Pinterest's Problem: Getting Men to Commit - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterests-problem-getting-men-to-commit-1421944331 <comment><USER2> Pinterest's Problem: [https://www.pinterest.com/](https://www.pinterest.com/)

Their front page does not explain what the hell it actually is, so all users that join them join because existing users already know what the site actually does and ask friends to join, which of course restricts new users to being close to their existing demographics.

Edit: While i typed this the teeny tiny "About" link at the bottom of the page disappeared. (?!)

Edit2: After browsing around on their about pages, they have a lot of breathless promises of virtually world peace caused by using Pinterest, but little concrete information of what the site is actually useful for. They could do with grabbing some people off the street and pitching them various explanations to find some where the person actually understands the site afterwards.

<comment><USER3> I'd go a step beyond the frontpage: every time I reach Pinterest for some reason (usually due to a picture that I found on an image search), I'm hit by a very annoying "log in to see more" banner (usually before I reach the picture I was looking for). If Pinterest is a magazine, that banner is the guy taking it from my hands and scolding me "this is not a library!"

I now actively avoid Pinterest links.

<comment><USER4> Yep. The article is the first time I've ever learned what Pinterest actually is. I'm not going to commit to an account _before_ I know what something is - signup walls prevent me from educating myself.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the Facebook landing page is better, but more people kind of know what it's about.

<comment><USER4> ... or got in before they put up the signup wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They should do like the tech community. Make "Pinterest Boys Meetup" and "PiGuys" making free lunch paid by all the major clothing companies where girls are not allowed to participate. Also, they should host conferences and encourage guys to participate and make discounts for them. They should tell everyone how much they appreciate guys joining them.

<comment><USER7> I sense some antagonism on your part against Women In Tech groups. Here's a piece about how they are actually useful [http://geekfeminism.org/2014/03/04/in-defense-of-women-in- te...](http://geekfeminism.org/2014/03/04/in-defense-of-women-in-tech-wit- groups/)

(Also all of those things would work, if men were negatively affected by our current patriarchy in the same way as women are in tech, which they aren't.)

<comment><USER8> Fwiw there are some groups like that for men in industries where there's historical stigma against male participation, like nursing: [http://www.aamn.org/](http://www.aamn.org/). Doesn't even seem particularly controversial; the AAMN doesn't generate nearly the level of anger that women- in-tech groups do.

<comment><USER9> There's no controversy because these goals are always seen through the lens of society as a whole. Groups like the AAMN helps people who are generally privileged achieve parity in an area where they are currently stigmatised. They don't do anything that looks like it erodes male privilege, so there is no reason for them to attract any ire.

<comment><USER10> And because the AAMN doesn't consist of a bunch of bloggers and click-bait artists attacking female nurses with a bunch of rude stereotypes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really see a problem here, I think it is a strength to have a big female audience. It's a unique selling point for pinterest.

Personally, I don't find social news/streams etc. very interesting anyway. For regular visits I much prefer sites that group content around certain subjects, not people.

<comment><USER12> It would be ok if they were a niche app/website. But I don't think they aren't.

<comment><USER13> Women are not a niche.

<comment><USER12> yes they are ,Men too.

Infact Men are targeted way more openly.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like you're thinking of market segments, not niches. Semantics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ignoring the massive concentration of fucked up gender issues in that article, I do find it interesting how sites develop these very clear cultures and how quickly.

I recently came into an Ello account, and ultimately found myself put off by the place; there's nothing about the _software_ that's that offputting (other than the overlarge sidebar), but I look around at who and what is on it and I feel out of place. The whole site seems to be populated entirely by 'modern artist' types and little else.

Similarly, G+ very quickly wound up being a go to for tech and general nerdery, but little else (perhaps just because no one else cared about the sales pitch).

Some of this of course is down to founder curation of a sort, Ello is run by artists so of course it being invite only meant they mostly invited more artists, while G+'s earliest adopters were Google coders and employees.

But the latter was certainly the case for Twitter as well, and it managed to claw past that reputation, just as Facebook clawed its way past its early rep for 'that place for college kids to play Scrabble'.

I wonder how one even goes about controlling or managing this kind of culture shift, and if one even should.

