Robots, Not Humans, Fake 23% of Web Video Ad Views, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-09/robots-not-humans-fake-23-of-web-video-ad-views-study-finds.html

<comment><USER3> Not sure I fully buy the argument that the industry is actually genuinely losing that $6bn. If I buy plates in bulk but find that 25% are usually broken in shipping, I will tend to pay 25% less for each shipment on the assumption that this will happen - the supplier might even have already priced this in.

Online advertising is a much more fluid market and very metrics-focused - <USER2> find it hard to believe that most smart companies haven't priced this into their bidding. There's not some sort of intrinsic value per click or impression - it should purely be based on the expected propensity of it leading to a conversion. Fake clicks and impressions are just a factor which reduces this and therefore it should automatically be taken into account.

In fact, I'm surprised it's not the suppliers of inventory, like YouTube, who are complaining that this is erroding their value. If advertisers are getting caught out by this then they're not being very smart.

<comment><USER4> There's a big difference if 25% of your plates are accidentally broken in shipping vs being smashed with a hammer in the warehouse.

<comment><USER5> Your 'big difference' is _intent_, a flighty, volatile emotion that no rational person will ever care to account for.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea)

<comment><USER5> The whole point of my post is that this kind of thinking is bullshit. Saying "the courts do it" doesn't contradict that, it's just an appeal to history or authority.

<comment><USER4> If I break the plates, you might be able to get restitution from me. You can't get that from a bumpy road. Also, you might be able to avoid broken plates in the first place by threatening me with jail time. You can't threaten a road into being less rough. The intention of a person completely changes the threat profile and mitigation strategy, that's why it's a big deal.

<comment><USER5> Only if you can predict intent. Which you can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many people are asking why it's a problem, why don't advertisers just pay less, etc.

The adbots are making money off of this, otherwise they wouldn't do it, and that money has to come from _somewhere_. Meanwhile, they don't contribute anything of value, so _someone_ 's losing money to the adbots.

The burden of the loss will actually be distributed between the ad buyers and ad space sellers depending on their elasticity. The economics is very similar to that of a sales tax, with the proceed going to the botnets.

<comment><USER7> I think a clearer way to put it is this: The 23% number was measured across networks displaying ads on many sites. Some of those sites employ botnets to generate fake views, giving them much more than 23% fraudulent views, while other sites that don't do such things have 0% fraudulent views. The amount the advertiser is willing to pay is presumably set by their experience across the whole network, so if they were willing to pay $X per ad without fraud, they will pay 0.77 * $X due to fraud, which means that the honest websites get less than they deserve (based on the value they deliver) while the fraudulent websites get more than they deserve. So, the fraudulent websites are stealing from the honest ones, not stealing from the advertisers.

<comment><USER6> Not knowing the rate of ad fraud does make things worse, but is not necessary to explain why it's a problem. Even if the ad fraud rate was absolutely uniform across all websites, there would be a deadweight loss. The ad fraudsters are extracting money from someone.

<comment><USER8> If the ad fraud rate were uniform across all websites, then advertisers would simply pay less CPM because its less converting traffic.

If website A is all fraud, and website B is 0% fraud. Then on the same network, you'd have a 50% fraud rate, and website A would be paid money it doesn't deserve (as it deserves nothing for its 100% fraud traffic).

Fraudsters are being subsidized by legitimate traffic.

<comment><USER6> No. The price is determined by supply and demand. So you're saying demand would fall - much as demand for a good falls when you impose a sales tax. There would be deadweight loss from the lack of traffic _and_ advertisers would still end up diverting funds towards adbots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It isn't surprising. Click fraud has always been an easy way for a creative programmer to generate "free" money. That said, it has also always been a complaint for ever that advertisers don't think they are getting their money's worth[1].

One answer is to switch to a pay for performance model like affiliates do, basically only pay when something is purchased not just on click or view. But brand advertising doesn't really have a good 'performance' metric.

As others have said though, its a 'fake' problem, just like credit card fraud is a 'fake' problem. The costs are baked into the charges so the vendors get their money either way. But having a story that BigCorp is taking pennies from its legitimate customers to pay for ads being clicked on by robots is a hard story to get sympathy for the advertiser :-)

[1] "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." \-- John Wanamaker

</comment><comment><USER10> To all the people saying this isn't a problem: it really is. Even if advertisers bake a fraud premium into their buys, blindly letting money flow to bad actors creates an incentive to be a bad actor, and bad actors in this space do bad things that hurt everyone: waste massive amounts of bandwidth, spam the web and app ecosystems with worthless content, and worst of all exploit users to build and run botnets.

We've spent a lot of effort over the last few years fighting this stuff, and we're really happy to see the industry as a whole starting to agree that it's a problem. If you'd like to help make the web better by working to remove these incentives, we're hiring engineers; contact info in my profile.

<comment><USER11> I agree with the above sentiment. To elaborate on who gets hurt, the problem is that small publishers get squeezed. If you're ESPN, you can create a private exchange, keep a strong agency sales force, and keep up your prices. However, the smaller publishers will not have the ability to reach the buyers except through these compromised exchanges. If the buyers flee the open markets, the smaller pubs have to band together into networks again or try their luck with programmatic direct (Pubmatic is making a push for this with their recent acquisitions). We go back to a world of media buying that looks more like TV; we become a lot less fluid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised that no-one is talking about accuracy here.

How, exactly, do they determine who is and isn't a bot?

> For the study, researchers put software into the actual ads of 36 members of > the advertising association between Aug. 1 and Oct. 1. The software allowed > them to tell if viewers of the ads were people or bots.

<comment><USER13> I think that's what is being sold, and is what the report is promoting.

As a product and company, they remind me of [http://spider.io](http://spider.io) who did a similar thing and were acquired by Google. I was interested in using the technology to fight comment spam on blogs and forums, but it was really tailored for detecting fraudulent clicks and impressions on adverts and Google were quick to acquire.

Some of the spider.io blog is still accessible and shares some of the approaches they used: [http://www.spider.io/blog/](http://www.spider.io/blog/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone please explain why this is a problem. The way I see it is that advertisers pay for results. If you spend $100,000 on ads and make less than $100,000 in extra profit - you're paying too much for ads. The fact that 23% of ad views don't convert just pushes down the price of an "ad view", ie those fake views are priced in to your CPM rates already. This does not effect your ad budget however.

People that get hurt aren't the advertisers but the quality publishers who may be struggling to sell ads at higher CPM rates, justifying those with fewer fake ad views. But this is nothing new, ad rates have always varied considerably across newspapers based on their quality and audience, and ad buyers should understand that. It's completely normal to pay hundred times more to show your ad on WSJ compared to PornHub for example.

I don't know enough about this, but surely ad buyers have the tools to track conversion rates of different advertising mediums and publishers, thus enabling them to ultimately compute the cost-per-sale?

<comment><USER15> Most advert buyers are not sophisticated. So fraud matters.

<comment><USER16> I don't believe that. I've worked with some companies that spend millions per year with online ads. They are sophisticated.

<comment><USER17> Being sophisticated might just mean you understand that the current cost of fighting fraud is higher than the cost of the fraud. It doesn't mean you're not getting bled.

<comment><USER16> Agree that they understand that fraud exists. And they are not immune to it any more than you or I. But they don't look at it as "being bled". They pay X cents for a click, and they get Y sales per click. And Y has to be greater than X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Advertisers, for example, should demand transparency from website operators about where their traffic comes from._

Ads are usually served from ad networks' servers so they should already have this information.

<comment><USER19> Yup, and also, it's oh so difficult to fake a referrer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how mass usage of AdNauseam could affect this:

[http://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/](http://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/)

[http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity- collabo...](http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity- collaboration-apps/ad-clicks-to-protest-online-tracking- surveillance/d/d-id/1317063)

</comment><comment><USER21> Online marketing/advertising is funny. You'd think once bots could get up to 20% fraud they could be scaled up a bit more and get to 99.9% fraud (the old "machines won't be exactly as smart as people argument", people will be smarter for some time and then machines will be smarter after that). The cynical me also thinks as the fraud isn't likely to be distributed evenly and you don't know if you are the one subsidizing the market you would get a "market for lemons" effect ( [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/05/is- search-advertising...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/05/is-search- advertising-a-market-for-lemons/) ). But I am guessing the desperation of people to be in the market keeps the prices up.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm confused about the motivation here. Are the companies serving these ads running the bots, or paying others surreptitiously to run them? Why not just directly fake numbers if you're going to cheat customers? I feel I must be missing something...

<comment><USER8> There's two reasons that spring to mind:

1\. The companies faking adviews don't directly control the ad management system, so they need to fake a page view on their servers in order to get the 3rd party ad manager (e.g. Doubleclick/Adsense) to record it.

