Facebook is now scanning your photos to make sure you send them to your friends - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-now-scanning-cameras-photos-222321479.html <comment><USER2> _If it still sounds a little creepy to have Facebook looking through all your photos, especially as you take them, you are basically left with two options: You can turn off the send-to-your-friend notifications, and you can turn off Facebook 's facial recognition feature._

Or, you know, ditch Facebook, since this is far from the total extent of their creepiness.

<comment><USER3> It's not really practical to do that. You're basically asking people to give up email or their phone at this point. That's how wired into Facebook most people are.

<comment><USER4> I normally don't post in the social network threads; but I've seen this argument enough times that I have a bunch of questions I'm legitimately curious about, since I'm clearly not the target audience: (For context, I tried facebook in college, found myself hating a lot of aspects about it despite heavy use, cut myself off by the end of college and have been "clean" for a good few years now.)

1\. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them over email/gchat/texting/in person.

2\. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method? This hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very limited population strata. As a followup, do these people find any difficulties when connecting with non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?

3\. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just the accepted dogma at this point. I don't mean to demean the group by suggesting that, I've certainly watched myself do the same in hindsight to other things (video games), but I do wonder if it's at least being considered.

<comment><USER5> In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties:

For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.

The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed- platform third party, but that's the way it is.

<comment><USER6> > My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited > to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes > them or thinks to invite them...

Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.

I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.

<comment><USER7> This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends.

It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.

The way I accidentally don't invite people is

1\. I setup Facebook event.

2\. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.

3\. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.

4\. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.

5\. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook

I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Engineer on the feature here. This article is incorrect in describing how this feature becomes enabled. It does __not __turn on if "you've ever sent your friends a photo via Messenger." The feature only turns on if you see the promotion and click "Try It".

<comment><USER9> Could you please clarify if the face recognition is done on-device or if the photo (or some subset of data) is uploaded to Facebook's servers in order to analyse the photos?

Thanks.

<comment><USER10> Yes, this is hugely important. If any photos are being uploaded without my explicit action, I consider it a huge violation of trust.

I've disabled every permission messenger has until there is clarification here.

<comment><USER11> The feature isn't live yet, is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's nothing wrong with this feature by itself. Nothing! The elephant in the room here is _consent._ If the app simply popped up a little box on first launch of the new version to the effect of "Would you like to be automatically notified when your new pictures contain your friends?" with a little "About privacy" link at the bottom, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

<comment><USER13> To get _informed_ consent you would have to communicate that this involves every picture taken being uploaded to Facebook servers (but not posted to your Facebook account) to be scanned for friends. Even that 'uploaded but not posted' distinction would be difficult to convey to a lay person.

I'm not sure hiding that in an "About privacy" section would get a reasonable level of informed consent either, very few would read it.

This is an issue that keeps coming up: useful features involve slurping a lot of personal data in order to do the processing remotely, that distinction is not understood by a large number of the users and explaining it fully is determined to be bad UX ("overly technical explanation") and bad marketing (makes the privacy implications obvious).

<comment><USER11> Are images uploaded to facebook though? Or are the face features extracted on the device? It's one thing to upload every picture in full to FB, but it's another to upload only a feature vector to Facebook.

What if the entire recognition pipeline happened completely on the device without any data being sent to Facebook?

Even if you have 1,000 friends, it might not a huuge deal to download a gallery of 1,000 models to compare to.

Of course, we can't be sure how this system works without the source.

<comment><USER14> Pffft! Yeah right!

Like you've ever met a developer who would risk the extreme likelihood of platform incompatibilities across a disparate menagerie of hardware platforms and mobile devices, instead of simply base64ing some images and JSONing them into a restful webservice, where they gain explicit control of the computation environment, and get to conveniently crawl the entire dataset in a high availabilty data center.

As if you've ever met anyone who would trade that, in favor of re-developing the same features 20 times for 20 different compiles, and risk the inability to deploy those builds to unreliable nodes, across throttled mobile contract pay-as-you-go bandwidth, to achieve a goal that doesn't align with the company's bottom line. As if you've ever seen any company anywhere do that... for privacy.

<comment><USER11> Most large app developers share common source code for all of their platforms, so I don't buy your argument about platform compatability. It's the same reason why the Facebook native app and Messenger are native apps rather than a simple UIWebView.

I also think that uploading tons of photos is going to be very hard on the "throttled pay-as-you-go bandwidth contracts" that you mention. It certainly sounds much more expensive than shipping a binary patch once in a while.

You bring up privacy, so let's explore this topic a little. I disagree that privacy inherently conflicts with a company's bottom line. Some Fortune-500 companies treat privacy as a _desirable goal_ because it _increases the perceived value_ of their business.

As one example, let's compare to Apple's public privacy statement[1]:

        > We also refuse to add a "backdoor"
        > into any of our products because
        > that undermines the protections
        > we've built in. And we can't unlock
        > your device for anyone because you
        > hold the key — your unique password.

See also Tim Cook's statement[2]:

        > Finally, I want to be absolutely
        > clear that we have never worked
        > with any government agency from
        > any country to create a backdoor
        > in any of our products or services.
        > We have also never allowed access
        > to our servers. And we never will.

Elsewhere:

        > Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage
        > and FaceTime data when it's in transit
        > between devices. So unlike other companies'
        > messaging services, Apple doesn't
        > scan your communications, and we
        > wouldn't be able to comply with
        > a wiretap order even if we wanted to.

This is what Apple _wants you to believe_ : that they take privacy seriously enough to _go out of their way_ to implement it. Facebook has never, ever tried to strike that chord. With their reputation, Facebook knows the public would never buy it.

The comparison isn't very far-fetched. Like Facebook, Apple also deals with biometrics. Rather than face recognition, they use fingerprint recognition. Do they upload fingerprints to Apple's servers? Or, despite your claims of impacting the bottom line, do they do the recognition on the device? Here's their official statement[3]:

        > This [fingerprint representation]
        > is stored in a Secure Enclave within
        > your phone's chip, and is never
        > accessed by iOS or other apps,
        > never stored on Apple servers,
        > and never backed up to iCloud
        > or anywhere else.

Maybe these claims are true. Maybe they aren't. However, you must admit that it makes _good business sense_ for Apple to make these (strong) privacy claims. They're setting a very good precedent here -- one that I sincerely hope Facebook chooses to follow.

If Facebook wants to win these kinds of brownie points with their customers, maybe they could write a statement like this:

        > Facebook knows that the photos you choose not
        > to share are deeply personal to you. That's
        > why we take special steps to keep them that
        > way. If you choose not to share a photo in
        > your camera roll, it will never be sent to
        > Facebook.

But they can't even try to pull this off if people see encrypted blobs flying across the wire every time they click the shutter button.

So. From a _privacy perspective_ , it makes _good business sense_ to implement the recognition pipeline on the device. And Facebook knows they could win back some public trust by doing that. The delicious question is: Is the trade-off worth it? Do the costs you mention outweigh the perceived benefits I mention? I think there were certainly developers on the Photo Magic team who _wished_ it could be this way. It might have even been a close decision. But we can only find out for sure once Photo Magic rolls out to everyone.

1: [http://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to- privacy/](http://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/)

2: [http://www.apple.com/privacy/](http://www.apple.com/privacy/)

3: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204587](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204587)

<comment><USER14> Fair enough, maybe the development team for this particular component is much larger than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm being naive about the head count at work behind the scenes on a project like this.

It's not really good news either way though. In my mind this would have been a smaller team, tasked with pulling the data over and then working on it to construct recognition scores, and passing a message back to prompt the user. This would have been a smallish team of 20 or 30, to do it quick and dirty.

For on-device processing, the project grows much more complicated, not just to develop, but also to test and prove end-to-end. So time and human resources are both more costly. And so too, come trade-offs. Network bandwidth, versus device battery/procesor/memory resources.

