Blazing Fast HTML: Elm vs. React vs. Angular vs. Ember - <AUTHOR> http://elm-lang.org/blog/blazing-fast-html-round-two <comment><USER2> Oh no...benchmarks.

Honestly, your decision to use any of the frameworks in the article should not be based on a benchmark. The frameworks here differ so much in how they work, the mental thought process you use in them, etc.

What is the technical debt of Elm? Training for developers to learn something other than JS, etc. This is a much bigger factor in a framework decision than a benchmark. Especially when all of them are fast and only a few cases would you even notice a difference between them.

Please, don't use this to decide which front-end framework to use. Nor switch from one you are using, "just because it's faster!". Save yourself and your co-workers the headache.

<comment><USER3> I very rarely see technology choice decisions based on performance. It probably should happen more often then it does. If anything most choices are based on popularity.

Benchmarks are not the best way to advertise languages but regardless Elm has do well on so many fronts to make it competitive otherwise it will die to the popular frameworks/languages (usually the lowest common denominator).

 _> Please, don't use this to decide which front-end framework to use. Nor switch from one you are using, "just because it's faster!". Save yourself and your co-workers the headache._

I would hope and fairly optimistic that people make decisions on a variety of compelling reasons (particularly tech people). Some of those reasons often can be performance. What you mean is don't make this the sole reason and even this "tip" isn't really helpful advice.

<comment><USER4> There is one benefit of choosing based on popularity - it becomes easier to hire for, and more likely to find engineers enthusiastic about the work. In addition, it increases the number of eyes on it, which can surface difficult bugs/edge cases to get addressed.

<comment><USER3> _> There is one benefit of choosing based on popularity - it becomes easier to hire for, and more likely to find engineers enthusiastic about the work. In addition, it increases the number of eyes on it, which can surface difficult bugs/edge cases to get addressed._

I didn't mean to sound like it isn't a good idea to have a good portion of your reasoning based on popularity. I have done it myself :) . But if your trying to make your framework popular you have to do some advertising (hopefully somewhat honest). I don't blame the Elm devs for publishing some benchmarks particularly when it is some impressive work they have done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every single comment here is focused on just one aspect of this article: speed. Far more interesting points the article covers are around _how_ Elm optimizes and _how_ developers optimize Elm code. From the conclusion:

\- Optimizing Elm only touches view code, unlike everyone else.

\- Optimizing Elm cannot introduce sneaky bugs, unlike everyone else.

\- These results should generalize to apps of any size.

Also interesting is how Elm's immutability allows it to use requestAnimationFrame by default, which plain vanilla JS libs can't use by default.

<comment><USER6> A related anecdote: One of the major reasons I decided to give elm a try was when Richard Feldman was giving a talk about writing Dream Writer in elm, and he got to a point where the performance was noticeably slowing down. He started trying to make it better by 'sprinkling a few `lazy`s through the view code', and then stopped because that had magically made everything super fast again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Speed in Milliseconds" should be changed to "Time in Milliseconds". More speed is a good thing, but more time is not. Using "speed" instead of "time" in the chart title makes it sound like bigger bars are better, but that's just the opposite. Plus, speed isn't even a measure of time (like milliseconds); it's a unit of distance (or some equivalent) divided by time.

</comment><comment><USER8> I recently heard Evan give an overview of the language and everyone in the room came away excited.

The speed is really just a bonus, as the real things to be excited about are the features you get from a typed functional language (HM type inference, union types, auto currying, etc.) that compiles to efficient JS with a focus on web development.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://github.com/elm-lang/virtual- dom/blob/master/src/Nati...](https://github.com/elm-lang/virtual- dom/blob/master/src/Native/VirtualDom.js)

<1500 lines of straightforward JS makes it all possible. It is indeed very similar to Matt Esch's original [1]. The Elm port reads nicely in one file.

[1] [https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom](https://github.com/Matt- Esch/virtual-dom)

</comment><comment><USER10> They should really spend more time on making the docs less attrocius for Elm. That's more important than benchmarks.

(Coming from someone who appreciates Elm)

<comment><USER11> Whats the problem with the docs? I mean docs can always be improved but I think the Guide is okay and the package docs are fine...

<comment><USER10> The core language docs are ok. --> If you know Haskell!

The architecture docs are ok. --> If you already understand the concept and are willing to read some other tutorials.

The effects docs are... no comment.

Compare the guide to others like from Rust.

A lot of people I've pointed to Elm gave up quickly because there s no good introduction guide. It's not even properly linked as a first, visible entry in on the docs page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the love of * (pick your preferred deity, I'm going with Flying Spaghetti Monster), stop benchmarking on ridiculously simple TodoMVC apps.

They are not at all representative of the complexity costs that emerge from real apps, which often mitigate differences between frameworks considerably.

(Apart from the fact that creators benchmarking their own framework know how to optimize it best).

<comment><USER12> I'd rather see articles about how to manage complexity at scale rather than about performance in apps so simple you'd be better off in raw javascript anyways.

Show me a framework which handles optimistic updates, knows how to query multiple data sources and merge their values, doesn't make it harder to reason about as I add more components and then I'll be very interested.

These are only a few of the hard problems to solve when building an app and I feel most frameworks completely ignore them and instead take the easy route of how quickly can I write yet another TodoMVC.

Productivity at the beginning of a project doesn't matter nearly as much as productivity at the end of a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has started to explore (and enjoy) elm, I have to say that speed is not one of the major selling points for me. Rather, seeing that it has at least competitive speed is just dodging a potential deal breaker. It could smother me in kittens and do my taxes, but if a framework only renders three frames per second, I definitely won't use it. Elm being in the same ballpark (slightly better? slightly worse? doesn't matter) means that I can see if the other features of the language entice me to try it out. They did, I did, and I really like it (even though apps that use random a lot end up being structured in a way that is strange to my brain).

</comment><comment><USER13> As much as I trust benchmarks from the creator of a product at the end of the day they are all fast frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mithril's omission is telling, as it it often faster than even Elm by 50% or so.

[http://lhorie.github.io/todomvc-perf-comparison/todomvc- benc...](http://lhorie.github.io/todomvc-perf-comparison/todomvc-benchmark/)

<comment><USER15> 1\. That benchmark is rather outdated - React 0.10, Angular 1.2.14 ...

2\. Article seems to compare most popular frameworks, so no surprise Mithril didn't make it since more popular frameworks like Vue are also not on the list

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a React user, I'd be really curious to see what these benchmarks look like when you're dealing with larger, more complex projects. I was under the impression that React scales well when dealing with lots of nested components and diffing the updates for each.

<comment><USER17> It "scales well" because of shouldComponentUpdate. That lets you avoid building huge chunks of virtual DOM as your app becomes very large.

The trick is that the same exact optimization is available in Elm and Angular 2 (with different names) so the same argument applies there as well.

The "Do these results generalize?" section makes an argument as to why the numbers you see on a simple TodoMVC app should generalize to apps of any size. When everyone has the equivalent of shouldComponentUpdate, the question becomes: when you finally DO need an update, how fast is it? That can be measured in small apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I believe the saying is "Lies, damn lies and benchmarks".

That said, he does make a case that elm is competitive with other frameworks, which is all anyone should take from a language benchmark, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER19> Speed is one thing, but the fact that you must replicate your business model client _AND_ server-side with Elm is a huge minus. I would take ScalaJS over any 4 of those frameworks any day.

<comment><USER12> Why not just use Clojure?

You've got datomic on the server and datascript on the client, transit on the wire, reader conditionals to share code and much more. Plus everything can be modified as its running.

When it comes to web frameworks I don't really care about performance as much as I care about managing complexity. Which is why I'm looking at om.next over all the other frameworks.

And managing complexity is not something you can benchmark in toy projects - every single framework is virtually the same at such a small scale.

<comment><USER19> > Why not just use Clojure?

I guess as a professional Python developer, it would take some time to get used to all the parentheses. I've used Emacs for 20+ years, but outside of elisp I've never been comfortable with s-exprs.

I had never heard of om.next. I think this is what you mean: [https://github.com/omcljs/om](https://github.com/omcljs/om) ?? correct?

> And managing complexity is not something you can benchmark in toy projects - > every single framework is virtually the same at such a small scale.

