Bayfiles: The Pirate Bay Founders Launch File-Hosting Site - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/bayfiles-the-pirate-bay-founders-launch-file-hosting-site-110829/

<comment><USER2> I find it hard to grasp how these kind of services turn a profit (apparently they do because there are so many of them!). The bandwidth and storage costs must be huge and I can't really see the benefit in paying for an account. As far as I understand even paying users have download limits and compared to something like a seedbox your account is only valid for one file hosting service while you have no guarantee that the files you'll want tomorrow might be on a different file hosting provider.

<comment><USER3> They turn a _huge_ profit by hosting pirated stuff and making downloading painful without a premium account.

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20087753-261/the- mystery-m...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20087753-261/the-mystery-man- behind-megaupload-piracy-fight/)

To download from bayfiles:

1) go to link <http://bayfiles.com/file/Rf5/GXSeLh/zeromq-2.1.7.zip>

2) click the discrete grey download button

3) wait 15 seconds on the next page

4) enter captcha on the next page

5) click start download, at a capped speed

OR with a premium account:

1) go to link

2) click download, at high speed

<comment><USER2> I know how they work I just don't see how they get so many people who don't like to pay for stuff to pay for the service( I don't find the free service that cumbersome).

<comment><USER4> Honestly after iTunes, it should have been demonstrated that pirates will buy if

1) They have what they want (ie, just the one song they want, not the entire compiled musical history).

2) It is more convenient than getting it for free.

And honestly from what I read, it does appear that does sites are pretty damn convenient.

<comment><USER5> 1) Why does everybody makes the assumption that people only want to download the song that is playing on the radio all the time? That is a huge misconception with no basis. In fact, those who download music [to use your example] from so called warez/pirate sources in large amounts, are usually more interested in music and more curious about the rest of the tracks than the average radio listener. Also having 'what they want' it's a mirage if we talk about services like itunes, spotify, etc. A source of content controlled by a commercial entity will never be able to deliver the variety of content that can be found in the wild, the very nature of the concept of 'commercial service' imposes this constraint. I myself was about to sign up for a spotify account when I checked out their catalog and find less than 50% of the music I was looking for. Not that I was surprised.

2)More convenient? For dumb users maybe... for the old school user that like to simply have his/her mp3 collection, I fail to see how itunes is more convenient than say bittorrent, let alone 1-click file hosting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's already <http://bayimg.com/>.

<comment><USER7> And <http://www.baywords.com/> and <http://www.pastebay.com/> .

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where's the go-to place for high quality (e.g. FLAC) pirated music now?

<comment><USER9> _cough_ What.CD

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do appreciate that the layout uses the kopimi pyramid shape!

</comment><comment><USER10> Why? I mean why bother?

<comment><USER11> Because a very large portion of piracy now travels through ad/premium based free file hosts rather than torrents. New hosts pop up each day and those who post the files rake in cash. There's seemingly no ceiling on the number of file hosting providers, especially if the users just want to download their file and go.

So, short answer, there's a ton of money being made in this sphere and TPB could swiftly grab a large swath of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Entering reCaptcha looks like too much work do just download a single file.

</comment><comment><USER13> Finally, a place to store all of my information on Michael Bay.</comment>


Jitendra Malik's free online Computer Vision Course - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/vision

<comment><USER2> The course page is timing out for me at the moment so I can't see what it says, but I emailed coursera last week asking about the start date. Their reply was that it was now expected to start in mid-April.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking forward to this course for a while. It was supposed to start in March, I hope it doesn't get pushed back again.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've to register, why?

<comment><USER5> Because the classes are designed for people who want to take various tests, keep score, track progress and participate in discussion. I think downloadable video files are floating somewhere, not sure about lecture notes, etc.</comment></comment>


Space lets you write code together, in real-time, from your browser. - <AUTHOR> http://chaoscollective.org/projects/builtinspace.html

<comment><USER2> This is very cool stuff guys.

If you had a way to somehow save the chat entries that happened at a particular cursor location, you have a way to capture the exact line of thinking / rationalization that went behind it. This would go way beyond arbitrary line comments while keeping your code clean. It follows that the more controversial / complicated segments of code will have more chat exchange between the developers. If a new developer were to be brought in to modify the code, it brings a very human element towards understanding what exactly the code does and why it was written that way.

I remember being brought into a 100K+ codebase as an intern and simply being overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to learn the structure and why it was written the way it was written. If the codebase also came with chat logs, it would've been an invaluable asset for me to pore over.

If I were you guys, I would make this into a full service that provides the automatic coding narrative. For any company that starts using this system, the value of such information will skyrocket over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, if chat and commenting could be combined into a more seamless, context aware log, that would be pretty amazing. We have some very light implementation around 'status' which is basically a persistant chat message, but was built with a different purpose in mind. Definitely worth looking into a similar thing that can travel more inline with the code.

Plus I love the phrase 'automatic coding narrative'. How awesome is that! Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've often wished for something like this when helping someone learn remotely. For example, let's say I'm hanging out in #ruby-lang (IRC) and someone posts a Gist they need help with. Forking and editing their Gist works great, but there is real power in _watching_ someone make changes to code piece-by-piece.

I voted for OpenSource, but only because I think this is the kind of tool that can thrive in an OSS environment. I wouldn't let that stop you from setting up a service as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree! Coming from a design background, being able to immerse myself in code and watch better-abled people code around me (and fix my code) is incredibly useful. Looking at it as a platform for education is a great idea. Codecademy + realtime!

I think open sourcing is a must: more things should be real-time! And if enough people see value in building a service around it, then shucks, we (or someone else) should do that too. :D</comment></comment>


The security behind the NHS contact tracing app - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-behind-nhs-contact-tracing-app <comment><USER2> "The system then takes that the contact events were 'authentic' and then takes the transmit power and received signal strengths that each proximity event produced (remember, these are broadly representative of physical distance), and runs those through a _sophisticated risk model_ to work out the encounters that are high risk from a virus transmission point of view. "

This is not possible.

Other countries use humans (Contact Tracers) to do this, working with the person infected.

Contact Tracer: On this day looks like blah happened, Infected: Yes I forgot.

Infected: On this day I talked to this person for ages but I don't know them. Contact Tracer: I see, we will contact them.

Fine, fine, move quick and break stuff. Don't think about it.

In Australia-

The App is not anonymous! It reuses the ID, they don't roll. 3rd Parties track away.

iOS does not work at all. You have to have the phone unlocked and on the front. If you want to pretend that works, you'll make a great government consultant like the Australians used.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Information Commisioner needs to sign off on this.

It would be entirely possible for someone like google or facebook with tons of location data to turn those anonymous ids into real people.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ugh. This is dreadful. Chock full of fallacious arguments. This is a very nuanced problem, but as described this approach is deeply flawed...

I'm cannot determine who is supposed to be the target audience for this "messaging". The narrative starts out trying to build credibility by telling stories from history, trying to build support for being able to track the source of a problem. I should note right here, that electronic surveillance did not exist in either the Middle Ages or the early 1900's when Typhoid Mary was alive -- so tracking the source of infection did not really incur other costs or "side effects".

There is then a middle fluff section, pontificating on the two models: decentralized, centralized. Yup, there is an agenda here...

The first kicker is "stopping the spread" \-- there is an unjustified statement that the "decentralized" model doesn't work -- no explanation. There is an appeal to the non-relevant stories. Then an appeal to "balance" with the public health authorities having the minimum information necessary to manage the spread of the virus.

Then there is a "dive" into the Crypto... Partial postcode (so "rough" geographic location data)... the model of your phone. Seriously -- WTF -- Covid-19 doesn't care what the model of your phone is, this is irrelevant, unless you want to profile and track individuals -- period. The system also ends up agreeing a few cryptographic keys, including a key used to authenticate your installation... and some system parameters. Sorry, this creates _highly_ identifying information. Covid-19 doesn't care about these. Why are these items important or relevant?

There is a fabulously contradictory paragraph that starts with "now let's say you wake up with a cough". I should note that the previous paragraph ends with "At this point, nothing has been sent back to the NHS". In this paragraph it explains that analysis will result in a list of (ahem, centrally recorded) installation IDs that have been in your proximity. Congratulations -- by reporting yourself as sick, you've filled in part of a social graph by identifying other people you came into contact with.

There is a paragraph about downsides, but it is fallaciously incorrect. If you identify as being sick you are no longer anonymous. You reveal your contact graph.

