Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read? - <AUTHOR> When I browse HN, I usually pick out a few articles I want to read from the front page, then email the links to myself to read later.<p>This method works out pretty well for me. I'm wondering if people have other strategies that work better? <comment><USER2> I used Instapaper ([https://www.instapaper.com/](https://www.instapaper.com/)), then moved to Pocket ([https://getpocket.com/](https://getpocket.com/)) to take advantage of the social features, then moved back to Instapaper for no really good reason. Pocket still looks nicer and the apps are more reliable, in my experience.

They both allow you to save the full text of an article to read later, as well as archiving and organizing articles you've already read. They sync to phones, so most of my reading actually happens on public transit. Pocket can also sync to a Kobo ebook reader; not sure about Kindle, but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked with them, too.

<comment><USER3> I'm a fan of Pocket as well. It's what I use. It's also easy to quickly look up old articles I've read or to find new content to read via recommended/explore option.

Plus you've got that whole cross-platform thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I open them in a new tab and come back to them when ready. This ensures I'll actually read them relatively soon. Bookmarks would be forgotten about by me and some more involved method seems like overkill.

<comment><USER5> What if I have 6 chome windows each with 10-30 tabs?

<comment><USER6> Switch to firefox. I have one window with over 1000 tabs, and it all takes just 4GB virtual, 2GB resident.

Older versions gave me the incentive to sort things out by slowing down with many tabs or taking too much memory. Now, I unfortunately just accumulate :( At the current rate, I'll likely never get down to 0, as I find more interesting things per day than I can read....

<comment><USER7> Also, if you still have memory/performance problems, these two addons make a noticeable difference:

\- LoadTabOnSelect: Load new tabs on selection. This addon will prevent new tabs from automatically loading, instead loading them on selection.

The intended usage of the addon is to facilitate power-users who open many tabs before viewing, but dislike auto-playing videos (and other annoyances).

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/loadtabonsele...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/loadtabonselect/)

\--

\- Auto Tab Discard: Use native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. Auto Tab Discard a lightweight extension that uses the native method (tabs.discard) to unload or suspend browser tabs to significantly reduce the memory footprint of your browser when many tabs are opened.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab- disc...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/)

edit: typos

<comment><USER8> > LoadTabOnSelect

As this is a built-in feature of Firefox, I'm curious if there are any additional benefits this addon provides?

Edit: Oh, I'm a bit slow, apparently this prevents loading a tab even on the initial click (the built-in option only prevents it on startup). Thanks, looks useful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use the Tabs Outliner: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl)

Here is a screenshot of my current HN reading list: [https://i.imgur.com/KvbucE2.png](https://i.imgur.com/KvbucE2.png)

It is similar to Tree Style Tabs for Firefox but with some key differences:

\- It sits in a separate window and shows the tree for your entire current session. Each Chrome window is a child of the root node.

\- It supports indentation via Tab or Shift-Tab and has several useful keyboard shortcuts

\- Rearranging the tabs with the mouse is very precise. Indentation can also be controlled this way.

\- It uploads the entire tree to Google Drive periodically and manually. This way I can move my tab tree between computers with a simple drag and drop.

\- It can unload tabs or entire sub-trees (the green X icon in the screenshot). This makes extensions like The Great Suspender obsolete and I can still keep my gigantic tree hierarchy without eating all my RAM.

<comment><USER10> It became nagware, which among several other (mis)features was a killer.

<comment><USER9> Do you mean that it repeatedly asks for payment? I purchased a license long ago and did not know how bad it treated free users in recent versions.

That being said, I still do not regret for paying for this extension. It is still the only browser extension I ever paid for and just like back then with Tree Style Tab for Firefox this is the extension that keeps me from switching away from Chrome.

<comment><USER10> It broke flow, which is the greater offense.

I've not used it in years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use Firefox everywhere.

When using phone, during commute to/from the job, I send links to desktop using Firefox's built in feature.

When using desktop at the job, I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.

At desktop at home I have Panorama View extension [1] to avoid tab clutter.

I plan to install Wallabag [2] on my server to have place to categorize and store already read articles.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/panorama- view/](https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/panorama-view/) [2] [https://wallabag.org/](https://wallabag.org/)

<comment><USER12> > I read articles instantly or send them to desktop at home.

From phone to desktop? Is it possible in an iPhone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't.

I have started bookmarking 10 years ago everything I find interesting, thinking I would be able quickly to read them later, and now, 10 years later, I have 34.000 bookmarks, of which there is at least 32.000 I am still waiting to read in depth.

But it's changing. I took some "vacations" to focus on closing this gap, and do it full time for the past days. So hopefully there will soon be "only" 1000 "to-read-soon" articles in my bookmarks ;)

<comment><USER13> That being said, I recommend you using "Shaarli" (with extensions available for all browsers and on iOS and Android) as your read-later system, I found it to be pretty useful and effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use "Push to Kindle"[1] (available as both a browser extension and mobile app) to push articles to my Kindle for later reading.

[1] [http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/](http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/)

<comment><USER15> Push to Kindle is great. I've built simple CLI app [0] to send articles directly from my terminal (using Push to Kindle). It works from Gnome Shell run command prompt too.

[0] [https://github.com/silenc3r/url2kindle](https://github.com/silenc3r/url2kindle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For the most part I use Pocket because my Kobo ereader supports it. However if it supported Instapaper I would swap in an instant.

I've found Pocket often skips bits of text, usually bullet point items which I'm assuming it things are navigation menus or something. Really annoying. Instapaper does much better with this.

Every now and again it also finds an article it cannot extract the main content from. In that case it never ends up on my ereader, and there's no obvious indication that there is a problem.

For either of those cases I save with Instapaper and use Erudite[1] to convert it to an epub.

To track my readying habits, I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API (and the hn.algolia.com API). Once I've read an article I archive it. Then when I'm back at my computer I run my app, which lists the archived articles, any related Hacker News pages, and lets me manage the articles (delete, save locally, etc.). It makes it easy for me to follow up and read the HN discussions after I've found the time to read the article.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

[1] [https://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/](https://evanmclean.com/software/erudite/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I use a text file named "read". I store links as a list. When I have read them and it was worth storing I move it to a subsection called read and write notes or copy content if necessary. It looks somewhat like this:

        # To Read
        - [ ] [Ask HN: How do you keep track of articles you want to read?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637835)

        # Read
        - [x] [why children aren't behaving and what you can do about it](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/02/611082566/why-children-arent-behaving-and-what-you-can-do-about-it)
        This is a short interview with the author of the book "The Good News About Bad Behavior". It's interesting how the author talks about disciplining kids.

The good thing about plain text is you can create any organizing method you like. If you want tags just create them :) If an article was useless I remove it. It uses basic github flavoured markdown format that I can render if I want to.

Someday I plan to automate it using a firefox plugin.

<comment><USER18> are you using this method when mobile too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've tried many others and always end up back at email to email@example.com. After I read it and if I want to keep it for reference, I tag and archive it, otherwise just archive it. I'd like to move from tags to a personal knowledge database with full text search, but I haven't been sufficiently motivated to set it up.

</comment><comment><USER20> I favorite them, and I made an api for HN user favorites. I pull into other software.

It's free to use also [https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites- api](https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api)

</comment><comment><USER10> Poorly.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/fj5rzi8zmouyrmvg8yzzva](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/fj5rzi8zmouyrmvg8yzzva)

Index cards. Lots of index cards.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a)

Pocket ... gets worse the more you use it.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Feedly ([https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com)) works great for me. I browse all my RSS feeds in the app and whatever seems interesting, I can tag it to read later.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use rss feeds + a rss reader. I have a 2 step process: i read headlines and tag interesting articles as "read later". Every now and then i go through this read later list, read some of the articles, and star the ones i want to save. I use the rss reader/news aggregator Aktu ([https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io)),shameless plug: i built it, but Feedly ([https://feedly.com/](https://feedly.com/)) is a good option too.

</comment><comment><USER23> 1\. Both Pinboard and Pocket as my main bookmarklet storage. They're just storage but not necessary to read them all.

2\. Instapaper and emailthis as my "to read" tools. Instapaper is very nice for article readability (better than pocket) and emailthis as article storage, or sometimes needs to send out to friends or colleagues.

3\. Zotero as main research or pdf keeper.

4\. I don't use Evernote now because I already bumped into their 100,000 limitation three years ago.

5\. Please remember to use "star" or "Love" to pin your important bookmarks. It'll help someday.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use Feedly for reading selected sites, it allows for tagging articles to organize for later reading. * [https://feedly.com/](https://feedly.com/)

Pearltrees I use to organize things I find outside of Feedly. * [https://www.pearltrees.com/](https://www.pearltrees.com/)

Both have apps and Pearltrees has a Chrome plugin.

</comment><comment><USER25> I used the Firefox extension "Scrapbook", until the switch to web extensions killed support for it.

It was quick. And it saved a local copy; no worry about stuff "going away". I might get back to it sooner, or I might a considerable time later. Regardless, it would be there.

Things like _this_ differentiated Firefox and promoted much support of it from its user base.

In short, it's _my_ god-damned client/user-agent, and it should do what I want.

(And I thank all the developers who helped enable that. It is, was _their_ creation.)