2\. The most obvious way of detecting fake traffic is to see that your ad click-through numbers don't match up with the actual traffic hitting your server. So to obfuscate this, you'll have your bot click through the advert then land on the advertisers page and spider through a few links before bouncing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ultimately, as long as advertisers see a positive return and receive value for their money, click-fraud continue. Once that changes, then advertisers will take their money elsewhere. Until then profit margins will just keep getting smaller and smaller.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am genuinly curious how they manage that. In a world where every user is followed I don't think the robots have a chance to fool the anti-fraud algorithms. At least with the bigger players (Google, Facebook) they don't.

<comment><USER25> Imagine a botnet has managed to get itself installed on Grandma's computer and is injecting 1 false ad impression for every 3 real impressions. The botnet can install things on the computer. You can't (if you're Google, assume Grandma isn't using Chrome). To stop the fraud you'd need to work out which of the 4 impressions is the fraudulent one. That's an incredibly difficult problem to solve...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Agree this is a problem, but if I'm making a list of companies I empathize with for being victimized by shady business practices, Wal-Mart comes in dead last.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have a link to the actual study?

<comment><USER28> Heh, I'm one of the authors of the report. You can pick it up at [http://whiteops.com/botfraud](http://whiteops.com/botfraud) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just make the viewer click Google's captcha in order to show the ad ;)</comment>


General Electric to cut 12,000 jobs in power business revamp - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-jobs/general-electric-to-cut-12000-jobs-in-power-business-revamp-idUSKBN1E11GU <comment><USER2> Wasn't GE running all kinds of commercials about jobs at the "new" GE, trying to hire millenials?

<comment><USER3> Well it's a huge, diverse company. That they're trying to recruit and promote areas appealing to young people while they still maintain (and pursue) stalwarts of industry is not in conflict. If anything, moves like that reinforce that notion, shifting business priorities

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something has gone very wrong at the GE board. They invested $10B+ in 2015 in the power business, which they now axe. They just took over Baker Hughes (last June), which they now want to get rid of.

<comment><USER5> It's the power business, where every purchase is planned 30 years in advance. To cut 12000 jobs there is just gross mismanagement.

<comment><USER6> Was any of the solar and wind power currently being installed planned even 10 years ago? I doubt it: fossil and nuclear installations planned have been going down for quite a while.

<comment><USER7> One of the UK sites that may shut in Stafford makes giant power grid transformers, you order those well in advance. I don't see how renewables are to blame, offshore wind still needs a grid connection and large substation transformers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The last sentence says it all. Its not that there is no market for GE's _type_ of skills, its that there are competitors from other places. That includes people located in the primary growth market footprint, of Asia. So GE would be competing with European and North american salary and cost models, against people every bit as good (and they are) but from a different cost model, and even if you equalize for _that_ the asian suppliers can deliver onsite for less, because they are constructing locally.

Look outside Asia. Who is investing in Africa? yep. China. They build roads, rail lines, power networks, in return for the coltan.

GE as an IPR company doesn't need the same number of people as GE as a build- and-ship company. GE will continue to exist as a bespoke engineering design entity. Maybe GE is becoming ARUP?

<comment><USER9> What does IPR, ARUP, and coltan mean?

<comment><USER10> Coltan: Columbite-tantalite, an ore that contains niobium and tantalum.

IPR: Intellectual property rights.

ARUP: I presume the Arup Group, as Wikipedia says: "a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London which provides engineering, design, planning, project management and consulting services for all aspects of the built environment."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> munk-a This coming within a week of them being handed a giant tax cut...

<comment><USER11> I don't understand how anyone thinks the tax cuts will have an impact on hiring or wages. Companies are already making record profits so if they had a need for hiring people they could afford it already. They also could afford to increase wages now if they saw a need. The tax cut money will probably go into stock buybacks or dividends.

<comment><USER12> Yes, to think that tax cuts would increase employment, you would need to first believe that companies hire people they don't need for fun.

In reality, they will hire if increased demand for their goods or services requires more people to produce them.

<comment><USER13> The idea is that greater money saved would lead to more money being invested, allowing for continual exponential growth of the company and thus increased employment.

Obviously it hasn't worked out well. Most large-cap corps have more cash than they need for investment, they just are holding onto it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Our problem isn't that we don't have enough stuff, it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserves the stuff " Douglas Rushkoff

</comment><comment><USER15> Why can't GM re-tool and redeploy those in steam and nuclear generation sectors to work on renewables? The coming wave of solar / wind deployments will be the largest power-related chunk of capex in a generation.

<comment> chroem- Because renewables, like wind and solar, and thermal power generation are completely different technologies. There is very little in the way of transferrable knowledge and manufacturing tooling between the two.

<comment><USER16> Also the margins on renewables are quite thin due to competition and recent innovation in that space.

<comment><USER17> ...Leading to thin margins on non-renewables (hence the layoffs?)

<comment><USER16> GE Power's bread and butter is gas turbines, and the margins there are strong. As long as natural gas stays cheap, there is usually demand for turbines. Renewables have obvious issues, which is mostly around demand and load. Like solar can't supply power in the evening. GE's problem stems from foreign competition where growth is. I'm oversimplifying here, but an example would be China pumping infrastructure into Africa. GE can't win in those markets because China can undercut and they don't have the same regulations that the US has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't think of a single big descision GE management has made that hasn't been terrible in the long term. And they were the poster company to justify big CEO compensation</comment>


Readable: A more readable version of "readability" - <AUTHOR> http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ <comment><USER2> "Legally, Readable's source is under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike license."

Erm... Why? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Creative Commons wasn't made for code. There are plenty (even too many) open source licenses to choose from. Why not one of those?

EDIT: Yup, using cc for source code is not recommended: [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Com...](http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F)

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I browsed around for less then ten minutes, before deciding on Creative Commons for the code -- and I did so only because I previously saw source-code under various Creative Commons licenses. I did not know that it wasn't recommended; thanks for letting me know. I'll be sure to study the issue more thoroughly and re-license the code.

<comment><USER4> Open Source Licenses[1] is a good place to "shop" for licenses, though you might find the "by name" view a bit overwhelming. Maybe start with from the "Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities" section on the "by category"[2] page.

[1] <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html>

[2] <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category>

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe a bit off topic, but readability, readable, instapaper, etc - weren't user-defined style sheets supposed to address at least some of the issues these services are addressing? I ask because it seems that sometimes we get decent tech ideas (the _idea_ behind CSS is good at least) but then we settle for half-baked implementations and don't pursue good user tooling. CSS specifically - no browsers have good ways of defining/saving/using custom stylesheets, yet this (IIRC) was a selling point of CSS back in the day. Had we had better browser support for this, we may have had a much different web than we do today.

As it is, people think it's really cool when there's those stupid 3 font size icons at the top of a page and they can 'resize' the page's fonts between 9, 11 and 13 point fonts (w00t!)

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more. If user defined style-sheets worked (and if content and presentation were truly separated) the web would be a much better place.

When I was developing Readable, btw, I pretty much thought of it as a better implementation of user-defined styles. The text-parsing and main body text extraction is just my way of getting around the problem of content/presentation.

<comment><USER5> BTW, this wasn't a bash at you at all (if you took it that way). More a lament that we ended up in this chicken-and-egg situation. No point in making user- css tools because there's so much inline style and mixing, and no point in moving towards building sites with user-defined CSS in mind because there's no good support in browsers.

<comment><USER3> Don't worry, I didn't take it in a bad way. And I do, actually, completely agree with you; I thought that my comment made that clear -- but I do appreciate you making sure I didn't take offense; that kind of courtesy is rare.

Back to our issue, though: if, tomorrow, browsers all got good enough at user- css that Readable wouldn't be needed anymore, I would gladly convert it into a one-page tutorial explaining to people how to set up their user-css :)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I was probably writing back more to assure anyone else reading it that I wasn't bashing you :)

Thanks for some great work, by the way!

<comment><USER3> You are most welcome.

It was -- and still is -- my pleasure.

<comment><USER6> Awww..... group hug! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (For what it's worth, I was a fan of the old Readability plugin, but I am somewhat concerned about it's direction now.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Our company (EDIT: not related in any form to readable or readability) does nonrss based crawling (blogs, news, message boards), so we spent quite some time on automatically identifying article, author and date and comments in articles.

If someone is interested in creating something similar to readability (e.g with us doing the article extraction for you) or does a need a website article extraction, you can contact me firstname.lastname@example.com.

PS. We have so many other ideas on our own and that's the reason we are not doing it ourselves.

<comment><USER3> Would've been nice if you mentioned that your company has nothing to do with Readable, as there is a chance someone reading might get that impression -- especially for the short time that your reply is the first reply.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, didn't think about that. Edited it. thanks

<comment><USER3> Thank you, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What about _printable_?

One of my major uses for Readbility was to format articles so that I could print them out for later reading. But a recent change to Readability made it so that (at least under Firefox) the browser print function will not break an article into multiple pages. And that makes it pretty useless for printing.

Whatever the problem is, Readable has it, too. Can something be done about this? (Also, does anyone know what the problem is?)

In any case, improving the readability of the web is a worthy goal. Thanks for your efforts.

<comment><USER3> I'm not aware of the problem you're describing. And I can't seem to reproduce it.

Could you provide more details, please? -- URL of an example article, more details on what exactly happens that shouldn't happen.