But all of this to push the envelope and solicit the user to expose more data to a for-profit service. Is it really something more convenient? Another nagging reminder, to do something the user doesn't need much prompting for?

The more weight thrown behind these sorts of projects the more curious the motives become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the face recognition done on the device, or on Facebook's servers? It's one thing to give the app permission to access your photos, it's another entirely to have it upload every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.

<comment><USER16> I don't work for Facebook or anything, but based on my own judgement I believe they upload the pictures on to their servers to then analyze with their super computing power, which our phones are not capable of yet, without of course analyzing all their existing data within our phones, which I doubt they would give an end user (probably too large of a data set). I've uninstalled the Facebook Apps since a while back, they request for permission to do really strange and intrusive things such as reading all of my SMS text messages, no thanks.

<comment><USER17> So basically, as soon as you take a photo, even if you don't intend on ever uploading it, it gets sent to Facebook?

<comment><USER18> Well that's disturbing (but not surprising) if true (if you haven't opted in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who is concerned that Facebook is going to eventually turn into a passive surveillance system for the government? I don't think it would be too difficult for Facebook to silently alert authorities when particular matches occur.

<comment><USER20> Microsoft does this

<comment><USER11> Really !!

Sounds interesting. Source please?

<comment><USER21> Haven't you noticed all of Microsoft's latest "cute" apps are all face-based?

* We can guess your age from your face: [https://how-old.net/](https://how-old.net/)

* We can guess your emotion: [https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2015/11/11/happy-sad-angry-this-microsoft-tool-recognizes-emotions-in-pictures/)

<comment><USER11> us0r's assertion was that Microsoft reports certain recognition results to the government.

You're replying with a list of some of Microsoft's technologies that use face attribute estimation.

That's not what I was asking for. These are two very different things.

<comment><USER22> I don't agree that "microsoft already does this" \- so don't take what I'm about to say to mean that. I mean only to show a piece of technology that more directly relates to the comments others have made.

That being said, Microsoft has developed a piece of technology called PhotoDNA[0], which is designed with the specific purpose of identifying child pornography. This is actively used on OneDrive and Bing, among other services - including Facebook. It's safe to say that OneDrive does not just delete the content if child pornography is detected - it reports to the authorities. Now, it's hard to argue that they don't have a right to do that, as long as the person is voluntarily using their services. That's where I draw a distinction here: Facebook could elect to turn on PhotoDNA on photos uploaded to their new service, and not properly educate their customers that stuff is being uploaded automatically. This does, essentially, constitute a passive surveillance system. Mind you, if it is used to establish that child pornography is found, you will have a hard time convincing most people that it is overstepping what Facebook should do. That's my concern - that this will be pushed as a "for the children" thing, and then extended to "to cut down on crime" later, once everyone stops caring about its existence.

That said, that's my concern. It's not necessarily what I think will happen. I have no reason as of yet to believe that it's the next step. I do not, however, want Facebook automatically uploading (or even scanning) my photos.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I fucking hate this company, but I'm drawn into it's gravitational pull like so many of us wanting to connect with long-distance family. There has to be technological way to stop these sons of bitches. What is it?

<comment><USER24> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKao_Pox5A)

Seriously. As others on the thread have pointed out, it's not as hard to live without as you think.

Don't believe me? Well... why don't you just try it for one week? If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Isn't it worth a try, though?

Try a step out of the social Skinner box.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, all this, "I need Facebook" stuff feels foreign to me. Maybe I'm just a sociopath who doesn't care about his extended network, but I haven't used Facebook in years and I haven't missed it for one second of that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This, and other things like this, is why I uninstalled the Facebook app. The website is slower, but functional.

<comment><USER27> Ditto. I never installed the messenger app. I would use the facebook app for browsing, and logged into the web app for messages. But then I realized I can do all the stuff in one place, the web app. So I uninstalled the main app as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How does this work? If they aren't uploading the picture how are they doing facial recognition? Surely they aren't running their highly proprietary recognition software on users' phones. Maybe they're doing preliminary zealous face-finding and uploading those potential matches for further processing? If so that means that no photo you ever take on your device is private.

<comment><USER11> You could probably run recognition on a phone.

Getting it running smoothly in the background without draining the battery? That might be a different matter. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am glad I have Android Marshmallow. Facebook no longer has any permissions.

<comment><USER30> My solution is simpler. I just don't have Facebook.

<comment><USER31> "Simple" is in the eye of the beholder.

For some people, it's simpler to keep in touch with friends and family by having a "least-privileges" Facebook account.

For those people, convincing every single person to also ditch Facebook would be very complex indeed.

<comment><USER32> why not just use the website?

<comment><USER31> I meant least-privileges in a general sense. Disallow tagging of you without approval, upload as little as you like, show as few details as you like, and for the app, deny any permissions you're not interested in giving up the keys to the castle for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And this is why "Photos" joined all the other permissions in off-land for the Facebook app. If the mobile web version wasn't horribly janky, I'd delete the app entirely.

<comment><USER34> I use only mobile web version of facebook and it good enough. No notifications and it's simple.

<comment><USER27> That correct. I use the web app as well. It works pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> turnoff suggested tags on FB: [https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=sugge...](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=suggestions&view&hc_location=ufi)

</comment><comment><USER36> So, let's assume that processing your photos on the device is far too processor extensive. That means that Facebook uploads every single photo you take to Facebook's servers.

That means that every single dick photo, or vagina/boobs photo that you have ever taken, is now with Facebook and readily available to the NSA under the FISA or Prism programs.

Basically the NSA has the biggest amateur porn collection in the world.

</comment><comment><USER37> Creepy. I'm glad I've removed the facebook app everywhere I've had it installed, in favor of using the mobile site under safari. The mobile site can chat too, so that limitation is also gone.

</comment><comment><USER38> Doesn't Facebook own your pictures you upload? I haven't been on there in a long time but I thought I recalled that.

<comment><USER39> I believe not but if you read snapchats terms they can do anything they want with your photos

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wasn't clear - is this feature for Android only? Surprised, as usually FB releases stuff on iOS first...

<comment><USER31> From the article:

> For Android, [it's realtime]. For iPhone users, it will scan through your > camera roll "periodically".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Another reason to root your phone or to get phone with android 6.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Magic" is a nice euphemism</comment>


Ask HN:  How many entrepreneurs out there are really passionate? - <AUTHOR>

I have a confession to make:  I've worked on several ideas, and I'm not completely insanely passionate about them.  But I love being an entrepreneur!  I work on ideas because I think they are good ideas and it is exciting to try and make my vision a reality.  I mean, I don't care about enterprise software or online video that much - but is that really so bad?  Isn't it enough to like working for yourself in a great group and strive for success, and have your passions not be your job?  I also find it strange how many entrepreneurs happen to be passionate about, say, group commerce these days.  Really? <comment><USER2> In my experience, business use of the word "passion" is nearly always code for something better said in other ways (if one is to be plain spoken). Some examples:

1) Entrepreneur Joe might have a good idea for a business but "Joe lacks passion" is code for an intuitive hunch that Joe is going to flake out and get distracted.

2) Alice might need something (investment, a business deal, etc.) and "Alice is passionate about this" is code for "Alice is completely screwed without this deal. She is highly motivated to perform. We've got her by the balls, so to speak."

3) Martin might have a great idea and the drive to do the technical work, but "Martin lacks passion" is code for "Martin can't dazzle people into uncritically buying from him." (This is part of the "passion is contagious" bs meme.)

4) Kate might have a start-up idea that looks great on paper, but it would require her to really drive a few initial employees very hard. "Kate lacks passion" is code for the hunch that Kate is not sufficiently sociopathic to abuse employees into a submission that is against their own best interests.