There are perspectives / options that a very large number of people will eventually get Covid-19 -- large % numbers of the population in every country. This type / style of app will leave behind a non-anonymous, persistent and connectable social graph.

In summary, the pitch and story was based on and contained fallacious arguments. The crypto "measures" irrelevant things. There is an appeal that this is the best that can be done.

Could this all have been developed with advisors that "helped" with the design and how it should be sold? If not, then this suggests that the developers are naive and need additional assistance regarding privacy, anonymity and forward secrecy.

<comment><USER5> "The system also ends up agreeing a few cryptographic keys, including a key used to authenticate your installation... and some system parameters. Sorry, this creates highly identifying information. Covid-19 doesn't care about these. Why are these items important or relevant?"

Thanks for this. Almost had me believing that the unique bluetooth bla bla didn't reveal too much - not that I would have installed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Contact snitches</comment>


Wirewize! - <AUTHOR> http://www.wirewize.com My new site just launched! Would love the hackernews feedback... <comment><USER2> Repost: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181840></comment>


Wii board comparable to 100x more expensive physio "force platforms" - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527435.300-wii-board-helps-physios-strike-a-balance-after-strokes.html

<comment><USER2> Likely more expensive for two reasons:

1) Wii board is mass produced in greater volumes.

2) Selling any technology into medicine is a long slow costly process involving multiple stages of approval and testing. Not so for a consumer game.

No 2 isn't going to change any time soon.

<comment><USER3> As someone has has in the past worked in biotechnology software and is currently working on biothech instrumentation software - you are EXACTLY correct.

The problem with #2 is that we could get a lot of things cheaper and faster to market with only slightly more risk for the consumer. But the regulators have no incentive to take on that extra bit of risk. Sick people on the other hand...

<comment><USER4> I wonder if, for exercise equipment at least, it would be worth developing it as a video game 'peripheral' and avoid much of the regulators control.

Imagine this: a row-machine that links into your Xbox/PS3/Wii and you can compete in tournaments in game and online, but have it completely usable without it being used as a gaming peripheral. It could be similarly attached to any 'sport' equipment.

I wonder if this would be enough to evade regulator oversight or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is another win for consumer electronics and the "trickle up" economy. The tail is wagging the dog here. Not by pushing the bounds of science, but by increasing the availability of tech throughout the economy.</comment>


Apollo's Competition - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/23/here-comes-competition-apollo/ <comment><AUTHOR> I looked at their site (Slingshot) and although the framework seems interesting, there's a catch. To use it free you have to host on their "Joyent Accelerators." Bah... no thanks. I'll just Apollo or XUL.</comment>


The Smartest Advice I Ever Got: Personal Finance - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/105452/The-Smartest-Advice-I-Ever-Got;_ylt=AqdvGb618aD7ChQv7OYbDP67YWsA

<comment><USER2> "Tom held some shares in Disney, and while he liked the company, he thought its stock price was a bit rich at the time, so he sold the Disney stock to fund the purchase of the piano. Tom never got back into Disney and instead watched it rise and rise. Years later Tom would walk through his living room, see the piano and mutter to himself, "That's the most expensive damn piano on the face of the planet!""

I have heard this story about Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, kitchen floors, new cars, and masters degrees. I bet at least 50% of the US GDP has been attributed to selling great growth stocks too soon -- or rather, to a friend of a friend doing so.

Sadly, we don't have any great stories about people cashing out of leveraged positions in Enron ("Have I ever told you about my negative four hundred thousand dollar house?").

<comment><USER3> Not enron, but close:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Sykes>

<comment><USER2> I'm afraid I don't see how that is relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Best advice I ever got: all money does is give you freedom (to do what you want and to get what you want). Therefore, it is absolutely pointless to give up freedom for money.

<comment><USER5> That informs one other axiom:

Much of modern life involves trading freedom of one form for freedom of another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _if you purchase nonperishables when they are on sale, the return on investment is enormous_

Only if you have space to store them. If you could buy nonperishable consumer staple _futures_ at similar discounts, it would absolutely be worthwhile; but if you make a practice of saving $10 by buying a dozen boxes of cereal when they're on sale and then having them sit on your shelves for the next six months... well, you're probably paying far more than $10 for the larger apartment/house which gives you the space to store said cereal boxes.

<comment><USER7> With good shelving the loss in square footage is vary minor. Let's say you add a shelf that's 6'x1' and 8' tall. Giving you ~6'x7' = 49' of linear shelf space. Your boxes take up 3 linear feet but I go though 2boxes of cereal a week so that's ~1month = $10 3/7th of a square foot a living space. Or ~230$/month per square foot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I know a bunch of really rich guys, and they're no happier than anyone else."

Yeah, but I bet they're a hell of a lot less miserable.

<comment><USER9> I'd take that bet. I'd wager that there are slightly more unhappy rich guys that non-rich guys.

Not sure how you would prove that, but I figure you take average happiness rates and add a bit because of the increased stress the money brings.

<comment><USER4> Sure, money brings stresses. However, it also eliminates many sources of misery. For example, a trip to the ER is only going to be stressful for health, not financial, reasons.

<comment><USER9> Only if you live in the US. Most of us do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "[My father's] most adamant instruction was that I should never under any circumstances go into debt."

Now _that's_ a dangerous heuristic. Never purchase a house, car, education, or medical treatment, except with cash?

<comment><USER11> A better rule might be:

"Never go into debt unless your benefit from whatever you buy using the debt exceeds the cost of the debt."

Examples:

A house generally appreciates in value. Usually worth going into debt.

A new car. Unless you gain somehow from having a brand new car (e.g. you're a movie star), you can get most of the value from a used car and avoid the massive value decrease.

A computer. As a hacker, you need your computer to create. Having a computer lets you make wealth that wouldn't be possible without one.

An education. Hopefully improves your ability to create value by teaching you new and interesting things :)

<comment><USER2> Most financial assets gradually appreciate, but borrowing to buy financial assets is a good way to eventually go bankrupt.

Maybe a better rule: borrow so your consumption fluctuates less than your income, but always save twice what you think you should and borrow half what you think you can, to account for how stupidly optimistic people are in the presence of easy money and compound interest.

<comment><USER12> _always save twice what you think you should and borrow half what you think you can_

pithy, I'm going to steal this if you don't mind. I like it a lot.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I knew a talented graphic designer who volunteered his services to a non- profit organization that he respected, and he did an awesome, bang-up job and from that got referrals for well-paying corporate work (annual reports).

"I started working as a freelance makeup artist in 1980, and I worried that I didn't have enough money. My father told me I'd just have to figure out a way to make more money. So I started looking through the Yellow Pages and calling agencies, magazines, photographers - anyone I could offer my services to. I'd work for free until I proved myself."

-Bobbi Brown, CEO of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics

<comment><USER14> I recently encountered the "no spec" campaign, which argues against doing preliminary design as a proposal before getting paid. More here:

<http://www.no-spec.com/>

Your example illustrates why I find their position unreasonable. Designers can get away with refusing to do spec work when their portfolio speaks for itself and they want to keep doing the same kind of things they've done before. But encouraging less experienced designers to refuse spec work is holding them back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Greenspun on shorting:

 _It is 1986. You buy yourself an IBM PC. You are using MS/DOS and say "This sucks. It isn't even as good as operating systems from 1960." You're a computer expert so you know that the technology is pathetic. You do some business research and find that out that the company making this MS/DOS product didn't even have the in-house expertise to build it itself. They bought it from another company!" You call your broker and find out that this "Microsoft" company is publicly traded and selling for a very lofty price/earnings ratio. You smell blood and say "I want to short 100 shares of Microsoft."_

I sure hope _he_ didn't do it, but he seems to have such bad karma, who knows.

<http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money>

</comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Spend less than you earn 2\. When there's blood on the streets, invest 3\. Use other people's money 4\. Class is dismissed

<comment><USER17> What is a "blood on the streets" situation? Surely investing in a revolution is not a good idea, because usually all property will just be taken away from you anyway?

<comment><USER16> Read this: [http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2007/03/28/buy- when-...](http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2007/03/28/buy-when-theres- blood-in-the-streets.aspx)

Baron Rothschild was big on it :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cypress-hill always have enough money in the bank to live your current lifestyle for six months. unexpected unemployment may be rough, but it need not be inhuman</comment>


Leonardo da Vinci won't be discovered through Notion - <AUTHOR> https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/ <comment><USER2> As Taleb say, if something has survived thousands of years, it's likely to stick around for the same. It's what's called as anti-fragile.</comment>


The Carnivore Diet for Mental Health? - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/201904/the-carnivore-diet-mental-health <comment><USER2> To what extent is their improved mental health a placebo effect from being convinced that they "finally have the answers" and getting dopamine from the process of successfully converting people to carnivore diets tho?