Well, looking at how much garbage was needed to implement todomvc in Backbone kept me from considering it any further :)

<comment><USER20> > looking at how much garbage was needed to implement todomvc in Backbone kept > me from considering it any further

And in this you were wise! Or at the very least fortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow - I'm a big fan of React, so I'm a little disappointed to see that it was the slowest of all.

<comment><USER22> Honestly benchmarks are useless. I'm sure Elm is "faster" and what not... but does it really matter? React is fast enough for a ton of businesses and people. So is Ember.

Sure, performance is good, but I think mostly bottlenecks are user code and the way the JS/CSS bundle is loaded and delivered. If there's a major performance issue in the framework, just submit a bug report. It'll be fixed.

I'm more interested in how productive I can be and how much fun I can have coding with said framework or language—something both Elm and React do well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those benchmarks should be done by someone independent from one of the tested frameworks though. Hard to trust the methodology, especially with Elm emerging as the "winner".

<comment><USER6> He provides links to the repo where the test code is, anyone is free to run it themselves and see if it matches up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The hard, but very useful, test would be getting a largish random sample of noobs and seeing which framework lets you _write code_ the fastest.

Unfortunately, that's an expensive test.

<comment><USER25> This is why I love angular 1.x so much. I was able to make a product in no time with no experience. Everything was so straight-forward for my mind.

<comment><USER24> Likewise, beside custom "directives" (tag libraries) being a bit complex at first. Otherwise, you just start with a page mockup, then progressively refine it by loading some scripting and view models for the data entry or variable substitution.

Angular 2 on the other hand. One of my coworkers (to paraphrase) felt like it was GWT all over again (and I agree).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whats the difference between a few seconds of loading time for a site that only needs to load its bundle once? Sure its nice for it be faster but the main benefit I thought is you don't need to reload pages as you navigate.

<comment><USER27> Possibly misunderstood the article, but it seems they are comparing performance once the bundle is already loaded. That said, as someone who personally prefers using browser over apps ( at least for content consumption, rather than something like a password manager) it is nice to have things boot up quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No vue.js?

<comment><USER29> Seems like a totally random benchmark to me.

None of them is known to be really fast and the benchmark tells, they all range in the same order of magnitude. So why not include Inferno, Mithril or Preact? Only a few of them are mainstream, so why mess with stuff that is neither popular nor known to be fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> react fanboys are gonna be a little upset that you showed that angular is faster in your benchmarks. They spent months flooding internet saying react was faster and you're contradicting that.

<comment><USER31> That's not why we use React

<comment><USER32> Please elucidate? Angular 1.5 has one-way binding, lifecycle hooks, component tree architectures. UI-router is well on the way to become framework agnostic. Redux or redux-style state management is possible with ng1.5, and a pleasure with ng2.

On top of all of that, you get the benefit of using a framework instead of patched together libraries. Basic tools like intercepting all http traffic at the request/response level is incredibly helpful with larger apps.

The only differentiating factor really left is JSX, and while that may be a personal preference, angular style templating is a lot more comfortable for developers used to server-side templating (JSP, Razor, et al)

<comment><USER29> For me React won the last round because of its simple API.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West's Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-julian-assange-russia.html <comment><USER2> These hatchet jobs are petty tiresome. How stupid do they think readers are? If there is a suggestion that Assange, who is a publisher, has failed to publish documents leaked to him that would embarrass Russia (or anyone else for that matter) then they have something.

But they aren't suggesting he's selectively publishing leaks. So I guess they want him to publish documents nobody has leaked to him by use of the 27th dimension? The NYT itself, while usually excellent, has acknowledged failings in that regard.

So now we play guess the NYT motive. Is it patriotism, wikileaks publications embarrass the US so let's hatchet them. Is it support for Hilary - email leaks are embarrassing to her campaign that they will probably support so muddy the source as much as possible? Is it jealousy of the sheer number of scoops, which are the journalists currency of bragging rights given Assange is not "one of them" and hasn't "paid his dues" and if they would have played his hand differently (as we all would have). Is it something else? Whatever the reason the bias is pretty clear.

I want to make this explicit. I am no more a supporter of wikileaks than I am a supporter of the New York Times. I support both in terms of their rights to do journalism and neither in terms of speaking for me or agreeing with what they say on all issues. I like the NYT, it's a pretty good newspaper. Somehow especially when they write on wikileaks they embarrass themselves pretty consistently about an eccentric activist journalist who used tech to scoop them on big stories and maintains a perfect reputation for protecting sources and for publishing. The NYT's reputation has suffered on both counts.

Full disclosure - I've given the NYT money but not wikileaks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty poorly written as it focuses on US disclosures (rather than say, the disclosures of the Erdogan emails), and adopts a zero-sum Cold War-like calculus for "Russia's benefit".

US media outlets and political campaigns crying wolf (bear?) every time their reputations are damaged or to discredit their opponents (Clinton campaign wrt Trump) looks a lot like a modern form of McCarthyism.

You could equally expect RT or Sputnik to run a headline "How the US Often Benefits When Leaked Documents Reveal Russia's Secrets". Or, if you could point to specific instances: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/04/russia-s...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/04/russia- says-putin-main-target-panama-papers/82600272/)

Indeed, the primary and most damaging leaks have been from US military whistleblowers - both Snowden and Manning documents - but also leaks from the former head of CIA (Patreus) betraying drone programs. Other leaks like the SONY leaks indicating the US State Department's active role in puppeteering "The Interview", while played down by US domestic media, was damaging to the normal and usually successful domestic propaganda narrative in the states.

The two leaks I can remember being attributed (possibly) to Russia include the DNC hacks, which disclosed huge election fraud and resulted in the retirement of the top five officials of the Democratic Party, and the leak (not published by Wikileaks) of the phone conversation by Victoria Nuland about supporting US-friendly political leadership transitions in the Ukraine (which the US media, again, covered as a scandal over swear words rather than content).

One of the interesting takes on the back and forth disclosure of corruption is that, in some sense, both Russian and US citizens 'win': they both gain access to transparency that their governments would otherwise prioritize their not having access to.

<comment><USER4>
       Other leaks like the SONY leaks indicating the US State Department's active role in puppeteering "The Interview"

Is there any source to this? I haven't found any in the leaks.

<comment><USER3> Yes, in the email leaks it was disclosed that:

\- Michael Lynton (the CEO of SONY) had been in consultation with the State Department over The Interview, and had been giving the Bureau of Information Programs (one of the State Department propaganda bureaus) early screenings.

\- Lynton was in consultation with both State Department officials and a RAND expert on nuclear non-proliferation, North Korea and regime change (Bennett).

\- The Special Envoy to South Korea had been speaking with Executives of SONY about plans to have The Interview smuggled into the North.

\- Clinton staffers and CIA officials were on site during the production of The Interview.

Indeed, the North Korean hacker group attributed by the FBI for the attack (Bureau 121) has a mandate to (and history of) target media companies partnering with adversary states to develop propaganda as a deterrence strategy.

If you Google around for those names and themes you will stumble on articles from various reputable sources that cover it as well as original emails themselves in Wikileaks.

It should be noted that the Wikileaks dump of SONY also implicated them in partnering with the US State Department in other business related to "international messaging", while "The Interview" was merelyl a high profile case.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Had no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Revelations of West's secrets may hurt in short term, but they make Western liberal democracies stronger in long term.

Revelations from Russia and other authoritarian governments make them always weaker.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nytimes is in a rush.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hahaha, Russia doesn't care, you muppets.</comment>


Sean Rad Out as Tinder CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/11/04/exclusive-sean-rad-out-as-tinder-ceo-inside-the-crazy-saga

<comment><USER2> This is eerily similar to what happened at Twitter. I just finished reading the book Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton and the parallels are frightening. Now I'm not sure how much of that book is true or fabricated, but the book claims that first Jack Dorsey was kicked out as CEO and replaced by Ev Williams. Then Williams was kicked out as CEO and replaced by Dick Costolo. Just like with Tinder, Twitter was a giant success (by any measure) when the CEOs were pushed out against their volition.

According to the book, the fatal flaw is board control. Even though Ev Williams was the largest shareholder (an assumption), he didn't have board control. He only had 3 out of 7 seats. And so he was forced out against his will.

Now Zuckerberg (at Facebook) never lost board control and hence was not pushed out by the VC board. The major conclusion seems to be it's imperative to maintain board control or you'll most likely be vulnerable to being replaced by professional management - even if you create a successful company.