People in tech business circles use the word "passion" with about as much care as they use the word "fantastic". As a first approximation, it means "uh... I thought I was supposed to be making some noise or other just now and that word is what came out of my mouth".

<comment><AUTHOR> The context in which I find the ambiguity most apparent is when it's related to someone's motivation for being involved in a project. While it's clear that some people are motivated by the subject of their work - I think they are few and lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hugh MacLeod's legendary "How To Be Creative" article had a great point which is meant mainly for artists, but I think applies to entrepreneurs as well, at least when you talk about passion.

 _Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually._

See no.24 - [http://changethis.com/manifesto/6.HowToBeCreative/pdf/6.HowT...](http://changethis.com/manifesto/6.HowToBeCreative/pdf/6.HowToBeCreative.pdf)

Sorry the blog post seems to have disappeared, all I could find was the PDF.

It is so good, I must quote all of it:

 _Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around.

One of the reasons I got into drawing cartoons on the back of business cards was I could carry them around with me. Living downtown, you spend a lot of time walking around the place. I wanted an art form that was perfect for that.

So if I was walking down the street and I suddenly got hit with the itch to draw something, I could just nip over to the nearest park bench or coffee shop, pull out a blank card from my bag and get busy doing my thing. Seamless. Effortless. No fuss. I like it.

Before, when I was doing larger works, every time I got an idea while walking down the street I'd have to quit what I was doing and schlep back to my studio while the inspiration was still buzzing around in my head. Nine times out of ten the inspired moment would have passed by the time I got back, rendering the whole exercise futile. Sure, I'd get drawing anyway, but it always seemed I was drawing a memory, not something happening at that very moment.

If you're arranging your life in such a way that you need to make a lot of fuss between feeling the itch and getting to work, you're putting the cart before the horse. You're probably creating a lot of counterproductive "Me, The Artist, I must create, I must leave something to posterity" melodrama. Not interesting for you or for anyone else.

You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.

Conversely, neither should you fret too much about "writer's block," "artist's block," or whatever. If you're looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you SHOULD feel the need to say something.

Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough. In the meantime, you're better off going out into the big, wide world, having some adventures, and refilling your well. Trying to create when you don't feel like it is like making conversation for the sake of making conversation. It's not really connecting, it's just droning on like an old, drunken barfly._

</comment><comment><USER4> Zuckerberg wasn't particularly passionate about Facebook in the early days. Now he seems to be on a possibly life-long mission.

There's no substitute for discipline and hard work, not even passion (though it may make it less painful).

<comment><USER5> Just curious what led you to believe he wasn't passionate about Facebook? He was involved a couple other social networking type stuff like ConnectU and his HotOrNot clone. To me, it seems he was at least interested in exploring the domain space.

<comment><USER4> Based on what I read in The Facebook Effect mostly. I think he's even said as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm passionate about making money.

That said, once you identify a sector in which to make money, you need to master it. With mastery almost alway comes at least an appreciation or affection for a subject.

<comment><USER7> Really? That's strikes me in a weird way.

To me, (at least subconsciously) passion means a drive to do something out of love, regardless of whether or not you can make money out of it.

Being "passionate about making money" almost doesn't make any sense.

Better said as "I'm very driven to make money".

<comment><USER6> Making money is a game, like baseball. If people can be passionate about the latter, why can't I be passionate about the former?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hear you brother. I do ask myself this sometimes.

I came to conclusion that I'm passionate about the "game"! Not money, not the product but figuring out the game of:

1\. how my domain/system works

2\. where is money

3\. who are players, their motivations

4\. how do customers/users function

trying out different hypothesis (gaming) for each of the above and seeing data and learning the GAME!

Once you KNOW THE GAME, you can use it anywhere else.

PS: Wall St 2 reference: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPFCKDexok>

<comment><USER9> this is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is a fundamental thing I've learnt about startups that is hugely important and massively over looked:

You need to be passionate about building a company, not an idea.

Because you will change the idea, and if your passion isn't in running a company you're dead. The groupon guy doesn't care about group buying, he cares about building a company with x culture etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was making that argument, somewhat unsuccessfully, with a VC friend last night. His counter was "I have to see that THIS idea is the one, among all the others you could be pursuing..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's kind of like picking a college major. Where college students invest their money and long amounts of time in a particular major, entrepreneurs (wantrepreneurs?) invest their minds in particular markets. At some point it becomes part of their identity.

I think it's better to decide on a particular market with some definitive action like starting a company or large side project, and if it fizzles out, avoid identifying with it. Being identified with a market that you don't know about doesn't impress genuine entrepreneurs.

Curiosity is different. It's good to be curious. Surprisingly, trying to be curious has worked for me. So has dealing with some of the many things that can get in the way of natural curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER12> The problem is not passion but vision. If you don't have a vision about where you want to take something then you will end up burning lots off energy but not really going anywhere.

The rocket needs a destination to aim for even if it never get's there completely.

<comment><USER13> Exactly - without vision there is no reason to be passionate. I spend all my free time (and my work time) on CouchDB b/c I see a vision of a programming model which is much better than today's web, and I want to make it reality. In this sense, passion may mean that I'm unstoppable, because I'll keep doing it no matter what. But really, it's the power of the vision that drives me.

<comment><USER14> What is your vision?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Find something about your work that you're passionate about, rather than the work itself (you could call it being indirectly passionate). For me, I'm passionate about creating useful things. So long as I'm creating useful things at work I'm passionate about it.

</comment><comment><USER16> To me, passion in the context of starting and building a business is about a deep commitment to serve the a source of pain or create a source of delight for a market that you feel a strong connection to.

If what's driving you is an attachment to a particular solution, then if the solution doesn't work, your commitment to the entire endeavor evaporates.

But, if your attachment is to a market, you stay motivated and have a much easier time pivoting as needed and surviving until you find the model and solution that work.

</comment><comment><USER17> I currently work on a startup together with my friend. We don't do this because we are passionate about starting a company or the problem we solve is exciting. We do it for the money. Why work for some company if you can make much more money selling you services directly? That's what got us started. Not passion.

Now I don't think it's wrong to be passionate but it's definitely a key factor whether your business is successful or not. It all comes down to hard work, execution and a little bit of luck.

</comment><comment><USER18> I forget where, but i heard someone say somewhere that the best entrepreneurs are ones that solve problems, not the ones that are just trying to make money. Maybe it's just me, but it's much easier to be passionate about a problem because I'm not satisfied until it's fixed. It's a finite conclusion that you can finally reach.

Might try asking yourself - what's one problem that makes you upset/annoyed/frustrated? What can you do to fix it?

</comment><comment><USER19> It's tough to know what you're really passionate about, though. One way to think about it, that I've found useful, is to say that you're passionate about something if you love coming in to work and doing things, and time goes by so fast that you have no idea how it's late at night already. If you can pull that off consistently, then you're somewhat on the right track.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get that - the "flow" idea. But I can get "flow" in a pretty mundane task - filing in the office, grinding in a game, etc. And I wouldn't describe myself as passionate about any of those things...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think you need other people (either a co-founder or ideally, users) to be passionate about an idea in order to stoke your own passion. It's hard to stay passionate about something for very long alone.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm truly passionate about making something people actually want to use on a daily basis. Getting the first users to really love the product is what I care about. Money is hopefully a biproduct.

</comment><comment><USER22> Be passionate about creating value.

<comment><USER23> translated: love making money.

<comment><USER22> "Value" is qualitative. "Money" is quantitative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _raises hand_

</comment><comment><USER24> Most deeply passionate are people in manic phase of bipolar disorder (2.6% of USA population).</comment>


Check.in - HTML5 check-ins to foursquare, Gowalla, brightkite... - <AUTHOR> http://check.in/

<comment><USER2> I have two questions:

First, doesn't using HTML5 mean that the site is accessible on _fewer_ devices?

