Overview of Text Editors for Programming on the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://smyck.net/2011/10/02/text-editors-for-programmers-on-the-mac/ <comment><USER2> I've just had a look at sublime text 2, and it's everything I'm looking for in a textmate replacement. After several abortive attempts to enjoy coding in macvim, I can't believe I didn't try this sooner.

EDIT: does anyone know how I can get two different projects in different sides of a split in the same window? I know this is going against OSX's window management paradigm, but I'm sick of pressing CMD ~ all day, trying to mentally model a stack of windows in LRU/z-order is a cognitive burden I can do without.

EDIT: I love how the Preferences menu item just opens the config file.

EDIT: OMG OMG it actually goes to the most recently open tab on tab close by default, rather than the one on the left! Hallelujah! It kills me that browsers still don't do this.

<comment><USER3> _Goto Anything_ and its composability[0] deserves an EDIT :)

[0] [http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime- text-2-publ...](http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime- text-2-public-alpha)

<comment><USER2> Also the minimap is, in the words of my mate Gaz, "fucking leet."

<comment><USER4> 1337

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just recently switched to Sublime Text 2, and a after a solid week of coding in it, I must say I'm hooked. It's the best editor I've ever used.

I'm writing Boo, both client-side (Unity3D) and server-side (between Mongrel2 and Redis), and all it took was for me to drop in the Boo TextMate bundle and away we went.

The Boo bundle is outdated and needs some love, and Unity integration is missing, but Sublime is so nice that it really seems worth the effort of getting these things set up (when I can get around to it). For now, however, I'm quite happy with it.

Before the switch I jumped around (angrily) between Unitron (Unity's Smultron fork), Smultron, MonoDevelop (still sucks on Mac), GEdit (great editor, but GTK looks like shit on Mac), and tried several others without satisfaction.

Sublime is like a breath of fresh air.

</comment><comment><USER6> For Emacs users, Plain ol' GNU Emacs[1] is almost as tickbox compliant as Aquamacs, and has the benefits of not breaking a whole lot of existing stuff by trying to retrofit it with a 'Mac OSX User Experience'.

If you're familiar with standard emacs settings[2] (and have the appropriate vitriol for those who falter into cua-mode), then <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AquamacsFAQ> might be of use.

[1] Fairly recent binary builds are maintained at <http://emacsformacosx.com/>

[2] or, more probably, a config built over several years of slow accretion.

<comment><USER7> I use Aquamacs with Unity to develop games. Opening a script file into an Aquamacs buffer by just clicking on it in Unity is very useful to me.

<comment><USER6> That should be fairly achievable with either-macs.

I started out with Aquamacs, but ended up getting annoyed with enough of the differences that I finally switched back to the (then Carbon, now Cocoa) emacs.

Most of the useful settings live in the _ns-_ customize-variable land.

        ; open all new files in existing frame
        (setq ns-pop-up-frames nil)
        ; make Cmd act as meta.
        (setq ns-command-modifier 'meta)
        ; ... C-h v ns- TAB TAB

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are a programmer, do yourself a favor and learn vi[m] or emacs. You are then ready to hit the ground running on any platform upon which you happen to find yourself working. vi in particular is almost always available on any *nix environment unless it's been deliberately removed as part of a "hardened" configuration. Emacs also is often installed, or if not is easily obtained. Both editors are also available for Windows.

<comment><USER9> I just started playing around with vim. I still use Sublime for most of my editing, but I enabled Vintage mode so I can test myself occasionally. I have also run through vimtutor a few times.

Finally, I made vim my default terminal editor, which forces me to use it for tasks like finishing my interactive Git rebase sessions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand what the Aquamacs people are doing, but I think it's a big mistake. What makes Emacs so useful is not adherence to platform standards, but that it is a Lisp runtime with a lot of highly specialized text manipulation primitives that people have been hacking on for years.

It's an autarky wherever it runs, so let it be. I'm as big a proponent of the Macengeist (or whatever you want to call the ineffable quality that makes a good Macintosh application) as anyone I know, but Emacs is it's own world. Best to use straightforward Emacs 23 or 24 as a portal into that world, rather than trying to shoehorn alien concepts into it.

Now, building it on OS X can be a PITA -- not that it's not fully supported, but some stuff could be in better locations than the hated /usr/local. But that's an argument against myself that I'd prefer not to have at this exact moment.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to build emacs to get a modern version without all the Aquamacs hoo-ha. I've been using the build at <http://emacsformacosx.com/> ever since carbon emacs was discontinued. It's a nice, no surprises build.

<comment><USER10> No, I was more referring to how you have to override a bunch of environment variables in the build and do some edits to Makefile.in to prevent irritating warnings about non-existent directories when you build it yourself. There's nothing wrong at all about <http://emacsformacosx.com>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Sublime Text 2 developer is wonderfully responsive. I've emailed suggestions twice and they were both implemented and in short order.

I was disappointed that discussions on the Mac-centric 5by5 podcast network framed BBEdit as the only place to go from TextMate. Granted, BBEdit has a history of not being abandoned, but it's clearly near the end of its evolution while bright new things like Sublime are blazing forward.

<comment><USER12> Which Mac-centric 5by5 podcast are you talking about? If it's "The Talk Show" keep in mind that John Gruber used to work for Bare Bones Software (the makers of BBEdit), so take his recommendation with a grain of salt.

I'll repeat myself from other comments here on HN. Sublime Text 2 is _amazing_ and worth every penny of the $59 it costs.

<comment><USER3> IIRC _Hypercritical_ , _Build & Analyze_ and _Back to Work_. 5by5 is packed with Mac nerds!

I stopped subscribing to The Talk Show during its original run because John's manner was so lethargic. I like his site but not his podcast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is a little too light on details.

In particular Kod seems to have stagnated completely, there has been no updates to the source tree since June 20th, and even before that the updates were very light. Kod is an interesting idea, but in it's current state I didn't find it very usable.

<comment><USER14> And a week late on the TextMate 2 announcement: <http://blog.macromates.com/2011/whats-next/>

<comment><USER15> Not at all, he mentions the announcement and includes the link in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I, for one, am astonished at quality and release frequency Jon Skinner (the author of Sublime Text 2) has been able to achieve. Perhaps he has help, but that doesn't appear to be the case. He has made steady, incremental, and visible progress that keeps giving people reasons to buy his product.

Here's to hoping he figures out how to make the configuration a little easier for non-programmer types to deal with.

<comment><USER16> You've piqued my curiosity. (and exposed my seemingly limited imagination) What are you using a text editor like sublime for other than coding?

<comment><USER12> All general editing. Blog posts, notes, etc. I stick to a regular text editor for _all_ editing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sublime Text 2 actually comes bundled plugin that enables vi keybindings. More info here:

<http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html>

Here, have some cake.

</comment><comment><USER18> 100% agree with his conclusion. For textmate fans who havent been able to make the jump to vim or emacs, try sublime text 2. It blows away textmate in every dept, and is incredibly extendable. Theres nothing out there thats more powerful (aside from vim/emacs)

<comment><USER19> Even in the documentation department?

<comment><USER20> Well, nearly all settings are documented in:

        Packages/Default/*.sublime-settings

All default keyboard shortcuts are in:

        Packages/Default/*.sublime-keymap

So, yes, there is plenty of documentation, but not on the website ;).

<comment><USER19> Indeed, there are some comments in the config files... :)

Vim and BBEdit have the best documentation:

<http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/manual.html>

<http://www.truth.sk/vim/vimbook-OPL.pdf>

TextMate's manual isn't too bad:

<http://manual.macromates.com/en/all_pages.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using MacVim on a daily basis lately and I don't get why everyone is so excited about Sublime Text 2. Does it have git integration, VCS integration, autocomplete, good plugin management, etc? Or is it just a better Textmate?

<comment><USER22> Yes, to all of those.

I've been using MacVim for ages, but after trying out Sublime Text 2 for a few days, installing a couple of plugins (a pep8 & pylint checker, and a git one), and learning most of the shortcuts I need, I'm completely hooked.

The minimap is just the icing on the cake.

Now if only I could find a Bazaar plugin...

<comment><USER21> Where can I get information about setting/configuring Sublime ? I would like to try it out but only if I can figure out how to set it up the "right" way. For MacVim I just read one of the numerous blog posts on setting up vundle and reading a few other people's .vimrc files.

<comment><USER22> Apart from installing the plugins (details depend on the plugin, but basically git clone into the right path), I've not done anything else but learn the shortcuts. Sublime Text 2 works the way (split views, Command-T, pyflakes etc.) that I wanted without all the configuring that was needed in (Mac)Vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some years ago wanted to try Textmate but then couldn't afford to buy a Mac. Being multiplatform is a plus for Vim, Sublime and Komodo. Not being is a deal breaker for Textmate (Mac) and Notepad++ (Windows). Also love the fact that with just one license I can run Sublime on OS X, Linux and Windows so thinks it's not expensive.

