Google and IBM announce Istio – easily secure and manage microservices - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, but there's currently a lot of overlap between competing things that want to inject themselves between service consumers and service producers.

There's API gateway products (Apigee, Kong, etc). Load balancers and proxies of various types. Caching and CDN products. More niche stuff like bot blocking, and this attempt to bundle control and statistics.

It would be nice if some sort of standard pattern emerged, where something was the main orchestrator. At the moment, you can end up with suboptimal stuff. Like a CDN that routes to a cloud API gateway that then routes to a (not geographically close) load balancer, that then hits the actual service.

I'm surprised that Cloudflare, Akamai, and the like haven't offered all of these things at the edge. Some things are service to service, but a fair amount is client to service...putting this stuff closer would help.

<comment><USER3> Regarding API gateway products, Apigee will actually work with Istio

[https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital- business/simplifying-m...](https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital- business/simplifying-microservices-management)

<comment><USER2> That's an example of the breakage though. Apigee's cloud runs in only 2 specific AWS regions. So once you tie all these pieces together, you end up with a long path, with some functionality that should be closer to the end user.

<comment><USER4> Apigee's cloud runs in a lot more than two AWS regions today, not to mention GCP regions, and the whole product can be installed in your own datacenter. We also offer a "micro gateway" that lets the proxy component run anywhere and communicate with the rest of Apigee via an API. We'll be taking this hybrid mode further and the Istio integration is one of the things that will take advantage of that hybrid model.

(I work for the Apigee part of Google.)

<comment><USER5> >the whole product can be installed in your own datacenter

Could you please provide a link to documentation/articles that showcase this use case... on-premise installation of Apigee?

<comment><USER6> Here is what i found [http://docs.apigee.com/private- cloud/latest/overview](http://docs.apigee.com/private-cloud/latest/overview)

(I work at Apigee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There seems to be also other companies involved:

Redhat: [https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio- launch/](https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio-launch/)

Pivotal: [https://content.pivotal.io/blog/pivotal-and-istio- advancing-...](https://content.pivotal.io/blog/pivotal-and-istio-advancing- the-ecosystem-for-microservices-in-the-enterprise)

<comment><USER8> and isn't the entire solution just packaging a proxy developed and open- sourced by Lyft?

<comment><USER9> Envoy is a big part of the solution, yes. But it isn't the only component. A control plane layer, including an auth component and an adaptable policy enforcement and telemetry collection component, is included as well.

More info is available in the overview doc here: [https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is- istio/overview.html](https://istio.io/docs/concepts/what-is- istio/overview.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This may be the most important project in distributed computing in a long time. It solves some fundamental problems that layer 3 networking has been unable to tackle. Its initial integration with Kubernetes is great but long term it could be the basis of all application level communication whether it is deployed in a container orchestration system, VMs, bare metal or as an enabler for Lambda (function) frameworks.

<comment><USER11> What fundamental problems does it solve that layer 3 networking has been unable to tackle? Not pushing back - just ignorant and want to learn!

<comment><AUTHOR> If you adopt micro-services in earnest, a challenge you face is how to ensure that the right set of services can communicate (and only communicate with) the right other set of services. In a large organization, it's not unrealistic to have hundreds of services, and not all of them are fully trusted (some may be run by vendors, etc).

What's more, these things are being constantly deployed to a wide variety of environments. Some may be on cloud VMs (or a dynamically scaled cluster of VMs), some on bare metal, some in orchestrators like Kubernetes. Some will run on networks that the organization maintains, some may be maintained by a DC or cloud provider.

Historically the answer to securing this communication has been to use L3 network segmentation with strict rules to decide who can send packets to who. But, particularly in an increasingly heterogenous and dynamic environment it's very difficult to do this reliably and quickly. Networks are also a pretty crude authorization system - it implies that just because you can reach an endpoint that you are authorized to use it, which isn't necessarily true in practice. Some of the other benefits of Istio - like system-wide circuit breaking and flow control are also difficult to do purely at the network layer.

If you're interested in this, I'd encourage you to check out [https://spiffe.io/about](https://spiffe.io/about) which has some more detailed thoughts on the limitations of the L3 micro-segmentation approach and how it can be solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good Istio links; IBM post: [https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/?cm_mmc=dw-_- soc...](https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/?cm_mmc=dw-_- social1705-_-hackernews-_-istio)

Project Calico Network Policy Engine: [https://www.projectcalico.org/welcoming-istio-to-the- kuberne...](https://www.projectcalico.org/welcoming-istio-to-the-kubernetes- networking-community/)

WeaveWorks: [https://www.weave.works/docs/tutorials/istio/istio/](https://www.weave.works/docs/tutorials/istio/istio/)

RedHat: [https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio- launch/](https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio-launch/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Google's announcement: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio- modern-ap...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio-modern- approach-to-developing-and.html)

Istio website: [https://istio.io/](https://istio.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Istio blog post is excellent, and provides a lot more detail. [https://istio.io/blog/istio-service-mesh-for- microservices.h...](https://istio.io/blog/istio-service-mesh-for- microservices.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happened to dumb pipes, smart endpoints? We do the same things again that we did before with SOA, having hard-to-replace middleware / bus systems.

<comment><USER15> The REST architecture always included the possibility of gateways and proxies in the end-to-end communication path to delegate shared responsibilities out of the user agent or origin server. This balances the need for centralized admin of some things and decentralized deployment of other things. Most microservices systems, even if they're not using HTTP in favor of something like gRPC, Kafka, or Rabbit, are taking a lot of WebArch lessons to heart in how they manage their policies, routes, etc. balancing centralized management over decentralized evolution.

The problem with SOA-in-practice was that everything flowed through a monolithic ESB as both client and origin server, that needed to have omniscient knowledge of every route, transformation, etc., and was often a single administrative bottleneck, fault domain, etc. Some SOA frameworks had service mesh patterns where you could deploy decentralized engines with your services, but without cloud IaaS/PaaS circa 2006-2007, there was no way to maintain/deploy/upgrade these policy agents without a heavy operational burden.

In sum: CORBA, COM+ or SOAP/HTTP were about mostly-centralized approaches to distributed services, REST was about extreme decentralized evolution over decades, most are looking for something akin to a dial where they can have something a bit more controlled than dozens of independent gRPC/HTTP/Rabbit/Kafka producers-consumers but not stupid like the SOAP/HTTP days.

Modern cloud native service mesh approaches like this Istio thing (NetflixOSS Zuul+Eureka+Ribbon or Linkerd are alternatives) are just decentralized gateways and proxies, possibly with a console/management appliance that makes it easy to propagate changes out across a subset of your microservices. This has the benefit of allowing you to default to decentralized freedom for your various microservices but for areas where you want administrative control over policy over a set of them , you don't have to go in and tweak 15 different configs.

NetflixOSS really pioneered this pattern. Netflix managed to use things like Cassandra and Zuul hot-deploy filters as the means to updated routing/health/balancing configs across their fleet of microservices. There are alternative ways to handle this of course - Hashicorp's Consul piggybacks DNS and expects your client to figure things out via their REST API or DNS queries. There are also things like RabbitMQ or a REST-polling mechanism to propagate config changes perhaps, as not everyone wants Cassandra. New frameworks like Istio or Linkerd are further alternatives. We're spoiled for choice, better or worse..

<comment><USER16> Well said.

Besides Netflix, I'd put Twitter as an early pioneer, with their work on Finagle. Both of these companies, for better or worse, took a library-centric approach (Eureka/Hystrix/etc or the Finagle lib). This limited their applicability to the JVM.

The sidecar model that AirBnb pioneered with SmartStack, later adopted by Yelp and others was the cheapest way to get non-Java langs to have similar resilience/observability semantics. And now given the popularity of polyglot architectures, it's probably should be the default choice for companies adopting microservices.

<comment><USER14> Maybe a local proxy, deployed with the service, is a good answer to my objections, rather than having a centralised approach. This can help in polyglot environments, but remove any limitations a centralised solution would impose. Something like Istio would be an agent a service connects to locally, used for service discovery, complex routing or rate limiting. The configuration is service specific. Load balancing is done by "dumb" proxies, like in the old days.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you don't understand how Istio works. The Envoy proxy is locally deployed as a sidecar next to each process. The centralization is entirely for the control plane. The local proxy uses the centrally managed configuration for making local decisions about routing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google Cloud Platform Blog Post: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio-modern- ap...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/istio-modern-approach-to- developing-and.html)

<comment><USER7> There seems to be also other companies involved:

IBM: [https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/](https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/)

Redhat: [https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio- launch/](https://blog.openshift.com/red-hat-istio-launch/)

Pivotal: [https://content.pivotal.io/blog/pivotal-and-istio- advancing-...](https://content.pivotal.io/blog/pivotal-and-istio-advancing- the-ecosystem-for-microservices-in-the-enterprise)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great documentation and some really great tools included. I was able to get the platform running in minikube really quickly. Interested to compare this to linkerd.

