Vivaldi browser v1.8 released, with calendar-style browsing history - <AUTHOR> https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-makes-history/ <comment><USER2> One alternative view on history that I think could be very useful, is a graph showing not just where I was, but also how I got there and where I went. It happens fairly often that I remember reading something through, say, HN, but I have no clue where the actual post was. Right now the best solution is to search for related words in my history and hope there isn't too much noise, or to search the site I remember coming from. That's incredibly suboptimal.

In fact, this is probably the reason I like Tree Style Tab[1] so much. Instead of a simple list, it shows my tabs in the context I opened them from.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

<comment><USER3> Let's expand that further.

I would like to do a custom search of the content of sites that I have visited.

Oftentimes, I'll remember I read something in the past few days, then it's a mad scramble to open various links to try to figure out if it's the right one.

<comment><USER4> There is a chrome extension for that: [https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon](https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon)

<comment><USER3> This looks interesting. Thanks.

Other use cases that I have are:

* I want to be able search all content & comments of HN submissions that I have either upvoted or saved.

* Want to search all the content of items saved in Pocket

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a bit hesitant to use a closed source browser. Browsers these days have such a large attack surface... I wouldn't trust something that is not developed and updated in the open

<comment><USER6> As an "alternative browser" I prefer Brave. It seems to load tabs the fastest, even faster than Opera with its own native ad-blocking. I used to like Opera before, but I stopped using it when it was bought by that Chinese group, and after seeing what they did to Opera Max, and app I found essential for saving data roaming costs. But they pretty much killed its usefulness when they started pushing their ads through it all the time.

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

<comment><USER7> Brave is _awful_. It removes ads on websites and replaces them with their own ads, which is incredibly unethical. Please, please don't use it.

<comment><USER8> It's about as unethical as removing the packaging from groceries and serving them on your own plates.

<comment><USER9> False equivalent.

Using your analogical line of reasoning, the equivalent would be stealing the groceries from a supermarket and replacing them with your own. I don't think Brave's proposed (but apparently never implemented) ad-replacement was quite this bad, but analogies are never very accurate.

<comment><USER8> I like my analogy.

I buy the food (content) and get the branded packaging (ads)

I then serve the same food, replacing the branded packaging with my own plates.

My dinner guests will give me credit for the plates, instead of giving eyeballs to the original branded packaging.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I need to retract my above comment completely. You're absolutely right.

The fact it took a second explanation/clarification is a pretty good insight into how accepting we've become of advertising as a thing tbh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is innovative and might be enough to get me to switch browsers. I'm perplexed at why Firefox, Chrome and IE only ever seem to innovate the engine and have basically given up on doing anything novel with UI.

OK performance is nice to have but frankly I think that's just managers shoving resources at that because they know how to measure it and a 10.3% increase in speed or memory efficiency or something is easy to sell in a meeting.

UI innovation is much harder to quantify, requires more work to sell, and the payoff takes much longer to manifest, not least because every change will generate a certain number of complaints from people who think their pet issue should have been addressed first, like UI designers are interchangeable with performance specialists.

Chrome shot to first place because it kicked Firefox's ass on performance and IE's ass on reliable rendering (an opinion which you may or may not agree with). But while extensions are wonderful they can't and don't replace core UI innovation. And tbh I'm really _bored_ with Chrome at this point; from a user point of view nothing significantly new has happened for a really long time.

Look at the bookmark management, for instance. It's been the same since forever, and if I want to socialize that information or turn it into a feed or something I have to go looking for third-party solutions, which are thin on the ground because people are reluctant to develop too much for a platform over which they have little or no control.

<comment><USER11> Mozilla had a recent project (Tofino) to experiment with browser interfaces, and one of their conclusions was

"Boy howdy do normal users have hard time with non-conventional browser interfaces!" [https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino- pro...](https://medium.com/project-tofino/re-defining-the-tofino- project-6d3c98521cc8)

<comment><USER12> You really need to both do longer studies and include (and distinguish in analysis) new vs. experienced browser users to separate out short-term familiarity effects from long-term usability.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. If there's a benefit to the new interface people can adapt fair quickly. Videogames deal with this challenge as a matter of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > There is a reason for that – as a rule, browsers don't really want you to > use history. They want you to search and find things multiple times because > search royalties are part of their business model.

I think that that's a little paranoid. There's just little demand for a revamped history tab. I like this change a lot, but it's certainly a case of not knowing I wanted it until I saw it.

<comment><USER14> It might be paranoid from the aspect of history, but this is something that I definitely noticed with the URL bar when moving from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome will often offer the first result as a search query, instead of a website I visited before. Feels very clear that it's a big part of their business model. Firefox is much more aggressive in serving history URLs. If I type "videos" in Firefox, it will give me "reddit.com/r/videos" as the first result, since I've been there plenty of times, but Chrome insists on offering the first result as a generic Google query for "videos".

Related sidenote, Firefox was also way superior in remembering which letters I type to go to which site in a more broad way. Chrome does it on a very basic level, prioritizing the sites that have the same string on the top level domain. Example, if I type "news" Chrome is always going to offer me sites that begin with "news" such as "news.ycombinator.com", even if I more often end up going to "randomsite.com/news" or "randomsite.com" whose page title is "News!" when typing that. Firefox remembers my preference, which means that after a few days of Firefox use, I'll have a bunch of 2 letter combos that take me to the exact site I want ("ne" to Hacker News, "vi" to reddit videos, "ap" to an apartment listing website which has "ap somewhere deep in their URL, or just in the title of the website, etc.), while Chrome will only give me top level URLs, and feels as useless on week 10 as it did on week 1. For sites where I don't remember the URL, I'll usually end up googling the page title in Chrome, while Firefox would serve me exactly what I need from history.

Part of all of that is just shit UX on Chrome's part, but it's a safe bet that shit UX drives significant revenue for Google.

<comment><USER15> One thing that Chrome's address box has over Firefox is speed. Sometimes I (mindlessly) press f and enter expecting FF to autocomplete to facebook but I get taken to google search for f. (Which of course has facebook.com as the first result)

<comment><USER16> Setup a keyword bookmark in Firefox for F and this problem will be solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always wondered why browsers don't put the contents of pages I visit into something like clucene, so I can search pages in my history by their contents, not just their titles and metadata. I'm sure there are security and storage tradeoffs, but to me this seems like a much more complete solution than this revamped history UI.

<comment><USER18> Back around 2000, I wrote a web proxy server that did this. It was a proxy server mainly because browser extensions were not a thing back then. I never released it because I never solved some performance issues (it was using a very naive implementation in a lot of ways). I did get a lot of use out of it for about a year, though.

I'm sure there are security/privacy trade-offs. Storage is not such a big thing. I found that index size leveled off somewhat after a point. It probably would use enough storage to make it unreasonable for mobile browsers.

<comment><USER19> Man, if this was a thing I would definitely run it. All the plugin approaches fall down for me as I use FF and Chrome interchangeably for different tasks.

This would be a good additional feature for Pinboard perhaps (which I've been intending to subscribe to for ages but never get around to).

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, HTTP proxies are kind of a thing of the past. Back when I wrote it, it was easy to implement a proxy (HTTP 1.0 with some HTTP 1.1 features). Now there are two issues. The smaller one is that you have to handle a lot of complexity from HTTP 1.1. The bigger one is that increasing use of HTTPS (a good thing!) means that things like caching, ad-blocking, and history search absolutely have to be in the browser. The author of Polipo, one of the best caching proxies, has declared it obsolete for this reason.