The other interesting parallel is Benchmark. According to the book, Benchmark was one of the vcs to push out Ev Williams. It's been reported that Benchmark is now on Tinder's board.

<comment><USER3> Not sure how similar this is, since the majority of Tinder is owned and controlled by IAC. The founders never really had a chance to control it since it was an incubated project.

<comment><USER4> The IAC thing makes me wonder whether these stories can even be read normally. Given that this is a very large company that is closely managing the creation of a startup-shaped thing, do things like "founder" and "CEO" and "investment" mean what we usually think they mean? And if not, is there at all a meaningful parallel in the story of Twitter or any other actually-independent startup?

[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders- forg...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forgotten- woman-whitney-wolfe-sexism-and-startup-creation-myths)

"""I spent a short and intense two weeks last summer reporting out a Tinder feature for Bloomberg Businessweek. What I found was a meteoric startup that wasn't really a startup, owing to the fact that Tinder was born in an IAC incubator, and IAC owned and controlled the company. Rad and [former Chief Marketing Officer Justin] Mateen seemed to be playing make-believe in a lot of ways. They were keen to hide the IAC arrangement ("They're sort of our partner in this") and pretend that they were living the dream of being wined and dined by Silicon Valley moneymen ("We are being bombarded by venture capitalists … it's very overwhelming"). When I talked to their minders at IAC and the incubator, executives were often dismissive of the two youngsters—happy to let them spin grand visions and soak up founder acclaim, while telling grownups, i.e. Wall Street analysts and investors, that Tinder was simply a lure to get millennials to pay later in life for IAC's profitable dating service Match.com."""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its very telling of IAC what they are pulling. I have spoken to Sean a few times (way in the past) and its insulting what they are doing. Hes created a great company (and has done so several times- orgoo, adly, etc.) He has proven his worth and IAC is getting greedy. Yes, there appears to have been slight mistakes lately, but this is a guy who has created a company worth over a billion- Give him some slack. The fact they are pulling this shit is ridiculous, when tinder likely has more value than IAC itself if it wasnt for the public market. If tinder was private, its valuation would likely trump that of IAC. I only wish him the best- Honestly my advice to him would be to drop it and move on. Hes a talented dude (obviously) who should focus on creating his next big win. I am rooting for him.

<comment><USER6> > _Hes created a great company_

Tinder has made 0 revenue since it's inception in 2012. That's not a company, that's a product. (a great product mind you)

> _If tinder was private, its valuation would likely trump that of IAC._

IAC makes a lot of money ($3bil) and has a high market cap ($6bil). Given it's ownership of every large dating site, it's it conceivable that IAC has set the precedence for the total addressable market for online dating. Or at the very least, has an indication of such. I'm curious as to the rationale that would make Tinder worth more than IAC given that (1) Tinder hasn't made a single dime (2) the sites that do make money already have a large market share and continue to grow despite a free contender like Tinder existing and (3) a company "worth over a billion" needs to theoretically have a trajectory to not only bring in $150mil in revenue but exceed that in the foreseeable future in order for a billion dollar price tag to be realistic (on that same note - "billion dollar" valuations only make sense when their is a buyer who can foot that bill or the company has a trajectory to make those kind of profits. to my knowledge IAC would be the only company in existence to do such a thing).

Lastly, I'm genuinely curious about the history and terms setup between IAC and Tinder. If Tinder is such a darly of the tech world and is a "billion dollar business" then why did it chose to be so restricted by IAC when it's valuation "would likely trump that of IAC"? I curiously ask not because I have any sort of knowledge of their history, but rather the current arrangement suggests a story entirely different than the prescribed narrative that you suggest.

<comment><USER7> no. it's a company. It's valued on future potential. Same as Whatsapp can be valued at $19billion, despite only having $10 million in revenue. Many examples; there is future monetization potential, that they're already discussing.

<comment> k-mcgrady A product can have a valuation. A company is 'a commercial business' and Tinder isn't making any money therefore not engaged in commerce.

<comment><USER8> > Tinder isn't making any money therefore not engaged in commerce

This would probably have been true in 1914. In 2014 it seems like a semantic quibble.

<comment><USER9> Oh how remarks like this make me think it's 1999 again. The valuation per registered user is also starting to get to that level (I had friends with business plans calling out values of $500 per user at that time). See what happens this time.

<comment><USER8> Even a Groupon-style series of accounting fuck ups would not be enough to make Tinder an unattractive business with a $value on users.

It's not true for everyone, but the fact remains that you can monetise people without them paying you a dime directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honest question - was Sean Rad ever the "CEO?" That is, given that Tinder was an IAC unit, does the concept of a "singular" chief executive have any meaning? Or was his position more akin to that of a vice president of a business unit of a larger corporation, subject to the whims and direction of the IAC CEO, Gregory Blatt?

<comment><USER11> The article brought up the point that he's an employee.

You're right. And it's funny people fight over the title "Founder" when that word doesn't mean anything on paper. Articles of Incorporation don't contain any mention of "Founder". Only CEO, Manager, etc. Founder seems to be an ego thing.

In reality Rad is not a Founder/CEO but was a General Manager or something.

Did he take risk? No. It was funded by IAC. Did he innovate with the product? Yes. He was a great employee and tool for Diller. And Diller got rewarded for his risk.

Sucks for Rad in that he didn't want to believe he was just an employee on paper. On paper he was like a General Manager of Quiznos. But look, he gets to drive his $115k mercedes around with Justin, retain equity and still cling to the notion that he was the Founder/CEO of Tinder. Whatever that means.

<comment><USER12> >> Honest question - was Sean Rad ever the "CEO?"

> The article brought up the point that he's an employee.

Wow. Are we under such a reality distortion field that the idea of being CEO & being an employee are in conflict?

<comment><USER10> It's a big difference. A CEO answers to the board, and the board only.

Sean Rad sounds something more like a President in this scenario.

<comment><USER12> > It's a big difference. A CEO answers to the board, and the board only. > > > Sean Rad sounds something more like a President in this scenario.

Let's think this through. The board represents the owners of the company. A President is different from a CEO how? Because there are other employees of the company who can fire them? Okay, what employees of Tinder can fire Sean Rad? None. Who can fire him? Hatch Labs, because with 100% ownership they completely control the board of Tinder...

Which all goes to show that in many, many ways, a CEO who doesn't have an ownership stake in a company is very much an employee.

<comment><USER10> A better analogy would be the CEO working for a company in which a single shareholder had majority stock ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The moral of this story is that you don't support a high-level executive that calls your users "sluts" and still keep your job as CEO. It was immensely bad judgment that made Rad a bigger liability for the company than whatever value he could provide going forward.

<comment><USER14> > The moral of this story is that you don't support a high-level executive > that calls your users "sluts" and still keep your job as CEO.

That's an interesting conclusion to draw from this.

Because, as others have pointed out, he still _would_ have had his job if he had control of enough seats on the board, like Zuckerberg did. Indeed Zuckerberg still has a job after calling FB users "dumb fucks" and offering his friend private information of anyone at Harvard (including private photos, private messages, etc. etc.) [http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new- zuckerberg-ims...](http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg- ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5?IR=T)

<comment><USER12> I can't get over how often Zuckerberg is being used as a reference here.

Sure, if you still control the company, it's hard for you to be fired. That's s tautology.

<comment><USER14> Right, I only brought it up in light of rayiner's comment -- that saying misogynistic, shitty things makes you lose your job as CEO. It doesn't, at least not when you control the board.

<comment><USER12> There seem to be a preponderance of founders under the illusion that a) this is practical in their circumstance and b) that this is desirable in their circumstance. While it was true for Zuckerberg, it is hardly true for most.

<comment><USER14> Can you expand upon why you think it would not be desirable?

<comment><USER12> Particularly if you are an inexperienced founder, there comes a point where you and everyone else is better off with some checks and balances on your judgement. Having to hold yourself accounting to some other parties, assuming they the best interests of the company at heart, is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Once Rad is out, will he end up with 10% equity? I'm asking to figure out whether he'll get rich from Tinder's meteoric success, assuming the company continues to do well.

(Is it even possible for Rad or any other founder to cash out their shares before a liquidity event like IPO or acquisition? I know the answer used to be "no," but Airbnb seems to have changed that in recent years, and I'm quite unsure how it works now.)

