Real Life First Person Shooter, Chatroulette Version [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p747PrxmZJ4 <comment><USER2> This is amazing.

It also speaks to the absurdity of FPSes. I was laughing so hard at all the little FPS tropes. Like how the guns were cached in "obvious" places or how the guy knew there would be something of use inside the conspicuous pot outside.

"Okay, now dual-wield the pistols." \--said no one ever in real life

<comment><USER3> They tested dual-wielding on mythbusters, it's absolutely of no advantage. You can't shoot faster or better since the gating factor is not the gun (you can shoot semi-automatic pistols extremely rapidly) it's the ability to focus and aim more than anything, both of which are hampered by dual-wielding not improved.

P.S. In terms of raw cool-factor, it's hard to beat this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tEYcUSQDyw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tEYcUSQDyw)

I won't spoil it by describing it.

<comment><USER4> > it's the ability to focus and aim more than anything

But if you're swamped with zombies, then maybe simply having more firepower is an advantage.

<comment><USER3> You can empty a magazine in seconds, being able to reload quickly with two hands is vastly superior to anything else.

<comment><USER5> I think you're forgetting the obvious solution of having tons of preloaded magazines strapped to you.

Single button magazine ejection, slam your Uzis down onto fresh 100 round magazines. Bonus points for an automated system that moves the next set of magazines into the perfect arms length position at your side for the next reload.

Two handed reloads are for chumps when you are fighting zombies. You would be the guy I'm standing behind to give me that extra few seconds while they're busy eating you. That way once I finish off your attackers I can pick up your freshly loaded (but unspent) gun. And triple-wield!!

<comment><USER6> The second problem is that ammunition is heavy and carrying an infinite amount of it increases your need for food and water in a world where your biggest threats are cholera a dysentery. And unless you want to find yourself among jittery poorly-prepared armed people, you can't just show up to Cabellas to steal more ammo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great stuff. Ben Folds did something similarly fun and surprising with Chatroulette:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYxiK0kpEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEYxiK0kpEw)

<comment><USER8> Just imagine if they had met each other on Chatroulette!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was so amazing. It's a great thing about technology in general; when Chatroulette was built, it's pretty clear they didn't envision people using it in that way. Often the tech has to come first, and the awesomeness follows. (Also a lot of penises, but that part probably was foreseen.)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is on HN before it is viral. The technology they put together for this is great!

<comment><USER11> Reddit beat HN to the punch

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There was a movie called Gamer (2009) with a similar concept: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034032/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034032/) (trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2g94xQmtHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2g94xQmtHw) )

<comment><USER13> Immediately thought of it.

\- I've got a bad feeling about this, Chris, Imma be honest with you

\- That's right, I'm not gonna die, you are

\- That is a good point

That's the inception of it we're witnessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is hilarious. Reminds me of the real life remake of Goldeneye 64:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RR5V0rmN4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RR5V0rmN4o)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hilarious. It reminds me of the terrible DOOM movie: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45jgCxucL0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45jgCxucL0k)

This is much better than the movie. The interactivity and the humanity of it is wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's really awesome and well done. Great job to all involved, even the players!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty cool. It reminded me of [0] where a guy emulates kinda GTA-like behavior.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1hOCX_UVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1hOCX_UVo)

</comment><comment><USER17> now, I think "video game" has a different meaning than before.

I'll be waiting for this to create this type of games and going on even multiplayer era. great stuff.

Btw I think, this would allow elder/non-tech people to enter gaming

</comment><comment><USER18> Corny sets. The fear of impending doom. Watchers giving not-always-very- helpful advice.

All it needs is sarcastic commentary to take me back to my childhood and the Crystal Maze, from the pre-FPS era.

<comment><USER19> There's an Indiegogo for a live Crystal Maze, open to the public:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-crystal-maze-a- live-i...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-crystal-maze-a-live- immersive-experience)

I'm already humming the theme music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> someone make this into a company

<comment><USER9> I recall hearing about a real-life zombie apocalypse sim you could do in London. Ya, here you go: [http://zombieexperiences.co.uk/](http://zombieexperiences.co.uk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Freakin brilliant! Almost makes me want to try out Chatroulette just for the chance at something like this.

<comment><USER22> Honestly didn't realize it was still around. I remember when it first blew up in the public consciousness, a local bar had a funny event one night where they set up a computer with a webcam/mic pointed at the bar and a projector to put the video on the wall. Then we logged on to Chatroulette and let the amusement roll.

Loads of people were taken aback by talking to a bar full of people. Some were really cool and chatted with us. Of course plenty of dudes were just whackin it. Some clicked "next" when they saw the bar full of people but at least one just kept going until we had to get up and click "next". Pretty fun idea but they only did it a few times before the novelty of Chatroulette mostly wore off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Innovation!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is awesome! But hopefully it doesn't inspire the first Periscope-based mass-shooting.</comment>


Creating a Whole New Business on the Web: Untemplater - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2010/01/25/creating-a-whole-new-business-on-the-web-untemplater/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Webworkerdaily+%28WebWorkerDaily%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Hope to see a pattern emerge of decentralized startups that are micro businesses. Matt Mullenweg is doing a helluva job with Wordpress, so it's certainly possible.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The technology to facilitate distributed teams working well together is in place, and it lets you pick to work with anyone in the world, while ducking a lot of office expense, etc...

As a founder of a small decentralized tech company, one of my favorite things is finding other small focused companies to do business with. Finding a small company that loves what they do, and does it really well, and is small enough to understand your needs and really value your company as a client, makes everything about the relationship better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is there such high turnover among Designers - <AUTHOR> We're looking for a (Software) Product Designer and hoping we can employ someone for the long-term (which is at least 2-3 years these days).  The vast majority of UI/UX Designers stay at a company for 6 months to 1 year - this includes FT/Permanent designers, not just contractors.  Thank you. <comment><USER2> Is the company a good place to work as a designer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, meant for "vast majority" to refer to the companies too. So not particular company.</comment></comment>


New Techniques Identify Users Across Different Browsers on the Same PC - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-fingerprinting-techniques-identify-users-across-different-browsers-on-the-same-pc/ <comment><USER2> So noscript is no longer just about avoiding annoying javascript but also to protect privacy. Time for the web to go back to simple markup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you guys remember privacy? Yea that was nice.

<comment><USER4> I 'member</comment></comment>


Open-source and .NET – it's not picking up - <AUTHOR> http://code972.com/blog/2016/01/93-open-source-and-net-its-not-picking-up <comment><USER2> I doubt Microsoft care whether oss projects use .net, that is not what it is about.

It is about stopping people throwing away their ms stuff and rebuilding so in the future they can come back to a more lean Windows core.

If code is still in the ms stack then putting it back to Windows is an easier sell than trying to get people to rebuild.

<comment><USER3> OSS is not some silver bullet to fix its startup problem. Microsoft needs cross platform more than it needs OSS. It needs tools that feel as lightweight as Python or node.js. It needs a platform that easily interops with everything else, instead of being limited to just Windows, IIS and SQL server.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What will computer science/software development look like in the future? - <AUTHOR> Just a fun thought exercise.
What will define a coder in , say, maybe 2200. How much of what we do will be relevant then.
I was curious because of the advancements in fields like quantum computing (I don't know much about it) etc. <comment><USER2> I think everyone will be a programmer in the future. It's the new literacy.

We won't be programming using text files, and we likely won't use a keyboard, a mouse, or even a screen.

The difference between using software and creating software will disappear. You'll use the exact same interface for both.

Programming by example will be a big part of it. You'll do things manually, and the system will generalize your actions and generate algorithms for you. You'll be able to fix any error by providing more examples or by fixing the incorrect output. Basically TDD as you use the software in real life.

We likely won't be limited to 2D screens. We'll be using AR and physical user interfaces ([https://dynamicland.org](https://dynamicland.org)).