It would be a good feature for the deluxe Pinboard subscription. As long as you're mirroring the content, you might as well index it with Lucene or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This seems very cool and all, but surely 99.99% of regular users have never really thought about seeing their browsing history in a calendar view, or wanted or cared for statistics about it. I am fairly sure a significant proportion of users aren't even totally sure how to access their history - apart from during brief moments of paranoia when they want to keep nefarious things from a partner - and, if they really were looking for something they know they'd seen before, surely they'd just think, "I found this before, I'll just google for it again." (Similarly bookmarks, frankly.)

I guess my point is that this probably appeals to a very small subset of users, but it seems like a massively over-engineered solution for the majority of people, and feels a little bit like the result of trying to answer the question "What can we do that's different?" with a "Wouldn't it be cool if...", rather than solving problems that people genuinely face. Am I being unfair?

<comment><USER21> Is making a browser for power users a bad thing? Does all software have to be lowest common denominator?

<comment><USER22> Also worth noting: users often don't know what they want until they see it. Tabs in browsers were a 'power feature' NetCaptor introduced (and Opera copied), then they got really popular.

<comment><USER23> Err, Opera was doing "tabs" for the word go. Only that Opera used MDI. This was present all the way to the end of Opera 12.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> At the risk of self promotion I made [http://fetching.io](http://fetching.io) to solve exactly this problem across all the browsers I use.

</comment><comment><USER25> This seems like one of the first features that will make me want to use Vivaldi. It's a project I've been rooting for a while, and this might be the turning point for me.

<comment><USER26> I personally like the built-in notes app with folders, it opens in a sidebar. It's a nice looking browser too. Been using it on Win & Linux for the last few months and it's grown on me a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice, but… This is not the history update I wanted from Vivaldi. The url autocompletion is annoying. I think it goes for the sub pages I clicked my way to, that shows up the most in history, instead of just the domain and the home page. I may click myself to my facebook profile 10 times during a fb session, but I don't want to land there.

Anyway, I'm using Vivaldi on Linux because the clean looks. No ugly borders or any of the other ugly Linux things. That and tab stacking.

<comment><USER28> Almost every Linux WM let's you disable borders on certain windows. That's what I do on firefox.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, but there is a lot of uglyness going on with linux programs over all, where different settings and themes doesn't really help. Vivaldi looks good on it's own and has decent settings for changing the looks, thats what I like. Maybe FF is the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> All these features are pretty cool, but why can I still not dock the dev tools? Developers are the most likely early adopters, like myself. But not being able to dock the dev tools is seriously a killer. I've been watching Vivaldi from beta, and have enjoyed watching it, but every version I open it up, remember I can't dock dev tools, then close it. If you want to get me using Vivaldi, it's really simple: let me dock the dev tools.

<comment><USER29> Brave has the same problem. I think it's a problem with Electron that makes doing that difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've found Vivaldi is becoming slower and slower with each update to the point that I'm starting to lose confidence in the browser itself.

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&so...](https://forum.vivaldi.net/search?term=slow&in=titlesposts&sortBy=relevance&sortDirection=desc&showAs=posts)

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi- brow...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3052560/browsers/vivaldi-browser- review-powerful-features-outshine-slightly-sluggish-performance.html)

[https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring- problem-...](https://thequo.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/one-glaring-problem-of- the-new-vivaldi-browser/)

etc...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lots of nice touches here to visualise your browsing data in Vivaldi, and adding History as a side panel in the browser.

It's part of the 1.8 release of the browser launched today.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good, I don't think the visualisations are that helpful, but the timeline/calendar part is. Lots of things to do in browsing history.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am sure that Chrome users have similar if not higher level of history analytics/statistics but most of it seems to be only available to Google itself and not the end user.

Yes there is the web history Google provides but it is very basic level of access.

</comment><comment><USER33> I switched to Vivaldi from Firefox a few weeks ago, and like it a lot. I am missing tree-style tabs _a lot_ but the horizontal tabs come close.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can vote for new features on the Vivaldi forum here:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14250/feature-requests- for-1...](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14250/feature-requests- for-1-8-1-9/3)

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I know, thanks :) Somebody actually released a treestyle extension yesterday which I found a few hours ago, and it is really quite decent already! [https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/15332/tree- tabs/14](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/15332/tree-tabs/14)

<comment><USER19> Wow....any chance you could post a screencap????

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm kept on Chrome just because of it's ability to have multiple browser profiles - e.g. work and personal - from what I've seen, neither Safari, Opera, Vivaldi or Brave support this - am I wrong?

My main beef with Chrome isn't privacy - it's battery usage. I keep looking for a browser that doesn't kill my battery (MBP) but allows for multiple profiles.

<comment><USER35> It's worth noting that Firefox offers multiple profiles support (since before Chrome existed). I can't speak to battery life on the MBP, though, as I'm a Windows user.

<comment><USER34> Yeah Firefox isn't much better sadly in terms of battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sadly the touch screen support is still more miss than hit.

the address bar brings up the Win10 OSK just fine. But any input areas in pages require that i bring up the keyboard manually.

And the whole browser seems to go unresponsive to touch input at irregular intervals.

Sad really, as they give me the ability to scale the UI as i see fit. Thus making the various elements that much easier to hit with a finger.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the idea of doing something to make history more useful. Firefox is doing experiments with this, too (activity stream), but this is a lot more comprehensive.

I've tried Vivaldi and really like it, but I'm pretty dedicated to Firefox. I'd probably play with Vivaldi more if they had a Mozilla sync adapter.

</comment><comment><USER36> It would be great if Vivaldi implements all the features available in Vimium (chrome extension) natively.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the only thing missing is the shortcuts to select URLs to follow on the current page (which is pretty cool, btw).

Otherwise you can do everything Vimium can by customising keyboards shortcuts and using the "Quick Commands" menu (similar function as the menu brought up when typing "O" in Vimium).

Keyboard Shortcuts settings: vivaldi://settings/keyboard/

Quick Commands menu: [https://help.vivaldi.com/article/quick-commands- menu/](https://help.vivaldi.com/article/quick-commands-menu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Any news on the mail client? They have been "working on it" for a long time now...

</comment><comment><USER38> I just want my browser to save every page that I load and make it full-text searchable.

</comment><comment><USER39> it looks beautiful. sometimes applications like this are hesitant to share their source code b/c of their business model or something.

are there any good "hackable" web browsers these days?

<comment><USER40> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If looked for a URL I visited two days ago and click it does the URL jump to today or is there now two entries for that same URL ? (I wish it's the second option)

</comment><comment><USER42> Not much difference in [http://arewefastyet.com](http://arewefastyet.com)

</comment><comment><USER43> I like Vivaldi well enough. The features I use most are tab stacking, page tiling, and full-page screenshots.

</comment><comment><USER44> The most notable feature is the partial links selection, line in old Opera.

Now we need sync and attachable dev tools window.

</comment><comment><USER45> I really like Vivaldi, I just would like if they allowed for custom start pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean custom URL for Startpage? Setting for that here:

vivaldi://settings/startup/

Or something different, e.g. customising the "Speed Dial" pages further?

<comment><USER45> You just saved my life, I see I can put an extension URL in the start page. This is perfect. Vivaldi is now my go-to browser ;)

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> BRILLIANT!

</comment><comment><USER47> What a crappy title. Why isn't it "Vivaldi browser releases calendar view mode for history"?

<comment><USER48> Thanks, a moderator updated it a little while ago from "Vivaldi browser v1.8 released, with more useful browsing history".

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Where's the GitHub link? I usually download my browsers using a repository.

</comment><comment><USER50> Now, this is an example of what an extension could provide in Firefox. And still can, today.