<comment><USER19> My read of the documentation also indicates a large overlap with linkerd. Hopefully one of the creators is around and can do a compare/contrast.

<comment><USER20> One important difference I see is istio works only with kubernetes/bluemix, whereas linkerd has many more deployment options.

<comment><USER9> The initial release for Istio is targeted at kubernetes. However, Istio is designed to be easy to adapt to other environments. With community help, we anticipate extending it to enable services across cloud foundry, VM, and hybrid clouds. We hope to have major new releases every 3 months, including adding new environments.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, This is interesting. Currently where I work, we have not started using containers/schedulers etc. We simply use VMs for services. For now I simply want to experiment with these new technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this going to be a linkerd vs. istio thing? Like a Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes?

<comment><USER22> I was just wondering the same thing, since we use linkerd in production to handle thrift traffic to, from, and within our k8s clusters. But this statement from the examples page put me off a little: "If you use GKE, please ensure your cluster has at least 4 standard GKE nodes."

<comment><USER9> That suggestion is based on the requirements of the underlying bookinfo sample application and is not related to Istio itself.

Disclaimer: I work on Istio.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why does Lyft need 10,000 microservices? They probably have less than 100,000 active cabs at any point in time?

<comment><USER24> "spanning 10,000+ VMs handling 100+ microservices" ?

<comment><USER23> Sorry...thanks...let me clarify the question, why on earth does Lyft have 10,000 VMs??? They have less than 200,000 rides per day. That's a 1 VM to 20 rides per day ratio.

<comment><USER25> I guess they're building with future growth in mind. What if they decide to expand to the rest of North America in the near future and have a sudden spike?

<comment><USER26> Then you spin up more VMs when you do the expansion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why aren't more people using MQ for inter-service messaging (something like RabbitMQ) instead of HTTP?

<comment><USER28> MQ shines in async calls/event delivery. gRPC / http2 / websockets / thrift is better for synchronous calls ?

<comment><USER29> With the ISO/oasis standard AMQP you can actually do synchronous calls without an intermediary. You also have 'direct' message routing capability with components like apache qpid dispatch router.

I can't see a reason why one would use gRPC/thrift and then having to build flow control, delivery guarantees and other messaging features yourself.

<comment><USER30> gRPC is built on http/2\. I imagine it supports flow control and delivery guarantees already? It's just http/2 + protobuf

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can someone ELI5 how is this relating to, and complementing, Kubernetes? What does it do that Kube doesn't, and what does Kube do that Istio doesnt?

<comment><USER9> Kubernetes supports a microservices architecture through the Service construct and performs rudimentary L4 load balancing and more.

But it doesn't help with higher-level problems, such as L7 metrics, rate limiting and circuit breaking.

This is where Istio comes in.

Disclaimer: I work on Istio.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Regarding API management in the context of Istio:

[https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital- business/simplifying-m...](https://apigee.com/about/blog/digital- business/simplifying-microservices-management)

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice to see that this comes with Prometheus and OpenTracing instrumentation!

</comment><comment><USER33> IBM's announcement: [https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/](https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/istio/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is the sidecar-container-within-a-pod the only deployment option on Kubernetes currently? Is a daemonset deployment (like what Linkerd does) option currently in the works?

<comment><USER35> We have been looking into a per-node deployment model from the beginning, which is what daemonset is doing. Things get more complicated across the board with the transparent traffic capture at the node network namespace level, invasive installation requiring tight integration with k8s and reconciling iptables rules, and a more complicated workload identity story. We have started with the sidecar model, but are certainly interested in more deployment options

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious what the benefit of side-loading proxies and load balancing versus centralization provides?

<comment><USER37> Check out [1] for an overview of the trade-offs.

Disclaimer: I work on Istio

1\. [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/kubernetes-sig- netwo...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/kubernetes-sig- network/weni52UMrI8/TUQ8fN5-DwAJ)

<comment><USER36> I'm not seeing any benefits though, there are a lot of assumptions and emotional comments here not any hard evidence of it being a better solution.

There is actually a lack of it, there is only connotative evidence here in one comment that refers to "hey look linkerd does this at scale" that sounds nice, except that is not necessarily the point or the case.

How is having side-loaded proxies _better_ or more beneficial than having it separate? It doesn't appear to be discussed or mentioned in this thread, all of the arguments made for doing so are equally applicable to the separation of the proxy.

<comment><USER35> Early in the design, we have looked at various modes of proxy deployment and found that there are pros and cons for each. You are right that the sidecar model is not always the optimal choice, it's a trade-off (see the referenced document in the discussion). The sidecar is the least invasive approach with respect to Kubernetes and was the focus for the initial release. We'd be happy to hear arguments for a more centralized proxy model, and if needed invest effort into making it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://istio.io/docs/concepts/network-and- auth/auth.html](https://istio.io/docs/concepts/network-and-auth/auth.html)

No option for OAuth2 or JWT? Maybe I'm not understanding the problem Istio solves vs. Envoy

<comment><USER38> Good question. The auth work for this release is mainly focusing on service- to-service authentication. We are looking into adding OAuth2 and JWT support for enduser auth in the future release.

Disclaimer: I work on Istio

<comment><USER21> Cool. Also - what does Istio use for persistence? I imagine it's gonna persist the data for auth'ing stuff somewhere.

<comment><USER39> If you're referring to where the key/cert is persisted, it's currently facilitated by Kubernetes' secrets and mounted into Envoy container

Disclaimer: I work on Istio

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Lyft developed the Envoy proxy to aid their microservices journey, which > brought them from a monolithic app to a production system spanning 10,000+ > VMs handling 100+ microservices.

Are those numbers right? Wouldn't it be the other way around realistically?

<comment><USER41> One of the benefits of microservices is the ability to trivially deploy many versions to improve performance and uptime.

You should be using service discovery and deploying multiple instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> There is a lot to like about this move. Microservices and service mesh's are certainly an interesting area right now...and this represents a big push from some big players.

</comment><comment><USER43> I know it's a higher architecture. But could anyone tell me the difference between istio and springcloud/dubbo?

</comment><comment><USER44> In case anyone is interesting in using Azure Container Service with the builtin Kubernetes orchestrator, I wrote an easy tutorial [1] for deploying Istio.

[1]: [https://readon.ly/post/2017-05-25-deploy-istio-to-azure- cont...](https://readon.ly/post/2017-05-25-deploy-istio-to-azure-container- service/)

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a great product! Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER46> > Really interested to hear user feedback from today's #istio announcement and > where it will have the biggest impact.

Okay: I immediately deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise your announcement and for just one, really simple, dirt simple, but totally unforgivable reason: What the heck is a "microservice"? You never said.

That word, _microservice_ , is not in a standard English dictionary, so you are writing undefined jargon, gibberish, junk and not English. You are insulting me and even worse yourself.

Instead, write English. Get rid of the undefined jargon.

Got it?

This was a difficult lesson?

> the biggest impact

Until you learn to communicate at, say, the late elementary grade school level, e.g., learn to write English, the impact promises to be minimal.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure if you're trolling or genuinely don't understand, so I think I can help you a little bit.

Microservices are services that are generally containerized and are easily distributable through some form of a network to be easily replaceable parts. These services are defined by a specification where they do a single task, expose some endpoint or API and are composable with other microservices.

There is a need for these services to talk to each other, and to external services and to do this they use some form of a meshing network. These networks right now are done through container networks, such as the Docker Overlay Network, the Kubernetes "POD" system, linkerd, serf, and a multitude of other systems like istio. It is a space or area of concern, because there is no singular approach to all these differing container services right now. So all of them are vying to be the one that wins.

The issue that I find here is that you're looking in an English dictionary while these are technical networking / operating system terminologies and that dictionary will not help you in this namespace.

This page might help you a little more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices)

Also: Service being, a backend or software that performs some action based on an input / output

<comment><USER46> Nice. Thanks. I'm perfectly serious -- obviously the OP didn't define microservices -- you did. Good for you. Bad for the OP.

Okay, microservices look like what used to be called _agents_. For their communications there have been various efforts at ways to define data _objects_ , complete with a _registration hierarchy_ (that is, a case of public naming) and an _inheritance hierarchy_ (roughly like some of inheritance in some cases of object oriented software). So, we had _object request brokers,_ CORBA or some such. And we had the ISO/OSI CMIS/CMIP where ISO maybe abbreviates international standards organization, where OSI may abbreviate something in French, where some international telecommunications group, maybe part of the UN, was involved, and where CMIS abbreviated common management information system, and CMIP, common management information protocol, all mostly aimed at computer and network system monitoring and management. The work was somehow close to some old Unix work with management information base and ASN.1 -- abstract syntax notation version 1. Whew!