Second, how useful are check-in sites if you're an adult who is working full- time? I've always liked the idea of seeing where my friends are and maybe being able to meet up with them, but in general where they are is in the areas they live. Do I just need more friends, or to be going to a concentrated place like the villages or LES (NYC), or am I just totally failing to get what these services are for?

<comment><USER3> They also serve up a regular HTML site. You can try it out in Firefox and other browsers. It even takes advantage of the location API available in modern browsers allowing you to locate yourself and check in via your laptop/desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, curious what people think about this. Imagine you were running foursquare. Would you block check.in?

I could see an argument for it. If Foursquare blocked them, it would be difficult for them to gain traction. And as the front-runner in the space, Foursquare is arguably hurt more by aggregator services like Check.in, while its competitors are helped by them.

<comment><USER3> I think they're completely fine with it. Foursquare has been extremely open about how people use their API and this is what their API is for. In the end I don't think they care how people are checking in. They're still gathering useful location information for businesses which is their real value add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is neat, I'll have to check it out. My t-mobile coverage can be spotty in Brooklyn, which causes the official Android Foursquare client to time out when actual web pages are loading fine, so maybe this solves a problem I have.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome url.

Back button not working on Android is very irritating.

<comment><USER7> We will look into it, thanks!</comment></comment>


Electric Zine Maker (Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker <comment><USER2> I love the geocities-era meets _why the lucky stiff aesthetic of the site and the whole idea of fun and playful software. This is more software that facilitates art than software as art, but I still thing it's great.</comment>


Did Mexico just make it *illegal* to install Linux? - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1278172057486766080 <comment><USER2> More importantly it's illegal to repair or have an independent technician repair computers.

Because we all know third world countries are thriving with corporate based repair shops.

</comment><comment><USER3> Betteridge's law?

"Se registran 367 votos en pro, 0 en contra y 1 abstención para el proyecto que expide la Ley Federal de Protección a la Propiedad Industrial y abroga la Ley de la Propiedad Industrial, que integra la legislación relacionada con el #TMEC. Queda aprobado."

Google translate says:

"There are 367 votes in favor, 0 against and 1 abstention for the project that issues the Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property and abrogates the Industrial Property Law, which integrates the legislation related to #TMEC. It is approved."

It seems like TMEC refers to harmonization with US and Canadian laws, so given that it is not illegal to install Linux there, I'd be skeptical that this makes it so in Mexico.

When I looked for non-Twitter information, I found stuff that says the criminal penalties are for unauthorized decoding of encrypted satellite TV, stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there an article or something that points out where it actually says that?

<comment><USER3> Probably not?

It appears to relate to laws being passed to enact the successor agreement to NAFTA. If you google the Spanish part, you will find more information. I don't know if Mexican bills are freely available on line though.

<comment><USER4> I did Google it and found the bill and have been scrolling through the translation for awhile and have yet to find a section about Linux or anything like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Goodbye Jody.  You Really Were Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/01/29/goodbye-jody/

<comment><USER2> Context: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/28/jody-sherman-ecomom- founder...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/28/jody-sherman-ecomom-founder-and- longtime-web-entrepreneur-has-died/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you, the author gave no indication of who the hell he was talking about.

<comment><USER4> It is written for Jody Sherman though, not for an audience.

I personally never heard of him, but I appreciated the writing anyway. It is a beautiful piece.

<comment><USER5> > It is written for Jody Sherman though, not for an audience.

Actually, I think the idea of "published" on the web means it is for an audience. I appreciate yuvadam providing the context as I was baffled, too.

<comment><USER6> _Actually, I think the idea of "published" on the web means it is for an audience._

I can only speak for myself, but I put a lot of stuff up there which is simply like talking or painting or jamming at an open window to me: anyone is free to stop by and watch and/or comment, but I always feel free to be as personal, or incomprehensible, or random as I want to be. I don't get paid to provide a certain service in my personal space, I don't even have to explain myself to anyone; so you know what, _I don't_. And if someone else posted it to another site, that's something else entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is a great post by Mark, I think everyone who knows Jody will be vigorously nodding their head throughout. way too early to go, man.. the only consolation is it makes me happy to see the tremendous impression you've left on so many others. rest in peace.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is happening too much... I don't know how to stop it... but if you ever feel like you are at your breaking point, like author on this post below says "Just Stop". I don't want to keep seeing posts like this. Not because it makes me sad, but because I really don't want people going down that road...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135274>

</comment><comment><USER9> For those interested in the interview between Mark Suster and Jody, it's a good one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5c645Uexx0>

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's what can help: Everyone needs a plan B and realistic expectations from life:

The majority of businesses fail, you won't achieve everything at 26, you're not going to get rich, and being addicted to success and fame is not a good thing. Have a realistic plan B, a way to have a normal life like everyone else in the event that your ambitions expire.

My Plan B: Work at a grocery store like my brother, live with Mom & Dad. Plan C: Start an Alpaca farm if feasible, and live quietly in Idaho for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty depressing. I'm just being honest.

<comment><USER10> For you that may be true. But billions of human beings live like this and find a way to be content and happy with their lives. If they can be happy with having little then maybe having little isn't depressing. Maybe your mindset is what's depressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the Clark County Coroner's office :( [http://www.8newsnow.com/story/20784172/ecomom-co-founder- ceo...](http://www.8newsnow.com/story/20784172/ecomom-co-founder-ceo-dead- at-47)

</comment><comment><USER13> can someone please explain what has happened or point to a link?

<comment><USER14> I can't say for sure, there's not a whole lot of info about the circumstances.

Reading into the last couple of paragraphs, it sounds like may have comitted suicide, but that's just speculation.

<comment><USER15> If this is true, then this is two suicides in less than 2 weeks :(

Whatever the reasons are, it is very very sad to see nice people go, at young ages

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did he die?</comment>


The End of Oz - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-end-of-oz-reflections-on-the-centenary-of-l-frank-baums-death/ <comment><USER2> In case anybody is interested, but isn't aware. The Oz "universe" is quite expansive and extends far beyond the 1939 film.

There's over a dozen books in the series by the original author and they're all in the public domain, free for anybody, and they hold up amazingly well as children's fantasy novels with memorable characters and an impressive amount of creativity. You can find them here (as well as dozens of other creative works by the same author): [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42)

There's also a couple dozen later works set in the same universe by other authors, notably 19 by Ruth Plumly Thomson. Most of these, I believe, are also in the public domain. You can find most of Thomson's works here [https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompso...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompson)

A complete list of Oz books is here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books) Notable authors who've written in Oz include Soviet author Alexander Volkov, Philip Jose Farmer, Joan D. Vinge, and even Stephen King.

In addition to the famous '39 film, there's several other films including a 1910 film, 1925 silent film, a 1933 Canadian animated, a 1975 film, a 1982 anime, an 1986 Japanese anime series, a 1950 half-hour tv adaptation, a 2013 film, various musical adaptations (including a Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow urban retelling in the mid-70s), games, comics and so on. There's also a 1985 Sequel film called "Return to Oz".

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone else who wondered, Mozart/Oz 2 has seen few commits this last year. And no new releases. It's still missing constraints and distributed objects. There was some work[1] porting 1.3 to 64-bit a year ago, but it's not quickly clear to me that it was ever merged. And I still don't know of a page to point people at, which conveys the wonderfulness that was Oz. Call it an extensible language, distributed, merged with a constraint system.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozart- users/jwk6D9e...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozart- users/jwk6D9eUh3U)

<comment><USER4> Ha, I don't think you realized what the article was about.

<comment><USER5> I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the domain.

Still, it's very sad that Mozart/Oz gets no attention. IMHO, the associated book CTM is on par with SICP.

I wish someone ported all their ideas to a Lisp, if that made development more lively.

<comment><USER3> > I came to see the comments thinking about Mozart/Oz, without noticing the > domain.

And I.