But in a few weeks, in Firefox stuff like this will be impossible – as the browser devs refuse to implement these features, and refuse to give extension devs the ability to override such browser-native features while still feeling native.

I built a similar extension for Firefox which I didn't publish (the reasons will be obvious at the end of this paragraph), where I log the entire browser history on my own server, transform all loaded pages via reader mode, also log them, then provide fulltext search in all of them, which sites were visited after another, how did I open tabs, etc, forever.

This means I can search history for years, with postgres fulltext search, and find anything I've visited or read about, pages I saw before or after, etc.

It's an amazing tool, but obviously once Firefox enforces WebExtensions, it's useless, because I can't integrate it with the omnibar or with the history tool anymore.

<comment><USER51> I've read similar complaints to this before, yet when I look at the documentation for WebExtensions it seems like there's plenty of scope to do what's wanted.

In this case, what is wrong with the history [1] and omnibox [2] APIs?

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/AP...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/API/history)

[2] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/AP...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/API/omnibox)

<comment><USER50> I don't want to _expand_ on the history the browser provides. I want to completely replace every bit. I want to be the history API.

That's the problem. I don't want to glue a new frontend on top of what exists, I want to completely replace every history API the browser provides, and replace it with my own.

I, as extension dev, can't remove the history API's implementation, and build my own implementation. I can't change what backend the browser's history UI uses, or replace that UI.

I can't hijack the history button in the menu, or replace it.

With Firefox, today, with lots of hackery, I can get pretty close. But I still can't fully get there.

With the new WebExtensions, I can only add UI – but not replace UI, or add backend functionality, or replace backend functionality.

<comment><USER52> You can definitely do that for Chrome extensions, not sure about Firefox.

[https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/override](https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/override)

This would be sufficient to create the type of feature described in the article.

Not sure why you'd want to replace the backend, this could break other extensions. Both WebExtensions and Chrome extensions allow changing/deleting browser history items, which should enable most things extensions would want to do.

<comment><USER50> > Not sure why you'd want to replace the backend, this could break other > extensions. Both WebExtensions and Chrome extensions allow changing/deleting > browser history items, which should enable most things extensions would want > to do.

As I said above, the whole point is to do my own history tracking system, which stores history via a sync system of my own, in a server of my own.

And loads it from there, too.

The user has a webinterface, mobile interface, app integration with browsers, etc.

You can easily do fulltext search of all sites you've ever visited, etc.

"Breaking" other extensions is intentional – I want to replace the backend in which they search.

I want to provide far more than what any of these browsers provide, although Vivaldi is still the closest yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where to finish a degree? - <AUTHOR>

I'm like a few folks in the technical community in that I never finished college. Honestly it didn't matter too much until recently when I took the plunge into management, but now I need one to advance further. I'm about 2/3 done with a degree. What's the best place to finish a degree up online? I just want to finish up with a general BS degree. Many of the programs I've been looking feel a little sketchy.<p>What's the best value in terms of price, reputation and online learning? <comment><USER2> I am finishing my BSc at the UK-based Open University. It is 100% online, legitimate, reasonably rigorous and quite well respected, at least in the UK. You can transfer up to 2/3 of the degree from previous studies. Many courses are not available outside of Europe though.

Two alternatives are Canadian Athabasca University and University of London International Programmes.

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean general BS? In computing right? You can find most of the UK universities have courses that they call "top up" and you can be accepted and given credit for previous studies but also for prior working experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> General BS refers to a bachelor of science. I don't really care what the degree is in at this point. I'd like to transfer my current credits to another institution and finish up.

<comment><USER4> You said you were just trying to finish up online.

Arizona state seems to have a good selection of programs. [http://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree- programs/graduate](http://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/graduate)

NOTE: If you decide to go in for a tech degree ABET accreditation is the standard for tech accreditation, and will allow you to transfer courses between other ABET schools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the US, I'd suggest looking at Western Governor's [wgu.edu] because the value proposition is reasonable due to its not-for-profit nature and quasi- public status.</comment>


How to implement pair programming with a distributed team - <AUTHOR> http://blog.12spokes.com/web-design-development/how-to-implement-pair-programming-with-a-distributed-team/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't sound like pair programming to me - it just sounds like a mandatory code review by just one (sometimes two) people.

But what the hell, it's got an acronym - someone pump out some certification documents and let's make some cash selling this methodology to project managers who are eager to paradigm outside the box.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something thats been on my list of potential project ideas for a long time is a suite of tools built for distributed teams. From this article, I am now convinced that this problem needs solving.

</comment><comment><USER4> check out <https://pair.io/></comment>


The day MIT won the Harvard-Yale game - <AUTHOR> http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/25276347/best-college-football-prank-harvard-yale-mit-balloon <comment><USER2> > But not before a call came from the dean at MIT. The fraternity was already > on probation, so getting caught could have been problematic.

> "I believe it was Bruce Sohn, who was the president [of the fraternity] at > the time, who had the fateful call from the dean, who said, 'Did you guys do > this?'" said Webster, who is in the process of attempting to turn the story > into a feature-length movie. "And he had to think for a second. 'If I say > yes, this could be the thing that has the straw on the camel's back and > kicks us off campus forever. And if I say no, there might even be more > trouble if they found out we did.' So he goes, 'Yes sir, we did.'

> "And then there's a pause on the phone, and then the dean goes, 'OK, you're > off probation.'"

That's hilarious. Props to the dean for having a sense of humor.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love that story, and the one where during the summer MIT students would wear a black and white striped shirt, blow a whistle and then throw bird seed out on the field. Eventually training the local pigeon population to respond to this, the early scrimmages were apparently mobbed by pigeons.

<comment><USER4> Please let there be a video of this too. Thats hilarious.

<comment><USER5> According to snopes, it's a legend that hasn't been confirmed.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/field-of- seeds/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/field-of-seeds/)

<comment><USER6> I want to believe!

...The internet being what it is, we ought to be able to find some eyewitnesses.

<comment><USER7> The pigeons can be trained again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > MIT president Paul Gray said: "There is absolutely no truth to the rumor > that I had anything to do with the planning or promoting of [the hack], but > I wish there were."

That's probably my favorite bit. Then, the sad reality of the present day sinks in:

> If anyone were to attempt the harmless type of stunt they pulled off -- let > alone the one in 1948 -- it would likely be met with a prison sentence.

<comment><USER9> MIT president Paul Gray asked Harvard President Derek Bok for the return of the apparatus, which was also a bit hilarious:

______________________

Dear Derek,

Word has come to me that your campus police are holding some property which rightfully should be located in the MIT Museum. Can this be true?

Surely you have little use for a makeshift device constructed from vacuum cleaner parts, points from 1967 Mustang, and a handful of marbles. We, however, being the sentimental sort, would take great care of indeed, we would enshrine--this symbolic highlight of the 1982 football season. Please give it back.

Sincerely yours,

Paul E. Gray

[https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/12/9/boks-mail- ballo...](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/12/9/boks-mail-balloons-and- breakers-pbthe/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you tried this, or any other famous MIT hack, at today's MIT, you would be in Big Person Trouble in a heartbeat. It's quite depressing.

<comment><USER11> I'd have disagree. Have you seen Hackapult? [http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2015/hackapult/](http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2015/hackapult/)

There are fewer hacks nowadays, and they're usually less ambitious, but I would argue it's for reasons other than hostility from the Institute.

<comment><USER12> It is because of institute hostility that there are fewer hacks.

That hack in particular took multiple months of preparation and was took down by the institute in less than 1 hour; before anyone could really see it. Also the amount of security and possible consequences has increased drastically in the last 2 years; continuing the trend of the last 6 years.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that sort of hack would have been taken down any less quickly in the past. The only time dome hacks have lasted a while have been when they're extremely tricky to take down.