Okay, if there are to be lots of such microservices, as you nicely described, then they will want to be able to communicate. So, maybe they will want to use JSON (as I understand it, essentially just name-value pairs -- from Google, JavaScript Object Notation and, thus, maybe more than just name-value pairs), other _mark up_ languages,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_document_markup_languages)

etc. But we'd have to suspect that there needs to be some common global standards and data definitions.

Okay. Gee, in the past I went through a lot of that CMIS/CMIP, ASN.1, etc. stuff, wrote some internal papers, wrote some software, etc. so was totally torqued at _microservices_ without definitions. Right, maybe the hidden secret is that we're supposed to retreat to Wikipedia for the undefined terms and acronyms -- bummer.

But, I still wonder: How popular, pervasive, important, practical so far are _microservices_? E.g., are they a lot like _agents_ for system monitoring and management? Where are microservices getting to be important.

No, I'm not trolling. And with your description of microservices, we're making progress here.

<comment><USER47> There's some reading here [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microservice&sort=byPopularity...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microservice&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER46> Good. Maybe the OP should have given the reference.

My main interest here is not microservices but just to tell the HN and computing community to be much more careful with undefined terminology and acronyms.

Here we now have some good descriptions and references on _microservices_. Good.

My main point is that articles on computing need to have, gee, call them _links_ , to explain jargon and acronyms, to explain stuff not in an English dictionary. The OP on microservices I am using just as an example.

To me, poor technical writing in computing and computer documentation has been one of the worst obstacles to my startup -- darned near killed my startup -- and is a sore point.

<comment><USER47> I guess my point is that microservices have been well trodden in this forum context, I would not expect every article to require a basic primer explaining every concept

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> [Deleted]

<comment><USER49> Well surprised or not, what you see in Istio is the result of contributions from all 3 founding parties. My team on the IBM side did much of the work on the Istio Manager and added capabilities in Envoy too, such as support for zipkin tracing.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My music discovery website - <AUTHOR> http://www.coding-music.com/

<comment><USER2> The submit page it's almost unreadable! =)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you work in an open office plan and get anything done? - <AUTHOR>

I started at a company that has an open office plan (i.e. where everyone sits in the same big open room and can freely walk between people).  For those of you who have been doing this for awhile: how do you get anything done?  One day I noticed that I got interrupted about every 20 minutes by something..even with the super duper noise canceling headphones.  The times that I don't work in the office feel orders of magnitude more productive.  Thanks. <comment><USER2> I hate open office plan environments. I feel very lucky to work from my own home office full time now. That being said, I've done my time in open offices. Some things to try:

\- Try saying "No" to interruptions. This is probably better worded as "Sorry, I'm really heads down on something right now - can you shoot me an email about it, or maybe I can come find you later?" Do that enough, and people will grow out of the habit of constantly interrupting, because there's no reward.

\- Develop a signal for your coworkers that indicates you're in "heads down" mode and that you shouldn't be disturbed. When I worked at Google, one of the SREs had a sign on his desk that said "If Cody is wearing the rockstar glasses, he is thinking and shouldn't be disturbed". I've also visited offices that have sliding whiteboard doors on their cubicles, and the office policy is that if the whiteboard door is open, you're fair game to interrupt, but if it's closed, you need to be left alone.

\- In ear headphones may be better than noise canceling, if you haven't tried those. I have a nice pair of shure's (SE210's) with these tips, which are pretty similar to earplugs: <http://compare.ebay.com/like/290692040848>. I also had custom molded earpieces made, but I could never get one to make a good seal. The other one was great though, so it might be worth a shot.

\- Try coming in early or staying late. Any time spent when the office is more empty will likely be more productive.

\- Hide:) Conference rooms are good, and out of the way couches or stairwells sometimes work.

As someone who is way more productive in quiet environments with minimal distractions, I wish open plan offices and "bullpen" environments weren't so trendy among startups.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have never actually heard an engineer ever proclaim why an open office plan is definitively a better approach to do things. I have heard things like "Foster open communication" or "Collaboration" but I am not really clear why one couldn't collaborate online or slip into a meeting room and conspire. I haven't got a good answer from non-engineering folks who usually decide on the office plan.

Rant aside, I try to get to work incredibly early and get a significant portion of my work done then. Another option as someone else suggested is in- ear phones. These can vary from $200 (Shure) to $500 (Westone ) for a really awesome pair and can get some getting used to, however they surpass active noise cancellation headphones in terms of shutting down coworker noise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Worked in that environment for 5 years... I honestly never found a way. Now work mostly remotely.

I feel like I tried everything - headphones, locking myself in meeting rooms, being uninviting when people interrupted.

I wish I could tell you a story about how I figured it out but now I only take jobs that are at least semi-remote. I would consider a job where there are real offices for everyone but this seems to be increasingly difficult to find.

I'd talk to your boss about working remote 2-3 days a week and proving how much more productive you are during those days.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I ended up talking to management and arranged to work from home a few days a week, mostly coming in on meeting days or team stuff. I asked them for a trial initially, and when they saw how productive I was when I wasn't in, they were instantly sold on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I worked in an open office, we had a small team of developers. We all wore headphones when we were in the zone, and we communicated during unofficial "quiet time" by using campfire. Eventually, we all started to complete 60 - 90 minute quiet time focused work sprints followed by 5 minutes of break time and joking, before starting the cycle again. It was weird how we all fell into a similar pattern. It made our team stronger, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Two rules we use to manage interruptions: 1) If I have headphones on, IM me. I will respond when convenient. 2) If I am pairing, a server better be on fire.

We make the pair sacrosanct. A greater emphasis on pairing means there is one fewer person to distract you.

Still, there are times when a quiet room is necessary. Striking the balance between productive cross-polination of ideas and total chaos is a tricky dance.

</comment><comment><USER8> Work from home, get in at 5am, leave at 8pm, have a 'meeting' at an empty desk elsewhere, and finally try to find another job. The problem is that there are lots of roles where success depends on other people. If everyone at the company is doing their own heads down work, this becomes a major issue for people in those roles. It's no mistake that you are being interrupted every 20 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I get in early and do the concentration intensive work then if I can. I've (re)trained myself to tune out stuff. I naturally tune people out but I got rusty when I worked alone in my home office for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER10> Chat, not talk. Reserve talking (interruptions) for critical things. Everything else, chat even if the person is directly next to you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Idea paint. We painted our room with idea paint (white board paint) I actually think better in there then anywhere!

</comment><comment><USER12> buy a couple of cubes. let people use them when they don't want to be distrubed.</comment>


Wanted: Awesome HTML5 app ports for Firefox OS and the Open Web - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/02/firefox-apps-programs-2014/ <comment><USER2> Browsers are supposed to be the new "platform" of the future. But their source code is so gigantic and inaccessible. A regular dev can't just pop in and help out, they have to learn a ton about internal browser infrastructure that they don't really deal with, and the learning curve is very steep. Contrast this with Linux, where most of us know the command line and can create/edit command line utilities much more easily.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, the Linux kernel is similarly opaque (although I agree that browser engines should make more of an effort to be clean and easy to understand—something we're working on with Servo!)

I think the right analogues to userspace utilities are something like Angular or jQuery, which are much easier to understand than the browser "kernel".

<comment><USER4> It's significantly easier for someone (an outsider) to build the Linux kernel for the first time than any of the OS browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do you want phonegap apps? Isnt the point of firefox os being web app ready?

<comment><USER6> They don't. They want apps that are ported to Firefox os from phonegap apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the Web is Open can I use my favourite language - C# in mainstream browsers without transpiling?

<comment><USER4> Even on Windows your C# "transpiles" to CIL.

<comment><USER8> But the performance doesn't degrade quite as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought HTML5 was renamed to just "HTML" you know, to be more clear and open like FireFox dropping version numbers.</comment>


Is this a bug in how hotmail handles outgoing email addresses? - <AUTHOR> http://tedroden.tumblr.com/post/3226704329/when-you-send-an-email-via-hotmail-it-converts

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what the article says: When you send an email via hotmail, it converts the entire address to lowercase. So if you enter "firstname.lastname@example.com," hotmail converts it to "firstname.lastname@example.com." Despite the RFC (linked in the article)</comment>


Swiftype: The Biggest Search Engine You've Never Heard Of - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/quin-hoxie-swiftype-interview/

<comment><USER2> Swiftype is fantastic. I've been using their service to power search on my Octopress blog since last May when they were still in Beta, and I've loved every moment of it.

Their REST API is also fantastic; I've modified my deploy Octopress rake task to automatically hit the endpoint that requests a recrawl of my site so that the results are always up to date. At first I felt a little dirty doing it, but I engaged them on Twitter (this was last year when I first implemented it, too lazy to find the records) and they actually encouraged it. A great team, and a really awesome product.