> no attention [...] CTM is on par with SICP.

It looks like CTM is available online at the moment: "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102.7366&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

I don't recall what year the SICP pdf became free for download from MIT Press. But while CTM drafts were available during writing, they vanished upon publication. Which given the poor state of other Mozart/Oz documentation, was an adoption barrier.

Scheme also seemed to have a broader base of support, with ties into the broader lisp and programming communities. M/Oz seemed more a European academic instructional-and-a-bit-of-research VM/language. A very different cultural context. And broader societal open-source culture and infrastructure was less developed back then, so there was less to fall back on.

I'm reminded of Poplog, a polylingual system of Common Lisp, Prolog, ML, and a C-like language, out of Sussex. But the culture from which the authors came, and the economic choices they made, took something with seemingly great potential, and reduced it to near-zero impact. EDIT: Looks like it's again ported to 64-bit as of this summer, FWIW: [http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog...](http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html)

Also perhaps, while Scheme was a lisp, Oz was weird in its own unique way, so it hit "eww, parentheses"-like resistance without sanctuary. Which I fuzzily recall motivating a second language for the Mozart VM, dividing attention.

> ported all their ideas to a Lisp

Some ideas from the Oz language might be ported perhaps. But the underlying Mozart VM, which provided the unification, constraints, and distributed programming... hmm. Are any of the lisp implementations of prolog for instance, at all performance competitive?

<comment><USER5> I think CTM drafts were always available online, even after publication.

<comment><USER3> At least circa 2004, while working on improving Mozart/Oz online documentation, I did not know of any such. The drafts previously available, had all been taken down. Shrug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a MOOC on programming paradignms that used Oz for its material. I was taking and enjoying it but unfortunately it was one of those time- constrained MOOCS where content is only dribbled out on a weekly basis and I got busy with work partway through.

If not for the fact that Coursera and now even edX are gutted[1] for people not paying for their certifications, I'd give it another go.

1) The final straw was disabling automated graders. They basically took away the one really compelling feature MOOCs have for programming topics that YouTube videos don't.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm annoyed that I read all the way to the end to find the author's conclusion is that everything in the world today is awful and everyone is pretending it isn't (that we are living a lie and pretending to live in Oz). What tosh. It is doubly annoying because from my perspective the exact opposite is true; that the world has never been better and most people believe things are the worst they've ever been.

I did enjoy reading through and remembering the Oz stories.</comment>


2020 in Memory Unsafety - Apple's OSes - <AUTHOR> https://langui.sh/2020/07/24/apple-memory-safety/ <comment><USER2> > If you're interested in a deeper dive on what memory unsafety is and why it > is Fish in a Barrel's mission to rid the world of its scourge please read > through last year's post for the details.

As I've said before[1], in terms of Apple products, maybe we should let some bugs through (for jailbreaking).

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23783453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23783453)

</comment><comment><USER3> You'd make a fortune investing in companies that use Rust and don't have these problems.</comment>


How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k <comment><USER2> Loved Tom's social hack for finding cofounders, from Startups Open Sourced. He also has a really good outlook on the role of design in startups.

Q: So, the best way to get to know somebody is to go drink with them?

A: That is absolutely the best way to really get to know a person and what they really like and are interested in because if they are interested in technology, then they will have no problem geeking out with you about Ruby or Node or something for three hours, over drinks; that's when you know that you found someone that could be a really successful cofounder. I think there really is something to doing business in bars. In the early days when there were four of us—we had hired Scott Chacon—we would go to this bar called O'Reilly's, up in North beach. We went there almost every week and that's where we would talk about what we had done. This is after we had started full time and it was where all the decisions were made. A couple of drinks in, you start to just say what you mean instead of thinking so much about whose feelings you are going to hurt or whatever, you say things very bluntly, like, "I think we should do this, and I think you are wrong for saying we should do it a different way," and now you can have an honest argument about what needs to get done and what the concerns are about the company or how it's structured or how the stock is going to be split. All this stuff will come up over drinks and as long as you are not too drunk, it can be helpful.

<comment><USER3> Warning: this restricts you to finding cofounders that are 21 and over. :)

<comment><USER4> Not if you live in a country where you can vote and drink at the same age :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll be honest. When I first read this post nearly three years ago, I barely knew what Git was, the stock market was crashing hard every day, hundreds of thousands were being laid off, and turning down that offer seemed pretty foolish. Now I can't live without GitHub.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, I don't think turning down an offer is ever a real problem. You can always ask for the offer again; does a company as big as Microsoft ever have enough smart programmers? People come and go every day. There is probably room for you somewhere.

<comment><USER7> This is very true, just want to add the caveat that the notion of low cost of foregone opportunity you are talking about could apply to mature-stage companies, not necessarily fast-growing ones.

Also there is tremendous selection bias in which of these "I turned down X to do Y" stories get told, of course.

<comment><USER8> I would definitely read the "How I turned down a $300,000 job at bigcorp to found a startup that crashed and burned 18 months later" story.

<comment><USER9> I turned down a job at Google (not 300k but hey, it's Google!) to join a startup. The startup started to sink about 2 years later.

I learned a ton and didn't regret it for an instant. Moved on to a new startup 2 years ago when it became clear the first was a dead end. Google recruiters continued to ping me religiously every 6 months regardless.

Moral of the story: Google, MSFT, Facebook, etc will all still be there in 2 years. Especially if you're early in your career and don't need the cash today, go wherever you will learn the most.

<comment><USER10> it was 300k over 3 years... so your offer probably wasn't that far off!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe."_

A great conclusion to a great article. Definitely a motto to live by.

<comment><USER12> A cynical mind might say that a really adventurous life might also expose one to more risk of being _young_ and dying, rather than old. Or other less than pleasant outcomes.

<comment><USER13> That's why our brains afford us both desires: the need for adventure, and the need for security. The two keep each other in check. Adventurous people, who aren't reckless, simply choose to be more adventurous than fearful when there aren't too many real safety risks, but mostly perceived ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's worth noting that none of the Ruby guys Tom worked with at Powerset are still working for Microsoft 3 years later. The guys I've spoken with had a miserable time working there and left to work for other startups like Greplin, Bank Simple, and Square.

</comment><comment><USER15> How did github get early users?

<comment><USER16> We invited everyone we knew in the Ruby community. We all attended local Ruby meetups and talked to anyone that would listen. We used it for our own open source projects and invited would-be contributors to join the fun. We used an invite-only model during the private beta to create artificial scarcity and encourage people to invite their friends.

<comment><USER17> Am sending this to every person I know building a community-driven site. You've perhaps unwittingly boiled the general solution down to its base components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great post, but dammit, now I'm going to have "You're The Best" by Joe Esposito stuck in my head all day.

</comment><comment><USER19> This story is encouraging! I'm soon to graduate college and am figuring out what exactly I want to do next. One of the options is to work part time on my startup, next to another part time job or freelancing. It's a lot easier when you have savings to make such a leap, then again, I live lean and live cheap.

</comment><comment><USER20> Turned out to be the best move.

<comment><USER2> No kidding. Coming from a guy who has never raised a single round of funding and has operated profitably every single month since launching (except for one month where he hired two people), they're doing really, really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very nice read. That also leads me to mention that Github, as good as it is in 'social' coding or whatever that means, does not fill a gap for a proper resource on how to use Git. Not that it should and it clearly doesn't carry that mandate, but there is hefty amount of respect to be made for any group that de-mystifies git in all it's glory.

Hell, there are plenty of comments here, on groups and proggit from users that lose their hair over advanced use of git.

In my opinion advanced consulting services and migration planning for currently SVN,CVS engaged companies would be nice.

<comment><USER22> > _proggit_

One too many Gs: progit.org

<comment><USER23> I'm having trouble determining whether you are serious, but I suspect the original poster was referring to reddit's programming community.