<comment><USER16> There's many ways for private stockholders to liquidate shares:

\- Founders can often sell shares during fundraising events, either through a pre-allocated block of shares called Series FF, or by having the company use a portion of the raised capital to buy back some of their shares at the same price.

\- Any private stockholder can simply sell shares on the secondary market. However, most often, the company has the "right of first refusal." That means that the sale must be presented to the company before going through, and the company has the option to buy back those shares at the same price instead of letting the sale happen.

\- Stockholders can also cash out by building derivative contracts where they "sell the upside" on their shares at a specific price. Think of it kind of like selling a stock option. ESO & Equidate are examples of companies / funds that facilitate this.

<comment><USER17> As a shareholder who would very much like to liquidate some shares in 3 different private companies, I'll say this has not been my experience. Maybe if your company is 99th percentile you can pull these tricks, but for the remaining 99% unregistered shares are completely illiquid due to a combination of SEC regulations and lack of ability to obtain/share the key data any potential buyer would require.

One of the biggest problems with bootstrapping startups is even after there's revenue, growth, and value, there's just no liquidity.

<comment><USER16> Email me (find it in my profile), I'd love to chat about your situation. I'm pretty involved in the field, so I'm curious if I could hook you up with any avenues to liquidate.

<comment><USER17> How common are mid-stage small software companies with co-founders looking to sell some shares? I'm not talking about anything near large enough to warrant registration. It doesn't seem like a lot written about this topic, because the focus is always on acquisition.

Obviously there's strong pressure from many directions to keep the cap table simple, keep the shares closely held, etc. But after many years of bootstrapping it can't be that uncommon to want to capture some of that value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Matt Cohler was brought in to fire Sean. Keep this in mind when you hear the next VC sound bite about "standing behind the entrepreneur."

<comment><USER19> Is this true

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does one monetize a 10% ownership of an entity that is majority owned by a public company? Unless there is a spinoff, or the public company sells that particular asset, I don't see how Sean makes his money on this. IAC can just continue to use Tinder to grow their own market cap, which in turn helps IAC shareholders but not Tinder shareholders or 'founders'

This could be the worst cap table of all time.

<comment><USER21> A spinoff is in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Apparently the board swiped left.

</comment><comment><USER23> _Occupying a keynote slot at the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit_

That in and of itself may highlight part of the problem. I've known a handful of people on those lists, and it rarely ends well. I don't know if reversion to the mean, or a shift in focus, but the success hasn't lasted for them.

</comment><comment><USER24> Downvote me at will, but frankly i'd be more interested if it was the CEO of the local liquor store. Since when are dating sites relevant to the technology sector?

<comment><USER25> They've been relevant in the technology sector ever since they became "sites" and stopped being mnemonics in the back of tabloid and local newspapers. Like it or not, Tinder is more relevant than your local liquor store.</comment></comment>


Stuff you should know: top tech breakthroughs of 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/109683-top-10-tech-breakthroughs-of-2011

<comment><USER2> Mostly a list of spin-laden, news release rehashes and promises that won't be met anytime soon. Hurrah.

</comment><comment><USER3> garbage</comment>


Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/atom/xray <comment><USER2> A higher performance backend with the undeniable community momentum that Atom has?

I want this to work.

Also excited to see the discussion and possible cross-pollination with Xi[1] and raphlinus.

[1] [https://github.com/google/xi-editor](https://github.com/google/xi-editor)

<comment><USER3> xi editor, when i tried it, would crash upon opening minimised css of fontawesome

A 3 line file, be it long lines, shouldn't happen

<comment><USER2> > A 3 line file, be it long lines, shouldn't happen

No. It should not.

But that's completely unfair. Xi does not even claim to be beta. I haven't touched it in months. But when I did, it was a good (start of) a Mac frontend that was clearly not finished.

The only people I imagine using it now probably use it to dogfood the backend and piece together a solid plugin API.

I would prefer Xi-style win the mind share. Native front ends that tie to a common solid backend that a large community can share to build strong plugin support.

I'll settle for xray-style, a better cross-platform frontend that doesn't redraw large portions of the DOM quite so often. Javascript is fast enough. A good (heh) extension language. The drawing layer is what makes Electron a slow, bloated choice for a text editor.

Since Atom came out, I have had a backgrounded dream that once things settled, they would write a faster front end for the text. But that is difficult to do if your API is "can you do it in the DOM with javascript?

But they are atom.io. They can change their API if they need to.

VS Code, with its well-bounded API is a much better candidate. And I would love to be surprised by a Microsoft skunkworks non-Electron release.

Xi, is a solid idea. Don't know if they can build a community out of nothing. I am worried that an API of "here is a JSON firehose, hook up whatever you want to it" will fragment the backend.

I think Xi would be well served by saying "Here is your firehose, but, the official way is our VS Code emulation plugin." Or something solid and well- defined.

It is unclear where Xi is going so far, that may happen.

<comment><USER3> oh yeah, i will give xi another chance, what it didn't crash on it reacted nicely and fast. But no reason to trade in my sublime text yet :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always felt like the inevitable conclusion of Atom and other electron based apps is the reversion to using low level compiled languages.

I'm starting to get tired of how much of a resource hog Atom is.

<comment><USER5> I'm always amazed when I see the size of the Atom executable on my computer(438MB). It's the size of a game! It's also pretty much the worst performing text editor (in runtime for most operations) and a memory hog. I really don't get the hype.

<comment><USER6> I always think back to when I had a 120MB hard disk in the early 90s. It contained multiple editors, raytracers, games, music editors + music, images, paint programs, multiple programming languages and development kits, a multi- tasking operating system... and room to spare.

90s me would be absolutely floored by a text editor needing 438MB RAM.

Wait, what am I saying? 2018 me is pretty flabbergasted by it, but perhaps less surprised (and more cynical) than 90s me.

<comment><USER7> My rose-tinted glasses are cracked, so I don't want to go back. Software was a lot less capable back then. And APIs were often incredibly obtuse, bespoke, or both.

<comment><USER8> > Software was a lot less capable back then.

Some was.

WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media.

Visual Studio 6 came out in 1998, had most of Intellisense up and running. The refactoring stuff wasn't there yet, but it could do remote debugging.

The Windows APIs were obtuse, but incredibly well documented.

It'd take a long time before a lot of things we take for granted got commoditized though. A streaming video player (+ server) was still an idea that a billion dollar company could be founded on.

It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC.

Web forums sucked though. Slashdot figured out the right idea, the entire conversation loaded at once, one big page, it took the rest of the web a lot time to catch up.

20 years later, I'm writing code, managing files, and have a chat app or two open. The monitor is higher res, and a lot larger. Hardware plug and play finally works, and printing is, on Windows at least, pretty much a solved problem. (Heck even Wi-Fi network printer works almost flawlessly!)

The APIs for writing code have gotten easier to use, but it seems like everyone's documentation is now 5, small, steps above garbage. Also APIs break more often nowadays.

My computer has dozens upon dozens of services running, most of which I don't know what they are. And individual websites take up more RAM than my entire OS used to.

That last part isn't even a joke. To load a few paragraphs of text, hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

It is cool that web browsers can natively play video. 99.9% of the time I don't want them to. I kinda just want that paragraph sitting in the <div id="content"> </div> tag.

<comment><USER9> > _WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming > media._

Related to GP's "Software was a lot less capable back then." \- somehow, WinAmp 2.x seems to be peak capability of music players; I don't recall any player made later that would be comparable in features for playing local music (with maybe the exception of Foobar2000).

My rose-tinted glasses have some scratches on them, but I still maintain that software of today didn't gain many meaningful features over the late 90s / early 2000s, and yet it grown tremendously in size and resource use.

<comment><USER10> WinAMP 2.x was nothing short of a miracle, it was a revolution in audio players. I wasn't a huge fan of the skin-based interface, and the playlist did some odd things once in a while, but on the whole, it was a damn good piece of software.

These days I'm using Foobar2000 and Quod Libet, and have looked at other "music library" type apps, but I'm considering just going with a simple player such as DeaDBeeF, and handle everything else through the file manager, since I've taken the time to properly plan the folder layout. I don't need ratings or playback statistics or all kinds of other things. I need a simple playlist to add music to, with basic playback controls. If I need to add tracks, I'll drag and drop from the file manager.