<comment><USER3> Their pricing plan only list on demand crawl at the top tier... i assume you have a very big blog?

<comment><USER2> I don't, now that you mention that it's entirely possible that my crawling scheme doesn't work anymore. The beta was 100% free and I didn't pay much attention to what changed when the beta ended.

<comment><USER4> We still allow this. You are just more limited in how frequently you can do an on-demand crawl with the free plan versus a paid plan.

You can also ping our API to update a specific URL immediately, which is really helpful is cases like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Swiftype is one of those products that is so easy to implement, you'll think you missed a few steps. It improved the search on our docs immensely in a few minutes. I also really like the ability to easily customize results.

As a bonus, we've found an unexpected benefit of getting a feedback loop on how to improve our docs by getting a list of the most popular searches and those that have not returned results. It quickly shows us where we have holes in our documentation.

</comment><comment><USER6> The real link is here: [https://swiftype.com/](https://swiftype.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I actually can't tell which parts of that page are ads and which are the real content.

<comment><USER8> I got the same feeling from a couple of comments in this thread

<comment><USER9> That's the way I feel every time I step into a HN thread about either a company being bought out or a company making their debut on HN. The almost instant responses of glowing reviews and praise for the service seem suspicious, but I have no way of knowing if the product/service really is that good or if the product/service has some dedicated fans commenting for them. It really is hard to tell the difference. I get accusations that I must work for Microsoft all the time because I'm one of the few people who don't hate everything they do. Since I'm well aware of the false positive rate for calling out paid comments, I tend to just not say anything even when I'm suspicious of another commenter. It _is_ possible to just truly like the product/service being talked about.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the record, both of the people who have praised Swiftype in this thread are actual Swiftype customers, and both of them have written about Swiftype on their own sites (without prompting from us).

[http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype- inte...](http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-integration- and-an-explanation-of-how-to-do-it/)

[http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update- mailgun-d...](http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun- default-smtp-config-for-rackspace-managed-cloud-plus-better-search-on-docs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We pay $79 a month for swiftype. We use it for our site search, using the developer API.

The big thing for us is that we have member's only content and we want to ensure what exactly is indexed and what is not. This was an issue with using Google site search especially since the rankings would get skewed by Google including words in our site template.

We've also added in custom filters like searching by author, date, category, etc.

If I remember correctly, we paid about $1000 a year to Google for our site search before this, so the money is about even but the overall search quality, accuracy and options have gone up.

</comment><comment><USER11> Swiftype is a site search engine. The title makes it sound more like a generic web search engine.

<comment><USER12> That's right. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.</comment></comment>


A switch that lets one photon alter the quantum state of another - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-photon-quantum-state.html

<comment><USER2>
      And if the first photon was in some weird quantum state, where it can't be said to have struck the atoms or not, the second photon will be both extra-delayed and not extra-delayed at the same time.

Maybe it's just me, but these always come out sounding massively hand-wavy and scare off a lot of people (or make you look like an idiot, depending on how much respect they have for physicists). I think the fix would be mostly a matter of coming up with terminology that doesn't fall flat on its ass, but still remains accessible, because, on the other hand, speaking of amplitude distributions would kind of alienate a lot of people.

Anyway, much more importantly - it's a clever little engineering trick to entangle the two photons. However, and I will say I have not researched the topic of quantum computing - doesn't operating them require interference between the different branches of the system at some point to get meaningful results? If so, you would need to get two or more branches to end up in exactly the same state, and nothing in the article mentions that the cesium atoms that have been altered will reset without outside influence.

Anyway, I put the conditional probability that I know everything about the system or quantum mechanics awfully close to 0, so it's more of a curiosity (how would you make it work?) instead of a genuine concern.

<comment><USER3> That terminology is an approximation of explaining the math that is used to describe what's going on at a quantum level. Basically you end up with a matrix that has one part describing one outcome, and another part describing a different outcome. Both outcomes have to be considered part of the same system, you can't have one without the other. For example, the "quantum bomb tester" [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester) requires both paths to be available at the same time, or the system would behave differently. This isn't just a thought experiment, it's been experimentally verified. Without the bomb of course :)

<comment><USER2> Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no trouble with multiple outcomes, or to put it in a different way, the whole wavefunction being real. Otherwise you'd have a pretty strange time explaining interference ("oh, one thing is real, but it considers the other possibilities anyways" or "oh no, the waveform hasn't collapsed just yet, but it will once we observe it"). In fact, the Feynman path integral, i.e. the sum over all histories, appeals a lot to me on a conceptual level.

But that isn't the point really. I just feel like saying "oh, it's in some weird quantum state of being both this and that at the same time" is a bit disingenuous, since it is not true in any classical sense, which, shockingly, most people would assume and get utterly confused. It is necessarily true if you consider many worlds as the valid interpretation (which I do like, but let's not go there), but it doesn't I think hint that well enough, nor does it hint that we have entered a cloud of possibilities that is about to collapse if that was the point.

More than just being clear on what is physically happening (and I do say "oh, it's just equations, they have no meaning" is the biggest hand waving of all), it feels kind of immature. The tone hints to a confusion in the speaker, as if we've just gotten these strange experimental results and we're not sure how to deal with them yet. It's something that could've been acceptable when practically nothing was known about quantum mechanics, but more than half a century later?

And to be perfectly fair, I'm not sure how you would phrase the wavefunction / amplitude distribution to at least give someone without knowledge of the subject a workable model. Maybe the inferential distance is too long to even have a not completely wrong intuition, but I feel we can do better.</comment></comment></comment>


Paul Rand's Unused Ford Logo from 1966 - <AUTHOR> http://imjustcreative.com/paul-rands-unused-ford-logo-from-1966/2010/12/23/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one seeing an F having sexual intercourse with a bent over person, who is performing oral sex on the d ahead?

<comment><USER3> Great, now I can't stop seeing that.

<comment><USER4> Good thing it never became the official logo then!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can see why it was unused. Looks like it says "Foid."

<comment><USER6> Lots of corporate logos give up on being readable and instead go for something stylistic, and only vaguely based on letters. Look at the LG logo in the top left of this page:

<http://www.lg.com/us/index.jsp>

Ford could have gone down that route as well, if it wanted to.

<comment><USER7> LG used to be Goldstar I think, until they screwed up their brand name by building lousy quality products. It sort of makes sense why they'd want a cryptic smileyface instead :-D

<comment><USER8> close. Lucky Goldstar

<comment><USER9> I think LG came from a merger of Lucky and Goldstar. Goldstar used to make low quality products, I have never used a Lucky product. Then merged and rebranded under LG.

<http://www.vb.com/lg.htm> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Electronics>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this article is more interesting: [http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/the-ford-logo- tha...](http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/the-ford-logo-that-almost- was/)

<comment><USER7> More images please :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks a lot like the Durex logo. <http://popsop.ru/wp- content/uploads/durex_logo_old.jpg>

<comment><USER12> Do you know when the Durex logo was done? I can't find the date. I am wondering who influenced who.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ford is one of those companies where a logo redesign would be crazy. As a company it has followers so rusted on it's not uncommon to see 'Ford' tattoos.

While Toyota, Mazda and others have fiddled with their designs over the years, I think a long-lasting company like Ford should leave things as is. It's true, the current blue oval doesn't go right back to the start of the company, but the styling of the font is well linked to the original logos.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, it's really evocative of a speeding car, yet really closely mirrors the classic logo.

<comment><USER15> The minimalist in me would prefer 1 or 2 more iterations. Maybe without the strange dot off the 'd' and the superfluous flair on the 'F'.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately Rand would have browbeaten you into oblivion.

He was a legendary curmudgeon, and would often try to defeat the client's meddling by saying something like: "you pay me for a solution. I'll make it, then you can decide whether you want to implement it."

<comment><USER17> Steve Jobs remarked as much in an interview once (Paul Rand designed the NeXT logo): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJthkRrQcfo> (around 1:40).

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the link context; probably where I quoted from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Beautiful! Looks influenced by an Indian script or maybe Thai. I wish I knew enough to be more specific.

Edit: After much googling, it looks like maybe it was inspired by Kannada script? <http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-kannada.html>

</comment><comment><USER19> Seeing this makes me suspect that Rand had pretty strict mandate to not stray too far from the original Ford logo, which could explain the ugliness of this design when compared to the simple elegance of some of his other work.

</comment><comment><USER20> Beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER21> For a second I was like "Rand Paul used to design logos?"

Then I was all "That's silly, he would have been like three years old when he did that logo."</comment>


What I know about Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nikolaj/what-i-know-about-minecraft-cd62aab4be92 <comment><USER2> A coworker of mine was telling me a story about how his son was supposed to be doing some homework with his friends. He walked in and saw him playing minecraft on the xbox. My coworker was obviously mad that his son was playing a video game instead of doing homework… until his son showed him that he was doing homework. They were all logged in to minecraft using the blocks to solve math problems.

