Is content marketing dead? - <AUTHOR> https://inbound.org/discuss/do-you-think-content-marketing-will-become-so-competitive-that-people-will-just-ignore-it <comment><USER2> (This applies for software startups— not sure what it's like for other industries)

It doesn't necessarily have to be competitive for software companies. Even though some do compete for the same customers, even many similar tools and software products have difference audiences. Software, for the most part, is differentiated enough that it's not quite like some CPGs where brand is the biggest factor in purchase decisions—even very similar products have slightly different feature sets and different interfaces.

If the content has slightly different audiences, the main problem then, isn't volume of content—it's the need for better distribution and targeting, which has been solved somewhat on the advertising side. Brands buy hundreds of billions worth of advertising, but it's mostly well-targeted, whereas by comparison, we just get blasted with content marketing without a ton of targeting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting discussion from the marketers. It seems the consensus is mostly "focus on quality over quantity" and get more open. A few years ago startups were pumping out content on daily bases in hopes of getting eyeballs, but it seems that's no longer the winning strategy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Content marketing has changed, and it is all about the story. You must rethink the way you craft your content. Establish and illustrate your company's values and worldview while delivering value to your readers.

<comment><AUTHOR> So what you're saying the game is not a lot more about the marketing side of the equation than it is about pure content. It's one thing to spin out "10 things to do X" or "You won't believe what happened when ...", and a whole other problem to understand how a company's brand and vision fits into the long-term desires of their audience. Noted.</comment></comment>


How to Become a Game Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.fragmentbuffer.com/how-to-become-a-game-programmer/

<comment><USER2> C++ isn't a great first language, and it's weird that the article focuses on the future possibility that going to it from C# will be hard, rather than what's most conducive to getting a game running quickly.</comment>


Python now uses Mercurial - <AUTHOR> http://hg.python.org/cpython/

<comment><USER2> I was confused why this was news since the decision was made two years ago:

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2009-March/08793...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2009-March/087931.html)

But I see from <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0385/> that it's taken that long to migrate away from svn.

</comment><comment><USER3> Git and Hg accomplish essentialy the same thing. The platform support and tool/utility support for Mercurial on windows in important to note.

I decided to choose Mercurial as the VCS for my 'work'. This was a team that had no prior exposure to VC before. And works in a mixed environment. Hg follows the 'one true way' philosophy of Python; so there's just a single command to learn for each task. Plus, Bitbucket's new Free pricing plan for tiny teams convinced me to go with it for online hosting(rather than roll our own hg server over vpn)

Though, If I had to choose a host/vcs for 'my awesome FOSS community project', it would go on Github.

<comment><USER4> As someone who hasn't used Hg before, I'm curious -- what are some examples of Git commands that are better executed in Hg?

<comment><USER5> No specific commands really, but I think the whole hg UI is just more consistent. I use both, yet with git I have to revert to `man` almost every day :/

Compare: `git branch xxx / git branch -a`, `git tag xxx / git tag -l`, `git show-ref --heads`

To: `hg branch xxx / hg branches`, `hg tag xxx / hg tags`, `hg heads`

There are also "duplicates" that I'm not sure why aren't folded into one command: `show-branch/branch`, `show xxx` which is `diff -c xxx` in many other systems, etc.

These are just simple cases, but there's loads of situations where you have to find out yet another command in git / yet another parameter to do what you want. Hg has better defined defaults and the whole list of commands looks like it was designed, while git looks like everyone just added what they needed... Auto-expanding commands in hg is also nice - I hate it when git tells me 'ci' or other short name is not a command (yeah, I know about aliases).

In some situations I also think that git does exactly what it's programmed to do... which isn't always the same as - what workflow makes sense in a specific case. For example `branch` creates a branch, but you still need to do `checkout` (or just `checkout -b ...`). Why? What's the common use case for creating a branch you're not going to work on? Which behaviour do you expect more often?

All in all, not the end of the world, but when you use the tool every day, it becomes annoying, especially if you see it can be done better.

<comment> X-Istence There have been times that I've created a branch just to have a stopping point to which I can go back, but I wasn't going to do any work on it, at least not yet, like two choices on how to re-factor something, try one, if it fails try the other, but keep both around for testing.

<comment><USER6> Hope this helps, then:

git tag -a tagname

git push --tags

git checkout tagname

<http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html>

BTW, it's also worth noting that hg can have tag merge conflicts (<http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GitConcepts>), which is just weird.

For anyone looking to learn more about git, I haven't found a better resource than this talk: (video) <http://blip.tv/file/4094854> (slides) <http://www.slideshare.net/chacon/getting-git>

That said, I migrated from hg to git, and I love them both way more than svn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting that each major web language seems to have paired off with a different VCS:

\- Python + Hg

\- Ruby + Git

\- PHP + ...SVN?

<comment><USER8> _PHP + ...SVN?_

Gotta say, they deserve each other.

<comment><USER9> You know, comments like that disparage by implication anyone who finds value in PHP or SVN. That's a big chunk of the development community. It tears people apart rather than bringing them together. Maybe you should redirect your energy from snark and criticism toward something more constructive.

<comment><USER10> _You know, comments like that disparage by implication anyone who finds value in PHP or SVN._

Maybe if we disparage them enough they'll switch to a real programming language and version control tool.

<comment> X-Istence Why is PHP not a "real" programming language? Why is subversion not a "real" version control tool?

Yes, I've programmed in PHP and know it has some downsides, and that it has some big warts that are ugly, but it is a real programming language. Real projects are built with PHP.

Now I understand the frustration with Subversion, but it still is a version control system that is used in the real world. Would I love it if everyone decided to move away from SVN and onto something more capable like Git or Mercurial, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to belittle people who are using those tools.

<comment><USER11> PHP is the Walmart of languages, everyone uses it because everyone uses it, but nobody really has anything _good_ to say about it.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't going to jump into this discussion but that isn't very fair. I don't use PHP myself and am not a fan of it but here are some reasons why I think it is popular:

1) It's very easy to get started with, even if you're not a great programmer (or even if you have never programmed before). Just start with pure HTML and then add a few <?php> tags. 2) Lots of PHP hosting available, much of it free. 3) Loads of frameworks and libraries available.

I'm sure a PHP fan could come up with a few more.

<comment><USER11> 2 and 3 are not really advantages for PHP, as the same can be said for most any language.

I think #1 is the big reason that PHP is as popular as it is, but that "feature" has a funny smell among programmers who don't like to mix languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g Interesting to note that bzr got close to mercurial in the votes in spite of this being bzr version 1. Version 2 is much improved in speeds (comparable to git/hg).

<comment> wh-uws I myself am quite partial to bzr espeically since tortoise-bzr uses my favorite diff tool by default

[http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/guide/qbzr/qdiff...](http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/guide/qbzr/qdiff.html)

I would be interested to know about other's impressions of bazaar and why most people seem to share the same sentiment towards it as those at pycon that year

 _While no one said they did not want bzr chosen, no one said they did either._

<comment><USER13> I have been using bzr for 2+ years now. For personal projects I am quite happy with bzr+launchpad. At work, we have been using bzr on Linux.

The move from 1.x to 2.x brought in significant performance and memory improvements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Announcement in Python-Dev:

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2011-March/10873...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2011-March/108738.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> via Guido (<http://twitter.com/#!/gvanrossum/status/44169137240551424>)

For those asking "why not git", read <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/>

</comment><comment><USER16> But why are they using Mercurial and not Git? I want to what are the advantaged for them to choose Hg.

<comment><USER17> I find the way your phrase that question interesting. Git and Mercurial are nearly identical in terms of functionality, to the point that converting back and forth between them is pretty trivial. (Example: here's Git's repository in Mercurial <https://mirrors.kilnhg.com/Repo/Mirrors/From-Git/Git>)

The only real difference between the two are the ecosystems. Mercurial, being written is Python, is very portable and easily extensible. I feel like, because of that, the tools for Mercurial are better. Git has GitHub, and the incredible open source community they've developed there.

* Note, the rainbow road is due to one of the few differences between Git and Hg: Hg does not allow octopus merges, so the conversion turns them to a sequence of two at a time merges. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the devs on Kiln, so I'm certainly biased towards Hg.

<comment><USER2> octopus merges are rare in the git.git repo:

      $ git rev-list --merges --parents --tags | awk '{print (NF-1)}' | sort | uniq -c
      4409 2
        22 3
         5 4
         3 5
         1 6

So there's been a total of 31 octopus merges compared to 4409 typical two- parent merges.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, roughly an entire 2% of merges on linus's linux tree have been octopus merges. Hardly something to scoff at.

          5 10
          6 11
          5 12
          3 13
          2 14
          1 18
      14592 2
          1 20
          1 21
          1 24
        129 3
          1 30
         50 4
         25 5
         21 6
         13 7
         18 8
          7 9

<comment><USER18> Relative occurence numbers don't say much about the need for octopus. Maybe they're rare but when the need arises it proves to be an invaluable feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> makes sense since mercurial is written in python, it's like eating your own dogfood in some senses.</comment>


Eric Schmidt On the Future of Search - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/eric-schmidt-on-future-of-search.html

<comment><USER2> "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

When I do a search, I really, really want Google to find me a page that answers the question I am searching for. I think they really need to get back to improving their search.