AI will help a lot overall.</comment>


Should we be concerned that Janet Napolitano doesn't do email? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/security/349932/should-we-be-concerned-janet-napolitano-doesn-t-do-email <comment><USER2> As long as she acknowledges her disinterest for all things virtual and hires competent advisers for that domain, what is the problem? She didn't say those things were not important, only that she doesn't like this mode of communication.</comment>


Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B - <AUTHOR> http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2311821 <comment><USER2> That was me and my wife. I'm pretty sure our baby stuff accounts for most of that growth.

<comment><USER3> Do you know Amazons order page lets you see how many orders you place each year?

It is quite telling: 2007, 2008, 2009 were <10 orders. Then 2010, after my son had been born: 41. 2011: 98. 2012: 138.

2016: 270...

It's all about establishing the habits.

<comment><USER4> They also have a page to generate CSV reports on your purchases. I noticed the wife and I spent well over $10k in last 12 months. Up 2× or 3× since last year!

<comment><USER5> Where abouts is that page? Do you have a URL?

<comment><USER6> Here is a url

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports](https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports)

What a really great feature and cheers to amazon for having something like this available.

<comment><USER7> Too bad this doesn't seem to work for amazon.de, .co.uk, and probably others. I'd love to get a report like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. How is that even possible?

Growing by a third in one year at that scale is completely mind boggling to me.

<comment><USER9> International, and unclear if subsidiaries like WFM come into play in this?

<comment><USER10> They note in the release that Whole Foods accounted for $1.3 billion in sales. Excluding Whole Foods sales and favorable exchange rates, growth was 29%.

<comment><USER11> Haven't followed the numbers closely, so pretty shocked that WF is only pulling in $1.3B/quarter. That means the average American household is spending $3-4/month there.

Plenty of room to grow!

<comment><USER12> WF has < 500 stores, slightly more than the number of Apple stores. People will travel further distances to buy an iPhone than perishables.

Apple stores also draw in people for repairs, etc. via their online presence (e.g. buy online, pick up in store). WF is 100% in-store.

It's astonishing WF is able to generate this level of revenue on so relatively few stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Once again, AWS is the reason Amazon made any money at all. AWS earned $1.1B in profits for the quarter.. a 25% profit margin.

<comment><USER14> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that just due to their accounting preferences?

Amazon has had the capability of making profit for years, but prefers to expense everything off in an effort to grow rather than pay increased taxes.

Their skyrocketing market cap hasn't been due to a change in the company's direction so much as investors gradually realizing this strategy and the raw growth potential of where Amazon has positioned itself.

<comment><USER15> You can't just expense stuff like that. For example you buy a warehouse you can't depreciate it all in one year. Retail is a competitive low margin business. Amazon has always had crazy P/E ratio. I could never really understand it. Maybe I could understand aws, but I can't understand the valuation of the core amazon business. Suppose amazon grows to the size of walmart. Walmart is only worth 260B, and they generate a ton more cash than amazon.

<comment><USER16> Company A grows revenues at %5 per annum. Company B grows revenues at %4.9 per annum. In both cases the trend is equally likely to continue in perpetuity. And neither company is expected to ever pay dividends.

Which stock are people going to buy? _Everybody_ is going to buy Company A's stock and _nobody_ is going to buy Company B's stock. P/E doesn't matter because 1) no dividends and 2) it's not a proxy for relative risk (we established risk is identical between the two).

Amazon is special because it's potential for revenue growth is believed to be nearly unlimited. As long as they're not losing money, and as long as they have enough profits to continue growing revenue, people will keep investing. Once the specter of stagnant revenue growth appears, Amazon's stock will probably come crashing down.

Basically, investors chase revenue growth, not profits. Berkshire Hathaway works the same way. Buffet might be a value investor who buys companies that can grow profits, but the price of BRK.A tracks the revenue growth of the holding company, not its profits.

Conversely, Wal-Mart's revenue growth has completely stalled. In fact, the stock price plummeted the year that revenue decreased slightly.

This is how things look as far as I can tell. I'm not a financial professional, and even if I'm right I'm sure there's a far better way (more technical, more comprehensive) to explain this dynamic.

<comment><USER15> Walmart is a 500 billion dollar company. Even 1% growth is 5 billion in revenue. They are asymptotic to the US economy growth which isn't growing much.

<comment><USER16> But the point is that the absolute figures don't matter themselves. Investors chase revenue growth.

The huge absolute revenues of Wal-Mart do suggest that revenue growth opportunities are structurally limited by the size of the domestic economy. But then again, unless and until every brick & mortar store in the U.S. says "Wal-Mart", they could still grow. That sounds unreasonable, but it's basically how people see Amazon: capable of growing revenues in large part by capturing existing markets, and being able to do that for the foreseeable future.

You said you could never understand why Amazon attracts so much investment despite their P/E and despite the poor margins of the retail industry. I realize you probably said that rhetorically, but in any event my point was simply that profit margins don't matter; what attracts investment is revenue growth. I'm sure there are many reasons--some rational (the corollary of revenue growth is growing marginal profit _potential_), some not--but it is what it is. And it's pretty much how investment has always worked.

Indicators like P/E only matter because of what they signal about future revenue growth. A poor P/E often suggests poor capacity for growing revenue. It's a heuristic, and if more direct evidence gives you reason to believe otherwise then you discount the predictive value of the P/E metric accordingly.

I suppose another way of looking at it is that Wal-Mart is at the phase where they're capturing profits, not growth. Their profit taking years were priced into their stock during the growth period; as they grew revenue their potential for future profits grew and this was immediately reflected in their stock price. If you look at the financial graphs, their stock price has remained steady with their revenue. When overall revenue declined the stock price dropped sharply, because revenue decline implies a decline in future profits and markets will quickly price future prospects into today's stock price. So in the language of "fundamentals" investing, profits are ultimately what matter; but _future_ profits, not today's profits. Future profits is just another way of saying profit potential; and the best indicator of profit potential is today's revenue growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amazon is proving to be a vacuum cleaner for inefficiencies in the economy. "Your margin is my opportunity" in another light.

</comment><comment><USER10> For AWS - 41.7% year over year sales growth (to $4.58b), 44% increase in operating expenses, 36% increase in operating income (to $1.17b).

</comment><comment><USER18> _rushes to EC2 Instances dashboard_ Aw shoot, I never actually shut down that P2 cluster!

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow. 34%? How does that happen at a company of that scale? That's simply incredible, they are hitting it out of the park like Apple and Google, FANGs are dominating this world at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER20> The stock is up 7.5% in after hours trading.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am very curious about Wallmart policies against Amazon growth. With this pace amazon will eat Wallmart eventually. And Wallmart is biggest company on earth. What they are going to do?

<comment><USER22> In many ways amazon has already eaten walmart. In what way is walmart the biggest company on the earth?

<comment><USER23> Walmart isn't the biggest company on earth by most means.

Last quarter, Walmart reported $31.8B profits on $123.4B earnings. For the similar quarter, Amazon reported $14.5B profits on $38.0B earnings. So Walmart dwarfed Amazon overall.

Amazon's fresh results are great, and it helps to close the gap between them, but they are still much smaller than Walmart.

Unless you're talking online-only, in which case the comparison switch around, and Amazon is already much bigger than Walmart. But Walmart's online sales are a small percent of their earnings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So, how much do they have to spend to stay "zero-profit"?

</comment><comment><USER25> "Operating income decreased 40%"

<comment><USER26> Operating margin has collapsed from 1.8% to 0.8% (adjusting for Whole Foods doesn't change the result).

<comment><USER25> If you exclude AWS, it's -2.1%, from -0.9% a year ago</comment></comment></comment>


JQuery Mobile 1.3.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2013/02/20/jquery-mobile-1-3-0-released/ <comment><USER2> It _looks_ great - in theory - but for some reason the performance seems to be dismal. I put together a site using an older version of jqmobile about a year ago and was impressed how smooth and quick the widgets worked, even on a 1G iPad.

I just went through the demo site on my iPad 3 and it just seems terrible - slow, improper rendering on a bunch of elements, stuttering transitions, etc.

Is anyone else finding this? Perhaps something is amiss on my iPad, but my impression is not great so far...