Mikhaila Peterson, for instance, insists that it's the carnivore diet that cured her depression — when IMO it's equally possible that the positive social feedback she gets from toting a depression cure is what actually cured her depression.

<comment><AUTHOR> Checkout similar reports from meatheals.com; the bulk of people over there are evidently not with any significant web presence so as to attract what you dub to be positive social feedback.

<comment><USER2> Awesome link, thank you for posting, this probably disproves my theory above. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very surprising result. Suppose it did help people with various issues, there are negatives with meat eating, especially if you vastly reduce plants, higher cholesterol for people with sensitivity to that plus, much more impact on the planet through production of meat, and animal deaths.

I love eating meat, even though I have tried to cut down for all those reasons. Hope there is more study of this.</comment>


The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple's 'Find My' Feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/ <comment><AUTHOR> The solution to that paradox, it turns out, is a trick that requires you to own at least two Apple devices. Each one emits a constantly changing key that nearby Apple devices use to encrypt and upload your geolocation data, such that only the other Apple device you own possesses the key to decrypt those locations.</comment>


The cost of virtualizing CS conferences - <AUTHOR> https://rachitnigam.com/post/virtual-cs-conferences/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the search for an alternative to the "hallway track" could actually be fruitful.

Speaking for myself I never benefited much from the hallway track, because it relies on the type of in-person socializing skills that I've always struggled with. Conferences feel like a grown-up intellectual version of a junior high dance to me! A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but high introversion.

Of course, maybe one's passion for research is supposed to override one's shyness. I'm unsure which bar I personally failed to clear :-)

<comment><USER3> > _A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but > high introversion._

This sounds like IRC, or whatever the preference is these days.

As a conference organiser myself, I think it's perfectly fine for people to not enjoy the hallway track.

These people might be the ones who benefit the most from sitting in the talk room, and being exposed to the variety of ideas that a conference would hopefully offer.

I also think that it's perfectly fine to just crowd around a speaker (at least, in pre-COVID times), and just listen in on the technical conversations that other attendees are having with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another aspect of conferences is their carbon budget. I attended a conference last year in SF that had a large section on climate change. It was estimated the 35,000 attendees traveled a cumulative 35,000,000 miles and emitted about 17,000 tonS of carbon. A virtual conference would eliminate this. But then you lose the hallway effect.

</comment><comment><USER5> > 2\. Chatrooms for discussing papers

I think this has more potential than the OP considered, but you have to optimize for asynchronous communication. Have conversations in chat, but if there's someone you want to talk to in particular direct message or email them. If the two of you seem mutually interested in each other's ideas, set up a time to have a live conversation

<comment><USER6> Isn't this a forum or bbs?

<comment><USER7> What if instead of text based chat you had to post voice responses. May make it more real?

<comment><USER8> you are right we have voice notes option for that which is digital version of sticky notes. They remain active for 24 hours only in your inbox. You can use it as voice chat also. You should download app for android and recommend to your friends too: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.demo.muspic...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.demo.muspiclite)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the largest international demoscene competitions was just held over twitch (Revision 2020 [1]). It normally has a few thousand attendees + a live stream, but this year was just the stream and twitch chat. In lieu of having people come to the venue, they released a game that was a model of the venue, so you could walk around and have some of the same experience as going [2]. At any given time the main stream had several thousand people watching and in chat.

This all worked pretty well for what is decidedly a very social activity, I presume breakouts could just happen in other streams with a moderator handling chat q&a for the presenter.

1 - [https://2020.revision-party.net/start](https://2020.revision- party.net/start)

2 - [https://www.sofaworld.net/](https://www.sofaworld.net/)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you haven't seen, I'd highly recommend checking out what we did for IEEE VR: [https://blairmacintyre.me/2020/04/02/completely-online- ieee-...](https://blairmacintyre.me/2020/04/02/completely-online-ieee- vr-2020-was-a-success/)

and in particular some of the notes on poster sessions: [https://blairmacintyre.me/2020/04/10/doing-a-poster- session-...](https://blairmacintyre.me/2020/04/10/doing-a-poster-session-in- hubs/)

In practice, people consumed the keynote/talk content in a variety of formats (streamed, recorded, and in-VR) and there was a fantastic networking and meeting-new-people effect in the poster, hallway (post-talk), and demo sessions. There's a bunch of formal research that was done there along with post-conference surveys to track down specific data (e.g., how many new people did you meet?) but it will take some time for those teams to rigorously collect & report.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Unlike most other research fields which primarily focus on publishing in > journals, conferences ended up being the primary publication and > presentation venue in CS.

The irony of this seems lost on the author. While I am glad that CS has truly split into a scientific discipline separate both from mathematics and engineering (this was not yet the case when I was in school), CS _of all disciplines_ should be able to progress remotely.

Physics has been the innovator in this regard, with preprint journals (Physics review letters grew from letters into a journal) to HTTP & HTML, and open preprint servers. It's a pity that CS has gone the other way, which limits its openness to scientists around the world!

<comment><USER12> Author here.

CS _does_ progress remotely—the publishing model in CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them up on arvix and our webpages which doesn't seem to be true of physics journals.

The post is directed to solving the problems of networking. It doesn't say anything about the orthogonal problem of open access of research.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for writing back.

I mentioned physics pecifically because it is the progenitor of this approach.

> CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them > up on arvix and our webpages which doesn't seem to be true of physics > journals.

ArXiv started as a physics preprint server so I don't understand how you could claim that physicists don't have such a system. And of course WWW and HTML came from physics, not computer science.

More to the point, though physics also has conferences, modern physics developed In the early 20th mostly without them travel was more complex in those days. The modern conception of journals dates to this period (and cf my comments about Physics Letters).

Conferences as experienced in CS are even less vital in mathematics than in Physics.

None of which is to claim physicists are somehow superior in some way! I'm just saying that it's ironic that CS, of all disciplines, has a social model more like the social science than the physical sciences. Perhaps that is what should change, and there are good wxetant models to follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if there is an equivalent. The beauty of conferences are the unscripted, chance encounters with other attendees. I gave a talk at last year's PyBay (bay area python conference) and the magic of it was in the side conversations leading up to the talk and then after it. Heck, I even nailed $20k worth of consulting work from hanging out at a random table. This cannot happen in a virtual setting.

I run the SF Django Meetup and we're hosting a nationwide virtual meetup this upcoming Wednesday. We have over 350 people RSVP'd and though I'm excited about bringing so many people together, it's not lost on me that those magical serendipitous moments aren't going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER14> The hallway chat will be so hard to replicate

<comment><USER15> Covid-19 or not, it's time to formally divorce the hallway track from the rest. We should have more event's whose explicit purpose is to discuss and collaborate, rather than it be hiding other some measurable rat-race ritual.

<comment><USER16> I got news for you, the Hallway Track is an important part of _any_ industry conference. Like, I make comics, I go to comic cons, and while sitting on the show floor selling my stuff to whoever wanders by and looks interested is an important part of the whole thing, so's stepping away from the table to have a meeting with a publisher, so's dinner and events after the show floor closes.

SF cons are like this too, though "making various social connections with other people who have this niche interest" is a big part of why you're explicitly there. Meet weirdos you don't have to explain your weird interest to, hang out, have some activities to share but feel free to make up your own fun and games.

The organized portion of _any_ conference is there to provide a starting point for _some_ of the Hallway Track, and an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the con's about.

<comment><USER15> > I know it's not just an academic conference thing

Yes me too.

> an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit > to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the > con's about

Exactly, I don't want an _excuses_. I think we should be honest with each other about the value of the hallway track alone and not need an excuse. I think that honesty will lead to better outcomes.

<comment><USER17> Think about why people haven't already done what you suggest. What do you think the reasons might be?

<comment><USER15> I know why, and I don't like it.

1\. Pure "Collaboration" being a "soft" nice-sounding word institutions won't buy your plane tickets for.

Planes are bad and those institutions are being bad for thinking that collaboration. Do cheaper rail-accessible regional events, which also help with communication graph ossification and density, to negotiate with them better.

2\. Academic rat race becoming ever more pernicious as job market grows tighter.

Academia is broken and research is yielding a lot less per cost than it used to. Academia needs to fix its shit or some right-wing goverment is going to succeed in turning off the money hose. I have zero interest in seeing status- quo-preserving procrastination on this front.