<comment><USER3> To me, where Google stands to improve search the most is in parsing more complex ideas. Sometimes, I want to search for a specific concept that may be expressible in any number of different ways, but I don't know of (or there doesn't exist) a standardized way of describing it. All I can do is throw different expressions into the field and sift through pages of results hoping my wording may have coincided with someone else's.

I've no doubt there have been many dozens of engineers on this problem in Mountain view for years, but the last time I was truly surprised by the intuition of a Google search result was probably 2002.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've heard the argument that people aren't free thinking enough as it is. There are many people that are willing to give up the decision of what to do now or tomorrow, maybe it absolves them of the responsibility of their actions. If Google starts suggesting folks do this or that how long will it be till people start blaming Google for their mistakes.

Sounds like a science fiction novel to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> For the first time I'm thinking damn, I don't want to live in Googleworld anymore.

<comment><USER6> instead of telling me what to do, i'd much rather google helped me make informed choices about what to do.

<comment><USER7> Your basic disgust at the concept sounds the standard distaste people have upon learning of the Compatibilist formulation of free will[1]. In "telling you what to do," Google would just be acting as an extension of your will—accessing all the same information you would access, and making all the same choices _the same way_ you would make them. Just because the choices of what to do would come from the external world (and thus be determined) rather than from your mind (and thus "feel" more like you are in control of them) is no reason to reject those choices: they are still yours, even if they are determined.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism_and_incompatibili...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism_and_incompatibilism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Original article: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870490110457542...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> While I have no reason to doubt the good intentions of Eric Schmidt, I think this makes a lot more sense from Google's point of view, rather than the consumer's point of view.

Being able to suggest things you may like is in a way at the core of what advertising is. Currently Google does a pretty poor job, both because it's hard to predict human behaviour, and because they mostly use (or used?) the search patterns as a guide. But if you want to make money from ads the obvious area to improve is to tell you what you may like before you even know it.

In other words, to me this speech sounds more like an advertiser wondering how to improve the significance of its ads than a search engine wondering how to improve searching.

</comment><comment><USER10> _"We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

As Google knows "roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are..."_

Stop the ride. I want to get off now.

<comment><USER11> _I'm sorry, Dan. I'm afraid I can't do that._

But seriously, I think he's just imagining something like a butler, who anticipates your information needs, or at least your context and where you're coming from. It's a kind of AI, as he says, moving toward _do what I mean_.

Unfortunately, these Frankensteinian quests have always ended up closer to Office Assistant Clippy, in practice. Historically, mental amplification has been a more fruitful approach, where the user remains in control.

<comment><USER10> I read somewhere a professor was saying that when you retweet, or vote up articles, or any other of a dozen activities in which you're simply reacting mechanically that _you are no longer an individual but part of a hive mind_. Sounded a little extreme, but I get his gist.

Years ago I worked on a warehousing system. Used to be that folks would get a list of stuff to pick, then go get that stuff, then get a new list. This became more and more automated. Soon the computer was talking to workers over wireless headsets, giving them step by step directions of where to go and what to do.

I imagine the next step, after "where do I go and what do I do?" will be people writing articles about how much more happy they are now that they have a clear purpose in life. How the system actually knows better at what makes them happy than they do themselves.

I liked the super-brain, immortal demigods sci-fi future much more than I do the borg one we're actually getting.

Hey kid! Get off my lawn! :)

<comment><USER11> I think I see what he means, but upvoting etc isn't necessarily mechanical. The mechanical conformity he's talking about sounds like social conformity: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments>

That warehousing system sounds like GPS car navigation systems - but this is still amplification (so far), and I doubt it can or will be extended.

I saw a reddit post about how army life can be very appealing, because of the "clear purpose in life": the matter at hand is urgent, so you don't worry about any other problems in your life, and the bigger picture is taken care of by the higher-ups.

aside: I think the ideal life, as organized by a super-brain/demigod (or, from a different point of view, what heaven would be like), would be still have ups an downs (as in the earlier matrixes/ices, people rejecting utopia), but these ups and downs would be more clearly meaningful to the person, like a composed heroic journey, without the meaningless clutter. For people who had grown more, it would include the meaningless clutter, so that part of the "ups and downs" would be to discern the meaning. ie. living in heaven would be indistinguishable from on earth.

<comment><USER11> Here's that reddit post: _Great post explaining a soldier's mindset, written for redditors_ <http://www.reddit.com/tb/d19pt>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The single biggest barrier for me is questions that I could google for, but I don't think of it, because in my mind it's just a thought or need, not an explicit question.

For example, issues about cooking, while cooking. Something like a (waterproof) iPad might be one factor in the solution, perhaps with (excellent) voice recognition.

But another problem is that, when I have searched on question like this, the answers are often not there, or buried amongst a lot of inaccurate/unhelpful answers to the question - and it ends up taking an hour, and not actually answering the question. eg. how to stop a rice cooker burning the rice (ans didn't come from google: leave it 15mins after it's cooked + cook a larger amount).

</comment><comment><USER12> Eric wants Google to be Marshall Brain's Manna?

<http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

(warning, the writing gets a little lame toward the end of the book)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is why I've switched to third-party search engines, and resort to Google when I can't find a result that works.

</comment><comment><USER14> isn't this what Apple bought when they got Siri?

</comment><comment><USER15> A technologist is speculating on the future and possibilities of technology, it's nothing to be an alarmist about.</comment>


Can Qt's moc be replaced by C++ reflection? - <AUTHOR> http://woboq.com/blog/reflection-in-cpp-and-qt-moc.html <comment><USER2> It's nice to see that C++ is finally getting reflection. The real question is why it took so long: reflection is a killer feature in a large number of commonly occurring practical settings (GUI creation, user scripting, serialization, multithreading/IPC) yet it came to C++ relatively late in the game, to wit, _after_ C++ got a turing-complete template system and _long after_ grotesque workarounds like Qt's moc grew to maturity and metastasized. When there are large numbers of people using workarounds ranging from "don't use C++" (see: desktop frameworks other than Qt) to "implement your own restricted C++ parser to _add_ reflection" (see: Qt) you would think that reflection would have found itself higher on the priority list. Is there someone here who can help me understand why the C++ standards committee had priorities that were so different from these communities for so long?

Are people making desktop apps, games, and other heavy users of reflection simply not well represented on the standards committee? Did bikeshedding delay reflection for a decade? Did language lawyers resist adding it because there exists a "clever" template-infested strategy for emulating it (at the expense of using arcane and sinfully ugly syntax in your declarations, naturally)? It sounds like it could make an interesting case study, but I'd settle for a tl;dr.

<comment><USER3> >The real question is why it took so long

Remember one of C++'s promises: if you don't use it, you don't pay for it. Your C++ programs have to be as fast as C as long as you're not using any C++-only features. The only way to have reflective information is to add all of this reflective information to your binary. But when do you add it? How? Obviously you don't want to add if the calling program never uses reflection, but it's difficult to predict in advance when this is going to happen. Worse, what if a program wants to use reflection on a pre-existing external library?

I suppose they're finding ways around this problem, but that's essentially why it's taken so long. RTTI is expensive enough, and reflection even more so. If you want polymorphism in your reflection (and reflection seems kind of useless to me without it) I don't think you can do all reflection at compile time, so some sort of payment will have to be done at runtime.

I suppose non-polymorphic reflection is enough for Qt, but it's still a very limited form of what is usually desired from a reflective interface.

<comment><USER4> You're confusing compile-time reflection (what is needed for moc) with runtime reflection (which affects binary size and execution time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another similar use for reflection I am waiting for is a way to effortlessly serialize data. Specifically for physics experiments I have several PODs from different acquisition devices. Instead of serializing them all myself, it would be great to just pass them onto a function to do that for me. Also useful because people will inevitably ask "I don't like file format <X>, can you save it as <Y>?".

CERN's ROOT software alleviates some of this issue with their dictionary builder for their own format.

<comment><USER6> Thing is if you go somewhat further than POD you always end up with 'this field should not be serialized' situations so you'd still have to manually add code to indicate that. Though I agree it would be nice just be able to tell 'serialize this struct', it's not really that hard with boost.serialization or similar to declare the serialization functions manually (I don't know how ROOT does it):

        template< class Archive >
        void serialize( Archive& ar, POD& pod )
        {
          ar & pod.field1;
          ar & pod.field2;
          ar & pod.field3;
        }

<comment><USER7> ROOT does this with its own preprocessor and custom comment decorators. like:

        class mydata
       {

            /* simple type */
            int n;

           /* the following array is of length n */
            double  * v; //[n]

          /* don't serialize the following */
          int reference_count; //!

         ClassDef(mydata,1) ; // this macro does some magic, 1 is the version number etc.
       };

<comment><USER6> Didn't know that. But after seeing this: I _vastly_ prefer a streams based orientation then. No magic, no comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never doubted that moc does things that C++ itself can't.

My objection to moc has always been that it does things I flat out don't _need_ in GUI design. I mean, there's a whole world of Win32 and GTK+ applications that get by just fine with specifying callback functions; and it's not as though they are suffering and in need of moc-like functionality. And now with C++11 lambdas, it's an absolute breeze: button.onClick([&] { printf("clicked!\n"); });

Certainly, Qt does a lot more than just GUI stuff, and there are use cases beyond my own. What immediately springs to mind is using callbacks within QtScript, or perhaps some integration with QtQuick.