<comment><USER3> An older version of jqmobile used some kind of FastClick technique, but it was causing too many compatibility issues on android devices. Projects like these need to strike a fine balance between usability and device-awareness, but there are a number of exposed options in the library where you can optimize for specific devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> JQuery Mobile is horrible for mobile applications, IMO.

The intrinsic stylesheet, with its rounded corners, box shadows and text shadows results in extremely poor rendering performance in mobile browsers. This can be rectified with work, but it demonstrates to me that their contributors are not at all concerned with performance. Its markup is node heavy (a single LI turns in to 5 elements). Considerations are made for desktop browsers, yet it is proselytized as a mobile framework.

Developing with it is cumbersome; the selectors you thought would work do not, because your element has been munged and wrapped with numerous other elements. Triggering "create" more than once sometimes wraps elements a second time because some widgets don't check their classes properly to know they've already been marked up. The only way to know the widget has been created is either checking for known classes or attempting to access one of its methods in a try/catch.

Some widgets respond to "refresh" - some don't. Some parts of widgets respond to it, some don't. This makes partial view updates almost, or completely, impossible. I have been slowly replacing JQM's functionality with backbone views and it is working much, much better.

If you use jQuery Mobile in your mobile application, I advise you do so with an exit strategy in mind.

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried building an app with jQuery Mobile and the performance was horrible. Whole sets of features didn't work. I spent more time trying to get things working right than I did building the actual functionality. I had a lot more success in Kendo Mobile.

If jQuery Mobile wasn't backed by the jQuery project, nobody would use it because it isn't that good. It's slow, buggy, and broken. Maybe this release fixes that, but I doubt it.

<comment><USER6> I endorse that. Wanted something lightweight to service some lage number of static pages on android and jQuery M performed just too bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last time a tried using JQuery Mobile for an Android 4.0.3 HTML5 app, button presses didn't work consistently/correctly and the performance was terrible. Also there is still that whole JQuery dependency thing. Until the Android Webview's robustness increases or JQuery/JQuery Mobile improve support for the Android webview I will stick to my Zepto + MV* Framework + Custom Transitions stack for Android HTML5 development.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a "standard" way of detecting mobile devices and loading jQuery Mobile along with your site's mobile JavaScript instead of the desktop version?

Right now I'd do it like this:

      Modernizr.load({
        test: Modernizr.touch,
        yep : ['jquery-mobile.js','mobile.js']
        nope: ['jquery-ui.js','desktop.js']
      });

<comment><USER9> With the advent of touchscreen laptops, this method is becoming less reliable.

<comment><USER8> Yup. Realised that after I posted. A way to tell if it has a HW keyboard attached would be useful. Although the user could prefer either method, and what do you do if they detach the KB?!?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could anybody with experience building mobile webapps comment on jQuery Mobile vs Sencha Touch?

It seems like if you are not building with responsive HTM5/CSS3 you may as well use a JS library for better UI. These are the two biggest names I have seen and it is difficult figuring out if either one is worth the time.

<comment><USER11> I was working on making a mobile web app a few weeks back and after quickly deciding that a js framework would be better than a responsive site (lots of widgets, built-in ajax functionality and push-state) I tried both jQ mobile and jQ Touch[0]. Both are quite similar in most respects(learning curve, widgets, etc.) However, if you're looking to completely overhaul the look then jq Mobile, IMHO, is not that great. I found the themeroller[1] to be clunky and difficult to use and would've preferred writing css. jqTouch, on the other hand, is quite customizable (allows SASS based theming).

[0] - <http://www.jqtouch.com/>

[1] - <http://jquerymobile.com/themeroller/index.php>

<comment><USER12> There's nothing that prevents you from writing CSS for JQM. The ThemeRoller is simply a setup tool intended to make it easier for the masses. I've actually found there's very little customization needed based on the JQM structural base CSS.

See: [http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.0/jquery.mobile.structure-...](http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.0/jquery.mobile.structure-1.3.0.css)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is screen sharing and video conferencing hard? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Like a lot of software problems, you can create a poor solution very quickly and easily and this fools people into thinking it must be pretty straight forward. As a Windows desktop developer I could quickly create an app that takes the output from a web cam and sends it over my local network to another machine for display.

A single frame might be 1024x768x3bytes ~= 2MB. For video we need 24 frames per second giving me 28MB per second to be sent and then shown. Over the internet I need a connection of at least 28MB x 8 bits = 224Mbs which is why it works between two machines on my local network but not over the internet. So start adding compression. Then you notice that even when you can hit the performance metric the image is still juddering. Well the internet does not deliver your packets at a nice consistent pace, so you need to buffer slightly to try and get around this. Plus the connection speed between your machines might vary over time and so you need to detect this and adjust the number of frames or resolution to adapt. Sometimes your target machine is behind a firewall and you cannot make a direct connection between you and them. So now you need a third-party server that can both connect to that acts as a relay.

So the implementation starts getting pretty hard but if you manage to do a great job then people using it just think it is simple.

</comment><comment><USER3> Attention to network connection quality has dropped.

1\. Many organisations have abandoned end-to-end internet connectivity, and deployed NAT or restrictive firewall rules. Hence modern videoconferencing apps designed to work without direct communication. This increases complexity on many layers, leading to hard to diagnose failure modes, leading to inability to fix the crappy network when things work poorly.

2\. Nearly all other communication is HTTP requests to services that are designed to tolerate mobile connections, people don't really notice hiccups and the videoconferencing ends up being the only real-time networked app that businesses use.

3\. Last mile internet connections have stopped getting faster, or nearly so. If the 2000's trend had continued, we'd all have 10 gigabit internet connections by now. But instead people got excited about iPhones and choppy 3G/4G.

</comment><comment><USER4> A whole bunch of problems.

Some people do not have good cameras and microphones.

Some people have a picture of Lisa-Marie Scott on their background, other people have a bill from their cardiologist or shit fanfic that they write.

Some people have a slow internet connection, others have a slow enough computer that they can't use a more effective compression algorithm that would help with the slow compression. Or maybe they can't or won't license the patents.

Somebody joins the meeting on a phone while they are driving.

Network address translation.

The amazing thing is how often companies have had a hit or dominant product in the space appear to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. Look at aim, icq, Lync and Skype.

</comment><comment><USER5> Technically, neither of those is particularly hard. I mean, you have to keep latency low, etc., but this is hardly cutting edge tech and lots of companies do it. Do you mean some other aspect of it aside from technical?</comment>


Ask HN: Internships - paid or not paid? - <AUTHOR>

I recently saw the "Who's Hiring" thread for January, and I see a lot of companies I am very interested in! Currently I am seeking an internship in California for the summer, and I would like to notify the startups of my interest.
Here is the pressing question I have: are most of the internships paid? Most of the time, information of pay and/or stipends is omitted. I understand why, but it is still important information I need to have before going through the whole interview process.
From a startup perspective, I can see two reasons why these startups would want to hire interns. 1) Finding engineers is difficult and the startups will take anyone if only for three months. 2) Free labor, which is especially helpful in an work environment where money could be scarce. Hopefully for the starups I am interested in, it's the first reason.
I currently have a comfortable, well paid job, so I don't want to leave it with the understanding that I could be applying for an unpaid internship.
Also, since I need to ask about pay or stipends, what is the best time and manner to do so (in the interview, by email, etc)? <comment><USER2> Unpaid internships that involve 'actual tasks' (as in, internships that aren't expressly designed for you to be taught things -- and that's not taught as in "you'll learn things while working!" but taught as in "people are systematically taking time out of their day to teach you things and that is what your internship entails") are illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, interesting. I was not aware of that. Perhaps I've been living in the bubble of my college, where some students have "internships" under professors, where they get paid in extremely modest stipends.

