Spotify censored Joe Rogan episodes - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_of_every_missing_episode_from_spotify Episodes:
1461 Owen Smith
1458 d'Elia
1356 Michael Shermer
1303 Tommy Chong
1296 Joe List
1255 Alex Jones Returns
1182 Nick Kroll
1164 Mikhaila Peterson
1093 Owen Benjamin / Kurt Metzger
998 Owen Benjamin
980 Chris d'Elia
979 Sargon of Akkad
(Edit):
the whole list can be found
https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_... <comment><USER2> Fyi... part of Rogan's deal he signed with Spotify requires him to delete his videos from Youtube by the end of the year so Spotify becomes the "exclusive" place for JRE.

I didn't know about this until a few weeks ago. Apparently, some folks have already archived (i.e. youtube-dl) all of his old videos before they disappear.[0]

It would be interesting to check back next year and see if these Spotify rejected/censored podcasts remain on Youtube.

[0] [https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/gmuoyu/joe_rog...](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/gmuoyu/joe_rogans_podcast_will_only_be_available_on/)

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is the case. It's that _new_ episodes will be exclusive to Spotify and won't be uploaded to YouTube.

edit: No, my mistake, the suggestion is that all but 100 or so videos will be migrated and then deleted from YouTube. I guess I'd misunderstood the earlier statements!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now we know which episodes are the most interesting. Also which guests reveal who/what can't be criticised or discussed.

That said, I'm not surprised that Alex "they're turnin' the friggin frogs gay" Jones is on that list.

<comment><USER5> I suspect this has to be more to do with particular things said on these episodes that may make Spotify legally liable, rather than a blacklist of people. Eddie Bravo and Joey Diaz have been on tons of episodes other than the ones listed. I can't even imagine JRE without Joey as a regular.

Some people strike me as particularly odd for blacklisting: Louis Theroux, Brian Dunning and Rickson Gracie must be politically uncontroversial, unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER6> > I suspect this has to be more to do with particular things said on these > episodes that may make Spotify legally liable

Are those episodes listed on Spotify as "Censored to avoid legal liability"? Or perhaps as "Unavailable due to legal reasons"? Or were they just quietly disappeared, and it was up to a random redditor to reveal that censorship even took place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know his show, but these are probably the episodes that are most interesting. Controversial stuff is often the most interesting...

<comment><USER8> I think some of these might just be cleaning up for advertising? e.g. "Sarkon of Akkad" (Carl Benjamin) is an unpleasant liar who once declared "I wouldn't even rape you" to a politician online - not exactly perfect for advertiser's on Spotify Free?

<comment><USER7> Hm, yes "cleaned up" content for advertisers would fall exactly into that category. I think he should prefer platforms where advertisers cannot make editorial decisions. This should be clearly communicated to users, so that animosity from controversial topics is not directed at advertisers.

<comment><USER9> But in practice, directing animosity at advertisers and platforms is an effective way to remove content you don't like. It doesn't matter if the platform/advertisers says that they don't necessarily endorse the content-- there's nothing stopping users from pressuring them regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Weird to see Louis Theroux on that list, who isn't that controversial at all, is Spotify afraid to incur the wrath of Scientology?

<comment><USER11> It looks like there was a copyright strike against that video which could be the reason why that episode wasn't on boarded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is not a podcast, it's a Spotify show. They can do what they want. A podcast is openly distributed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know if Joe Rogan allows for censorship on the part of Spotify?

Tommy Chong the comedian has managed to make the list of censored folks. Now I feel compelled to look up the others.

<comment><USER14> When he first announced the move, he expressly stated they would not be censoring future episodes or interfering at all, he would maintain 100% control...

Edit, source in case it's relevant:

>"It will remain free, and it will be the exact same show," said Rogan. "It's just a licensing deal, so Spotify won't have any creative control over the show.

>"They want me to just continue doing it the way I'm doing it right now.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment- arts-52736364](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52736364)

<comment><USER15> How is that possible? What happened that guarantees every future potential episode is spotifyable yet past episodes weren't?

If he's telling the truth, why aren't his first 10 episodes him an past guests reading the transcript of censored episodes?

<comment><USER14> Not sure, we will have to see.

I like Joe, so maybe Spotify thought they could pull this and no one would notice?

Or maybe they're replying on (I heard) $100m being enough money to buy some flexibility? Maybe they're making a show of it so he can make a show of insisting they're replaced so no one thinks he has sold out?

It's sort of confusing because Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan. It's not like he suddenly changes position or he's ever been PC and family friendly or whatever this edit is meant to get to.

Either way, something is dodgy as fuck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wth... i enjoyed JRE for the openness of having controversial people and a space for them to talk freely... seeing that list... well, i'm done with Joe. Sad. Very sad.

<comment><USER15> Joe has $100M to comfort himself with that loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Full list from here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/ikf9at/full_list_of_every_missing_episode_from_spotify/)

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1461 - Owen Smith

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1458 - Chris D'Elia

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1456 - Michael Shermer

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1303 - Tommy Chong

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1296 - Joe List

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1255 - Alex Jones Returns

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1182 - Nick Kroll

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1164 - Mikhaila Peterson

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1093 - Owen Benjamin & Kurt Metzger

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1033 - Owen Benjamin

The Joe Rogan Experience - #998 - Owen Benjamin

The Joe Rogan Experience - #980 - Chris D'Elia

The Joe Rogan Experience - #979 - Sargon of Akkad

The Joe Rogan Experience - #920 - Gavin McInnes

The Joe Rogan Experience - #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo

The Joe Rogan Experience - #820 - Milo Yiannopoulos

The Joe Rogan Experience - #750 - Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn, producers of Conspiracy

The Joe Rogan Experience - #710 - Gavin McInnes

The Joe Rogan Experience - #702 - Milo Yiannopoulos

The Joe Rogan Experience - #640 - Charles C. Johnson

The Joe Rogan Experience - #582 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #538 - Stefan Molyneux

The Joe Rogan Experience - #524 - Rickson Gracie

The Joe Rogan Experience - #520 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #487 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #463 - Louis Theroux

The Joe Rogan Experience - #461 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #454 - War Machine

The Joe Rogan Experience - #441 - Brian Dunning

The Joe Rogan Experience - #368 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #361 - Dave Asprey, Tait Fletcher

The Joe Rogan Experience - #331 - Dr. Steven Greer

The Joe Rogan Experience - #303 - Matt Vengrin, Brian Redban

The Joe Rogan Experience - #275 - Dave Asprey

The Joe Rogan Experience - #256 - David Seaman

The Joe Rogan Experience - #239 - Adam Kokesh

The Joe Rogan Experience - #213 - Eddie Bravo

The Joe Rogan Experience - #199 - Joey Diaz

The Joe Rogan Experience - #182 - Bryan Callen, Jimmy Burke, Brian Redban

The Joe Rogan Experience - #128 - Joey Diaz, Brian Redban

The Joe Rogan Experience - #119 - Jan Irvin

The Joe Rogan Experience - #108 - Joey Diaz, Brian Redban

The Joe Rogan Experience - #98 - Daryl Wright & Brian Whitaker

The Joe Rogan Experience - #97 - Freddy Lockhart, Brian Redban

The Joe Rogan Experience - #81 - Pete Johansson

The Joe Rogan Experience - #57 - Jayson Thibault, Brian Redban

</comment><comment><USER18> The only thing surprising about this is how quickly it happened.

Podcasts are just RSS feeds with audio (or even video now apparently, no one seems to use that but it solves the "videos are only discoverable on YouTube" problem.) You don't need to be part of any special platform to host them. Maybe someone should set up one of those PSA sites.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can still see these old episodes on my podcast app. I just tried downloading one of them and I was able to.

</comment><comment><USER20> It is concerning that the last main stream sanctuary of free speech might have been compromised.

However, as of right now we dont know if Spotify censored these episodes, if Rogan censored them himself, or if they just didnt upload them yet. It's only 9 hours in to the first day, no need to jump to conclusions yet.

</comment><comment><USER21> Really, a link to a reddit thread? Can't we get something resembling journalism instead of ranting fanboys spreading rumors.

I recognize few people on that list but I can see why Spotify wouldn't want the headache with advertisers over Alex Jones, Milo Y and Gavin Mcinnes. Rogan chose this when he went exclusive with Spotify.

<comment><USER22> >Can't we get something resembling journalism instead of ranting fanboys spreading rumors

I don't see ranting nor rumors.

Go to Spotify and you can see those episodes are missing.

Also what does "resembling journalism" mean? Reddit is a perfect to cover topics like that

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't enjoy being the one to say this but censored is the wrong word. Censoring is something governments do. We can't keep using the wrong words and expect communication and discourse to improve. Words matter.

<comment><USER24> [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censor](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/censor)

As a verb, it's used the same as Merriam Webster defines it. There is no need for it to be the government, just someone that is suppressing or deleting things that are objectionable.

Everyone knows what is meant here, so there's no problem with the clarity of communication.