But the annoying part is the way that you _need_ to run your headers through moc (and this often dovetails into "replace make with qmake", which is even more extreme) in order to use Qt. I think most, if not all, of the objections over moc would go away if they made the moc component optional to those who want the extra power.

<comment><USER9> Qt started long before C++11, as I'm sure you know, and lambdas weren't available for the 10 years prior. The big advantage of the MOC from my perspective is the signals and slots. Sure, most of the buttons are just a callback. But there are times when something in the UI needs to change based on another piece of the UI. With signals and slots, neither object needs to know about each other, the function creating them connects the signals. So you can connect(togglableMenuItem, enabled(), uiObject, setEnabled()); and with one line of (pseudo-ish) code, when you toggle to menu item, the object will be enabled and greyed out, as appropriate.

You can do this with callback objects, but it's kind of clunky if the pieces of the UI that need to communicate are far apart in the widget hierarchy. The worst is if you need to notify a component inside a widget (or several levels down); then you have to pass the object all the way down. Or you can go with something like Java's observer pattern, which from my experience is a whole lot of annoying boiler-plate which the MOC avoids.

You only need to run headers of QObjects through MOC, although that is most of them if you are using Qt, obviously. I tend to prefer qmake over make, as you don't have to deal with non-GNU make on Solaris, AIX, etc., although that is less of a feature these days. (QMake on Windows is not too fun, but I try to avoid using Windows in the first place.) It is also really easy to add pieces of Qt without needing to remember what libraries you need to add. Need OpenGL? "QT += gl" (or something like that) Want the optimized version on all platforms? "QT += release"

<comment><USER8> > Qt started long before C++11, as I'm sure you know, and lambdas weren't > available for the 10 years prior.

Of course. That's also the reason we have UTF-16 and a Qt reimplementation of the standard library: the project's age and need for backward compatibility.

moc for C++98 didn't offer closures, so you still had to write a separate function and then call connect() to link the signal with the new slot function. Even in C++98, moc could have instead just allowed you to use a version of std::function, written for C++98 (I wrote such a container, as did boost.) So instead you'd have: button.onClick(&MyClass::clickEvent, &myClassObject); which for at least 98% of GUI programming, would cover the same use case as connect(button, SIGNAL(pressed()), &myClassObject, SLOT(clickEvent())); but without the need for preprocessing; and without the downside of run-time type checking of the signal and slot names.

...

I definitely don't doubt you that you have use cases that moc makes significantly easier. But in my case, I really don't. And I've written a dozen simple to moderately complex UI applications. So, I would be appreciative if in my simple case, I didn't have to use moc at all.

One thing I do like, that is possible with a fancier std::function class, but is still kind of clunky with pure C++, is the way you can bind a slot that has less parameters than a function ordinarily takes. It's a nice way to offer additional information, but not require you to have an exactly matching callback signature. Great for binding multiple signals to the same generic slot that handles all cases at once (eg "synchronize()" called whenever you change a setting.)

> You only need to run headers of QObjects through MOC, although that is most > of them if you are using Qt, obviously.

Yeah, I wrote a recursive wildcard search function in GNU make to find all files that matched "%.moc.hpp", and then ran moc against all of the results. It's not a huge burden, but it's still kind of annoying. It interferes when you just want to write a small utility class and have your interface and implementation in the same file. You have to deal with knowing what moc is called (moc on most platforms, moc-qt4 on Debian). You can't distribute pre- parsed moc files because they are _extremely_ version-dependent.

> I tend to prefer qmake over make

I prefer GNU make over qmake, bsdmake et al. qmake is great if you like it, but not if you're already happy with your build environment, use lots of specific features from your build tool, and don't want to change it just to make using Qt easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Qt's meta object compiler (moc, a code generator that lets C++ kind of emulate Objective-C's message passing) is mighty handy for transparently queuing (instead of directly calling) signals that cross thread boundaries. I don't see anything in this post that mentions it.

See the relevant bit from Qt's documentation for more information: [http://qt- project.org/doc/qt-5/why-moc.html](http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/why- moc.html)

<comment><USER11> wxWidgets has QueueEvent and ProcessEvent and AddPendingEvent for this sort of thing - does Qt force you to emit a signal without being able to queue it first?

<comment><USER12> Qt offers both signals/slots and a lower level (but still cross platform) event system with the usual post event (async) and send event (blocking) methods.

Signals/slots provide a connection abstraction on top of events, and blocking vs queued behavior is a per-connection attribute. So, in cases where the emitter wants to control blocking vs async behavior, you might use the event system with post or send directly.</comment></comment></comment>


Western news about China depends on intrepid Chinese 'news assistants' - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1094098/why-you-dont-know-the-names-of-the-people-who-take-the-biggest-risks-to-bring-you-your-china-news/ <comment><USER2> China under Xi Jinping has effectively turned into a dicatatorship, and so with a dictatorship, censorship and blackouts naturally comes along with it. That's the reason why Beijing has recently cracked down on VPN, sent many of the young, brave democratic protestors in Hong Kong to prison, silenced many of its Xi critics, etc.

Will China suffer from the censorship and blackouts? As discussed heavily on HN, probably. Then again, it is most likely that China is already suffering through its own turbulence. Its economy is standing perilously on shadow debt (its going through its own 2007 real estate bubble deflation), while it engages in heavy protectionism - it recently disallowed South Korean companies from moving its assets out of the country, and its citizens, suffering from massive inflation in food and real estate, pollution, dirty water and food, are suffering.

<comment><USER3> > sent many of the young, brave democratic protestors in Hong Kong to prison, > silenced many of its Xi critics, etc.

The crackdown on black people and BLM is very similar, but a lot more violent.

<comment><USER4> I'd say that has more to do with societal norms and biases, not political strategy.

<comment><USER3> From a commoner standpoint, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my perspective, it looked like China will overtake the world and maybe prove that democracy is optional for economic prosperity, a blow to Western values and ideal.

But how true is that? I hear a lot about corruption and crackdown, and wonder how much does that impact their economy.

How critical is good information about the world? Do Western Media do a good job of it, or at least a better one than those in less democratic societies?

<comment><USER6> They might take over the world (I think it's unlikely), but in my opinion, the main reason isn't their political system: it's human capital (1/7 of the world population) and homogeneity (very cohesive culture due to China's history). Western countries lack the former, India and others lack the latter.

<comment><USER7> I think you're vastly overestimating China's cultural homogeneity. 30% of the population (so, a greater number than the population of the U.S.) doesn't even speak Mandarin. Just like in India, regional loyalties are very strong despite modern attempts to unify; see the continuing efforts to wipe out Cantonese, a language with 60 million speakers in China and that is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin: [http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its- biggest-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest- cantonese-speaking-region-to-speak-mandarin-2014-8) . And this isn't happening in some backwater part of the country; in addition to Cantonese being the official language of Hong Kong, Canton (a.k.a. Guangdong) is the most populous province in the country, and the location of Shenzhen itself.

<comment><USER4> _> > I think you're vastly overestimating China's cultural homogeneity. 30% of the population (so, a greater number than the population of the U.S.) doesn't even speak Mandarin._

Mandarin is basically the Han dialect of Chinese. The Han people are 92% of the population. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese)

In addition, Mandarin is the standard language used in most or all public schools. I volunteered multiple times in an area where the majority of people are the Yi minority group (location: Zhaojue in southern Sichuan). The Yi people's language doesn't even share the same characters as Chinese. When I first heard their language, I swear it sounded like it was from Africa, a lot of similar phonemes. But even there, they used Mandarin in the public schools.

 _> > And this isn't happening in some backwater part of the country; in addition to Cantonese being the official language of Hong Kong, Canton (a.k.a. Guangdong) is the most populous province in the country, and the location of Shenzhen itself._

Shenzhen is a city built on top of a fishing village in the 80s that had very few incumbent people. Most of the people who live in Shenzhen come from outside of Shenzhen and never spoke Cantonese. As such, they have no choice but to speak Mandarin to each other, as that's the only common language out of all the people who come from all the other provinces. The fact of the matter is that I cannot remember the last time I heard Cantonese in Shenzhen. Guangzhou has a lot of Cantonese, but that's because there were a lot of Cantonese people in Guangzhou from the beginning, as Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong (the Canton province). Shenzhen's economy is forecast to outpace Hong Kong's economy, though Hong Kong will by no means become insignificant. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-05/as- shenzh...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-05/as-shenzhen- overshadows-hong-kong-the-ex-colony-keeps-its-jewel)

If Cantonese is dying, it's a natural death brought on by social and economic factors, not a forced death. Mandarin has been the standard language used in public schools since the days of the Republic of China, China's attempt at democracy, in 1912. This is not some kind of new malicious strategy brought on by the modern Communist government. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Modern_Standard_Chi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Modern_Standard_Chinese)

So many factors are making it a natural death for Cantonese. My Cantonese speaking friends agree with this.

Source: I live in Shenzhen

edit: formatting

<comment><USER8> Mandarin is _NOT_ the Han dialect of Chinese. Each region has its own dialect and while they are not taught in school (mostly due to central government's policy), regional dialects are often spoken at home.