That's reassuring. Thank you.</comment></comment>


Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Somehow the idea that this is all caused by people applying to more places doesn't cut it to me. It might account for some of it, but not all of it. A lot of this is probably fairly chaotic and complex. For example, the GI bill probably contributed directly somewhat also, but also probably led to cultural shifts because of the veteran population, which then in turn changed career and educational expectations, but the GI bill itself reflects WWII, which also reflects cataclysmic societal changes (that is, WWII caused many significant things, but was also caused by many significant things).

Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit.

The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not _useless_ , but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit.

Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general ([https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/the- mueller-report-theranos-billions-american-scams/586297/)). Something is broken. Probably many things.

<comment><USER3> The SAT reliably correlates with IQ, and of any psychometric variable we are able to measure, IQ has the strongest correlation with long-term socioeconomic success. Insofar as it is useful to funnel smart people into college, using the SAT is a good way to filter them.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a source on the first claim?

I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2].

[1] [https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/) [2] [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new- research-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research- suggests-sat-under-or-overpredicts-first-year-grades-hundreds-thousands)

<comment><USER5> _> Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year [...] collegiate performance [2]._

That's not what your cite says. The InsideHigherEd article actually shows a _strong correlation_ between SAT and grades but Aquinas identified a _minority %_ of schools where it didn't. Please carefully read the 3 bullet points again and notice the minority percentages.

Your qualifier of _" Generally"_ in your comment is misrepresenting Aguinis' findings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in the neolithic (1972), when I applied to college, most kids seemed to apply to two or three colleges at most. I'm not sure I even completed two applications. In the fall of 2006, my son was threatened with Saturday detention if he didn't have three safety school applications completed by the date the counselor preferred. He ended up applying to eight that I recall. A kid a year or so ahead of him at the same school applied to fourteen or eighteen. So if kids are encouraged to step up their applications to about 4x that of the boomers, will that not drive acceptance rates now?

[Edit--added dates.]

<comment><USER7> Presumably, except at the boundary conditions, an increase in the number of applications per student comes with a corresponding decrease in the percentage of accepted applications that result in a student actually showing up to the university— in the end every student still picks only one to actually attend. These should mostly cancel out and keep the university's acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.

<comment><USER8> >These should mostly cancel out and keep the university's acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.

I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications.

The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't _know_ the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?"

e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in.

Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue.

[1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.

<comment><USER9> It's not Coursera and EdX. It's that foreign students pay full price. As administrative costs increase and infrastructure costs increase and state contributions decrease if there ever were any, the money needs to come from somewhere.

<comment><USER10> Specific programs also tend to set their own prices. Even in Canada with all public schools tuition for business, medical, veterinary, etc. Are all higher

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMHO the biggest problem with US college admissions is that it is very subjective and dependent on hidden variables.

I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales.

All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress.

Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.

<comment><USER12> There is a simple explanation: Academics is not the primary focus at most top schools outside of perhaps MIT, Caltech and Chicago. When it comes down to it, their goal is to develop the next generation of 'elites', and the basic MO is to get a bunch of current gen elites and surround them with a cross-section of the society, so that their education is 'well-rounded'.

Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.

<comment><USER13> If I were a school I would just recruit people based on their instagram, selecting for physical attractiveness, psychopathic tendencies, creativity, narcissism and/or special skills/talents.

<comment><USER14> They already do. It's just more subtle and complex... but they do review social media. And narcissism and psychopathy is going to bring you big points. Those things let you get the things they want to see (school president, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary- evil/](http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/) In spite of increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.-- do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, college is more expensive but also more necessary, partially due to the continued decline of manufacturing jobs, but the failure of middle-class, medium-skill jobs such as construction and auto to recover to their pre-crisis peaks .

This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still provided a positive ROI [https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda- triangle-o...](https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of- wealth)

 _And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click "See Full List", and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn't have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major._

<comment><USER16> I wonder what happens if you include all the people who do a few years, drop out, and never get a degree. Graduating from college still makes sense if you can do it, but lots more people start college than graduate, especially as you start getting to less selective schools.

<comment><USER17> Bryan Caplan's book[1] has a chapter where he specifically aims to control for this, and to separately calculate the ROI of different levels of education for "Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Poor" students. The main result was that college is a good deal for Excellent/Good students, a terrible choice for Poor students, and only makes sense for Fair students in special cases (e.g. they got a scholarship, or plan to study engineering).

The bad ROI for Fair and Poor students is mostly driven by their lower probability of actually graduating and getting the degree.

I highly recommend the book if you're interested.

[1] [https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html)

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I'm a fan of him based on blog posts of his I've read, but I haven't read the book yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "3.4: Could the issue be that students are just trying harder?"

\-----

without making a value judgment about it,

I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage.

Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them.

\</comment><comment>--

I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.

<comment><USER15> The media and pundits often push a narrative that society is 'dumbing-down,' regressing, or that standards are being lowered, and maybe to some degree they are depending on where one looks, but we also see evidence of increased competitiveness and higher standards. Cramming for AP courses and SATs have become the norm for an increasingly large number of high schoolers. High- stakes testing is also common for New York's elite public and private primary and secondary schools. A high school grad who gets high AP and SAT scores and a 4.0 GPA is demonstrably smarter and more competent than someone than from generations ago without such scores and credentials.

<comment><USER18> To riff off Charles Murray's thesis a little, it could be 'Coming Apart' too

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_\(book\))

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>-

I think youtube and twitter are sort of interesting tools in this regard.

I see a lot of commentary about how they're tools of distraction, but I'm not sure that's quite right.

I think the better way to think about it is they're going to send you down rabbit holes that will magnify whatever habits you already have.

If you're into cat videos, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,

If you're into physics lectures, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,

youtube is magnifying the differences between what the people who are into cat videos and what the people who are into physics lectures know

twitter works like this too

</comment><comment><USER19> A solution to an increased number of applications per candidate is to use a modified version of the stable marriage problem. [1] This is how medical rotations and a few other positions are filled.

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps my opinion is a bit stupid, but I frankly don't view attending a top college as such an important thing. The point of a career is to eat and live with some dignity. I don't think you need a top school for this. If you're much more ambitious, maybe you want to contribute in a higher way to society with your career. If you're on a path where it's obvious to others you're doing this and likely to be successful, you'll probably end up at the top school naturally. If not, you'll probably end up somewhere better fit for your level. I frankly consider the state school honors kids to be the intellectual elites of their communities and the top school kids to be some weird combination of academic parents, childhood interventions (extra math tutoring etc.), extreme striving, VERY abnormal talent in a specific academic area, or, as recent events have shown, nepotism

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was young and considering college in the 80's, I knew that they considered grades as well as extracurriculars - sports, clubs, activities, volunteerism, etc. Where I lived, there were few opportunities for that sort of thing and I couldn't afford the ones that there were, so I hoped my grades would be enough. I did OK, I suppose, but now that I'm a parent and coaching my own teenagers through college prep, I can't help but notice how expensive, time-consuming and out-of-reach all of these college-admissions-approved extracurricular activities are for all but the upper-middle class. My kids have done sports, band, dance, church and camps their whole lives, and all of those have been time consuming, expensive or both.

</comment><comment><USER22> How about we drop all criteria for admitting students into colleges ? Instead we increase the coursework load and passing requirements ? They can all get in but they can't get out unless they are exceptional students ?

<comment><USER23> Why would Yale exist under your proposal?

<comment><USER24> It wouldn't, and perhaps we should discuss if that's really a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How much of dropping acceptance rates is simply due to students applying to more colleges? I know when I applied a few years ago, I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges simply because they all used a very similar electronic application form. [1] Were these sorts of services available, or as widely used in 2006?

[1]: [https://www.commonapp.org/](https://www.commonapp.org/)

<comment><USER26> > I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges

How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?

<comment><USER24> Not OP but I know lots of people that applied to colleges they never visited.

With that said, I also know lots of people that visited lots of colleges, doing a road trip or something spring break during high school. I didn't and honestly don't know why someone would.

<comment><USER26> I can't understand why you'd uproot your entire life and move to somewhere for at least four years and set the tone of your social and professional life, based on somewhere you couldn't even be bothered to visit.