<comment><USER23> Here? Maybe. But here isn't always here. There is zero value in perpetuating a false narrative. We can't maintain an affinity for LCD and still expect positive change.

Finally, you're making assumptions. I'll leave it at that.

<comment><USER5> > There is zero value in perpetuating a false narrative.

I agree, it just happens that your narrative is wrong.

There are important distinction to be made between government and private censorship, of course. Nevertheless, the word "censorship" never implies "government censorship".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Science of Why It's Too Hot for Some Planes to Fly in the Southwest U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2017/06/20/the-science-of-why-its-too-hot-for-some-planes-to-fly-in-the-southwest-u-s/#167669cf54ce <comment><USER2> I love this article's conclusion. At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in global warming. Fact is, the climate is literally changing and it's important to stay informed about other unexpected consequences of it so that we can all be prepared.</comment>


Google Docs: use of an URL parameter is a violation of intergalactic law - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/DocAction?action=unsupported_browser

<comment><USER2> Amusing. Loaded it in Chrome, and my first thought was "why in the world do they not support Chrome?". Lightbulb.

<comment><USER3> Same, except I was using privoxy as well, so suspected that. Kept me er ... amused for a little bit longer than yourself most probably :-)</comment></comment>


America's Farmers, Reeling from Floods, Face a New Problem: No Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/nebraska-wyoming-farmers-water.html <comment><USER2> American infrastructure has been given a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

[https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/](https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/)

We have been under-funding maintenance for decades and problems, such as this example, will be on the rise given the additional stressors due to climate change.

It is a problem of political will. To quote Vonnegut, "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

<comment><USER3> Isn't there a bit of a conflict of interest here, insofar as the members of the ASCE would be the ones to benefit from increased infrastructure spending?

Note that the article says "The tunnels and canals, though old, were maintained regularly".

<comment><USER4> Hundred year old infrastructure is not the most sturdy, obviously this structure was past the end of its design life (leading to its failure).

Maintaining a structure doesn't prevent the concrete from spalling (as the chemical bonds that bind the concrete age and degrade), nor does it necessarily pick up on failing earthen tunnels in hard to inspect areas.

Many bridges across the country are going on 100 years old, and have a ~50 year design life. Structurally they are deficient, often undersized for the modes of traffic using them, and structural failure (which is very possible) would likely kill people. US infrastructure needs heavy investment, rather than the neglect it has seen for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >"It's just been event after event after event," said Dave Kaufman, who canceled the purchase of a new Ford F-150 truck to save money after much of his farmland outside Gering, Neb., went dry. "And you would think that the last shoe had dropped, but it hasn't."

That ... seems like a mild consequence, all things considered.

<comment><USER6> If you depend on a reliable work truck for your livelihood, it's not mild.

It's like saying "I guess my 2008 laptop will have to keep working for a few more years, there is no budget in the foreseeable future to upgrade"

<comment><USER5> I doubt this upgrade is as urgent as a laptop though; trucks last longer and don't have to deal with ever hungrier software.

<comment><USER6> "trucks last longer" is an arbitrary measurement to this scenario. If it's broken down and you don't have the means to replace it or buy a new one, you can't operate your business

<comment><USER5> Yes, but that's a separate question from how often you really need to buy an entirely new one, which is usually a very optional expense. Repairing will generally be much cheaper.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, but that's a separate question from how often you really need to buy an > entirely new one, which is usually a very optional expense. Repairing will > generally be much cheaper.

I grew up on a farm, you're presuming a lot. Guess what goes into a new heavy duty pickup truck purchase?

Well lets look at the new fuel efficiency, project out 10+ years to figure out how much fuel that will save, figure out how much gas will cost in the next 10 years (fudge it mostly).

And the work that these things do tends to be hard on everything. There is a need for new pickup trucks, and its not because you want it, its because it will save money. Repairing' isn't cheaper when you have heavy use.

Our trucks lasted maybe 200 000 miles of wear and tear. At the end, they were getting to pretty expensive options, like replace the engine entirely or rebuild, both about the same cost. Oh and the frame was starting to rust, or crack etc...

Your day to day car usage in the city does not give you much insight into how heavy duty pickup trucks get used on farms and ranches.

This is pretty close to the poor problem of having to buy $20 dollar boots every year because you can't affort a $100 dollar pair that will last 10 years. If you get behind on replacing things, you end up paying more.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for explaining it better than I could

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Goshen Irrigation District of Wyoming (17 employees listed) had a water tunnel collapse and expects to be down for three weeks. This isn't a nationwide event.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article seems hyperbolic. I'm not sure how a bill of $18M translates into a monstrous tax bill. It's been a tough year for farmers but I'm not sure if this is any more than just a small blip in the reality for farmers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Meanwhile the republic of kongo plants 350m trees xD

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmmm....outline.com doesn't work, nor does reading in private mode on fire fox. I'm almost more interested in how to read the article than what the article has to say.

Googleing the headline works! Here is a short url: shorturl.at/CLOQW, or you can google it if you don't trust me :P.

Thanks!

<comment><USER12> [https://archive.fo/bB9N9](https://archive.fo/bB9N9)</comment></comment>


Why git is better than X - <AUTHOR> http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ <comment><USER2> I more or less settled on git, but I think he's being glib with some of these points. For instance 'easy to use': many git commands require --funky 'options' -t -o get the desired results, whereas that's rarer with svn and systems that have taken that approach.

<comment><USER3> the majority of commands you use (clone, pull, push, branch, add) dont require many options at all .. -a -m -b ..

Of course if you're doing something elaborate then you will get some random options like -soft or --before="yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm" .. those are generally things you can't do in svn ..

edit: I forgot to mention that good guis like gitx do most of these things for you

<comment><USER4> This would be vastly improved if Git's documentation and help system wasn't so incomplete, out of date, convoluted, and messy. Git has an incredibly rich featureset, but the documentation often falls down in highlighting the 99% use cases so it ends up with a steeper learning curve than many other SCMs. I think this is one reason why Mercurial is so popular, at the scale of most development projects the advantages of Git over Mercurial are not terribly significant, but Mercurial has much, much better help and tutorials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Github - really? I just can't imagine Github being _nearly_ as important to git adoption as some of those other points. It's a slow, clunky interface to a fast VCS.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has darcs just disappeared off the radar? I'm using it for all my projects, though I'm not sharing wih anyone else, so I've never come under pressure to switch.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is some interesting discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381920>

</comment><comment><USER8> My take from that chart is that if git was actually easy to use, it would be as good as svn. whoopee!</comment>


Bringing ChakraCore to Linux and OS X - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/07/27/chakracore-on-linux-osx/ <comment><AUTHOR> To everyone thinking we already have V8 - competition is necessary for the ecosystem not to go stale. For it to thrive, we need competition.

Just look at JavaScript. Dozens of libraries that do the same thing, a vibrant ecosystem as a result.

<comment><USER4> For example, in V8 a try/catch statement triggers the whole function to be deoptimized [1]

Chakra and SpiderMonkey fully optimize these functions even with a try/catch statement (according to 2 devs last time I talked about this [2]).

Without alternate engines, people start to think that implementation details in one engine apply to javascript as a whole.

Just look around at most javascript "performance tips". Most of them talk about how you should avoid try/catch in performant code, even though it's only one engine that doesn't optimize it, and they have talked about how they want to fix it, but just haven't [3].

And that's just one example, there are hundreds of examples of bugs, performance tricks, and even differences in spec interpretation that can cause issues and can inadvertently become a "standard" without multiple competing engines.

[1] More accurately, the function will never be optimized in the first place if it contains a try/catch at all since Crankshaft doesn't support try/catch.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896729)

[3] IIRC they haven't devoted time to optimizing it because the architecture of V8 doesn't work well with something like try/catch, but also because it's fairly simple to work around, and most people already do. So you kind of get a catch 22 where V8 won't spend time to fix it because it's not worth it, and it won't be worth it because V8 doesn't support it.

<comment><USER5>
        > Most of them talk about how you should avoid try/catch in
        > performant code, even though it's only one engine that doesn't
        > optimize it

That still sounds like great advice even though it's "only" slow on one engine. Very few performant JS applications have the luxury of not worrying about how Chrome performs, as opposed to only IE, Firefox & Safari.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that perf tips have a strong tendency to become "cargo cult knowledge" that keep getting passed around even though no one knows the original reason for their existence, or that they have long since stopped applying. This has been a problem in the C world for ages, and now it looks like it's coming to JavaScript as well. Even if Google were to fix this issue tomorrow, we'd probably still see programmers in 2025 writing convoluted code to avoid try/catch because "it's bad for performance, I heard that somewhere".

If Microsoft had released Chakra around the same time, it never would've been an issue, because people would've known "Oh, this is just Google's bug", gotten on their case to fix it, and it would've been gone a long time ago.