That same coworker describes minecraft as an 11 year old boy's Facebook. I think he has a great point. Minecraft is more than a game now.

<comment><USER3> The 7yo was ridiculously delighted to find servers you can play on, including roleplaying on, and talk to other people!

(yes, her computer's in the lounge and we keep an eye on what she's doing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I worked on a couple things for Mojang, including the relationship with LEGO, which originally was meant to be much more encompassing had it not been for the poor attitude of LEGO's IP lawyers who were so counter to the culture of Minecraft and LEGO that it ultimately killed the deal."

Wonder if Lego will come to regret that or if they're strong enough to see off a threat in this space?

If your kids play Minecraft, have they also played Lego?

<comment><USER5> Just another friendly reminder that when your lawyers do whats safest for your company from a _legal_ perspective, that's not automatically whats best for your company from a _business_ perspective. This goes triple when it comes to "IP".

<comment><USER6> Just another friendly reminder that your lawyers give advice, they do not (usually) decide. It's easy to say "kill all the lawyers" and all that, but the reality is that for every finger wagging pack of lawyers, there's a management team that doesn't have the stones to say "we understand the risk and it's worth it to proceed anyway".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed the article, but this was the most provocative line.

"Microsoft bought Minecraft to keep its desktop Windows franchise alive."

Is this really still about desktop operating systems?

<comment><USER8> I don't understand the line of thinking that went into that. How on earth is minecraft going to save windows? It is available on windows so everyone will suddenly throw common sense out the window and buy windows PCs for no reason?

<comment><USER9> Well, Minecraft involves producing content not just consuming it. So people with enough common sense to be able to produce something will get PCs... Or Macs. The rest will be playing Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga on their tablets.

<comment><USER8> Sure they will get PCs. They likely already have one. With an apple on it. The notion that people will flock back to minecraft is MS makes it windows only just doesn't seem realistic. They will be more likely to just move to a minecraft clone that isn't windows only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't the price tag quite sad for a product that influenced the world that much? I think even my parents have heard about Minecraft by now.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Simply put, Microsoft bought Minecraft to keep its desktop Windows franchise > alive.

If he's right, then Minecraft's support lifespan on non-Microsoft platforms can be measured in months, not years.

</comment><comment><USER12> His "Games Redefine Entertainment" video is a good watch (short, 11 mins): [http://vimeo.com/97757759](http://vimeo.com/97757759)

</comment><comment><USER9> "...did anyone ever care about how much money the founder of LEGO, Mr. Kirk, ever made..." \- er, yes. Especially here on HN I believe.

"...I don't even think my 12- and 8-year old sons know what Word is..." \- it means something, right? I mean it's so common for 12- and 8- years old to be using some sort of powerful text editor. I forgot the last time I used iOS, it's getting obsolete and dying, right?

</comment><comment><USER13> "he consistent manner with which Markus, Jakob and Carl steered Mojang out of the principle of doing the community right, is outright admirable."

That sentence made my brain hurt.

</comment><comment><USER14> If Minecraft is worth 2.5 billion, how much is Dwarf Fortress (an all around superior game) worth?

<comment><USER15> Next to nothing.

First, it's not obviously superior. The learning curve, both for playing and creating, is _much_ higher. Proponents with slight (or more than slight) elitist tendencies might see that as a positive, but everyone else sees it as a negative. Also, the mechanics of DF don't lend themselves as well to free- form experimentation as Minecraft's. As a GAME with a goal etc. perhaps DF is better, but as an ACTIVITY and particularly as a learning experience it's far behind.

More importantly, the value of Minecraft goes well beyond the game itself. It's also about the community, the business relationships, the approval of educators. There's a maker place that my daughter goes to, where they offer several very popular courses in Minecraft building and modding. There are probably thousands of such places, and millions of individual kids talking about Minecraft after school. Critical mass matters, and DF will never have that.

So you enjoy DF more? Bully for you. Your enjoyment DOES NOT MATTER in terms of valuation. "Worth" is determined directly by the purchaser, indirectly by the market as a whole, not at all by the opinion of one person who wasn't involved.</comment></comment>


Siri, Quora, And The Future Of Search - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/siriquora-and-the-future-of-search/ <comment><USER3> The problem with the idea of "an internet on which the best answers to the majority of our queries come not from the vast, increasingly noisy expanses of the world-wide-web but from the concentrated knowledge and experience of its most articulate experts" doesn't exist on any sort of large scale. A site that gets you in conversation with intelligent insiders and hooks them in with upvotes used to be called Reddit. We see what happens to that on a large scale (which, in Quora's case, doesn't even seem to be in the cards).

Google and Wikipedia work because they don't limit who has a voice (initially, of course). They gather every contribution, and then make a decision. That way they can be both more comprehensive and often better sources of information than some guy who has a bit of cachet in a community.

</comment><comment><USER4> Quora has the worst karma-whorage of any site out there and its more about who answers the questions rather than what they say. This has killed its credibility in my mind. (Contrast this with Stack Overflow, which is about high quality answers and doesn't seem to suffer from whoring for karma)

<comment><USER5> I agree there's something to your observation. And yet, Quora doesn't show karma totals or leaderboards, while SO does.

How does Quora get more distracting status/attitude-competition when answers are only ranked against each other in the context of a single question – a tiny subset of the gamesmanship-encouragement that SO implements?

Is it the greater subjectivity of Quora's topics? The vague pretentiousness of its seed community? Or something else?

<comment><USER6> IMO it has to do with the fact that Quora forces you to state your real name and credentials when creating an account. Although certain people will feel this is the way to ensure answers are given by the best possible authority on a subject, it actually hinders the meritocracy of user-driven content. Uneducated but well-informed Quora users may feel it's not worth their time to contribute, because they'll just be overshadowed by someone with better credentials. In essence, it's like paying for a game's DLC instead of putting in the time to earn it on your own, cheapening the experience for all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Siri disappoints me.

It is limited to the 10 styles of commands and it from what I have read it cant interpret different grammatical forms of similar search contexts.

I have written software that can do the barebones of what Siri can do (www.samir-ahmed.com/iris.html). It is far less efficient flexible and polished. But I have 6 months of software experience and Siri has 8 years of DARPA quality experience.

I dont think that google is going to suffer to much unless

A - Siri can integrate well with other apps so that app developers can contribute to its grammar and its ability to interface with twitter, foursquare, facebook, open table etc. This is open the floodgates for Siri to basically be the ultimate iPhone utility, allowing people to use it to interface with their entire phone in a new way

B - Siri starts to get smarter - and I mean creepy smart. When your wife sends you an email, Siri needs to read it. Understand what your wife is like, and store that information. It needs to do this with every contact so that it has context. This will require an immense amount of machine learning and natural language processing. What this will do however, is open the doors for a variety of new applications.

You can data mine with Siri E.g -"What did my wife ask me to pick up from the supermarket"

When you query your contacts, it can make smart recommendations E.g -"Remind me to buy my wife a present" Siri can look into your correspondence and make recommendations.

Being able to do all these things will make Siri an order of magnitude more useful, open to door to advertising revenue too and kick Google in the balls.

Until Siri can do these things, Siri is will not be the future of search.

<comment><USER8> Samir, I read through your site and the sample video and it looks quite impressive. Put a good-looking front-end to it and I don't know how anyone would differentiate it from Siri, except for some differences in what API 'verbs' the system is capable (Siri knows how to manage my calendar, but Iris knows how to get content from YouTube, for example). Iris even knows how to concisely get some info that Siri doesn't perform well with; for example, it gives a concise summary in response to a question about who a particular soccer player is, whereas Siri would probably just punt me to the web or at best pull up a long WolframAlpha response.

Anyone know why Siri seems only as capable (and in some respects less so) than this 4 week project done by a junior in college? Or (besides the UI work) is there something majorly different?

My understanding is that the speech recognition isn't special with Siri, Apple just licensed tech from Nuance, known for their Dragon Dictation product line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If TC had any reliable source on a $1 billion Google offer for Quora, wouldn't that morsel have gotten it's own story, rather than being trickled out indirectly in a guest post?

Someone – maybe someone who'd like to make it true via self-fulfilling premature reporting – has been pushing the ill-sourced 'gossip' of such an offer since Quora's last funding round. Nicholas Carlson gave the gossip a more sober treatment back in February:

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-22/tech/30094132...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-22/tech/30094132_1_quora- answers-com-adam-d-angelo)

</comment><comment><USER9> " most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market"

Huh ? So no other consumer-facing product's AI can match a smart STT? Google Search, Kinect, handwriting recognition.. nothing ?