Source: I grew up in Hong Kong and have relatives in mainland China

<comment><USER4> Sorry, to be clear, I said that Mandarin is _basically_ the Han dialect. It is true that a lot of people interchange the names Hanyu, Guoyu, and Putonghua, though they are not exactly the same thing. Just asked my co-worker about this to be sure, he said a lot of people consider Hanyu to be Putonghua even though it's not.

It's like me telling a Chinese person that Canadian English is basically American English, even though it isn't.

<comment><USER9> It's closer to saying "English is the European dialect of Indo-European". Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese are all languages spoken primarily by Han people, they are all Han dialects. Of course Mandarin has a priviledged position among them, but that priviledged position has not much to do with the _Han_ people, since it shares that with all the others.

EDIT: it may well be the case that people use "Hanyu" (literally, Han language) as a synonym for "Guoyu" (lit. national language, the Taiwanese version of Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) or "Putonghua" (lit. common speech, the PRC version of MSM). "Han language" is a poor English translation for "Hanyu" if that's what you mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best iPhone Task Management App? - <AUTHOR>

What do you use? Things? ToodleDo? Remember the Milk? Notes? <comment><USER2> I use OmniFocus, in spite of their bad UI and general priceyness.

* Things: has a lot of things going for it, but syncing is terrible. You can't directly sync from iPhone to iPad for example without having a copy of Things.app on Mac on your local LAN. If you're only using one device, I guess this doesn't matter, but it's a big deal for me. I seriously tried to switch to Things, since it was so much easier than OF, but the syncing support sent me back within a week.

* RTM: No projects support (tasks inside tasks). This is a dealbreaker for me, since I like to organize my tasks into groups. RTM just seems really lightweight to me for organizing my whole life.

* ToodleDo - sync is a problem again. It syncs to RTM, but you have the same projects problem. It syncs over Bonjour/WiFi, but you have the same Things problem.

OF's UI is terrible, but it is powerful and can basically be configured to work however you want. I wish there was a more painless way to do start/end dates for tasks like Things, and I wish they had a native iPad client. And I wish they moved towards tags and away from tree hierarchies. But overall, not bad.

<comment><USER3> Not that it helps anyone today, but Cultured Code (author of Things) has "Cloud Sync" at the top of their list right now:

<http://culturedcode.com/status/>

<comment><USER4> What a great news, thank you. I've been waiting for this feature for a long time and Things is really great, in terms of UI and features and GTD experience, more user-friendly than remember the milk IMO.

<comment><USER5> Don't get your hopes up; it seems that it's been on their list for a year and a half, and it's been on top for months now:

[http://getsatisfaction.com/culturedcode/topics/sync_mac_thin...](http://getsatisfaction.com/culturedcode/topics/sync_mac_things_with_iphone_things_via_mobileme)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised not to see anybody mention Nozbe.

It's been around quite a while as a web app, and does a great job of balancing simplicity with functionality and features. The web interface is excellent for just letting you get on with what you want to do - i.e. things work just as you'd expect, and there are no frustrating UI punishments for doing things 'the wrong way'. The iPhone counterpart has recently had a major overhaul and is now just as slick and easy to use.

It's pretty hacker friendly, too - for example, you can export all your task info to a plaintext file, edit it however you like, and later re-import. There's a simple syntax for adding new tasks with metadata by email or Twitter.

I'd highly recommend giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER7> I enjoy GeeTasksPro from a HN contributor. It's synced with your Google Tasks, including GAFYD accounts.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geetaskspro-google-tasks- app/...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geetaskspro-google-tasks- app/id335547882?mt=8)

<comment><USER8> GeeTasks/Pro author here. :-)

Try the free GeeTasksLite and see if you like this cloud (Google Tasks) + native iPhone app combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Pocket Informant (<http://www.pocketinformant.com/>). It is kind of GTD- based (though flexible enough to accomodate other workflows), synchs with Toodledo for tasks and Google Calendar for Calendar, has push notifications. Last time I checked it had a free lite version but after using it for a little while I did not hesitate buying a full version.

I used to use (already mentioned) Zenbe lists for TODOs, but since then I migrated all TODOs to Pocket Informant. Zenbe Lists is great but is not really a task management app. I still use Zenbe for nice-to-do things and checklists like 'movies to watch', 'books to read', 'groceries', 'travel packlist' etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> I bought Things and have been loving it. It's simple, intuitive and syncs with Things on OS X.

</comment><comment><USER11> Zenbe Lists 2.0 was just released last night...

It's dirt-simple checklists with cloud sync, and their web UI is pretty good.

I don't need the fancy GTD or GPS stuff--just let me bang out a list, order the contents, check em off as they're finished--and gimme a web UI when I'm at my desk.

Last night they finally upgraded the app for iOS4 compatibility--it never worked right with iPhone OS 3. Hopefully they stay on top of future iOS releases (been waiting over a year for last night's release--thought it would never happen, was a pleasant surprise).

<http://lists.zenbe.com>

</comment><comment><USER12> Things gets my vote. The syncing gets to be a pain, but I have the Mac, iPhone (ipod touch actually), and iPad versions so I just leave a Mac on. I also have 2 macs synchronized through dropbox (which is also a pain when you get conflicts).

I've tried RTM, TeuxDeux, among others, and they just aren't as amazingly intuitive as Things. There's something about the interface and the way it's set up that just completely gets out of your way so you spend less time tinkering with your task manager, and more time doing the stuff on it.

If they could get cloud sync, it would be _perfect_

<comment><USER13> +1 for Things. The iPad and Mac OS X versions of it are even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use Toodledo for long term things. Toodledo has the most flexibility for complex tasks. They also are a very customer-friendly shop so I like to support them, but their iPhone interface is not great for quickies. I use them for stuff I would use a computer for anyway, and tasks that I want a history of, even after I have done them.

I use a shortcut to google tasks for the equivalent of post-it-notes, i.e. stuff I want to flush out of my brain and do in the next few hours. Nothing that would carry over for more than a day, and stuff that once done, I delete.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use OmniFocus for iPhone and I also have OmniFocus on my laptop. Both are syncing over the air to a database in LDAP dir on my own server.

Setup is definitely geeky, but at the time I decided to go for Omnifocus, none of the competitors could do it in a such way that I would have non-network access from my iPhone and laptop + over-the-internet sync between laptop and iPhone.

OmniFocus has all the stuff that you need to do for GTD style task (task, context, project). UI would benefit from a simplification, but I think it's good enough as it is.

</comment><comment><USER16> Todo, syncing with ToodleDo's annual subscription for sync and web access.

I own Things, OmniFocus, Todo, and others, and at the moment, I prefer Todo. My objective is simplicity of entry with "GTD" style task management, with OTA sync across multiple Macs and devices.

For non-techies with just one Mac and one iDevice, I tend to recommend Things, while for sales, I tend to recommend Daylite.

(LAN WiFi sync doesn't count, only OTA sync ensures you're up to date.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I've tried just about everything - OmniFocus, ToodleDo, Things, ToDo, Remember The Milk, etc. What really worked for me though was Unfuddle (free both online and iPhone).

It's a software project management system - which sounds complicated - but I found it to be the most intuitive. It allows me to manage all my tasks (programming, bugs, personal) in one place and I always like apps that have online/iPhone components.

P.S. Unlimited SVN and GIT repos too :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I use ToDo (iPhone: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/todo/id282778557?mt=8> and iPad: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/todo-for- ipad/id371787147?mt=...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/todo-for- ipad/id371787147?mt=8) ). They work great and have good sync support with ToodleDo. The iPad version especially is so useful that it's on my dock.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like OmniFocus for iPhone, and find it to be the perfect companion to OmniFocus running on my laptop:

<http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus_for_iphone/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Hunny Do is a nice collaborative application for sharing lists.Works great with your spouse. And it's free for iPhone.</comment>


Why Experts Are Wrong About AV1 Being Slow - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-experts-are-wrong-about-av1-being-slow-1e9bda9f09d4 <comment><USER2> Quite right.

But the adoption of video formats is hampered by the lack of a fast en/decoder.

The people pushing for the adoption of one or anther codec really ought sink their time and money into making ffmpeg work really well.

They gain nothing from saying "it could be really fast" when all people looking for a format to use for something have is a slow reference implementation.

<comment><USER3> Like [https://github.com/xiph/rav1e](https://github.com/xiph/rav1e) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really really really want AV1 to be successful, since I would prefer if all my infrastructure were unencumbered by patents, but until we can get a reasonably fast encoder working in FFMPEG, I'm basically blocked on using it. My current encoding infrastructure for blu-ray backups is a simple script I wrote that uses ffmpeg to convert rips into h264 and flac, and stream with Emby.

Keep in mind, that for me, it doesn't have to be _fast_...I'd put up with an encoder that performs around 5-10fps on an ODroid board. As it stands though, with libaom, I'm getting around 0.25fps, which is too slow.

I really wish I knew more about the guts of video encoding...I would really love to help get AV1 off the ground for the average consumer. Does anyone here know a way that I could help?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Does anyone here know a way that I could help?_

You could test Intel's SVT-AV1 encoder and report any issues to them. SVT-AV1 will scale to as many cores as you can give it. It's still quite fragile and buggy, but in fairness it's only at version 0.6:

[https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT- AV1](https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1)

<comment><USER4> That's a great idea, actually. I'll play with that tonight and see if I can contribute.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "with default settings, the AOM encoder is slow, but as we have seen, that > does not mean that the AV1 format is too slow."