3\. People that aren't qualified to partake in hallway chat are still eyeballs for marketting at industry conferences.

Let's not hitch everything good in the world to the monster than is marketing and advertising?

4\. Big conferences are more glamorous

Giant hotel are is tasteless and so are people that uncritically enjoy them. But OK fine, Vegas conferences are exempt from my proposals.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Xcode 8: Code Signing Configurations - <AUTHOR> http://pewpewthespells.com/blog/migrating_code_signing.html <comment><USER2> I can't see the online version, here's a link to the offline PDF (I think it's the same one as trying to be linked): [http://pewpewthespells.com/blog/migrating_code_signing.pdf](http://pewpewthespells.com/blog/migrating_code_signing.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Signup for service via e-mail instead of html form - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking about having my developer focused startup accept signups by having users send an inbound e-mail (firstname.lastname@example.com) instead of having a traditional web based form.
Using Mailgun, I can parse incoming e-mails and automagically create accounts. My thinking is that this will cut down the back and forth of going from form to email to activate. It also reduces the likelihood of signup bounce.
What are the pros and cons of this approach? Anybody tried it? <comment><USER2> I would just go with a typical signup process. Don't listen to all the growth hacking stuff when you're first starting out. If your service is good, people will use it. Period.

Optimizing for bounce rate comes after. I see so many people fall into this trap because they read too many growth hack stuff online. These are all correct once you get to certain point, but when you're just starting out they're nothing more than distraction.

I've been there, and learned the hard way that optimizing early is not only unproductive but actually counter-productive because:

1\. Let's say your optimization effort paid off and 100 more people signed up. This only means you had a good optimization strategy and doesn't tell if your service itself is attractive or not. Which means you may feel like you have made some progress but you actually haven't. Let the product speak for itself.

2\. From my experience, if you have a compelling product and just put some effort to put it out there and promote, you WILL get users.

Optimization by definition is something you do when something's already "working". You have no idea if your product works or not early on. Your goal is to find THAT out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Many people live in their web browsers, which includes reading e-mail. The debatable gain of not going through web browser disappears here.

Then, your prospective users need to learn about your service and how to sign up from somewhere, likely from a web page. You'll just make them go from web browser to e-mail client earlier, that's all.

And last, not many services have e-mail-only signups, so the process may be somewhat surprising and misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you don't think the context switching from html form to checking email (either web or native) to clicking activation link results in drop off and bounce?

<comment><USER3> If you're worried about that, provide both ways of confirming the activation: replying to the e-mail and clicking a link. But the switch from web browser to e-mail client will still be there, unless you think up something different.</comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Fatigue Makes Me Scream - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dmbcllc.com/javascript-fatigue-makes-me-scream/ <comment><USER2> >We'll take another look when [Yarn] matures a bit further.

I thought the same thing, but about NPM. It was using up all my inodes and felt really slow. I decided to give up on JS development for a while. Then, a month later, Yarn came out. The projects I couldn't build before were building!

Yarn keeps your inodes safe :)

Maybe NPM has fixed those problems, but I'm a believer in Yarn now.</comment>


Credit card super-users take a $330M bite out of JP Morgan's revenue - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/credit-card-super-users-take-a-330-million-bite-out-of-jp-morga.html <comment><USER2> > These consumers, he said, only use the cards in categories that pay the > richest points. For instance, they would whip out a Sapphire card for dining > and travel but switch to Chase's Freedom card to pay for purchases in the > rotating category that's rewarded most, such as gas stations and drug > stores.

This just seems like common sense to me and I would doubt it is a rare activity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Chase cards with very generous bonuses were advertised very agressively on sites like slickdeals, fatwallet, kk and others by JP Morgan itself.

No surprise it attracted power CC users.

My take on that is they wanted to show CC business growth on paper even by actually giving away money.

Similar thing was happening after Wells Fargo scandal. WF pushed it's WF Cash Wise credit card with $200 sign up bonus.

</comment><comment><USER4> Calling sensible people who don't live in a state of perpetual credit card debt "super-users" and blaming them for not falling for their scams is some high-grade FUD.</comment>


The Most Important Assets you Lose when you're over 30 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/6/20/the-most-important-assets-you-lose-when-youre-over-30/10169/view.aspx <comment><USER2> They guy has a point here. I think facebook wasn't the greatest example, but in general, people are in danger of ossifying as they age.

I'm in my mid-30s now, and I know some people who are, or at least were, really good programmers. But I was amazed recently when they didn't really know what Ruby on Rails was, or django, or AJAX. I'm not trying to play buzzword bingo here, and I certainly don't think people need to know these things in detail, or agree that they're good tools. But it is very alarming that they draw a blank. These aren't obscure technologies - if you haven't even _heard_ of them, you clearly aren't paying attention.

I suppose the 30+ set could get insular enough that nobody brings these things up.. whereas it's nearly impossible _not_ to learn about them if you hang with a younger crowd.

That said, I had a professor in college who was over 70. He could write programs on the whiteboard that would compile without a single syntax error - it was bizarre. He was unbelievably up-to-date. And it wasn't out of some kind of old man and the sea stubbornness, it was just deep in his personality to keep reading, hacking, knowing what's up.

You can't tell who has a drinking problem in college, because everyone drinks too much - you have to wait and see who's still overdoing it 10 years later. By the same token, maybe you can't tell who the true hackers are until they've considered and rejected the opportunity to fade away...

<comment><USER3> You're totally on point with what I'm saying. It's about the fact that when you get older the crowd you run in is worrying about mortgage payments, spouses and kids. You don't have the time or curiosity to engage new stuff and share it with your friends like you used to.

And yes, there is probably SOME GUY out there that does. It's a trend, not an absolute rule.

<comment><USER4> Friends of my age are all having children right now. That way I learned about the existence of pages like <http://lilypie.com/> which seems to cater for parents. What if something like that is the next killer-app? Older people would be more likely to create an application like that, I would think. Why should the "teen apps" be the only ones that are interesting?

<comment><USER3> It's not that the "teen" apps are the ones that matter. Don't take Facebook / Myspace so literally. It's pointing to the fact that major opportunities are being created that are obvious to one generation and almost oblivous from another.

<comment><USER2> Another factor can be that the previous generation doesn't see what's such a big deal about a groundbreaking technology. A lot of the folks 10 years older than me had trouble seeing what was so revolutionary about HTML and a browser (you're requesting a file and displaying it through a markup language? OK... and how is this different?) Personally, it took me a long time to grasp why blogging offered so much more than just maintaining a personal website (that said, RSS did seem very cool from the get-go). Facebook was hard to distinguish from earlier (may I call them 1.0?) applications that were "basically a bunch of web pages linked together" (a bunch of these went down with the first dot-com bubble).

So another risk is too much awareness - rather than being technically clueless, the older crowd goes too far in the other direction.

A handful of genes separates a human fom a sea cumcumber (ok, maybe a _little_ more than a handful)... uhh, how is this different from using DNA to make more DNA? ;)

<comment><USER3> @ Tichy - I really like your point about a younger generation missing out on an older trend. Perhaps we're just used to seeing more opportunities creep up from the younger generation than vice versa.

Point well made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> According to Comscore, 40% of MySpace users are over 35 and 33% of Facebook users are over 35. The numbers for people aged 18-24 on facebook is only 1% higher than the 35+ demographic.

A large number of 18-24 year olds makes sense because Facebook started out as a way for students to network, and the site's features remain optimized for people still in school.

Regarding curiosity and learning by trial and error - most people are not naturally curious. In 1994, many 42 year old people didn't understand why you would need a web page. However, neither did most 22 year olds.

<comment><USER6> This is absolutely not how myspace started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's funny how often these articles go scanned versus read.

A few points of clarification

1\. Thanks to migpwr for pointing out that facebook was just an example of the generational gap, not the point of why facebook is good or bad.

2\. The generational age issue has never been more salient than it is now since the periods between meaningful technological changes are shortening significantly.

3\. I'm over 30 and writing/building companies based on these technologies but I'm doing so as more of an outsider than an insider like before.

<comment><USER7> Additionally, the generational gap might simply mean that 30 year olds won't write the next 100%-high-school-adoption-rate app in the same way a 22 year- old probably won't write the next parenting/401k management/funeral home- related application. If you turn 30 don't give up on writing good software.

What might be a more important metric is the willingness of a certain demographic to adopt a well-written piece of software in large numbers. Will these high-schoolers grow up and be 30 year-olds flocking to new applications in droves or is there something about being young that makes you do exactly what your friends are doing?