<comment><USER22> I'm suggesting that's a better place to learn about git not to mention being created by one of the Github guys.

<comment><USER22> Okay since I'm just getting driveby downvotes, let me explain the source of my comment. The original comment said:

> _That also leads me to mention that Github, as good as it is in 'social' > coding or whatever that means, does not fill a gap for a proper resource on > how to use Git._

Well, Scott Chacon (#4 githubber I believe?) wrote the book to demystify Git. Of course, there is a certain irreducible complexity there, but I think Github has made a significant contribution there, so I don't think it's fair to level this criticism at them out of passing unfamiliarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "You're the best around, Nothing's gonna ever keep ya down!"

</comment><comment><USER25> When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe."

Great quote and I try to live my life by the same philosophy

</comment><comment><USER26> I pay for github, great decision :)

<comment><USER27> GitHub makes using version control fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The next night, Friday, October 19, 2007 at 10:24pm" Was there a time-machine involved overnight or is it supposed to be 2008?

<comment><USER29> I think the post was published in 2008 but it was talking about events from a year earlier:

"2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke's Sports Bar..."</comment></comment>


DigitalOcean and Cloud9 - A Match made in (dev) heaven - <AUTHOR> http://www.fluidbyte.net/post/70512388281/digitalocean-cloud9ide-a-match-made-in-dev

<comment><USER2> I wont be able to test it out for a few hours, how is the latency from australia if anyone knows? is it still usable, by usable i mean -never- have to wait for the net to unlag. Id love to use something like cloud 9 but the lag issue is pretty huge.</comment>


Found a great article but don't have time to read it now? Email it to yourself - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/introducing-email-this-send-ad-free-articles-to-your-email-inbox-for-later-reading-5a5c972b98f1#.ina675k17 <comment><USER2> I've learned that within three standard deviations, if I am unwilling to read something approximately now, I will be unwilling to make time to read it in the future. I've also learned that the last place I want more stuff is my email inbox (it is a todo list that anyone can access).

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to do this, but then I found the browser bookmark bar, and late Pocket

</comment><comment><USER4> This is like a lifehack from the 90's

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that this extracts useful content from the article and only sends text + images (like Readability).</comment></comment>


The Elaborate Wig-Snatching Schemes of the 18th Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-elaborate-wigsnatching-schemes-of-the-18th-century <comment><USER2> I dont think they mention the reason people shaved their heads and wore wigs in the 1st place is because otherwise they would have had lice. Commoners had hair, and also lice.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I didn't read it close enough (kinda skimmed it) - but I don't recall seeing any mention as to what these "wig thieves" did with the wigs?

Sell them to others? Disassemble them and sell the hair?

<comment><USER4> One of the pictures was captioned with this: "Stolen wigs, large and small, could be sold for a pretty penny." One of the stories also involved a man stealing a wig for his own use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al Someone please train a monkey to snatch Trump's "hair" :-)</comment>


Tell HN: Guess what Baidu and Yahoo China have already censored? - <AUTHOR>

Step #1: Visit www.baidu.com or cn.yahoo.com.
Step #2: Search for Google or blogspot.com. Note that both work.
Step #3: Now search for google.blogspot.com.
Step #4: Enjoy your Baidu lockout. You should be able to search again in 5-10 minutes, I haven't timed the duration exactly.
Source: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1508260&cid=30746302 <comment><USER2> Had never been to Baidu.com before. Wonder where they got their inspiration for that UI...

<comment><USER3> When I was working at Google in 2007 the DNS in China would redirect Google to Baidu every now and then. Can't point fingers at who was making the changes... but it usually coincided with the U.S. doing something China didn't like. Talk about irritating.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me if China blocked Google all together, made a clone of Google's UI, and powered searches on Google through Baidu.

<comment><USER4> Well, since we control the root servers maybe we can fight fire with fire and have some fun with China. We could randomly allow innocent (to the Chinese govt) sites to be redirected to free speech and human rights activist sites.

<comment><USER5> Making the DNS even more unreliable isn't good for anyone. Also, you're talking about returning an IP that is probably blocked by GFW anyways. So instead of getting the web page for the "innocent (to the Chinese govt)" website, the end user just gets a TCP RST.

<comment><USER4> I was joking (mostly), but if we did it I imagine we'd go all the way and host the censored content, changing IPs faster than they could block. They would have to wall us off completely to their people, which is exactly what we'd want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that you'll also get blocked out if you type in:

       http://poorlytyped.blogspot.com/2010/01/haskell-ray-tracing-parallel.html

from which one can conclude that the Chinese are being kept in the dark from Haskell's enlightenment.

 _All_ blogspot websites have been blocked for at least the 6 months that I've been here, and I doubt that Baidu has anything to do with it. There's nothing _new_ here. There's also a ton of workarounds. I just use vtunnel.com.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am astounded. The server actually dropped my connection when I tried searching for it!

<comment><USER8> I believe this is one of the main techniques of the Great Firewall -- once it detects a connection is disfavored, inject a few spoofed packets to break the connection. It's cheaper than being a full participant in the stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre.

So the government may block access to google.cn if it hasn't already.

<comment><USER10> _google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre_

Are you claiming google.cn has already _changed_ their filtering though? Just fwiw, from what I understand you would need to use a Chinese IP address if you wanted to properly verify that.

<comment><USER11> Further proof : [http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh- CN&um=1&newwind...](http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh- CN&um=1&newwindow=1&sa=1&q=tienanmen+massacre&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2)

Screenshot : <http://hotelcostantiga.com/specials/censor2.jpg>

<comment><USER12> That is misspelt though; is that new or has that always been uncensored.

The correct spelling IS censored.

I know when I tried in the past (when it first was censored) miss-spellings were still not filtered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried it and got locked out. But if you remove "www" completely or replace it with "www1", you're back in.

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't matter, because you cannot access blogspot from china. Even the google official blogs, you can't access. Even state.gov. And you know what ? during the days Obama was here in China, the NyTimes was censored, and they did not unblock it until recently. And it is the Great Firewall blocking everything. Google is beyond this. They can do nothing. The PRC Committee controls this. What a shame</comment>


ITerm 2: The social terminal - <AUTHOR> http://www.iterm2.com/ <comment><USER2> That's hilarious. For all the grief April Fools gets for being tired and even painful, there have been some really great jokes so far this year.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not even April 1st in my time zone yet and I'm already bored to tears with this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Luckily it's April fools, otherwise I'd see a lot of attention seekers in my feed...

rm -rf / I'm going to do it this time!

</comment><comment><USER5> April fools.

</comment><comment><USER6> No doubt Mark would use this, nice touch. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't decide if this is real or fake. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> ...............................</comment>


Speed as a Habit - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/ <comment><USER2> I take offense to _idea_ of speed as a priority, though not necessarily to the whole article.

> All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.

All else is never equal when speed is the driving factor. I have _never_ seen a company execute well while pressuring for speed.

It's significantly more important to think about systems. What is the cooperative source of your speed? What are the barriers to making good product quickly? What allows us to make faster decisions?

Invariably, without fail, unequivocally, the answers to these questions—which are sources of speed, quality, and market fit—lie in the systems that compose a company. Not systems as in slow methodical heavy processes, but systems as in a clear understanding of how things are connected and how to continually improve how they work.

Start with systems, then you can go fast. It's ludicrously dangerous to put the cart before the horse. Granted, much of this article dives into detail on how to make things run smoother in order to go fast—that's great, but if you make it the primary focus, imagine how fast you could go.

Speed... a noble goal, but as W. Edwards Deming said, "By what method?"

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. Being first (or even early) to market is obviously an advantage, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient for success, as countless examples show. "The second mouse gets the cheese."

In a market with rapid growth and technological change, sometimes it can even damage your prospects. For example, MySpace found themselves dominating the market while it was still small, and for whatever reason, wasted the opportunity. Facebook learned from their mistakes and took control of the market MySpace had helped to create.