Basically, I don't need in-between applications between simple WinAMP 2.x style and the all-singing all-dancing streaming services such as Spotify, that do a much superior job with ratings and especially smart playlists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The strategies being employed here look similar to those of xi (CRDTs for multithreaded buffer representation) and neovim (separable backend and frontend). This is definitely a project I'll be keeping my eye on.

Another thing that's interesting is that if they're targeting a web-embedded editor (mentioned as a goal), they could possibly reduce the need for a full Electron install, possibly using the Rust web-view bindings[1] to link with the system web engine.

[1]: [https://github.com/Boscop/web-view](https://github.com/Boscop/web-view)

<comment><USER12> I've been waiting for a proper web editor that allows me to easily access my configured workspace anywhere easily. c9 and a few other web IDEs come close (though that former one is in the hands of Amazon now...), but I want something simpler and more lightweight, similar to Sublime Text.

<comment><USER13> SSH into a box with tmux and vim? Or is that too minimal?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > For all interactions, we shoot for the following targets on the hardware of > our median user:

> 8ms Scrolling, animations, and fine-grained interactions such as typing or > cursor movement.

I don't believe that. Either they use expensive powerful hardware or they measure performance only on start with empty documents. Because even Sublime Text starts lagging after long use and typing several pages of text. There is no way HTML page can be faster than optimized native code.

Especially with React (which adds even more overhead and which was never made for high performance) and these weird ideas:

> a CSS-in-JS approach that automatically generates atomic selectors so as to > keep our total number of selectors minimal.

<comment><USER15> Sublime Text isn't necessarily "optimized native code."

<comment><USER16> Sublime Text is written in C++. Not sure how much closer you can get to "optimized native code" than that.

<comment><USER8> All the best, highest performance AAA games have been written in C++.

So have all the slow, under-performing, crash prone, unoptimized AAA flops.

C++ isn't a magic bullet that gives instant speed. Indeed a long running native app that isn't properly written, will fragment the heck out of memory and get slower and slower. (With 64bit address spaces, at least they don't crash now days!)

The choice of algorithms and data structures is of utmost importance. Optimizing around one's run time is choice #2. C++ doesn't provide some magic hyper optimized environment. Heck C++ doesn't provide much of anything. You need to build a threading model and concurrency model that works, and performs well on different platforms. File I/O performance is different based on the file system in use, NTFS for example hates lots of small files, other file systems have less issues with that usage model.

This goes on and on and on. With C++, every decision has to be made, and each one of those decisions can, if made incorrectly, lead to a poorly performing app.

<comment><USER17> A badly written C++ application will still be faster and consume less memory than anything written in JavaScript.

C++ has a defined threading model and libraries since 2011.

<comment><USER8> > A badly written C++ application will still be faster and consume less memory > than anything written in JavaScript.

JavaScript engines are written in C++. :-D

<comment><USER18> Not for long... This could make rust rewrite feasible [https://github.com/nbp/holyjit](https://github.com/nbp/holyjit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, they replace backend JS with rust, and frontend DOM/CSS with WebGL. Then all that's left of Electron is the V8 JS engine for scripting.

For the desktop, they could cut out Electron entirely and replace it with V8 and some minimal OpenGL bindings. I wonder how that would improve performance!

<comment><USER20> I was just thinking that this effort is a real departure from the earlier stuff. The original Atom project was to build a text editor using the core of a web browser to do all the heavy lifting and use web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) to provide the GUI.

It looks like this latest effort is ditching most of the web browser stuff, and some of the web technologies to build something performant and extensible. Just like Sublime Text (and others). Have we come full circle?

<comment><USER21> Could we look at it as putting out an MVP to drive adoption and get community feedback on what matters to developers and how they want to use it, and now that they know exactly what they want to build, they are re-factoring and re- building to that?

I feel like the original Atom, as you described, was almost the internal prototype that got out in the wild, and now we're going to get the production- ready one eventually..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's funny they want to rewrite some of the core functionality in Rust and make it available through an N-API binding. I've mentioned on HN (and gotten plenty of hate for it) that another approach to gain performance with Electron is to use a back-end language to serve up a local web page, I can only imagine just using a Rust or D web framework that can handle heavy data traffic, only running on 127.0.0.1 serving up some of the content the Editor (or whatever application) needs and doing some heavy lifting from Node itself. In fact I think there's already an open source mail client I don't remember the name that does this, it feeds Electron from a Python back-end, would not surprise me if they're doing pretty well performance wise, let back-end people do their thing, and let front-end people do theirs. Of course things will also get interesting whenever WebAssembly becomes another way to build an Electron application (really can't wait for WebAssembly to become totally mainstream). If my website had half of the stuff on the front-end that my back-end is supposed to handle yeah people would call me out for shoving so much into the DOM / front-end and suggest I offset some of the heavier stuff into the back- end.

Long before Electron I saw applications that ran on localhost in your own browser (think SlickBear, CouchPotato and Headphones) and they were highly responsive regardless of browser used! They were all coded in Python too, so I can only imagine if some of those native API's could just be done as a web api instead to keep things simpler, then you just need to identify a REST framework to handle some of those things. Anyone could add on to a RESTful API for the editor / call said API as well, though it should be locked down securely for obvious abuse reasons.

I used to like the idea of taking nw.js and making something like Atom (before it was even a thing) but using D as a back-end language for it, but never really got through doing it. Ah well.

Edit:

I also find it funny they're ditching CSS for JavaScript when Firefox redid their CSS engine in Rust. I have to wonder if and when Electron will deviate from Chrome altogether and become it's own forked browser engine, but maybe that's a thought a bit ahead of it's time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looking for some advice.

I want to build a text editor where git history is displayed as first class files directly in the file tree. Like a page named landing.html would have landing.html.v0, landing.html.v1, landing.html.v2, etc. directly as regular files. With maybe the git commit message also in the file name for more context.

What would be the best way to make this happen? Build an app from scratch with something like Electron? Build an extension for an existing text editor like Sublime, VSCode, or Atom?

<comment><USER24> Get Emacs and Neotree[1] and start hacking. You'll learn a Lisp, and you'll have a working demo in under a week.

[1] [https://github.com/jaypei/emacs-neotree](https://github.com/jaypei/emacs- neotree)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's something that's buried right at the bottom, but sounds really exciting:

> More concretely, our goal is to ship a high-performance standalone editor > component suitable for use in any web application, something we could > eventually use on GitHub.com. This standalone editor will give us a chance > to test a limited set of critical features in production scenarios without > building out an entire desktop-based editor. We plan to develop this new > editor in the context of a prototype Electron application, but we'll offer > the standalone component as a separate build artifact from the main app.

<comment><USER26> What about MS Monaco, that's used in VS Code? I heard it's very good compared to atom, VS Code Is receiving much praise on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Bypassing the DOM means that we'll need to implement styling and text layout ourselves

I really wish the Servo technology was available in something like Electron which would make this unnecessary

<comment><USER28> Servo is actually modular, and most of it is available as Rust libraries including the layout and rendering engines. There is not a full electron like solution available yet though.

<comment><USER29> And how easy is to actually to incorporate in other projects?

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately it's not very good. Sometimes it works, sometimes there's regression. Acid2 is still broken sometimes.

[https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/ACID2-Status](https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/ACID2-Status)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also, I noticed that it requires WebGL so without modern and supported by WebKit graphic card it won't work. Why is OpenGL necessary for a text editor? I don't understand.

<comment><USER31> Hardware acceleration of rendering is more energy-efficient and less resource intensive than CPU-based software rendering.

<comment><USER14> Is it really so? Can OpenGL update only a small part of a framebuffer (for example, when a single letter is typed) or will it rerender the whole text?

<comment><USER32> Depends on how you render.

I've written a OpenGL engine for a university course that use partial frame updates to reduce the number of redraws per frame.

IIRC the partial rerender variant was about 3 times faster than the full render.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why doesn't someone make a better native editor? (That's not sublime)

<comment><USER34> > _Why doesn't someone make a better native editor?_

I can make it.

In fact, there are many native text editors out there.

The problem is not creating the editor itself but the community around it. If your editor doesn't supports the most common/basic plugins like linters, debuggers, painters, formatters, code intelligence, etc then it becomes another one in the pile.