I have some further opinions about what you allude to at the end of your comment, but that should probably be taken offline.

<comment><USER13> R2D2 hack was left up for more than a day...

[http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1999/r2d2/](http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1999/r2d2/)

Several Lobby 7 hacks were also left up for a while (though admittedly less obvious and dangerous perhaps than Great Dome hacks).

<comment><USER10> r2d2 also happened 19 years ago.

I know people who were at MIT then. It was, by all accounts, a vastly different place.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but so was the rest of the country.

They did the annual sodium drop pretty soon after 9/11 and were somehow surprised when the response was different.

For smart people, they could be really, really dumb.

<comment><USER15> The terrorists won that day, not because of the physical destruction, but because of the literal description of their profession. Terror was instilled, and the public psyche still hasn't been treated properly, it's like the nation as a whole has PTSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My father was at MIT in 1948, and he'd regale me with stories about MIT pranks, especially the explosive wire one.

MIT at the time was full of older men who were WW2 veterans on the GI Bill. They were skilled at handling explosives.

<comment><USER9> > _They were skilled at handling explosives._

The reputation for explosive hacks at MIT go back to the 1800's. It used to be that students had to participate in marching practice. Some wag got the idea to put a layer on the floor of nitrogen triiodide, a mild contact explosive.

So when it came time to bang your feet against the floor during the march...

<comment><USER16> The reason Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is not on campus is the locals had become concerned when one of their rocket engines exploded :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Caltech's most famous prank is the Rose Bowl prank. The instructions for which cards the audience would hold up were altered so they would spell out CALTECH rather than the team name. It's the only time Caltech ever was at the Rose Bowl :-)

<comment><USER9> Taking over the Rose Bowl scoreboard in 1984 also ranks up there.

[https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.trbimg...](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.trbimg.com%2Fimg-52bf764c%2Fturbine%2Fla- sp-rose-bowl-in-black-and- white-20131228-pi-002&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wildwestsports.com%2FDiscussion%2FBoard%2FFootball%2FPost%2FView%2F1325287%2Fcaltech- king-of-pranks&docid=xyAiFWiaL0Sj6M&tbnid=6nGkLq9-BdXl9M%3A&vet=10ahUKEwjMg- KZzOTeAhXXFzQIHUSmCTsQMwg8KAMwAw..i&w=2048&h=1112&bih=929&biw=1904&q=caltech%20mit%20rose%20bowl%20prank&ved=0ahUKEwjMg- KZzOTeAhXXFzQIHUSmCTsQMwg8KAMwAw&iact=mrc&uact=8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "There have been some big changes between then and now," Douglas said. "Not > just that 9/11 has happened, but if something like this happened today, they > would probably evacuate the stadium.

> "I would say anyone who was there absolutely remembers the event in the > stadium. It didn't evoke the kind of panic that we are sometimes accustomed > to seeing in news accounts or whatever, and so it makes me, in many ways, it > makes me yearn for those days again."

Me too, me too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Never been to MIT or any such place, but I know the story from the Jargon File: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of- hack.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html) (It mentions the Caltech hack, too.)

Interesting to read some more details in this article.

</comment><comment><USER19> "All MIT men carry batteries for emergencies."

Sounds about right.

"One night, they ran into another group of pranksters from Brown University"

Harvard, destined to be the butt of everyone's jokes.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like the fact that I can Google "30 feet in smoots"

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410360/smoots- legacy/](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410360/smoots-legacy/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Imperial College London, 1940s, the engineering students winched a car onto the roof. Apparently they hid sheer-legs down trousers (oxford bags were in again) and constructed a viable winch from short lengths, hidden ropes &c.

I know the modern MIT prankery is pretty big, but I just wanted to say it does happen at other universities.

<comment><USER22> +1. Students at my father's engineering class at another uni allegedly dismantled a lecturer's car and reassembled it inside their lecture hall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >The way the device was designed, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone but them to activate it because it required a double male extension cord.

I can think of one group of people who would have been able to activate it. I am guessing that they had surprisingly low electricity bills as well.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember that! Made me want to go to a fancy tech school. Didn't get in to MIT or Caltech, tho.

</comment><comment><USER25> Stories like this are what made a teenage me want to attend MIT (though alas it was not to be). And countless more will feel similarly on the coming years. I hope it lives on.

</comment><comment><USER26> Am I correct in reading that this was on the same day as "The Play"?

They reference it in the article, but I thought that was Stanford.</comment>


Vue Passes React's Star Count on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1007439168400654336 <comment><USER2> State management is more sane and easy to understand in vue. I'm build an extremely complex application with vue and pulling it off. The extra layers of complexity with react like having to use container components was too much cognitive load for me as a single developer building a very complex app that it was crash and burn for me. Vue's simple and clear approach wins for me over perhaps the power of a purely functional environment like react. I don't doubt that react is a powerful tool but the combined cognitive load of learning react and redux compared to vue and vuex was what caused me to go for vue, its clarity reduces cognitive load and enables you to focus much more on the problem domain than the learning curve.

<comment><USER2> Also the rate of breaking changes with react is pretty intense. While you can author react without a build tool, and I certainly am using webpack with vue myself, your same vue know how also works for spots where you may not have a build tool available, like freelancing updates to wordpress for people for side money. In those cases you're stuck sticking js into a CMS editor. But vue has you covered in all scenarios from the complex app with webpack and vuex to simple reactive code entered into a cms editor without the benefit of a build tool.

<comment><USER3> What breaking changes? React's API has been very stable. As of version 16 the entire core has been rewritten without breaking the API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of the technicalities of the two frameworks, it's good to have a community-backed alternative to stop a Facebook-owned product from completely dominating Web development.

</comment><comment><USER5> The star count that should matter for me would be as follows:

1\. The happiness and productivity level I have when perusing one over the other.

2\. The actual application being shipped and the level of happiness and satisfaction that I get from the customers.

3\. The number of features I can quickly ship on top of the application.

4\. The ease of maintainability / support for the application. Easier to maintain = more stars in my world.

The feature set that both frameworks offer are pretty much on par, although I would say (IMHO) that Vue is far easier to understand and seems to be less complex, over all the other frameworks I have used (React, Angular, Ember, Knockout).

<comment><USER6> Productivity level and customer satisfaction are great metrics. There are successful businesses created in measuring customer satisfaction ( foresee, medallia etc ), but has anyone tried to or cracked measuring software productivity? Seems like an interesting and valuable space.

Edit: found one. This looks awesome [https://www.gitprime.com](https://www.gitprime.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good, hopefully that will encourage more newcomers to try Vue instead of React, I find Vue to be more elegant and easy to learn (and understand) than React.

Hopefully as the Vue community grows that will drive more resources to the development of cool projects like Weex either directly by having members of the community getting involved on the development of those projects, or indirectly by motivating companies to develop tools to cater a sizable market.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was also discussed with the topic "Has Vue passed React yet?" yesterday. Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316267)

</comment><comment><USER9> What conclusions can be drawn from this? If any?

<comment><USER10> JS ecosystem's trends are as stable and predictable as English weather.

<comment><USER11> FUD; what major upheaval has been in the field since idk, Vue was released?

<comment><USER10> Major upheaval? I think big dotcoms efforts to forcefully push their vapourwares onto the dev community in attempt to gain developers' "mindshare" reaching a point when that becomes genuinely obnoxious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

</comment><comment><USER13> It's actually currently behind by 1 star [https://i.imgur.com/IHBBZX7.png](https://i.imgur.com/IHBBZX7.png)

The empire strikes back

</comment><comment><USER14> Having used GitHub at several employers in the past, I have to say I never once noticed a project's "star count" before. Is this just me?