OK, so there's currently no proof that AV1 is slow.

But arguing that "it could be made fast" is actually propagating the idea that "currently, it's slow".

There's no better way to convince everyone than pointing to an existing fast implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cisco AV1. Live AV1 encoding and decoding on a laptop: [https://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/cisco-leap- frogs-h-264...](https://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/cisco-leap- frogs-h-264-video-collaboration-with-real-time-av1-codec)

A talk about it with a demo: [https://vimeo.com/344366650](https://vimeo.com/344366650)

<comment><USER6> What is Cisco's motivation for working on video codecs?

<comment><AUTHOR> To make their Webex conferencing platform better:

[https://www.webex.com/](https://www.webex.com/)

[https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/conferencing/index.ht...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/conferencing/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"More coding tools don't make formats slower, they have the potential to make them faster."_

That's not _quite_ true. If your encoder has more options, encoding what option you chose takes more bits. That means that picking only options that were available in older encoders produces a (slightly or less slightly, depending on how many times you change encoding strategy) larger file.

So, to get equal image size, you may have to pick newer options, which may be slower (and, AFAIK, often are, in exchange for better compression/higher image quality)

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds counter-intuitive, but Cisco found that having more coding tools available actually helped their live, low latency video encoding use case for video conferencing and screen sharing. They discussed it in their presentation at Big Apple Video:

[https://vimeo.com/344366650](https://vimeo.com/344366650)

<comment><USER8> GP is right though. It's possible to add options that don't pay for themselves in terms of the entropy of encoding "don't use option X here." Here's an example of a feature that didn't make it into the Daala codec: [https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/paint_demo/index.shtml](https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/paint_demo/index.shtml)

<comment><USER9> It's possible, but with adaptive probabilities, the cost for never using a feature is pretty negligible (roughly O(log N) bits of overhead to learn that the probability is ~zero, where N is the number of times you code the symbol... and potentially even smaller depending on your initial probability).

Intra paint was not defeated because of the cost of entropy coding "don't use feature X here", it was defeated because due to "lapping and block size alignment issues, we cannot just turn it on and off when we want" (last paragraph of the "Pretty Images" section).

<comment><USER10> It's analagous to optimizations for resource-starved systems. If you have trouble processing 16 of something, you don't really benefit from improving the O(n) at the cost of higher overhead, you benefit from the same algorithm processing each item twice as fast. Linear micro-optimizations rule the world.

Being able to use lots of tools and hybridize your engineering to get relatively bigger savings is a result of having the headroom for algorithmic complexity to start ruling, which for video might be a relatively recent phenomenon(I don't actually know the domain).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm no expert in these things, but I find the comparisons to language unconvincing.

Eg if 'Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis' exists, decoders have to know about it regardless of whether its used, it does have a cost, and arguing its ok because it isn't used seems strange from a security/bug finding pov.</comment>


Man vs. Machine on Wall Street: How Computers Beat the Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2011/03/man-vs-machine-on-wall-street-how-computers-beat-the-market/73120/

<comment><USER2> take with grain of salt -- if you have a profitable hedge fund, unless you are trying to raise money, publicity is bad.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it worth converting a large JavaScript codebase to TypeScript? - <AUTHOR> As stated. We have a medium-large codebase in Javascript, using webpack to transpile `es2015` code to Javascript, as is standard.
TypeScript may be deemed "yet another shiny thing" by some, but the benefits of a typed superset of Javascript feel quite enticing
Any experiences or thoughts to share? <comment><USER2> Would the same people that originally wrote the code be doing the conversion? Is it code that was written in a few months or over the course of five or more years? Is the functionally the code provide well documented or is the code itself the documentation? Is there automated testing that can help ensure things still work properly?

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say absolutely yes, it is.

I wrote up my experiences learning TypeScript here:

[https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/11/blogged-answers- le...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/11/blogged-answers-learning-and- using-typescript/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing this!</comment></comment>


Amazon Reverses Course, Encryption Returning for Fire Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-05/amazon-reverses-course-encryption-returning-for-fire-devices <comment><USER2> This is really the dumbest, most unnecessary drama that Amazon has needed to face with absolutely zero gain. The entire chain of command who approved this decision should get fired, because who knows what other dumb decisions they will make.

<comment><USER3> Bias note: I've been an Amazon SDE for the last few years, though no where near the devices division (I make warehouses and delivery systems work better, weee). Additional note: in no way do I speak for the company, I'm just a guy who writes code and likes working here.

Generally speaking, this isn't how Amazon operates.

Firing someone for making a bad call is silly. Mistakes were clearly made but firing people in situations like this is like cutting off your hand because you burned your finger. The person who made the call probably has made hundreds of _good_ calls over the years, and will continue to make good calls in the future, given the chance. Sure, if this is a pattern of stupid mistakes then clearly this person is in the wrong role, but that's not nearly as likely to be the case.

Instead, I suspect a process will be put in place to help make these decisions better in the future- and process written in large part by the person who made the mistake. This way, not only will they not make a mistake like this again, but no one else will either.

Maybe I'm wrong, but from what I've seen of the Amazon culture that's how we generally react to mistakes.

<comment><USER4> That is exactly the right culture. If someone makes a series of blunders, without the history of good choices, that's one thing (maybe they need to be in a different position?), but simply firing someone over one decision is usually very bad for morale, and doesn't really teach anyone anything.

<comment><USER5> Hm, remember [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/apple-fires-maps- ma...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/apple-fires-maps-manager/)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a Kindle Fire HD 8 Tablet. Amazon has clearly optimized the software for it. For example it has three types of memory. Flash for storage, RAM for main memory and (presumably) slower RAM that is used as swap space. Most Android devices run a linux kernel without any swap space configured. But the Fire Tablet swaps (which is why it can run Android 5+ with only 1Gb of RAM I suspect). It has two processors. A slow processor that uses less battery, and a faster one which is switched on when needed.

My point is that Amazon tried really hard to give a good experience with lower end hardware then most Android devices. Encryption likely adds a significant performance cost.

Keep in mind, the iPhone has hardware support for its encrypted memory. It is my understanding that the main processor does not get involved in the actual encryption of the flash storage. Because Apple controls the hardware and the software, they can do this tight integration. Android is software and encryption on Android must be done in software unless and until a hardware vendor integrates bulk encryption into their memory system and provides an appropriate driver for Android to control it. If such a device exists, I haven't seen it yet...

<comment><USER7> No, Android works just fine on lower end hardware. I have a very old phone running 5.x smooth as butter (the 3" Xperia Mini, single core Cortex-A8, 384MB RAM, running LegacyXperia).

However, I could turn my phone into a pile of mud (and you could probably do this too with your kindle fire) by installing Google Apps, in particular google play services.

(created an account just to say this)

<comment><USER8> It's a 1 ghz a9 snapdragon cpu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This whole story seems overblown. Amazon removed a feature that nobody would ever use, and people imagined some conspiracy.

A Kindle Fire is not a desktop computer, it's somewhere between a television and a crappy web browser. Amazon Silk is so painful to use that you'll never browse the web with it for more than a minute or two anyway, why care about encrypting your browsing history? Would anybody care about encrypting the local storage on their TiVo?

My guess is that this went: "Oh, here's a feature that 0.5% of our users have tried, and 50% of them contacted support for help turning it off (because it slowed down video playback), let's kill it." (Mwahahaha?)

<comment><USER9> Don't take my word for it, read the article...

""" Also, the devices are mainly designed to deliver digital entertainment, instead of being used as communication tools. That suggests there's less of a chance users will have any sensitive personal information stored on their Fire tablets. """

""" Amazon removed encryption from the devices in late 2015, possibly to reduce costs for its tablets and electronic readers. The devices aren't intended for communication of sensitive data, although they can be used to access the Internet and e-mail. """

<comment><USER10> "Reduce costs"? How does having an encryption program installed add costs?

<comment><USER11> Chips and Help Desk Support?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The most likely reason for encryption to be removed is simply that the two engineers on the Kindle Enterprise team who implemented the feature both left the company a year and a half ago. The remaining engineer on the device side portion of that team moved on to another project. The integration, security review, etc with the SoC vendor is fairly complex, and the expertise required to build out encryption was lost. The original integration took quite a while as well. Most of the speculation as to why Amazon removed it seems pretty out there.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only reason I didn't use encryption on my Fire is because I didn't know it supported it, until the news came out that they removed it.

</comment><comment><USER14> If they had done this earlier, nobody would have cared, because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices. Their timing was really bad.

<comment><USER15> > because likely nobody's storing any sensitive information on these devices.

Not wittingly ;)

<comment><USER16> Have an upvote for using a Clapper-ism. I imagined your hand against your forehead while you said it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Amazon likely had been looking at Apple and felt extricating themselves from the potential to be in Apple's position was financially advantageous. Seeing them reverse course suggests to me that the PR backlash was more than Amazon could stand and made them think the situation they were trying to avoid was better.

</comment><comment><USER18> Someone must have a got a "?" email from Jeff /s

<comment><USER19> Not sure, why you're downvoted, that's probably exactly what happened. It's a huge company, there are a lot of moving pieces, and the original decision probably didn't travel too far up the food chain. Some Dev Manager or Director was optimizing for device speed and figured it was a worthwhile tradeoff. When the rest of the company found out they probably quickly reacted and flipped out, much as the rest of the world did.