<comment><USER27> Getting away from your comfortable home is a good thing. Once you have agreed to leave everything you know and move it doesn't matter where you go.

Visiting local schools is important because you need to ensure that the details work. Can you get from your parents home to class during rush hour? Can you get from class to your weekend job?

If you are going far away from home though, who cares. What you can do in Fargo North Dakota are very different what you can do in Maui Hawaii, but either way you there are plenty of things to do. You will find out when you get there. If forced to either you will find something you like that you didn't know before. You will meet new friends.

<comment><USER26> You can have very different lifestyle in different communities. Moving blind to somewhere you have no understanding of is a recipe for unhappiness when you find it doesn't suit you due to climate, politics, economics, etc.

For example moving to a college and realising you can't get anywhere in the area without driving and you're a walking person.

<comment><USER27> Only if you are so closed minded that you cannot learn to enjoy something different. I know many such people, they wouldn't go to any college not close to home. I also know many people who have moved to different countries blindly and had the best time of their lives because they can enjoy something new.

Either way visiting campus isn't really required, either you are cut out for anything or you already are not cut out because it isn't close to home.

<comment><USER26> I think you think I'm arguing to go to college at home - nobody here said that you've imagined it.

You're arguing you'll probably be fine wherever so don't bother yourself to learn anything about the community you'll be joining before you go. I'm saying do research into where you want to be. How can you argue against informing yourself?

<comment><USER27> I'm not arguing against all research (though this is obviously not clear). I'm arguing visiting campus and the town are not useful research in general. You should research your proposed school to make sure that you can get the type of education you want: that is why you go to a school, to get an education. If you can get the education you want, that is important.

Note, if you are disabled in some way you might need to research campus and town are accessible to your needs. Most people don't have this consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the common application) but it is likely easy to test for.

Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high).

As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had _not_ been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.

</comment><comment><USER29> When I went to college - there were 30 people per 1 college placement for comp-sci. In order to even be considered u had to have top scores from high school (gold metal is better). And that was in regional college - I can only imagine what was happening in the capital. TIL - getting in harvard is easier. Americans have it easy.

<comment><USER30> I've always wondered why we're so over the top about college admissions? It's weird. It's already really easy to get into our schools compared with other nations. And the data in this article really does agitate on the side of an uncompetitive application as the reason for any failure to gain admission.

This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not _that_ many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure.

Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.

<comment><USER21> > The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you

My kids can claim hispanic status through their (very very Mexican mother) and conventional wisdom is that they can both breeze into any college they care to by checking the right box on the application. Whether that's true or not, I've always warned them not to rely on it - if they coast in and find themselves surrounded by people who know the material backward and forward while they're still struggling with the basics, they're going to end up coasting right back out.

<comment><USER30> They won't even get in if they "coast".

The blacks and hispanics at MIT or wherever, they are definitely _not_ "coasters". That's an urban myth that will be roundly dispelled about 15 minutes into a working relationship with one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

" But of course there's a reason that it's so difficult to get into Yale – it's because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there's roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.

Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):

Princeton: 5,336

Harvard: 6,658

Yale: 5,405

Columbia: 6,068

Stanford: 7,063

Chicago: 5,590

Duke: 6,655

MIT: 4,503

Upenn: 9,682

CIT: 997

Dartmouth: 4,193

That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.

By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:

McGill: 30,000

UBC: 47,500

UofT: 67,000

So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."

Full article here: [http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher- education...](http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/)

\</comment><comment>----

I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.

I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.

I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.

<comment><USER32> Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.

<comment><USER31> The thing is, those top three are quite prestigious in Canada. Maybe not _as_ prestigious, but being a smaller country we have less room for minor shifts in ranking value.

MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don't really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value.

Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you'd be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.

<comment><USER33> If US schools are Veblen goods then we can look to luxury goods as a comparison.

Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What a great article. Loved the mix of historical references mixed with statistical data. Easily better than any news article I've read on college admissions issue. It's so rare that an article exceeds my expectations.

<comment><USER21> Everything he writes is amazing - you should go back through his archives, you'll be shocked at how much you can learn from this guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The author is too humble. Should be titled: what everyone must know.

<comment><USER36> I disagree. It's great that Scott Alexander gathers all this information, and in the end admits he still doesn't know what the cause is. It leaves it open to further discussion.

<comment><USER35> Human behavior isn't always explicable. This is one of those deleterious behaviors which boils down to a bunch of smart people exploiting the cognitive, emotional biases of parents and students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He titles it "college" and mostly uses Harvard as the example. About 0.1% of students attend Harvard, and their admissions experience is atypical.

</comment><comment><USER23> The author sort of casually dismisses foreign enrollment but then also focuses on UC which seems like cherry-picking. There are 6500 foreign nationals enrolled at UCB alone in 2018. That is up by 600% in the last 15 years alone. The entire UC system has 45k foreign nationals enrolled, up from only 8k in 1999.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm a high school senior who just went through the process. Feel free to ask me any questions if you have any.

<comment><USER39> Ok, where are you planning to go, and why? What will be your major?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Re-posting my SSC comment here:

I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.

At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources.

Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until _after_ they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.

In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need- based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.

In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.

[1] [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard- annou...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-announces- sweeping-middle-income-initiative/)

</comment><comment><USER40> We are thankful for SSC.</comment>


The Let It Crash Philosophy Outside Erlang - <AUTHOR> https://stratus3d.com/blog/2020/01/20/applying-the-let-it-crash-philosophy-outside-erlang/ <comment><USER2> This is my biggest criticism of JavaScript: it fails silently quite often. `{}.foo` returning `undefined` is the most common culprit, but there are many other possible causes.

Django templates also do this, which causes all sorts of debugging problems.

<comment><USER3> The worst part about javascript failing is a lot of time it doesn't do it at the thing that is the problem.

I've run into a lot of cases in node where I passed something not quite right to a crypt library but didn't find out until like 2 pages later. Usually for things that in python would throw an exception immediately.

<comment><USER4> That's not really a Javascript problem. That's a dynamically typed language problem. Unless you add some kind of assertion/test at the entry point to a library, the failure will always be postponed to the point of use (or silent if it's never used, until the day someone turns a feature on). If the same sort of issue works differently in Python, the Python library has asserts or other tests, or is using the value at an earlier point so it's more easily discovered.

<comment><USER5> JavaScript is absolutely the problem.

As pointed out, {}.foo will not cause an error. In Python and any good dynamic language, that will generate an error.

Another problem is all the implicit (silent) type conversions. JavaScript will happily add an Object and an integer, then multiply that by a string. Any sensible type system would not allow that, but JavaScript silently produces a NaN.

The problem isn't that its a dynamic type system, but that the type system ignores things which are clearly problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While 'Let It Crash' is a philosophy, it is greatly aided in Erlang by extremely lightweight threads that communicate with each other via mailboxes.

<comment><USER7> It's helpful in other domains, too.

For example, in ETL pipelines, I would greatly prefer to have an entire DAG go down quickly and noisily than to risk having it generate incorrect data. It's the difference between a crappy morning, and a crappy day or even a crappy week.

<comment><USER8> Just curious since a lot of my work is on an ETL - what are your favorite DAG libraries/approaches? Some of my ETL workflows can run in parallel with each other because there aren't data dependencies between them, and others should definitely crash loudly

<comment><USER7> We use a home-grown solution, and try to keep it pretty minimal. For example, we can run all our pipeline steps serially and still get all the work done plenty fast, so, for now, we're keeping that parallelism can of worms firmly shut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I don't think Let It Crash is a good name for the philosophy Erlang has about handling faults"

This is also known as "Crash-Only software" [1]. I'm a huge fan.

[1] [https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only- softwa...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only-software)

<comment><USER10> What he might be getting at, that others have certainly discussed, is that things like "crash only software!" are not winning marketing slogans when trying to sell a piece of technology to higher-ups in your company.

<comment><USER11> Yes, you tell those people the software is "self healing".