</comment><comment><USER15> React and Vue are both great frameworks. React is a bit more adopted and there is a ton of better documentation and Q&A.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does this gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity?

<comment><USER17> On a meta level, I find it interesting that a maintainer of a React has been checking on a vanity metric of a competing framework, and felt the need to put out a congratulatory statement the moment it surpassed React.

"Accidentally", hm.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, it's probably more likely that they saw this thread[1] yesterday at some point after React 'won' than that they were dutifully monitoring competing product's star counts.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17316267)</comment></comment></comment>


MARKUS Swivel chair - <AUTHOR> http://m.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/art/00103102/ <comment><USER2> They're fine, I'm sitting in one right now that's been doing well for 5 years; but why are you posting this to HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> 'cause as a programmer I spend the better part of my day seated and just discovered this chair and thought others might appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Steve Ballmer steps down as board member at Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/aug14/08-19steveb.aspx <comment><USER3> Thank you for all your cloud first, mobile first. I think that cloud first, mobile first, but that cloud first, mobile first. If only cloud first, mobile first,then cloud first, mobile first. But I digress, because what is really important here is our cloud first, mobile first strategy, which will require much cloud first, mobile first along with cloud first, mobile first.

I reckon Ballmer's PR drone won this one though. More words.

<comment><USER4> Can't understand the snarkiness and silly jokes. I mean, I get it, this is Steve Ballmer, the guy everyone loves to hate. But we can be better than that.

Of course the letter was carefully worded to sound like a press release; it _is_ a press release.

But the entire memo strikes me as a thoughtful summary of what Microsoft will face over the next 10 years. The company is transitioning from the cash cow of software business to a much, much more complex environment. One driven by platforms and ecosystems, built on top of open source stacks, where hardware is key to the experience, frequently monetized by ad revenue.

The shareholders - who typically don't read HN - don't fully understand the shift, and won't like the thinner margins. They want results, now. But some of the bets - mobile, cloud, hardware - will take years to pay off, just like the battle for home entertainment took 10+ years, and the judge is still out.

 _" Making that change while also managing the existing _[cash cow] _software business... "_

This. The next 10 years won't be easy for Microsoft, and that's why Ballmer mentioned - four times - that Nadella should be bold and not fear the shareholders.

Also I don't understand why people are nitpicking with _mobile first, cloud first_ wording. They're not mutually exclusive. It's about empowering companies developing mobile experiences for their workforce, using cloud-based systems. And figuring out how to make money.

<comment><USER5> The only comment at this level which is constructive and thoughtful gets the downvote?

My thoughts were there is nothing wrong with saying mobile-first and cloud- first. They are complementary to each other. i.e. You build your mobile apps using a cloud backend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The level of snark and juvenile responses in this thread is amazing. Technically, all Ballmer had to write was "I resign my board position effective immediately" and Nadella could have responded with "Acknowledged". But the letters aren't meant for us. They are meant for investors who may cast doubt onto Microsoft's future with such a key member of the board stepping down. They also serve to reinforce the company's new direction of mobile and cloud. Perhaps the letters are worded awkwardly, but let's not devolve HN into a Reddit joke thread.

<comment><USER7> "They are meant for investors who may cast doubt onto Microsoft's future with such a key member of the board stepping down."

Yeah, because Ballmer contributed so much to Microsoft. Just look at the stock price [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MSFT&t=my&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=)

Ballmer was the CEO from January 2000 to February 2014

<comment><USER8> And that matters how? Any big decision like a board member stepping down or a CEO resigning will cause investors to be in a panic. Having a carefully drafted press release is the best way to go about the situation.

<comment><USER9> His point is that investors won't be panicking after 14 years of stock performance like this. Almost any change will be an improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady >> I bleed Microsoft — have for 34 years and I always will.

No matter what you think about Ballmer you have to admit his passion for Microsoft is unrivalled.

<comment><USER10> His spelling needs a bit of work, though. There's only one 'e' in 'bled.'

<comment><USER11> "Bleed" is fine. He's referring to both the past and present. You can replace "bleed" with "ooze", if that helps.

<comment><USER12> Or "squirt". (Do MS still do that, or did it stop with the demise of Zune?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR

Steve Ballmer

        Bye. I'm outta here.
        People to teach. Basketball to watch. You know.
        I'll write postcards and stuff.
        Love you. SB

        P.S - I've got all the shares.

Satya Nadella

        Whatever. I've also got loads of shares too.
        Keep your postcards.
        L8r amigo.

<comment><USER14> *Basketball to watch

<comment><USER13> Thanks. Corrected. The perils of being in the UK.

<comment><USER15> It was "cricket" originally, wasn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> two pr teams talking to each other.

I would have written:

Steve to Satya: I love Microsoft, and I feel like I can trust you to take on the world for me. Microsoft must live. Here, take some seasons tickets for the Clippers.

Satya to Steve: Hey dude, I need to make Microsoft faster, leaner, and stronger. I'm glad I passed the 1st date test with you and the rest of the board. I'll take those seasons tickets now.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, quite possibly the same PR team drafted both letters.

<comment><USER18> > _quite possibly the same PR team drafted both letters._

How cynical are you people that you don't think long-time corporate executives can sit down and write a professional, "safe" sounding, 500 word resignation letter?

<comment><USER19> Why do you think that we think that's what happened because the two executives "can't"?

I think it happened because both had lawyers looking it over due to the fact both are operating in the heavily regulated space of high-level officers in one of the world's largest publicly traded companies, and it would be suicidally stupid to _not_ have lawyers looking over your every official utterance... and while the words are in the lawyers hands, the PR department might as well have a go too, since it's not a hard guess to think this could go mobile-first, cloud-first... er... public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nobody actually communicates like that, in terms of company slogans like cloud-first mobile-first and describing each other as having boldness and innovation. Not even CEOs.

This is a crafted communication targeting information to Microsoft employees and investors. It is not a 'leaked memo'.

I've heard it said that Ballmer's retirement had much more to do with strategic board shuffling to prevent predatory dividend dumping from the vulture capitol firm ValueAct Capitol.

<comment><USER18> > _This is a crafted communication targeting information to Microsoft > employees and investors. It is not a 'leaked memo'_.

Leaked memo? Who made that claim? It's posted on Microsoft's own website.

Carefully crafted? Uh, yeah, it's a resignation letter from a major corporate executive that is publicly posted. Should it have some LOLs and emojis?

<comment><USER20> It has not been claimed that it was a leaked memo. I must apologize for the imprecision of the word 'leaked'. 'Published' is a better word than 'leaked' and should have used it instead.

To reiterate the point without the confusion regarding 'leaked': The media is the message. The form of the news/announcement of the resignation came in shape of a memoized email exchange, as if these actual words between Ballmer and Satya were exchanged in this actual format.

I submit that they were not.

I submit that the substantial majority of the content was not written by or for Satya nor by or for Ballmer, but that this announcement is for employees and investors to read. I submit that it is also a method for Microsoft to contextualize a complicated decision for the tech media and for the digestion of the broader interested public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's very difficult for the new CEO and old CEO to be on the board together for 100+ reasons. As stated this comes at the 6 month mark. I'm sure this was all part of a carefully crafted calendar going back to the transition.

<comment><USER16> Bill and Steve were together on the board for a long time, but I think the pair is the exception rather than the norm.

<comment><USER22> Eric Schmidt is still on Google's board.

Pierre Omidyar is still on EBay's board.

Reid Hoffman is still on LinkedIn's board.