<comment><USER3> I think as a gen-x'er we grew up in a time period (the dot com era) where much of our careers was defined by a major generational/technological change that provided us a great deal of opportunity. For that, we are aware of how these shifts can create great opportunities, but now we're becoming aware of where they can be liabilities as well. (now that we're the old guys)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, all these age articles have convinced me. I'm going to be 25 instead of 31, as that may well be the ideal age to start a startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> What a bunch of horsepoop.

Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that "INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat.

The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies.

Follow the money.

That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only metric that matters is who makes the money.

The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right.

As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit delicious facebook account to get that!

I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their well deserved and fully diluted 2% return.

Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET?

I don't.

In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".

<comment><USER3> That was the most obnoxious view of our youth I've read in a long time. Well done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So basically what he says is that over 30 you lose the ability to be excited about Windows Vista? Fine, I can live with that.

The reason I don't have a facebook account is that I used to have an Orkut account and eventually got bored with the whole thing. Perhaps the class of 2007 was too young when Orkut came out, so they try Facebook instead - eventually they might get bored, too, only time will tell.

Maybe Facebook is so much better than Orkut, but in the meantime there are so many other things to do.

Btw., I am over 30 and I am still reading articles like that, which basically refutes the article's thesis.

<comment><USER10> The class of 2007 absolutely will get bored with Facebook - I know many members of it that got bored with MySpace before it, and LiveJournal before that, and Xanga before _that_.

But in the process, they will have explored every feature of it, added dozens of third-party apps, started using it in ways the developers never intended, and possibly created a few competitors.

The point of the article, as I understood it, was to not let "But it'll be obsolete in five years!" be a reason to keep you from learning something new. Of course it'll be obsolete in five years. Chances are, your job will be too, and we'll all be using some website or technology or whatever that hasn't been invented yet.

FWIW, I have a FaceBook account, a MySpace, 2 Livejournals, 3 PlanWorlds (that's an Amherst-only social network), 2 Bloggers, a DeadJournal, a GreatestJournal, a uJournal, and a Plog. I don't use all of them regularly, but I do keep up with a good half-dozen or so of them.

<comment><USER4> I had a blog before the name was invented (diary on diaryland). Right now I am doing some Scripting for Second Life.

I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Facebook isn't the all-telling oracle. It's the fact that my ENTIRE CLASS is not on it from 1992 and the entire class is on it in 2007 that demonstrates the significant generational gap.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well... there were lots of things we _all_ used to do when me and my friends were in high school. Most of those things were... well... _absurdly dumb_ just like most things you do when you're in high school.

Nobody used to write articles "ahh! I don't get it, I'm old!" about it back then.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry, but I don't see the connection between not being on Facebook and "not getting it" as the author implies.

<comment><USER13> Which is exactly why he wrote this article...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Again with the age stories... living life fully in exploring what one loves and finds interesting, and exciting. For me personally; MySpace/Facebook do not offer anything of interest. LinkedIn offers more of what i'm interested in spending my time on.

</comment><comment><USER3> In all fairness I should have titled the article more toward what _I'M_ losing over 30!

</comment><comment><USER15> "What I'm going to lose is the benefit of learning. My experience is going to let me avoid mistakes but at the same time avoid learning from those mistakes."

This is one of the few points anyone's made in the whole age debate that I agree with.

<comment><USER16> Huh?

That makes little sense.

If you're experienced enough to avoid a mistake, you _have_ learned that lesson, and that's why you don't repeat it.

<comment><USER15> The point I took away from the article is this: There are things I have enough experience of that I will never do them (installing Vista was the example from the article). But there _may_ be things that I would learn along the way if I did install Vista that would be useful to me in some random venture.

<comment><USER17> Of course you could do something else more productive with that same amount of time, which would be even more useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You all are focusing on "Facebook" and missing the point.</comment>


Swift – observations from Rust's original designer - <AUTHOR> http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/5785.html <comment><USER2> To those wondering why Graydon is qualified in the title as just the "original" designer of Rust, it's because (as far as anyone seems to know) years of being a technical lead wore him down (lots of administrative tasks and infrastructural tasks, little coding) and the fact that the position of BDFL was foisted upon him unwillingly, to his chagrin. He abdicated the project last year, though I still keep hoping that we'll entice him back someday!

</comment><comment><USER3> He seems to generally like it -- similar to Rust in a lot of ways, but a little higher-level, which is appropriate for its intended uses (iOS and OS X apps). He nor I seem to think that it can replace Rust (especially if they don't open it up!), but it definitely seems like a compelling option.

EDIT: Does anyone know if it's possible to try it without a paid iOS / OS X dev license? I'd especially like to try the playground, but I'm not willing to dump $100 on it.

<comment><USER4> They used to offer free student developer memberships, but I think they stopped that a while back. Now you have to be part of one of the paid programs (or be part of a university that's signed up with Apple).

It is pretty disappointing that Apple is walling in Swift like this. I was excited about it to begin with, because it looks like a great language, but apparently as Microsoft moves toward openness, Apple is doing the opposite. Now I'm not really sure what to do with it.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be surprised if Apple ends up open sourcing Swift after it cleans it up, perhaps even making it an LLVM project. I see it similarly to how they handled their own AArch64 backend -- proprietary at first, but mostly for secrecy before it was announced and then merging it with the preexisting backend after it was announced.

<comment><USER4> How much cleaning up do you expect at this point? It's already both announced and released to developers. Obviously it's not 100% finished, but if they intended to open-source it, I wouldn't expect that announcement to come _after_ publicly releasing it.

<comment><USER5> They did announce they would not guarantee source compatibility until after the release date. So the language will likely change a bit still.

<comment><USER4> Huh, I must have missed that. That's definitely contrary to the message most of their stuff is putting out, which is "Go ahead and and use it to write applications." Thanks for pointing that out.

<comment><USER6> There is a context you're missing. Use it sure, but be ready for them to change things prior to GA.

This happens pretty often in their betas. First few iterations of even new frameworks can end up doing vastly different things than later versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I started work on the Swift Programming Language (wikipedia) in July of 2010. I implemented much of the basic language structure, with only a few people knowing of its existence. A few other (amazing) people started contributing in earnest late in 2011, and it became a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013. The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list."

\- Chris Lattner, [http://nondot.org/sabre/](http://nondot.org/sabre/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope ideas will flow the other way too, and Rust adopts some sugar from Swift.

I find `if let concrete = optional` _sooo_ much nicer than `match optional { (concrete) => , _ => {} }`.

Rust has solid semantics that covers more than Swift. OTOH Apple has put their UX magic into the language's syntax. Some syntax shortcuts, like `.ShortEnumWhenInContext` are delightful.

The two combined will be the perfect language ;)

<comment><USER9> Funny how this just falls out of JS (in CS):

      if concrete = optional
        call concrete

<comment><USER10> Pretty much every language to date allows this construct. And it's often considered a bad idea in languages where = is assignment because it's so easy to get it confused with == and accidentally assign to the thing you're trying to compare to, which will usually evaluate to truthy.

The special things about the way it works in Swift are:

\- You have to put let in front, thus avoiding the confusion.

\- If the RHS is optional it unwraps the option for the success branch, but the variable is not available in any other scope, thus ensuring safe use.

In JS, C, CS, Ruby, etc. you're not really doing anything useful if you assign a value to another name just for one branch of an if statement. In Swift you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does he knows something of Obj-C? Because a lot what he says coming from elsewhere was already well known in Obj-C, like named parameters, "protocols", etc. Which he barely mentions. I think in the light of Obj-C, the newer C# would be less mentioned.

<comment><USER4> Objective-C doesn't really have named parameters. Objective-C has arguments spliced into the selector at each colon. (Of course, Swift inherits the selector->parameter limitation, but it goes to somewhat greater lengths to hide it.)

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure that Objective-C's named parameters actually have priority over all other forms, being from the nearly identical form they took in Smalltalk. It's only recently that languages have had the looser form of named parameters where their order doesn't matter and they're mostly just a way to disambiguate default arguments.

The Smalltalk form is actually more powerful, since it gives you a kind of multiple dispatch (a.la. C++ argument overloading) that would be quite expensive in a non-statically typed language otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aren't the interfaces-as-generics constraints also from c#? It seems to be c# more than anything else.

<comment><USER13> One of the Swift developers is a former F# dev:

[https://twitter.com/jopamer](https://twitter.com/jopamer)

The language seems more closer to F# than C# to me. It's all good though!