<comment><USER12> It reminds me of how people _love_ , for marketing purposes, to have technology, say in vehicles, that is "adaptive". In software in general, but particularly in cars, there is nothing I hate more. Because "adaptive" makes people think of a partner that anticipates your needs, but it can't do that, _not being intelligent_ so adaptive ends up being the _opposite of responsive_.

<comment><USER13> "unexpected acceleration" in cars comes to mind.

<comment><USER12> I was more in mind of steering and transmission algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i'm a huge fan of erlang and i'm familiar w/ this philosophy and tend to have a hard time w/ applying it. when i develop software, i read man pages for the functions i call. i intently study their return values and do my best to address whatever conditions i can at that moment. if i'm unable to handle the fault, i generate a message with the intent to add context to the error and let it bubble up. that context is important. it's _very_ beneficial when a failure does occur because i can quickly ascertain the root cause due to my diligence in annotating the _BAD_ path with context--all the way to the top of the function stack.

i've noticed that when erlang programs crash, the error message and stack trace is a WTF moment. i hate that. so yes, there are all these benefits when focusing on the happy path, but there are down sides, can we explorer those? once software is written, it's how the _BAD_ path is presented to maintainers that matters. this philosophy, in my current understanding, throws those people under the bus.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the Let-the-user-handle-it approach from CL.</comment>


How about implicit interfaces in C#? - <AUTHOR> http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/How-about-implied-interfaces-in-C.aspx

<comment><USER2> By implicit interfaces I believe you mean inferred interfaces in the same way that 'var' is inferred typing - type/interface definitions still exist, but you would like their assignment to an object to be inferred.

I don't think this is particular helpful. For instance, many interfaces share the same method signatures (although perhaps not the same collection of method signatures) so assignment is unlikely to be accurate and the resulting behaviour of treating an arbitrary object as an implementor of a particular interface seems unlikely to be desirable. For instance, just because I can run and a river can run does not mean we should both be entered into the 100m dash at the olympics. However, I'm open to positive examples that are more beneficial than saving a few letters on your class definition.

What I find interesting (and plan to develop into a longer piece of writing) is an investigation of the general idea of implicit interfaces combined with something like Yegge's prototype pattern ([http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pat...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html)). The details are still hazy in my mind but an elegant way of requiring that the object passed into a method meets particular conditions at runtime sounds pretty cool and useful to me.</comment>


iminlikewithyou is now OMGPOP - <AUTHOR> http://omgpop.com/#/ <comment><USER2> Be prepared for stiff competition from ZOMGFTWPOP.

</comment><comment><USER3> We just wanted a simple meaningless name less than 15 characters that was impossible to mistype. We will be playing up the brands of the games moving forward. Most people just refer to the site as "Blockles" or "Balloono". The key will be to continuing to provide really great match-based games.

</comment><comment><USER4> They talked about this a month ago with the new CEO, and it is an interesting move, but I wonder how much it'll hurt them from a branding perspective...

omgpop is definitely shorter and easier to remember than iminlikewithyou, but I wonder how far along do you have to be into your startup before it becomes hard to say how to get mindshare plus pagerank from an old name back? should be interesting to see the compete graphs: [http://siteanalytics.compete.com/iminlikewithyou.com+omgpop....](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/iminlikewithyou.com+omgpop.com/?metric=uv)

does anyone know of any other startups that have done this successfully?

<comment><USER5> there is a way to transfer pagerank from your previous domain to the new one

<comment><USER6> A 301 redirect will typically pass most of it, except when it doesn't. (There are a variety of reasons why that could happen. Most involve automated filters designed to make the technique less effective to spammers. They're not perfect.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What does the name mean? I don't see it on his site.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's chat speak, clearly. OMG = oh my god. Pop is popular and happy.

It could also have been JAMLOL or KTHXBBQ, though <http://ohai.com> is taken by another company I'm looking forward to tracking.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for pointing out ohai.com. These types of start-ups are definitely worth tracking; I have a hunch they'll do very well. They provide a much more immersive and meaningful experience than MySpace, and also provide incentive (points) for coming back. On top of that, no registration is required to get started.

On the other hand, it's basically Yahoo Games repackaged for a younger, hipper audience... not exactly innovative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There seems to be a lot of game sites coming out lately. I guess they all seem very much like kongregate to me. This one seems to be more focused on multi player though which is nice.

Wonder if they will go for traditional games like chess, pictionary, etc at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> Whoa, is there really that high a proportion of cute girls hanging out online, playing casual games?

<comment><USER11> I don't know about cute, but a majority casual gamers online are female. Google "casual gaming female" and there are reports across several years. Some of them have the proportion as high as 70%.

<comment><USER12> If you dig further into the market research, though, you'll find that the majority of those are 40-something housewives in middle America. Basically the same population who watches daytime soap operas. Actually, I suspect the Internet casual game marketplace will kill the soap opera.

So no, there are not a bunch of cute girls on casual gaming sites. Most of the cute girls seem to be on TV fansites of shows popular with teens and 20-somethings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> not a bad name. They should have used my domain <http://ombop.com> !

<comment><USER14> What makes it a good name? Personally I think its pretty terrible. Does not mean much of anything, makes me think of a celebrity blog or something. The domain is hard to pronounce. If you don't use the OMG acronym its completely meaningless. Always amazes me when companies with millions in funding put their sites on such crap domains.

<comment><USER15> Some people on here are just outright ridiculous.

It's a website of poppy glossy Flash games for teenyboppers. How is this not a perfect name for the site and its demo?

<comment><USER8> Remind me how "ombop" appeals to teenyboppers... they don't meditate, and Hanson went out of style years ago.

<comment><USER15> I went to the local junior high around here and asked the girls hanging around to come over and I told them whether or not omgpop.com sounds awesome. They said yes. Then some school admin guy came over and told me to go away.

<comment><USER8> Did you ask about ombop.com, the name that this thread about?

<comment><USER15> Oh hey, I'm a tard with the grayed out texts.

<comment><USER8> I thought it was pretty clear that I was talking about "ombop.com" and not "omgpop.com." If you read only the first four words of my post, before accosting junior high girls, this would have been obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Brilliant name! Well played =)</comment>


Evernote Hello for Android is Here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evernote.com/2012/05/30/evernote-hello-for-android-is-here/

<comment><USER2> I'm failing to see the benefit here over the default Android contacts app. It supports pictures too and syncs (with your Google account). The main difference seems to be that Evernote Hello pulls their info from LinkedIn for you, but that may or may not be the info you need (maybe you need their cell phone instead of their office phone), and the person may or may not have a LinkedIn profile. Am I missing something?</comment>


Spelunky by Derek Yu - <AUTHOR> https://bossfightbooks.com/collections/books/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu <comment><USER2> I've read this book. It is an excellent history of the development of the game spanning its creation, commercial release, and Xbox Live Arcade port written by the creator of the game.

However, the other books in the series do not necessarily match this format. The book about Earthbound is a largely autobiographical reminiscence written by a fan, for example. Read summaries and reviews carefully.</comment>


Police use new tool to source crowds for evidence - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CROWDSOURCING_EVIDENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

<comment><USER2> "Designers say users can post anonymously and should strip metadata from files they send."

Talk about poor design. Instead of automatically stripping metadata, they rely on users to do so. On a mobile phone.

<comment><USER3> Would you trust them if they auto-stripped the metadata for you?

<comment><USER4> I think I would strip the metadata, but also want them to auto-strip.

<comment><USER5> They should prompt the user. Let the user decide what metadata to include and review it before submission. Personally, I would probably leave all the metadata intact and leave contact information if I were submitting pictures of a riot.

I don't agree with Nate Cardozo. If you're in public then you may be photographed and those photos may be shared with other parties, including law enforcement. More concerning is access to the database of photos. Anyone who is accused must have full access. It wouldn't be right if prosecutors were able to withhold exculpatory evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in Santa Barbara (neighboring Isla Vista). At least judging by portrayal in local media, there has been a lot of locals sympathetic to the police; the general feeling I get is that those living in IV blame all the out-of-towners for the various parties getting out of control (Including Floatopia/Deltopia and Haloween).