<comment><USER24> Yeah. Cross platform availability is definitely a must these days. For some time, E-texteditor looked like it could be Textmate on Windows. By now it is just as much vaporware as Textmate itself, though. A pity, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The reason I switched from TextMate to Vim was simple: portability. I can keep my environments at work (Windows) and home (OSX) the same. Editors naturally prompt a deep investment in studying, plug-in finding, and muscle memory if you really want to use them to their fullest. I didn't want to split my investment between TextMate and <some Windows editor>, so I started the long process of getting familiar with Vim. I do miss some of the native flavor of TextMate, but the comfort of having my entire suite of plug-ins and shortcuts apply virtually anywhere (e.g. logged into some VPS) is really helpful.

If I was mostly in OSX it would be a different story, but for the cross- platform developer, I really think the Vim and Emacs options are the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER26> Agree with the conclusion. I used TextMate for a while. Then I came to Sublime Text 2 and think it's the best editor ever.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been on a Mac a few years and tried a few editors, so (for what it's worth) here's my 2c. Main use case is scripting and Rails development.

Smultron: Used this a bit. not bad but I didn't really take to it. Missing a number of features

Vi: still use it regularly, but I don't have much skill with it. Extra handy for quick editing of a single file (I use the command line a lot so vi is convenient)

Aquamacs/Emacs: Gave this a shot but really had no idea how to use it. Gave up in the end

Netbeans: Been using this for years and found it mostly the best fir for my needs. Looked around when Orace took it over and ended up with...

Rubymine: Excellent. Great fit for me, although I'm still on 3.1 as the newer releases run like molasses on my aging macbook. It's a bit heavyweight, but it has a ton of really useful features.

Kod: Showed great promise as a Scite replacement but seems to have been abandoned. (Scite was what I used in Windows for years. fantastic once you change the default fonts)

Texmate: Used the demo, couldn't see what it offered over netbeans

GEdit: Used this all the time in Linux and was surprised to find it runs fine out of the box on the Mac! Great for reading extra large files like long logs etc.

Textwrangler: For some reason I really can't get to liking this. I give it a shot again every now and then but it just doesn't seem to work the way I do

Coda: Looks lovely but I just couldn't get over the price.

<comment><USER28> > GEdit: Used this all the time in Linux and was surprised to find it runs > fine out of the box on the Mac! Great for reading extra large files like > long logs etc.

Does Gedit for require X11?

<comment><USER27> I honestly have no idea, but I guess so. Here's the page <http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/> link to dmg is on the rhs. I was very pleased to see it looks just like gedit should (they haven't os-x-ified it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> how do you write such article without using screenshots :s

</comment><comment><USER30> I just tried Vico (free trial downloadable from the website), and damn is it nice. I'm a huge fan of ST2, and I've been playing around with Vintage mode, but so far it just isn't enough for me: my poor fingers get confused by Vim operations that aren't supported. Vico has much better Vim support (although still not complete), and it's just as shiny as ST2 to boot. Anyone else have experiences with Vico to share?

<comment><USER31> Vico basically rocks my planet. It's got shortcomings, but it's scriptable using Nu, and you have access to all of Cocoa when scripting, so there's definitely room for big, awesome improvements. For example, I reimplemented a subset of the zz/zt/zb functionality in just a few lines of Nu ([https://github.com/Shadowfiend/vico-fill-in-the- blanks.tmbun...](https://github.com/Shadowfiend/vico-fill-in-the- blanks.tmbundle)), added the ability to run an external console process and pipe its output to a vico buffer in a few more (<https://github.com/Shadowfiend/pointy-haired-boss.tmbundle>) and then implemented support for Scala's simple-build-tool on top of that in a few more (<https://github.com/Shadowfiend/simple-build-tool.tmbundle>). 250 lines of Nu altogether. Epically awesome.

I'm still missing a couple of key functions, especially `` when doing searches, but vico is already awesome and can only become more so with progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Komodo Edit (<http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit>) anyone?

<comment><USER33> yes! komodo edit is awesome

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would just like to throw in that the major obstacle to my finding an editor on Mac OS X has been the pricetag involved with most of the more popular editors. Sure, $60 isn't much if you already have a stable programming job, but I am a college student (which is financially the exact opposite of a stable programming job), and as a college student I am generally highly adverse to paying for things (especially software, since I "grew up" as a programmer among Linux and OSS).

That said, TextWrangler is a decent option if you aren't in the mood to spend money. The only thing I miss about other editors from TextWrangler is an actual file browser that works like Gedit's instead of "you can only have one file open from the file browser at once."

<comment><USER28> Seriously, if you want value of money, learn vim or emacs, they kick any $60 worth editors.

<comment><USER35> Or you know, (re)install linux and use any of the great text editors available on that platform. I think linux is the best platform for CS types in college.

<comment><USER3> Since vim and emacs run fine on OS X, do you mean GUI ones? I think Linux is the worst platform in terms of GUI experience.

<comment><USER36> why?

also kate is a very nice editor gui editor(mainly linux but probably runs on os x/windows -because of kde portability)

<comment><USER3> That's just my experience that compared to Windows and especially OS X, GUI on Linux is typically ugly and unrefined.

It's understandable given the more fragmented, programmer-centric ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is a nice overview.

I have been a happy user of Vico for the past two months after years of putting up with Textmate's lame undo. I recommend it if you are comfortable with vi/vim/macvim but want a more Maclike interface plus Textmate bundles and theme support.

</comment><comment><USER38> The main features Sublime Text 2 needs before I give them money (since I already have TM and Rubymine):

\- code navigation: The main reason I deal with rubymine cpu and memory hogging. \- intellisense-ishness: The 2nd reason I deal with rubymine. \- better preferences interface: way too emacsish, but is probably much easier for cross-platform compatibility.

The only reason I don't use emacs is its abominable configuration process. I used to use Lucid/XEmacs way back when, but I lost whatever emacs mojo I had gained when I was "forced" to use Windows.

<comment><USER39> There is a plugin called SublimeCodeIntel[1], which basically rips the code intelligence stuff out of Komodo and packages it up for Sublime.

[1] <https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Has anyone had success with (the somewhat recently released) UltraEdit for Mac? I've used UE on Windows for many years and had been quite happy. When I made the switch to OS X, I continued to do much of my coding in UE via a Windows VM. Looking to finally kick the VM habit, now that Outlook for Mac is available, and selecting a native OS X text/code editor remains the most significant challenge. Sticking with UE would seem to be the easiest approach, but curious if there is any feedback from the community.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why would any programmer ever risk learning a proprietary/closed source text editor? You're putting your most important tool at the mercy of some corporation or individual.

<comment><USER42> While I can understand the principle that motivates your comment, I disagree. You could say the same thing about an operating system, a particular computer brand, the online services you use - anything. If whatever tool you use makes you more productive, it has a positive impact on your work, meaning you should most definitely use it.

I seldom think about whether something is closed or open if it helps me actually get things done. Why would I pick anything else (open or closed source) based on an economic principle if it made me worse at my job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I started my coding on OS X with TextMate, in the time when releases were frequent. I spent a summer working a job where local development was not particularly easy and so I spent a lot of time in remote vim sessions over ssh. While it took a little adjusting and learning to get to the same level of productive as with TextMate I've never looked back. The ability to sit down at any machine and know that Vim is most likely installed is really really useful.

</comment><comment><USER44> Long time Textmate user here. I'm learning emacs because of the productivity and the portability.

I tried vim but gave up, the Esc key was too clunky to me. Then I tried emacs and it was way more bearable. To be sure, I still need to figure out the features other than moving the cursor around but...all in good time.

Undo button is a bit weird conceptually. When does it switch to redo?

<comment><USER45> Try putting this in your .vimrc if you don't want to reach all the way to hit the escape key

imap jj <Esc>

Come back to vim :(

<comment><USER46> This! Although I prefer jk & kj instead of jj.

<comment><USER45> KJ feels pretty awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I really like the package management options in emacs. Between Package.el (baked into emacs 24) and el-get I can include almost anything I need by configuring my dotfile. Packages from marmalade, elpa, git repo, hg, emacs wiki, etc...

I can blow away my .emacs.d and, when I restart, all of my configured packages are retrieved and installed. Bliss!

</comment><comment><USER48> FWIW: I use XCode for all Objective-C development, TextMate for almost everything else, and BBEdit to open large files (IMO the single biggest area of weakness for TextMate). I've tried other editors, but 3 covers everything I need.

<comment><USER24> I tried to use Texmate like that for a while but ultimately, not having a sensible undo and the kind of sucky non-regex incremental search blew it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I installed Kod a month or two ago. It's buggy and crashes _all the time_. Needless to say, I don't program on it (I use TextMate) but for what I use it for (cheatsheet reference) it's fine.

</comment><comment><USER50> I feel sad for anyone who refers to emacs and vim as dinosaurs. I feel sadder for anyone unfamiliar with emacs and vim dismissing because they're old tools, and missing out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Slickedit has been around an awful long time. It's always looked like a very professional product, but it gets no love in fora like this. Anyone know why ?