It does seem to be more of an exception when the ex-CEO is not also a founder (or someone very close to the founders, like Schmidt). Carly Fiorina is not on HP's board, Meg Whitman is not on EBay's board (although, ironically, she is on HP's). Lou Gerstner is not on IBM's board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing to see what Ballmer stepping down from Microsoft has done. Microsoft's stock has outperformed Google's in the past year: [https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=140847...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1408478400000&chddm=98923&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG;NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0;0&q=goog), msft&ntsp=0&ei=qJbzU7D4JvLLiQLNuYCACg

<comment><USER24> I think you'd be interested in reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Specifically, he addresses CEO's as well as the stock market. I think equating Ballmer's leaving of Microsoft to the stock market success is coincidental at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Five years ago I joined Microsoft. I have been neutral to pro-Ballmer the whole time, but this chart explains why many people were unhappy with him.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1408478400000&chddm=543131&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:GOOG;NASDAQ:AMZN;NYSEARCA:SPY&cmptdms=0;0;0;0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=9pfzU8iLHsSyiAKN7IGoCA)

<comment><USER26> True, this is a big part of it. However to calculate return people should also consider the dividends that Microsoft has been paying out as well (for longer than many competitors).

Starting on Jan 23rd 2009 (which is when the chart you linked to starts for me) an investment of just under $10K (with reinvested dividends) would leave you with just over $30k today [1] which is honestly not a bad return.

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/investor/Stock/StockSplit/stockcalc...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/Stock/StockSplit/stockcalc.aspx)

<comment><USER27> Sure that makes it outperform the S&P 500 over this arbitrary period, but still falls short from the other companies. It makes more sense though to look at it since he became CEO[1] in January of 2000. Now we see a _huge_ difference with MSFT the only one in negative territory and the other companies having _massive_ returns. Reinvesting dividends over this period would push this into positive territory, but it still wouldn't even outperform the S%P 500 (22.57% vs 34.99%).

[1] [https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1408488110378&chddm=1433797&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:GOOG;NASDAQ:AMZN;NYSEARCA:SPY&cmptdms=0;0;0;0&q=NASDAQ:MSFT&ntsp=0&ei=jdHzU- jIFMqfrAHHp4GoCA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For those who don't speak corporate: " Under your leadership, we created an incredible foundation that we continue to build on — and Microsoft will thrive in the mobile-first, cloud-first world. " = your plan failed and here is what we are going to do now instead

<comment><USER29> Just change the and ("— and Microsoft") to "but Microsoft", and you get the true meaning.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r Anybody struck by the number of times the word "bold" was used? What do you suppose is the hidden meaning behind that?

<comment><USER30> An attempt to highlight how much gambling they will be doing going forward as opposed to simply riding some (much easier) opportunity.

"Microsoft will need to be bold and make big bets to succeed in this new environment. Writing great software is a tremendous accomplishment and selling software has been a fabulous business. In the mobile-first, cloud-first world, software development is a key skill, but success requires moving to monetization through enterprise subscriptions, hardware gross margins, and advertising revenues. Making that change while also managing the existing software business well requires a boldness and fearlessness that I believe the management team has."

"Big bets" \- we won't win everything we try or even come close. Some of the things we do will make us look foolish.

"software development is a key skill, but success" (it's not the olden days when we had a lock on things)

"moving to monetization through enterprise subscriptions, hardware gross margins, and advertising revenues" (I'm not sticking around for this one, best of luck!)

"well requires a boldness and fearlessness that I believe the management team has" (but I"m not certain after all I didn't say "I'm sure" I said "I believe".

Ballmer want's to leave the party before the end or at least when all the good food and booze is gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Boldness aside, this sentence struck me:

> I have confidence in our approach of mobile-first, cloud- > first, and in > our primary innovation emphasis on platforms > and productivity and the > building of capability in devices > and services as core business drivers.

That's a lot to have confidence in. Is this tangled web of nested lists Microsoft's idea of "focus"? cf. Apple, Google, and Amazon's mission statements.

<comment><USER32> Mission statements are usually pure BS. Microsoft is too big to have a single focus. Google has discovered that recently. Apple is still having some focus, but just made a joint PR with IBM about enterprise-y stuff.. so where's the focus?

I'm trying to think of a huge company with a specifc focus and I can't. Perhaps others can weight in here.

<comment><USER33> I'm quite certain Intel is pretty focused on making faster, smaller and more efficient processors.

<comment><USER34> They certainly have their fingers in more pies than just processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Healthy thing for him to do. People should have two or three distinct careers, in my opinion, in their lives. I hope he has a blast owning the Clippers and teaching.

Off topic, but: I have been a bit negative on Microsoft since NT, which I liked and helped me get work done. However, I like their direction with Office 365 for all devices and their high end Surface Pro 3.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm surprised how short and to the point Satya's letter is to Steve. You would think in the 20+ years they worked together he would relate some kind of interesting or personal story. Instead it's pretty terse and reads like a termination letter. I wonder if it was really Steve's choice to step down off the board.

<comment><USER37> For all I know, in the twenty plus years they worked together, they both related lots of interesting and personal stories. Obviously Microsoft's PR department decided the official announcement of change in leadership wasn't the place for those, though. Remember the thing actually being communicated here is "yes, this is all part of the plan - so there is no need to panic sell Microsoft shares".

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Dear Satya,

Sorry I forgot to give you the three envelopes.

Sincerely,

Steve

<comment><USER39> Dear Satya,

As we discussed, this paves the way for you to use the first envelope.

Best wishes,

Steve

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "success requires moving to monetization through enterprise subscriptions, hardware gross margins, and advertising revenues"

That's a big step for Microsoft. My opinion is that they are late on subscriptions and ad revenues.

<comment><USER41> They were too busy building real value instead of chasing ad revenue for a long time--I'm okay with that.

<comment><USER42> You mean churning by creating frameworks and brands and then dropping them within a year or two?

Quick, what's their free email service called today?

<comment><USER41> outlook.com?

Also, note that Google/Apple can be quite gnarly about frameworks and brands, right? How's that Wave thing going? Groups? Reader?

<comment><USER43> Most of us who have been developing with the Microsoft stack have been burnt at least twice with key frameworks/technologies that have been artificially end-of-lifed while at their peak, leaving our projects based on obsolete technologies at v1.

I suspect that is what the parent comment is about, and not immature projects that were discontinued (with ample warning and exit) due mostly to lack of interest, as mentioned in your counter-bicker.

<comment><USER42> Exactly. Linq2SQL, launched in .NET 3.5, superceded by EF in .NET 3.5SP1. Silverlight, which was launched into a state of immediate torpor. XNA, first release in 2006, last release 2010, incompatible with Windows 8 which was launched in 2012. That's a pretty short lifespan for an entire development environment, especially considering that most folks don't touch these things on a first release.

And MS tools aren't just little libs. They're things that take a heavy time investment to learn - they're practically languages and even IDEs in their own right.

Almost every .NET release has _completely_ changed the data layer, RPC, serialization. The only thing that hung on for a respectably long time was the abominable trainwreck that was ASP.Net WebForms. Did anybody out there suffer through WCF? Ouch.

This was Ballmer's microsoft.

The new MS has nothing anywhere close to that kind of churn, and the platforms are developed out in the open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "I continue to love discussing the company's future. I love trying new products and sending feedback. I love reading about what is going on at the company. Count on me to keep ideas and inputs flowing."

This describes Ballmer's 34 years at the company. I used to think highly (or high-er) of him but it can't be clearer to me that him being appointed CEO was the worst decision in the history of msft, leading to the lost decade. I don't think he has any idea what he was doing - listen to his recent interview on Bloomberg.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands This sounds a lot like a pro athlete that realizes its time to really retire and stop chasing his dreams from 10 years ago when he was able to play a really high level.