<comment><USER18> I've seen exactly this happen at Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now that you know how high of a priority encryption is to Amazon, do you trust them to do it right?

</comment><comment><USER21> It's like when they take a book away -- only, your security!

</comment><comment><USER22> Watch, it'll be some weak encryption no better than no encryption as far as the ICs are concerned.</comment>


Finally, NASA has its universe of images in one happy, searchable place - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/finally-nasa-has-its-universe-of-images-in-one-happy-searchable-place/ <comment><USER2> When I visited the site yesterday, all the pictures on the front page were of Russian rockets at Baikonur. I'm sure it was a quirk of timing based on what was getting uploaded at the moment, but I thought that was amusing.

This seems like an uncommon example of a pure success story as far as digitization and government website projects in general. Hopefully someone has written down the playbook so this can be replicated in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> My first search "alpha centauri" only comes back with one blurred result.

</comment><comment><USER4> This has got to be the best looking website our government has managed to create.</comment>


Aneurysm - <AUTHOR> http://lithub.com/aneursym/ <comment><USER2> My son had surgery for 3 aneurysms 5 years ago. At 8am he was a normal 6 year old boy, going with his mom to LA Fitness. Then at 8:30 I got a call that he couldn't get up off the floor. An MRI showed 3 golf ball sized aneurysms, and they put him in a helicopter from Tucson to Phoenix, about 100 miles apart. I was pretty crippled by fibromyalgia at the time, my wife was 7 months pregnant, and they wouldn't let us fly with him. We cried driving two hours to learn if our kid lived or not.

They used superglue to plug the fistula at Barrow's in Phoenix Arizona, they went up through the leg. [http://www.thebarrow.org/index.htm](http://www.thebarrow.org/index.htm) Amazingly, he was walking again within 4 days and home within 7 days. I have a friend that had the same surgery 5 years before; she was there for months recovering from the clip method.

My son was ok for 4 1/2 years, but for unknown reasons he had another brain issue in December that caused temporary paralysis for a few hours. They went spelunking again and found nothing. They did decide that the 5 year old repair had healed perfectly. Dr. Cameron McDougall the surgeon was just beaming with happiness when he told us that.

My kid is doing well, he is pretty smart. He attends the hardest charter school in Arizona, BASIS. He is 11 years old, and I am his angel investor (Total investment about $500) in his website [http://legimon.com](http://legimon.com) which is his version of Pokemon. Total revenue so far is $282.00 and about $40 in profit for some t-shirts. He was quite amazed when I told him how long he would have to scrub toilets at McDonalds to make that much money. We then had an hour long discussion about trademark law; he knew more than I did. He has been doing all the wordpress and photoshop work lately, and he works about 3 hours a day on it, everyday for the last three years. He has developed 400 characters and tells me that he is not stopping until he passes Pokemon's 700+.. He has planned out the app, the Xbox game, the VR headset upgrade for gokart racing, and the theme park. I couldn't be more proud of him.

I keep a photo of him in the hospital taken right after they used a cordless drill to put a hole in his skull. He looks like corpse, his head is half shaved, his spine is twisted sideways and the drain from his skull is a bright orange. I use it when I am having a bad day at work, as a reminder of what a bad day really is.

Ask me anything.

<comment><USER3> I don't have anything to ask, just wanted to say that this is an amazing story. Can't imagine going through that with a kid of mine and him doing so well now makes me happy for you guys! All the best to you and your family.

<comment><USER2> People have asked me "How were you so strong" which is flattering but not true. The truth is that I had no choice and that I was going along for the ride. I was not strong, I merely had no choice.

Thanks for your kind words. He does make me appreciate everything else more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comedy timing for me.

My father was taken into hospital 4 hours ago after collapsing and turns out he's got a brain bleed. They stuck him in a CT straight away and are now doing a lumbar puncture to see if there is any blood in the spinal fluid. They don't know what has precisely happened but they suspect an aneurysm that went undetected. The mortality rate of this event is 50% in 30 days. He's had a long history of hypertension and a couple of surgeries to clean out arteries in his neck.

Not sure why I'm sitting here on HN but it was taking my mind off things. Fail :(

Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day.

Edit: Ordered the book as well now like an idiot. Scary tale when you're close to it but I find comfort in knowing things rather than ignorance.

Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER5> God, so sorry to hear that. There's no "Fail :(" here, please don't think like that. You're just trying to cope with this stuff. It's the most humane thing to do, and you know what, you need to stay strong for your family and for that your mind needs such breaks from time to time.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the uplift; appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> " I rarely clip aneurysms now. All the skills that I slowly and painfully acquired to become an aneurysm surgeon have been rendered obsolete by technological change.

Although neurosurgery is no longer what it once was, the neurosurgeon's loss has been the patient's gain. "

so nice to read this

many of the entrenched remain so through superstition at the loss of progress,

but to read someone speak highly of a practice that rendered a section of their skill set obsolete is heartening

i have family who work in trauma and they condescendingly balk at my excitement over new medical technology:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-H0L3eEo0#t=3m14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-H0L3eEo0#t=3m14s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g#t=14m17s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g#t=14m17s)

personally, i look forward to bones:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Or- Hx3yqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Or-Hx3yqc)

</comment><comment><USER7> Just sent this link to a friend of mine who suffered from a full-bleed aneurysm a few years ago. She was lucky enough to be out in public when it happened, and got to a hospital in time for surgery (couldn't do the noninvasive method described in the excerpt).

Two weeks later they sent her home! It was amazing. Doctors told her that "Fifty percent of people who have one never make it to the hospital, fifty percent of those never make it home."

She's had some personality changes (to be expected with such a traumatic brain injury), but nothing horrible, and I'm amazed at modern medical science.

One of the hardest parts (emotionally, for her) was me helping her shave her head after she got home; they'd had to do part of it anyway for the surgery, and two weeks in the hospital hadn't done what was left any good as it was matted and beyond fixing. Shave a bit, let her cry, shave a bit, let her cry... until it was all done.

</comment><comment><USER8> "All the skills that I slowly and painfully acquired to become an aneurysm surgeon have been rendered obsolete by technological change. Instead of open surgery, a catheter and wire is passed through a needle in the patient's groin into the femoral artery and fed upwards into the aneurysm by a radiology doctor–not a neurosurgeon–and the aneurysm is blocked off from the inside rather than clipped off from the outside."

Wow. That's a most un-expected way of fixing things in the brain!

This subject never ceases to interest me because both my parents have had aneurysms, my dad died of them (he had three over the course of several years), my mom recovered (she had one which got clipped exactly as described in the article), both had paralysis effects, and both were heavy smokers.

Incredible how reading that story affected me, worse than any movie I've ever watched.

<comment><USER9> If you're interested reading more personal encounters like this, I highly recommend _" When the Air Hits Your Brain"_. It follows the author's journey from resident to experienced neursurgeon with a wisecrack sense of humor and greusome detail.

I finished it in premed days when I was looking for an candid story of becoming a neurosurgen. Definitely kept me fascinated.

*[http://www.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Brain/dp/0393330494](http://www.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Brain/dp/0393330494)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you've read Marsh's _Do No Harm_ and you're interested in more stories like it, I strongly recommend _When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery_ [1]. Its author-surgeon (Frank Vertosick) lacks much of the compassion shown by Marsh, but the stories cover his failures more than successes. I find failures and mistakes more interesting, as there are countless ways in which an operation can go wrong, but only one way it can succeed. Though sometimes morbid, the cases are always fascinating.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Brain- ebook/dp/B006...](http://www.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Brain- ebook/dp/B006WOFB5C/)

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. That is a fantastic book. I gave a copy to my neurosurgeon as well (meningioma resection, benign).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have the book this passage was excerpted from. It is phenomenal. Highly recommended. One chapter has him visiting a Ukrainian neurosurgery clinic not long after independence, and somehow getting involved in a titanic bureaucratic struggle. Utterly fascinating.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I just want to second how spectacular this book is. Certainly the best I've read in the past year. Well, I say read, I listened to the audiobook ;-) (the narrator is amazing so it was very enjoyable). It really opened my eyes to what it means to be a high flying surgeon and how to deal with both the psychology and aftereffects of risk taking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It bugs me so much that the huge font, single word title is a typo.

</comment><comment><USER14> I felt so nervous reading that I actually felt a little ill.

How people do these jobs I cannot know. Yet somebody has to. Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Lovely piece, shame whoever posted it can't spell - stonking great big title reads "aneursym", rather than "aneurysm".

<comment><USER16> And the URL :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They chased stroke the night I was in the ER. CT of head, spinal tap, etc.

Turns out, different kind of aneurysm.

Ascending aortic dissection. Different repair (Dacron tube replaces the first 4" of my aorta.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Very well-written. The suspense was absolutely killing me as well.

<comment><USER14> I nearly crumbled under the opposing pull of reading each word of excellent prose vs skipping to the end to find the result.

Thank goodness I went into programming and not brain surgery!