</comment><comment><USER51> I use Jedit. I find the ease of macro creation and the ability to edit the subsequent macro file to be the big seller for me.

</comment><comment><USER52> there should be a poll ... I would make it but the only editor I've used in the list from the article is MacVim

</comment><comment><USER53> No comments on Chocolat? Seems very nice

<comment><USER54> It is nice! Still very alpha though.

I post invites to <http://simp.ly/publish/kkhBKb> when I get 'em. Or request your own on ##chocolat (two hashes) on Freenode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> No mention of acme? :(

Rob Pike and Russ Cox both use acme on OS X.

See <http://acme.cat-v.org>

</comment><comment><USER56> I could have sworn this was one of those "solved" problem spaces. :)

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm the Smultron/Makefile type.

</comment><comment><USER58> 1) install plan9port

2) use Acme

3) program !!!???

4) profit

<comment><USER59> does RoR run on plan9? I mean if it doesnt, then what am i supposed to do for step 3?

<comment><USER60> He suggested installing plan9port[1], which "just" ports some user land libraries and applications to different Unices, including OS X. So we're talking about native OS X executables here.

There's also the "Acme Stand Alone Complex"[2], which - if I remember correctly - is a "virtual" Inferno OS applet which includes the Acme application.

I'm not exactly agreeing that piping is the end-all, be-all of editor extensibility, but it's certainly worth giving it a try.

[1]: <http://swtch.com/plan9port/>

[2]: <http://www.caerwyn.com/acme/>

<comment><USER58> There's so much more to Acme than piping. Actions based on regex matching via the plumber for a start. Menus you can type / keep in a text file anywhere you like. No stupid colour syntax highlighting or pointless fancy shit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Window manager for multiple projects recommendations? - <AUTHOR> Is there a product that organizes terminal, browser, FTP client, finder, etc. sessions and organizes them by project? I'm a freelance dev who is working on a project 4 hours in the morning, then switch to something in the afternoon, only to have the re-initialize everything from the morning project to put out a fire.<p>Any existing tools or tips welcome! <comment><USER2> A tiling window manager like dwm, XMonad or i3 could be configured to do what you want. For example in XMonad if you set the title of your terminal windows to a project name you can sort the windows by project workspaces using ManageHook.

myManageHook = composeAll [ className =? "URxvt" <&&> title =? "<project- name>" \--> doShift "<project-workspace>" ...

[https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/General_xmonad.hs_config_tip...](https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/General_xmonad.hs_config_tips#ManageHook_examples)

[http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad/XMonad- ManageHook.html](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad/XMonad-ManageHook.html)

You can check windows with xprop, and filter by strings as well.</comment>


Facebook mistakenly leaked developer analytics reports to testers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/22/facebook-analytics-leak/ <comment><USER2> Sadly, there no good alternative where all Facebook's users could migrate.

Facebook in our days mostly _users community_ rather than _collective web- service_. So, most of it's user depend on other users.

Nobody will migrate somewhere where he will can't find rest of his _Facebook- friends_.</comment>


Edward Tufte and the Truth About the Challenger O-Rings - <AUTHOR> http://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-the-challenger

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the referenced paper (pdf): <http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf></comment>


Roger Ebert: The dying of the light - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/the_dying_of_the_light.html <comment><USER2> As someone who finds just as much interest in sound quality as the lyrics, as critical of the picture as the storyline, I whole-heartedly agree. Most movie theaters are simply horrible. The sound is atrocious (overly loud and muddy is the most common problem) and the pictures have become dimmer and dimmer. Having to travel further to find a good screen just makes movie theaters that much worse. Give me a Blu-ray and my home setup for quality over most movie theaters.

I used to get most movies off of Netflix and then see action movies in the theaters. I thought that I was better off seeing the spectacle on a large screen. But the technical inferiority of the typical movie theater has led me to flip my viewing habits. Now I really only see comedies in the theaters and watch everything else at home.

You still can't replicate a crowded movie theater at a comedy, it makes it far funnier to laugh with other people.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more. The last time I went to the movies, it felt like such a rip off that I vowed never to return. Questions: 1) How long are advertisements anymore? It felt like 15+ minutes. 2) Is there no cell phone etiquette at all?

<comment><USER4> In Germany I witnessed 30+ minutes of advertisements.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, we first get commercial adverts, kinda like in TV but usually more elaborate. Then movie trailers. When I still went into the cinema it was common for the movie to "start" at 2000 and then actually start at 2030 to 2045. Which is just one reason why I do not feel bad about pirating movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> New iteration of an old problem. Not sure if I was the "Kodak spokesman" he referred to.

\---

Movie Answer Man

Roger Ebert / February 7, 1999

Q. In your recent review of "Virus", you commented: "It didn't help that the print I saw was so underlit that often I could see hardly anything on the screen. Was that because the movie was filmed that way, or because the projector bulb was dimmed to extend its life span?" A dirty secret is that movies are under-lit in most theaters. Films are produced with the intent that they be projected at the brightness of 16 foot-lamberts. Field research by Kodak found that they are often shown at 8-10 foot-lamberts, well under the SMPTE standard for brightness. To get theaters up to this and other standards, Kodak is introducing the Screencheck Experience program. The under-lighting of screens may be acceptable for a few movies--lest you see the entirety of their badness--but in general it unnecessarily degrades the theater experience. (Carl Donath, Rochester NY)

A. I've seen thousands of movies and I believe the Screencheck Experience program would only confirm that "Virus" was severely deprived of foot-lamberts when I saw it in a Chicago theater not a million miles from the Water Tower. Martin Scorsese, who travels with a light meter, once told me movies are projected at the correct brilliance in New York and Los Angeles, because that's where the filmmakers live, and they squawk. In a lot of other places, he said, the theaters turn down the juice to save on the replacement costs of expensive bulbs.

<comment><USER7> The common thread is that the corporations in the supply chain between you and the creators of the content really don't care much about the experience you have in the theater. They care about maximizing profit. We need to link, in their minds, their bad decision making and reduced profits. That is the only way any changes will be made.

Of course, for my part, the movie going experience is horrible for additional reasons: commercials, talking patrons, and crying babies. I've seen one movie in the last 6 months and there was a crying baby __and __and a talking child in the theater. Had I not traveled 40 minutes to see the movie, I'd have asked for my money back immediately.

<comment><USER8> You'd think with the panic the film industry is in they'd be falling over themselves trying to please the moviegoer. Instead we see them trying to treat you as a captive audience and squeeze more revenue out of your eyeballs.

They forget who actually holds the money in every transaction: the customer, and few transactions are as thoroughly optional as movie tickets.

I'm sure the talking and disrespect in the movie theater is a symptom of the problem. People no longer respect the theater because it's stopped respecting them, and in the process lost its own self-respect.

<comment><USER9> > Instead we see them trying to treat you as a captive audience and squeeze > more revenue out of your eyeballs.

I'm going to blame this on B-school theory, particularly Michael Porter. What Porter did is take economic theory about the undesirable behaviour of monopolists and turn it around. "You should screw your customers and suppliers in _this_ fashion!"

And in the short term, it absolutely works. In the long term you disgust the people who put you there -- your customers -- and most industries are _not_ natural monopolies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _At my recent Ebertfest, one seasoned director called the projection in the > 90-year old Virginia Theater in Urbana-Champaign "the best I've ever seen." > That's because we use two of the best projectionists in the nation, James > Bond, who consults on high-level projection facilities..._

James Bond? Okay, not every theater can afford to have James Bond in the projection booth... ;-)

\- - -

A serious and interesting information is that for Pirates 4, people apparently chose to see the film in 2D (60% of first week gross) rather than 3D: _"Not only is this a clear rejection of 3D on a major movie, but given how distribution is currently designed, it makes you wonder whether Disney cost themselves a lot of gross by putting their film on too high a percentage of 3D screens."_ (quoted from Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com)

<comment><USER11> Re 3D: The only reason we pay the extra money for 3D is that the 2D is not available at the time we want. I think 3D is a clear example of technology for its own sake (ooh! cool!), but which doesn't actually help the story be experienced (your involvement with the characters is not enhanced at all, etc).

<comment><USER12> There was a piece posted here some months ago that made the claim that 3D movies would never work, because the human eye (or brain) has to work harder than normal to process the false perception of near and far objects which the eye has to focus on at one fixed distance (the screen surface).

<comment><USER13> Correct - that was also a post by Roger Ebert: <http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm fortunate enough to live in Austin, TX and we have several Alamo Drafthouse locations here (<http://originalalamo.com>). They treat movies like events: most locations during peak times show current fare, but they also have "Weird Wednesdays" and "Terror Tuesdays" with old movies, and similar specialty nights; they do MST3K-style riffing on old classics every once in a while; they serve food and beer; and they have a very draconian policy on talking during movies: do it twice and you're out. They also publish a program much like the local stage theaters each "season."

They're very professional and enjoyable, and are the only theaters I visit these days. Otherwise, hell, I'll put up with my 480p projector and a hacked Wii over sticky ringtone-festivals across town at $7 a pop.