<comment><USER7> > _If Microsoft had released Chakra around the same time, it never would 've > been an issue, because people would've known "Oh, this is just Google's > bug", gotten on their case to fix it, and it would've been gone a long time > ago._

But this is the exact situation that the browser world is in (V8 is only one vendor among many) and that hasn't come to pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having different engine is good, even "non-obvious" ones

If you look at the sources of TypeScript you can see it supports: Node.js, Windows Script Host and ChakraHost (see [1])

I made a little experiment to support another engine: the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) which not only support ActionScript 3.0 but also JavaScript (see [2])

Personally it's not that I don't like Node.js, but I do like the idea to take the JS sources of some command-line tool and bundle them in one independent executable to then distribute it as a deb package or Mac OS X pkg etc. without having to first install node.js/npm

[1]: [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/src/comp...](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/src/compiler/sys.ts)

[2]: [https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/the-case-when-you-dont-want- no...](https://discuss.as3lang.org/t/the-case-when-you-dont-want-node-js/307)

<comment><USER9> It's all about resource efficiency. If you do that (bundle), you're not resource efficient (memory), but the resulting solution is easy to use (no dealing with dependency conflicts where A depends on X-v1 and B on X-v2, and you need A and B running in the same system). How important is resource efficiency, and what it even means today vs. yesterday varies wildly.

<comment><USER8> I experienced different results.

One of the main problem with JS engines is that they load external code on demand, even with something like JSDB (see [1] based on SpiderMonkey engine) where you can bundle all of your JS inside a zip that you then bundle/merge with the runtime, the JS files still have to be extracted from the zip and loaded "as file" from memory.

In the case of the AVM2, wether the files are AS3 or JS they are first compiled to bytecode (like Java) and that's what you bundle with the runtime, the bytecode still have to be loaded but it is "one big file", so wether your sources are many 100s of JS files it does not matter.

That matter a lot for the resource efficiency, and it influence a lot the memory footprint (~10MB for AVM2, ~50MB for a Node.js, see [2]), eg. the more files you load the more memory you gonna use.

For the dependencies conflict yep it make things easier too, not only for the versioning of libraries as you describe but also for the versioning of the runtime itself, eg. runtime v2 could be installed system wide but your self- contained exe could use an older runtime v1.

[1]: [http://www.jsdb.org](http://www.jsdb.org)

[2]: [https://github.com/eclipse/kura/wiki/Footprint](https://github.com/eclipse/kura/wiki/Footprint)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is good news for a healthy Node.js ecosystem, but I can't see what's in it for Microsoft. V8-based Node.js works fine on Windows and Azure, so they don't need this to attract Node.js developers and the npm ecosystem to their platform.

Are there any theories about how this (presumably substantial) investment makes business sense for MS?

<comment><USER11> It's a hedge against Google.

Google, through V8, Chromium, Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and Dart, has a large say in the future of the web platform, browsers, apps, the future of Javascript, etc.

Time and time again, Google has used their substantial influence and market share to make unilateral decisions affecting the web platform [1][2][3][4][5][6]; the individual merits of each decision notwithstanding, Google can do just about anything and it will affect enough of the userbase that others must compensate or follow suit.

By offering an alternative to V8 monoculture, they can protect against Google using its influence to drive the Javascript platform in its own direction.

[1] SHA1 sunset: [https://security.googleblog.com/2014/09/gradually- sunsetting...](https://security.googleblog.com/2014/09/gradually-sunsetting- sha-1.html)

[2] NPAPI discontinuation: [https://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final- countdown-for-np...](https://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown- for-npapi.html)

[3] Block Flash by default: [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/ch...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/chromium- dev/HTML5$20by$20default/chromium-dev/0wWoRRhTA_E/__E3jf40OAAJ)

[4] Chrome ignoring autocomplete=off: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153#c164)

[5] VP9 available in WebRTC: [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/01/vp9-webrtc...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/01/vp9-webrtc?hl=en)

[6] H.264 in WebRTC still gated behind a flag: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500605](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500605)

<comment><USER12> #5 and #6 are even worse, because it basically means Google can dictate whatever terms onto you, if you develop a competing browser.

As VP9 is heavily patented, and the license only allows you to use it if you don't ever sue Google, you're out of luck if Google ever fucks you over somewhere else.

<comment><USER13> The alternative is worse(H.264)

<comment><USER12> H.264 is worse, but at least it's available with pretty straightforward license terms (just pay).

VP.9's license might actually violate antitrust laws.

<comment><USER14> > H.264 is worse, but at least it's available with pretty straightforward > license terms (just pay).

That's pretty much discriminating against a wide range of software - <USER2> Free and Open Source. VP9 on the other hand, is compatible with a such development model.

<comment><USER12> Sure, yet VP9 is discriminating against about every startup with innovative patented algorithms that also wants to support VP.9

At the example of Pied Piper from SiliconValley: If they used VP.9 for video encoding before compressing and sending it, Google/hooli would now have the right to use their (potentially) patented algorithm for whatever they want, without ever getting sued.

Now that's great, eh?

<comment><USER14> The VPx cross-license does not work that way.

You are granted patents to use VPx (you can not use these patents outside VPx scope) and you are granting patents necessary to use VPx[1]. If you have some other patents that are not necessary for the VPx, they are not subject of the cross-license.

[1] - "that must necessarily be infringed by the act of Exploiting Licensed Products in the Licensed Field of Use"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've not tried recent versions of node but have had to port things like Brendan Gregg's flamegraph tools from node to other languages because node would die with even pedestrian memory use (well under 4GB).

Does anyone know if ChakraCore has better memory management? Could be a big win for longer running applications or those that simply need a larger working set.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does this indicate a desire to bring Edge to macOS/Linux? Finally some more browser competition!

<comment><USER17> [disclosure - I work for MSFT] It's only ChakraCore that is going cross- platform at the moment, and existing platform support matrix for Microsoft Edge remains unchanged now. That said, we'd welcome input from developers and users who want to see Edge on the platform of their choice.

Limin

edit - <USER3>

<comment><USER18> One reason for Edge on other platforms: not having to spin up a Windows virtual machine or boot up a PC for cross-browser testing.

<comment><USER19> It's possible for there to be _platform_ -specific bugs / quirks even in the same engine.

<comment><USER20> True, but if you could do day to day testing without a VM, even running automated tests against it, that would be a huge timesaver. Then you fire up the VM once a week (or some reasonable interval) to confirm it's 100%. There are platform specific bugs, but most issues I see now with Chrome or Firefox are specific to the browser, not the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What does ChakraCore bring on to the table V8 currently doesn't? Can someone elaborate?

<comment><USER22> All JS engines make different tradeoffs, so they are better at some things compared to other engines.

For example, Chakra has had full asm.js optimization support for a long time now, while v8 still doesn't (but it's coming).

We now have 4 high-quality JS engines that are cross-platform and open source (v8, SpiderMonkey, JavaScriptCore, and now Chakra). This is great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is interesting enough, I suppose, but I think they should have included some kind of interesting benchmark where Chakra outperformed V8 or something for Node.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the suggestion, great idea! However, it's really early days for us still- as the blog post mentions, we are still working on implementing the JIT and concurrent GC which are quite important to awesome performance. When we complete that work, we'd definitely keep a close eye on current industry benchmarks

<comment><USER23> Heh, I didn't actually think an actual MS developer would respond to my comment.

As it stands, I can appreciate what MS is doing; you guys aren't probably going to compete with or replace V8 or SpiderMonkey on Linux overnight, hence why getting a working Node port is a good first step of presumably many.

Regardless, this is definitely an interesting step; it would be really trippy if I end up using an entire MS stack on my Linux desktop, but it appears that might be a legit possibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Super

</comment><comment><USER26> What's the point of this exactly? Why would someone chose this over V8?

<comment><USER27> Why would someone buy Benz when there is BMW. Every engine is better in some aspect and suffer in another aspect. There is already benchmark link provided, which already prooves one reason to choose over V8.</comment></comment>


Rubicon development: Can anyone help us become successful developers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubicondev.com/blog/can-anyone-help-us-become-successful-developers-pretty-please/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not related to me at all, I just like their games, amd they seem like a group in need of good advice.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you love C#? - <AUTHOR> C# is great language, additionally, core is open source now, so how much do you enjoy programming in C#?<p>Do you consider porting your Ruby,PHP,Python code running on linux machine into C# in near future? <comment><USER3> I respect C# and haven't found anything to match it yet. I did actually say out loud, "I love C#!" the other day. Lambdas, linq, generics, reflection and runtime type loading all are top notch with very few sacrifices.

When it runs well on Linux, it will probably be something we take advantage of and run our applications there. We probably could do so now, but time is short and figuring out cross platform quirks is not something we can give a lot of time to.

</comment><comment><USER4> I coded c# in my last job. We used mvvm and wpf and msbuild and all that other lovely stuff. I was productive if you counted lines of code. It's a terrible language for actually getting things done properly though.

I first coded a winforms app using 1.0. It was very nice experience. The OOPfuscated wpf api with its confused mvvm anti-pattern made my life a living hell of high coupling and constant refactoring. Performance and debugging were terrible because of all the dispatching. The rect class alone has 200 members and is the 6th or so down on the inheritance chain. Making your own widgets was a very messy and tricky task.