<comment><USER14> He is also a former typescript developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the distinctive features of Rust that Swift has that aren't in some way derived from ObjC? (I'm sure there are some; I just don't know Rust.)

<comment><USER16> Nothing unique to rust.

The biggest thing I see is that it's an imperative language with functional- style ADT's, tuples, sum types, etc.

It also looks fairly similar syntactically (all those let's).

Not sure if there are other things it has in common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> He doesn't seem to know much about iOS or Objective-C due to that comment about parameter names probably being unused. You wouldn't be able to make meaningful method selectors calling into the code from Objective-C without them, since the names of the parameters are part of the method name in Objective-C.

<comment><USER18> Method parameter names are used similarly in Swift as in ObjC. For example two methods can have the same name, as long as they have a difference set of parameters. For example:

        func methodName(paramName: String)

and

        func methodName(paramName: String, otherParam: Int)

are different.

I'm still playing with this but there are some interesting/weird things in here. What follows is a bunch of random observations of how named params work in Swift / ObjC. For instance:

        func methodName(name name: String)

Can be shortened using a pound symbol, because the variable name within the method, and the parameter name are the same thing:

        func methodName(#name: String)

It also seems that most of the Cocoa APIs follow a convention, when called from Swift, of having an unnamed first parameter, and a named second parameter. e.g. this:

        -(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath

becomes:

        func tableView(tableView: UITableView!, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath!) -> UITableViewCell!

which means it's called like so:

        myObject.tableView(tableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath: indexPath)

If you name a parameter, you have to use the name. The order of parameters matters, and there doesn't seem to be a way to define optional method parameters (make sense as parameter names are essentially ObjC "selectors").

<comment><USER19> > and there doesn't seem to be a way to define optional method parameters

Did you miss the part about default values?

If you're calling an Objective-C selector with more than one argument, you are indeed using an external parameter name, but external parameters are explicitly not required if you're writing pure Swift.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/Functions.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014097-CH10-XID_213)

<comment><USER18> Oh cool, I definitely missed that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lack of expressions and a macro system are really unfortunate.

<comment><USER21> Thank god they didn't unleash a macro system on everyone.

<comment><USER20> Macro system != C preprocessor.

<comment><USER22> To be honest I would be disappointed if they let loose a macro system that is as incomplete as the C preprocessor. I'll be much happier if in a year or two they add a proper, more well thought out macro system to the language which aids in readability rather than ruins it.

Now, we'll likely not get the Lisp macro system in all its glory, but I think the point to take away (despite the short parent comment) is that its almost better not to have a broken macro system than something that is rushed an not properly implemented.

<comment><USER23> The C preprocessor is bad enough; it's much better if a separate macro language can be avoided altogether, leaving a single consistent syntax for the language. If there has to be a macro system, I would greatly prefer a simple preprocessor to a more powerful system that would allow even greater convolution of the syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A lot of the features allegedly inspired by C# actually come directly from Objective-C. It's a decent discussion (I also skimmed the manual front to back after the presentation) but it's sad the writer appears ignorant of how advanced a language Objective-C is/was, especially since it significantly predated C++, let alone Java and C#.

<comment><USER25> Sure, but can you explain which features rather than leaving off at the author is "ignorant".

Are there features in Objective-C available now that weren't present back in the early days? Perhaps this is what the author means? Has Objective-C drawn inspiration from newer languages such as C# or Java?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Protocols get to play double duty as either concrete types (in which case they denote a reference type you can acquire with as from any supporting type) and as type constraints on type parameters in generic code. This is a delightful convenience Rust stumbled into when designing its trait system and I'm glad to see other languages picking it up. I'm sure it has precedent elsewhere." \- C# again.

PS: Apple says "Swift is an _innovative_ new programming language"! Just like everything else they do lately!

<comment><USER27> I pretty much only know Java and shell script. Could someone perhaps explain what this "double duty" is? A small example would be really helpful.

<comment><USER26> // protocol = interface

interface ISample { void Process(); }

ISample sample = new ConcreteSample(); // Duty #1

class GenericSampleProcessor<T> : where T : ISample // Duty #2

{ public void Process(T sample) { sample.Process(); } }

<comment><USER27> Ah, i see, thanks.

It's the same in Java:

      ISample sample = new ConcreteSample(); // Duty #1

      class GenericSampleProcessor<T extends ISample> // Duty #2

Java got generics in 1.5, released September 2004, and bounded types like this were in that release. C# got generics in 2.0, released in November 2005, and i imagine it had them too. I assume Java lifted this idea from elsewhere. I am really quite surprised that Mr Hoare thinks this is a novel discovery in Rust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is the official Book coming from Apple: The Swift Programming Language by Apple Inc.

Link: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming- langu...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming- language/id881256329?mt=11)

Hope it helps.

</comment><comment><USER29> Couple of things that are still not clear to me, even when people keep saying that it's similar to C#:

\- How about Garbage Collection?

\- Many mentions to "type inference", is it then a statically-typed language? Or is it hybrid?

<comment><USER30> \- Garbage Collection is handled via reference counting and ARC. No automatic cycle detection, the programmer has to manually track and resolve reference cycles. Same as using ARC in Objective C.

\- It is a statically typed language. Type inference is the same mechanism as is used in C++11 with the auto keyword. Basically, anywhere the compiler can "guess" the type, you don't have to be explicit about it. Unless you want the variable to have a different type from the inferred type, that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think the author is seeing a little more than there actually is. There is a lot more overlap between Swift and C#/Java than with Rust. Actually, I see very little Rust in Swift, except for very trivial features that are present in 90% of C-based languages.

But hey, any opportunity to pimp your favorite language is fair.

<comment><USER32> It is common when a new language appears to authors to see similarity with their own language. Actually, most of the features of Swift were already implemented in some older language. Extended pattern matching for example exists in Scala.

<comment><USER33> ... and in many other languages way before scala.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yeah, that's all good. But why call people who understand that programming environments should not be opaque (and not violate elementary laws of design by obscuring readings of system's state) "livecoding nerds"? Really, why? :)

<comment><USER35> Perhaps because he doesn't see 'nerd' as pejorative.

<comment><USER34> Well, me neither. :) Although it looks a little bit suspicious in the text. But what's the relation between 'not throwing crucial design principles out of the window this time' (by not creating opaque, contrived and state-hiding system because tradition seems to approve it) and 'Live Coding' (where people see process of writing code in real-time as a part of artistic performance)?</comment></comment></comment>


Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 5: Sex, Power and Tips - <AUTHOR> http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-5-sex-power-tips/

<comment><USER2> This is a very interesting but dangerous post: It's interesting because obviously the author has put a lot of thought into the topic and has done _some_ research. However, for me, it clearly shows the danger of ideology, in fact it's a great example of it. "To be ideological is to preconceive reality." and we have a good example of that here: The author has strong opinions about sexuality and our approaches to it, there's nothing wrong with this, it's a prior. But then he starts using bits of "proofs", examples from music and literature, and the tipping experiment to bolster these claims.

Take the claim "The meme of sleeping with our waitress is important to Americans." This may or may not be true (why Americans are singled out is an interesting questions). He then cites a song, a _sex and the City_ episode and a bartender's essay to back this up.

The later part of the post is devoted to an analysis of how our monogamous human sexuality evolved, based on text lifted off from a single book. And towards the end he switches to the notion of the waitress as a "sexual worker".

Now for the interesting part. Although his non-tipping restaurant experiment did NOT provide any proof for his theory he still views it as if it did on hypothetical grounds.

For a much better treatment of some of these ideas, consider: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolu...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/are_humans_monogamous_or_polygamous_the_evolution_of_human_mating_strategies_.html)

<comment><USER3> I don't fully get this. It's the nth article about non technical topics I come across where the first comments start with ripping the content and the author apart. Always in such a subtle but mental and aggressive way. The other article which comes to mind was the post about the 10 simple things which make you happier from yesterday.

It seems to reflect how narrow minded this community outside of technical problems and business models actually is.

<comment><USER4> Hold on. It's reasonable to critique an article on the basis of the evidence given (or the lack thereof.) That is what the parent commenter is doing.

It is a big theme in HN, but why not give all ideas the same treatment? What is your thesis, your pitch, and have you made your case? What are the holes, where do you need work?

How do you evaluate ideas, if not by critique?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I enjoyed the discussion here on HN regarding the 2nd article in this series:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6126926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6126926)

This time around the early comments all seem to be negative.