Oh, and the sound and picture quality are un-paralleled, which was my point: theaters which care care about all aspects of the experience, not just technical excellence.

<comment><USER15> _> ...sticky ringtone-festivals across town at $7 a pop._

I only wish movies were $7. The local AMC is currently $8.50 ($11.50 for 3D), and that's in Columbus which is generally cheaper than most big cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sony's name is really being dragged through the mud lately. Not that they don't deserve it, of course. It's just interesting to see how many different areas of business a company can be attacked in at once.

<comment><USER17> SONY is fantastic. a Vaio X and Vim, Chromium and Xmonad is a perfect dev box. their shortwave recievers are a cut above the competition in selectivity and build quality. im still using some video monitor of theirs from the late 70s to catch up on youtubes.

<comment><USER18> _a Vaio X and Vim, Chromium and Xmonad is a perfect dev box._

I have never used a Vaio, but I would question how much one contributes to being a perfect dev box. You can install Vim, Chromium and Xmonad on any other machine.

 _im still using some video monitor of theirs from the late 70s to catch up on youtubes._

Again, I haven't used Sony stuff from the 70s, it may well be fantastic. However, that was over 3 decades ago, and irrelevant when evaluating their behaviour in recent times. I certainly won't be buying anything from Sony anytime soon - I simply don't trust the brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have never seen a 3d movie yet. I went to my best local theater, that was built within the last ten years (There actually are only two local movie theaters.) to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3d. The opening credits/intro pieces looked incredible. I was so excited! When the movie started I realized there were only two tiny speakers at the front of the theater by the screen outputting audio. I started complaining to the point that i was getting shushed by some patrons. Mostly asking around who else noticed the audio was broken.

After a few minutes I went to speak with the manager. Basically I was told I was the first person to complain and that was the way it was supposed to be. I couldn't fathom that to be correct so I continued to question the manager. Eventually she somewhat admitted that the audio, for some technical reason she couldn't explain was not properly able to be played on their 3d projection/audio system.

So I left. I got the ticket price refunded but not the cost of my concessions. I couldn't help but feel mass amounts of consumers were being ripped off. I felt the team that produced that fine film would have been heartbroken to have seen the movie there. I know i was not willing to watch a movie, my first 3d movie! with audio the quality of a poorly pirated movie.

I considered finding someone to complain too. I imagined the theater was breaking rules by showing the film with such a key component horribly crippled. But I did not.

I have not been back to see a 3d movie. I would like to see one someday. I will go again, perhaps to a theater in another town, someday. I hope they get their "stuff" together. Articles like this do not inspire confidence.

</comment><comment><USER20> If the movie industry wants people to stop pirating movies, they need to stop giving them excuses like this to do so.

<comment><USER21> OTOH this makes TS videos even worse.

<comment><USER20> Maybe that's the secret strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> OT: None of my coworkers recognized the "dying of the light" reference. [Insert rant about how nobody reads anymore.] It's Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

<comment><USER23> Wow, that is sad. My knowledge of literature and poetry is spotty at best but I certainly picked up on the reference without a moment's thought. The ability to make literary references in a few words is a basic aspect of literacy. I suppose their brains are probably crowded with internet memes and celebrity facts and have no space for this sort of more beautiful trivia. Something I love about geeks is that their big brains tend to retain more references like this, so when they talk and listen they can use the whole language, including classic literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Somewhat OT, did they do that thing yet where they were going to synthesize his voice from past reviews?

I'm very curious to hear that.

Haven't been to the movies in years but last few times I was there what really drove me crazy was the messed up sound - way too loud and the quality sucked. If the picture is also poor now, well I guess I am staying home and waiting for the bluray release. Everything is out on disc for rental in less than six months now, not a big wait.

<comment><USER25> _did they do that thing yet where they were going to synthesize his voice from past reviews?_

Sure: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9OS74Sa8s>

They had it working last year IIRC.

<comment><USER24> Actually in that video it's not working yet.

He gives a preview of it at 5:40 but it's a little rough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The entrepreneur in me wants to point out that any cinema owner worth his or her salt would get great PR from making it clear that they make sure that their projection (and sound) is as intended by the director, now that all the discussion is blowing up.

At least owners who live in a place with nearby competing cinemas.

</comment><comment><USER27> "It is as if the Industry is courting self-destruction." And how.

</comment><comment><USER28> It is an interesting variation on what I think of as 'crapitalism.' The increase in profitability at the expense of quality.

As Ebert points out, crapitalism works because consumers let it work. If there are enough people willing to pay to have the lower quality product, then the motivation to supply the higher quality product is removed.

What is missing is a good feedback mechanism for 'fixing' the problem.

Let's accept that Ebert is correct in that the cost of the projectionist and their training is the dominant factor in the quality of the projection. Now take what it would cost to hire a projectionist that did quality projections, and raise ticket prices to cover that cost.

As the theatre which charges a higher ticket price than any other theatre in the area, you will find you get fewer patrons, that will reduce the number of tickets sold so you will need an even higher price to cover the lower volume. But the higher price will reduce the size of your market. Once you cross the price where the per-person ticket cost exceeds the expected BluRay release cost, your attendance will drop to nearly zero.

It is mentioned in the article that people already feel that the 'home' experience with bluray is better than their theatre experience (for some number fraction of people).

The message here is that movie theatres are essentially already dead, but like some species of shark they haven't realized it yet. It's only a question of 'when' they will cease to exist.

Interestingly this will be blamed on "piracy."

But the actual issue will be that the industry has moved into a place where the cost of presenting the information (the 'movie') is exceeding the marginal value of that information to the consumer. That has occurred because not only do people have more choices on how to consume the information, the relative costs of those choices are shifting. A 55" 1080p LCD television is now under $1000. That is a 'durable good' (3 - 5yr lifetime) so represents less than $30/month at 3 yrs or $20/month at 5 yrs of cash flow. It costs $20 for two people to go to the movies, it costs < $10 to rent a movie/stream it. So the value equation on 'cost to consume' is increasingly leaning toward the living room and the marginal value of seeing something in the theatre has to compete with that.

I was thinking that digital projection would actually help theatres by reducing their labor costs but having seen a digital projection setup and the complexity and cost that are layered into the system to prevent copies from being made, the cost equation made things actually worse (you need more skill projectionists).

<comment><USER29> Apple does all right with higher costs. "HN advice is often raise your prices".

"ChuckMcM Theaters. We're more expensive because that's what it costs to give you a better experience."

"ChuckMcM Theaters. Our projectionists make a film look a million dollars, and it will only cost you $40. One showing per night."

Etc.

<comment><USER28> It's an interesting choice of comparisons, why not use Vera Wang evening gowns? I mean its just fabric right? Except both Vera (who designs lovely evening wear) and Apple aren't actually playing the same game.

A more apt comparison would be Windows based laptops. This is because a pre- requisite for this effect to occur is the ability to compete on price. Since everyone who has attempted to make compatible hardware that was cheaper than Apple but ran MacOS has been sued mercilessly into bankruptcy, using Apple in this case fails.

Theaters, like MS Windows laptop makers, have a cost they have to bear and they pay a tax for a key ingredient in their product to a third party (the studios, or Microsoft depending on which we're talking about.) The product the consumer buys is a combination of the part the supplier got from someone else, and the part they made themselves. Their margin of course being their revenue above their costs.

When, unlike in designer gowns or Apple equipment, there isn't a legal barrier to enter, multiple entities pop up to supply the demand. They compete on quality, feature sets, and price.

The less maneuvering room they have around feature sets, the more they compete on quality and price. And the less sensitive the _bulk of the market_ is to quality, they are left competing on price. I'm sure this is really obvious so I won't belabor the point.

For me, that leaves the interesting challenge of finding ways to make quality a differentiator in a market with low barriers to entry. If you have any ideas on that I'd love to hear them, they would be the kind of things that let entrepreneurs break into and disrupt existing markets.

<comment><USER30> Saying Apple has a monopoly on Apple equipment is like saying Vera Wang has a monopoly on Vera Wang gowns. There's no legal barrier to competing with Apple to make general-purpose personal computers. Dell/HP/etc are choosing to compete on price, and licensing Windows lets them do that, just like outsourcing your fabric manufacturing to a third party in Cambodia or wherever lowers costs for a clothing designer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, this is another case of Sony's locking stuff down impacting its practical quality/adoption?

As a counter to one of the points in the article, I don't think people splitting 40/60 on 3D/2D is a "clear rejection" of 3D. 3D still gives a lot of people headaches or other discomforts, and it does cost more and look worse from bad angles (and you'll get the bad angles because there's less 3D theatres and they're packed). Maybe compared to a 3D event movie like Avatar, but that's not a fair comparison.

EDIT: Also, I finally some ammunition to use against people who insist that I should turn the brightness/contrast on my TV down to be "theatre" correct. It's supposed to look brightier, even in the theatre! :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Given the fact I have no depth perception and all 3D does is reduce the sharpness of the image and force me to wear stupid glasses, the day 3D wins is the day after I leave the theaters for good.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone now of a good resource for theater reviews? Some quick Googling didn't pull anything up for me. It would be interesting to see a listing of which theaters use which projectors as well as sound system quality.

