need for a central authority, without the approval and shilling of advertisers etc. So, after decades of the taxpayer funding R&D to create the Internet, when the Internet was handed over to corporations in the early 1990s, the question is not if such a resource was going to go away, but when.

News stories like this marked Usenet going away - [http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-tries-to-pull-plug-on- usenet-s...](http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-tries-to-pull-plug-on-usenet- seriously)

It's a confluence of forces. The old Bell monopolies get a stranglehold on the last mile, and then wireless transmissions as well. They become so bold as to lobby to end net neutrality so they can pump more money from content providers with their monopoly. A vast infrastructure is being built to monitor what people say on the network (like the NSA's Utah Data Center) which makes the Stasi look like Inspector Clouseau, in a country quite different than the one whose Secretary of State said in the 1920's "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". The RIAA/MPAA oligopolies are not busy yet trying to extend their 95 year copyright lease which is kicking in again in 2019, so they can try to shut Usenet down as well. After all, it's one of the rare mediums of distribution of content they don't control. I'm surprised the powers that be haven't cracked down on Internet Relay Chat yet, it's one of the last remnants of the old, distributed, decentralized, noncommerical Internet.

<comment><USER48> It makes me sad that federated protocols are on their way out.</comment></comment>


Adversarial interoperability: reviving an old weapon to slay today's monopolies - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay <comment><USER2> The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers.

As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well (so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one application. There was no real downside to another account on another service, you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go.

Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end. This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced features they wanted.

We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch.

There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that MSNP, the protocol Microsoft used for MSN messenger, was actually submitted to the IETF as a draft:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger- protoc...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00)

From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML, whereas MSNP was a line-based textual protocol closer to a mix of IRC and HTTP. I found MSNP simple enough that I wrote a client and used it right up until Microsoft shut down their servers.

Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited) use today.

<comment><USER2> > From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the > biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML

I'm not making a case it was the best, or only protocol, but it existed and was popular, and importantly, was the protocol that Apple, Google and Facebook all used in their initial forays into the space.

That is, not only were they originally using open standards, they they were originally all using the same standard and could interoperate with each other easily if desired. That's important because it shows just how far we went. Literally from one end of the spectrum (fully open and interoperable on a client level) to the other (closed proprietary standards and enforced incompatibility).

> Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in > (limited) use today.

Sure, I wasn't making a case that they died, just that we were sold an implied bill of goods that was bogus. There was no reason at the time to not use gtalk more than AIM as many people that had AIM eventually got a google/Gmail account (or Apple ichat one, or Facebook one), and to focus on those more. And new people didn't see the need to get an AIM/ICQ account because everyone they talked to had a way to reach them on those major platforms with those accounts they also got.

If we were back at the time people were signing up for accounts, and people were presented with the choice of getting a dedicated IM account in addition to their gchat or ichat or facebook one knowing that their bigcorp one would be closed to outside networks soon, I think a lot more would have done so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a friend of mine whose dad was a state senator.

I asked how his dad dealt with all the craziness of lobbyists?

Turns out he used them a lot. If he had trouble with a school textbook issue he would call up an unrelated lobbyist (such as oil) and ask him about it. Very quickly, he would have a thick report from leading exports on his desk outlining and analyzing in detail the school textbook issue.

Pit em against each other.

Steve Jobs was a master of things like this. He made the phone companies compromise and got smartphones to market. He made the music industry compromise and got online music jumpstarted.

<comment><USER5> "Hey, Joe, it's your buddy the Oil lobbyist. Yeah, the Senator is asking about school textbooks again. I know that's your area. You got anything?"

"Sure, buddy. I'll have a thousand page report ready in a couple days. By the way, yesterday a Congressman asked me about the safety of fracking..."

<comment><USER6> Yep, his example was pretty shady.

<comment><USER4> (note: my example of "textbooks" and "oil" was arbitrary, and this was also in a _completely_ different era, maybe 50s?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why stop at _adversarial_ interoperability? When we're talking about monopolistic participants, why not compel them to open the network and standards that are serving as a barrier to entry. We take for granted that a Verizon phone can call a T-Mobile user; the situation in social media in particular, as well as .doc/.docx, is archaic.

<comment><USER8> I was under the impression that the docx format is a published standard, first under ECMA-376 then ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK docx as produced by Word doesn't even comply with the standard.

<comment><USER10> It's a superset of the standard. Word uses some features that were in the standard that was first proposed but did not pass, like OLE serialization.

<comment><USER11> Strange that they can call it a standard yet continue to include non-agreed- upon extensions. At some point it becomes false advertising, unless they fork it under a new MIME type

<comment><USER8> I believe a company has a right to support backwards compatibility for file formats. If they propose a standard and the outcome of the standards work prevents their supporting backwards compatibility (in both directions), I'd rather they support their customers (and their data/files), document their extension use, even at the expense of pure standards implementations not being able to read those files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The EU came fairly close to forcing Microsoft to open up the Office document formats as part of their string of antitrust actions against Microsoft.

In the end they did force Microsoft to open up the protocols used by Windows clients to communicate with Microsoft's own servers (to allow third party interoperability with server products like Samba), but did not do the same thing with the various Office document formats.

After an additional $1.3 billion fine, Microsoft stopped dragging it's feet and complied with the ruling.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines- micro...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-microsoft- another--1-3b.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's absolutely obvious that FB needs to be forced through legislation to allow for interopability of its basic features. This has been obvious since it achieved its hegemony. When this happens FB will be dead.

</comment><comment><USER14> The elephant in the room here is strong cryptography. We now have the technology that makes this kind of interop pretty much impossible.

<comment><USER15> Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format because millions of users have files stored on disk that way.

When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.

<comment><USER16> That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating tools.

If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the cheating users to campaign against you.

The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged.

What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law.

Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the link included in the article to "Usenet's alt.* hierarchy" actually points to an article about the Hayes Modem. I hope the author changes it to something that explains the adversarial nature of the alt.* hierarchy.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article uses it as an example, but I don't quite see how a search engine's web crawler user agent string (or whatever Doctorow is talking about) is an example of adversarial interoperability.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes, yes, yes. Legislation and regulation towards proper competition in the IT space is the only way forward. For all of its history, high-tech has been the wild-wild-west: good for the powerful few, not good for others. GDPR or the- right-to-repair are baby steps. The monopolies we have now are like your grandma putting sleeping pills in your food so you don't leave. It's a rigor mortis hold on tech.</comment>


Cities in motion: how slime mould can redraw our rail and road maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/18/slime-mould-rail-road-transport-routes <comment><USER2> Quote: "Researchers using slime mould to compare motorway systems found the US network to be among the least efficient."

Yes, but only because the simulation fails to take geographical obstacles and terrain into account. In the simulation, the slime molds make their way across the Rocky Mountains as though they aren't present -- which, in the simulation, they aren't.</comment>