<comment><USER4> Also: Tablet PCs vs. iPads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of > the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

Not even close.

Apple was _WAY_ late to the MP3 player party. AltaVista was way ahead of Google, but DEC marketing ("DEC has it now, but you can't have it.") couldn't sell water to a man dying of thirst in the Sahara. Android had far better and faster competitors, but it brushed them aside.

In addition it is _well_ documented that the first company in a category takes all the arrows while the second company makes all the profit.

Things rarely need to be done that fast.

<comment><USER6> >>Apple was WAY late to the MP3 player party.

If you think of the iPod as an MP3 player, sure. But I think Apple tapped a brand new market with the iPod: the "fashionable gadgets" market. Arguably, that's the main reason it was incredibly popular.

<comment><USER7> I'd say the Walkman gets that honor, if not some other product.

The iPod was popular because it was the first practical MP3 player. Take a look at the competition:

[http://www.examiner.com/list/five-portable-mp3-players- that-...](http://www.examiner.com/list/five-portable-mp3-players-that-arrived- before-the-ipod)

You've got reasonably sized devices that could hold a few dozen megabytes, or impractical tanks that had real capacity. The iPod was the first to do both. It also had a user experience that was quite painless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He quotes Patton. It's worth remembering that Patton was not in overall charge of the war in Europe. Eisenhower was. Eisenhower, who was a logistics officer by training and background, had a basic plan for winning in Europe - build up a mountain of resources so large that the Allies could roll over any possible opposition. Which is what happened.

Eisenhower put Patton into play when a part of the operation needed speed and violent execution. Eisenhower took Patton out of play when it didn't.

<comment><USER9> This is super interesting, where did you learn about it?

<comment><USER8> Any good history of WWII covers this.

"Patton", the movie, shows it from Patton's perspective.

"You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics." \- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

More detail than you probably want - Gen. George C. Marshall's comments after the war.[1] See p. 8 of the transcript.

A more modern perspective - "Moving Mountains", a book by Gen. Gus Patronis, head of logistics for Desert Storm. How the U.S. Army built up a massive force in the middle of nowhere and then won a war in four days. This is a useful perspective on "speed". If you want to go fast, having massive resources available makes it work.

[1] [http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp- content/uploads/sit...](http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp- content/uploads/sites/16/2014/05/Marshall_Interview_Tape13.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, so I can see this article being twisted all over the place.

It's hard enough to get proper time for planning technical projects without this kind of crap.

Guess what, planning time does save time and lowers your cost of ownership. ROI-wise, planning time is the best gift you can give your project.

But... then someone is like, "Speed, I hear speed is good... move faster. Dependencies... fuck 'em... I don't understand 'em anyway so fuck 'em. Let's just go as fast as we can and we'll worry about everything we should have worried about up front over the next few years after all our devs quit because they're tired of working on shitty code that was rushed through."

This article so rubs me the wrong way. "Technical debt? What's that?!"

Anything worth doing, is worth doing right. To the best of your ability. Doing things right takes time. Take your time, do things right.

<comment><USER11> You read my mind. Points from this article need to be taken in context.. especially all the examples from Google. It's one thing to say 'Do it faster!' and have unlimited resources at your disposal (Google), but it's whole different ball game to harp on your 5 member startup. One adds hours via bodies and the other ruins work/life balance. That can really set a negative tone for an early startup trying to attract talent.

I enjoyed the 'GM is slow' comment. While that may be true in terms of innovation, it is the opposite when it comes to manufacturing. I've worked in those plants where the 'speed above all else' sentiment is eerily similar to this article, and is largely the reason I chose a different career path.

The one thing I take away from this is the accountability perspective. It's ok to ask why things will take the amount of time projected. Things often do get tacked on that don't need to be.

<comment><USER10> I was going to write up a bit of a rip on this as well:

> All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.

So, that's why we all still use AOL? And why Microsoft never had to worry since it built Office? Why PayPal squashed Venmo? The point is really that all else are never equal. Speed to market is A factor, but it's not the only factor, or even the most important factor today. Look at Box, vs. Dropbox, vs. Copy, vs... The market is big enough for multiple identical services. Users pick the one that works the best for them.

And I certainly agree asking questions is a GREAT way to start documenting all the stuff that has to go into a project. I'd add a bullet point, "Way more hours than I want for... explaining why setting up Vagrant is important... explaining why unit tests save time, for the 900th time... explaining why QA is needed..."

Things don't often get tracked that ought to be, but PLEASE do not send more meeting requests to your entire dev team asking them to justify to marketing or sales why we need the basic steps we ask for.

(This article hits a bit close to home today, as I'm literally in a meeting with 15 people where only 2 people are talking and I literally just had to defend QA marketing guy who clearly doesn't get it. And the topic... "How we can organize our team to be more efficient.")

<comment><USER12> Speed clearly isn't everything but I think you picked terrible examples.

AOL might have been first but then they just seem to have quit. They didn't keep up with the times. Their whole paradigm was terrible out of date. They were in the ISP market but extremely slow and it killed them.

Lotus 1-2-3 was before Excel but Lotus took a long time to release new versions while Office did not. You'll notice that MS isn't super quick with releases now, but they do churn out new versions with some regularity.

Business doesn't have a finish line so companies have to start and stay fast. This is why technical debt is a problem; sometimes you need technical debt to get something out the door fast, but it will slow down future releases so you need to get it under control.

<comment><USER10> In today's market, I don't see any customer being like, "Man, I wish this came faster." Look at Blizzard... they focused on speed for their last expansion, and they lost 3M subscribers. Look at all the automotive recalls this last year. And really AOL... wasn't even first to market, Compuserve beat them but like 10+ years.

There are many ways to get ahead. Bureaucracy sucks.

But just saying, "Speed man, speed... that's the good stuff..." It's only true when it's paired with customer demand, high quality, and all the other things users demand.

ICQ vs. AIM? I can't actually think of a single example of a product being first to market and that making them better than the challengers. Getting to market... no question, that's great. Blowing away what exists in the market... that's what gets you customers. So inherently being first isn't advantageous since you're opening the door to others taking your idea and improving on it.

I'll say again, build the best thing you know how to build... if you don't build it great, people will notice. Nobody wants a quick and dirty solution once they see the well-designed, delightful, secure, improved, etc. solution.

Facebook > MySpace

Instagram > Facebook

Reddit > Digg

Any modern software language... nobody is like, "Man, give me some ASP VB, that came out before Rails or Node... it must be better." We evolve. Speed, it may be a factor. But what you build has to survive past launch. Do your best to give it the legs it needs... and maintain it as vigorously as you can. ROI is in planning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprising number of people on this thread are conflating first mover advantage with moving fast.

First mover just means you are first to a new market. Hypothetically, there could have been 10 years of product development behind your first mover advantage.

Moving fast, as I see it, is not becoming that huge, slow organization (think GE), that has so much bureaucracy baked-in nothing ever gets done.

Most decisions really don't require the level of debate they're given. The author is pointing out that a lot of the decision making process is influenced by shit that doesn't have anything to do with the actual decision.

<comment><USER14> The reason big, old organizations tend to have a lot of bureaucracy and process is that they created it in response to bad outcomes from lot of ill- considered fast decisions.

<comment><USER15> I don't think it has to be entirely responsive to a specific poor choice. At the company I worked at the bureaucracy increased hand in hand with the complexity of the system (paired with the departure of the original systems sages [who literally knew every specific of the aircraft on par with the design engineers]). Single persons could no longer see the effect of their decisions on the entirety of the system (and therefore needed to check with others via protocols etc). Cascade that a couple times (smart, ambitious people do not like filling out forms [in general]) and out pops a 20k employee company where no one knows anything except how to fill out form 108DB-A.