</comment><comment><USER34> He said you can tell if a movie is digitally projected because it has a 'D' after it in the listing. Is that only in newspapers? I don't see that info on MovieFone, does anyone know where it can be found?

<comment><USER35> I usually look up showtimes on Fandango and they clearly label any digital showings as "DP (Digital Projection) Showtimes". I usually see those for Regal theater listings, it could also be a matter of other chains not reporting the information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know of a resource that lists theaters based on projection and sound quality? I'd like to find out which theaters in Manhattan are worth going to.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm sitting about 200 yards from the 90-year-old Virginia theater in Champaign. I need to get over there more often, I guess. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> _Short-sighted, technically illiterate penny-pinchers are wounding a great art form._

And a lot more than that.

</comment><comment><USER38> Another quality article by the Ebert.. quoth the Ebert:

"I began by asking if you notice, really notice, what a movie looks like. I have a feeling many people don't. They buy their ticket, they get their popcorn and they obediently watch what is shown to them. But at some level there is a difference. They feel it in their guts. The film should have a brightness, a crispness and sparkle that makes an impact. It should look like a movie! -- not a mediocre big-screen television."

Note how the Ebert cites his 'gut' evidence right at the bottom of the article. This is not by accident - but a master stroke. For why would you admit that you have no pragmatic basis for your outrage at the beginning of the article? This would simply alienate you from those readers who might, oh, you know... be after some kind of empirical data.

I know I probably deserve to be down voted - in order to cure me of my irk. (After all - why should I care if people like the Ebert?)

But it's IRKSOME this guy is so well read.

<comment><USER39> I obliged you with a downvote.

Almost the entire article is devoted to explaining that there is an empirical (the word I think you intended when you used "pragmatic"? not sure) degradation in film projection and why that is.

He then relates that to the comments he's had on his blog and in email about how movies look better on blu-ray than at the theater, as well as other comments from professional movie critics. This doesn't seem unreasonable at all.

I'd like to hear more about your contentions with the article, because I don't really see how what you wrote corresponds to what Ebert wrote.

<comment><USER38> How does one get downvote powers anyway?

So yes - clarification is needed. I'm willing to take on faith that there is measurable degradation of film quality. Let us grant that there is plenty of empirical evidence for this claim.

There is no empirical evidence presented besides blog comments that this measurably effects the greater portion of hedonic goodness in theatre goers. Worse - I see no presentation of empirical evidence whatsoever for Ebert's larger thesis that the degradation is sufficient enough to have a measurable effect on market share (as against dvds etc). Bearing in mind they were losing market share before 3d.

Hence there is no pragmatic reason to be upset beyond perhaps you're own heightened sensitivities - which Ebert himself may possess - I have no idea.

In any case - it's an extremely poorly argued article.

But it is truly weird - People just love the Ebert.

<comment><USER39> Thanks for clarifying!

You make a good argument that Ebert's argument isn't sufficiently scientific. Ebert also doesn't provide any data for his hypothesis that the degraded qualities of movies is going to effect box office returns.

However, I think these are the wrong criteria for judging the article. I don't think Ebert's it's meant to be scientfic, nor is his article primarily about economics. I saw it as more of a love letter, which is very personal, very subjective. His last paragraph:

"I despair. This is a case of Hollywood selling its birthright for a message of pottage. If as much attention were paid to exhibition as to marketing, that would be an investment in the future. People would fall back in love with the movies. Short-sighted, technically illiterate penny-pinchers are wounding a great art form."

The primary purpose of the article isn't to explain the potential economic impact of the degradation in projection quality, or to provide scientific proof that the majority of people are affected. It's to say that movies look shittier, and to explain why - and to express how sad it makes him that movies are looking so shitty. I saw the remark about how people would be less likely to return to theaters as more of an expression of his unhappiness than as the central point of his article.

Personally, I found the article very helpful. I saw Thor opening weekend, and I was confused about why it looked so dim. It was disappointing to me to view something so graphically rich in a way that made it look it was 50 years old and faded. I didn't know what was wrong, but now I do, and now I know how I can attempt to see movies in a way that I'll like more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yes, There Have Been Aliens - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html <comment><USER2> It may as well that life is an extremely improbable event.</comment>


XXL-RPC – A high performance, distributed RPC framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xuxueli/xxl-job/releases/tag/v2.0.1 <comment><USER2> From the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Submissions_

> _Please don 't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or > exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an > article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's > important._

It's not necessary to add the release in fancy brackets 【】.

Also, submitting each minor release is a bad idea, because they is usually not enough new material. This release has only 16 new commits and was released only 6 days after the release 2.0. The difference is probably too small.

If you want to get more traction here you must write a nice blog post about the program in English, and submit that instead. It doesn't have to be in perfect English, don't worry too much. (You can use spelling/gramar checker of MS Word to fix most of the obvious errors.) I'm from Argentina an my native language is Spanish. Many people here speak other language, but the common language here is English.

Also, the blog post is more interesting if you write about a problem that you found writing your program and then explain how to fix it. Try to include one or two photos/graphics if they are relevant.</comment>


Ask HN: What has improved your productivity in 2019? - <AUTHOR> Curious what technologies/ways of working/tools/languages/etc people have picked up this year that has increased their effectiveness at work, or on side projects. <comment><USER2> It might seem entirely unrelated, but I have started rising before the sun so I can catch the sunrise and subsequently reap the "brightest slice of the day" and it has increased my general productivity</comment>


Records and Sealed Types for Java (JEP Draft) - <AUTHOR> http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8222777 <comment><USER2> For Records, can the public read accessor method be overridden? I'm assuming so, otherwise should just make the instance variable public final.

</comment><comment><USER3> ADTs in Java, that's pretty cool. The nice thing it's not really adding anything new in the language, only restricted forms of classes.</comment>


Bao: A verified streaming tool based on BLAKE3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oconnor663/bao <comment><USER2> To stave off some confusion, Bao was originally two things: 1) a custom tree hashing mode based on BLAKE2, and 2) an encoding format and verified streaming implementation for that tree hash. The first half grew into BLAKE3, which we announced on January 9. The Bao project itself is now focused on the second half, with the internal tree hash defined to be BLAKE3.

</comment><comment><USER3> So if I understand correctly from the spec, the point is to be able to have slices that include the content and the necessary metadata that confirms this is a part of the original content. This is something that is already done with merkle tree hashes: specified in bittorrent V2 ([http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html](http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html)) (although I don't know if any client implements it) and already working in dat ([https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat- works](https://datprotocol.github.io/how-dat-works)): when receiving a piece, you also receive

\- its hash \- the hash of the brother so you can derive the hash of the parent \- the hash of the uncle so you can derive the grand parent \- etc... Up until the last brother before the root, so you can verify the root hash

In bao it seems to be the opposite: the included hashes are the ones from the direct ancestors ? So how can bao trust the whole chain ? Or maybe there's something in BLAKE3 that explains how "Chaining Values" fix it ?

<comment><USER2> > This is something that is already done with merkle tree hashes

Yes, BLAKE3 is a Merkle tree, and what Bao is doing is conceptually similar to BitTorrent. (BEP 30 is even cited in the BLAKE3 spec.) Bao's goal is to be a general-purpose wire format and implementation library, for any application that needs verified streaming. Applications that use BLAKE3 for generic file hashing today can also start doing verified streaming at any point in the future, without needing any other trusted metadata.

<comment><USER3> Understood. My question was more about what is the exact content of a slice, apart from the chunk: is it the sibling's hash and the uncles hash ? Something else ?

<comment><USER2> It's the set of parent nodes on the path from the root to the chunk(s), plus the chunks themselves. Parent nodes contain the hashes / chaining values of their two children, so you could also think of this as including sibling hashes. For example, consider this tree representing a 4 KiB file:

                     root
                  /        \
           parent1         parent2
           /     \         /     \
        chunk1 chunk2   chunk3 chunk4

Say we build a slice containing only chunk2. The contents of that slice will be:

        [4096][root][parent1][chunk2]

The parent node parent1 is [hash of chunk1][hash of chunk2], and the root node is [hash of parent1][hash of parent2]. The 8-byte total length on the front (4096) is the same as in the full encoding; it defines the structure of the tree, so the decoder knows how many parent nodes to expect.

For more details: [https://github.com/oconnor663/bao/blob/master/docs/spec.md](https://github.com/oconnor663/bao/blob/master/docs/spec.md)

This is my first time looking at the Dat protocol. Thanks for pointing that out.

<comment><USER3> Ok so the intermediary nodes are the concatenation of the children, that's what I missed. Thanks a lot for the details, and even more for the rest of your work !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this functionally different than sending the hash of a block of bytes when sending a block of bytes?

> _With a serial hash, the recipient would need to download the entire > attachment to verify it_

Rings to me as being trivially untrue, since, if the file is divided into chunks, you can just verify each chunk separately.