I've now read the 5 published articles and have been really impressed with the this guy's insights. They have greatly aligned with what I've noticed, as someone who was born and raised in a non-tipping culture (I'm Australian) and who has come to live in the US two years ago (at the age of 34).

Back in Australia I had tipped in restaurants on occasion, to reward amazing service, excellent dining experiences and to be honest as a form of flirtation.

Coming to the US where you "have" to tip I noticed a real difference in the experience. Overly attentive servers, forced friendliness, expectations from both sides.... just different.

Trying to explain these things to my American friends was difficult. But I think these articles have really summed it up well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found the series of articles as a whole to be an enlightening account from the perspective of a restaurateur who tried new things in San Diego.

This was Part of 5 of a series that begins here:

[http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a- tipless-...](http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless- restaurant-part-1-overview/)

Prior to this aside from being a patron of restaurants my only knowledge of the restaurant biz was based on Setting the Table which Fred Wilson blogged about here:

[http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/setting_the_tab.html](http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/01/setting_the_tab.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of an Amtrak ride along the CA coast, where the 50yo man next to me enjoyed sparring w/ the young female stewardess/whatever over the course of several hours, until the climax: he offered to take her into a bathroom and put her on a diaper changing table. I don't believe she was thrilled to hear the proposal.

There are men like that. So what? Long-winded article w/ poor quality of evidence and thinking.

</comment><comment><USER7> In New Zealand, there is typically no tipping (it reflects excellent service, instead of expected), it's already built into the price - not even listed as a fixed service charge percentage.

Perhaps the complaints have more to do with seeing something listed on the bill that you didn't order. If it was removed entirely instead of being presented as a tax, that might change the response.

<comment><USER8> But then the prices of the food would be more expensive to compensate, which is arguably the reason that the tipping culture has been created in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _I'm proposing that tipping allows us to assign women a role where any > sexuality they display can be attributed not to their desires but instead to > their greed for money. In doing so, we both dehumanize and desexualize > women, in large numbers._

Sorry, but as merely a "guy's opinion", this is pretty worthless. Maybe if he brought in some quotes from actual women working as waitresses, it would be more convincing and he could make a case.

But it's just far, far too simplistic. Maybe some guys look at waitresses that way... but that doesn't mean all of them do, or even a majority do. Lots of people disrespect lots of service workers, period. And why stop with women? What about hunky bartenders hired for their biceps or handsome faces, to attract a nice female clientele? Are they dehumanized as well?

This blog posts starts out with some interesting observations, but quickly veers into drawing unwarranted universal conclusions, making waaaay too many assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I tip more than 20% because the server minimum wage in Massachusetts is $2.63/hour. It is that simple. You would be surprised the number of people who think that a server is getting $8/hour with tips added on top.

I'm a heterosexual male in the age range that this guy is remarking on but I tip male servers and older women the same as I tip younger women. He is stereotyping. No doubt there are some who see tipping as a sexual power trip but probably in no higher percentage than any other endeavor.

<comment><USER11> Just because you're being altruistic doesn't mean everyone else is.

>No doubt there are some who see tipping as a sexual power trip but probably in no higher percentage than any other endeavor.

I don't follow you. In what other aspect of everyday life is someone forced to converse with you, meet your every whim, and then afterwards you get to decide how much money they take home?

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra You never know where those fixed-service-percentage money go to.

I've visited quite a few 10% "service" restaurants and I often leave a small tip on top of that because I'm entirely not sure whether waiters see any money from that "service".

The whole scheme is ridiculous: If you pay 18% for service, what are you paying the rest of 100% for? It doesn't make much sense. Just name your final price.

<comment><USER12> > and I often leave a small tip on top of that because I'm entirely not sure > whether waiters see any money from that "service".

Isn't this a crazy sentiment though? It's like we've all been trained to pity waiters and unless we're handing them money directly we're worried they might go home empty handed. How did we get to this point?

<comment> guard-of-terra Yeah it is a crazy sentiment.

If we weren't crazy on this part we would refuse paying anything not on the bill. Like we do in grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you like this sort of analysis, try The Last Psychiatrist.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> I still find the entire idea of tipping to be super silly. Those people are being paid to do their jobs,and you leave them tips if they do them well? Why? I understand that in the US waiters are paid less because they also get tips,but that entire system is wrong(in my personal opinion) - you are going to a restaurant, you should be paying exactly what it says in the menu, not more,not less.

<comment><USER15> The system of tipping in the US is used to skirt around minimum wage laws and to push the cost of labor onto the customer, which makes eating out at restaurants seem deceptively cheaper than in other countries.

<comment><USER16> And the servers are often happy with this arrangement, because unlike a higher wage, the cash tips are rarely correctly reported as income and thus perceived as tax-free. Other than the damage to rule-of-law and personal integrity, everyone wins!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These articles are repetitive, overly wordy, patronizing, pretend-smart and filled with straw men and other logical fallacies, and finally simply not that interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> My wife gets angry if I don't tip 20%, so a place with a built in tip that is less is a bonus for me.</comment>


Remote ≠ Isolated: CEO of Gitlab Speaks of What Makes Remote Work a Success - <AUTHOR> https://youteam.io/blog/gitlab-ceo-sid-sijbrandij-speaks-of-remote-work-success/ <comment><USER2> I've got a problem with GitLabs recruiting practices. They actively mine for email addresses and reach out and then if you want to hear about their culture or practices they won't get on a call but send you a large survey like your are pursuing them. Pretty disrespectful of folks time and a red flag. Hopefully they stop this.

<comment><USER3> Hey andymoe. I am one of the recruiting managers here at GitLab. Candidate experience is important to us and we want to make sure our process reflects that. If you would be open to it, I would like to schedule some time to chat with you. I want to understand what may have happened as I am not aware of any part of our recruiting process that resembles what you have mentioned.

<comment><USER2> Happy to chat. Email is in my Profile.

<comment><USER3> Email sent. I look forward to the conversation.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the conversation and clearing this up. Glad to hear this is no longer the approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You don't have to be remote to feel isolated either.

I'm the only Dev at my company which is itself pretty isolating fortunately I'm both an introvert by nature and I have my IRC water cooler.

I work with lovely people but our work doesn't really overlap except when discussing UI/UX stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to hear that man! Indeed, people are beckoming more and more self- adsorbed these days.I hope you find the way to reconnect with your colleagues.

<comment><USER4> It's fine, I'd like to work with a team but I also like autonomy and a 37.5 9-5.

With my health bullshit I value that.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SongBranch – An interactive song lyric visualization experiment - <AUTHOR> http://songbranch.com <comment><USER2> Hah, I did something similar around ~2007 when I was at Last.fm and never got around to publishing it. Nice work!

This is the only example I can find lying around in my backups: [http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png](http://jonty.co.uk/bits/radiohead_creep_lyricviz.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, jonty. I like your layout choice, makes it more readable. What do the colors and arrow tips represent?

<comment><USER2> I actually had a version using force-directed layout very similar to yours, took me a while to decide on this version!

Each colour is a verse, fading through the spectrum.

An unfilled arrowhead shows a transition between words in a line of a verse, a filled arrowhead shows a transition between lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a pretty neat approach, maybe I should do something similar. Originally I color-coded the words (based on frequency) but having a gradual spectrum applied to the edges feels a lot more intuitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those that are interested, I'm basically using lyrics-fetcher to conduct the song searches (via [http://makeitpersonal.co](http://makeitpersonal.co)) and Springy for the core visualization.

</comment><comment><USER3> Daft Punk's "Technologic" is entertaining:

[https://i.imgur.com/JKxZ8zC.png](https://i.imgur.com/JKxZ8zC.png)

Nice work! Wish it had sharable URLs for specific songs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it :) The share buttons actually use the current page you are on, but I can see how it would be much more useful to just update the URL based on the search pattern.