If you'd like, you can get in touch, to do this (<http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/>) -- as a matter of fact, it would probably be preferable, as opposed to using HC as a bug reporting forum.

<comment><USER8> I'll do both (report here & there).

I just tried the top five HN links. All exhibited the problem.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/04/16/powers...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2011/04/16/powershell- language-now-licensed-under-the-community-promise.aspx)

<http://www.logolounge.com/article.asp?aid=lnPf>

<http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/>

[http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37525/?p1=A2&a...](http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37525/?p1=A2&a=f)

<http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/05/solar-fire/>

For each, I clicked on the link, and then clicked my newly made Readable bookmark, which I had set up using the default settings. Then I went to Firefox's File:Print Preview. I have it set on the default settings (Shrink to Fit, Portrait). For each of the five articles listed above, the result was that only one of the displayed pages had article text on it, and this was not the entire article, since it would not fit on a single page. Sometimes other pages were displayed, sometimes not, but if there were any, then they were blank pages.

I am running Firefox 3.6.16 under Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid). I'm perhaps a bit behind in my patching, but, in any case, this is not a new problem.

<comment><USER3> The problem, in the steps you said you followed, is the "Print Preview" step. File >> Print Preview will show you a preview of how the entire current page will look like, when printed -- but that's actually not what you want to print.

What you want to print is only contents of Readable's overlay. To that end, please use the Print link, shown in the menu at the bottom of the overlay -- unfortunately, there is no "Print Preview" available.

The technical explanation for this is that Readable's overlay is actually an IFrame -- and browsers support printing the iframe contents as if the iframe were a window onto itself; but they will print the iframe as an element in the main page, when you're printing that instead.

<comment><USER8> Wow.

Well, you're right. "Print" works fine.

Three suggestions for you:

(1) Make the "Print" link easier to get at. Not just 'way down at the bottom of the page. Maybe put one with the "Close" link at the upper-right?

(2) Change the text of the "Close" links. I'm not sure what they should say; but "Close" doesn't really convey the right idea. What it actually does, from the user's POV, is not _closing_ , but rather returning to the original styling.

(3) Maybe figure out how to make Readable work with Firefox's Print Preview. (I realize that FF's behavior isn't your fault, but it would still be nifty if it worked.)

Thanks again for all your work.

<comment><USER3> Readable's interface is due for a slight overhaul. But I haven't yet decided what the new design is going to be. I will take your suggestions into consideration, though.

As for the work: you are most welcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm Readable's author.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, or even feature requests, I'm all ears.

I'm not promising I'll implement them; but I'll definitely listen and consider them carefully.

P.S. jbm, thanks a lot for posting this -- I've tried posting Readable to HC myself (twice), but it didn't stick.

<comment><USER9> I'm another one who uses such services for PRINTability. And one of my big sadness is that the _author_ _line / date_line url_lines are often missing: a real nuisance on a piece of paper that gets discovered months (years?) later.

Note: readability only _of late_ thought to start displaying URL at end of articles.

EDITs:

1) Meant to say I'm pleased to see you working on more flexible/powerful version than Readability (don't much like their latest approach of redirecting during reformatting).

2) You might want to try this sort of test-case - for which Readable only presents the first paragraph: [http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/08/seni...](http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/08/seniorland_circa_2050/?page=full)

<comment><USER3> Boston.com is now fixed; thanks for the report.

As for your issues on printing: thank you.

I had honestly not given printing very much thought -- as I don't really use it myself.

Your ideas make a lot of sense, though; so count on seeing them implemented.

<comment><USER9> Great, Gabriel...

I like the way your mind works - and so look forward to following your work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A great improvement over Readability! It's bookmarklet has been replaced, at least on _my_ bookmark bar: it's faster, has increased customization options and justification, and is open-source... Add hyphenation to that mix and you've got a solid ten out of ten service.

(Justification and hyphenation were the two features I always wanted Readability to have, and it always seemed odd to me that something branded "readability" lacked them...)

In the FAQ you answer to whether Readable is open-source: _"no" in the sense that the source isn't on display somewhere_. Not to split hairs here, but that sentence is incredibly confusing; what does having your code "on display" have to do with being open-source?

<comment><USER11> Why would you want justification in something that's supposed to make something more _readable_? Justification might make text look nice, but it's terrible for readability, and people with dyslexia often struggle at reading it, and the same usually goes for hyphenation.

<comment><USER10> Why, then, are books typeset justified and hyphenated?

> _Justification might make text look nice._

And that's bad? You have to _look_ at text to read it; I'd rather it look "nice" and as non-distracting as possible. Perhaps "readability" is subjective, but I think text that flows _evenly_ is easy on the eyes.

<comment><USER11> On the contrary, variable spacing from justification is very distracting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I tried using Readability the other day to zap the SpaceX article from here and it damn near froze my computer. When it was done, it didn't even show me the right article...

</comment><comment><USER13> One thing that makes me prefer Readability (or in my case the Readability Redux Chrome extension[1]) is that it's able to stitch together multiple-page articles into one page. It makes reading articles on sites like The Register and Ars Technica much more bearable. I'd love it if Readable gained this feature. (Safari Reader mode also does this, using code from the old Readability.)

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jggheggpdocamneaac...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jggheggpdocamneaacmfoipeehedigia)

<comment><USER3> Quoted from an email, where I answered the same exact question:

      Most likely, Readable will never have multi-page support.
      The reason for this is Readable's philosophy, and not any technical difficulties that feature may imply.

      It is Readable's intention to take whatever is in your browser window right now, and make it better.
      But it is not Readable's purview to go beyond that.

      Readable tries to act like a browser, in this respect.
      Think about it like this: Readable getting subsequent pages in the background would be pretty much equal to web-browsers doing the same thing for all paging, on all websites.
      Just because it is technically possible, does not mean it should be done.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough. I like that you have a strong sense of Readable's goal(s) and know what features would be overextension. As for sites that publish articles spread across multiple pages, I should really vote with my feet (eyes?). Looking forward to hanging quotes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's been quite a small bit of time, now, but IIRC I had some direct correspondence with the author/creator of Readable, and he was a quite agreeable chap. I realize this doesn't speak to the technical merits, but the exchange left me feeling more comfortable about using his product. (Leaving aside the role of advertising and the need to support sites, a separate but not insignificant concern.)

Here's the old URL/site, which is also more visible with Javascript disabled.

<http://readable-app.appspot.com/>

<comment><USER3> Glad I made an impression; and thanks for the compliment. I'm actually about the same in real life, too.

Don't worry: Readable won't ever have advertising -- the most I'm looking for is something like a very small "Sponsored By XXX" banner, at the bottom -- if any cool company will ever be interested that is.

The new site will be redesigned -- and it will be a lot better when JavaScript is turned off. But I really don't recommend you use the old site any more, as that still runs the old version of the application -- which is way worse, in terms of performance.

I hope you're still using Readable, and that it's still helping you read the web more comfortably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hope this doesn't track what I'm reading unlike the new readability.

<comment><USER3> Yup; all text processing is done in the browser.

URLs are tracked, though -- they would be tracked in my server logs, even if I didn't do anything specific to track them.

But they are intentionally tracked -- and a percentage of them are run through an automated Readable test, every day, so that I can see, on average, how often Readable gets things wrong.

<comment><USER3> I will also be adding an option that will disable even this anonymous tracking, for those who really want/need it.

However, you'll just have to take my word for it that I won't be reading the server logs -- which contain the same, if not more, data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So the source is licensed CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, but there's no public repository or support? That's a curious approach.

<comment><USER3> The source code isn't in any repository because I don't work with repositories. And, if I were to list a specific version of the code, it would become slightly obsolete in less than a week -- as I am continually tweaking Readable's text-parsing algorithm. You can find an always up-do-date version of the code here: <http://readable-static.tastefulwords.com/_r/bulk.js>

<comment><USER17> >> The source code isn't in any repository because I don't work with repositories.

You really should be using version control. If you want people to contribute to this open-source project, you can't beat a public repository (like github) at which you can receive patches from other developers. Right now, it is not apparent how I can work to improve your project.

<comment><USER3> You are correct, sir. But I haven't really gotten in to the open-source game just yet -- maybe I should; I don't know.

I am using version control; just not public version control.

If you want to help, get in touch (<http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about- and-contact/>). I'm happy to hear any ideas; and, if you want to do some actual work, that would be quite awesome too.

<comment><USER18> I don't know why you would use your own version control. and not release it... Makes little sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Comparison of the new versions of Readable and Readability, here:

[http://www.filterjoe.com/2011/04/11/web-page-reformatting- se...](http://www.filterjoe.com/2011/04/11/web-page-reformatting-services- readable-and-readability/)

Hightlights:

The new Readability takes 6-12 seconds to reformat a page, vs. less than 2 seconds for both the new readable and the old Readability.

New Readability has more features, including Instapaper-like sharing for those who pay.

It is possible to use the old Readability, for those who prefer it.

<comment><USER20> Readability 2.0 choosing to load and reformat the pages via their server instead of doing it in place in browser really slows it down.