Alternately, can this be used to generate the complete file hash from chunks received out of order by a download using multiple parallel substreams without writing all of them to a block device in order first?

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of mischievous things an attacker could do if you just verify each chunk separately, including reordering or omitting chunks, and truncating the file.

<comment><USER4> An attacker who can do those things could send you a different initial checksum as well. How does this solve that?

<comment><USER5> Any sort of verification presumes that you have an initial trusted checksum against which to verify, so I don't believe this solves the separate problem of obtaining such a checksum.

IIUC your question here boils down to "what is the point of a hash tree?" as opposed to e.g. a list of individual chunk hashes. The answer is that a hash tree lets you verify an individual chunk by looking at the hashes of O(log(N)) chunks rather than having to look at the hash of every chunk.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. That is meaningful, but I still don't understand how "the recipient can stream a video attachment, while still verifying each byte as it comes in" isn't basically also true for sequential hashing with periodic chunk hashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody explain the Outboard Mode? I don't really understand the example. It decodes the input file using an outboard file, but the result is what? You already have the input file?

<comment><USER2> The Bao encoding supports two modes, combined and outboard. In the combined mode, the bytes of the tree are interleaved with the original file, producing an encoded file that's about 6% larger. In the outboard mode, the bytes of the tree are stored separately in their own file.

Which mode to use depends on whether you need to keep the original, unencoded file around on the server. If the only thing the server needs to do is serve encoded bytes, the combined mode is more convenient. But if the server also wants to serve the original file (to clients who trust the server and don't need to verify any hashes), the outboard mode can avoid taking up double the storage space.

The idea in the outboard example is that the decoder is running somewhere else, not on the server, and it's streaming both the original file and the outboard encoding simultaneously.</comment></comment>


Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/al2p6q/7_months_into_fang_company_want_out/efad55p/ <comment><USER2> I once worked at a company where the new CIO came out and said very plainly that the attrition rate was too low. The implication under the circumstances was that there were too many low competence long-timers. This was followed up with a ham handed campaign of making everybody miserable by dramatically increasing the sense of stress and "urgency" that everyone assumed was designed to increase the attrition rate. That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers (since that's who is able to leave easily when things go south.)

Five years later that company is now two CIOs removed from the original attrition warrior who left presumably to help the attrition rate even. The company still has a ton of long-timers that they seemingly can't get rid of. Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare?

<comment><USER3> Maybe focus on making the less competent more competent?

<comment><USER4> Nonono, that would require actually investing in your people^Wresources. You're supposed to minimize CapEx, man. Human resources are a fixed asset; depreciation is expected, and good for taxes.

<comment><USER5> > Human resources are a fixed asset

Human resources are rented, and thus an expense not an asset; I mean, since the abolition of chattel slavery.

<comment><USER6> Which seems like a part of the problem here. Also, since they're an expense, not an asset, why would you want to invest in them? After all, you wouldn't pay for a paint job on a car you're just leasing.

And then companies are surprised people job-hop :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I have to push out X number of low-performing people every year, I'm going to damn well make sure I have X low-performing people around to push out so I don't have to get rid of anyone I value.

The first one or two times a manager is asked to do this, there may be adequate dead-weight around that has accumulated "naturally".

After that, a significant number of managers will game the system -- they'll attract and retain people for this very purpose. Meanwhile, general employees will realize what's going on and you're going to have political games.

I don't see how this works for a company as a policy. It's too rigid. Meanwhile, a great way to get your attrition rate up is create a generally miserable environment. I can see executives patting themselves on the back for achieving their attrition goals even as their better employees are leaving for greener pastures.

This makes so little sense I would doubt it could really be true. Except I've see it myself, and worse (not at Amazon).

</comment><comment><USER8> Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers, because those coworkers are also competitors.

Could Amazon really be falling into the same trap so soon?

<comment><USER9> The actual number of really bad hires is actually quite low give my experience at BT (15 years) and I only knew two cases of really bad performers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a former Amazon manager, I don't have a problem with forced attrition so much as the proportion of my time that was put into finding the candidates for that forced attrition.

There are a tremendous number of low achievers in every industry and if you keep them around they are toxic, every bit if not more toxic than Amazon's culture in 2019.

That said, I would have liked to have seen most of the time dedicated to this task allocated to developing the careers of my direct reports because I think that is of much higher value to any organization.

Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this problem, but that now seems intractable. It seems there's a real temptation to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill positions these days.

<comment><USER11> > Not hiring idiots in the first place is IMO the proper solution to this > problem,

If you hire all rockstars and you have to let go of 10%, then how does this help?

<comment><USER12> Across thousands of hires, can you hire all rockstars? When you hire 1,000 people, how many do you expect are underperformers?

<comment><USER13> No matter how many people you hire, at least half of them are going to be at or below the median for your new employees.

So I'd say 500. You'd have to be very good at hiring to get a lower number, and judging from my anecdata, companies that hire software pros use hiring processes that are terrible predictors of future performance, if not entirely useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Marginalism.

As someone who's managed teams for many years, I think it's really odd to do this stack-rank thing.

A team is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts. People on the team do different things that are complementary. If you've ever watched sports, you know what this means. Not everyone is scoring the goals, someone needs to make critical passes, someone needs to get the ball out of defence, and so on.

That's not to say everyone should be paid the same. Clearly some roles are more rare than others and need to be compensated thus. But it is also true that your star needs someone to carry water for him, and that having the star and the water carrier makes the team more effective than two of either.

So when it comes to letting go of people, it rarely makes sense to try to decide who is productive and who isn't. A lot of businesses wouldn't even operate without juniors on the lowest grades. For instance junior investment bankers make powerpoint slides and financial models. Senior investment bankers, who have long forgotten how to use PowerPoint, take these to customers and get business.

The only times I've let people go is when I've thought the team really doesn't need this person. It's not a question of being inherently productive, it's a question of whether the marginal productivity of the team goes up. And as in sports, sometimes you find it's a star player who needs to go. Sometimes a bit-part player.

But in no sense is there a magic score from which the bottom can be removed.

</comment><comment><USER15> _Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year)_

What Amazon fails to consider is the number of high-caliber engineers who would never consider applying to work for companies that have policies like this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is one of many articles on Microsoft's stack ranking debacle: [https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me- secretiv...](https://www.smh.com.au/technology/microsoft-made-me-secretive- cynical-and-paranoid-20130827-2snei.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've seen managers game this kind of system out.

1) Reserve 5%-10% of your staffing for people going to be laid off.

2) Hire people that won't make the cut after 1 year.

3) Fire them

4) Rinse and repeat

In other words the only reason they were being hired was so that the manager could protect the performers of this team. Basically if the manager's view is the only one that matters, he can pretty much get away with it.

<comment><USER18> How do I apply for that job? :-)

I want to be an SRE:

Scapegoat Redundancy Engineer

<comment><USER19> You have to make a career out of it!

Charge by the month and rotate in different companies to be hired and fired yearly!

<comment><USER17> God, the pain of interviewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another big technology corporation has forced attrition rates because their previous CTO came from Wal-Mart (yeah, that works-out well). Managers are told that, even if everyone on the team does the same amount of work, they either have to pick someone to _lose_ or find themselves "lost", instead.

Forced attrition is bad for morale but it's an especially shit situation every review-cycle, when people are on edge because _someone_ has to go, no matter what, and it's either going to be themselves or someone that they work with.

</comment><comment><USER21> If only forced attrition were so enthusiastically applied to Amazon's recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ex Amazon here. The attrition rate is much higher than what most people expect. Yes, the company does stack ranking... unofficially.

Even in team with very skilled and productive engineers managers will still set expectations so high that someone will be put on dev plan.

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought most companies have figured out Jack Welch's rank-and-yank system doesn't work by now? Surely Amazon isn't that naive are they?

<comment><USER24> So I think it depends on the organization. I have tended to work in more aggressive, competitive fields. Different versions of "rank and yank" (as you call it) or "up or out" or other types. BigCorps need to do it to keep the average talent bar from trending down (A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players). Startups need to do it generally because the pool of applicants tends to be either "great", "good" or "can't get a job elsewhere" and it needs to weed out. I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game.

<comment><USER25> This doesn't make sense.

"A-Players hire A-Players; B-Player hire C-Players"

If B:s hires C:s than in analogue A:s would hire B:s since it's a bell curve- ish distribution not digital buckets. Who hires the A:s? A, B and C:s by accident?

"I believe it forces people to improve themselves and their game."

You probably want people to improve their skills in their craft, not players to improve their skills in the a management game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> mandatory quote :

CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don't and they stay?

</comment><comment><USER27> Netflix and Facebook definitely have something similar too especially for newer grads (although the former rarely hires new grads). Amazon just does it in the worst way possible.

<comment><USER28> The interesting thing about Netflix is that they are very upfront about their hiring culture: no internships and no hiring of developers without at least five years experience. They are upfront in the fact that they are liberal when it comes to letting people go and pay way above market rate to compensate for it.