I welcome progress. But, taking away useful features like this, does not feel like progress.

P.S. Yes, my thanks and all that, don't really suffice.

However all the credit and blame shakes out, we've got a composite medium that seems, in important aspects, to be becoming more transitory. Things disappear. It's harder to "keep up with the flow". Noise and rank-gaming and all.

And (thinking of another recent round of comments on Google search results), I guess search isn't "sexy" anymore. Not for Web content, at least.

</comment><comment><USER26> It depends. For a lot of content on HN, I simply save to Pinboard with a tag. Most of that never gets read, but when I happen to need to work on something that uses, say, a graph database, I'll review my "database" tag bookmarks to see if there's anything useful there.

If I actually intend to read the content of the link and not just potentially return to it later if needed, I'll save to Instapaper, which is configured to automatically create a Kindle-formatted digest of all the links and send it directly to my Kindle on Friday mornings. It's like a mini-magazine of only articles I care about.

Some other commenters have suggested other "Send to Kindle" options, but I prefer this because those create a single Kindle item per article, while Instapaper's digests compile a whole weeks worth (or more, the length of time is configurable) of content into a single Kindle "book".

</comment><comment><USER27> Books : amazon wishlist Internet content : bookmark Anything else : gtd personnal archive system

Little trick : telegram has a "saved messages" chat where you can write messages, including photos, audio and video. It works offline, automatically synchronize when you get online with all telegram instances.

You can put a direct shorcut to it on your android home screen, meaning you have a synchronized multimedia in-basket system between all your devices. I just dump all my random thougths or todo in it to sort it out the next morning.

So somebody talk about something i might wanna read ? I just take 2s to dumo it into the chat and forget about it. Later, i review it, assess if i really want to read it, and if yes, i put it in the proper list.

</comment><comment><USER28> I open them in a separate tab, then occasionally think about reading some of my tabs when I have time in the future. Then occasionally my browser crashes such that it loses the open tabs, thus cleaning up. And thus I start anew.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like Linkpack: [https://www.linkpack.io/](https://www.linkpack.io/)

It syncs to Dropbox, so I own my data, it's a nice interface over that.

</comment><comment><USER30> I use Safari as my daily browser so I end up just using the Reading List feature. It works well, but if you want more options like tagging/categorizing then it's a no go.

</comment><comment><USER31> Bookmarks bar folder on chrome.

Don't see the need for a specialized app, which I would enthusiastically install and then never touch again.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use Org Mode so I have a plain text file called todo-bookmarks.org with a list of links to the articles I want to read.

</comment><comment><USER33> I read what I have time for at the moment and that's it. I accept that I won't ever be able to read or even do all the things I want in life and just take it moment by moment. If something seems important than I use my built in memory to remember it later. If it's very important then I make time for it now.

</comment><comment><USER34> Newsblur. You put the HN RSS in its feeds, and you have a folder for saving stories and/or tagging them.

<comment><USER6> Second newsblur, its awesome; My two missing features is adding a random website (not an rss / mailing-list article), and storing the article text for offline/archive.

I am a paying customer, planning to run my own instance when I have the time, but it's been so reliable that I just can't prioritize switching to my own instance over other stuff...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I add articles to Instapaper using the Chrome and iOS extensions. Then in Instapaper I highlight key phrases/takeaways which get automatically added (via IFTTT) to a new Evernote note for each article. I periodically review these notes to reinforce the takeaways (ie. spaced repetition).

</comment><comment><USER36> I use Instapaper but I have also recently started trying out Pocket. These tools are effective since it is very easy to set a bookmark let to save articles for later.

One great thing about them is that they allow you read articles offline and without ads and in the format you want such as black background.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like to use tiddlywiki to keep track of stuff like that. It is super flexible and it is easily self hostable. Therefore, I don't have to worry about some startup going out of business but I still have the benefits of advanced features like tagging, full text search, etc.

</comment><comment><USER38> I pin the tab in Chrome, then move most (when eventually not read) to a bookmark folder called 'Tsundoko', never to be seen again.

This means the most important ones are read, and the ones that don't matter are no longer taking up my "background" attention.

</comment><comment><USER39> Google Keep browser extension.

I store my "jotted notes" of all kinds in Keep, and one of my labels is "toread", while the one for videos is "towatch". Keep works for me since it's cloud-based, free, and works across iOS and Android.

</comment><comment><USER40> I use a simple TXT file formatted as YAML that is a part of my organization system: [https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder](https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder)

<comment><USER18> remind me of this [http://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text- organizer/](http://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/)

<comment><USER40> Interesting. Nowadays I manage only three TXT files: one for bookmarks, one for notes and one for calendar/todos. Less is definitely more but having just one file is too extreme.

I 'tree shake' them agressively to be always under ~2K lines and keep them maintainable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The |favorite| link on each story is one way. The advantage, it is integrated to HN.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have a bookmark folder and within that folder i have multiple folders "philosophy", "politics", etc. Moreover, i have Evernote i created a a note book called "Inbox" where random articles are saved in to read later.

</comment><comment><USER43> I use Snooze (a Chrome extension). Some articles I'll snooze for when I get home from work. Other articles I snooze until the Saturday.

If you haven't heard of Snooze, be sure to give it a try [1].

[1] No affiliation to the Snooze extension.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use the favorite link, as mentioned in the other comment, but I also use Pocket, and its chrome extension. I have the app on my phone, and my e-reader downloads my pocket saves for me to read offline.

</comment><comment><USER45> I get most of my articles by Feedly and save them there if they are short or time relevant like news, but I use Pocket for any articles which are longer and more in-depth.

</comment><comment><USER46> I save anything that looks interesting in Pocket and sort it out later. My to- read list never gets bigger than 10 articles. Other people seem to struggle with this.

</comment><comment><USER47> I bookmark them into a folder named "Reading List". If after two weeks, I haven't read it, then I reconsider if it needs to be kept.

</comment><comment><USER48> I use a own instans of wallabag(wallabag.org)

</comment><comment><USER49> I like to save the page as .mhtml file by Chrome, and I can read it later offline or even the author delete the article.

</comment><comment><USER50> As an open source alternative to poket, you can use wallabag. Or you can store url through shaarli too...

</comment><comment><USER51> I'be been favouriting them since the feature was added.

...

I confess though that I haven't actually gone back and read any yet.

</comment><comment><USER52> The Google Keep Chrome extension is a handy way to save articles that I want to read later.

</comment><comment><USER53> I forward the link to the "Saved Messages" chat on Telegram. Nifty Feature.

</comment><comment><USER54> You just add them to your favorites ... Remove them later if you dont like them ..

</comment><comment><USER55> New tabs in browser, and the "onetab" add-in to keep lists of links.

</comment><comment><USER56> I use a app which I have written especially for this stash.bobbydreamer.com

</comment><comment><USER57> Yup...this is how I do it too actually for all sites

</comment><comment><USER58> Instapaper or newsblur save

</comment><comment><USER59> thats what browser tabs are for, open 10-100 and read thru the day

</comment><comment><USER60> F-Droid, Bulkshare

</comment><comment><USER61> I use Pocket.

</comment><comment><USER62> raindrop.io

</comment><comment><USER63> Instapaper!

</comment><comment><USER64> Pocket

</comment><comment><USER65> Feedly is awesome in terms of keep track of sources, and saving article for general "Read Later" as well as specific tags (can add multiple to any article). Highly recommend for gerneral content aggregation / sorting.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you plan out your travels/adventures? - <AUTHOR> Just curious. I see a lot of people I know traveling all over the world in their 20's and I wanna get started with that myself. I am 27 and not getting any younger. <comment><USER2> I think the most important step is to first commit yourself that you're doing it. And this happens when you book your plan tickets.

Next your create an itinerary of what you want to do. Unless you've done this a lot, it can be really helpful to make sure you're on track and got all your basics covered</comment>


Google Megastore: Providing Scalable, HA Storage for Interactive Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper32.pdf

<comment><USER2> Great paper. I tend to work on medium scale systems but I always enjoy reading material from companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter on how they manage scaling, especially data stores.

There is an interesting pattern: the more scalable a data store is the larger the hassle of writing application code against it. I am lucky that MongoDB master slave has been sufficient for what I have been doing because it is almost as simple to use as a RDMS. It is clear that writing against HBase and Cassandra takes more effort and it is more difficult to be in an agile development mode.

</comment><comment><USER3> The architecture of MegaStore is so complicated... There are so many roles in the system, e.g. stateless replicate server, different stateful paxos instances, stateful co-coordinator, bigtable and other auxilary roles.

I suspect some roles are added later because the original implementation does not meet their design goal, as patch to normal software product.

It is a nightmare for operation engineers of GAE.</comment>


A message from Gabe Newell - <AUTHOR> http://www.dorkly.com/article/54448/a-message-from-gabe-newell

<comment><USER2> I totally agree, but - release a comic and close the story. There are other mediums than games and you could explore them if Valve thinks H/L as a FPS is dead end right now.

Edit: rewording after realizing dorkly is the geek's onion.

<comment><USER3> You mean to say that you didn't think something was off about Gabe Newell saying "... you slobbering shit-wizards ..." in an apparently official communication? :-)

<comment><USER2> I would say that if I think it. If someone is a slobbering shit-wizard you are doing the humanity a disservice by not calling him that.