Atom became the popular piece of software that is today because of the JavaScript community. Hundreds of high school, college and university students with several hours of free time during the week, writing code in a language that overflows on the Internet, to extend the functionality of a program baked by one of the most popular companies among software developers [GitHub]. This is the type of community that you need to build around your editor in order to make it popular.

Take a look at TextMate [1] which used to be one of the most popular code editor with a graphical interface for Mac years ago. It was open-sourced [2] after its developer put it in maintenance mode. And while it is still being maintained today, not many people are well versed in C++ and Objective-C to contribute to the project at the same speed as a JavaScript programmer would do with Atom.

[1] [https://macromates.com](https://macromates.com)

[2] [https://github.com/textmate/textmate](https://github.com/textmate/textmate)

<comment><USER35> >> Hundreds of high school, college and university students with several hours of free time during the week, writing code in a language that overflows on the Internet

Citation definitely needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I love new editors, but i have to ask every time - what is this one doing new?

I'd kill for new editors trying new and interesting methods of text _(or code)_ navigation and editing, but so often i don't feel like i see... anything, new. The only one i can recall offhand is Kakoune, which is basically Vim-like but changes the verb order a bit. It's a nice attempt, i like it.

Yet with things like Atom, Xi, Xray, i don't get what they're doing special?

I totally get that focusing on easy plugins could be a major selling point. I'm not disputing that or ignoring it. I'm merely trying to.. well, i guess understand, why so many new editors pop up but don't try anything new. They just try.. speed, generally.

Am i alone here? I want more Kakounes of the world.

</comment><comment><USER37> How disappointing that text editors require such... abstraction. Overengineering at its finest?

<comment><USER11> Every text editor beyond the most basic is incredibly complex. Terminals are a complete mess, so every terminal-based text editor certainly can't be called "simple", and that's not even beginning to consider extensibility! Emacs and Vim have entire interpreters embedded into their codebases, for instance.

Maybe text editors with an extensible feature set really are more complex than we've been led to believe?

<comment><USER38> What's the memory footprint of Terminal.app and vim + plug-ins?

<comment><USER39> Not sure, but I have had vim lock up my MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and force me to do a hard reboot

<comment><USER40> That sounds like an OS/hardware problem, honestly. There's no reason vim with _any_ setup should lock up a machine.

<comment><USER39> The linter was the issue.

I actually have better performance with Sublime Text and JavaScript than I do with vim and JavaScript. I wish that weren't the case.

If you know if any better ways to get vim working with Syntastic for linting (eslint), I would love to know.

<comment><USER37> Agreed, if anything will slog a text editor it is usually the linter

Also, you can choke vim with large (>5gb) test files. Or is that fixed now?

<comment><USER39> The irony is that sublime text doesn't slog down

<comment><USER41> Sublime Text and TextMate will both choke big time if you feed them a large enough file without any line breaks. I have some largish machine-generated (5-10 MB) JavaScript data files that will reliably bring either editor to its knees if I accidentally click on one of them. The XCode editor also chokes.

I seem to recall (though haven't tried it for a while) that the Visual Studio Code editor handles them okay.

It's not a big issue -- since these are machine-generated, it's not normally necessary to edit them by hand. Every once in a while, though, I'll accidentally click on one of them in the file tree. Then I'll curse and kill the editor process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> raphlinus said that many of the design decisions are similar to xi.[1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7qszkz/xray_an_experi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7qszkz/xray_an_experimental_nextgeneration_electronbased/dsrpg63/)

<comment><USER43> They're talking:

[https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/4#issuecomment-359483293](https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/4#issuecomment-359483293)

<comment><USER44> Indeed. I'm open to the idea of even joining forces, but if the goal is to explore technology choices, it does make sense for them to do their own thing. In the meantime, xi is making progress, and I think will be a pretty viable choice for people who prefer native to Electron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Another next generation Electron-based editor? What generation are we at now?

<comment><USER46> Infinity + 10

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I didn't see it mentioned in the docs, but I assume the idea is to compile the rust core to webassembly to make this web-compatible?

</comment><comment><USER48> I always felt like the Atom team should scrap their work and start afresh. I love Atom, and have used it as my primary editor since its inception, but it's been the worse performing text editor I've ever encountered.

I almost switched to Vim a few months ago, but the impact to my performance was too high for me to keep it up for long enough.

I'm definitely going to be using Xray the moment it becomes stablish.

<comment><USER49> ...why not sublime?

I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. With all due respect to the people working on them (because it really isn't their fault for the most part), they're bloated slow pieces of shit. I don't like electron in general, but its an especially bad choice for a text editor intended for developers.

If you don't like vim or emacs, sublime does what the electron editors do but better. Its probably the most performant of all the text editors I've used; vim and emacs both don't like gigantic logfiles, but sublime handles them without issue. The only bad things I can say about it are lacking vim emulation and worse dev experience than Emacs. But then again, I've never used an editor anywhere near as nice as Emacs in terms of language integration for a lot of the languages I work with.

<comment><USER50> > I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all.

I would like to understand this better too. I'm guessing vim and emacs take too much time to learn, since they drag the whole unix ecosystem with them. Sublime might be a decent easier to learn editor, but it's a non-free product that could disappear one day, you have to go through the hassle of buying it and it's expensive one too. So sublime is not even a choice for most people. This leaves us with electron based editors as an acceptable choice. But obviously bloat, performance still matter and people will choose something better if available.

<comment><USER51> > it's expensive one too

It's $80. If you work in text all day, then that's practically nothing.

It's kind of disheartening to see how little value people place on excellent software.

<comment><USER19> That's easy for you to say, as a (presumably) rich American developer. It's a different story in, say, India or Africa, or students or poor folks. $80 can be several days or weeks of sustenance.

<comment><USER50> True. Most of the world cannot afford to pay $80 for a text editor.

<comment><USER51> We're lucky that there are lots of excellent text editors available for free. People that can't afford $80 for a text editor aren't really disadvantaged.

Tools generally cost money. Most people can't afford welding equipment but if you want to be a welder, you need it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/20/pjs_every_day/

<comment><USER2> This article seems to conflate "works less than eight hours a day" with "doesn't get the job done." I would expect somebody who doesn't have the distractions of an office or the pressure to appear busy for eight hours regardless of actual workload might get things done faster.

Also, a lot of telecommuters are either intermittent workers (e.g. freelancers) or part-timers, so it's unsurprising that a significant number don't average many hours a day.

<comment><USER3> From my experience, a day of working from home is about as productive as working a week at the office.

<comment><USER4> It's not as black and white as that for me, but that definitely does happen.

I find working from home 2 out of 5 days to be great for my productivity, while still being very available to colleagues.

<comment><USER5> Weekend hours without anyone else in the office is generally 2-3x (as measured in a BPM database) as productive for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm quite sure a large number of people working in an office are truly productive only an hour per day as well. The only difference is what gets in the way of real work.

<comment><USER7> I'd say 1-2hours of productive work a day is quite common (it fits with my current experience). The difference is when you're working at home you don't have to pretend to be working. So when you've got no work to do you don't have to pretend to read a document. You can go for walk, do the dishes, play with your kids, work on side-project/ learn a new language. Same productivity, happier worker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual _work_."

<comment><USER9> And that movie was pre-facebook, he was not wasting time on the internet.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the internet sure sucked before Facebook came along and added... nothing.

<comment><USER9> I've been using the internet at work since 1997. But it was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. "Surfing the web" was generally something people did at home, on a 56k modem. A software engineer fixing the Y2K bug in bank software probably didn't have much access, and probably didn't care a whole lot anyway. Certainly, the movie made no mention of the internet.

And obviously facebook was merely an example. 1999 was pre-reddit, pre- wikipedia, pre-digg, pre-hacker news, and pre-twitter. Yahoo had just bought viaweb. Most of the people using the web today weren't using it in 1999, and most of the pages, services, and content that exist today did not exist in 1999.

The point is that no matter how distracting the internet might be, procrastination has always been an issue for developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't journalism, it's useless garbage. The article assumes a clear bias in the way it interprets the data and doesn't bother to ask any obvious questions in hopes of explaining the numbers.

</comment><comment><USER12> And somehow we manage to outperform our office counterparts. PG talks about how some people can produce 10-100x more than others and that those who produce 100x should start their own companies. The idea is that you will be rewarded for your huge productivity with huge rewards. The flip side of this is that you could work a normal job from home and work 1-20% of normal job hours and make a decent wage with tons of free time.