With similar party-turned-riots at the college I went to, the majority involved were students, so I think something like this would get less assistance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who remembers the complete fiasco of Reddit trying to catch the Boston Marathon bombers can tell you one scenario in which this technology can go horribly, horribly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER7> My startup automatically collects photos & videos that are shared (Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Flickr, Youtube) that were taken at events (geotag, hashtag, contextual analysis). It can consequently be used for this purpose as well.

Example event: [http://wesawit.com/events/bruce-springsteen-and-the-e- street...](http://wesawit.com/events/bruce-springsteen-and-the-e-street-band- at-bbt-center-2014-04-29-52fa03f7165dc)

</comment><comment><USER8> >And since it uses remote database servers that police access online, floods of data won't cause system crashes or be expensive to store. Most agencies, Edson said, "don't have lots of bandwidth lying around."

I dont really get what they mean here. Are they saying since the DB is in the _cloud_ /remote it isnt subject to crashing?

<comment><USER9> I read it as this: the police are outsourcing the crowd-sourcing to a "valued partner" who may or may not have ties with the commissioners, legislators or city officials that have decision making power.

ie, it's yet another public-private partnership that is ripe for crony capitalism. Also absent is any discussions of ramifications on misuse (what happens when this turns into a snitch-line?)

<comment><USER10> What is the difference between a "snitch-line" and the specific purpose for which this was designed? What is wrong with a "snitch-line"?

<comment><USER11> It promotes "snitch culture." Which you might pattern-match with gang talk about "no snitching" until you realize that the ultimate snitch culture was the Soviet Union and satellites.

What's wrong with a snitch line is that everyone has _something_ to hide, and that everyone also does things that look unsavory at times. Nobody wants to live looking over their shoulder every minute of the day. Nobody wants to live thinking that their being in an unusual place at an unusual time will lead to someone "saying something."

That's not even going into malicious use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This link doesn't work for me. I'm taken to AP's "pick where you live" page :/

<comment><USER13> Same here. At first, I though selecting any state would lead me to the article, but it just opened a drop-down menu, and clicking it does nothing.

Very frustrating. Any ideas, anyone?

<comment><USER14> Looks like the querystring was cut off : [http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CROWDSOURCING_EVID...](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CROWDSOURCING_EVIDENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT) takes me to the story.</comment></comment></comment>


"It should not take seven years and a team of lawyers to open a small business." - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131758.html

<comment><USER2> I agree it should not take seven years and a team of lawyers to open a small business...and in general it doesn't. I agree that city politics should not favor a local cartel, but every new business venture faces some degree of barrier to entry, this just happens to be an extreme case. Does this mean Erroll Tyler is in the wrong business? Not necessarily, he just needs to find a new way to compete. He needs more friends in government, and cartels are notoriously unstable...</comment>


Ask HN: If you could write to Mark Zuckerberg, what would you write? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I'd ask him to repay me the $100 he froze in my Facebook ads account in 2004 for selling tshirts making fun of Facebook.

Seems the appropriate thing to do would be to repay the cash as if it were a $100 investment in Facebook in 2004 - stock would be fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would ask him who's idea was it to auto-play videos on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER4> I"d ask how they felt after sinking billions into OculusVR only for Google to slap them with Google Cardboard (and the DodoCase et al), then made another slap with Magic Leap.

<comment><USER5> Having built Cardboard myself, but used an Oculus DK1 for about 10 minutes, I can tell you for sure that even the first Oculus is a totally different order of magnitude of product compared to Cardboard-style devices. I'm not really a part of the Oculus cult of personality, I didn't back it and probably won't buy a devkit, but this is a ridiculous statement.

Oculus efforts on mobile VR appear to include much more attention, including Carmack et al campaigning to change Samsung phone hardware APIs to improve fidelity.

Magic Leap is a totally different product, AR vs VR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd ask him if I could work for him once I get out of undergrad.

</comment><comment><USER7> stop selling personal data (if you do) !!!!!! Respect privacy

</comment><comment><USER8> Are you happy?</comment>


Hornet for Blackberry, real-time address book (Will .tel kill the phone number?) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hornethub.com/how-hornet-works/

<comment><AUTHOR> .tel is about using existing infrastructure (the DNS) to resolve contact information. Will it make phone numbers as inconsequential to the experience of communication as IP address are to browsing the web? Discuss.

<comment><USER2> It sounds like it's just someone trying to make money off a domain they're stuck with. Why can't I use my regular domain name to store my contact information? (And why would I want anyone that knows my domain name to be able to call me? I treat phone numbers like _passwords_. If you don't know the password, you can't call me. This system treats them like usernames. Not the same.)

<comment><USER3> I guess you could use something like Google Voice to blacklist (or whitelist) phone numbers.

<comment><USER2> I do, but blacklisting is annoying (requires effort), and whitelisting can easily cause me to miss important calls. The current system works pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see why this needs to be a .tel specific technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it doesn't, but see my other comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. Phone numbers are unique. Names are decidedly not unique. Every look in a phone book for John Smith?

A .tel domain may be great for the first person to get a popular .tel name, but it sucks for everyone else. And for that reason alone, it has no chance of replacing a telephone book.

Also, it is an expensive, proprietary, unscalable solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> With a little bit of creativity you can do a lot with language, e.g. there are hundreds of millions of names in each of the biggest namespaces (AOL/Gmail/Skype/etc).

One shouldn't assume that the John Smith you know has JohnSmith.tel, but to use a specialised search engine to find the correct one. You may already know one piece of his contact information, his location, or some keywords that might define him.

It's hardly expensive ($10 /year). Everything is open source and compliant with preexisting standards. You can run your own TelHosting provider if you want to. It's decentralised (obviously). Why would you say it's not scalable? DNS is the most distributed and well balanced network that we have.

Finally, you OWN your data. There is no malevolent third party.</comment></comment>


Google Fires Back at Twitter: You Took Yourself Out of Search - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/01/11/google-twitter-search-3/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

<comment><USER2> _Sullivan said he thought Google had enough permission to include links from networks like Twitter in its search results, Schmidt said: "That's your opinion. If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful."_ [1]

Sounds like the reporter expects Google to be able to scrape and index all tweets in real time. The whole point here is that (1) that's a big deal and (2) Twitter would prefer to charge dearly for that access if they allowed it at all. In negotiating terms, Google+ provides Google with a great BATNA in this situation where previously all they had was "pay whatever Twitter asks to index tweets or go without".

Frankly, the "I believe you have permission, make it happen!" argument hinted at in the above quote sounds just as naive as the Congressman who says "We can do it! We have the technology!" about SOPA.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=o3FEILaTP3o#t=110s)

<comment><USER3> "Sounds like the reporter expects Google to be able to scrape and index all tweets in real time."

Do we know how this worked on the technical side "back in the days" when tweets appeared on Google? Did they share a database, or did Google actually scrape in close to real time? (I can't imagine the second alternative being particularly efficient for any of them, though)

<comment><USER4> Google used to have access to a firehose of live tweets, but then their contract expired.

[http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/google-realtime-search- suspen...](http://mashable.com/2011/07/04/google-realtime-search-suspended/)

<comment><USER3> "While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google"

"A special feed", that's the information I was looking for. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The posturing going on right now between Google, Facebook and Twitter is childish and hypocritical. Each company is only interested in leverage against each other, pure and simple. And when that approach stalls, they attempt to curry favor among the public with their situationally-convenient comments.

The disingenuous collective here is ridiculous. Google and Twitter haggle over dollars, Twitter says no thanks, and Google says Twitter "took themselves out of search"? Google goes with what it has for real-time data (Google-plus) and incorporates that into search results, and Twitter calls it "bad for people"? For all the smart people involved in these organizations, I find this public conversation makes everyone involved look really small and petty.

Similar to the game of adding "in bed" to every fortune from a fortune cookie, I now append "because we want to be in control" to every statement from Google, Facebook or Twitter.

<comment><USER6> Twitter is returning it's pages with all of the links marked as rel=nofollow. This means Google can't index the content that is linked by Twitter users.