<comment><USER10> Just watch this video[1] of Siri asking for the user to choose Home or Work and then after the user, who has a heavily accented English, says "work" twice it offers up "walk" and "wall". There are only two possible answers, both his replies start with a "w", the first ends with a "k", and this "most sophisticate piece of AI to ever see the light of the consumer market" can't figure out he probably means work?

Edit: I work with, and know personally, a lot of geeks, hackers and researchers. I don't know anyone who uses Quora or thinks it's the key to anything.

[1]<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiU8GPlsZqE>

<comment><AUTHOR> "I work with, and know personally, a lot of geeks, hackers and researchers. I don't know anyone who uses Quora or thinks it's the key to anything."

What about Stack Overflow?

<comment><USER10> I know it's not popular on Hacker News, but actually AI research has little to do with Lisp/the language of the moment or the Q&A website of the moment. It's to do with algorithms and core datasets. Watson being one example that's not just based on shuffling around email and setting alarms on your phone.[1] Andrew Ng's work at Stanford is another example of something that's feeding into really changing the world, not the HN stereotype of two ivy grads doing a ruby on rails app which gets an edge in a market dominated by a few lumbering megacorporations. Not that both aren't important, but there is a heavy bias on HN toward the latter, and new languages, rather than core research and algorithms.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I "love" those articles sticking "Quora" next to every major tech buzzword. Yet quora is not relevant for me anymore. Are you guys still on quora?

<comment><USER12> This is just typical Techcrunch kingmaking, no different than any other popular news source leveraging its position of influence.

<comment><USER13> Based on third party traffic measurement services, it appears that quora is roughly the same size as hacker news

<comment><USER12> What is the relevance of the traffic numbers?

(Not trolling, I'm just wondering what I'm missing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's really saying anything more than: Quora, as a knowledge-store, can power mobile search. I say mobile search, since that seems to be the implication of his dream of a siri-quora collaboration.

But is knowledge extraction from Quora really so game-changing with respect to the mobile web? Don't get me wrong--I love Quora and I think it's an incredible knowledge resource online.

But I think the power of siri comes from real-time knowledge (that is, knowledge or information that is useful to us while we're on the go). My experience on Quora has been so much more about intelligent, high-quality content than about real-time, practical, in-the-moment information.

</comment><comment><USER15> The "future of search" is very intimately related to the "future of AI", and quite frankly, Quora has nothing to do with either, except that maybe it will be a decent source of answers to specific questions about startups...

As for the future of search and AI, the way I see things, there are eventually going to be two main AI camps that emerge (NB, I'm not saying that this is the state of the AI field right now, but I think it will segregate more along these lines in the next few years):

1) Big data AI: this is the Google style of AI, which usually assumes that the best way to do AI tasks is to use fairly naive algorithms and toss truckloads of data at them.

2) Deep model AI: this group is more about models, and believes that the best approach is to extract as much structure as possible from a limited data set. More data helps, to be sure, but the emphasis is more on getting as much as possible out of the data rather than getting more data.

The way things are going now, Google is going to win at big-data AI, no ifs, ands, or buts - they've got more data than just about anyone. So the way I see it, the only way someone is actually going to unseat Google is if it turns out that deep-model is a workable approach (thus far it hasn't had many serious successes), and Google doesn't focus on it early enough (because if they _do_ , then their massive data availability will make sure they win anyways - <USER2> said, the folks like Peter Norvig driving the attention at Google are very explicitly in favor of data-based approaches, so I don't see Google leading the pack on model-centric research).

IMO there are some good reasons to think that deep-model approaches are viable: despite Google's massive billion-book data sets, humans are still better at doing, for instance, translation, despite the fact that a good translator might have only received the equivalent of maybe .1% of the input that Google leans on for its translation approach. The question is, will anyone actually figure out how to do it well? That's up in the air, but the fact that evolution figured out how to do it means that it's probably not terribly difficult, we just haven't looked in the right places yet.

My personal opinion is that the main pinch point in the typical big-data approach is that it's limited by statistical correctness, whereas human intelligence is not (we happily assume patterns exist in data even when we don't have enough data to make a proper statistical inference, and then we filter out incorrect assumptions later, also by using statistically incorrect heuristics and patterns - in other words, we're usually wrong, but sometimes we get lucky, and as long as we can eventually recognize that we're wrong, we do just fine). I think deep-model hopefuls would be wise to look more seriously at explicitly statistically unsound approaches if they want a shot at beating out big-data...

<comment><USER16> Deep model is progressing much more rapidly than the statistical card-trick algorithms, Boltzmann machines, and in specific Restricted Boltzmann machines already vastly outperform SVM (By which I mean to say both Structured and Support vector machines) in a number of hidden model discovery tasks related to CV and is taking a lot of the existing 'state of the art' backprop classifiers (classical Neural Net & k-means clustering) to town.

That said, traditional stochastic & markov driven approaches are more familiar and are cheaper to implement, which has hitherto driven the development of virtually all sciences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quora still exists?</comment>


What do you use to email your users? - <AUTHOR>

We have thousands of users and want to email them - preferably with some software/service that can get the email addresses out of our database, without having to manually export. A few I have seen can connect to mysql, but not postgres :(<p>While I could use something like mailman I am hoping some of you have found a cost effective method for emailing a large number of users and getting statistics as well. <comment><USER2> PHPList is a good, free mailing software - its usually included in fantastico

<http://www.phplist.com/>

i've heard of people modifying it to use postgre, but i believe it only comes with support for mysql out of the box

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, PHPList is kind of what we decided to use if we have to manually import.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> After you get the machinery to pump out the mail, there is the issue of getting it through spam filters. I have had numerous problems when sending emails from my own domain. It is all too easy to get on various blacklists even if you are extremely well behaved.</comment>


Web typography for non-designers - <AUTHOR> http://www.presslabs.com/blog/web-typography-for-non-designers/ <comment><USER2> I applaud the effort and share the sentiment that typography is important for the web, but there seems to be quite a bit of problematic advice given. E.g.,

1) the author suggests a range of 120-150% of leading; the upwards bounds of this is far too much (too much leading causes the eye to skip down a line). Bringhurst's suggestion is much lower---around 12/14pt (Bringhurst is referencing print, not online, so an argument could be made for _slightly_ more leading, but not 150%).

2) The discussion of kerning doesn't mention kerning tables that are built into the font: one doesn't manually kern body text.

3) Tracking, aka, "letterspacing". There's some debate about it, but one doesn't typically letterspace lowercase (body) text (the exception may be _very_ small text). F. Goudy _may_ have said that "anyone who letterspaces lowercase would shag sheep" [http://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html](http://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html)

<comment> grey-area While this article is a bit of a mess in many ways (structure, content, design), and I wouldn't take it seriously as a guide to design, you can use leading to give emphasis to things like an intro paragraph or pull quote, in which case 150% is totally fine and you might even go over that. They should probably have mentioned the context in which their advice might have been used, and given examples of different usage. 150% on main copy would usually be way too much of course. Even for main text, personally I find 12/14 to be pretty tight - Indesign for example chooses 12/14.4 as a default, and how tight it feels depends on a lot of factors (face, line-length, weight, density of text (is it head, pull-quote, long body?)). There's a lot of variables there and I'd be careful about making sweeping statements about leading.

I agree the kerning examples are pretty absurd, if anything automatic kerning usually gives you too much space - I've never seen automatic kerning make such a mess of spacing as in their example, and as you say it's something you'd only do manually on heads (and even then rarely in web typography as the tools just are not there to do it well, unless you want to litter your code with manual spans).

The practical typography link you gave is great - that's a much better resource for online typography, and beautifully done:

[http://practicaltypography.com/](http://practicaltypography.com/)

PS Gill tried to shag sheep and his typography was really rather good.

<comment><USER3> > 150% on main copy would usually be way too much of course.

I think this is true in general, but fonts that are typically used in web design tend to have pretty tall x-heights (designed that way to compensate for low monitor pixel density). As the x-height goes up, I find the leading can too.

I like the rule of thumb that the line spacing (i.e. distance between baselines of successive lines) should be about 3x the x-height.

But I also do tend to like my lines a bit more spaced out than most. Some sort of weird compensation for suffering through years of painful single-spaced Word documents and old web pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The picture in the "measure" section has a red "x" over 99 characters per line and suggests 45 to 75 characters per line. But the article's paragraphs have about 95 characters per line.

Do as I say, not as I do.

<comment><USER5> _Do as I say, not as I do._

Or not. Such experimental evidence as we have on this point -- which isn't much for a sensible scientific/evidence-based debate -- doesn't necessarily support a claim that wider line widths will objectively reduce reading speed or comprehension/retention, at least not until you get a lot wider. There may be an argument that readers subjectively prefer mid-width lines, though.

In any case, it may be that the optimal comfort width is dictated by more physically-based factors, such as the angle we can comfortably scan moving only our eyes and not also turning our heads, and that letter counts are just a proxy for this based on typical text sizes and reading distances (meaning that it may or may not be a good proxy since the recent shift to much larger web fonts).