<comment><USER13> Or, if you're willing to omit a lot of personal details to your employer, one could also work 2 or 3 jobs in parallel this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"Stay-at-home workers also said getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous"_

As someone who has spent a few years working from home (but doesn't now), that's a horrible assumption.

Sure, there were days when I'd be working in my boxers, but there were also days when I would be wearing trousers and a shirt ready to go out for a meeting. And when I wasn't properly dressed, it wasn't that it was "strenuous", or even that I was lazy, it was a case of not needing to.

If I wasn't going to see anyone for a few hours after waking up, and I didn't happen to feel like wearing much, why would I bother? Other times I did feel like it and I was fully dressed even if I wasn't going to see anyone. That has no relation to what work I did.

<comment><USER15> I definitely think it's a matter of someone's personal ritual.

I've been working from home for the past four years, and I have definitely slipped into a habit of being lazy with my clothes/appearance.

I sit around the apartment in a pair of track pants 90% of the time (which makes me look like either a washed-up, out of shape footballer, or possibly a mobster), only putting on real clothes if I have to do something later that night (and even then I don't get dressed like a real grownup until just before I have to leave).

I also haven't gotten a haircut in about 8 months. I don't particularly like long hair, I just haven't gotten around to it (in spite of the fact that the ridiculous mane I have grown makes me look like one of the Thundercats).

In fact an observer might look as the way I live and conclude that I've been in a horrible bout of depression for the past four years (doesn't put on clothes, doesn't shave or deal with their hair, is a shut-in), but I can attest that I'm quite pleased by this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm inclined to call this survey bullshit. There's no information available about it, except a blurb at the very bottom of the infographic claiming that it's from their survey of hiring manager. At best, it only tells you how lazy hiring managers who use careerbuilder.com are when they work from home.

</comment><comment><USER17> How much telecommuters work, depends on each case. In my case, I have been working from home for the last 7 years. I am highly motivated because I want to maximize achievements in the rest of my life.

Mostly, I work in small teams with other remote friends, on fixed price contracts and on my own projects. Fixed price contracts means that the faster I can finish work, the more profitable it is, and the more time I get for my own projects. For my that is a brutal incentive to get things done.

This is my current pattern. works for me, but may not work for others:

\- I don't watch TV, except occasionally while lunch. In general I don't like TV.

\- 4 years since my last vacation. I hardly can forget about work.

\- I don't follow any daily routines. Typically work around 5 - 12 daily hours, usually until late in the night. I find this way the more productive for me. Overall, that translates to around 40 hours of fair intensity work per week. I wish I could do more, but I have found that to be the sustainable amount. Surpassing that, leads to burnout, and less productivity overall.

\- I take a few short breaks during work. A walk in the garden, cook something simple, browse hacker news, etc. I have found that necessary to stay productive. That seems to take over the occasional talks in a on-site work. For example, I once did a project in odesk, with their invasive surveillance system, and without taking breaks. Got a five star rating in the end. But the experience was so dismal, that I almost decided to retire from programming. I was often dreading every minute of work.

\- I maximize use of time. When I can't stand more work, I do 1-2 hours of intense jogging. Or get out, take a walk at a pleasant place, take lunch at some place, etc. In this way, I am always highly motivated in what I am doing.

\- I have found that I am very self sufficient. I used to need some hangout- with-friends time, but I don't need that anymore. Now I mostly feel that as a waste of time.

\- I work on weekends, and usually take the Mondays off. When I visit places, I prefer to avoid the usual tumult of the weekends.

</comment><comment><USER18> Note - this isn't "20% of full-time telecommuters are skiving off". Some might be, others might telecommute 1 day a week and use that to do their chores (which might be sanctioned by their manager). Some are freelancers who are effectively unemployed. Others are self-employed, and procrastinating. Some might be students, who have a part-time job they do from home. Some might be full-time mothers, who do the odd job on Mechanical Turk.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a comparison, I'd like to know the breakdown of hours of _actual work_ for those who go in to the office every day.

</comment><comment><USER20> With telecommuting, amount of time worked != amount of work completed.

Chances are, that hour they're actually working at home is getting the equivalent of 8 hours of traditional work-in-an-office work done.

<comment><USER21> Are there really work environments so distracting that 8 hours in the office equals 1 hour at home? That seems crazy. If so, there's is something seriously messed up at that office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telecommuting and did a 100% telecommuting gig for 3 years straight, but there's no way to get a days work done in 1 hour.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I work in an open plan office so because they can see me they think it's OK to interrupt me whenever they feel like it. I'm in a room with the support guys and testers so all their phone calls I get to hear. Especially distracting if they're talking to a user about something I've worked on. Sometimes I manage to space out and not hear it but then you look up and people are staring at you "what do you think Bob?"

Headphones only go so far.

<comment><USER23> I worked for about 6 months in an office with an open floor plan, and the noise did get to me sometimes, but at those times I would undock my laptop and find an empty desk in some other division where people didn't have conference calls going on speakerphone. (BTW, hearing a conference call coming out of two speakerphones - or hearing a person speaking to your left and then their voice coming out of a speakerphone on your right half a second later - is perhaps the most distracting thing ever.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really think they should define 'work'. Creative work is much different than, say, assembly of radios. A lot happens when you're away from the computer.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mentally, at least for me, it's too easy to fall into the trap of classifying "work" as something that directly produces results....writing code, changing a design etc.

When looked at it from that perspective, it's easy to feel that you/someone are not doing a lot of "work", but often a lot of my time is spent on "work about work".... answering emails, managing clients, or even just brainstorming on a whiteboard / notebook. All of these are just as important to the end result of a project but are easy to overlook in a day/week/month that is ruled by deadlines, expectations, metrics, etc.

If I've got a telecommuter on my staff that gets shit done, but only works an hour a day, more power to him.

</comment><comment><USER26> In the office, I'd be lucky to have a net work day of +1 hour.

Sometimes, friction and bad decisions can make you work -8 hours a day. Or worse.

Also, for some people, definition of "work" in a big company is "presence". So, that's obviously not fitting for a telecomuter.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, a lot of you guys are getting really defensive here.

I can get some good work done at home, but only if I've remembered to bring home all materials I need. And if I don't need to face-to-face with somebody. And if there are no meetings scheduled for that day.

</comment><comment><USER28> Good workers don't need to be managed but are self-directed by their own desire to do a job well done and commitment they share with the vision of the company.

There is tremendous value in coming in to the office to see your colleagues face to face but sometimes not all work requires it. Perhaps these workers finished their work early as I have often heard that telecommuters are far more productive. If they didn't loop back with their managers then I would question that relationship or the worker. I wouldn't attribute telecommuting as a killer to productivity though.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here is an interesting article that sees telecommuting as an increasing phenomena:

<http://mashable.com/2011/09/17/work-from-home-infographi/>

Telecommuting reduces overhead cost (rent, utility, etc) and gas usages but it's still important to maintain rapport with your team. Yay video teleconferencing!

</comment><comment><USER29> Shouldn't productivity be measured in number of things done where each "thing" is multiplied by a number that represents the difficulty of the task divided by the time taken to do it?

If hours are the chief measurement, then you can stretch things out to make it take more time. I'm sure this is happening in businesses the world over anyway.

</comment><comment><USER30> Back when I worked contract at Eli Lilly, I knew a guy who _looked_ busy all day long, but was doing nothing at all, as far as anybody else in the project could tell.

If he'd been telecommuting and working less than an hour a day, nobody would have noticed.

</comment><comment><USER31> Couldn't there be some bias from the people that were polled? For example, I love working from home, right? So of course I'm going to tell someone polling me that I do a lot work from home.

Not saying that this is anecdotal...just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER32> I bill less than 8 hours a day (normally) but I work that much. I just don't feel like I should bill for what I call "stupid time" or getting stuck on something that, were I faster and more knowledgable, would only take 1/3 the time.

<comment><USER33> In this case I hope you also charge the fast and knowledgeable rate. Otherwise you sell yourself short.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As long as you get paid by the hour you should work those hours, be it at the office or at home.

If you don't want to get paid by the hour, become a contractor and do fixed price jobs.

<comment><USER35> Or be paid a salary whilst working in an overtime-exempt position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wouldn't care if my employees did five minutes of work at home per day as long as they get things done in similar amounts compared to their peers.