<comment><USER21> It does make it nice that I can share links to the "readable" version with other people.

<comment><USER3> This is a planned feature for Readable, too.

Count on seeing it in a future release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I still don't get how/why is this different/better than the firefox readability extension?

The commercialized readability was a step back from the bookmarklet, but this firefox extension seems to work as well if not better. Could someone more experienced please explain this to an ignoramus ...

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability/>

<comment><USER3> Readable doesn't really want to be "better" than Readability. In all, they're actually very different beasts.

And I honestly don't consider Readability to be my competition. Readable first started because of my own desire to have text formatted a certain way, no matter what website that text happened to be on.

Unfortunately, Readability beat me to the launch by 2 weeks -- otherwise you would all now be talking about Readability as a version of Readable :)

The only reason I didn't kill Readable after that, was that it was different enough from Readability to diverse it's own shot -- plus, I love working on Readable's text-parsing algorithm; it's a very cool problem to solve.

P.S. The extension you pointed to is based on the first Readability bookmarklet -- and it's made by a guy who also made an extension based on the first version of Readable.

<comment><USER22> Thank you for the clarification, I was unaware of the details you just mentioned.

Talking of algorithms, does Readable use something like the Knuth and Plass line break algo used by LaTeX? A Javascript implementation was mentioned a while ago on HN[1].

Good luck with Readable, anything that helps reduce clutter (in any part of life) is a great gift. Thanks for sharing!

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974963>

<comment><USER3> You're very welcome.

No; Readable doesn't use anything like the Knuth and Plass algorithm.

But I did thoroughly check out the JS implementation you mentioned; and Readable will probably use a part of the Knuth algorithm in the future -- as I am planning to support hanging quotation marks, hyphenation, as well as better (typographic) justification.

<comment><USER23> Author of the JS implementation here. Let me know if you have any questions about the implementation or problems integrating it. I was hoping someone would pick it up and integrate it with Readability-like service. (I've slowly been working to add support for it to Treesaver <http://www.treesaverjs.com/.>)

For hyphenation you might also want to check out my Hypher project (<https://github.com/bramstein/Hypher>) which is a minimal hyphenation engine written in JavaScript. In my benchmarks it is about 4 times faster than Hyphenator.js (and a lot smaller.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the info, Bram. I'll be sure to hit you up if/when I have any questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This one is better than Readability, seems faster. It's more instant like the old readability.

I am complaining the new direction that Readability take since day 1 when they decided to first abandon old readability, than force a meaningless frame around content with a very slow implementation.

My only critique for all: please have a name something other than contains "read".

<comment><USER3> I agree with you about the names -- and I really wish I could've thought of something clever when I first named it; unfortunately, it's a bit late now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A favicon. I just want a favicon. Every single bookmark in my bar has an icon, and no words, and ALL I want is a favicon! Readability doesn't have it; neither does Readable. Makes things much uglier, no matter how pretty the text is. A golden star to whoever hacks it first.

<comment><USER3> I believe there's an extension (for Firefox, at least) that allows you to create custom buttons for bookmarklets.

In the near future, a native solution will be available -- i.e. I'm working on a thin extension, for all browsers, that will act as Readable's launcher (with benefits like keyboard shortcuts, an icon, and slightly faster load times).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's nice that you can customize it because the default - serif - font isn't that readable, atleast not on win7+opera.

Also, I think they need to update the default font families because calibri and other post Vista fonts are as commonly used as Arial & co.

<comment><USER3> If you have any suggestions, I'm very open to them. As a matter of fact, if you're up to it, you can design your very own theme -- I'll let you name it, and give you full credit. Or, if you just have a couple of quick suggestions, feel free to list them here, or get in touch (<http://readable.tastefulwords.com/about-and-contact/>).

<comment><USER26> Design own theme? Sure, why not. How does this work?

Here's a bug report for you. Using Win7,32bit/Opera 11.10, the text field for specifying custom font families doesn't really show because the borders aren't visible. Screenshot <http://i.imgur.com/gwb2O.jpg>

<comment><USER3> Well, just customize Readable (<http://readable.tastefulwords.com/?setup>) to your heart's content. Then, get in touch, and send me the custom options you used.

If the theme is awesome, I'll add it to Readable's selection of themes ([http://readable.tastefulwords.com/?setup#explain-style- theme...](http://readable.tastefulwords.com/?setup#explain-style-themes)). Did you try those out, by the way?

If you know CSS, you can also heavily customize Readable via the "More CSS" option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't work on this page: [http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/08/seni...](http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/08/seniorland_circa_2050/?page=full)

I like it though, keep it up. :-)

<comment><USER3> Boston.com is now fixed; thanks for the report.

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant I use NoScript, and they mentioned that possibility. I'm glad they showed respect for my choice, even though there's no escaping Javascript here.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd use it, but my Apture extension doesn't work while using your script.

</comment><comment><USER29> Readability works just fine</comment>


Shoehorning startups into the VC model - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/07/19/shoehorning-startups-into-the-vc-model/

<comment><USER2> If there is one thing I wish I saw more of on HN, it's posts about funding and business outside of the VC model. I feel the thoughts expressed in this post are on the rise.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see analysis that suggested if traditional VCs have it right or not. Yes, yes, startup returns follow a power law distribution, I agree. That doesn't _necessarily_ mean that it's optimal to chase the potential top companies!

<comment><USER4> "Shotgun" angels take a different strategy..

Edit: also, if you think about the YC acceptance rate vs the VC acceptance rate in terms of attempts to money, then it is interesting that VCs consider YC a filter. IIRC, YC has a higher acceptance rate than most top-tier VCs. Note that i probably don't remember correctly ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"There are lots of tech companies that are very successful but don't fit the VC model. If they don't raise VC, the founders can make money, create jobs, and work on something they love."_

e.g. Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER6> His billion dollar marker is drastically high. He has been living in dotcom fantasy land for far too long.

There's no reason you can't raise $250k for 25% from an angel investor, to build a $10 or $20 million business. That's a helluva result to put it mildly. You know, building an actual business that produces actual profits, not vaporware built-to-flip companies that produce nothing and only exist in a tiny corner of the economy.

The stock market hasn't moved in real terms in 13 years or so. Interest rates are on the floor. Any investor outside the big VC game would kill for a 10 or 20 fold return over 10 or 20 years. There's a beautiful thing called dividends, which a successful business can pay to its owners. Dixon doesn't seem to know anything about that however, as his assumed scenarios require the big exit and ignore any other possibilities.

If you take $250k, and you build a $10 or $20 million valuation business, it's not difficult to kick off a very nice dividend to the investor that provides a stellar return on their capital. AND if you ever choose to sell, said investor also gets their big exit as well. You can also buy their stock back at the higher valuation and they get their exit that way. These types of results are common in the real economy, but not so common in the fantasy dotcom economy.

<comment><USER7> This comment is an exemplar of how not to behave on HN.

It is as insulting ("dotcom fantasy land"? "Dixon doesn't seem to know anything"?) as it is wrong: Chris's post is explicitly about "the VC model" as opposed to "investors who are less aggressive about returns". Since he's recommending that _fewer_ startups pursue that model, you could hardly have missed his point more completely.

But it's the tone that is inappropriate, that sharp-elbowed nastiness that strives to pack something mean in every phrase. I know it feels good to write this way; I've done my share. But it really is like peeing in the swimming pool, and not underwater either.</comment></comment>


Amazon unveils shopping cart that knows what you're buying - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/f2e83ab1261fd6fe3935cf51e976b4a5 <comment> core-questions Can't wait to see homeless people pushing these around and throwing them into creeks like normal carts</comment>


Are We Wayland Yet? - <AUTHOR> https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland-yet/ <comment><USER2> This would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver [0]. The author recommends nouveau but this leaves out users that 1) have very modern GPUs 2) need vulkan 3) need CUDA 4) do heavy gaming. The author is also quite spiteful about it and I'm not sure I like that. There is even a flag "\--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" [1]. Whether or not this is nvidia's fault I can't judge but there are usually two stories to every disagreement and so far at least I haven't heard nvidia's.

For me at least, this is a dealbreaker as I don't always get to choose the systems I get to use and I'd like to use the same config/wm everywhere if I can help it and if I sometimes have to alternate between i3 and sway then that won't do for me.

[0] [https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia- users](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users) [1] [https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4...](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4897117d5559036f5/sway/main.c#L101)

<comment><USER3> The thing is - nVidia uses shared source for all of their drivers. This is why you always have the newest GPU feature support and performance on their Linux driver - it's the same codebase as it is for Windows and was for macOS.

Linux community on other hand wants nVidia to restructure their driver just to fit Linux model and essentially lose the source parity or publish the source completely. It's not an invalid request, because nVidias APIs don't really fit into Linux kernel design and userspace APIs. It's also not very likely to happen, especially due to poisonous behaviour of kernel maintainers towards nVidia, unwilligness to compromise and nVidias refusal to add more resources to refactor the driver.