</comment><comment><USER45> A lot of people here are calling most of the letter marketing speak, that may be true, but Satya has been talking about mobile-first cloud-based since he became CEO, like I haven't seen him do a single interview or public appearance where he doesn't mention _at least_ one of the two things.

<comment><USER44> New CEO's - or even existing ones - only have so many things they can openly talk about. Listen to Marissa's interviews over the past year - I had to since I was preparing for an interview and the repetition in her talk was almost maddening!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Has any other corporate CEO generated more profits during his watch than Steve Ballmer? Not sure if this true but I suspect it might be.

</comment><comment><USER47> What is with this trend of e-mail correspondence between high-level people at big companies being available to the general public?

</comment><comment><USER48> So funny Cloud first, Mobile first... Henry Mintzberg would say that this is an inward focus statement telling and reminding MS employees what their focus should be. Bottom line : no many great mobile apps on MS devices...

</comment><comment><USER49> He's got bigger things to do: [http://instagram.com/p/r2jjTdhQFx/](http://instagram.com/p/r2jjTdhQFx/)

<comment><USER50> Am I the only person who started shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" at the screen while watching this?

<comment><USER51> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Watch as MSFT's stock jumps.

</comment><comment><USER53> boldness bold boldness bold boldd bold.. ness.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, it read like a BBQ sauce commercial.

Sweet Baby Rays - big bold taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Clippers! Clippers! Clippers!

<comment><USER56> I think Clippys is now a more suitable name.

<comment><USER57> "I see that you're trying to post up. Would you like me to set a screen?"

<comment><USER58> I love how that matches Clippy's standard incompetence, since generally speaking screens are for creating openings to drive or take jumpers. Sometimes you see a screen designed to get a guy into good post position, but usually not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Bla, bla, bal... How about showing us some great products instead?

</comment><comment><USER60> Microsoft is a spent force these days. Yes, they missed the opportunity to jump onto phones, but destroying their entire business and alienating all their customers is a complete overreaction.

Shame though, I liked Windows before they tried to slap the UI from a mobile phone onto it.

</comment><comment><USER61> some people are born without the ability to walk.

others, are born without the gift of hearing.

i was born with an incredibly low "cringe" threshold.

reading this "exchange" almost put me in a coma.

</comment><comment> UVB-76 How out of touch does a corporation have to be to announce the resignation of a board member in this manner?

<comment><USER25> I'm hoping the target audience is 50 year old millionare shareholders and not us peasant folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> "Mobile-first, cloud-first"... I've used their cloud and even our .NET fanboys voted it off the island at our shop.

And mobile first? Do they even have a mobile offering? I mean, sure, the Slate is kind of cool. But doesn't your company need marketshare to say that you're "mobile-first"?

<comment><USER63> What they mean is that in the face of criticism exactly such as yours, that Microsoft will not revert to server-closet, workstation first in order to keep the easy flow of cash coming. Think AOL at the start of the broadband era. Microsoft doesn't want to become a mindless machine with ever dwindling returns.

<comment><USER64> Funny thing.

Has the cloud market already become larger than the server market? And has the mobile market already become larger than the desktop/laptop market?

I ask because there are always lots of markets that appear, grow like crazy, stealing money from another related market, and then saturate, without ever getting bigger than the original one. The trend we saw in computers - <USER2> every new generation brings a cheaper incumbent that plainly wins is an exception, not the rule.

I'd be quite open about a new generation of computers being an exception again, I even tought they'd be for a while. But there is no way the mobile (phones + tablet) market will grow a lot anymore. How many phones does a person need? The cloud (IaS) market has space to grow, but so do servers, and each has its own set of advantajes, thus there's no reason to imagine that the cloud will "win" while servers "lose".

<comment><USER63> I think that the cloud will win, if only because it's the logical first step for any small customer (which you can later up-sell). And large customers will be won over when you tell them they never have to upgrade again and that uptime/security is guaranteed by an SLA. Businesses love eliminating liability and risk, and theoretically the cloud can win on both counts.

Also, I think mobile-first will win via the web and because mobile is the lowest common denominator (you can put a qwerty keyboard and browser on any full computer).

My $.02 though, it's a huge gamble for Microsoft to beat others in this space. If I were Microsoft I'd be buying Pandora, Redbox, Sirius XM, expanding MSNBC, and putting more into Xbox. That space is all about negotiating with parties and exploiting your dominance, which they've proved to be masters at over the years. For Microsoft to win in the cloud and mobile, I think they need to embrace open source and common platforms similar to IBM and Oracle, and I think they can never summon that desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> You know those extensions that replace 'cloud' with 'butt'? It might be worthwhile to replace the entire phrase 'mobile-first, cloud-first world' with 'butt':

>In the _butt_ , software development is a key skill...

>Under your leadership, we created an incredible foundation that we continue to build on — and Microsoft will thrive in the _butt_.</comment>


Suggestions for Introduction to CS? - <AUTHOR>

I teach at a big research university. Next year I am teaching for the first time Intro to CS and I am very excited about it. The course right now is conventional and stale. Any suggestions for topics or teaching techniques to make it more interesting or relevant? Or, to rephrase: what/how would you have liked to study in an Intro to CS course?<p>One clarification: This is not Intro to Programming, that is a separate course. This is Intro to CS. <comment><USER2> Check out Mehran's Programming Methodology course publicly available on iTunes and Youtube.

<http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=84A56BC7F4A1F852>

While the course is called Programming Methodology, the focus of the course is really to teach computer science and what it means to be a computer scientist and teach solid software engineering principles. The language choice really doesn't matter and Mehran has said so himself but they chose Java as it had good OOP principles to teach.

It's by far the absolute best teaching style I've ever personally witnessed and he makes the classes fun and engaging and very easy to learn from.

One thing I would probably have personally changed would be instead of Java, use Python (but that is really a personal preference and bias since I like Python better). Hope that gives you some inspiration. I would try and sit down and watch the first 3 lectures just to check out the style and the way the course is structured.</comment>


DNA from skull links Ice Age girl to Native Americans alive today - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-first-americans-20140516-story.html

<comment><USER2> This is not at all a surprise although it is good to get more data on such an issue. There is still very limited sampling of DNA from prehistoric individuals,[1] and a frequent popular confusion that ancient human regional populations can be well characterized in their relationships just by phenotype (which in practice means by the shape of their skulls, jaws, and teeth) without any information about genotypes. Even living populations are still astoundingly undersampled (same reference).

[1] [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344219](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344219)</comment>


Systemd: tmpfiles: R /dir/.* destroys root - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5644 <comment><USER2> This almost seems like a generational clash. Anybody who's been around for a while knows that you never ever type rm -rf .* because it can blow up in your face. Lennart's response is tone-deaf because he can't understand how anybody could make that mistake. He's never noticed that rm has started refusing to let you shoot yourself in the foot because he would never think of typing rm -rf .* in the first place. Newer users have never had the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot with rm and are now tripping over systemd. For all the criticism of systemd not being unixy, this bug reproduces classic unix behavior!

edit: unintentional italics

<comment><USER3> Nah, it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to make their own rm equivalent. But they fail to look into the evolution of defaults for said command before going "its unix, deal with it".

Yeah it is unix, it is the kind of unix that you only find running on some old DEC somewhere. Not on a modern x86 cluster.

This while presenting systemd as being about making Linux something more than a unix clone.

And when people complain about systemd not being unix, it is about how everything is blobbed together via interfaces that keep changing at the whim of the developers.

This in contrast to how someone can pipe the output of a GNU command to the input of a BSD command and get sane results, because the interfaces are known and fixed.