And there were debates in tech about rough language anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just don't get it. Gamers are apparently very eager to play a new version of Half Life. Just like they love to play yet ANOTHER version of GTA (and it's selling!). Why not go ahead and create that game people are waiting for?

(yes i understand this message is fake, but considering the time it takes Valve to create HL3 i seriously doubt it will ever come)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can someone confirm this is legit?

<comment><USER6> No, it is not legit.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DataRake – Search and download CrunchBase companies contacts - <AUTHOR> http://www.datarake.com/search.aspx?_d=7848d5cc-7e4d-41b3-b3c8-3f5e7c041e7a

<comment><USER2> You really, really need to proofread your copy.

[http://www.datarake.com/faq.aspx](http://www.datarake.com/faq.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> We will definitely take some time to do that. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty cool. Thanks! Could you make the URL clickable? And moving it to the search results instead of the inner page would be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea we'll see how to make that work.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have been uploading data from various sources, mostly Data.gov. Please let us know any public dataset you will like us to index.</comment>


Meg Rosoff Is the 2016 Winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award - <AUTHOR> http://www.svd.se/arets-alma-pristagare-presenteras/om/kultur:litteratur <comment><AUTHOR> This is breaking news, no international media has had a chance to cover it yet. Here is the submitted link, as translated by Google: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.svd.se%2Farets- alma-pristagare-presenteras%2Fom%2Fkultur%3Alitteratur&edit-text=&act=url)

</comment><comment><USER2> Story at BBC after this was published: [http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment- arts-35968632](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35968632)

Guardian story: [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/05/meg-rosoff- wins...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/05/meg-rosoff-wins-astrid- lindgren-memorial-award-how-i-live-now)</comment>


Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner Is Real Food (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/science-compared-every-diet-and-the-winner-is-real-food/284595/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "They conclude that no diet is clearly best, but there are common elements across eating patterns that are proven to be beneficial to health."

They also didn't compare every diet.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Pretty much sums up the key to health.</comment>


Oral History of Don Knuth - <AUTHOR> http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Knuth_Don_1/Knuth_Don.oral_history.2007.102658053_all.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Summary here: [http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/1026580...](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658053)

Description: In this wide-ranging interview conducted by Edward Feigenbaum, Donald Knuth talks about the progression of his life and career. Topics include his family background and early interest in music, physics and mathematics, his first exposure to programming, finding a mentor, and writing a doctoral thesis. He describes how ?The Art of Computer Programming? became ?the story of my life?, and why it was put on hold for the TeX and METAFONT projects. He also talks about personal work habits, programming style, analysis of algorithms, the influence of religion in his life, and his advice to the next generation of scientists.

One quote: "I would say that's my major disappointment with my teaching career, [that] I was not able to get across to any of my students this love for that kind of scholarship -- reading source material. I was a complete failure at passing this on to the people that I worked with the most closely. I don't know what I should have done."

Man I wish I had time to read this whole thing!</comment>


Ask HN: XPS 13/15 owners, how many of you got bent corners on the lid? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I have both. No bent corners.</comment>


Iowa Caucuses, the Blob, and the Democratic Party Cartel - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/iowa-caucuses-the-blob-and-the-democratic <comment><USER2> _The root cause of the Iowa fiasco is a nonprofit corporation called ACRONYM, which owns the technology company Shadow, Inc._

It's not at all clear to me that this is the case. I mean, sure, there are obviously big problems with the app's design and implementation. But there are ample signs of deeper problems with the customer (and indeed, TFA alludes to some of it).

The fact that the Party insisted on keeping specifics about the app secret until the last minute was the first big red flag to me. With the customer making such a demand about a product that's intended to be widely distributed with zero ramp-up time, they had at least two strikes against them from the start.

Further mess-ups outside the app development, like using the same phone lines for support and for reporting, are mistakes that don't obviously fall on the shoulders of the developer.

The customer - the Iowa Democratic Party - probably needs to bear at least part of the blame for this. It's true that an experienced developer might have given their customer better guidance, but that doesn't absolve the Party from these mistakes.

<comment><USER3> It's really jarring that the orgs are called ACRONYM and Shadow. I thought those were just ironic filler names to mock the real, undisclosed orgs. But from the article and tweets, it seems real.

Still feels like a parody of some sort. Let me know if I'm not getting it.

<comment><USER4> In politics, there's a huge incentive for insiders to appear to be a kingmaker. Names like Shadow and ACRONYM play into that stereotype of a behind the scenes puppet master, that politicians will pay big dollars to get them / keep them in power.

At a larger level, it makes understanding whats happening really difficult. Its hard to tell who is actually corrupt and who is "peacocking" corruption.

<comment><USER5> So you think it's coincidence these orgs are made of former high level Clinton campaign staffers?

<comment><USER6> Not a coincidence, an inevitability. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in politics for many years, Bill Clinton was President for 8 years and Hillary ran for President twice. Anyone who is anyone in the Democratic party would want to work for them at some point.

<comment><USER5> That's a fair point. Although... when you think about the idea of peacocking that you are a kingmaker, it just flat out reminds me of the hubris that lost Clinton 2016 and that her staffers had to bear some of the blame.

Now here we are years later and there are "app voting irregularities" from the people that swore up and down Russia was hacking our elections, you think those people would be more cautious if they actually believed those claims themselves.

Thinking about it some more, I guess this is probably a "attribute to incompetence, not malice" situation, but as amusing as I found it, really was just made for the conspiracy theorist!

<comment><USER6> Go to any political environment, everyone tries to swagger like they are the best connected in the room. Hell, go to any convention anywhere and see the same thing.

State Democratic parties are cheap and obstinate. Most of the money is siphoned off by salaries and contractors. They don't work together nor work with the national party. When the deign to do so it is because their offered a lot of funding or favors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an extremely interesting and important discussion to be had around what happened with an App in Iowa, but TFA seems like the wrong plank to walk off of to have it.

Maybe one day we will have an honest and true post mortem of what happened on Monday. Reports have been conflicting and non-sensical. No one that I can find has managed to actually show the app in question in detail, what numbers were meant to be reported, and how it actually all fell apart.

I've heard explanations ranging from caucus chairs unable to login to the app, to the result reports coming out of the app being corrupted. Days later we're still at only 70% precincts reporting and a race still too close to call. For what was apparently, a fairly low turnout event.

We're talking about a web form collecting like 6 integer values from 1,765 precincts, right?

<comment><USER8> That's exactly what I'm not getting. Everybody is discussing scalability problems, but as far as I've seen it all comes down to ~2K users and ~2K consequent form submissions. I can understand juniority, but here even a kid could've handled this kind of "scale"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me, the Iowa Caucus Fiasco™ is best explained by incompetence and embarrassment. A bug in the app caused it to fail, call centers overwhelmed, and a bunch of people who had been at the caucus for hours probably tried to take the reporting into their own hands, and caused even more delays.

Verifying the results that were scribbled on an undated piece of paper by 1600+ volunteers is not an easy task. [Esp after the fact, when the whole verification was centered around username / pw / 2fa / \+ pin, which may have not been readily accessible for call-center use].

The Des Moine Register poll was scrapped for less, which is why it feels like a cover-up. Not because of any candidate bias, but because the caucus probably needs to be redone for the results to be credible under scrutiny, or nullified entirely, which would be quite an embarrassment.

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel really bad for the people who made this thing. It looks like it was mostly interns/people at their first job out of a bootcamp.

It was a mess, sure. My first major project was probably a mess too, except my "mess" would have been looking at a display and going "huh?", not being accused of trying to undermine democracy.

<comment><USER11> The thing that blows my mind is that they only spend around $60k developing it. Steyer and Bloomberg have spent 400 million dollars combined on ads in South Carolina. Couldn't any of the several billionaires that support the Democrats have kicked down a couple hundred grand for this at least? Even Epstein randomly handed out 100k checks to profs at MIT. It's not that much money for these people.

<comment><USER12> 60k for a web page, that has a form to input about 8 numbers? With about 1000 users maximum?

<comment><USER11> Well, apparently it wasn't enough.

<comment><USER12> In Russia we sometimes joke, that a project can be implemented by a student paid with food. This project reeeeeally looks like such project.

I mean honestly, probably anyone here can create this "app" in a day.

Maybe I don't understand the complexity, but it doesn't feel like it has any. And if so, than no money could save it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Funny Matt is usually a straight shooter but didn't mention Tara McGowan (CEO of Acronym; it's on linkedin) is married to Buttigieg senior staffer Michael Halle. Maybe he didn't notice.

[https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior- st...](https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-michael-halle-senior- staff-36f664e9-0099-4eb1-a01b-1f07cc488709.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> key paragraph: "In this moment in history, the network of institutions that comprise the Democratic Party, from cable news channels to law firms to campaign operative networks to Silicon Valley lobbying outposts like Facebook and Google, are hollow and obviously incompetent."

This seems to be hyperbole, but I am not familiar with Matt Stoller so I reserved judgement and read a number of the back issues of his newsletter (archived at no charge on the site at [https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/) ). I came across this [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and- accounting-...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/airplanes-and-accounting- games-the) which was written in December and correctly predicts the subsequent collapse of Boeing.