<comment><USER6> It's almost impossible to say anything definitive about line width on web pages because the experience depends so much on viewport aspect ratio, device rotation, and surrounding content.

The x-words-per-line standard derives from print, which has different traditions. Calling them rules is probably unwise. (See e.g. small column widths in newspaper and magazine layouts, vs paperback novel layouts, vs etc.)

Blog pages seem to have standardised on a single central column between a half and two thirds of the viewport width. Text sizing covers a huge range from ~12pt up to 16pt or even 18pt.

Modern product pages seem to have standardised on a selection of standard Bootstrap layouts, but with a lot of holdouts - e.g. Amazon - who do their own thing.

I'm not aware of any hard evidence about comprehension/retention metrics for these layouts. But they're very popular, and visitors don't seem to hate them.

There's actually more evidence for unexpected conversion rate increases from apparently insignificant changes to button positioning, icon colours, and such.

Much as I love beautiful typography, I think it's only a deal-breaker when it goes horribly wrong. For many sites, other design elements are likely more important.

<comment><USER5> _It 's almost impossible to say anything definitive about line width on web pages because the experience depends so much on viewport aspect ratio, device rotation, and surrounding content._

I agree. We know that margin width seems to make a difference in other contexts, so it seems likely that on small mobile devices where there is very little margin the other characteristics for optimum readability might need to be adjusted to take that into account. Clearly there is an inherent limit on the physical width of lines we can show on such devices anyway.

 _Blog pages seem to have standardised on a single central column between a half and two thirds of the viewport width. Text sizing covers a huge range from ~12pt up to 16pt or even 18pt._

It would be nice to see some real evidence about the effectiveness of single- column blog layouts, but first we'd have to choose some plausible alternatives to compare them with. There don't seem to be many "standardised" ones today, as other heavily text-based sites that use things like multi-column layouts tend to be in fields like news or e-commerce, where they aren't trying to present a single piece.

It would also be interesting to see a proper study about the effectiveness or otherwise of very large fonts and of thin/light fonts, as widely used on trendy blogs today. I suspect they would not be a resounding success, but I have nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back that up.

 _Much as I love beautiful typography, I think it 's only a deal-breaker when it goes horribly wrong._

Sadly, that is true of much design work. When you get it right, your site works well and no-one notices. When you get it wrong, it can be disastrous. Such is life. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Script and Novelty fonts shouldn't really be used on the web as they do not > emphasize readability.

Yet this article is full of novelty fonts.

Perhaps the author meant to say that script and novelty fonts shouldn't be used for body text.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is a badly assembled collection of other people's ideas. Taking most out of the content out of its original context is why it doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER9> I agree. It seems very heavy on pictures, and light on explanations or reasoning for the rules given.

I find a much better resource is "Butterrick's Practical Typography"[0], which is a very accessible. If you want just the absolute bare essentials, the first section of the book/site "Typography in 10 Minutes"[1] is fantastic.

[0] - [http://practicaltypography.com/](http://practicaltypography.com/)

[1] - [http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten- minutes.htm...](http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Web tpyorpahpy wtih slplenig eorrrs. [http://www.mrc- cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt-davis/cmabridge/](http://www.mrc- cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt-davis/cmabridge/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article falls for one of my major designer pet peeves: using heading tags as style tags.

Having a fixed relative ratio of font sizes for h1-h6 makes no sense because heading tags (as all html) are structure, not style. They are used to indicate the relative importance of heading text within a page and/or section, and should have a semantic css class appropriate to their role applied.

Depending on how a page is structured, a h2 may be a section heading, or an article heading, or a page sub-heading, or many other things, and each of those roles may call for very different styling relative to a h1 page heading.

</comment><comment><USER12> Lots and lots of typos in this article. I eventually clicked off because it was getting too distracting. I would suggest to the author that proper grammar and punctuation is even more important than typography.

</comment><comment><USER13> Realising that different font sizes need to be in proportion to each other (e.g 3:4 or golden ratio) made the cake for me when I briefly studied typography a while back. This article touches it as well.

<comment><USER5> Although the article immediately loses points for proposing an absurdly precise ratio for font sizes based on a mathematical constant whose interesting properties are utterly irrelevant here.

What matters is that your range of sizes are visually equivalent or clearly distinct when you need them to be, and that the text looks good at each size in your chosen fonts. Generating a geometric scale of 7 or 8 different sizes by just multiplying some base value by a random ratio will not achieve those goals with any screen fonts I have ever worked with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was a good read - i struggle with fonts, and found it insightful. I'm always big on usability but its interesting to think that in the end they're often readers above all else, and to optimize around that.

But I do not agree with paying for a webfont library - Not that its a bad idea, but its likely not appropriate for most people.

Google fonts is good - if you stick to the popular ones its hard to go wrong.

I also use this to get some ideas for combinations, all from google-fonts: [http://femmebot.github.io/google-type/](http://femmebot.github.io/google- type/) if you suck at typography but want your site to look nice, this is a great way to clean things up without much thought.

For me, I've tried to focus on the tone, feeling and readability when looking at fonts. You have to really trace over the letters and feel everything out - or compare how different fonts portray a given letter and which style you want. Also, what font weights are available? if you want bolder or thinner text you'll need a font that has several weights - not all do.

<comment><USER15> I feel that it can be argued that paying for a font library is a good idea. It is far cheaper than buying individual fonts, which can get expensive quickly. I feel that the Typekit library is ahead of the Google library. The Google library always has felt very stale and bland to me. The Typekit library has a better variety if they dont have as many available fonts as the Google library.

Also their systems to include the fonts into your pages also eliminates the headache for many people of how to include the various font files for a particular family, as well as by which method to include them.

That github link is very useful for people getting their feet wet in typography and seeing how things work together.

<comment><USER14> You're not wrong - its just that most people aren't THAT serious about it. People that pay for it, or even think about paying for it, give more focus to that area. But for many devs that's simply not going to happen. They'll just go with whatever is free, and to be honest thats perfectly fine.

I would say, if you want to take your sites typography to the next level... pay for a font library. But if you just want it to be better than defaults, plenty to be had for free.

<comment><USER5> _I would say, if you want to take your sites typography to the next level... pay for a font library._

That was the theory, but I'm still waiting to be convinced about it in practice. I check in on all of the major rent-a-font services from time to time, and I'm rarely impressed by their results.

Consider TypeKit's home page. Personally I would not consider some of the fonts and typography they use themselves to be acceptable for professional work.

For example, they're currently using Adobe Clean for a lot of the text, but it has more hinting glitches than an excited child the week before their birthday. They get away with it -- up to a point -- because many visitors probably still have a default browser font size of 16px, but if your default is a bit larger or you zoom the page, the text rendering is _awful_. (Actually, their whole layout breaks if you set your default font size a bit larger, but that's a separate problem.)

Notice how in the font showcase section, under "THE BEST ARE ON TYPEKIT", all the examples are actually screenshots and almost exclusively of very large text? What happens if you actually look at the samples of a popular Adobe font, say Minion Pro, which they feature there? Well, in tests based on TypeKit's own specimen screen, 3 out of 3 main Windows browsers render it with nasty weighting issues, and even significant gaps in the letter forms in narrow areas. This isn't a problem with either Minion Pro or the hardware I'm using to display it; it renders just fine at the same physical size in InDesign or Adobe Reader. It's a problem with Minion Pro served as a web font by TypeKit.

The quality of web fonts from Cloud.Typography generally seems to be better, but again, even their own home page shows plenty of fonts that either appear blurry or have hinting problems and appear with uneven line weights, uneven spacing, counters closing up, etc. The blurring might be acceptable to Apple users who are used to that style of rendering, but unless your target audience doesn't include anyone who uses other platforms, it's going to look very odd to a lot of people. The other hinting glitches might be unavoidable results of trying to render fonts designed for print faithfully on screen, but they are glitches all the same.

I just don't understand why anyone who cares about the quality of their work would voluntarily choose these options, and pay for them, when you can have similar or better looking rendering for free with native system fonts on most platforms these days and with several of the standards from Google Fonts if you want a change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Man, I can't believe I'm feeling this cranky on Friday but this is just rubbing me all sorts of wrong ways. I really like the author's intent here. Getting more people to care about type is great and can make a real difference in the usability of the world. But, as with type itself, the devil is in the details. And in the details, this post really falls short.

This is a common problem with designers. They are a lot of people who are good designers, but few are _articulate about how they do design_. For most, they have just internalized it and go by intuition. They can do, but can't verbalize how they do.

There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're _writing_ about typography, it's not enough to be a good designer. You must also be a good communicator about design.

        > Now since the chief design language of the web is text,
        > every web designer should first and foremost comprehend
        > the art of typography.