Until I fix that, here's an example of how to deep link to a particular search:

[http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=tech...](http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=technologic)

<comment><USER3> Ah, thanks! I missed the share button. I shared a screenshot (with credit) to r/DaftPunk which got a kick out of it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/4b4l3m/technologi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/4b4l3m/technologic_the_flowchart/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's fun, I did KC and the Sunshine Band "Shake your booty"

[http://i.imgur.com/ia6RNHK.png](http://i.imgur.com/ia6RNHK.png)

mainly just to see how many arrows would go to the word "shake"

</comment><comment><USER5> Eminem's songs can be used to stress-test the visualization

<comment><USER6> They certainly can: [http://songbranch.com/?artistName=eminem&songTitle=the%20rea...](http://songbranch.com/?artistName=eminem&songTitle=the%20real%20slim%20shady)

<comment><USER7> Excellent example of a stress test - of course it's people on HN who would think of doing something like this. I wonder if the whole genre of rap and hip hop is particularly difficult to process, due to the sheer number of words in each song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool. Thanks for sharing. I tried a long song with a lot of unique lines and the detailed view is a jumbled mess that won't stop erratically moving. See Redemption's Sapphire for an example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha yup - maybe not so great for epic ballads :)

<comment><USER9> yeah, try Lou Reed's Street Hassle ... ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for stress testing, I made a fix this morning to reduce the spazziness :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting, played around a number of songs, though it seems to wig out badly on "Born Slippy":

[http://songbranch.com/?artistName=underworld&songTitle=born+...](http://songbranch.com/?artistName=underworld&songTitle=born+slippy)

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of infinite jukebox for endlessly playing a song without it becoming too tedious from repetition [http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html](http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice idea (BTW: how does it cut text into sequences of words) abut the search is crappy (I tried a few times, no results). Maybe a single search (for both author and title) with references as you type? It would be really, really helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion, I had thought of having a single field earlier (delimiting artist and title with a '-') but I thought that most users might find it cumbersome.

To generate the final graph, I started by more or less splitting the entire song into a list of words, then iteratively rejoining fragments in an order based on frequency of occurrence.

<comment><USER12> Actually I meant without having to write it all (especially as artists have a few names, e.g. with different initials). So e.g. after writing "Rammstein" I would be getting "Rammstein - Sonne", "Rammstein - Amerika" etc.

So, something Google-like rather than SQL-query-like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh do you mean auto-complete? Not that easy to support since I'm relying on a remote server for song lyric searches

<comment><USER12> I see. So in that case it would be great to have a predefined list of good (and well-know) examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where does the lyrics data come from? I've looked into lyrics datasets before for side projects, but copyright seems to be crippling everyone's attempts at providing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I've had similar difficulty. I ended up using [http://makeitpersonal.co](http://makeitpersonal.co) since it appeared to have decent coverage of most of the songs I searched on.

<comment><USER14> I used Lyric Wiki ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyricWiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyricWiki)) to look at song lyrics by parts of speech ([http://colorsong.herokuapp.com/](http://colorsong.herokuapp.com/)) it works pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really awesome work, something cool (but I have no idea how feasable) would be listening to the song while you jump around. Other than that awesome work

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion, I had originally wanted to create something like that, but I figure folks can just open up a separate YouTube window for that. Would also love to have the timing be in sync (ala Karaoke) but I'm not aware of any open database that stores that kind of metadata.

<comment><USER2> I believe MusixMatch has timing data (it's what the Shazam karaoke mode uses), however I'm unsure if the free API allows access to it. Worth a look though. [https://developer.musixmatch.com](https://developer.musixmatch.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jonty, looks like a fine resource, though it's a bit expensive to use ($25000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is amazing! Well done. Blues flows beautifully. My colleague wanted to know if this uses d3.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Springy.JS ( [http://getspringy.com/](http://getspringy.com/) ) It's a pretty awesome library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice job, Bob Dylan's songs are fun to watch on this

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm a HUGE Bob Dylan fan, incidentally :)</comment></comment>


Apple Chiefs Discuss Strategy, Market Share, and the New iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/cook-ive-and-federighi-on-the-new-iphone-and-apples-once-and-future-strategy#p1 <comment><USER2> There's a lot of middle ground between Apple's current exceptional margins and the bottom feeders. I'm not sure why this is always cast in such black & white terms. Apple has a lot of pricing options open here that would enlarge their market share without sacrificing anything essential in performance or build quality.

And please let's not have any Mercedes analogies. It doesn't matter to me what car my friends drive but the network effects of mobile ecosystems are very real.

<comment><USER3> Except that Apple really honestly don't care about market share. They want to capture the high margins and profits in the premium end of the market, and that's it. Going too far down market would threaten to undercut the value proposition of their premium products too much.

The corollary of this is that Apple knows there is a large 'junk' end of the market, and they don't care who captures it. Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Symbian? It doesn't matter. There's not enough profit there to be worth it. It happens to be that Android has captured the lion's share of that end of the market, and therefore dominates sales numbers. Doesn't matter. Whether one OS dominates the low end, or a dozen OSes split it between them makes no difference to Apple as long as they keep producing consistently high quality products that sell well.

Just look at the PC industry. Apple makes as much or more profit than all the Windows licensees put together. Windows market share domination has actually played into Apple's hands by forcing Windows Licensees in a race to the bottom against each other, leaving Apple the only high quality premium PC hardware vendor outside the server market. Selling lower priced Macs would just undercut their own high end sales and margins, and the same goes for phones.

<comment><USER2> These are the same black & white terms people usually use to frame this debate but the iPad mini has already demonstrated that there's room under the premium tier for quality products and healthy margins. Apple's dwindling market share undermines their efforts to establish Facetime, iMessage, iCloud etc as popular services.

The problem with dismissing the low end of the market as "junk" is that this segment of the market is increasingly made up of reasonably capable phones with Android 4.x, which is good enough to serve most people's needs. We've already hit the point of diminishing returns on increasingly powerful mobile chips.

<comment><USER4> I tend to agree with you that partitioning the market into two tiers ("junk" and "premium" in particular) is an artificial distinction but I disagree with your characterization of the iPad mini as something from the bottom tier. It is a different form factor, but that isn't the same thing as lower quality or less featureful.

Apple isn't afraid to use form factors, feature sets, and multiple SKUs to partition the market it is just that they focus on partitioning the upper-end of the market and not the entire market.

I wonder if Apple could ever manage multiple brands to partition the market even further in the way that Gap Inc, partitions the clothing retail market via its Banana Republic, Gap, and Old Navy brands.

<comment><USER2> _I disagree with your characterization of the iPad mini as something from the bottom tier._

My point is that the iPad mini is neither premium nor junk, but somewhere in the middle. It expands Apple's user base and makes them a tidy per-unit profit. Like a lot of people, I was hoping the iPhone 5C would be a similarly mid-tier priced device that would open up new markets for them but unfortunately (IMO) a premium-priced phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get what he's saying but it rubs me the wrong way.

What he is saying is that he only wants to serve the richest 10% of the market. That's his choice. But I think it will ultimately be their demise.

The rest of the world needs phones too. Is an iPhone 4 class phone really so out of date that someone in India can't use it?

I think they could. I think it'd be orders of magnitude better than what they currently use.

What I think is this: He is worried that nobody would buy the 5S if there was a cheap 4 because the 4 is what 90% of us need (not want) and is at the price point that the 90% of us need it to be at.

<comment><USER6> 90% of the economic profits are to be found in the top 10% of the market. Simple as that. By going after the low-end, they are chasing after a market which is arguably smaller in profits than the market they have yet to capture (namely the high end -- they are strong but haven't expanded to everyone yet) and risk losing customers (that would get the low-end device rather than the high-end)

The flaw in your logic manifests itself in many places, including app store revenues (comparing iOS to Android)

<comment><USER7> > The flaw in your logic manifests itself in many places, including app store > revenues (comparing iOS to Android)

I think this is what so many people ignore when trying to compare ecosystems. People who have a major focus on what they spend on their phone are also going to have a major focus on what they spend on phones.

The last figures I heard: Android lead iOS by 10% on app downloads, but the iOS App Store generated over 2x revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure about the context but Tim Cook's statement sounds arrogant.

People in 3rd-world countries use these "junk" phones to improve their lives.

Even here in the US, some of the poor doesn't own a PC but own a cheap Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the > automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?_

That's the money quote to me.

For some reason everyone continues to think Apple should try to be the Toyota or Kia of the computer world, but in reality, it's perfectly acceptable to be BMW or Mercedes.

<comment><USER10> You make it sound as if that's some original thought from Apple headquarters. I've seen that comparison for _years_ in blog comments. I swear sometimes it felt that even Steve Jobs got his talking points from blog comments.

<comment><USER9> Oh no, not at all. I realize this has been around for a long, long time (in fact the quote is attributed to Jobs).

I personally think it's as important today as it was back then, and people need to be reminded of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Title: _Apple 's Cook: "We' re not in junk business"_

Actual Title: Apple Chiefs Discuss Strategy, Market Share—and the New iPhones

</comment><comment><USER12> So their answer to Android eating their lunch in market share is, "we weren't hungry anyway"?</comment>