Both articles are well written and insightful, the analysis is not from a political perspective but from a careful review of governance models and the impact of incentives on behavior.

<comment><USER15> Well you won me over. I do think this guy is trying to honestly shed light on the powers of influence and concentration at work in the industry at large. I'm dubious though about the value of this particular article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _It's always been a bit of a puzzle for me to define just what the Democratic Party is. There are no formal membership dues, and registration varies by state. Candidates can sometimes run for the party nomination without being a member_

As a non-American this kind of stuff has always been a bit bewildering for me. Why is such opacity accepted in the electoral/political process?

Doesn't this always risk shifting power to unknown and unaccountable individuals?

Doesn't this muddying of waters allow for all sorts of hidden conflicts of interest?

<comment><USER17> Part of the reason is that the framers of the US constitution hated parties, and seemed to take a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach. With no backbone of written law to fall back on, US political parties only rely on their own rules as an organization of people. All the problems you described do affect them, and they used to be even more exclusive and opaque. The candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fruits of the opening up of parties, effectively allowing takeovers by determined blocks of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is Matt Stoller credible on this topic? Is there evidence he has better sourcing than a book he once read and a bunch of Google searches?

<comment><USER19> Just sounds like some vague connections thrown together that happens to match the thesis of his book. Yawn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Gods, why not just take a picture of the voting sheet and send it in. Iowa only has about 1700 voting districts? I could data entry that myself in about 2 hours. Split the work among 10 people, and you'd have it done in 12 minutes.

<comment><USER21> My guess is either (a) they're hand-counting all the paper backups, and/or (b) campaigns are chiming in and confirming or disputing results before the IDP makes the result public, which means more time for folks to weigh in and more fact-gathering before the public knows the results. And that while this wasn't the plan, the initial things going wrong caused such distrust in the process they felt this was necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is clearly not an HN appropriate topic from the comments alone. This thread is devolving into a mixture of the worst possible interpretations of what happened with outright lies and misleading representations being used to fuel FUD.

<comment><USER22> welcome to the shit show that has been present for quite awhile. at least this article up and declares its political while too many are slipped in under the covers and are very easily traced back to one campaign's or another talking points.

just flag every article and maybe enough others will join in and we can get back to pretending to having an agnostic view on this site

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please consider this.

\- In software engineering it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between capable and incapable companies/individuals. You basically need a very capable person to make the evaluation. But who chooses the evaluator ?

\- Even a capable company can screw up by no putting the right people in the project.

\- Even one person in a capable team can derail a project.

\- A project needs time to ramp up, go from alpha testing to beta testing to production. A project that goes from dev to production in one night has 10x the risk of a regular project.

\- 60k is very little money for such a risky project.

\- Finally, The obligatory don't ever, ever trust voting software [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

<comment><USER24> The obligatory xkcd! They should have known, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Definition of conspiracy

1 : the act of conspiring together

Definition of conspire

1a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement

b : scheme

2 : to act in harmony toward a common end

Following the above, a conspiracy can be "the act of working in harmony toward a common end". Otherwise known as Politics. Whether there's a conspiracy here isn't up for debate; by definition a political party is a conspiracy. What's debatable is if they conspired illegally.

</comment><comment><USER26> Bias Check: I didn't vote Bernie in 2016, I won't be voting Bernie in 2020, and I can honestly say there's not a single politician running that would actually represent my opinions and values.

"It's not a conspiracy, it's a community."

I don't know. I have _serious_ doubts about whether or not we're seeing foul- play here. What we know for sure is that the app in question was partially funded by a(at least one) candidate. Essentially, a candidate gave money to the system that counted their votes. The company behind the app was founded by people tied to the Democratic 'establishment' (specifically, Hillary Clinton). And, as far as I can tell, the Democratic party has done everything in their power to ensure the candidate with the most name recognition and popular support in the race (Bernie Sanders) isn't their nominee.

From what I have seen thus far this cycle, and from what I saw in 2016, I can't help but be suspicious.

<comment><USER27> The baffling thing to me about so many conspiracy theories from Sanders' camp is that the delay hurt Buttigieg far worse than Sanders.

Sanders is fine with no news from Iowa, the next primary is in his backyard and he has nationwide name recognition.

Buttigieg on the other hand needs Iowa to be huge for him, and this fiasco certainly hurt that strategy.

<comment><USER28> The idea that the delay(s) hurt Buttigieg in any way is a profound misreading of the situation. Iowa has a small number of delegates, and it's only important in as much as it creates momentum for the winner going into the next three states.

If they released the vote totals on time and Bernie won, that would have given his campaign momentum, which could have lead (still might) to a NH blowout.

Instead, Pete got to "declare victory" twice -- night-of, and again after the 60% release. Now it really doesn't matter if they release the results and Bernie is shown to have won, because we're already multiple news cycles away from caucus night and most people aren't really paying attention, so it's going to be hard for Sanders to capture any momentum, if it's shown he has won. Pete, on the other hand, got a significant NH bump from the IA results in the latest polls.

I think the only way it's hurt Pete is through IDP incompetence, where to most Americans (who hate a cheater and love a conspiracy theory) it looks, for lack of a better term, extremely shady. It's also fired up Bernie's base of die- hards, who are now on the warpath (or even more so) for the early states

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anybody know why this story was flagged? :-S

</comment><comment><USER24> I mean srsly people, has nobody read the relevant xkcd? It was all so clear: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Best line: "It's not a conspiracy, it's a community".

That sure can be applied to a lot of things in this world.

<comment><USER29> When seen from the inside, it's a community. When seen from the outside, it might look to some like a conspiracy...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why ain't there many rant about Apple App Store? - <AUTHOR>

Why ain't there many rant about Apple App Store despite the much obvious suffering every developer had to go through atleast one way or another? <comment><USER2> Do you complain about a gold mine, just because it's dark and you have to bend over to get the gold? Also, NDA's.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think there is any obvious suffering that all iOS developers have had to go through. I've submitted 17 different apps to the app store and I haven't faced a single rejection yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember rants about the Apple App Store being submitted here. Maybe people got bored of writing them, or people got bored of submitting them to HN.</comment>


Reduce personal data leakage using Pi-hole, the easy way - T-Winsnes https://winsnes.io/posts/pi-hole/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Enter Pi-hole, a simple and automated solution that works as a DNS resolver and filters on a list of known bad entries that's updated frequently (113,000 blocked entries at time of writing)."

Pi-Hole is not a resolver. It is a forwarder, with only minor differences from dnsmasq.

Chances are, the Pi-Hole user is forwarding her queries to a third party for resolution.

What the Pi-Hole developers call the "Upstream DNS Provider".

The default settings -- the number one suggested choice during setup is to forward queries to a third party DNS service operated by an online ad sales company.

There is no resolver on the Pi-Hole.

<comment> T-Winsnes Thank you, I've updated the post with the correct term :)</comment></comment>


List of failed and over-budget custom software projects - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects <comment><USER2> In 2006 I worked briefly on an air-traffic control system (ERAM) that was eventually delivered 5 years late and $400M over budget. I was a small cog in a giant government-contract-software machine, but it was easy to see the project was going to be a disaster.

There are some pretty basic strategies to make building "large" software easier. All of them were attempted, but in an entirely broken way:

\- Break the architecture down into smaller components _that can be tested independently_.

\- Break the functionality down into smaller features _that can be released independently_.

\- Develop automated tests _at the system level_ (i.e. integration tests, not unit tests).

The software took 2-4 minutes to launch in development, and very few of us knew how to meaningfully test it. This meant that any change that compiled (and passed code review) would ship.

Oh yeah - and the system used binary structures in shared memory to communicate across processes, which were running code written in two entirely different languages.

<comment><USER3> > the system used binary structures in shared memory to communicate across > processes, which were running code written in two entirely different > languages.

What could go wrong

<comment><USER4> "We should have just used XML for everything!" \- said every Java developer ever.

"We should just have used binary for everything!" \- said every C/C++ developer ever.

"We should just have used Json for everything!" \- said everyone currently.

<comment><USER5> Any reason not to use JSON? Apart from needing lightweight traffic, in which case MQTT would be fine, right?

<comment><USER6> * You need strict typing * You need well defined numeric formats * Message volume is high enough that the parsing costs of messages outweigh the savings on implementation time * You cannot guarantee plain text messages won't be managed in transit.

You can get around the strict typing by adopting a schema format, but then you have a tooling problem that all the languages you need to support may not support your chosen JSON schema format.

Other solutions such as protobufs exist and are far better for transmitting large amounts of binary data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember, when as a resident of Oregon, I was wondering why we couldn't sign up with the national healthcare system. I then noticed that the Cover Oregon system was being built by Oracle.

Suffice to say, I wasn't the least bit surprised that it was a complete and total catastrophe, and even less surprised that Oracle tried to sue Oregon for attempting to use the software. Nothing like LDD - Lawyer Driven Development.

<comment><USER8> I remember this being quite the story. Anybody know what came of it? Still in litigation?

<comment><USER9> Still in litigation. OR has spent more than $6.6m in legal fees fighting Oracle.