<comment><USER4> Do you think Windows or MacOS make compromise on the way they code their kernel to accomodate nVidia ?

No, it's just a matter of economics.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Windows has a stable driver API you can build upon.

Linux does not, because they want all drivers to be inlined (included in the kernel) and open source. nVidia does not want to release their trade secrets, so they don't want to open source their drivers.

(No idea about macOS)

<comment> vertex-four Of course, AMD managed, so there's no technical reason that nVidia cannot.

<comment><USER3> Except that AMD doesn't have feature parity with Windows driver on open source version and has all the Nvidia driver headaches on closed source version.

I'm not sure what AMD really managed here.

<comment><USER6> AMD's open source driver is fully usable for normal usage (including gaming), and in general more performant than the closed source version.

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx590-li...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx590-linux- drivers)

<comment><USER7> Still behind the proprietary Windows driver or Nvidia's proprietary Linux driver.

<comment><USER8> They are not behind their windows driver on OpenGL. And neither for Vulkan, I think. AMDVLK scores a few wins here and there, but RADV is generally more stable, performant, and compatible. Plus being open-source, it is easily extended, like valve is doing with their AC0 experiment [1].

Last I heard, people were installing Linux to use the AMD OpenGL drivers to play emulators (it might have been Cemu, actually ran trough wine).

[1]: XDC2019 slide deck [https://xdc2019.x.org/event/5/contributions/334/attachments/...](https://xdc2019.x.org/event/5/contributions/334/attachments/431/683/ACO_XDC2019.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what I've read, it seems like Wayland's "controversial design choices" don't stem from developers being inconsiderate of different workflows, but rather from the intention of making a general purpose protocol.

Being general purpose means that things like screenshotting capabilities are not the protocol's concern and should be implemented in the upper layer(s) instead.

In that case, this general purpose approach seems to me like the right way to tackle the problem, since we won't need a different protocol for use cases that fall outside the traditional desktop paradigm. You can just use Wayland and implement your own business code on top. There'll be a de-facto standard way to do graphics on Linux, no matter your use case.

Correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'm not a Wayland expert (I have many articles and books in my to-read list).

I'm excited about Wayland for the simple reason that I hate screen tearing.

<comment><USER10> That means the screenshot application is, to some degree, compositor specific. It leaves the door completely open to the outcome that if you want to stream using a Gnome streaming application you will have to be using the Gnome project's window manager. Or the KDE streaming application will require the KDE window manager. Or the 'best' screenshot application will be tied to the XMonad successor on Wayland.

Wayland is a good experiment, and the community may well go with it because X11 is atrocious and Wayland is a viable alternative. But call a spade a spade, they dropped the ball with that design decision. It isn't a big deal.

The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well. The required negotiation for that to happen is taking/going to take years and delay Wayland adoption. If they'd designed that at the same time as an optional part of the Wayland protocol it would have saved time and confusion.

<comment><USER11> freedesktop have had success in standardising the Linux desktop. I fail to see why gnome, KDE, etc wouldn't eventually standardise around a common screenshot protocol.

<comment><USER12> "eventually"

Windows switched to composited desktop with Vista in 2006 and didn't lose any[0] functionality. 14 years later and we're still saying "eventually" when discussing basic features Wayland should have.

[0] Technically it lost a few, the ability to ignore vsync for non-fullscreen applications being the biggest one.

<comment><USER13> > and didn't lose any[0] functionality

Apart from stability.

Jokes aside, this has nothing to do with the protocol as much as the fact that there are vast differences in how an open source project is developed vs. how Microsoft develops.

A lot of Wayland development was initially funded by Samsung, which mainly focused on usecases for their smart devices. They then shut down their entire OSS department, so that workforce is out.

Now, finally redhat seems to be gearing up a bit, with GNOME Wayland being default on Fedora, and sponsoring Wayland work on things like Firefox.

But, even then, things are powered by what people want and care about, rather than just trying to tick every previous feature box available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't really like Wayland and I think X is better in many ways. There are a few problem which is why I had some ideas about X version 12. One is to ensure the implementation and protocol are separate. Another is proxies to implement security features. Another is support for SCM_RIGHTS and SCM_CREDENTIALS (only for local connections; these are obviously not supported for remote connections, which are still possible, if implemented by the server and enabled by the user). And then, also 64-bit numbers in many places. But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), but with a few differences. (I don't really like much of the freedesktop stuff either; I work without a desktop environment, and programs should not assume the existence of one.) Maybe there is even a possibility to implement these different systems over each other when needed.

For example, with text rendering. Font path setting is not part of the core protocol (although there may be a XSET extension which can do this on some implementations), nor does the protocol specify font formats (PCF is recommended, but the protocol doesn't actually care so you can implement different formats if wanted). Characters are still sixteen bits, although to allow optional support for some more modern features, there are two flags you can specify when loading fonts: EnableLigatures and EnableAntialiasing. Servers that don't understand these flags can ignore them, and fonts that don't support them would also ignore them. EnableLigatures waives the requirement that a sequence of characters is the same as each of those characters put next to each other, and EnableAntialiasing waives the requirement that text is painted in the specified background and foreground colour only. (EnableLigatures is required to correctly render Unicode text with the X core text rendering system (if the server implements support for Unicode fonts, which is of course optional). Of course you are not required to use the core text rendering (previewer programs should not use it, for example), but if you do, and your program uses Unicode, then this will be needed. In effect, a surrogate pair is treated like a ligature at the protocol level (how it works in the actual implementation may differ, and is independent of the protocol).)

<comment><USER15> > But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the > extensions they have added),

It's hard to tease out, but it sounds like you're advocating for the state of the art drawing model of 1980 in 2019. I don't think this is going to fly except for a very niche audience.

<comment><USER16> I've seen this sort of comment frequently: "it's 2019, why are we still doing n?", as if somehow it should be assumed we have grown out of it.

It's a completely unsubstantiative argument; its effect is to sweep under the rug any justification for the 'old way' of doing things.

<comment><USER17> No, it isn't unsubstantiative at all.

For one very big thing, hardware accelerated rendering didn't exist in 1980.

Also, no one really cares about network support anymore, because it's simpler and better to just do a screen share.

<comment><USER18> Does Wayland improve the remote desktop story at all? I sometimes drop to X11 forwarding because VNC and X2Go don't really work so well for me. If I think I'm going to need a remote desktop for a while, I'll reboot into Windows and load my Linux installation up as a raw disk VM in VMware Workstation and then rely on Windows's RDP for remote desktop. I'd love to simplify all this.

<comment><USER19> I had good ux with realvnc, maybe novnc, ..

<comment><USER18> It's been a while, so maybe I'll give that shot again. My experience with VNC is that it's just laggy and really doesn't like it when I connect to a multi- display desktop with a single display laptop. Windows Remote Desktop adapts beautifully with virtually no lag, so I was hoping Wayland adopted something similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour.

Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume:

\- It's faster than Firefox.

\- It's safer than every other browser out there.

How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user:

\- It's different.

\- Firefox feels plenty safe.

This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need _features_ to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch.

Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit.

The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.

<comment><USER21> This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland.

The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default).

For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.

<comment><USER22> Nobody replying to you seems to catch on that _i3 is not the only environment other than KDE and Gnome_.

i3 users have sway. Good for them. Now what about _every other window manager_?

<comment><USER23> Indeed; I've used wmii for around 10 years now, and its developers have openly stated they will never support Wayland.

<comment><USER24> They might want to consider revising that decision because X is going away. If they don't, wmii will go away with it.

<comment><USER25> X has been going away for longer that the careers of most people on this site.

<comment><USER22> At this point maybe even longer than a substantial chunk has been alive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Important to note that Sway WM is not Wayland as a whole; I am a happy Sway user, but unfortunately it is not 100% at parity with the experience you will get with GNOME. However, you can always contribute if you have time; it's fun and the codebase is very nice to work with. You don't even have to switch to Sway to work on it. (If you are skilled at debugging and use graphics tablets we could use some help trying to figure out some crashing bugs with tablets...)

Regarding screen capture: wl_roots actually supports this, but WebRTC doesn't support the wl_roots protocol for it. I've been told Pipewire should solve this problem eventually.

Edit: accidentally wrote Waypipe instead of Pipewire. (Waypipe is cool too, though.)

</comment><comment><USER27> > The fact is, Wayland is the only viable X11 successor

There's at least one other option in the running, Arcan: [https://arcan- fe.com/](https://arcan-fe.com/)

<comment><USER28> I'm a big fan of Arcan (moreso than I am of Wayland), but it's nowhere near as far along as Wayland and I think at this point is still the product of just one person. I think it's fair to call Wayland viable, but I don't think I would say that of Arcan until it's:

a) generally usable as a daily driver; and

b) maintained by enough people that there isn't a single point of failure.

Right now I'm still on X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The discussion in the post, the description of what a technical user had to do to switch, the problems encountered, the X11 problems mentioned (tearing, etc), and the suggestions and workarounds in the comments, should be mandatory reading before someone calls Linux "ready for the desktop".