I'd rather deal with a company that puts all of its cards on the table like Netflix does rather than an implicit forced attrition process that is described here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Competition undermines any form of cooperation. Presumably Amazon is a company of people cooperating, otherwise they would all just be individuals under competitive contracts right? Competition undermines cooperation but we do it anyway because some must be good right? Just like some amount of child abuse must be good right? Or a small amount of lead in your body is good right? Sometimes moderation is not a good answer. There is no safe level of competition in a cooperative organization.

</comment><comment><USER30> How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous.

The forced attrition is no surprise. I'm in Seattle and considering the thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.

<comment><USER31> > How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? ... The forced > attrition is no surprise.

I believe because people do not see forced attrition as a surprise, they also believe this post. I agree that we shouldn't take every Reddit post as truth but it makes sense in the culture Amazon portrays. Also there hasn't been anybody that offers a counter perspective into the inner workings (that I have seen). True or not, it would be interesting to see the companies that do practice this and what kind of workplace culture they put forward.

Edit: Formatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Current Amazon employee here (Senior Software Engineer) - I don't speak officially for the company obviously, but I wanted to share my experience. I am not a manager, so I don't know the particulars of what goes on during the process referred to in the linked post, but I can offer a few things:

My experience has been that people at Amazon are generally pretty willing to help each other in various different ways, whether helping a teammate on a project or helping someone new to a technology on one of our internal mailing lists.

Many on the reddit thread take it for granted that Amazon is, as one person called it, a "hellhole." That is not at all my experience - I know others in different orgs or different roles may of course have a different experience. Amazon has been significantly less stressful than almost everywhere I've worked (and the one exception was not less stressful in a good way).

At least among people I know, most of the people who leave our team join another team at Amazon. I've known a few people who have left Amazon, but we haven't had 5% of our team leave Amazon every year as this thread would indicate.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is stack ranking something Bezos wanted, or something other executives brought in that Bezos thought might be a good idea?

</comment><comment><USER34> This is one should reconsider hiring anyone from Amazon. They came from a culture of backstabbbing, distrust, and a cutthroat ideology. How can they be a good cultural fit anywhere that relies on trust?

<comment><USER18> For juniors: because they _left_ Amazon.

For seniors: yes be wary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> When Toyota US HQ moved from CA to Plano, Texas, there were rumors that part of the reason was to purge out employees with low/no energy, initiative, output, etc. Employee with no output at work will most likely not bother with the whole enchilada involved in relocating to another state.

Apparently the US HQs of Japanese motor companies follow Japanese corporate model and do not lay off employees. So they end up with quite a bit of low performing employees. Just rumors I heard.

<comment><USER36> wouldn't desperate people who have low skills move instead of people who can get a job anywhere

<comment><USER35> From what I gather, some were old employees near retirement and really did not want to pick up and move to Texas, leaving family/friends/CA behind.

And then there were those who really really did not generate output at work and apparently management hoped(?) they would do the same in their personal life and not bother moving to another state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Im not trying to be a dick, but it seems to be working for them pretty well. Why is forced attrition rate a such a bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot of companies do this - without it being known. I see nothing wrong with the practice. Some companies I know of rotate each quarter to cut the bottom people or % that just don't make it. (eg: Q1 might be operations, Q2 finance, Q3 development, etc). It is a forced method of keeping the bar high or moving it higher.

<comment><USER38> If you try a bit harder, maybe you might be able to think of something that's wrong with this practice.

<comment><USER24> An acceptable variant that I've seen implemented well is "the pass". Where a competent leader, decides to "pass" (one or many rotations) because of hiring rates or current team excellence. Just my experience.

<comment><USER25> Then it is not forced?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> the reason has nothing to do with the ones being let go. It's about the people who remain: they're gonna be working a lot harder when they see their colleagues laid off. No one wants to be next. It's like running away from an alligator. You don't have to be faster than the alligator, you just need to be faster than your friends.

<comment><USER25> Are there any proof of this, that it's making people work harder?

If there is, does it offset the potential tendency of workers to not want to help new hires getting up to speed in fear of being eaten by the alligator?

What about teams that turn around and beat the alligator to death with sticks. It sounds like the foundation of civilization.

Maybe cooperation is not for co-operations. Who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Isn't this common throughout the industry? I love to bash on Amazon as much as the next HN'er, but is this really news?

<comment><USER34> This is Amazon, Netflix, and, in the past, Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> That's nothing compared to what is going on in their warehouses. Buy hey, who cares.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is this that surprising? In my experience it's less prevalent/institutionalized in tech consulting, banking, etc. where the "up or out" philosophy is much more transparent e.g. if you aren't promoted in a certain window of time (say 2 years) to the next level then you're expected to leave.

</comment><comment><USER43> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve)</comment>


Ottawa's venture industry a shriveled husk of its past - <AUTHOR> http://saunderslog.com/2010/05/26/ottawas-venture-industry-a-shriveled-husk-of-its-past/ <comment><USER2> Feh, another rent-seeker.

Can any of you cite examples where a "failure" of private sector investment has been redeemed by government?

(Scare quotes for failure because this sort of thing is telling us one or more important things.)

<comment><USER3> Israel. A concerted strategy to create a positive environment for investors over a 20 year period has led to the most vibrant start-up scene in the world outside Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I'll bet there's a unique to Israel and SV and Boston factor here: military R&D. Whatever it's faults, it real world stuff with various measurable outputs (does this plane fly, does this RADAR detect X at Y distance).

I've heard it's been a factor in Israel and it's well documented for SV and Boston.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Search strategies for finding a non-techincal co-founder? - <AUTHOR> I'm a solo technical founder working on a new startup. The product is fairly technical so after doing a bit of product-market testing I've been heads-down on it for the past month or so.
I know right away the area I need the most help with is the business side of things -- marketing, sales, market research, etc. But being a professional software engineer for 10+ years, the vast majority of my professional network consists of other engineers.
How do you go about searching for a biz-savvy partner? And what criteria do you use to evaluate them? I assume there's no Github or other such site for business folks. <comment><USER2> Biz Dev/Product guy available as a co-founder and eager to launch a new venture. Wanna chat? drilopel at gmail dot com</comment>


Google +1 button for websites - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-button-for-websites-recommend-content.html <comment><USER2> Google is trying to throw it's weight at something it's competitors already do better. Even if it does catch on, we all lose with the social sharing craze that is littering the web. More clutter, slower loading pages, and gimmicks to get to you upvote a site.

This has happened before, first it was the syndication format craze with icons for RSS, RSS 2.0, atom, xml, etc. Then it was the aggregator craze (Digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon, etc) and now it's the social craze (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

There's a clear need for sharing what you like, from the perspective of the user and the publisher. I've put these buttons into my design, but I'd rather see the browsers' favorites revamped into a searchable database that allows easy sharing and get rid of this madness.

<comment><USER3> _we all lose with the social sharing craze that is littering the web. More clutter, slower loading pages, and gimmicks to get to you upvote a site._

Couldn't agree more. I've made a deliberate effort to not buy into the craze with swombat.com. Anything that can't be restyled as a text link which blends into the no-graphics minimalist style of the site just ain't gonna happen.

One small concession I've made is that I show the reddit upvote widget for people who have come directly via Reddit. Like that's helped me. ;-)

<comment><USER4> I love the way Good implemented the Twitter/Facebook sharing feature. Very minimal.

<comment><USER3> Good?

<comment> user-id I'm guessing <http://www.good.is/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's unclear what the user gains by clicking on a +1 button. Clearly my friends won't see my recommendations because Google doesn't connect me to them.

They should just come out and say "listen, we know search is broken. We need your help to fix it! Click on this button when you see something you like on the web."

Position it as a passionate call to arms to all google users. Right now it feels like a boring press release.

<comment><USER6> Google does connect you to social graphs it can see:

[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=1067707)

I wouldn't say that +1 is saying "search is broken" at all. It's just another signal.

<comment><USER5> Re: the social graphs, I should have said that for me personally, my friends aren't on any of those services so that's why it isn't relevant.

I'm saying +1's main reason for existence SHOULD be to fix search. And they should say as much. A better search experience is a much more valuable thing than friend recommendations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ugh, another button. The check-in buttons are coming next. Soon, there will be an aggregate button that lets you Like, Follow, +1, Check-in, Tweet, Post to FB, and save the page for later. There will be no more corporate or personal websites to house the aggregate button either. They will live on an aggregate page which has all the feeds from all the social networks in one place. This aggregate page will itself live on a social network which will have many clones that need to be aggregated. Goodbye signal, hello noise.

</comment><comment><USER8> One thing that's going in it's favor is the SEO advantage you get. This data is eventually going to play some role in the SERP rankings, one way or other. I'm not sure if it's confirmed by Google, but it apparent enough. That's incentive enough for sites to add this button.

<comment><USER9> This is something I feel like people are discounting.

+1 won't displace Liking as a _social network feature_, but it will be very interesting to see how it plays out as a _social search feature_, which is why I'm looking for how best to implement it on my own sites.