<comment><USER10> I still don't understand why people trust Oracle consultants. Their list of failures is ten miles long. I guess nobody gets fired for hiring Oracle.

<comment><USER11> Oracle is today's IBM, just as IBM is today's Infosys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The modern NHS system in the UK was the biggest fuck up I have ever seen. I worked with people who also worked on the project. They are seriously amazing people but apparently all the layers of management, red tape and politics was, according to my friends, the worst they have ever experienced. Two friends were so traumatised by the experience they ended up taking 2 years off work to travel/recover.

The sad thing is it shouldn't have been such a difficult thing to develop. Complex sure but no more complex than many other similar systems. It was destroyed by too much meddling from the government adding, removing and changing the spec every other day and many, many managers just finding non- sense jobs that were totally pointless.

It is shocking it went so over budget and was allowed to continue doing so for so, so long.

<comment><USER13> Which NHS body in the UK are you talking about? There are four separate healthcare services in the UK which operate and are funded separately:

NHS Scotland

NHS England

NHS Wales

HSC Northern Ireland

<comment><USER14> NHS England - The National Programme for IT.

It is as far as I've seen the 'greatest' fuckup in UK development history, 12.something billion down the drain, massive overspending, they basically made every mistake you could make short of setting the office on fire.

<comment><USER15> They should make mismanagement of a government project become a felony.

<comment><USER16> > They should make mismanagement of a government project become a felony.

This would involve either:

(1) Clear and unambiguous definition of "mismanagement" involving distant- from-the-specific-project procedural mandates, which would reduce "mismanagement" by the definition applied but increase (and mandate) what would be functionally mismanagement for specific real projects (lots of government regulation designed to prevent mismanagement all around the world, while usually not specifically felony criminal rules, works this way now), or

(2) Being so ambiguous and vague so as to provide a basis for arbitrary prosecution, such that it would make sure no one wanted to touch management of a government project at all (at least -- assuming this was the US or one with similar fundamental rules as to what can be an enforceable criminal law -- until it was inevitably ruled unenforceable as impermissibly vague.)

<comment><USER15> It would indeed be a hard task to define what is "mismanagement", but spending billions of tax money earned by hard workers all around the country on salaries of incompetent people and fees from incompetent consultancies has at least to be slowed down, if not stopped. As civic responsibility is not enough, a higher level of control is needed. I am open to other solutions.

<comment><USER16> > It would indeed be a hard task to define what is "mismanagement", but > spending billions of tax money earned by hard workers all around the country > on salaries of incompetent people and fees from incompetent consultancies > has at least to be slowed down, if not stopped. As civic responsibility is > not enough, a higher level of control is needed.

Much of that waste is a product of the "higher level of control" adopted, in law and policy governing government IT work, in response to previous failures, which has mandated additional bureaucratic process, and causes more and more decisions to be made farther and farther from the people with either the specific business knowledge or the specific technical knowledge of the project being executed as more layers of "higher levels of control" are implemented.

I am not really sanguine about the prospects of more of the approach that has made things worse suddenly making things better instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I should sit down and add the failed IT projects of the Danish government, but I don't have that kind of time. Our government is notorious for initiating software projects that ends in almost predictable failure.

The latest project to fail was a system for the Danish Tax Office. It was suppose to automatically collect debt owed by citizens and companies.It's not entirely certain how that was suppose to work and it has been described as a utopia project with an unprecedented expectation of what kind of problem computers are capable of handling. The specification where 9000 pages long, tax law not included, and some how failing to supply a sufficient amount of actual requirements. It failed, of cause, costing almost $150.000.000 (DKK 1.000.000.0000), not including the 78 Billion Danish Kroner the tax office haven't been able to collect due the system not being delivered on time and generally not working.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't the government there (and most companies for that matter) contract IBM for big software projects?

You know the old adage "nobody gets fired for buying IBM".

I have a friend that's partner at a consultancy in Copenhagen and he says IBM is often their competition.

<comment><USER17> Mostly CSC actually. They have contract for systems that should have been part of licensing rounds, which would have allowed other to take over support, but no other where ever allowed to bid. The reason: CSC documented the systems so poorly that no one else will be able to handle the support.

The government knows that it's illegal, yet CSCs contracts have automatically been renewed, multiple times.

But yes, IBM have a large number of contracts as well. CSC just seems to be behind the worst projects. I suspect they bid for project and just focus on delivering exactly what's in the contract, knowing that it will never work. Either that or they are even more incompetent that anyone could imagine.

<comment><USER18> Given my experience with the managers of CSC here in the States, that sounds exactly like what I'd expect.

From my discussions with that friend I mentioned though it sounds like the attitude is changing and there's more work going to smaller shops like his (though friendships with government officials seems to help loads when it comes to securing work). Honestly it sounds like a really exciting environment to work in when we talk about it and I wish I had the time to really learn Danish so I could have a decent chance of securing good work out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain to me how the fuck my government can spend _15.8bn_ [1] on a software project? We could build 5 Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers for that. Five! For the cost of a bloated Java app!

Seriously, someone fill me in please. How can a software project possibly ever cost more than a billion pounds? You could employ 20,000 software engineers full time for £50K ($70k) a year for that much, and I expect the number of engineers working on Universal Credit is much lower than that and paid less.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit#Costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit#Costs)

<comment><USER20> They don't employ the developers. The development is done by companies that might pay the developers that much, but bill the client more per hour and bill the client more time. And of course you can't forget project managers, architects and other consultants that are more expensive. And have a lot of meetings. And hardware, and oracle databases/SAP licenses, and support contracts for those, and audits, and extra charges for change requests, and travel budgets, and...

Just because one team of developers could do something in 200 man hours doesn't mean you can't spend and bill 2000 for it.

And that's just development. Data migrations and user training/support are going to be massive issues if you replace or newly introduce a widely used system.

<comment><USER19> > Just because one team of developers could do something in 200 man hours > doesn't mean you can't spend and bill 2000 for it.

It doesn't mean you _should_ pay, or plan, to spend 20,000 man hours in meetings and devote huge chunks of your budget to expensive licenses for something that could take 200 man hours, especially when it's taxpayers money.

Sure there are unavoidable overheads but why does our government keep splashing __billions __on them and failing, with little accountability?

Training is going to be expensive, sure, but perhaps plow millions of pounds into that after the program is finished. Maybe don't use the same massive, costly consultancies that fail to deliver? The Obamacare website was a great example of this IMO. Costly consultancy failed to deliver, small agile teams brought in to save the day - if only a bit too late.

<comment><USER21> Basically all the laws that are written to avoid government abuse and corruption create a corrupted system of regulatory capture.

Here is the simplest example. Say you need a device that does X. Now, I can go down to the local hardware store and pick up a device that does X (and Y and Z) for $40. But the law is written so that I can't just buy it where I want, because I might be wasteful and I might buy it from my buddy. So instead, I have to put out a bid that says I want a device that can do X and only select whom ever wins a bid. But there are a lot of regulations in who can bid, so the local hardware store doesn't ever even try. So I say I want a device that does X, and I end up getting a couple offers, the best of which is a device that barely does X for $200. That is the best offer I receive, so I have to take it. So now I have a much worse device at a much higher cost. Now, multiply this with every single thing you need to pay for in a software project (including other software, licenses, hardware, manpower, even the paper to print specs on).

<comment><USER22> >> the best of which is a device that barely does X for $200.

OK, after we did the bid, and that's the result, why can't i just go buy something if it's less than half the price ? even if i buy it from my buddy, as long as it fits ?

<comment><USER23> Because your buddy was secretly cutting corners using Chinese chips that have a backdoor. Or chips that weren't bonded to spec and last only 2 months in the desert heat.

That's the theory anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> IEEE Spectrum had a great series of interactive information graphics on 'Lessons from a decade of IT failures' [0].

In particular, "The Staggering Impact of IT Systems Gone Wrong" [1] and "Monuments to failure" [2] are good lists of failures, many of which are not included on Wikipedia's list.

[0]: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/lessons-from-a-decade-of- it-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/lessons-from-a-decade-of-it-failures)

[1]: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-staggering-impact-of- it-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-staggering-impact-of-it-systems- gone-wrong)

[2]: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/monuments-to- failure](http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/monuments-to-failure)

<comment><USER25> I don't know if those are all in the same category. For example the Army cancelled Future Combat System because it didn't work. Would the project have been considered a "success" if they had put it into production instead?

For my money, a real failure is like the giant BART fiasco in the 90s where they spent 80 million dollars on a new train control system that simply never existed, at all. They had to sue General Electric to get their money back.

<comment><USER26> > I don't know if those are all in the same category. For example the Army > cancelled Future Combat System because it didn't work. Would the project > have been considered a "success" if they had put it into production instead?

If it didn't work? Hopefully not.

But military stuff is a bit different. Military systems tend to try to push the state of the art as far as possible, for as much edge in combat as possible. That makes for much higher chances of failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The primary problem with lists like this is that they don't compare to successes.

For example:

* I've been on projects where we're rewritten applications from the ground up that were totally successful and we were better able to build in the future because we had a clean setup.

* I've seen government IT shops hire contractors to do a large project and ended up with something better than the internal devs would have done.