For some reason Linux discussions are bimodal: in some everybody chimes how perfect everything works, and what peace they found switching to it. In others, like this one here, it's all about all kind of problems, hacky solutions, tinkering with system settings, and so on, and still having serious issues.

<comment><USER30> If you like tinkering, you can certainly do so, but there's a maintenance cost to customizations, and if you're not willing to shoulder them, then you should go with something closer to the stock install where the distribution will generally have sorted out things for you.

Perhaps this is the explanation you're looking for?

Actually, I think, and this is perhaps somewhat surprising, that many software developers don't pay terrible much attention to future maintenance costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My biggest problem Wayland, is no screensharing. (i.e. casting on Chromecast, sharing screen on zoom). Apparently this because of security. Is this possible to overcome? Is this something can fixed by simply having chromecast/zoom devs implement something? Or will it never be possible?

<comment><USER26> Good news actually, it's already being worked on. As mentioned, Pipewire is the current leading solution. Upstream WebRTC has experimental support for Pipewire; in Chromium it can be enabled with a flag and in Firefox it can be enabled with a patch or configuration flag (I believe it is supposedly merged, but not sure if stable versions will compile and work with it.)

GitHub is down atm but there's also an xdg-desktop-portal implementation for wlroots which should allow for Pipewire clients to run under Sway (I have not tried this personally, so I have no idea if it actually all works in practice yet.) [https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal- wlr](https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr)

<comment><USER32> It doesn't sound like it's ready (as of June): [https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal- wlr/issues/4#...](https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal- wlr/issues/4#issuecomment-510622361)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been using Wayland full-time (via Sway) since Sway went 1.0. It's been a pretty straightforward experience. The transition took some elbow grease at first (things like getting redshift working, as the author notes), but the last time I fucked around with my graphical config was months ago. I use a display manager, so the "crashes lead to an exposed terminal" thing doesn't matter so much (I've had a total of two crashes, once when I was putsing with XWayland, video games and multi-head -- and the other when building a since- abandoned alternative to kanshi).

There are some quirks I need to spend a little more time investigating whether they're caused by Sway/Wayland or just my configuration: drag-and-dropping between windows seems to be busted, and right-click context menus that overflow their host window's boundaries aren't clickable outside those boundaries. But I mainly use the keyboard/terminal/TUIs, so I don't frequently drag and drop, and it's easy enough to right click somewhere else when the second issue occurs.

Other than that, for how I use a computer, it's been smooth sailing. I wouldn't say we're Wayland yet for general usage either, but for the group of users who are into tiling window managers, we're maybe Wayland enough for now.

<comment><USER16> I use i3 (with X11), and the last time I messed around with my graphical config was when I installed the system 18 months ago. Haven't had any issues even close to what you're describing, much less the screen tearing that I have never seen in my last 10 years of linux.

<comment><USER33> Like I said, getting started took some elbow grease, but as a daily driver on my personal and professional machines, Sway's never once crashed or behaved poorly. I no longer need to tinker with it or worry about it; hence, I believe that for the collection of people willing to hammer at something a bit when they first pick it up, Wayland's in an OK space.

<comment><USER16> You described several crashes and a number of bugs, above, which is what I was responding to. Even from your generous assessment of Wayland/Sway, it seems like my X11/i3 system is more robust and stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >One point that I totally forgot about, but is now painfully apparent now that I'm back on X11, is screentearing. On Wayland, screentearing is a thing of the past. Everything was so smooth, flicker-free, and tear-free. Now I need to mess around tweaking compositors to get a nice experience on X11 (i3)… So that's a big plus for Wayland.

This was my big hold up of using Linux as a whole. The screentearing is horrible, and coming from OSX where everything is as smooth as butter, it is an issue. But thankfully, Mint (which I'm on atm) allows the user to turn off vsync, and because I have an nvidia graphics card, I can turn on full- composition, and have my graphics card do vsync, and BAM! smooth as butter. It's an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience.

I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side, but with hardware becoming more powerful and better supported, I don't think the future is Wayland, but instead defaulting to a higher level of gpu acceleration than the default Gnome settings we have today. This removes the latency, the page tearing, and responsiveness issues that X11 has Wayland was created to fix.

<comment><USER35> > I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side

I recently switched to AMD - that, with a compositor (compton/picom), resulted in a super smooth tear-free experience in X for me.

My experiences with Intel integrated graphics has always poor performance, and bad screen tearing, sometimes screentearing even with compton running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A good way to think about Wayland is the screen manager brought to you by the people who thought xrandr, Mesa, Cairo, the Linux FireWire stack, and freetype were good things. If you come in with appropriate expectations you'll be amazed that any of it works at all.

Is you think it over for a bit you'll realize that the real Linux graphics protocol is Android SurfaceFlinger. Wayland is like five orders of magnitude less popular.

<comment><USER37> I have had this unpopular opinion since the beginning of the decade: Linux should just adopt AOSP UI, be able to run apps, and that's it.

<comment><USER38> So what stops you from doing just that? (There is ChromeOS, anbox and co)

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h And Android x86, to take it from a slightly different angle

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Please, please, please, people, don't impose your personal choice of font and background color on the rest of us. Faded beige background with light colored font makes this hard enough for me to read that I simply gave up. Yes, I have a particular issue since I'm partly red-green colorblind--but a substantial percentage of people have color perception issues of one sort or another. There's a reason why black text on a white background is so common.

<comment><USER35> I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on toning down the color scheme a lot now. I'll post further updates on the issue that you or someone else has raised on github: [https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1](https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1)

The site should work nicely in reader view or through an rss reader which could be a temporary option until I can fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience :/

<comment><USER35> Resolution: tweaked the font colours to be higher contrast and removed custom absolute font-weights. Please let me know if there are other accessibility issues with the site. :)

<comment><USER39> The font is easier to see now, but the background being as dark as it is still makes the font harder to read than if the background were white or something much closer to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Gnome/Wayland on Fedora works pretty well last time I used it. I eventually had to switch back for a few reasons (mouse over the network had no replacement) but that was almost a year ago I'd bet it was even smoother now.

<comment><USER41> My work laptop has been on wayland for years now. My desktop was on x11 due to nvidia drivers but now I have an amd card in it so I am back to wayland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The biggest hurdle for Wayland adoption is the absolutely brain dead "security model". Commonly used features like hotkey daemons, push to talk, screen recording/streaming/sharing, window management, clipboard history manager or even Wallpapers need to managed by the particular implementation (of there are many) of the Wayland server itself and have mostly no common protocols, at least not official. And when all those protocols after a long process are finally finished I have serious doubts that Wayland will be either less bloated and "messy" or more secure than current X11.

The non-existent X11 security model is not really ideal but at least you could mitigate the problem there with access control hooks and as long as you use trusted software (which is 99.9% the case on a typical Linux system) you can use all the above mentioned features today without having too much headaches.

<comment><USER43> The non-existent X11 security model is irrelevant considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid. Wayland's security is entirely pointless.

I suspect Wayland will just become a container for an X11 session.

<comment><USER44> > considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else > under a uid

Right? Couldn't only security hardened distros like SELinux take advantage of this?

Or I suppose Docker GUI apps?

<comment><USER45> Docker isn't a security layer

<comment><USER44> Security isn't the only thing Docker offers, but yes Docker on Linux is a security layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not quite overall, at least from my perspective.

1\. Adaptive sync still needs Wayland protocol support, before compositors can pick it up. It already works on X.

2\. Some major features like common frameworks for screen capturing need to be agreed on, in order to avoid reinventing the wheel in tons of incompatible ways. Did everyone agree to use Pipewire, or it's still bikeshedded with everyone trying to do their own thing? I wasn't following this recently.

3\. KWin has some major bugs to fix for the Wayland session, like subsurfaces clipping issue.

4\. Support for Wacom drawing tablets is still missing in KWin on Wayland.

And so on.

<comment><USER12> What I'm hearing is, by the time Wayland is actually on par with X, feature- wise, it will by time for a whole new rewrite because something else will be fundamentally different in the way graphics are rendered. Windows went full compositor with Vista in 2006, with all the features and then some of its predecessor (except you can't have windows with no v-sync). 14 years later Wayland almost has a standardized way of taking screenshots.

<comment><USER46> Possibly the part of the problem is, that there is no single owner and no one directs it. Everything seems chaotic, many things are low priority for developers, while in practice they are high priority for users and so on.

I suppose that's the natural consequence of Linux desktop stack being developed so collaboratively. And the fact that desktop itself is so fragmented (KDE, Gnome, etc.) doesn't help either. Resources are spread quite thin.

The major problem with Wayland is, that unlike X which is a unified point of collaboration, Wayland compositors need to do all the work on their own (unless they figure out how to share the effort, which doesn't go too well so far). So problems of fragmentation and lack of resources are only amplified in Wayland case, causing a huge delay in overall progress.

And I'm not saying all the above is a bad thing (some argue choices are good and etc.). But the downsides are obvious.