.net also felt like a second class citizen on its native windows (8.1 was last time I touched it). Had to fall back on win32, incomplete comparability layers, deprecated apis, weekend hobby projects that are incomplete.. Yuck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the ecosystem (Windows, Nuget, Visual Studio) and the fact that it runs on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows).

I think it could be slightly less verbose. F# is a nice improvement, but it's not perfect either. Haskell is closer to the syntax I like in a language.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work with C# professionally and prefer it to Ruby, PHP and Python simply because it has a superior type system, which allows you to have more checks at compile time and in my opinion that means fewer bugs. It is also preferable to Java in terms of language features.

In addition you have code contracts that is a pretty damn good bandaid to the 'allowing nulls' legacy C# has inherited from it's parent languages.

Having said this if I were on linux I'd prefer to use Haskell as it has a superior type system that blows C# out of the water. For example monads cannot be worked with generically in C# through the type system as there are no type variables / type constuctors to allow this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the language itself. Some C# 5 and 6 features still bug the hell out of me, but it fine as long as they are optional. The tools (Visual Studio) is the best editor out there without question and makes coding C# a breeze.

That being said, I've always hated the choices Microsoft made about the .NET framework; closed source, license, installation, dependency and all that. Thankfully, that seems to change for the better now with .NET core, which I really hope takes the language to the next level.

.NET native is also a MUST in my world. Give me C#, open source portable .NET, .NET native and I'm convinced C# (and .NET) is the best there is.

</comment><comment><USER8> I worked with C# for years. I think it's a great language. I like its type safety and its advanced features (dynamic types, lambdas, async).

I got tired of how Microsoft managed the whole .NET ecosystem, uncertainty and changes regarding data access and web services libraries, etc.

Currently I'm working with Scala. It can be compared to C#, and some helpful features like immutability and case classes. I also like the JVM ecosystem (e.g. libraries, Linux compatibility).

</comment><comment><USER9> I love it, moving from C++ to C# has been great for my productivity. Not just the language but the tooling around it as well.

Not sure I could use it for cross platform yet, my software is a desktop/service combination and I don't think WinForms on Mono on Linux is good enough (although I haven't tried this so I may be wrong).

</comment><comment><USER10> I like C#. There are two reasons why I don't use it more.

First, the whole .NET thing (Or rather, the lack of cross-platform compatibility). Yes, Mono is pretty good, but nowhere near perfect. (Although note that this is changing).

And second, enums are hideous in C#. One of the few things Java does better than C#.

<comment><USER11> That's funny. Enums are one of the things I believe C# got better than java.

<comment><USER10> Elaborate?

I find it _really_ annoying that C# enums cannot have constructors and variables.

<comment><USER11> That's exactly the point. Enums are just enumerations, they're not classes. It makes little sense in my opinion to add constructors and variables to enums.

You can do exactly what java calls enums with classes in C#, which in my view are better suited to having constructors and fields. But I agree it's all preferences.

<comment><USER10> > You can do exactly what java calls enums with classes in C#

No you cannot. You lose the single biggest benefit of enumerations - <USER2> compile-time checking. (For instance: warning when a switch statement does not cover all cases.)

Try to do this in C#, and you'll see what I mean: [http://snipplr.com/view/42422/the-planet-enum- example/](http://snipplr.com/view/42422/the-planet-enum-example/). Either you end up with it being ~3x as verbose (if not more), or you lose the compile- time benefits, or both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love C#/.net/ASP.net (I enjoy it, actually) but it's not ready for prime time on non-Windows platforms at all. And I'm unsure .net will ever be nothing more than the proverbial "red-headed stepchild" on non-Windows platforms, we'll see.

</comment><comment><USER13> I code C# for money not love. It's a mongrel language.

<comment><USER6> > It's a mongrel language.

Care to expand? To me mongrel means 'not thoroughbred' or in other words a mix of things. Which I guess it is, but no worse than Java, Python, JS in that regard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love C#. Use it for all programming I do.</comment>


New Facebook IR release suggests Mark Zuckerberg will run for a government offic - <AUTHOR> https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/01/04/199252/zuckerberg-could-run-facebook-while-serving-in-government-forever <comment><USER2> This explains his sudden public departure from atheism.

</comment><comment><USER3> And with this, the world edges ever so slightly closer towards the dystopia pictured in Continuum where corporate oligarchs control government and the world.

It's on Netflix if you are interested. See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_\(TV_series\)) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954347/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954347/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Duplicate? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13320671)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anecdotally I was just in Hawaii a few days ago and happened upon Zuckerberg meeting with Obama at the restaurant at the hotel I was staying at.

<comment><USER2> Was there a lot of security? Usually the restaurant's customers are pre- arranged and fully vetted by intelligence agencies whenever the president decides to "casually" eat at a restaurant, and half the tables are filled with covert security and secret service workers. There were probably snipers on the roof too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I for one would like to see a real billionaire and/or genius as president. Or at least someone who acts on data.

<comment><USER7> "Acts on data" reminds me the story where the program was given caloric values and cost of various products and tasked to calculate the cheapest way to feed a human. The answer was to drink 10 liters of vinegar per day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mark, don't. we have enough idiots there without you.</comment>


Google Is Not God of the Web - <AUTHOR> https://bilge.world/google-page-experience <comment><USER2> > 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly > instantaneously.

The author may be unaware of how ridiculously huge web pages have gotten. I just loaded Wired.com, scrolled down and let it sit for a few seconds. It downloaded 96.2 MB, requiring over 33 seconds on one of those average connections. On a pay-as-you-go data plan, it would have cost about a dollar just to load that one page. The front page has about 500 words of content. It also covered 100% of the content with ads, twice.

This is unsustainable. Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and then covered their grossly inefficient work with impossibly annoying, privacy-invading advertising. Google should be applauded if they make these wasteful developers suffer monetarily until they shape up. They've already stolen untold amounts of time and energy from us all.

<comment><USER3> >Web developers have utterly squandered all efficiency gains of the last 30 years, and

Loading Wired.com with uBlock and no javascript the page comes in below 1.5MB for me, with most functionality seemingly intact (in that the front page looks mostly normal and I can load articles that appear to have their text completely intact). The bulk of that seems to be fonts and images, which are probably unavoidable for a media site.

Some reasonable noscript whitelisting for Wired.com and a few others (out of 12 total that noscript shows me) gives a page size that's still under 5MB.

Looking at the full page with everything loaded and unblocked, the biggest offender here seems to be not web design, but an aggressively downloading autoplay video on the front page. Without that the page itself is - while not necessarily great - at least reasonably bearable.

Truth be told, I'd started this post intending to blame advertisers, and there is still some merit to that since even before the video kicks in the various third party scripts balloon the page size several times over from the minimal functional one that loads with everything blocked. But in this case, it does simply seem to be a wasteful media stream playing without regard to whether anyone wants it to or not.

<comment><USER4> With uBlockO it was 1.5MB for me, without it was 3.8MB, on Firefox, coming from Germany. Which is still pretty ridiculous on both numbers for what's actually visible on the page.

Once you scroll, however, things get messy no matter what, because of their "Scott Adkins Answers Martial Arts Training Questions From Twitter" auto-play video they have right now. That ate way another 30MB quickly and the video wasn't even visible (I had scrolled past it).

<comment><USER5> I browse without 3rd-party and 1st-party scripts [0]. I wanted to praise my setup but it does not work well with Wired:

1.37 MB / 722.93 KB transferred, Finish: 6.57 s

versus uBlock default

8.62 MB / 4.49 MB transferred, Finish: 28.38 s

Clean setup mostly increase load time:

11.58 MB / 5.79 MB transferred Finish: 1.13 min

^ checked with "Disable Cache".

Not much content delivered for such big HTML file

660.46 / 167.60 KB transferred

because it's mostly inline script:

        $$('script').map((s) => s.textContent).join('').length
        568681

And fonts.css is inline font:

127.70 / 100.15 KB transferred

[0]

uBlock Origin:

        * * 1p-script block
        * * 3p block
        * * 3p-frame block
        * * 3p-script block
        * * inline-script block

or uMatrix:

        * * * block
        * * frame block
        * 1st-party css allow
        * 1st-party frame allow
        * 1st-party image allow

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (Disclaimer: previously worked at Google search)

I think some commenters are attributing to Google an ulterior motive, whether ill- or good-intentioned, separate from its core business. But in this case no such motivation is necessary.

Basically, Google wants its users to be satisfied - otherwise it will lose to, say, Bing. So it measures user satisfaction - e.g., if a user clicks on a Google result, and immediately hits back button in three seconds, it's a strong signal that the user was not satisfied. And Google tries very hard to increase this "user satisfaction" (and other similar metrics), because not only does it help Google's business, but it also improves the service itself.

And, guess what? When a page takes fifteen seconds to load, lots of people hits the back (or close) button. Showing such a page _is_ giving the user a bad experience. Unless there's literally no alternatives, it makes sense for Google to "penalize" such a page.