Both of these are situations where the opposite case (time-consuming and expensive failure) gets a lot of attention. (and, in my experience, failure is more common). Show me one of those failures and my instinct is to say "Of COURSE that was a failure! It was obviously going to fail!". But, in reality, not always.

Rather than building unhelpful conventional wisdom, we should be trying to understand the distinctions between the failures and the successes.

</comment><comment><USER28> 96% of government IT procurements over $10m are deemed failures.[1]

Absolutely shocking how ineffective the system of contractors and RFPs is. Part of it is a mindset, part of it is just needing better options.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/10/22/the-l...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/10/22/the- lessons-of-healthcare-gov-stretch-far-beyond-obamacare/)

</comment><comment><USER29> When it comes to government projects, I always wonder how many people involved treat it only as an opportunity to make as much money as possible without being caught - after several years you just sweep the whole thing under carpet so nobody remembers how much money has been wasted and you're set.

<comment><USER30> This is true not only of government projects, but of all projects.

Anyone in charge of a budget is potentially corrupt. I'd argue that it is more common in corporates than in government, because the personal damage that could be inflicted is less. A company doesn't want reputation damaged by being involved in fraudulent bidding (so will sweep under the carpet readily), and as long as the job gets done, nobody cares (unless internal politics get stirred). The employee may be fired, but they can go somewhere else. And all is off the public record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> These lists seem a little short. What about:

* The Distributed Computing Environment (or at least the OS/2 portion of it, anyway), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment)

* Taligent, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent)

* IBM Workplace OS, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Workplace_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Workplace_OS)

And that's just a few from off my personal resume.

</comment><comment><USER32> >This article contains one or more incomplete lists which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness

Well isn't that ironic.

<comment><USER33> Don't you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> SAP doesn't even get a mention?

Waste Management: [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2517917/enterprise- appl...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2517917/enterprise- applications/sap--waste-management-settle-lawsuit.html)

Levi's: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/levis_erp_costs/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/levis_erp_costs/)

<comment><USER35> The problem with SAP isn't the software, it's "consultants" writing purposefully bad code - the customer can't assess the delivered quality and the consultant will keep his "ongoing maintenance" fee.

(Okay, yes, the software itself is a problem too but it's not the major problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Would have been much easier to create a list of projects that were completed within budget (assuming that's ever actually happened).

<comment><USER37> Hey, I wrote a little shell script yesterday that I had budgeted 30 minutes for and had it done in 20.

But outside of that one thing.. lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Note: very few, if any, of these examples failed because someone on the team didn't pass a coding test. Next time you interview someone remember: bad code could bring your project down, but there are 9 other factors that are more likely to bring your project down.

</comment><comment><USER39> Great idea.

The UK tried a NOMS (offender management) system and that was an expensive disaster too..

Would be nice to put down the contracting companies who were ripping of the Govt along with the civil servants who over saw the massive waste of tax payers money/time.

</comment><comment><USER40> Of course, there's a level of disclosure for Government run projects that means their blunders get exposed more easily.

I'm quite sure there are some spectacular failures in the corporate world that won't make the list.

<comment><USER41> There's also an asymmetry in the way we think about public and private projects.

When a piece of private software flops, it still exists as a product and however bad, often offsets some of its cost in sales.

Since most public software is offered for free, no cost is visibly recouped.

Healthcare.gov is actually a great example. It was a colossal failure at first. A quantity easily measured in dollars spent. However, it has largely functioned in the years since but measuring its positive economic impact is hard because the service is delivered free. None if that money has been reclaimed but it certainly has had some positive economic value.

<comment><USER42> No, they don't always flop and still exist privately - sometimes they are bad enough that they don't ever see the light of day anywhere - even internally to the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Now we need a list of overbudget customized COTS software projects.

With all these companies running on Excel macros, years old SAP R/2 or 3 (just two common examples) and so on, the list will be extensive.

(COTS = commercial off-the-shelf)

<comment><USER44> That'd need a whole Wikipedia just for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That list is much short than the headline would imply. I was afraid of a list of thousand of projects, with a final footnote of "Every Enterprise software application ever written."

</comment><comment><USER46> For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend episode 181 of the Omega Tau podcast, "Why Megaprojects Fail (and what to do about it)" [1].

It's a fascinating listen into the psychology behind gigantic failures.

[1] [http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects- fail...](http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and- what-to-do-about-it/)

</comment><comment><USER47> As a side note, I cannot understand why these articles are written in a table format. Where there are cells with such a long description, bullets would be much suitable.

<comment><USER48> Agreed on the formatting, but the sorting functionality can be handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was trying to look for patterns in these projects. Looks like most of them were outsourced and most of them were US/UK Government projects. It would be interesting to see patterns in very successful US/UK Government projects.

My personal experience has been that it almost always boils down to upper management/leadership issues, that result in hiring weak project managers which in turn leads to talent drain on the implementation side.

<comment><USER50> What it boils down to is no-one is spending their own money, they have a bottomless pit from the poor taxpayer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I will document my bias before reading the article in the hope that I am proven wrong.

I estimate that most of these have occurred in apparatus of the state, including organizations that superficially are not but for all practical purposes (funding, license, regulation) are.

Wise man once say: there's nothing easier in this world than spending someone else's money.

</comment><comment><USER52> I see a lot of billions, with a b, and then I look at what small teams do on bootstrapping or little seed rounds. The mind boggles.

<comment><USER53> A huge, huge, cost driver in many of the applications is the fact that they have to integrate with the old systems in numerous ways.

A startup could probably build the basic version of many of these apps no problem, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. When you have to then import millions of customer records, which were not stored in any particular format (they're idiosyncratic with each doctor/office), and then integrate with the COBOL based system vendor 1 uses, and the IBM Mainframe that vendor 2 uses, oh, and those systems were never intended to interconnect with anything and the vendors are years behind schedule as well, and all while you have lawyers breathing down your neck with a 28 inch thick binder with all of the regulations you need to follow written in impenetrable legalese you can see how it can cost billions of dollars.

Your startup guys heads would explode if you asked them to write a formal specification for an interconnection system between their elegant web frameworks and a big blob binary COBOL based record system on an IBM 360 with only hardcopy documentation written by a vendor that went out of business in the 80s. And yes, healthcare systems still run in environments like that for the reasons mentioned above: making a new system is too hard/expensive.

Oh, and the vendor that had the lowest bid for the contract is planning to outsource to some country that doesn't speak English and is 12 hours offset from your local time.

<comment><USER54> It still seems like an excuse, "it's hard". The cost of "hard" shouldn't be $15B.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The Software Engineering Radio podcast did an episode on this recently:

[http://www.se-radio.net/2016/02/se-radio- epislode-250-jurgen...](http://www.se-radio.net/2016/02/se-radio- epislode-250-jurgen-laartz-and-alexander-budzier-on-why-large-it-projects- fail/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm surprised the outsourcing companies aren't listed on this. They are often huge contributors to the overruns.

</comment><comment><USER57> "Sabina SEIFERT's Project: Software Project Failures"

[http://www.scism.lsbu.ac.uk/inmandw/past/9697/projects/prj12...](http://www.scism.lsbu.ac.uk/inmandw/past/9697/projects/prj127.html)

</comment><comment><USER58> Why are these all in the UK or US? Better transparency?

<comment><USER59> >> Why are these all in the UK or US? Better transparency?

Maybe because that particular Wikipedia page's editors are from the UK or US? [edit: just speculating, don't know this for a fact]

If I recall correctly, the Gun Registry [1] in Canada was a huge, expensive debacle, with a lot of the costs coming from the underestimation of the software development.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> As far as I can see all software built in Germany always ships on time and is within budget. Or maybe the page needs an update :-)

</comment><comment><USER61> this is why haskell has support for infinite lists

</comment><comment><USER62> This is by no means a conclusive list.

</comment><comment><USER63> ...in UK and US. Apparently other countries never had any of these.

</comment><comment><USER64> when they list healthcare.gov has costed 1.5bn, does that include setting up the back office and staffing, or simply the project that responsible for putting the website?

</comment><comment><USER65> See Also: Agile Software Development

</comment><comment><USER66> Did nobody mention Xanadu?</comment>


Artificial Killing Machine - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2015/07/16/artificial-killing-machine/ <comment><USER2> This link lead me to the API used by the project: [http://www.dronestre.am/](http://www.dronestre.am/) followed by the twitter account linked to the api [https://twitter.com/dronestream](https://twitter.com/dronestream)

I never thought the US conducted so many strikes, especially in Pakistan ...

<comment><USER3> thanks for checking it out. i'm the person who made it. there are also iOS and android apps if you'd like to get notified for each one...

<comment><USER4> Impressive. Would you mind explaining how you collect the data?

<comment><USER3> most of the heavy lifting is done by the bureau of investigative journalism. i just read the news articles they aggregate and fill in some metadata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a reminder that a missile fired by a drone is no different than a missile fired by a manned jet or any other vehicle. Drones are simply a technology tool to help protect the lives of our own military. Drones are no different than something like stealth technology in that regard. I can't imagine that anyone would create an art project criticizing the US because the radar signature of our aircraft are too small. You shouldn't have a problem with how many people we kill with drones, you should have a problem with how many people we kill.