Also it should be considered that if a small business makes a lot of ill- considered, fast decisions, chances are they're no longer in business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> During the Vietnam war the US began to look into the unexpected underperformance of its pilots in air-to-air combat. They weren't exactly losing but they weren't doing nearly as well as they were expected to, and there was a litany of mistakes being made again and again that were hurting combat performance, all of which came to light in the "Ault Report". A lot of research went into studying what was happening and why and ultimately a new theory of aerial combat fundamentals came out of that research.

The main difference that was causing problems for American pilots was that the planes they were fighting against were more maneuverable. It turns out that greater maneuverability naturally led to a faster and more responsive cadence in combat, leading to MiG pilots gaining the upper hand in encounters.

The two theories that came out of this study were Energy-Maneuverability Theory and the idea of the "OODA loop". As it happens, OODA loop theory is generally applicable in many situations outside of aerial combat.

OODA is an initialism standing for: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It is the fundamental event processing loop for "doing stuff" in almost any situation. The faster one's OODA loop the faster one can respond to changing situations, which translates into huge practical advantages. And the amazing thing is that this is somewhat independent of maneuverability.

OODA loop theory should be well understood by anyone in the tech industry. It's a critical element for the competitive advantages of small startups over big, entrenched competitors. And it's the reason why agile methodologies are so often advantageous.

"Speed" is a crude substitute for understanding the value of feedback-based iteration and the competitive advantage of tighter OODA loop cycles.

P.S. Raw speed is not a substitute for good design, thoughtful engineering, or keeping technical debt under control. It is quite possible to speed yourself right into a wall where you lose agility because of excessive technical debt. Also consider the relative merits of building on good foundations, increasing value exponentially over time versus constantly tearing down and rebuilding disposable structures. Don't confuse busy work with craftsmanship, value doesn't scale linearly with effort.

<comment><USER17> Book recommendation to go with the OODA loop idea: Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This exact attitude is the reason why modern software is so bad. Dates are set before anyone has any idea how long the software will actually take to design. Then, when it turns out the dates were too aggressive, the design is compromised so the software can be shipped faster.

That's not to say the article isn't right. Maybe speed really does win. But if that's true, we might be stuck with terrible software forever.

</comment><comment><USER19> > "You know you're going fast enough if there's a low-level discomfort, people > feeling stretched. But if you're going too fast, you'll see it on their > faces, and that's important to spot too"

Most people can't tell the difference here, and failing to do that is deadly. You can lose a lot of good engineers by forcing too much crunch, and that can kill or significantly delay projects.

This happens not rarely in game development.

</comment><comment><USER20> "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week." General Patton. Because software development is so much like dropping as many bombs onto a bunch of people as possible.

"I've long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.". The irony that the authors two previous employers were Google and Apple. Both of which are massive companies that were (and are) famously never first to market with anything.

"All things being equal": it's the company with the deepest pockets and the best PR. Which is not equal.

</comment><comment><USER21> >All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.

All else being equal, the best-funded company will win. All else being equal, the company with the catchiest name will win. All else being equal, the company with the best product will win. All else being equal, the company with the best-advertised product will win. All else being equal, the company with the most stories being written about it will win. All else being equal, the company with the better cafeteria will win. etc.

all true statements. don't mean much though...

</comment><comment><USER22> > All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.

Yea, no doubt. Don't even need an MBA to see that. If you have two equal competitors, the first one to market has a useful head start.

I think this article is what I would call aggressive trolling; scoring points by 'thinking different'. But essentially this is not more than standard knowledge, repackaged as a hype laden pseudo-intellectual conversation meant to score points.

<comment><USER23> Except that you will find a lot of disagreement. Even here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> See [http://integratedleader.com/articles/40-70rule.pdf](http://integratedleader.com/articles/40-70rule.pdf) for another take on this. (At least, I think it's the same thing - we want certainty, and that causes us to take far too long to make decisions.)

</comment><comment><USER25> "Move fast and break things" is a way for immature and arrogant people to mask the guilt they should feel for offloading their poor decisions and planning to the end user.

<comment><USER13> Arrogance is spending twice the time perfecting a product that you come to find nobody uses.

I'm not necessarily an evangelist of "Move fast and break things" but it's a good mentality to speed up the feedback loop and avoid sinking a lot of time into stuff people don't want (even if it's really well engineered).

<comment><USER25> The best products I have release have been programmed by people who plan well, take their time, and get it right first time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "There is more to life than increasing its speed." \- Mahatma Gandhi

Also a commonly cited zen story:

Eager Student asked: "How long will it take me to be enlightened?"

"Ten years" said the master.

"What if I work twice as hard?"

"Twenty years" said the master.

<comment><USER27> These are a bunch of context-less quotes that are entirely irrelevant to the article. The article didn't say that the purpose of life was to move fast. It was saying that there are benefits to moving fast in the business world.

The zen story also sounds like complete hogwash. All else equal, if you work harder, you will improve faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > There are decisions that deserve days of debate and analysis, but the vast > majority aren't worth more than 10 minutes.

Quick! I need a vast majority detector.

Setting a deadline for deciding something sounds good to me, but the above is some kind of puzzle.

<comment><USER29> How much will it hurt if you do nothing? is a decent heuristic. Any time the answer is "a lot" there's a big complicated change that needs to happen. If there was an obvious or easy answer, it wouldn't have gotten to the "a lot" level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> To the nay-sayers on speed as priority:

I'm currently on a two-week deployment cycle. It's not only annoying to wait but it's also _dangerous_. There have been several incidents where the code that broke something was committed a whole week or two weeks before! Worse still is that we're deploying two systems at once and usually we're patching the systems at the same time. So you have a perfect storm of bad things that can happen with multiple causes. Faster means you see the problems sooner.

<comment><USER11> I see what you're saying, but maybe if you didn't go so fast you could have had properly tested code that didn't break something in the first place. I'd argue that not breaking it in the first place is better than speeding up to find the break.

<comment><USER30> Yeah I see what you're saying as well and I agree with that. It's hard not to break something when our release cycle depends on a QA person and on customers to break things that we can't always test for (and we're actively discouraged from writing unit tests and other automated tests).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > There's not always a stark tradeoff between something done fast and done > well.

Yes, there is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle), and to have both requires more money (resources).

This article also doesn't seem to have been written by an engineer. I'd love to get a more technical perspective on how to move fast.

</comment><comment><USER32> On a side note, the hero photo looks realistic (has the 'pop' feeling), wondering how to produce this kind of photo?

<comment> mh- it's a mixed lighting/flash photography technique

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The answer as usual is "it depends". At the very least it depends on the consequences of missing a deadline and how painful "undo" is if you screw it up. A software update is much easier than a hardware recall. Formal processes are necessary when undo becomes painful enough.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was prepared to disagree but, you know what? He's right. Very few decisions are irreversible or benefit from extended debate or analysis. Some keys are that you have to be prepared to undo and not crap on the decision-maker.

</comment><comment><USER34> I hate it when people narrow things down to one factor. Yes, speed can be helpful, but you still need to balance it with other factors like quality. Speed for its own sake can kill you quickly.

In short, you need to know what you are doing and why.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember how many __years__ it took Apple to figure out how to do right- click properly while their competitors were speeding along with that silly second button.

Speed is important. Patience is important. Stepping back and smelling the flowers is important. It's not about fast or slow. It's about right, and you can't be right all the time if you're stuck in the habit of zooming along all the time.

<comment><USER14> I always heard that the one-button mouse was a Steve Jobs mandate. So users didn't have to think about which button to click. Of course the NeXT had a two-button mouse, so maybe not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Am I being asked to take seriously the company that produced this atrocity? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJIBxtDUHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJIBxtDUHc)

<comment><USER37> Oh. Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wheeee!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4UPvorv2qY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4UPvorv2qY)</comment>