Of course no metric is perfect, so it will occasionally backfire and penalize a great page that takes thirty seconds to load. But that's life.

<comment><USER7> How is this helping Google not lose to Bing, when the change would equally improve Bing experience (rising tide rises all boats?).

<comment><USER8> Not all websites are going to improve their performance, even with Google's incentive. If Google ranks fast websites better than slow ones, that gives Google an advantage over any competitor that doesn't, as long as slow websites still exist.

<comment><USER9> And it creates monopolies, perfect for gulag control of the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are lots of questionable ways in which Google owns the web (AMP, reCaptcha harassing users without Google cookies, Chrome's "Fire And Motion" web standards strategy), but this one isn't one of them.

In the webdev community it's well known that good performance is very important for user satisfaction, and that's backed up by research. There are no ideal metrics, and unfortunately every single one of them has some dumb edge cases. You could endlessly bikeshed which metrics could be better, but this particular set is not unreasonable.

It makes sense for search engine to pick websites that not only have the relevant content, but also are able to actually get that content on screen without frustrating users with slow-loading crap that makes browser freeze and stutter.

Keep in mind that your high-end desktop web experience is in minority. The web is now mostly mobile, and mobile is mostly low-end Android. That's a shit sandwitch, and it desperately needs an intervention.

<comment><USER11> I don't follow the "Fire and Motion" bit on web standards. Mind an elaboration?

<comment><USER12> I presume it's a reference to this: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and- motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/)

ie constant standards churn to keep your competitors busy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's infuriating to me about these types of "signals" to the search rankings is that they have little to do with the content that I'm searching for. Google will hide results that I might find useful because the web master hasn't kept up with whatever Google decided was today's best practices. How about ranking based on the best source for what I'm looking for?

<comment><USER14> Google's ability to surface useful results has been thoroughly defeated by SEO spammers. To a lesser extent, the same is true of other search engines (Bing, etc.) though Google is the foremost SEO spam target for obvious reasons. Given that state of things, there is some sense in promoting more user-friendly pages that are thus a bit less likely to be SEO spam.

<comment><USER15> I wonder if Google could combat this by having every X search pages swap page 1 with, say, page 5? Or give users the option to jump straight to a given search result page by default?

That way the SEO-ignorant sites that actually have the info you want, but get pushed out of the way due to SEO spam, will have some chances at traffic.

I have never written a search engine, so this comment is worth about 1 kb.

<comment><USER16> For some queries I instinctively jump a few pages ahead because I know the first few pages are going to be absolutely filled with SEO spam. The remainder is still not free of spam, but has a higher chance of containing what I want to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Back in 1998 or so people weren't just enthusiastic about the Google search engine because its results were good but because the search page was simple and fast.

Compare that to Altavista or Yahoo whose pages were belarded with all sorts of irrelevant links and ads _around_ the search results. Slow to load and hard to visually navigate.

I still think the sparse pages are the best.

<comment><USER18> I worked at one of these companies during this era and yours is an often forgotten fact. It was a very long time before Google search result quality was any good. Their initial popularity was due almost entirely to page load speed, which they included on every page to highlight it.

The second was being able to serve a large index with parallelized querying, which was relatively easy for a newcomer company with no user base to engineer, and much harder for existing search engines trying to protect a revenue stream. People often don't really remember how late Google was to this business and how much of a difference that page speed indicator was.

<comment><USER19> The same exact argument could be made for Chrome. Google was extremely late to the browser game and most of the initial switch was on how quick it was in comparison to other browsers at the time.

<comment><USER17> Can you expand? Chrome seems to be popular but I don't know the motivation for it.

<comment><USER19> I was replying to the parent comment above mine stating that Google came late to the browser game just as they did with the search game and if part of what initially made Google appealing was that they were simple and faster than other search engines, that is true when Chrome was introduced as well. Google explicitly marketed Chrome speed as a selling point. For example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > There is a very reasonable argument for essential services like search > engines and news websites to conform to/adopt standards like AMP, but for > the rest of The Open Web, ingenuity and risktaking should be encouraged, not > discouraged, for the true good of all Peoplekind.

Hadn't really considered this - because minimalist page size is often such a given - but, for instance, many amateurs often don't know yet how to crush their pngs and such.

> [https://bilge.world/open](https://bilge.world/open)

Cool - thanks for this!

(As an aside, it's great to see a continuation of topics like this - which is commenting on last week's article from Parimal Satyal. It makes this place seem more like a forum.)

<comment><USER21> Actually, I'd be interested in an alternative web where ingenuity and risk- taking would be utterly forbidden. Just HTML, and a very basic subset at that. No Javascript at all, no CSS.

So much of the web would be better and more universally usable without "modern" cruft.

<comment><USER22> Who decides what is and isn't cruft? You?

Is data journalism cruft? Are web applications? Is Google Office cruft? What about the web application my parents have been using to order groceries during the pandemic - that has loads of JS, and loads of CSS to make it readable to anyone over 40. Does that qualify as cruft?

Are dyslexia friendly styelsheets cruft? Is Google Maps cruft? It's full of JavaScript. Are browser games cruft? I played QuakeJS last night and had a lot of fun with it. I was also using a WebXR 3D app the other day to preview a rental property remotely - is being able to socially distance myself cruft?

It's all cruft until you ask the people who use it.

<comment><USER23> That it _works_ is table stakes. A web application your parents wouldn't be able to use to order groceries because it was so broken wouldn't even be discussed, it would be pulled off the Internet and replaced with something that works.

The criticism about cruft is one level up. Not about how to accomplish something, but how to do it in a way that isn't extremely wasteful of both computer resources and end-user's time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you direct their web vitals tool to test itself ([https://web.dev/vitals/](https://web.dev/vitals/)), the report isn't great:

[https://lighthouse-dot- webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?ur...](https://lighthouse-dot- webdotdevsite.appspot.com//lh/html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.dev%2Fvitals%2F)

<comment><USER25> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think most people haven't internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine.

A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it's searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want.

One example of this change is the fact that it's no longer useful to go beyond the first page or so of Your results. Because anything down that low is irrelevant as an answer and is probably discarded by google anyways, which wasn't the case when it was a search engine.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, I suspect the majority of time the majority of people want an answer, and not a multitude of results. But I think this is what leads to google search changing in a way that does not meet many people's expectations here.

It means google emphasizes stuff that gets people answers quickly. They parse text and reveal the answers on their page itself. And they are not very useful for exploring anymore.

<comment><USER27> s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/

FTFY

<comment><USER25> This meme is tired. We get it, Google makes money from advertising.

Your comment is same as "NYTimes is a advertising company hurr durr because they make money from advertising"

<comment><USER28> Well that's a very rude comment. You are also using false equivalence to halt any discourse on the matter. Doesn't seem very safe.

<comment><USER27> Yeah I think the Google trolls came through last night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One anecdote where their "Largest Contentful Paint" metric fails, and fixing degrades performance:

We have a large 300kb animated gif that takes up maybe 20% of the viewport above the fold. The gif demonstrates visually what our service does.

A couple months ago Webmaster Tools reported that page as being "slow" pointing to the large image download. So we decided to show the first frame of the gif as a (30kb) png file, and then swap in the gif 2 seconds after the page is fully loaded.

Except now the new "largest contentful paint" metric is failing on those pages because it includes the 2 second delay when the animated gif is swapped in. I guess technically they're not wrong in how they're calculating it.

In fewer words, Google doesn't like anything being lazy loaded if it's above the fold.

The metrics and how they're calculated are questionable. We ended up optimizing for Google and removed the lazy load (ignoring that we think it's a better UX to lazy load that specific gif).

<comment><USER30> > We have a large 300kb animated gif that takes up maybe 20% of the viewport > above the fold. The gif demonstrates visually what our service does.

You might be able to turn a 300kB GIF into a much smaller encoded video; as long as it doesn't have audio, you can autoplay it.

<comment><USER31> Interesting case scenarios: 1) a Site has a stupid big gif that shows logo and staff parties, basically adding nothing but sucking up bandwidth(Not your case)

2) Your case, where you actually add value-content with the gif.

Now the speed metrics are just that, speed metrics they "report" in isolation from "content".

So now my question is: Is Google's OTHER-content-signals good enough to overcome any penalty that might have been applied because of the speed ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a web developer who has recently spent an ungodly amount of time trying to make my pages meet Google's impossible standards for qualifying as "fast" on mobile, I sympathize with the author's point. But I think he's missing the even bigger picture. Personal computing is mobile now. And even though the phones have as many megabytes, kilotonnes, little clowns or whatever the device greatness is measured in these days, browsing the web on them is still slow as hell. And I would seriously entertain the suggestion that it's all Apple's evil plot if every Android phone I ever used didn't suck donkey balls for browsing the web. Whatever the reasons for this are, what's at stake now is not web's diversity but it's relevance altogether. I'd rather live in the world where web is needlessly optimized for performance than in the world of apps.