<comment><USER6> They are no different functionally and perhaps morally (though on could argue that killing people remotely from your desk in Missouri is troubling).

They are VERY VERY different politically and therefore in reality, however. It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones. Maybe it's the low cost, or the fact that we don't risk American lives doing it, I'm not sure. If you looked at all the drone strikes over the last 10 years and replaced them with operations that involved american boots on the ground/f-16s/CIA wetwork etc it's very hard to imagine a scenario where that would have been acceptable to the American public.

Drones also have loitering capabilities that would be much more expensive to maintain with jets. Basically, I'm of the mind that drone strikes are seen as 'easy' and low risk politically so we end up killing more people than we would if we had to weigh the risks of more traditional means before we carried out the operation.

<comment><USER7> The public isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by a volunteer military. But nobody is proposing that we reinstate the draft, are we? And as a reminder, even the draft did not stop Vietnam - including My Lai, Agent Orange and uncountably many other atrocities. Why would eliminating drones do so? There is no drone-based explanation for why we accepted adventures like, say, Nicaragua. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not primarily enabled by drones. Maybe you can argue that drones "helped." But the real thing that feeds this is the insanely high approval ratings of a "war president" (at least at the beginning, before political objectives are clearly unwinnable) and the high electability of presidents who beat their chests about raising our military profile. Which is the fault of an irrational, undereducated, bloodthirsty electorate.

I will go even further here: in my opinion, drones have not really helped make the wars more palatable at all, on the contrary, they have actually been the single best, most emotionally impactful argument anyone can think to deploy against US military policy and the Obama administration in particular. THAT is the reason we keep hearing about them, not necessarily because they are more heinous, but because the issue is perceived as a great political vulnerability and political opportunity. It sounds better to say that things are now worse than ever because of Obama's unprecedented evil than to point out that the real problem is _why we are bombing at all._ I don't expect focus on the drone issue to have any real fruit in terms of reducing the impact of US wars.

I wonder if you even base your opinion that drone strikes are resulting in more deaths on any real data or if you made up your mind ahead of any data. And I suspect you are grossly overestimating the degree of care taken in bombing campaigns prior to the drone era. The risks to high-altitude bombers in the conditions we are using drones are not vast. The real risks are of overbombing, which is one of the objectively worst and most immoral aspects of bombing campaigns in decades past (think cluster bombs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of a short story written in 1914 by Franz Kafka called "In the Penal Colony"[1]. It's very much worth a read, an English translation is available at [2].

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

[2] [http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm](http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm)

SPOILER:

In the story the condemned prisoners aren't told their sentence. There is a elaborate machine - described in much detail - that carves the sentence into the skin of the convict. The machine works (or used to work) in such precision, that after exactly 24 hours an epiphany about the misdeed and death occur simultaneously.

<comment><USER9> That's not the spoiler.

<comment><USER8> After rereading the story: No, it's really not _the_ spoiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The current nearly worldwide drone campaign that the US is engaged in is one of the least ethical things this country has ever done. It has proven to be a mostly indiscriminate weapon, little better than using car bombs, and it has not only eroded America's moral high-ground on the international stage, it has in many cases destroyed a favorable image of the US and turned entire populations against us, for very little tangible benefit.

<comment><USER11> If you consider drone strikes to be indiscriminate, compare the upper bound of about 6,000[1] or so drone strike casualties over more than a decade to the 90,000[2] or so Vietnam bombing casualties, which in turn is dwarfed by the World War 2 bombing casualties[3]. Compared to the alternative of using traditional bombers or using ground forces, drone strikes represent a huge reduction in civilian casualties.

I don't understand the people who protest drone strikes. War is hell - if your country engages in any sort of violent military intervention, there will be civilian casualties. I can get behind opposing unnecessary usage of military force; I can get behind opposing attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation that we aren't at war with. Protesting the tools used to conduct war instead of the war itself makes little sense to me, particularly when that tool marks a dramatic improvement in reducing civilian casualties.

[1] [https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones- graphs/)

[2] [http://thevietnamwar.info/operation-rolling- thunder/](http://thevietnamwar.info/operation-rolling-thunder/)

[3] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strat...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strategic_bombing)

<comment><USER12> The drone system enables not a big war, but a war small enough it can be pretended away. It also represents a new kind of war: not against an opposing national force, but against a list of individuals whose names are computed from the global surveillance programme.

Yes, if you look at drones-the-technology the protest looks a bit mistargeted. But that's just because it's a convenient label for drone-bombing-the- politics.

Compare nuclear weapons. You could say that they're just another increase in scale from the lethality of World war 2. But the politics (mutual assured destruction etc, antiproliferation etc) are different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Visualizations like these are incredible and I want to see more like them. We're at a time where data wealth and transparency is becoming more and more sought out and computers/microcontrollers are incredibly cheap.

An installation like this one would be thought provoking in an art gallery or event space, especially if it's pulling raw data. The silence, or even onslaught of noise, would be deafening. Presentations like these give a much more tangible understanding than points on a graph.

<comment><USER14> If art installations of this type became more commonplace we could begin to see dissenters manipulating them to make counterpoints. I'm sure someone with a favorable opinion of the drone program is already working towards a method to exploit this piece.

<comment><USER13> I think an answer to this is raw data. Data is data and you can of course massage the information to do what you want[1] and it can also be argued that it's been misinterpreted and improperly reported since the beginning of time. The truth is that the only "true" judgement that can be made is by the person who reads and interprets the raw data. If we make more "actualizations" like this where it takes a raw information stream and leaves it to the viewer to interpret, it will become less exploitable.

Akin to a thermometer, there are reporters and newscasters who can tell you the weather outside and we hope they are not deceitful but if you look at a thermometer, you have the raw data and you can make that judgement yourself.

[1][http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/lie- factor.php](http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/lie-factor.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is such a beautiful art object. Interesting, does it author know that white is colour of death in the Middle East?

</comment><comment><USER16> I think something like this is equally (or more) apt to the meat industry, just replace humans in this with say cow or pigs on the assembly line.

</comment><comment><USER17> (If you use headphones you might want to turn them down until you hear the volume of the cap guns in the video.)

</comment><comment><USER18> First thought those guns were automated drones flying around killing people

</comment><comment><USER19> Worth mentioning the Red Alert : Israel iOS app. Informs you every time a missile is launched against Israel, rather distressing considering every notification means someone could/did die - and how often those notifications occur.

<comment><USER20> A Palestinian version would be much more alarming considering that 10 times more palestinians are killed compared to Israelis.

<comment><USER21> There's a weekly data report on civilians harmed on each side of that conflict maintained by the UN at [http://www.ochaopt.org/reports.aspx?id=104&page=1](http://www.ochaopt.org/reports.aspx?id=104&page=1) . It's not real-time but the format is standardized enough to make an app out of I guess.</comment></comment></comment>


Marvell announces $99 Moby Tablet to Revolutionize Education - <AUTHOR> http://armdevices.net/2010/03/18/marvell-announces-99-moby-tablet-to-revolutionize-education/ <comment><USER2> Well, there is the issue of educational content...</comment>


Cellular Automata - <AUTHOR> http://nbickford.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/cellular-automata/

<comment><USER2> I was browsing around the Wikipedia articles for Cellular Automata recently, and the thing that struck me about it is how easy it is to notice, if not understand, the levels of abstraction. You start with the rules of Conway's Game of Life and a few samples, easy enough. You think in terms of what a cell does. Then you learn about oscillators, periodic self-sustaining patterns, which aren't that surprising, and still on the level of individual cells.

Then you learn about Gliders, a simple pattern that in four generations gives rise to a copy of itself, but translated 1 cell away. Now we're not talking about what cells are doing anymore. We're talking about what patterns are doing, and they can move around independently from the cells used to represent them. It's a layer of abstraction.

You find out about objects like Reflectors, where when a Glider collides with it, the result is a Glider in a different direction, and things like the Glider Gun that periodically produces a new glider. You start arranging these things together to get a nice little circuit, and soon the Gliders aren't even the object of study anymore, they're just little blips that other things use to pass information. Instead of just the patterns, you now think in terms of the interactions between the patterns, which is another layer of abstraction.

And you can grok these successive layers of abstraction in 15 minutes of reading a little explanatory text and watching animated .gifs. I think the fact that Conway's Life is inherently a very visual phenomenon makes it easier to understand like that.

The article covers a lot of breadth of cellular automata. I think you get a lot more out of it if you have a tiny bit of depth in one particular automata first, so you can understand in a general sense the cool patterns and phenonema that it talks about. Quick reading on Conway's Life (selected with order in mind):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(cellular_automaton)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conways_Life)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_(cellular_automaton)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_(cellular_automaton)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_(cellular_automaton)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflector_(cellular_automaton)>

Be sure to click through on the preview images to the animated version, especially rakes, breeders, and reflectors.

<comment><USER3> Your second link is broken.

<comment><USER2> Blarg, too late to edit.