People would be much more accommodating of systemd if the logind part could be used independently of the init part etc.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, the bug was fixed before Lennart even started the whole discussion.

> it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to > make their own rm equivalent

I disagree. It's a failure of the C standard library to not provide a recursive unlink(), so every C program that wishes to do one has to reimplement the logic manually. Most standard libraries of other languages have a recursive unlink(), for example: [https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll](https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That bug is like the quintessence of why systemd is bad. Breaking the system when getting user input that previously worked, not even knowing that the existing tools they replaced had safe-guards against this problem, and when confronted with the issue having a first reaction of "that's not a problem".

The one good thing about this is that they did not close it as 'won't fix'.

<comment><USER6> > The one good thing about this is that they did not close it as 'won't fix'.

My educated guess based on reading several previous bug reports is that Poettering would've drag his feet and maybe first close it as wontfix before fixing the issue some time later. Thankfully Martin Pitt fixed it quickly before Poettering came over to badmouth UNIX and point out how everybody else is wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For people jumping straight to comments: it is not so much about issue itself (which IS pretty bad), but more about sloppy off-hand comment from a systemd maintainer, and systemd opposition that did not miss a chance to pile up.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is what happens when you try to reinvent what could be achieved by shell scripts and basic command line utilities.

<comment><USER8> Because no one would every do rm -rf / in shell?

<comment><USER6> irrelevant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX > pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

says Poettering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really interesting how quickly this vanished off the front page...

<comment><USER10> hackernews has heuristics for controversial topics and down rate them automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "@poettering locked and limited conversation to collaborators 34 minutes ago."

<comment><USER12> The bug is already fixed and they have better things to do than messing with our trolling. :-)</comment></comment>


Google showing a (strange) "Find results on [competitor]" box in top spot (EU) - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
When setting France as a location, Google now shows a box taking you straight to its competitors for your query, above ads and above Google My Business answers. Here is an example for a hotel search in Dubai: https://imgur.com/a/P2jF58n
This appears to be f*cking up a lot of SEO/SEA strategies that focused on not relying on other actors than Google, e.g. in France, the "Yellow Pages" website now has a free top spot for lots of queries, whereas most people ceased investing in it long ago, not least because it was not relevant against Google My Business/Google Maps.
I wonder how much of it comes from the application of EU rulings.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> All of those websites are linked with google or partnered with them... they arent competitors. Only real competitors to google are Bing and Yahoo.</comment>


3 Reasons Mainstream News Is Awful - <AUTHOR> https://austingwalters.com/mainstream-news-is-awful/ <comment><USER2> I wish you luck, amigo. If you get traction, the next two challenges will be to prevent people from gaming your rankings, and to prevent experts with undeserved cultural authority from monopolizing results in their area of expertise.

How do you allow for multiple schools of thought and also whittle away the dead wood?

Even if you don't succeed, you may pave the way, and that is no small thing.</comment>


Building a Full-Text Search App Using Docker and Elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.patricktriest.com/text-search-docker-elasticsearch/ <comment><USER2> The sync issues between an RDBMS and ElasticSearch are definitely the most annoying aspect of getting something like this working.

In the case of my current project, I've got an 'indexer' service whose sole job is to await messages from RabbitMQ to create/update/delete records to/from the index.

But sometimes an update may get missed for any number of reasons. So, I've got a systemd timer that fires off a little script to go through my audit tables in Postgres and make sure all changes since the last run were actually, in fact, synced to ElasticSearch.

And I'm still wondering if what I'm doing is 'good enough.' How else could this thing fail?

<comment><USER3> What if your server crashes after you commit to the database, but before you submit to elastic-search? Even if submitting is flawless, this still presents a problem.

<comment><USER2> Depends on which server :D The Database, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, and the application services are on different VMs (in my case, Linodes).

Committing to the database will trigger an entry (via a trigger function) in an audit table. So there is still a record of the transaction. After the system is restored to a healthy state, the next time the sync script is run (either automatically or manually if I'm feeling anxious), it _should_ catch up.

Of course, in a worst-case scenario, I could always rebuild the index :O.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great, really comprehensive walk-through!

For folks that want to work with a bit more than books, there are a bunch of examples on Elastic's Github profile - I've found this useful for testing queries that pull back visualizations, etc: [https://github.com/elastic/examples/](https://github.com/elastic/examples/)

If you want to test query results without building a whole front-end / API, you can also use Sense / Kibana to query directly via the query language or, enable CORS and use something like POSTman.

If you don't want to use node I'd also recommend taking a look at their python client.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is epic! The COO at Docker is one of my advisors and some customers of ours are doing really neat open source ElasticSearch integrations:

Even comes with a dashboard for dataviz and querying the FTS system: [https://github.com/lmangani/gun- elastic/blob/master/README.M...](https://github.com/lmangani/gun- elastic/blob/master/README.MD#screenshots)

And one of the other comments asked about how to keep their RDBMS synced with ElasticSearch, that is also what the above linked person is working on, I know they already have it syncing with Cassandra. I'm sure Postgres is just a plug and play away.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I run elastic search out of the box, I've noticed that search is quite slow, on the order of 5 seconds per search, over say 10000 PDF documents (papers), on a single node. Is this normal? And is there an obvious place to look or a (quick) fix which doesn't require me to delve into the ES details too much? (as I'm not a Java person)

<comment><USER6> Sounds slow, but it depends on the total size of the index. I could see 10K PDFs being big enough to slow things down. The easiest thing to try is setting the Java heap to half the RAM up to 32GB. The more RAM the better in general. I have also found setting the number of shards to the number of CPU cores to be optimal in many cases, however if a shard is too big (>50GB) then it can start causing other problems. Again the more CPU cores the better in general.

Here are the relevant docs, and don't worry you don't need to know Java to get good performance.

indexing: [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/tune- for-indexing-speed.html)

searching: [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/tune- for-search-speed.html)

disk usage: [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/tune- for-disk-usage.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'll have a look at that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great overview. Some numbers from step 4 - size of data set, time to load index and space used on disk by that index+ES would be interesting to see. I have a feeling for small datasets postgres/mongo even sqlites FTS would perform better.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great tutorial

</comment><comment> jarl-ragnar It's really nice to see a full-stack example like this that builds out a useful application while demonstrating how to utilise a broad spectrum of technologies. Good job.</comment>


Police thwarted by criminals using BlackBerry Phantom encrypted phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/nsw/are-encrypted-phones-allowing-criminals-to-get-away-with-murder-20150523-gh82gv.html

<comment><USER2> "Phantom" is a service not provided by BlackBerry itself. But this title made me think that there will also be benefit someday in using obsolete or obscure tech, much in the way that Macs were shielded from most viruses back in the day.</comment>


Google Taking a Step Into Power Metering - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/technology/companies/10grid.html?partner=rss&emc=rss <comment><USER2> Although it's a later submission, it's on Google's site, and doesn't require registration.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474808></comment>


Walmart Will Let Its 1.4M Workers Take Their Pay Before Payday - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/business/walmart-workers-pay-advances.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> > Walmart said the new initiative is intended to help workers avoid costly > payday loans and other debt traps, and reduce the stress that comes with > financial hardship.</comment>


The Healthy Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://healthyprog.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This product is relevant to me in two ways:

* I am a programmer and I care about my health * I am a startup founder and I am impressed with the package Joe Kutner provides: A book, a website and a (free) IOS app with lots of resources and features.

Slashdot has a review of the book: [http://books.slashdot.org/story/13/08/12/1239250/book- review...](http://books.slashdot.org/story/13/08/12/1239250/book-review-the- healthy-programmer)</comment>