<comment><USER7> That's not true. It just means that it won't contribute to pagerank. But the GoogleBot has discretion to crawl or not crawl the links.

<comment><USER8> So you're saying that the Google spider should break with expected and normal behavior (honoring nofollow) in order to crawl pages that someone else has gone to the trouble of making noncrawlable?

Yeah, that won't get them into any PR hot water or anything! </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If Google had to pay every web-service out there for the privilege to index their otherwise free content, that could cost Google more money than is possible for them to spend.

Then again, Twitter and Facebook are certainly large enough that some kind of deal could have been negotiated. But if they did that, would other social networks uproar in protest because now it's not just Google monopolizing their power.. it's the 3 largest websites out there doing it together.

<comment><USER10> _If Google had to pay every web-service out there for the privilege to index their otherwise free content, that could cost Google more money than is possible for them to spend._

It would also be a disturbing direction to point the web in. The reason that google and other search engines are useful is because their bots can crawl the web like any user, they just also obey when a website asks them to stay away.

Using robots.txt or nofollow to keep bots away unless they cough up cash concerns me greatly because it means they're turning what was a "count me out please" mechanism into a paywall. A paywall that the public doesn't see, but goes up between the public and finding public content with a search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do think we should be worried about letting google get too strong a walled garden. The most worrisome thing about google is that we depend upon so many google products, that it might be difficult to see what we are missing if they started to overly favor google offerings. I don't think google has gone there yet, but it is something to keep track of. That being said, twitter has no excuse to complain if they did simply remove themselves from google's results. I suspect that in fact they negotiated and got a better deal going exclusive with bing.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think that Twitter search is a real missed opportunity, I was hoping that Google with all their resources would be able to capitalize on it, but looks like Twitter isn't playing along.

I did a university project (retreave.com) which used the streaming API to receive tweets, index the pages they linked to, and then provide a lucene based search engine for it. It's really cool to search for say 'design books' and see what your twitter network has reccomended that relates to it (and of course, the search doesn't just search the tweet text, but the page text as well). It ranked results based on social stature in addition to relevance (ie a link tweeted by lots of people is higher ranked)

Unfortunately the User Streams API only scales to a few users, and I've been waiting for 9 months for an invite to the Site Streams Beta, but looks like they don't want me to make their search useful either.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why there is a deal at all. Why isn't the situation simply that Google indexes things (like tweets) unless they have a rel=nofollow?

<comment><USER14> As of June last year, Twitter was churning out 155 million tweets a day: [http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/gnip-twitter-firehose- realt...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/gnip-twitter-firehose-realtime- data.html)

It's not easy to index find that much fresh data in anything resembling real- time. And with real-time data, seconds and minutes matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Once upon a time it was possible to get a clean (not rel=nofollow) link from one's Twitter profile: <http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink- tip.html>

Presumably for anti-spam reasons, Matt Cutts (of Google, and regular Hacker News commenter) implied in a tweet that Twitter would want to fix this: <https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396>

I think this implies - in my opinion rightly - that Google want or wanted links on Twitter to have the nofollow attribute set.

<comment><USER16> Twitter was already implementing rel=nofollow. Matt was just letting them know they were doing it inconsistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it not make sense that Google would want to create as much synergy as possible between their offerings?

I don't understand the concern here. It looks to me like they are going to use a small amount of screen space to let users know how many relevant Google+ links were found in the search. All of the Google+ links will be collapsed at the top. The other 95% of the page layout and result is the same.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't mean to go off topic - but for some reason the imagine of the Google 'G' and the Twitter 'T' just looked like the word 'Git' to me, so I was hopelessly waiting for more controversy involving Github to make it's way into the article...

[http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/google-vs- twi...](http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/google-vs- twitter-360.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER19> It all depends on how you look at the overall system Google has created. If one considers the entirety of Google+ to be a mere component of Google Search (like the now-extinct Friends section of Netflix was), then one can better reconcile this situation with supposed fairness. After all, what's to stop Bing or Yahoo from creating a social component to their products which affect search?

So the issue in is not one of ethics, but of how Google is marketing Google+. When all that existed was the +1 button, no one complained about ethics. Nothing has changed since then except a reworking of the information architecture of the same +1 data and processes. Google seems to believe that Google+ needs to exist independently of Search. If they're gonna stick with that route, they need to open the Search platform to 3rd party integration.

</comment><comment><USER20> This fight is going to spill over to Facebook too -- Google has been trying to get Facebook to open up for a while.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't help but be reminded of early 90's Microsoft when I read about what Google is doing lately. They're definitely on the "extend" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish. They're creating their own little insular community. Search results return Google+ results first and prominently at the top. Their browser has features that no other browser supports (native client, Dart etc). Their previously free APIs are now going to cost lots and lots of money (Maps). None of these things are bad in and of themselves, and all of it is certainly their choice. However, if this is the direction they're headed then I want no part of it.

Edit: For those of you who find my comment off topic - did you even read the article or just the summary? Here are some relevant quotes:

"Twitter had criticized Google's new social search feature, which it calls Search plus Your World, on Tuesday. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, its statement said. We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone."

"Sullivan told Schmidt he thought one feature of Search plus Your World, which recommends relevant people to follow on Google+ but not other networks, is the equivalent of saying 'hey, you can only find information about finance on Google finance. You cannot find information about finance anywhere else."

Clearly people are upset about Google trying to block out competitor's results. I believe my comment is completely ON topic.

Edit 2: Wow, I had no idea how many Google apologists were out there. I had high hopes that the Hacker News community might actually be objective and not just fawn all over Google. Christ was I mistaken.

<comment><USER22> > native client, Dart, etc.

You forgot SPDY, WebRTC, etc. This is nothing like ActiveX. These are open- source technologies and other browsers are free and _invited_ to implement them. They're trying to push the web forward.

<comment><USER21> Sure they're free and open source. But they aren't STANDARDS. You seem to be unable to look objectively at the situation. While ActiveX was closed source, by extending the web with non standard technology the end result will be the same, open source or not.

<comment><USER23> But they are adhering to standards as well, more so than anyone else for that matter, point to an instance where they're not. Also it takes ages for stuff to get standardized, are you suggesting that no technology should be applicable until it's the standard? I see no issue in introducing new cool tech specially if it's opensource.

<comment><USER24> I think people complaining about this are upset about the network effect, rather than Chrome adding new features. Say you love Firefox. One day, your favorite website decides to switch entirely to SPDY, and you can't use Firefox anymore. It's natural to blame Google for this, since they invented SPDY and put the client into production. But really, it's that site's developer's fault for using nonstandard features.

This happens all the time; Firefox adds non-standard CSS transforms, Microsoft adds non-standard Javascript functionality, and Apple adds proprietary video codecs to Safari. When your web app depends on these things, you hurt your users. But it's your fault for using nonstandard features; it's not Apple's or Google's or Microsoft's fault for making their browser support them. If this upsets you, consider software in general. To use Facebook, you have to use Facebook. That's nonstandard! To use an Emacs extension, you have to use Emacs. That's nonstandard! And so on.

Google and Mozilla are especially innocent, since Apple and Microsoft can easily steal any features they want from Chrome and Firefox. They're the only ones out in the open, and for that, I think they deserve to try new things for the web. If they stick, the other vendors can easily support the new features.

<comment><USER25> first you say "One day, your favorite website decides to switch entirely to SPDY, and you can't use Firefox anymore. It's natural to blame Google for this, since they invented SPDY and put the client into production. But really, it's that site's developer's fault for using nonstandard features."

then "Google and Mozilla are especially innocent, since Apple and Microsoft can easily steal any features they want from Chrome and Firefox. They're the only ones out in the open, and for that, I think they deserve to try new things for the web. If they stick, the other vendors can easily support the new features."

How would these features stick, if developers using them are to blame?

<comment><USER24> By degrading gracefully, of course. It's why you _can_ read GMail in IE6, even though the experience is a lot better in Chrome 17.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>