There's an apostrophe in the link, in "Conway's" that's getting stripped out of the URL. The following link now works for me:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conway%27s_Life)>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR The post mentions a bunch of programs for playing with cellular automatons; You can check out GarlicSim, which is my project, and it's intended for simulations in general, including cellular automata:

<http://garlicsim.org>

Currently only Conway's Game of Life is implemented, and in a crude inefficient way, but the important thing for me with this project is to build the best infrastructure for simulations such as these. For example, I give something similar to source control management for organizing different states of the cellular automata.

I think that in a year from now GarlicSim will become one of the best programs for simulating cellular automata.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just finished my thesis about cellular automata. Specifically, I worked on the automatic verification of logical formulas about the behavior of a given automaton.

Here's what that means. Suppose that you have some cellular automaton p, and you're interested in knowing whether p returns to its original state when you run it for a while. For finite grids and specific opening patterns this is an easy question to answer -- in theory -- you just simulate the automaton for long enough. But what about infinite grids? Or what if we wanted to answer a question like "does there exist a configuration of p which returns to its original state after 3 steps?" Or what if the automaton is just too big and too complicated to simulate for a long period of time? The majority of my work was in implementing a way of answering questions such as these (link for the really, really interested reader: [http://carnegie- mellon.academia.edu/documents/0107/1998/thes...](http://carnegie- mellon.academia.edu/documents/0107/1998/thesis.pdf)).

Cellular automata are surprisingly deep, for how simple they are. However, they aren't "a new kind of science" - like most constructs in computer science they are amenable to mathematical treatment.

If you already know a fair amount about CA, here's another good question for you to think about. How can we better classify different types of cellular automata based on their behavior? The usual classification system essentially boils down to choosing one of "it is obvious what this CA does", "you can prove what it does", "you can sort of guess what it does", and "no one has any idea so maybe this is universal". This is clearly unsatisfactory -- any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER5> Plenty still goes on around Game of Life. For example this self-replicating 'creature' recently found: [http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&...](http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0)

(Was featured in New Scientist I believe)

</comment><comment><USER6> Somewhere I still have a deck of punch cards of my version of Life written in (of course) FORTRAN IV. Each generation printed out on fan-fold. Of course if it ran 'too long' I'd get kicked off of the printer, so I'd run those with different JCL during the night shift ;-)

</comment><comment><USER7> By and large an excellent rundown, though I had a few issues with the details in places—e.g., totalistic CAs aren't anything special, they're just a restriction of the generalized rules, and happen to be used more often in many-state/many-dimension CAs because the rule enumerations just get too damn big. A niggle.

Seriously, though, some really fantastic stuff. My undergrad thesis used a lot of CAs, and some of the examples still floored me. A working prime generator with integrated LCD display? Um... what?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's not often mentioned is that it's possible to build a Turing machine emulator as a Life pattern. That means, courtesy of the Halting Problem, that in geenral there is no decision procedure for whether a given Life pattern will expand indefinitely, oscillate, reach steady state, or die (a special case of steady state)[1].

[1] It shouldn't, but it always amuses me in crime dramas and news reports when a victim's condition is reported as "stable." After all, "dead" is stable.

<comment><USER8> I read this in a book about maths and biology called "Games of Life" and I was amazed that this had never come up despite reading and playing with the game quite a lot. Very cool.

The actual implementation of the machine would run so slow that it is infeasible to do anything with it, but just the possibility is mind-boggling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My Conway's Life screensaver for Mac: <http://twilightedge.com/mac/crepuscularlife/></comment>


Zaarly Launches Realtime, Local Marketplace To The Public - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/18/zaarly-launches-realtime-local-marketplace-to-the-public/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, but the centralized platform means it would be hard to buy/sell drugs, sex and contraband, which would make it _really_ interesting :) I'd also like to see a bidding component; for example, head to the Apple store on a big launch day, and bid for an iPad 3/iPhone 5--those at the front of the queue could make a tidy profit, and those with deeper pockets could skip the queue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if they should have launched slower, maybe a few cities at a time.

I'm in DC right now and can only find 4 items within a few miles. I think that kind of experience will give people a bad first impression.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I think that was the best feedback I saw when Color launched as well.

Anything location-based needs to start in 1 or 2 cities and grow from there–until other cities are begging for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I predict this will not fly–or will require serious pivoting.

I don't really get why they're focusing on the demand-side. The "Wanted" section of Craigslist is considerably smaller than most of the other For Sale categories (I personally never check it).

I also don't see any real-world/brick-and-mortar example of reverse person-to- person selling like this. What is the incentive for someone to even check Zaarly for a need I might meet? Don't say "make extra cash" because if I need to sell stuff, I dig through it and post it for sale.

If I need something, I search Craigslist. If it's not there, I check Ebay. Or I buy it new. I don't post a request and pray someone will get back to me.

People are going to request things ... and most requests will go unanswered. Then they'll stop using it.

(BTW, totally not trying to sound like a pessimistic jerk)

<comment><USER5> I kinda like it - picture this simple scenario; you need to fix your car's brakes/rotate tires/change oil/fix taillights/buy gas?/ instead of going to 4-5 garages to get an optimal price/quote you broadcast your interest in the local neighborhood in the hopes that the interest will be fulfilled by a "service provider"..

<comment><USER4> That sounds like RedBeacon (which I think is a good idea). My take was that Zaarly was person-2-person, not person-2-biz. Maybe I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the concept, I think it's well designed and the iPhone app seems to be really great. It's got a bit of a chicken and the egg problem at the moment, but I really hope it grows.

<comment><USER7> I know they used launchrock, but I'm really curious how effective it was in locating the proper initial users in solving this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool, it's basically like the WTB (Want To Buy) announcements in online video games.

</comment><comment><USER9> How is it different than RedBeacon? What are good things vs. the bad?

</comment><comment><USER10> Another US only product. What a tragedy.

<comment><USER11> What an opportunity for you, if you have local market knowledge and can clone & localize the concept.

(edit: or for someone like you)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Go Zaarly!</comment>


Apple CEO Tim Cook blasts encryption backdoors - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-blasts-encryption-backdoors/ <comment><USER2> Snowden says Apple products have built-in backdoors. Is Tim Cook willing to go on record saying that isn't true?

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/10/8181531/cia-tagets- apple-x...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/10/8181531/cia-tagets-apple-xcode- encryption)

<comment><USER3> The article claims the CIA is targeting iPhones, iPads, and OSX. It says nothing about a deliberate backdoor coded by Apple.</comment></comment>


Why Minimalist Web Design Is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://getspace.org/minimalist-web-design/

<comment><USER2> Bottom line: too many sites try to have too many features - they should focus on having one prime functionality. It's like writing a paper - it has to have a thesis that is clear.

I would disagree that minimalism is dying. In fact, minimalism is key these days. Users are now bombarded with too many apps and websites. A minimalist app with a clear thesis (what does it do) is essential. People have to understand what your site DOES in 1 minute or less.</comment>


Facebook Quietly Releases 'Find Friends Nearby,' Then Quietly Pulls It - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/facebook-quietly-releases-find-friends-nearby-then-quietly-pulls-it/

<comment><USER2> I have had this feature for a couple versions. One annoying thing about the FB android app is the fact that it checks my GPS location even when location features are disabled, including this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not surprising -- it came out of a hackathon project, didn't have much potential for actual growth, but Facebook just wanted to showcase one of the cooler projects for a day.

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like it was meant to be used the same way as Bump.</comment>


NZ Auction Site Bans iPad-Lookalike Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/nz_auction_site_bans_ipad-lookalike_tablets/ <comment><USER2> lickspittle sycophant: awesomest description of the day.</comment>


SpiffyGif - <AUTHOR> http://spiffygif.com/

<comment><USER2> Love the sharing feature [http://spiffygif.com/?length=26&radius=18&corners=0....](http://spiffygif.com/?length=26&radius=18&corners=0.1&color=f990fd,ed0c24,2f3049,90c021,3402be,570718&trail=47&bgColor=e6b4b1)

super useful

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome, it is a very good alternative to other sites like ajaxload.info

I would like to see more options like a loading bar instead of just the spinning circle.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like this. Similar controls to spin.js in getting a certain look and feel, but for gif.</comment>


Kanye West to start a Y Combinator for the music industry - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1305977929180966913 <comment><USER2> What are the odds that he'll call it 'Ye Combinator'?

<comment><USER3> I hope he does.

All I can say is he should go for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure there's really a meaningful discussion to be had about a tweet. Not least because Y Combinator (in my opinion) isn't innovative in terms of its contract terms (although maybe someone can correct me - not sure anyone around here knows about that sort of stuff).

<comment><USER5> One thing to remember is the music industry is significantly different than tech when it comes to contract terms, and terms that look or work closer to tech for artists (even if they are worse in practice), could look radically generous compared to standard record label deals. It's also possible that Kanye wants to start something that looks completely different. You're right though, it's hard to decipher in a tweet</comment></comment>


Chinese builder puts up 57-story skyscraper in 19 days - <AUTHOR> http://bigstory.ap.org/article/82ebe4bf0a8b4c079c7a3e8932b6936f/chinese-builder-puts-57-story-skyscraper-19-days

<comment><USER2> The phrase I would like to see: "...while surpassing industry's toughest quality and safety standards...".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A time lapse video can be found here

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/30/china- bui...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/30/china- build-57-storey-skyscraper-19-days-timelapse-video)</comment>