<comment><USER33> It doesn't help that ~every mobile device is 6+ cores while the web still largely pretends that there's only a single CPU core & that that core is getting faster. The web should have started adapting back in 2006 when this trend really become common reality, but it didn't.

So you're stuck with 1 shitty CPU core, and you're stuck sharing it with the browser & JS runtime (yes there's of course multithreaded aspects to the browser itself, but you're still sharing an awful lot of CPU time on your single thread with the browser). 1/6th to 1/8th the performance of the phone is the _most_ you can achieve if you're lucky. That's a fucking terrible starting point, and nobody should be surprised the mobile web sucks ass as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's funny that Google is so large, that one way to grow their business is to improve the user experience of the internet as a whole.

<comment><USER35> If this were true chrome would ship with ad block and they would accept cold hard cash for their services.

<comment><USER36> I tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed.

Largely people prefer the free perception of the internet and wouldn't pay the prices it would cost if direct payments were made.

I believe its in the $x00s per year

<comment><USER37> _They tried this, I used it, no big adoption, product got killed._

To which service do you refer?

<comment><USER38> I believe it was Google Contributor: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor)

<comment><USER36> Yes, that is the one, thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > web.dev is operating on some irritating assumptions:

> 1\. Smaller assets are ideal.

> 2\. Minimalistic design is necessary.

This doesn't sound right to me. Aren't the three new page metrics mostly targeting what happens when the page initially loads?

[https://web.dev/vitals/](https://web.dev/vitals/)

> Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a > good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page > first starts loading.

> First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user > experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

> Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good > user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

The first two are about initial loading. For the last one, you can avoid layout shift by e.g. reserving space for images that are yet to load fully.

For example, it sounds like your page could load 100MB of images with the most complex design ever, and it would get a good score as long as the initial viewport of the page displays quickly, is interactive quickly, and doesn't jump around as it's loading.

They sound reasonable metrics to me in terms of fighting bloat but with flexibility for web developers (as opposed to AMP). Who gets to decide the metrics is another issue though.

</comment><comment><USER40> If not Google, someone else must step in and set some standards. Either way, I don't see anything wrong, their platform, their rules. Don't like their rules? Don't use them. When less people use their products, they will listen to what customers want.

Having said that, what exactly do customers want? They want the best experience on whatever device they're on. This is 2020, there's so much that has happened since the 1990s. We can't simply keep using standards from the 1990s.

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly > instantaneously.

The author needs to come down from his high horse and use internet in developing countries. I was in India the other day for a client meet and I was on one of the largest networks there. I had a subscription to NYT and I tried to load an article and whoa, it took me 3 full minutes for the browser to fully load the article to the point where it was even barely readable. I'm not saying the network in India is slow, I'm saying, even with the best networks, when you're travelling your speeds will be in KBPS. If we don't have strict standards, the sizes of these pages will only grow and grow.

Later that day, I loaded the same article from my desktop again. The site made a gazillion requests in the network tab to so many advertising vendors and each of them had consistently sizeable assets. More than being offended for selling me out despite a paid subscription, I was offended how ridiculously unoptimized sites like NYT are, despite being a popular online, large scale publisher.

I'm happy such sites like NYT will be penalized if they don't provide their users a good experience.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not sure what this article is arguing.

Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn't fit well on a phone screen?

Leaving aside the fact that you _can_ of course do that, and that if I'm using a search engine on my phone I probably (usually?) don't want to look at your slow site that I have to horizontally scroll...

> _Modern web design principles are very rarely directed at regular people > looking to make a website on something they are interested in. Instead, the > focus is on creating websites that perform well:_

> _Don 't use too many colours. Write short, catchy headlines. Don't let > content be too long. Optimise for SEO. Produce video content, attention span > is decreasing. Have a an obvious call to action. Push your newsletter. Keep > important information above the fold. Don't make users think. Follow > conventions._

All that's true to some extent if you're making a _product_ on the web and you have a few seconds to hook a customer before they move on. If you're making a website for enthusiasts in some niche, though, content is your draw and you can worry less about some of these things.

<comment><USER37> _Sometimes you want to make a slow website that doesn 't fit well on a phone screen?_

Sometimes you should have the choice of making a slow web site that doesn't fit on the phone screen. A large corporation shouldn't dictate how you present your information.

Sometimes you want to put a document on the web without having to pay someone to run on Google's treadmill of changing standards and policies for the rest of your life.

I'll take a crappy-looking web site with good content over an SEO-pumped disaster that provided no information.

Craigslist, eBay, and dozens of others didn't get to be huge because of their good looks.

<comment><USER42> Sometimes you can choose to make a website whose sole purpose isn't to attract Google Search traffic, and that's OK! Not every website has to rank in Google Search to be useful.

<comment><USER43> but that isn't really true. google gets ~80% of the searches on the web. that means that if someone who isn't conforming to google's frankly arbitrary ranking system is being censored, to use strong language.

<comment><USER33> > but that isn't really true. google gets ~80% of the searches on the web.

Not every destination started as a web search.

Case in point, the list of links on this very site that we're all commenting on. This discussion didn't start with a google search. Google was never involed at all. Not _everything_ on the web goes through google search. Nearly all _searches_ go through Google, but there's a hell of a lot more to the web than searches.

As also evidenced by some of the largest & most visited sites driving a ton of non-search traffic - like reddit. And facebook. And twitter. And etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Anyone who can force the web developers to make more responsive, small, junk free, sites that focus on user than ads will have my support. I don't see anyone else making the attempt to force a change. The author is mistaken in their views.

</comment><comment><USER45> I thought this was going to be a reasonable article but its just another whine from a designer who wants to add another 6mb of pretty animation to a web page.

1 and 2 are totally wrong and 3 googles moving away from amp ant letting normal pages rank.

I have wasted to many hours of my time on conference calls with people like this.

</comment><comment><USER46> I keep telling people that search shouldn't be a monopoly but they just keep looking at me like I'm a crazy person

</comment><comment><USER47> Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down.

I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

<comment><USER48> This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links.

[badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.

<comment><USER49> I tend to think search results could benefit from a little bit of curation.

For example, when I search anything HTML, CSS or Javascript related, W3Schools manages to be the top link in many of the cases.

While W3Schools is fine, I guess... I have to ask if they truly represent the best result for my search query.

<comment><USER50> It feels a little dirty, but this FireFox extension will fix that for you: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/hide-w3school...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/hide-w3schools/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Google Search is an index, it can do whatever decision it like. If we don't like it, we can use other indices, even better, we can build more alternatives.

The web is a open network. Anyone can share content as well as indices. I know it's mostly impossible to beat google, but niche indices has their place to shine.

For example, here, HN is an index of hand picked (mostly great) content, and there are multiple "unofficial" HN variances. See? the web is very diverse and free.

</comment><comment><USER52> I find this tweet about how Google approaches web standards illuminating. To quote:

> 1\. design a flawed API (it's fine! APIs are hard)

> 2\. ship it in the most-used browser, despite objections

> 3\. get cross-browser working group to fix the API

> 4\. oops, too late, that would break the web

[https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114](https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114)

<comment><USER53> >5\. Rally a group of developers and PR to bash Webkit as the only one not implementing those flawed API and name it as the new IE.

<comment><USER52> Too true. Not to mention that many of the APIs Google introduce are prone to tracking and spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Google has largely made the internet a safer and more efficient system by pushing standards through their market dominance.

Is this a bad thing?

<comment><USER54> What did Google ever do for us?

<comment><USER36> How many Google services and systems do you rely on each day?

<comment><USER55> I'm pretty sure it's a reference to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ)

<comment><USER56> My exact thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I agree with the general thrust of the article, but not a lot of the details. And then there's this:

> Our phones have as much RAM as my "studio" work desktop

This is unlikely to be true. From what I can find, the latest iPhone has 4GB of RAM, and Samsung is up to 8GB (and they are growing this stat fast to be sure), but no "studio" desktop made in the last five years is going to have that little.

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web > pages nearly > instantaneously.

This is definitely not true. It is true that the download time is not large, but between DNS and TLS latency and the fact that most "complex" web pages are built of assets from dozens of different servers, your actual wait time for the assets can be quite long. But even if you discount that, the render time is probably longer than the download time. If your page is that complex, I hope it's very beautiful to look at.

</comment><comment><USER58> And we are allowing it. From the dangerous tactic of allowing them to MITM all users via the AMP platform, to pushing their features only in their browser. A browser, which I may remind, was pushed to success by abusing their market position.

Had Google pulled this in the 90's they would have been attacked like Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER31> I see a lot of hate for SEO - Sure it can be use for crappy things but so can a lot of business functions. I see a lot of complaints about ppl saying "oh but this stupid page outrank company abc or the page they would expect." I am just thinking out loud... if we are willing to employ "specialist" lawyers, accountants, programmers etc in our business, why do we balk at employing a SEO specialist as a specialist business function?

There are many good seo companies(true, you have todo your home-work, but that is true for other service providers as well).

The dream is of course to not have to use them and just reply on Google and it's good nature and or algorithms... But is that not saying.. Oh we will just relay on never getting sued and therefor never need a lawyer cause, crimes are bad ?