<comment><USER19> I on the other hand almost just stopped reading - I absolutely hate sad stories and I was sure it was going to be so sad :( I'm so glad I finished it though, it was incredible to read and I want to read the rest of the book very badly now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wonderfully told. Thanks for posting it.</comment>


You Are Not Late - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142 <comment><USER2> Had to find out what eventually happened with Quittner/McDonalds.com:

"Quittner did indeed offer the name back to McDonald's in one of his magazine columns, but not in exchange for money. In a manner reminiscent of the Princeton Review, he instead offered to surrender the domain name if McDonald's corporation would underwrite some Internet equipment for a grade school. This and other provoking articles caught the corporation's attention; they responded not by funding grade school computer access, but by pressuring the InterNIC to revoke Quittner's registration of the name. Although the registry had stayed out of previous disputes such as the Adam Curry litigation, sticking tenaciously to its "first-come, first-served" policy, it wavered before this new corporate threat. InterNIC first resisted McDonalds' demands, then eventually agreed to revoke the registration, then changed its mind again, leaving the registration with Quittner. McDonald's ultimately agreed to donate $3,500 to purchase the equipment."

From [http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html](http://jolt.richmond.edu/v1i1/burk.html)

<comment><USER3> Would that nasty move be acceptable today for McDonalds? The Internet has changed some things.

<comment><USER4> Yes? That's basically what large corporations do today...

Nissan (the car company) is still working to get nissan.com, and they're almost exclusively attempting to do it through legal means instead of negotiating with the current owner.

<comment><USER3> What is acceptable for some companies is not for other companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How we access the internet has changed (mobile, smartphones, pervasive broadband), and businesses effectively provide great services connected to the Internet (Amazon in particular), but for me, the only real changes other than those from ~1992 to today are mixed:

1) Lots more people on the Internet

2) Lower barrier to access

Sure, it's prettier, but USENET, IRC, etc. basically covered what we do with the Internet today. USENET was still technically superior to most discussion tools today; the web was a big step backward overall until the mid/late 200Xs, vs. native clients.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s.

      o Google
      o Wikipedia
      o Netflix
      o iTunes
      o Spotify/Pandora
      o Stack Exchange/Overflow
      o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..)
      o GitHub
      o Facebook
      o Instagram
      o Whatsapp
      o Gmail
      o Google Earth/Maps.

I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.

<comment><USER5> Handling video and audio was an improvement brought mostly by computing technology vs. the Internet expanding; I'm fine with a LAN-local archive of music and video (admittedly, using flac/mp3 and bd remux and h264), and a lot of my content was ripped from physical media vs. downloaded. So the streaming services aren't terribly compelling to me.

(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)

USENET > RSS.

CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.

gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.

Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.

<comment><USER7> re: streaming, the value is the instant access to the content. how did you fill up your hard drive? rip DVDs? Pirate it? Totally absurd to say streaming legal content instantly is not compelling vs. the file server/warez approach.

Web based e-mail is obviously superior to setting up your own mail server. Zero-install, access anywhere. I have memories of configuring sendmail and ripping my hair out. You really think this was a superior way of dealing with something as fundamental as _e-mail_? Nowadays it "just works." In the interim we had ISP hosted mail servers which were always broken, misconfigured, going down, and eating our e-mail. I remember walking on eggshells helping people set up their ISP e-mail knowing that I was one checkbox away ("Leave a copy of e-mail on server") from making it so their entire e-mail history was a hard drive crash from being destroyed permanently.

And don't get me started on OSS source control. Github has transformed the way open source works. CVS (and non DVCSes in general) sucked. The online tools sucked. I still cringe when I get redirected to source forge for a download. A lot of amazing work got done but I'd never want to go back there.

I'm with you that wikipedia "the software" _could_ have been created in the 1990s, but it would have been a barren wasteland without the larger access the web has now. In fact, I'd be shocked if there weren't a handful of attempts to bild an open internet based encyclopedia during that time, and now we have selection bias making us think wikipedia was the first. So what you see there is an example of something that, imho, couldn't exist _without_ wider access to the web. Ie, it's an example of not just better tooling but Internet applications that became enabled by wider access, which is what you seem to have been arguing against actually existing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU >You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, "Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!"

It's a bit easy to imagine once something's already survived it. A device with a hundred sensors probably survived hundreds or thousands of failed released or unreleased iterations. Every other mature field has probably gone through this same sentiment (and maybe still going through it, and perhaps will always go through it). If only astronomers today could imagine what new, novel techniques are just lying right in front of them with all of this computing power and automated manufacturing ability. Imagine how much further ahead astronomers would be in 2044 if they had discovered thingamajig back in 2014 instead of 2040! I think the greybeards of 2044 would be a bit biased.

But this feels like we'd be backpedaling on choosing the right tool for the right job. Slapping AI onto something and watching it fail is great for our knowledge, but not our wallets. This is when business leaders create friction with development. This is where you get "Just make it work" commands which gets the snowball of technical debt rolling. The value gained is "This solution sucked in reality! Or maybe we just sucked delivering it! Don't do what we did unless you have a good reason!", but that's not what we're really after, is it? We could sit around and brute force a bunch of combinations of ideas and markets, I guess.

And finally, if it was true back in 1985 with domain names, and it's true today with AI and the cloud, why wouldn't it be true for 2044 with VR contact lenses and holodecks? It seems like the future will be like then and now in this regard. So.. there will always be a wide open frontier _somewhere_? Do we really say anything substantial by saying "Today's an open frontier for internet ideas!"

I think there's a lot less low-hanging fruit than this article might have us believe.

<comment><USER8> The amount of low-hanging fruit available is at least partially dependent on how tall you are.

<comment><USER9> ...and the number of patents/patent trolls waiting in the wings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The funny thing about the Wired article they mention [0] is that it first ridicules McDonalds for being so tech-unsavy, and in the very next sentece suggests Burger King register a domain name containing an underscore...

[0] [http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.htm...](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html)

<comment><USER11> If there actually existed domain names with underscores, probably many casual internet users wouldn't know how to type them.

<comment><USER12> I think phreeza's point was that underscores aren't allowed in host names. (Officially, at least. I feel like I've seen them work and then sometimes seen them not work.)

<comment><USER13> Yep they flat out break stuff in IE at least. Cookie saving, for instance, simply won't work if the domain contains an underscore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tell this to people all the time. Usually my analogy is that working on the web now is like working on Television in the 60s. It's still early and while the medium might be defined, the delivery and the product never is.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good article. Reminds me of the proverb that says that although the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, th second best time is today. If only I could remember to keep that point-of-view more often...

</comment><comment><USER16> There is no such thing as "the low-hanging fruit".

The year is 1982. Rodney Mullen just managed to perform the world's first "Ollie" skateboarding trick, that can be count as somewhat the start of the modern day street skateboarding.

What now is the most junior skateboarding trick (with available equipment, training etc.) was not a low-hanging fruit back then. While looking back, you can easily learn the trick by imitating; but back then there was no-one to learn it from. You had to go trial-and-error a sh*tload of times before making the first trick.

Of course it looks sooo low-hanging fruit now. With current equipment and support. But you have to realise that the tools and methods came afterwards, to support the original invention. But looking the time back then, you had none of the aids. Just you, climbing to that tall tree to grab the apple and plant the seeds so everyone else could grab the fruits from smaller trees.

</comment><comment><USER17> "... saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content ..."

The article has a nice positive message, but it needs to be tempered with experience that railroads didn't go on being formed and expand forever in the 1890s, nor did car companies around 1910. Starting Tesla might be a good idea, but don't forget Delorean and Yugo, and 80s home computers, and early 80s video games.

I'm not claiming the opposite negative view is correct (unlike the article's claim about that the positive view is correct). The negative view is worth considering. Also among readers who know about the above argument, some acknowledgement that the opposition exists might make the article more persuasive.

<comment><USER18> You make a good point, but I think it's clear that the Internet and HTTP will be here to stay for a long time. It's just a matter of creating something that adds real value.

<comment><USER17> Correct. Note: US centric dates: My point being that starting up a railroad in 1850 was a great idea, not so good by 1900.

Or there were about 150 startup automobile mfgrs around 1900, not quite so many by 1925.

Starting up a telephone company in 1900, good idea, in 1950, not so good idea.

We still have railroads and car mfgrs and telcos in 2014, they're just not realistic startup fields.

Every other field of recent human activity has gone thru the same stages of startup success, startup failures/consolidations, oligopoly oscillating with semi-regulated public utility, sometimes a long term decline in the industry after that.

Someday its economically inevitable that "Internet and HTTP" will not be the place to do startups. I don't think its today, but my grand kids are highly unlikely to be doing internet startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember having McDonalds.com in a shopping cart, ready to buy it. It was 1993 and I wasn't sure if it was worth $35 per year - I expected I would get sued.

I chickened out, and didn't buy any dot com domain names, and went back to my business at the time that had nothing to do with tech. I also chickened out from buying any other domain name until 1999.

So one of my life regrets is that I didn't buy a whole lot of domain names in 1993 when I first looked at them. A few millions in income missed.....

<comment><USER20> You were afraid to do it. The sale of the domain later for a large amount of money resolved that fear inside you, only leaving the desire to have bought it. This is regret defined. While it serves a purpose in our lives in teaching a lesson, it makes very little logical sense to wish for a future scenario where you are less afraid, or more intent without considering the reasons why you were to begin with.

To avoid regret, realize and accept you are going to make mistakes. To avoid regret, face your fears when they are presented to you. The choice to do what scares you the most is the single most important ability you have in controlling your fate in this universe.

<comment><USER18> What would stop McDonalds from suing him if he refused to relinquish the domain name for free? Couldn't they claim it was trademark infringement?