Personally, I'd prefer developers focusing more on KDE, but Gnome users would likely disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The thing about scaling is a bit difficult. Sway chooses to render XWayland windows in the lower resolution and scales up, rather than the other way around; I think this should be configurable.

<comment><USER48> I don't see what would make such a configuration option particularly difficult. Maybe file a bug report requesting it? The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland so you're left with two problematic options.

<comment><USER47> > _The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland_

Well, sort of. There are fundamental issues with having per-display scaling in X. If you plug in a HiDPI display after starting an application, it's my understanding that there is no standard way to signal that to a window.

The toolkits, or GTK+3 at least, do handle changing the scale at runtime internally, so it's more of a social problem than a hard engineering one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Here are the issues that I still have (other than that it seems smoother):

\- I could not make copy/paste work from a Wayland host to Wayland guest in a Qemu/KVM VM. It seems that the guest utilities like spice vagent only work for Xorg.

\- I noticed that chrome/firefox are still relying on X and run in XWayland (at least on my arch setup).

\- Fractional scaling make some applications blurry but it seems that they are the ones running in Xwayland.

</comment><comment><USER50> VAAPI support on Wayland is painful.

I've built a kiosk system that requires videos playing in Chrome/ium (cannot use Firefox because also need web-bluetooth support)

Our hardware is Intel NUCs and currently we are rolling these out on Windows OS, but would vastly prefer Linux but hitting so many roadblocks.

Trying to get Intel hardware accelerated GPU video decoding working in Chromium running on Wayland has wasted me days of time with no resolution yet (tried ClearLinux and CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 16).

With Wayland on Intel hardware, only VLC player can make use of VAAPI but Chromium doesn't seem possible, which results in 100% (Celeron) CPU usage trying to view a local video in the browser using video.js player.

I'm going to ditch Wayland (Gnome) and try Xfce on my next attempt.

<comment><USER51> Are you sure you're using a build of Chromium with VAAPI support patched in? Support for hardware video decoding in Firefox on Linux does not exist at all, and Chromium does not support it either except in a set of patches which are not included upstream.

<comment><USER50> yes I am using chromium-vaapi thanks.

[edit] I am about to try Arch Linux (or Manjaro) with Xfce to get Chromium- vaapi working

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Most xorg drivers have an option to run in tearfree mode.

Another dealbreaker for me (i did the i3 sway journey this summer) is the early stage of remote desktop. With x it is super easy to spin up a nice vncserver. I also miss setxkbmap, xrandr, import etc.

Wayland had some nice ideas and some not so useful ones. I'm waiting for something simple to replace xorg and wayland in the future.

<comment><USER53> Tear free mode has never worked for me on multi-monitor setups. All Xorg drivers have this issue in my experience. Nvidia, AMD, Intel and even the modesetting driver. Wayland seems to magically fix it.

<comment><USER52> Strange, it seems to work fine for me on 2 FHD monitors at least. Maybe I just don't see it...

<comment><USER53> Hmm. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the refresh rates of my two monitors are not exactly the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Any news on remoting Wayland? This article kinda ignores it, but I don't see how it's not a complete showstopper.

<comment><USER55> The Waypipe Summer of Code project implemented that recently:

[https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe) [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2019-Au...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2019-August/040819.html)

<comment><USER54> Outstanding. Are they software rendering at the client and shoving raw images? Remote GPU from scratch strikes me as an even bigger job.

<comment><USER56> Since it's SOC there was a blog post for it that got posted here. Should be findable with some searching.

<comment><USER54> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't > always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi > network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then > switch back to sway.

I haven't tried using something else than nmtui, TBH

> Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my > previously secured computer at a logged-in tty

Ah! I've had some issues running SysRq+R, then Ctrl+C. The tty intreprets this as my wanting to quit sway :/

I was actually disappointed to find out that screensharing not working was preventing me from using Steam's in-home streaming (or Steam Remote Play, as it's now called). I hope sway can fix that for Xwayland apps at some point.

</comment><comment><USER57> For me KDE has offered the best Wayland experience. It's easy to switch between X or Wayland.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm using the latest Ubuntu to run an art installation. So far I've been unable to launch GUI apps or take screenshots from a remote SSH terminal under Wayland. I had to resort to adding the commands to autostart & rebooting.

</comment><comment><USER59> Tried to use Wayland earlier today on Ubuntu 18.04 for fractional scaling support, but sadly there is no support for nvidia drivers. This does not seem well advertised so posting as a PSA to save others from trying to debug the login loop!

<comment><USER35> To clarify, it _does_ support nvidia through the open source nouveau drivers. It's only the proprietary drivers that aren't supported.

<comment><USER45> You mean it does not support the drivers that actually work?

<comment><USER35> Yes exactly. I don't recommend nvidia.

<comment><USER45> This is a good reason to select different new hardware but insufficient to get rid of existing hardware.

If most people agree we can worry less in 5-10 years. Unless people work around it during this time frame in which case people can continue not caring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I've tried wayland around half a year ago, but switched back. Wayland was surprisingly usable, but a couple of features were missing that are essential for me for example color management.

</comment><comment><USER61> > Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland > appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind > of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing > in Zoom for work.

Isn't this one of they key points _FOR_ Wayland, though? I thought Wayland specifically stops applications from having access to other chunks of the screen without special permissions?

<comment> fake-name "Doesn't give access by default" is very different from "cannot be made to work".

I'd assume the complaint is about the latter, which is a issue. I can't imagine anyone complaining about the first.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. The extra security given by the latter is a huge win for Wayland, but it needs to be possible to give access when required.

<comment><USER35> s/latter/former

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Last time I tried to migrate to wayland on a hidpi device, scaling wayland 2x would scale all xwayland windows naively by doubling pixels. In particular, this made graphical emacs fonts blurry. Is there a way to fix that, i.e. letting wayland apps scale natively, but scale xwayland apps using the regular X dpi setting (Xft.dpi and the like)?

Emacs may be old and crufty, but unfortunately is my most often used graphical application.

</comment><comment><USER63> The problem with Wayland is the extremely long tail of use-cases that it does not cover (yet).

(For example, I use VNC extensively and it has a lot of issues there still)

<comment><USER64> After reading through this thread, my impression is more like VNC being the _only_ use-case that is not covered enough yet. What are the other uncovered use-cases?

EDIT: Okay, VNC and xmodmap.

<comment><USER63> I believe accessibility integration is still on the to-do list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> What happened to Mir if Wayland is the only viable x11 alternative?

A cruel friend has suggested everything touched by Ubuntu billionaire founder Shuttleworth turns to manure but I think this isn't so helpful to understand why Mir seemingly died completely? Even GnuHurd hasn't died so dramatically..?

<comment><USER66> Due to the huge PR fuckup that was the Mir announcement, they never gained much traction in the greater community. And a display stack needs a lot of community support across the whole ecosystem: kernel support, kernel drivers, user space drivers, widget libraries, applications etc... none of these parties were willing to support Mir in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> > Wayland has xwayland, which somehow provides mini embedded X server(s) for > GUI apps that don't support wayland yet. I kept this disabled when > switching, going for the "pure" Wayland experience.

this seems like a really limiting decision in deciding how viable wayland is.

</comment><comment><USER68> Is wayland viable for gaming yet or does it still add an extra frame or two of latency?

</comment><comment><USER69> I just cannot get Wayland work on a VirtualBox instance of Ubuntu, with the host being MacOS Catalina on an iMac Retina. The screen just keeps flickering.

I would love it if Wayland would work!

</comment><comment><USER70> Ive been using wayland and sway for about 2 weeks now.

My experience is this.

If it's compiled to run for Wayland. Fan f-in tastic. No hiccups, no random screen tears or visual glitches of any kind. My logs are surprisingly sparse and when there is a configuration issue it's something trivial i overlooked and easily fixed.

Now here is the issue. When it comes to X-Wayland. Well lets just say that my opinion of X-wayland can be boiled down to two major criticisms.

1\. It's turning into another X11. I've been trying to get apps that should just work out of the box when running on gtk like Google Chrome. And frankly looking at the bug reports and hack ass solutions to get things like Video Hardware Acceleration to function using X-Wayland... Nightmarish to say the least and glad it's not my job.

2\. I think history has shown time and time again with debacles like Apple trying to retain backwards capability for powerpc MacOS or Windows ensuring your archaic MS-DOS application at work doesn't end up need an expensive update.... that any time you try to not throw things away that need to be thrown away, regardless of how sentimental they might be, you always end up a dead hoarder buried somewhere in your house where nobody can find you but they can sure as hell smell you; so they know you are in there somewhere... Where ever the hell that may be.

My attitude when it come's to the critics of Wayland is to say build something better or shut up and just not use it and keep letting X11 make the desktop experience on Linux suck on two fronts.

The first where nobody who is working on it actually knows how the entire thing works except maybe a handful of people. (all of whom are btw wayland core developers).

And the second, where things just don't work like they should out of the box on whichever desktop environment circumstance you may be in. When you have such a complicated API you end up with 50 million different ways 50 million different developers can write bugs into the 50 millionth reimplementation of your system.