</comment><comment><USER59> Now go look at the page source for the home page of Google.

</comment><comment><USER60> The web is optimized for Google Chrome, not the inverse. It's not surprising. Google is an advertising company with >90% search market share. There is little competition in the economy, only product differentiation.

</comment><comment><USER61> Didn't expect something as silly as this, especially the assertion that page sizes don't matter and since internet speeds are going up, web people are free to use it.

I don't see internet costs going down per MiB. Not everyone is on an unmetered connection. And users expect the large amount of bandwidth to be utilized for Netflix or something like that.

And how do you say Google is being evil for doing this? Even if there was no search monopoly and imagine there were two competing search engines. I think both of them would factor page load times in search results for better user experience.

</comment><comment><USER62> > The entire point of the web was to democratize and simplify publishing [...] > But the iPhone's [...] shitbox performance means we're all sort of ready to > throw that progress away.

A hilariously ignorant statement. Simplified and democratized publishing doesn't require one smidge of javascript, not one pointless tracker cookie, not a single facebook pixel, no hideous autoplaying videos, not even a jot of CSS. It needs nothing but HTML and text, rendered plenty fast by any computer made this side of 1995.

</comment><comment><USER63> It would be nice if you could specify preferences. For instance, if you hate tracking and ads, you could tell google that and it would down-weight those results.

</comment><comment><USER64> It thought I be in favor of whatever this article was arguing but then it went in a weird direction by arguing against certain things that are just considered good practice but its bad now because google is saying it. Like yes, I would consider it a good thing to have lighter websites. Unless your site is catering to some niche that _needs_ to offer 1 to 1 perfect image quality there no reason to not compress your assets.

</comment><comment><USER56> Casual users don't care about details in user experience, when you innovate casual experience they will consider using new search engine.

</comment><comment><USER65> I recently began having a lot of problems with Chinese "searchbot" traffic for a website. Filtering it out, my load went down by two orders of magnitude. It made me wonder how much of the purpose of this sort of thing is SEO. And how much slower Google is making the web for everyone by ranking on it, and therefore encouraging the shenanigans.

<comment><USER66> Every website is different, but if a single bot is bringing your website to a crawl, you should probably start caching a few things and working on performance.

<comment><USER65> Other people are reporting the same thing:

[https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei- aspiegelbo...](https://www.hypernode.com/blog/performance/huawei-aspiegelbot- is-increasingly-impacting-european-online-stores)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I wish there was a way to index the web which was not so susceptible to marketers gaming the ranking system; it is clear Google has lost the battle there. Moreover, I don't believe it is in Google's best interest to surface the best results for me, but those that will generate them the most revenue.

</comment><comment><USER68> Many inlinks are good for search ranking - people create fake sites and spam. domain is important for search ranking - people pick domain after search keyword. Faster pages rank higher - people make fast websites. Quality content rank higher - like if that ever going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER69> Is there a formal study available that examines the tradeoffs of google vs a search engine like ddg?

</comment><comment><USER70> God, how? Like, in the monotheistic sense or the polytheistic sense? If we're going poly, then Google is definitely one of the Gods of the web. Maybe even the top God, but there may be some competition there.

<comment><USER71> Google is the God of Control of the web. It thinks it knows what the people want, but it's just using its influence to make it look that way.

The only difference is that Google isn't even aware that's what it's doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> My favorite Google war story is implementing a web application using Google's polymer, only to watch their Google bot choke on crawling the site. It took about a year for them to get their bot working.

</comment><comment><USER73> Of cause Google is not God: Money is.

</comment><comment><USER74> The article is an unexpected take on what I would have assumed "the basics of web development" that would not be argued against. I would like to touch to some of the points here, as the arguments of the article were not very clear to me:

> The simple assumption that it is always better to have the smallest page > possible – that images should be resized and compressed to hell and > typography/other elements should be few in number. I strongly agree with > this statement overall, and the article doesn't seem to provide any counter- > arguments against it. We need to serve the smallest page possible because > the larger the page, the more resources it consumes, it is that simple. > Every _unnecessary_ byte added to a page literally translates to more > storage for the page, more processing power to prepare the page, more data > being sent on the wire, more data on the client-side to interpret the given > data, and all these add up to more energy being used to consume that page > and more resources being wasted. If I can remove one byte from a page, this > is for sure a win for everyone, one byte is one byte, whether that saving is > relevant considering the scale and the effort is a whole another discussion, > and the claim was never "send the smallest page at all costs". Considering > the time and effort, if there is a way to send a smaller page, then do it, > it is no different than turning the lamp off of an empty room, just on a > different scale.

> Instantaneous page loads should be priority over any other standards of > measure for a web page – like interesting design, for instance. I have never > seen such a claim anywhere before, needs citation. As a developer, I think > the look and the feel of the pages are as important as performance or > efficiency, and web on its own can be used as an art platform, which would > make this whole point irrelevant. Again, the overall point is this: if you > can offer the same thing with smaller pages witha reasonable amount of > effort, do it.

> Minimalistic design is necessary. I have never seen such a claim, needs > citation. As a user, I prefer cleaner design over fancier things, but this > is neither a "rule" nor the industry standard. There are various research > being done on this topic and I am no expert on it, but a joint research [1] > done by University of Basel and Google/YouTube User Experience Research > shows that the users perceive the cleaner designs as more beautiful, making > the point that if the user perception is a goal for the given webpage, then > keeping things simple might actually make a difference there. Again, depends > on the use-case.

> 22.82 Mbps will reliably download very complex web pages nearly > instantaneously This is a pain I am living with every day. I have a 4 year > old mobile phone with 6GB of RAM, and it takes at least 8-10 seconds for > Medium to be usable over a ~100Mbps connection, combined with fetching the > page and rendering / interpreting it. This is exactly the point I was making > above, if the page was smaller, it would have actually made a difference of > seconds. The same device over the same connection at the same time opens the > bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com in under a second, so, there is something to > be seen there.

In addition to that, even if I had 1Ghz connection, a 1-byte waste is a waste, irrelevant of my connection speed. I am not talking of the effort of saving that byte, but it is important to acknowledge the waste.

> Google has the right to dictate "Best Practices." This is a point that I > agree with more than the other ones, but this seems to be a separate topic > to me. The previous arguments were against the practices themselves, and > this one is against the entity that is supplying those practices. Even > though I agree with the majority of the points there, it would have been a > more informative read if the claims and frustrations there were stated with > better point-by-point explanations and data to back those claims up. Google > having a huge power and monopoly to push people to certain standards is a > big problem, but it is not clear in the article whether the author is > arguing against the practices or Google itself.

Overall, I believe it would have been a more resourceful article if the points and claims against the given practices were backed by better alternatives and data. We all accept that more data is more processing power + more energy, therefore trying to minimize it is an important goal, if the author thinks it should not be, then would be more interested in the answer of "why?" rather than a rant against long-standing practices.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is the best place I know of to have thoughtful discussions and talk about what most consider taboo.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html)

There are times where it gets heated, but those are quickly shut down by the very excellent community moderation.

<comment><USER75> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383662).</comment></comment>


Free Isn't Enough – What do we do when music has a negative value? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@upto12/free-isnt-enough-809d96fedf6e

<comment><USER2> Music has had negative value for a long time. A lot of businesses play music outside to discourage loitering. We leave our alarm clock tuned to a country music station and you'd better believe we get up to turn it off. Nothing else on the radio has been much better since sep 11, when the regional rap station took oochie Wallie off the playlist.</comment>


Debunking Porn Addiction - <AUTHOR> http://www.complex.com/life/2016/05/debunking-porn-addiction/ <comment><USER2> This seems to be too quick to dismiss the problems people have self reported.

In addition, the idea that there is no such thing as sexual immorality is one that I strongly disagree with.</comment>


JPMorgan Chase Building Bitcoin-Killer - <AUTHOR> http://letstalkbitcoin.com/jpmorgan-chase-building-bitcoin-killer/ <comment><USER2> The author's entire premise is off. The recent filing is a continuation of an application filed on Feb 3, 2000 (see patent 6,609,113). So, Chase wasnt taking a "swipe" at Bitcoin because the original application was filed 13 years ago. (Hmmm, is Chase...Satoshi?)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, there is a need for a better bitcoin alternative (even centralized).

No, what they propose is not a new paradigm.

I believe people will support an electronic payment system backed by financial giants but only if it is based on a limited supply of money like bitcoin.

We are not sick of all the wonderful services the banks provide. We are sick of the fed and banks inflating money. Period.

If JPChase created their own alt, JPCoin, with a trillion coins fixed, no fine print, insured, protected, with a check card, a mobile app, available 24/7 from around the world, that and only that may compete with bitcoin.

People do not support bitcoin because it is geeky or nerdy, they support it because it protects them from government confiscation and inflation. They have to offer both protections, or at least one, in order to excite us to take a look at their offer.

Bitcoin is doing fine, thanks. They have to make it better.