Edit: Changed "copyright" to "trademark".

<comment><USER21> Back then things weren't as clear-cut and I believe a lot of money changed hands when corporations realized that they need their website _right now_.

<comment><USER22> You _can_ be too late, with respect to certain windows.

For a while, people made significant money selling highly desired domain names, including to big companies.

Now, those companies just "take them away" via trademark infringement claims. The legal structure for doing so has since been constructed and tested by them.

One of my concerns is that more and more such windows are being closed. It's not the isolated case, but the overall trend towards a corporate and corporate state restricted "push" implementation.

I.e. the end of "open".

<comment><USER18> I don't really see how disallowing people from registering a name already in use by a person or company goes against "openness". If you're using someone else's name, I think they're justified in trying to forcibly retake control of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The argument made here is flawed. There is still plenty of "low hanging fruit" today but the cost/barrier of entry is significantly higher than it was in the early days.

"People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn't really have the internet"

Seems to me like even if developing a holodeck is looked at as an iterative process comprised of many small innovations it's still a lot more daunting and less feasible for a _small_ team to do than building an online book store in the 90s.

With that said the internet is obviously in its infancy and the opportunities now are indeed boundless.

</comment><comment><USER24> When the author is wearing gloves with cut off fingers* and poking around in the rubble of the post apocalyptic civilization looking for an iron bar suitable for fending off packs of wild dogs, I hope he remembers writing this article.

Ok... that was a bit dark. But my point is... no one knows exactly what the future holds. I do expect he is somewhat correct and more advances are in store. But sometimes given the geopolitical and resource situation I become less confident of this as a certainty.

*Post apocalypse characters must wear gloves with cut off fingers. See Mad Max and The Matrix for specific style references if you wish to make your own in preparation.

<comment><USER25> I, too, have fear of the future. Specifically in terms of the unstable world we live in. In some regards we're very lucky in that certain things are much more difficult for the world to let happen, mostly due to the speed at which news (and outrage) travels.

But, at the same time, I'm forced to admit that if it comes down to it, we really are very much powerless. This is specifically why I'm an anarcho- capitalist, as I believe that the state is the single most dangerous entity we can conceive of; and we've gone ahead and given it near-absolute control over our lives with what lately seems to be very little oversight.

As an aside, the article is indeed quite motivating. No time like the present, I say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love this article.

But honestly, I think we make an important and incorrect assumption- we try to revolutionise by evolution.

Why put smartphones on your wrist or your head and call it a revolution? Why make an app that is a Tinder or a Wikipedia or a Google for something else and call it a revolution?

The real revolutions are going to be things that havent been thought of yet, in any manner. In the meanwhile, we have this hyper-accelerated evolution- lets focus on lowering the barriers for entry...

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can > you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It > was a wide-open frontier!_

Maybe the rest of the article is making it sound simpler than it is. But I couldn't agree with the above lines more.

</comment><comment><USER28> I take issue with the comparison. The barriers to the internet were many times lower than the current round of innovations (3d printing, virtual reality). The only thing that comes close is bitcoin and the relative cheapness lasted only a few years.

<comment><USER29> The barriers were still high back then, but they were different barriers. Bandwidth, CPU and storage all cost a lot more than they do now, and the tools available were less sophisticated. Building an online store or CMS back then was a much bigger piece of work.

Today, you don't need to focus on those kinds of problems, generally. The problems are the next level up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great motivational read for budding or aspiring entrepreneurs. The one point I'd add to the article is to start viewing the world as a solver because we have more tools to fix and build better solutions than we did 30 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER31> You are not too old either

</comment><comment><USER32> Probably correct. But, it doesn't feel that way.

</comment><comment><USER33> thanks, I really needed this. I had similar feelings about computer hardware for years.</comment>


Unannounced Facebook feature uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://lifeisagraph.com/2011/07/04/facebook-vibes.html

<comment><USER2> Heard that Facebook are integrating Spotify. Maybe that will be 'Vibes'?

Some more speculation here: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/social- media/facebook-said-to-l...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/social- media/facebook-said-to-launch-music-dashboard-service-with-spotify-others/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, wasn't there an HN article on Spotify coming to the US recently?

<comment><USER4> There was earlier some speculation but yesterday it was confirmed by Spotify: <http://www.spotify.com/uk/coming-to-the-us/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now that Facebook actually has something to worry about slightly, it's kind of cool watching Facebook and Google both scramble to win over the users with these awesome A+ features one after another.

<comment><USER6> I am actually hoping that Google resists the temptation to fight a war of feature creep with Facebook. In fact, the sum total of my enjoyment of G+ has come from the cleanliness and austerity of its UX (well, maybe combined with the refreshing Circles concept -- but that's arguably a "cleanliness" measure of a different sort).

Personally speaking, I'm totally comfortable with a social network as simply a credentialing and sharing layer running through my other experiences and touchpoints on the web. I don't need everything in one place. I am willing to admit that I might be an odd man out on this sentiment, however.

<comment><USER7> Count two odd men out.

My ideal social network is a Rolodex on steroids. Just a global, searchable, tagged index that I can pull from for all my apps.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like Google Contacts, but I'm not sure if it's taggable. It's what Google uses to automatically bring up your contacts when you activate a new Android phone, suggest friends in G+, and emails in GMail.

Edit: It is taggable, sort of. Head to contacts.google.com and you can search your contacts, as well as place things in a "Notes" field. There's also groups, but I don't know if they're one per contact or labelable.

<comment><USER7> Oh I make frequent use of Google Contacts. The high order bit that makes social networks a better Rolodex is that the contact takes some onus in keeping their contact and profile information up to date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Odd to think it will be called Facebook Vibes when the chat isn't called Facebook Peep. Probably just a codename, and it will end up being called Facebook Music.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would speculate that this could be something like <http://turntable.fm> built into Facebook.

If so, what a great way to keep users actively using Facebook: I can imagine someone spending a lot of time doing other things on the site while listening to music with their friends.

<comment><USER11> speculation => Well, if tt.fm is raising money at a sudden $40M valuation, maybe they're positioning themselves for a quick exit via Facebook.

<comment><USER12> That kind of makes sense given you have to sign in via Facebook (which is why I intially didn't try tt.fm).

<comment><USER11> My senses point to it. From my perspective it makes sense because you can't really point to it being a "serious" app that [serious] matured users would point to as a sense of belonging and we all know that Facebook users have no embarrassment at all when it comes to publicizing anything and everything they deem worthy in an effort to appear cool and belonging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In all honesty the only feature one social network has over another is where my friends are. I never check the stuff otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER14> This all seems so familiar...

In a completely unrelated note, apparently Myspace sold last week for around $35 million.

</comment><comment><USER15> I still woundn't mind some investigation on how the call/video feature works. The post mentions some java. We are not talking about applets here are we?

<comment><USER16> Yes they are talking about Java applets. However, the technology has improved (a large portion of windows users have a java quick launcher set to run on start up) and if it is anything like Facebook's original "Photo Uploader" (back before they integrated with phones and iPhoto and other apps, they had a Java app where you could browse and add photos. It would also scale/reduce quality of high megapixel photos that otherwise couldn't be uploaded to Facebook -- this was down client side through the app and was still relatively quick.) it won't be so bad.

TL;DR: Yes, it's a java applet. However, if its anything like how Facebook has done java applets in the browser, it will feel quick and lightweight on most systems.

<comment><USER17> > a large portion of windows users have a java quick launcher set to run on > start up

So in other words it's still slow but because of vendor pressure it's been lumped into "The OS" to hide that cost from the user?

More overhead is a tradeoff you make to use a VM. I think it's worth it usually but it is there.

<comment><USER16> >So in other words it's still slow but because of vendor pressure it's been lumped into "The OS" to hide that cost from the user?

I only used it on a Mac, before I discovered plugins that did Facebook integration for iPhoto (and later, that was baked in). And on OS X, no, it was not slow. I'm assuming it would be equally fast for windows.

Also, its not so much lumping the start up cost to "the OS" so much as "The OS Starting Up". How often do people reboot their machines nowadays? Once every six months? With that in mind, it's a pretty negligible trade off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Personally, I'm more excited about the fact that it requires an app ID. I'm very interested in users being able to record video from within Facebook and upload it.

Anything to escape the awful Flash implementation of it...

<comment><USER16> You can already record video with your webcam and upload it directly to Facebook, just like you can with YouTube.

<comment><USER18> I know, but as an app maker I can't interface with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I still don't understand why I would want to pay for music through facebook.

<comment><USER20> People who type "facebook" into Google probably would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Strange that this was posted on July 4th and is now just getting promoted / submitted.

<comment><USER22> I think he got the date wrong. He couldn't have found it until the video chat feature was live.

<comment><USER23> yeah, I screwed up on the date...

<comment><USER23> I was about to fix it, but using jekyll that breaks the link...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You would think they would use another filename that wouldn't reveal Facebook Vibes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Beautiful! Competition is good for the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, Facebook is going the way of MySpace then?

</comment><comment><USER27> this will surely be their spotify-based app.

</comment><comment><USER28> FB giving Google a run for its money

</comment><comment><USER29> So what, Jeff is proud of his discovery. So what, he made a few snarks.

I appreciate the info and he's ultimately correct. "[I] heard it here first."</comment>