There is a reason why Unix was the most ripped off and successful operating system in the world. It's not because it had X11...

</comment><comment><USER71> hooray, finally a wayland criticism article that actually put in some effort instead of "muh unix philosophy". most of these issues are real issues for wayland today, and the author might be right to switch back to X for now. however, I'll try to explain some of the issues:

> I had consistent font rendering issues. There was this painful issue in sway > relating to display scaling that caused fonts (among other things) to be > missing, fuzzy, or just terrible in general.

yup, still a problem. hidpi doesn't work great on X in the first place, and adding Xwayland definitely makes it worse for X applications. but, once the majority of applications are ported to wayland, hidpi should become much, much better.

> NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't > always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi > network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then > switch back to sway. Bizarre.

personally, I recommend using either raw wpa_supplicant or iwd with a separate network management daemon (dhcpcd or systemd-networkd). the wpa_supplicant GUI is very ugly and uses weird terminology (what's a "PSK" \-- yes, I know what it is, but if you didn't, you'd have to google it), but if you can get over that hump as well as the initial configuration, it's been 100% reliable for me, unlike NM, which _usually_ works but then sometimes silently fails somewhere. I recently switched to iwd, which has been mostly fine, but, like wayland, still lacking features important for some people.

> Sometimes, on my desktop, everything would lock up for 10 seconds or so, the > screen would blank, and then come back on and everything would be fine. It > appeared to be some issue with the graphics drivers - I don't have that > issue on i3, so something deep in Wayland is interacting strangely with it.

I would assume you are using intel drivers and are experiencing a GPU reset. check dmesg, but it's quite possible that a poorly behaved application is causing the trouble.

> Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland > appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind > of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing > in Zoom for work.

yeah, this is definitely a problem. as other commenters have said, ordinary applications aren't allowed to just record the screen, they have to ask the compositor. unfortunately, this has not yet been standardized between different wayland implementations. iirc, gnome has a screen recording api, kde has one, and wlroots has another, and they're all incompatible. my current solution for sway is to use wf-recorder + v4l2loopback, which works fairly well but is a little bit hard to set up. install wf-recorder-git and v4l2loopback-dkms-git, then modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=7 && wf-recorder -m v4l2 -f /dev/video7 -c rawvideo --pixel-format=yuv420p. then you'll have a fake camera device which you can select in your streaming application. that works for me on Firefox 70 and Chromium 78, so it should work for Zoom too. the workflow is not as smooth as built-in screen sharing (for one, you can't display two "cameras" at once), but it works well enough for most purposes.

> Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my > previously secured computer at a logged-in tty. Not great for security!

this is actually very easy to solve.

solution 1: instead of running sway, run exec sway.

solution 2: instead of running swaylock, run physlock. if security is a high priority for you, this is probably better anyways.

<comment><USER35> Thanks for these comments!

I definitely need to migrate away from NetworkManager; I think you just gave me the motivation to do so. :)

<comment> iam-TJ You might find 'nmtui' (Network Manager Text User Interface) more helpful if you prefer an ncurses based interface similar to the GUI nm-applet (but it doesn't work for GUI-only configuration extensions for some VPNs, etc.)

'nmcli' is good for basics, eg:

nmcli == connection summary inc. addresses, routes, DNS

nmcli dev wifi == wifi networks found (inc. specs)

nmcli dev wifi rescan

nmcli con == list configured connections

nmcli con up Connection-Name

nmcli con down Connection-Name

most of the above support intelligent tab-completion including of (space containing) connection names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> on the lack of clipboard history: [https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist](https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist) this exists and is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER37> I lost the faith, guess Joel law of not rewriting things was again upheld.

</comment><comment><USER73> I don't agree with the assumption that we need to ditch X11 entirely. Implementations are different from the spec, and a common complaint I have is that certain implementations are gathering code smells like nobody's business.

You can fix both an implementation and a spec by continued review and revision, while making choices to either remain backwards compatible or breaking that compatibility with newer revisions. I don't think Wayland is a good solution to this kind of problem, despite it being touted as one in many circles I've witnessed.

The competition is nice, though! I have yet to give Wayland a try, but it's on my to-do list some time on a fresh machine.

<comment><USER74> X has long been a crufty dusty codebase. Due to a small amount of people that obsess about networking it has stayed alive. Hopefully Wayland hits critical mass and x can finally be old yellered as it should have been twenty years ago

Due to the down votes let me clarify. X sucks

<comment><USER45> I want things that only work under x that aren't spacebar heating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Summary: yes, unless you use video conferencing and screen sharing software, which is likely to be totally broken (but see Hello71's comment). The author needs to use Zoom, so he reverted to X11.

<comment><USER76> That's not at all an accurate summary. I'd cover why but really the article is apt and to the point on doing so without summarization IMO.</comment></comment>


Looking in the Wrong Places - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/sabine_hossenfelder-looking-in-the-wrong-places <comment><USER2> The problem with scientists like Sabine is that she is working in an underfunded field of fundamental physics (phenomenological QGR) while (literally) on the adjacent floor there is an overfunded field of physics, namely gravitational wave astrophysics, which is well connected to experimental physics, astronomy, all kind of branches. In the end, this probably boils down to the "big science, little science" problem: Donors give the money to a crowd of scientists who already aquired a lot of money.

The point is that she is also a scientist and has to play the rules. She is not a professor at her institute but probably would like to be. There is definetly some envy between the lines.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Very plausibly, the main reason why we haven't made progress [in physics] is > that we're not doing the right thing. We're looking in the wrong places. We > are letting ourselves be guided by the wrong principles. It's about time > that we rethink this because, clearly, it's not working.

This is the vaguest possible call to action: "think different." Okay ... but who doesn't intrinsically understand that this is required for a 'breakthrough'? Perhaps it is just a plea to funding groups to consider more projects outside the mainstream?

<comment><USER4> > _" think different." Okay ... but who doesn't intrinsically understand that > this is required for a 'breakthrough'?_

Probably almost everyone. Usually people back high status approaches and people. (And you're wrong to assume that the breakthrough must necessarily come from thinking differently).</comment></comment>


Tapbots shows how much you can do with just a little upfront - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1713-tapbots-shows-how-much-you-can-do-with-just-a-little-upfront

<comment><USER2> I think these kinds of posts are a bit deceptive:

"You can keep your day job. Just two months of nights and weekends. Then launch it. Maybe it's not perfect yet. But get it out there."

I mean I'm all for releasing early and often, but it actually does take a lot of work to make a good application. From the Tapbots guys themselves:

"We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot's of passion and a lot of hard work..."

How do you reconcile this? These guys want to spend a lot of up-front time building polished apps whereas the 37signals guys are saying get something out there even if it's not perfect. Seems like a contradiction to me.

<comment><USER3> In defense of 'release early and often', the 'often' part is more difficult (from what I understand) on the iPhone. Each update must go through the approval process. That takes time -- time during which you are getting no feedback about the updates you've made. "Release early and often" is a lot easier when you're talking about a web app on server that you control.

I do agree that the 37s post seems contradictory in light of that.

<comment><USER4> It's actually not that bad. I updated my little game "Recall" _cough_ shameless plug _cough_ and it only took a few days from submitting the new binary to getting it pushed through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another 37signals article that's actually about survivorship bias.

<comment><USER4> True, but you could also look at it this way: perhaps these 37signals articles are helping to illuminate WHY some of these things survive.

After all, success criteria in iPhone apps (or apps in general) may not be objectively quantifiable, but I'm sure there are plenty of do's and don'ts that will help.

<comment><USER5> Well, if you go back and read the article, they actually offer no useful information or opinions about why Tapbots might have been successful, other than the fact that it's "two guys in a basement" as opposed to some big VC- funded venture.

What gets my goat about this article is that they treat this like it's some novel idea -- as though there are not hundreds and thousands of hackers toiling away after hours and on weekends (yours truly included), to the chagrin of wives and girlfriends everywhere, trying to put together awesome applications without any kind of funding or outside help whatsoever.

Highlighting the fact that one company succeeded with this approach is not merely useless, it probably only solidifies the unfortunate myth that all it takes is a little pluck and a lot of sweat to be successful in an endeavor like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The tapbot products really are awesome. These two guys wanted to create their own interfaces for their products from scratch, and they succeeded.

However, I think it's worth noting that the tapbots programmer has been writing objective-c since the 80's. Even with that amount of experience it took two months of "nights and weekends" to create their weightbot app. If you're just starting with objective-c / cocoa / iphone development, I think it's unrealistic to expect to achieve their level of quality in as short a time.

</comment><comment><USER7> But did they get paid by Apple yet? Cashflow is king and depending on one customer or partner for the majority of income doesn't make for a healthy company.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do I find all there is to read up on Bitcoins? - <AUTHOR>

I'm getting seriously interested in Bitcoins, and have quite some amount of free time in my hands. While I have tried mining bitcoins before just to try-it-out, I would like to understand it to the very root. Would be awesome if I could be recommended resources to read up ? blogs, books, papers, etc.. anything would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> <http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)</comment></comment>