</comment><comment><USER37> ...but at least they're not stuck in a car/bus/train for two hours like those who work less than and hour per day in the office.

</comment><comment><USER38> Working at home require twice the discipline needed when you work at the office. There are lots of distractions.

</comment><comment><USER39> I thought about getting 2 jobs telecommuting: twice the pay for half the work.

</comment><comment><USER40> I bet that if you measured actual, focused work time spent, this would be roughly accurate of the average office-bound employee.

Edit: BTW, flagged for having basically no objective content at all.</comment>


The Nielsen Family Is Dead and Television is Better Than Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/ <comment><USER2> "monolog"

WTF. Can't people spell anymore?</comment>


Amazon and Alibaba in talks to buy the Brazilian Postal Service - <AUTHOR> https://labsnews.com/en/news/business/amazon-vs-alibaba-the-global-giants-could-fight-for-the-brazilian-post-office-in-case-of-privatization/ <comment><USER2> If Alibaba buys it it's going be the glory of Aliexpress in SA, but since Amazon has recently invested a lot in storage facilites maybe a Amazon / Alibaba greater partnership can occur and that can be huge benefit for all.</comment>


Are investors moonstruck? Lunar phases and stock returns (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://escholarship.org/uc/item/70z5b0ng#page-1 <comment><USER2> It's worth noting the less-than-well-known saying that "correlation does not imply correlation" (which is a very nice turn of phrase too). [1] In the introduction they say the effect is significant at the 5% level, which for an exploratory data analysis doesn't mean much.

[1] [http://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/04/correlation-even-imply- co...](http://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/04/correlation-even-imply-correlation/)

<comment><USER3> Reddit discussion

[https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/5fd8q3/to_predic...](https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/5fd8q3/to_predict_the_stock_market_with_some_indicator_x/)

<comment><USER2> Since I said "correlation does not imply correlation", not "correlation does not imply causation", I'm not sure what you're replying to.

<comment><USER3> If you're not sure just ignore it. It's there for everybody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting study, but I think the experimental design was pretty weak. _The Moon Affects The Stock Market_ is a trendy headline, but the results are basically meaningless without a plausible method of action.

I'd like to see some data about why the moon affects the stocks. If it were me, I'd break the data in to smaller time series and try to control for the known effects of the moon. Does the full moon have the same effect on the stock market on overcast nights as it does on clear nights? Is the effect significant for countries and cities with lots of artificial lighting compared to those where the moon provides more artificial light?

Personally, I'd be interested in how stocks traded at particular exchanges did. I live in Chicago right now, and the light pollution is so bad I barely notice the moon. I'm always amazed by how much a full moon illuminates the world when I am elsewhere. Does the full moon keep people up at night? Maybe people stay out later when the moon is full because the world is more brightly lit. Then they show up to the markets tired/hungover, affecting market performance. Chicago has a HUGE financial sector. If controlling for the city is too difficult, you may be able to look at commodities, like grain, since Chicago has a huge commodity exchange.

<comment><USER5> IANAA (I am not an astrologer), but I have a hunch they'd say it has to with "energy", not light ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you haven't noticed, people are more wild just before a full moon. Always a good idea to plan parties the night before.

This is just my observation but I've found it to be very helpful in social situations. I could, from an empirical pov, understand this to be true in trading as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't a more likely answer that calendar months affect stock?</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there so much hatred and distrust of Microsoft? - <AUTHOR> The overwhelming reaction of commenters here at HN to the news that Microsoft might be acquiring GitHub is negative at best and "OMG, the sky is falling" at the most hyperbolic. Why is that? Microsoft  is a Platinum level member of the Linux Foundation, a huge advocate of open source in general, and is open-sourcing more projects and technologies of their own every month. Why, then, is there so much antipathy for this company? <comment><USER2> Well not all the critism might be directly aimed at MS but more at GitHub losing its impartial / neutral status.

However regarding MS specifically; I don't know your age but a lot of us were around when Microsoft was a different company then it is today. The Microsoft of the Halloween documents ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents) ), the Microsoft that killed Netscape with very anticompetitive practices, the Microsoft that had to pay Sun billions for its anticompetitive behaviour, the Microsoft that called opensource a cancer, etc. etc. You know what they say: Trust arrives walking and leaves riding...

</comment><comment><USER3> Microsoft's recent behaviour could represent a genuine change in corporate culture, and I sincerely hope that it does.

But, spending a little cash to have a LF sponsorship to point to, and talking up open source and switching development of some peripheral products to that model now that they've figured out how it can be good for them doesn't really mean much.

We've had 30 years of the old Microsoft, where free software was cancer, a joke, and Microsoft used all its corporate power to try to strangle Linux (especially) as a possible competitor.

You'll notice that today, Windows, Exchange, Office, Azure, etc, etc, -- all the products that they make money from are still totally, or almost totally, proprietary. There's clearly been a recognition that open source is not going away, and even has some value, but they haven't actually changed to being a genuine open source company.

GitHub was always a risk: one day it was going to be acquired (pre- or post- IPO). Clearly others (eg. Oracle) would be worse than Microsoft, but I think some level of concern (especially given the Skype debacle) is warranted.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Why is there so much hatred and distrust of Microsoft?

Because of more than two decades of trampling on open source and competitors. Remember when Microsoft called Linux a cancer? No? Then read up on their history.

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember when the person who called Linux a cancer retired and started playing NBA owner? And the new CEO declared Microsoft's love for Linux -- becoming a PLATINUM member of the Linux foundation -- and said he didn't want people using Window because they had to, but because they wanted to?

Maybe you should have another look... Microsoft isn't the same company it was 12 years ago.

<comment><USER5> So it's fair to say that they're _embracing_ Linux, then?

Don't get me wrong, I'll be thrilled if it turns out that their newfound commitment to open source is driven solely by an interest in creating better software. But there are few solid reasons to believe that that's the case: the PR around open source is, well, PR, and Microsoft's anticompetitive practices were around long before Ballmer took over.

<comment><AUTHOR> Over 3/4 of Azure VMs are Linux. You don't call that an embrace? The ironic truth right now is that Microsoft is a better supporter of Linux than Amazon, Google, or Facebook.

<comment><USER5> To clarify, I genuinely believe that Microsoft is embracing Linux. The issue is that, if history is any indication, its next two steps will be "extend" and "extinguish."

I'm probably over-extrapolating a bit, but my point is that there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of claims that Microsoft is being altruistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Embrace, extend, and extinguish

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

Microsoft was quite dominant for quite some time.

These days they're a little disappointing. I don't want the old Microsoft but they certainly need to be a little more aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER7> For one, if the SCO Unix lawsuits had had a different outcome, Microsoft might have killed Linux completely.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes)

<comment><AUTHOR> If.

There was always FreeBSD. And NetBSD. And OpenBSD.

<comment><USER8> so who needs to worry about an agressive lawsuit funded by them right? Im sure they are cool now /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still hanging on to Microsoft centralizing Skype, Apple trying to smother mp3s, and Googling killing (your favorite side project here).

Follow a company long enough and they'll break your heart.

Also, we old geeks really know how to hold a grudge, especially if it involves a protocol or standard.

<comment><USER10> I agree with that. And remember before Microsoft was the evil empire... IBM was the original evil empire (yep, holding on to a grudge is fun)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally I just don't like their software. One by one, I stopped using all of their products and services.

I wouldn't say I hate Microsoft, but I wouldn't be surprised if they changed github into something I wouldn't want to use anymore.

<comment><USER12> Same here. Annoying peculiarities in their software drove me towards Linux. But then, I've only seen the user side, they supposedly try very hard to cater to developers.

As someone preferring to self-host wherever possible, I don't have strong feelings about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Why is there so much hatred and distrust of Microsoft?_

Because a leopard never changes its spots, a zebra doesn't change its stripes, and the scorpion always stings the frog in the end.

Or to put it another way: because they earned it.</comment>


Google app inventor closing down. - <AUTHOR> http://www.appinventorbeta.com/forum/#!msg/app-inventor-announcements/KOElwBV3sVs/-9b0XUwam90J

<comment><USER2> Actually app inventor allows creating new apps for non programmers, my brother, for example, created a small game in few days, if it was easy to put app inventor programs on app store - it would be much better.</comment>