<comment><USER4> > We are sick of the fed and banks inflating money.

Actually, I quite like it. It has advantages like stabilising the economy and encouraging investment. I've never heard a serious economist suggest that moderate inflation is anything but good for the economy, and I've heard plenty tell me why deflation is dangerous.

Inflation is important because economics is all about creating incentives. We have property rights because it gives people an incentive to work hard and takes risks. We have patents because they give people an incentive to explain how their invention works. We have a market economy because it means that if a company wants to gain market share, it has to create value for the consumer. In the same way, central banks try to maintain low levels of inflation (~3%) because it encourages people to invest their money in profitable ventures, rather than just leaving it under the mattress. Investment is the way wealth is created, so it should be pretty obvious that deflation is bad for the economy.

Notice that I'm talking about the economic health of the country, not the individual citizen. If you're only concerned about immediate short term benefits, you should push for zero taxes, high deflation, and the gold standard. But that's penny wise and pound foolish. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Better by far is to support actions which improve the economy, because a rising tide lifts all boats.

<comment><USER5> > In the same way, central banks try to maintain low levels of inflation (~3%)

You must be joking. The way the inflation is officially calculated is totally biased (they don't even take in account energy costs properly) and 3% is basically the best number they can get by tweaking it like crazy. The actual inflation is way higher.

<comment><USER6> Energy is so volatile that it makes little sense to count it in measures of inflation. When oil prices double in a year, is that really because USD became less valuable?

There are certainly a number of methodologies for calculating inflation, but this idea that inflation is 10+% seems to be something of an Austrian fantasy.

The consensus that moderate inflation is good for the economy is about as uncontroversial as you get in economics, and is generally agreed upon by economists across the political spectrum.

<comment><USER5> The fact is that oil prices affect significantly your purchasing power across every product you buy. There is no reason why you should remove energy costs since there are a significant cost in most of what we buy. And the price of oil does not double every year, it's been rather stable most of the time.

Again, if moderate inflation is that good for the economy, why do they need to tweak the numbers? (rhetorical question, the answer is obvious).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Such a patent application is not evidence of JPMorgan _building_ anything, only that they feel that the ability to _stop_ someone else from building it could be worth a few bucks.

Thus is the patent.

<comment><USER8> Just another bullshit linkbait headline.

There's nothing being built here and nothing different from a dozen existing electronic peer to peer payment networks. (Venmo, PayPal, Dwolla, Square Cash).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is more of a Visa / Mastercard competitor than a 'Bitcoin Killer'

It's centralised, it's bank-controlled, it's USD denominated. Also this is just a patent, we don't even know that they're actually building it at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> If bitcoin is successful, I think existing national currencies will eventually roll their own and it will be absorbed in the same way as promissory notes were.

Bitcoin is a revolutionary way to run a currency, but it is still a currency and national banks have already successfully absorbed several monetary revolutions. If anything, they are getting rather good at it.

</comment><comment><USER11> _" For a currency that has been lauded for its frictionless characteristics, Bitcoin sure has been causing a lot a friction over at the legacy banking institutions."_

Um, isn't it the other way around? Legacy banking institutions have been causing a lot of friction for Bitcoin by refusing to do business with Bitcoin businesses.

<comment><USER12> You're not using Bitcoin fanboy thinking, where banks are so threatened by Bitcoin that they sent AML/KYC laws back in time specifically to kill it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Link bait. This is about as much a Bitcoin competitor as Paypal is.

</comment><comment><USER14> Governments will eventually implement virtual versions of their currencies!!!</comment>


Learning about distributed systems: where to start? - <AUTHOR> https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/06/learning-about-distributed-systems.html <comment><USER2> MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems

[https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html)</comment>


Ask YC: What is your background? - <AUTHOR>

Is your B.S./M.S./PhD in C.S. or Software Eng.? Or did you come from a different area? Which one? What brought you in to the Hacking world?
I would guess quantitative fields, like Physics or Math would be the most common, but I'm sure there are some bio people out there too.
I'm a Physicist by training with a bit of formal CS background and I've been debating whether I should try to transition in to the corporate/entrepreneurial world or not. How easy was it in your case? <comment><USER2> I dropped out of college to go work on "that newfangled internet thing".

</comment><comment><USER3> It's better be a poll</comment>


On code clarity: you can't be proud of something I can't read - <AUTHOR> https://blog.svpino.com/2015/04/22/the-thing-with-code-clarity-you-cant-be-proud-of-something-I-cant-read

<comment><USER2> Are developers often proud of their code? I'm pretty sure most developers who open up their projects to the world and say "look at what I built" are proud of the result of their code, not the code itself.

I'm not sure I've ever met a developer who is genuinely pleased with their code beyond a nice implementation of an algorithm or a neatly abstracted class. Most of us are deeply, sometimes overly, modest and humble about how readable our code is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's fair to separate the code and the software itself. I personally don't feel proud of the result of a piece of software if the code is crappy, i.e. spaghetti code, (almost) unreadable, unmaintainable, ...

I think what the author wanted to emphasize was the importance of code clarity, as many of us developers don't actually care. Bad code builds up negative tech debts that somebody has to pay at some point in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the analogy of the architect ... It's probably wrong to say that "it was built on a shaky foundation that will collapse sooner rather than later" and it's more accurate to say that another architect or professional engineer might not be able to understand the intent behind the drawings/plans and thus make necessary changes without compromising the building's structural integrity.</comment>


Eye movements 'change scenes' during dreams - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33860994 <comment><USER2> So essentially, eye motions during REM sleep are not directly related to visualization of dreams. Instead, it's linked to another set of neurons.

      "The eye movements are not actually scanning your dream - they're reorienting
      your visual thoughts," Prof Horne told BBC News.

Further, the study delves into the connections between REM sleep and wakefulness. This could lead into lucid dreaming, as other commenters have remarked.

      "This study endorses other findings that REM sleep has many similarities to
      wakefulness.

Others are using the new findings to dig into evolutionary causes.

      Prof William Wisden, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, was also
      convinced by the similarity of brain activity between awake and REM states -
      but he said there are bigger questions still to answer.
      "The most fascinating question of all is why do we have to have REM sleep? Why
      does our brain have all this circuitry to do that?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure what "change of scene" means, but:

"Based on earlier studies showing that some of the eye movements of REM sleep corresponded to the reported direction of the dreamer's gaze (e.g., Roffwarg et al. 1962), we asked subjects to carry out distinctive patterns of voluntary eye movements when they realized they were dreaming. The prearranged eye movement signals appeared on the polygraph records during REM, proving that the subjects had indeed been lucid during uninterrupted REM sleep (LaBerge 1990; LaBerge et al. 1981)" (from [http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/](http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/))

<comment><USER4> It sounds very similar to a 'Saccade' [1]. Something your eyes do all the time when waking whenever they move. From your mind's perspective it seems to cut off the old signal from wherever yours eyes were previously facing/absorbing, wipes the slate clean and starts building up mental imagery and models based on the new input feed.

I think this might be getting at what they mean by 'change of scene', but it's probably not possible to prove exactly what's happening since it's subjective.

As an experiment you can do yourself to highlight this effect, go to you bathroom and look into the mirror with your face almost touching it, staring at the point between your eyes.

Try not to move your eyes at all and relax them, even if it feels like they might be moving off-target. Eventually your whole 'view' should subtly change, maybe blur and come into and out of _seeming_ focus as your brain tries to interpret the noisy input it's getting (since nothing should be changing, the only difference in the input is noise) and may refocus your mental imagery/minds eye at showing you what it _thinks_ you're looking at.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> News is so weird. The top of the article shows a picture of a person sleeping. Sleep is a pretty universal experience; I'm not sure how that image enhances the article =P

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really amazing, I have always wondered what the first dreams a sentient creature are. What is the context of a dream before we have any experiences to form it from?

<comment><USER7> Hm, I don't think there is such a moment. From the moment we acquire some sort of consciousness and sleep becomes a requirement for the body and mind to work properly, you at least some sort of _experience_.

Newborns can't see properly, they see only shadows and perceive mainly by sound and contact. But even them, have nightmares or _good_ dreams :-)

A better question might be: "What kind of dreams does a human blind from birth dream?"

Nature Magazine featured an article on the topic[1].

[1] [http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/26/how- the-b...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/26/how-the-blind- dream/)

<comment><USER8> Or even dreaming in the womb:

[http://www.science20.com/news_releases/do_babies_womb_have_d...](http://www.science20.com/news_releases/do_babies_womb_have_dreams)</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter & NYSE Honeymoon Is Over As Stock Price Takes Another Nosedive - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/the-twitter-nyse-honeymoon-is-over-as-stock-price-takes-another-nosedive/

<comment><AUTHOR> Shares of Twitter Inc. (TWTR) slide 6.4% in early trade this morning, building on Friday's 13% plunge. The stock has now slumped 20.1% from Thursday's intra- day high of $74.73, putting it in bear-market territory. It is current trading at $59.67 -- This is a BIG slide.</comment>