Wouldn't you be more inclined to choose a result on Google if people you know/trust +1'd it?

<comment><USER8> Yes, Google can easily rank the search results based on +1's in your social network if you're logged in. The implications are really interesting. It has to succeed though first. People have to start +1'ing for it to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It'll be good to test this feature; it sounds like it could be a useful addition to the other social-esque 'like this' type buttons.

One thing though, the 'add +1 to your website' page (<http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html>) is broken for me.

I see the following in vanilla Firefox 4.0.1, Windows 7 64-bit:

<http://www.tristanperry.com/pics/GoogleSite.jpg>

Changing the settings doesn't fix the fact that the preview doesn't appear (and that its bounding box is overflowing)

Just an FYI.

<comment><AUTHOR> They just started working for me.

<comment><USER10> Ah yep, works for me now. Is working well :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish it came with a -1 as well, but I imagine that will develop by itself. Significantly, this is based on your contacts, rather than what everyone at Facebook/Digg/whoever likes. I think this is a winning characteristic.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, but Facebook's graph describes my actual friends. Gmails with my bank and landlord are not a better representation of my contacts.

<comment><USER13> To most people Facebook's graph represents their friends, their family, their coworkers, people they went to high school with, random people who sent a request even though you met them once at a party... that is the norm. I've been saying for a while that the best representation of a true social graph is on you Android and iPhones. the people you call, text, email, and Facebook wall post are the people you care about. Why Google and Apple haven't used this to their advantage yet, I'm not sure.

<comment><USER14> There're potential privacy implications to using your call logs to build an implicit social graph. People have an expectation that their phone call records will remain private; look at all the trouble the NSA got into when they started spying on them. There's no such expectation when you explicitly give your relationship data to a third-party website.

Not to say it won't happen, but a bunch of things need to be worked out on the legal/ethical/cultural side of things before this is practical. As PG always says, social changes take longer than technical changes.

<comment><USER13> No need to violate anyone's privacy; do it completely on the client side. Then bridge to public via Buzz (in the case of Google).

<comment><USER15> I have two contacts in my email, one is my Mom, and the other is my male boss. All of a sudden I am seeing lots of transgenderfication sites in my results. Mom?

It would still be a violation of privacy because it is crossing the friend/contact line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given what my friends "Like" on FB (I'm friends with them for other reasons), a similar signal (aka "noise") in Google search results seems almost or actually to be a disincentive, for me personally, to forming "connections".

I think this may be an attempt to conflate two things that for some (many?) remain separate domains.

EDIT: OTOH, general initiatives to improve search results (i.e. Panda) have been quite useful, for me.

Now I'm sitting here, wondering why/how I end up repeatedly sounding negative about various Google "social" initiatives -- as actually incorporated. It's not that I'm against their trying. But... they do seem to keep missing the mark.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm feeling like this is another 'Buzz', another failed attempt to get social. The proposed idea of sharing stuff with my 'friends and contacts' rings very hollow, since the vast majority of my google contacts are people I've only emailed once, and never have met. For a company seemingly filled with very smart people, this is a pretty basic mistake.

-1

</comment><comment><USER18> well, lets just hope they don't just deprecate it - due to the "economic burden" - the second after we all implemented it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Pff, doesn't work with Google Apps accounts, as these accounts can't have a Google Profile.

So here is Google offering me the best and most useful online service I ever used (Google Apps), and they can't integrate it with their services properly.

<comment><USER20> Not only that, it's the flavor of their services that you are paying for. Drives me crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's with everyone making up tag names and undefined namespaces nowadays? <g:plusone>? A simple  with a class or data attribute would suffice.

<comment><USER22> I had the same reaction. Looking into the documentation[0], it turns out that you can also use a div with data- attributes instead, like this:

[0] <http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Best feature here: built-in support for callback functions. Makes Google Analytics integration seamless!

</comment><comment><USER24> added to my Enterprise hosts file: (for workers)

127.0.0.1 www.co2stats.com 127.0.0.1 apis.google.com 127.0.0.1 l.sharethis.com 127.0.0.1 w.sharethis.com 127.0.0.1 wd.sharethis.com 127.0.0.1 plusone.google.com 127.0.0.1 platform.twitter.com 127.0.0.1 www.google- analytics.com 127.0.0.1 seg.sharethis.com

any others I am missing? need to make sure this garbage is kept off of business workstations and the network

<comment><USER25> Thanks!

Hopefully Ghostery/Disconnect will start blocking this soon, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Which friends though? Who are these friends that I am recommending it to??

<comment><USER27> Your GMail contacts. Wait, they can't do that anymore! I genuinely don't know then, they must have a clever algorithm in place to create a brand new list of friends, depending on your past searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Isn't "+1" kind of an insider reference to the Slashdot voting system? It may be instantly recognizable to us, but is it really intuitive what this does to the vast masses of everyday-Joe internet users? Seems to me like another hit from engineer driven Google product development.

Also: _"But sometimes you want to +1 a page while you're on it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that recipe for chocolate flan if you haven't tried it out yet?"_

I may be having a case of the Mondays here or something, but I really hate this kind of forced chipperness in corporate communication, and I am seeing a lot of it from Google, most recently in the 'funny' "Let's put more cats on the internet!" marketing for the Chrome netbook. Again it seems like some high-brow Google engineers, based on statistical evidence that humans have feelings, decided to employ some grandmother type to filter all their marketing through.

<comment><USER29> > "Again it seems like some high-brow Google engineers, based on statistical > evidence that humans have feelings, decided to employ some grandmother type > to filter all their marketing through."

It seems like you, based on unstatistical evidence of Google Engineers, decided they were all Borg and incapable of feeling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised WordPress.com wasn't on board with this at the start. It already has Like buttons (ugh) as well as Twitter, Facebook, etc. WordPress is otherwise great at getting its blog posts into Google results, so I figured this was a natural.

</comment><comment><USER31> In case anyone's wondering how to add the +1 button to their Posterous (which doesn't allow Javascript), feel free to use this iframe:

I'll publish the PHP script on my github[1] shortly in case you want to host it yourself.

[1] <https://github.com/olalonde/google-plusone-posterous>

</comment><comment><USER32> Out of all of Google's social efforts, this is the most promising yet. What's unique about this is that (if they're keeping a search oriented business model) it could allow for a more social ranking system. In other words, after a link gets so many recommendations, it moves up in search. I for one would love a search feature where I could click "recommended" and see if anyone I know has had experience with the topic. Baby steps are imperative with this one.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hmm, too bad that the HTML4 code they propose fails validation with my validator (Nokigiri) and the HTML5 code they propose doesn't seem to work on HTML4 pages.

I solved it by mixing and matching the two:

This fails the official W3C validator but it works with Nokogiri. The odd way to set the language of the button {"lang":"de"} trips up syntax error marking in my IDE too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Tried to integrate it on <http://infostripe.com> but ran into issues of it not rendering as expected or when expected, the counter balloon having some CSS background issues.

I'll try it again in a bit but I am disappointed so far with the implementation. Maybe it's getting crushed.. but it is Google..

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, the +1 button worked for a good 10 minutes, and then my site stops responding trying to pull the js from google. down for 2 minutes, now back up again.

Must be a frenzy.

EDIT: when it came back up, it also didn't have my saved +1. I had to redo it.

Seems pretty buggy right now.

EDIT 2: Okay, my site is down again. I'm removing the button for awhile.

<comment><USER36> That seems hard to believe. The buttons seem to show up fine on tech crunch and google search.

It's difficult to imagine that Google has been 'slashdotted' due to serving up a javascript widget...

<comment><USER35> I certainly agree, it's not like I don't use google to host jquery, or any other number of things.

However it was seriously hanging on that one js call. Perhaps it's just my experience, but I'm going to wait at least an hour before I try again. I like my site responding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> and yet there is no +1 button on that page..

<comment><AUTHOR> There is now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This has the same problem as Facebook Likes - you can create a +1 for a url other than the one you are currently on. And spot the javascript callback which encourages a '+1 this page to reach the video' setup.

</comment><comment><USER39> I sort of have an issue with the name. I can understand that the average user would understand Facebook's Like and Twitters follow but I see that +1 is sort of technical jargon...

<comment><USER40> Nah, even my technological challenged family understands the concept of giving a website plus one point. +1 is fairly simple to understand as a positive thing both inside and outside of a computer context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Funny, the "Get code" link in the email Google sent me goes to 404 page. Fail.

<comment><USER41> What's the deal with the downvote? Even the button in the Adsense interface does not work.

<comment><USER20> I didn't down vote, but I guess it was a reaction against using "fail" as a standalone sentence. There are some curmudgeons who don't like that newfangled interweb colloquialisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ok, I've added it to one of my clients' sites (NOT WORK SAFE <http://www.dirtyhotproductions.com> NOT WORK SAFE).

I'm not sure if anyone will use it on there (especially with the big warning about your +1s being publicly viewable), but here's hoping it boosts search engine rankings at least.</comment>