The title of the article is "for non-designers", yet it seems to assume the reader _is_ a designer.

        > So, why should one design a web page with a particular
        > device range in mind when he can better target what's
        > really important for his user? Design for the reader
        > not the device.

I do a decent amount of responsive design and spend a lot of time thinking about the device. That's because _the device is my design 's window to the reader_. The most readable type on a 30-inch 96-ppi display on your desk is very different than on a 4-inch retina screen held in your hand.

You have to think about _how the reader will see your design on their device_. You need to consider the entire path from CSS to neurons firing in eyeballs.

        > mcuh

This is just the editor in me, but it drives me crazy when posts about quality design are riddled with typos. Quality is a key component of good design.

        > Use a leading that's too small, and the paragraph is
        > hard to read. Make it too large, and your reader will
        > have a hard time jumping to the next time.

_Narrow_ leading is hard to read because it makes it harder to scan to the next line. When lines are near each other, it's easy to skip too far down or not far enough while your eye is scanning to the left.

Too large leading doesn't have that problem at all. It's just that when your leading is too large, you waste a lot of space and it can make the paragraph not feel like a single conceptual entity relative to other things on the page.

Also, "time" should be "line".

        > Like in the case of the leading, measure, which is the
        > length of one line, also has a soft spot. This soft
        > spot means 45-75 characters per line, value which helps
        > the reader keep a pleasant and natural pace while
        > reading without being interrupted too often by line
        > breaks or getting impatient to reach to reach the end
        > of the line because of its length.

The author means "sweet spot". "Soft spot" means something else. Again, the explanation here doesn't make much sense.

Long lines don't cause "impatience". It's just that, like narrow leading, they make it harder to scan to the next line. If your eye has to move farther to reach the beginning of the next line, there's a greater chance of miscounting.

The problem with short lines isn't really that they interrupt—we're pretty used to scanning lines. When you have short lines, a break before a long word is likely to be a larger fraction of the overall line length. With a narrow column, breaking on a long word can leave a big chunk of whitespace on the previous line.

That will either cause a really ragged right edge if the column isn't justified or blobs of distracting whitespace and rivers in the middle of the column if it is. Look at how distracting the wide variation in line length is in the narrow column example compared to the wide one.

        > Kerning solves this problem by manually adjusting the
        > space between such pairs in order not to convey the
        > right meaning.

This is true, but you generally should _not_ be manually kerning fonts in web design. The font itself contains kerning pair information. All you need to do is pick a font where the typographer did a good job with this. (This is one of the things that really sets great fonts apart from mediocre ones.)

        > it's another area where you can vastly improve
        > legibility in some particular cases.

Tracking can be used for nice effect for things like headers and navigation, but you generally should not mess with it for body text. If you can make the text more legible by changing the default tracking, that font already has bigger problems. The type designer likely put more thought into the tracking than you did.

Where tracking is useful is changing the color—relative lightness or darkness of a blob of text—for things like subheadings, asides, etc. It gives you a way to control emphasis of text separate from changing its literal color (RGB values) or weight (line thickness).

It was really overused in the 90s so these days, most designers are more conservative about it. (Remember when every design l o o k e d l i k e t h i s ?)

        > Almost every modern web page uses at least two or three
        > to enhance it's structure. For example, you can align a
        > big heading to the right, grid-based text should be
        > centered, and usual paragraphs can be left-aligned or
        > justified.

Please don't do that. I don't even know what the author means by centering "grid-based text", but if you mix alignments like this, your reader will likely hate you. You can occasionally do something nice with right-aligned headers. But left-justification is the right answer almost all of the time.

The author also confuses alignment and justification, which are separate things. (Though CSS does sort of confound them.) Justification just generally doesn't look good in browsers and requires a more sophisticated line-breaking algorithm than the web supports. Look at all of the knobs something like InDesign gives you to justify text.

On the web, just align left (i.e. ragged right) and that will be the most readable solution almost every time.

        > Getting these values to work well together is not an
        > easy thing, but an idea might be to use the golden ratio
        > between consecutive sizes with manual adjustment where
        > necessary.

There's absolutely nothing magical about the golden ratio. Using any consistent ratio (i.e. making each size a constant multiple of the previous size) will pretty much get the job done. I aim for somewhere between 1.5x to 2x.

        > A natural and pleasing size variation will make a web
        > page beautiful on its own while keeping everything nice
        > and legible.

Well, sure, but that's a tautology. That doesn't tell the designer (or non- designer) what to do. A couple of tangible guidelines:

1\. Don't use more than a couple of sizes.

2\. Use size to indicate structure.

Readers will automatically associate size with hierarchy so do that deliberately. Headers are bigger than subheaders are bigger than body is bigger than asides. Make the most important stuff (either content or for understanding the structure of the writing) biggest.

        > Capital sins of type setting
        > - Text sizes
        > - Lazy handling of titles and subtitles
        > - Text blocks that are not split up into enough small,
        >   scannable, digestible parts
        > - Indiscernible links
        > - Text is not treated as an interface but as decoration
        > - Fancy navigation drawing the attention from the actual
        >   content
        > - Lack of active white space

Wait "text sizes" are a sin? Should you just have unsized text?

Use of whitespace _is_ the key to great design, but the author doesn't provide any guidance on how to use it.

        > Rely on quality fonts
        >
        > Prepare some text and read it–do you like what you see?

How do I know what a quality font is? If I can trust my own judgement, I don't need this article, do I?

        > When it comes to fonts, workhorses are all the rage.
        > They're like the AK47s of typefaces.

The author doesn't _define_ what a workhorse is, and then uses a metaphor that is both mixed and wrong (though I do like the image of a machine-gun toting horse). AK47s are popular because of their _uniformity_. But a workhorse type family—assuming the author means one with a variety of styles and weights—is useful specifically because of its _variety_.

        > They're great also because they come in a huge variety
        > of weights and styles (bold, italic etc.)

Well, that's the _definition_ of a workhorse typeface, isn't it? If it didn't come in that variety, it wouldn't be a workhorse to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER16> I might write an article about this, but in the meantime I'll ask for any thoughts here. I've noticed text size on the web has gotten enormous. I very often scale down websites I find on here to 50 or 60% zoom to get the article text size to be reasonable. Has anyone else noticed this? Is there some reason for this? Was there some design convention I missed where headline text size is appropriate for article text?

<comment><USER17> Web designers realised they were excluding very large numbers of people by using tiny fonts. They decided to be more inclusive. The old cry "Just zoom in" excludes a bunch of people.

The new cry "Just zoom out" is less discriminatory.

In general I prefer big fonts with a 1.5 line spacing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was a great article, but the "This site uses cookies" warning struck me as a little disingenuous. It seems like there's a choice to not accept cookies, but if you click "Decline" it just kicks you out to Google. It's nice that they ask but the options really should be "Accept" or "Leave". Maybe this is standard, I usually just ignore those things.

<comment><USER19> It is a stupid EU law: [http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm](http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm)

<comment><USER20> Session cookies require no notice. Only persistent cookies and 3rd party cookies require notice, and there are no features on this site that should require them (besides remembering an affirmative response to the cookie warning). In fact there are no features that should require any cookies, save them for logged in users.

<comment><USER5> _Session cookies require no notice._

It's mostly an academic issue at this point -- European governments seem to have realised that this law is very poorly written and even the governments seem to have little interest in either following it themselves or having the relevant authorities enforce it.

That said, I think you're mischaracterising what the letter of the law says. It's not session cookies that are exempt, it's (paraphrased, read at your own risk) cookies that are essential for the normal operation of the site. In practice this probably means session cookies for things like logging in or shopping basket contents, but that's coincidental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not a designer, but I notice something strange in the size section. At lower sizes, the numbers are lower than the letters.

Is that an error, or is that "by design"? It looks really ugly to me.

I'm using an rMBP with the latest Chrome and Mavericks.

<comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Web Design is 95% typography" is depressing.

</comment><comment><USER24> > But if you think about it, this consumer is a very specific type–he's a > reader. The number one reason he's visiting that web page is to read the > text on that page, irrespective of the device he's reading it on.

The consumer is also apparently a male.</comment>


As Facebook Struggles for Blockchain Support, a Decentralized Challenger Emerges - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2019/07/17/as-facebook-struggles-for-blockchain-support-a-truly-decentralized-challenger-emerges/#161527919eb0 <comment><USER2> Do all these new digital currency schemes have the two important properties that inflation is prevented and that transfers are anonymous?

The first is realized by ensuring that the calculation for minting a coin requires the expenditure of some increasing threshold amount of energy to compute the next coin. It's just like the fact that producing a kilo of aluminum requires some ampere-hours of current through an electrolytic cell, except that the next kilo requires more.

The second is realized by the transfer protocol and the distributed ledger of blockchain.</comment>