<comment><USER15> Orkut, which became largely Brazilian, is the classic example. There were some good articles about how that arose but cant find them (maybe the dead link from [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/07/17/2243232/language- tem...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/04/07/17/2243232/language-tempest-at- orkut) ?). In that case it was partly about language initially, Google allowed mixed languages in threads, and Portuguese put off the English speakers but not so much the other way round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My wife has a Pinterest account. She has dozens of neatly maintained boards and about 300 followers. It's an amazing space. But for my male friends and myself, it's not even on our radar. It's an odd dichotomy. So many spaces are overwhelmingly male, this one stands out for the opposite. But I've no idea what causes it.

<comment><USER17> It seems to me that maybe there's some sort of phenomenon where women really enjoy image-focused websites to a greater extent than men do.

Other examples of sites and apps that seemingly have more heavily weighted female userbases and also are image focused - Tumblr, ello, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr? And of course the greatest example which we've already discussed - Pinterest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can't browse the site without being signed up; every time I hit it from a google image search the content I want to see is teased behind a registration wall. Does that keep men out disproportionately? Probably not but it does hurt when you're trying to catch up on users and those users might be more skeptical consumers than your existing customers. How on earth do you convince someone to use your product if you won't let them use your product?

</comment><comment><USER19> The use cases for Pinterest have always been very vague, and the default categories keep changing.

Pinterest hasn't done a good job of explaining the uses of the service, especially the great wishlist service whose rich-data pins can send you an alert, when the price on one of your items drops. I also think they haven't nailed down exactly what Pinterest is for and just keep seeing what people do with it; they didn't have a Quotes section initially, if I recall correctly, for instance.

On the other hand, it's a little silly to frame it as an issue that guys aren't using a particular service. I hear the demographic of women is still quite large.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Ms. Meyers-Levy's studies have shown that women are able to process > information more comprehensively and to do so at a lower threshold. Men are > more selective and tend to focus on the essentials.

I was expecting a cool, UI/gender studies point about pinterest's grid style getting gendered as for girls through social construction, but instead just read some bullshit gender essentialism.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a key insight for the Pinterest team ... your demographics are going to look like the demographics for scrapbooking [1]. I don't scrapbook (I'm male) or know of _ANY_ other men that scrapbook (or at least admit to scrapbooking). Personally, it seems like a very boring past-time and the closest I come is to look at what my wife and daughters have created.

I won't be signing up for Pinterest for the same reason.

Please note: I'm not that macho personae ... I love to cook, can sew and knit and generally do my own laundry. I'd love to be able to draw better (but the engineer in me likes his straight lines and square corners). I'll even occasionally watch (and enjoy) a chick-flick.

[1] [http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking- demographi...](http://blog.hummiesworld.com/2011/02/scrapbooking- demographics.html#.VMJN1zW350w)

EDIT: Yes - I know the demographics shown at the linked site are affected by Facebook's demographics.

</comment><comment><USER21> >In other words, Pinterest's busy design may create an information-overload for men. "If this was a magazine, they'd turn the page," Ms. Meyers-Levy said. "It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity."

Not sure who they studied here, but I love high information density. Sparse metro interfaces and blank pages with one thing on them are far, FAR more likely to make me move on to something else. I've stopped reading more than one site when they suddenly went from high to low information density. Of everyone I know, male and female, not _one_ has a good thing to say about low information density.

Not a Pinterest user because I always had the perception it was recipes and fashion, but might be more interested to look now.

<comment><USER22> Maybe it's your group of friends? Lots of folks I know seem to appreciate the cleaner sparse designs, larger fonts etc... It seems a lot a easier to just move your thumb and scroll than zoom in or squint tbh

<comment><USER21> Meh, I don't use touchscreens other than a phone, and even then, if I'm anywhere near a real computer instead, I'll use that over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.

The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.

(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).

<comment><USER24> I went through that same process to view one recipe, then deleted my account - and then started getting unwanted marketing mail by pinterest every couple of days. When I tried to disable the mail\unsubscribe it asked me to login (to the account I'd deleted) to update my marketing preferences. They now get filtered to my trashcan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Reddit is the Pinterest for MAN.

Personally, I just find the way Pinterest organizes its contents leads to low information density, maybe because there isn't any place left for text and the images are so slim make memes look bad?

However, I don't the lack of male participation is an emergent issue for Pinterest right now. Bigger issue may be, since the whole site already looks like a giant billboard, how to squeeze real money out of it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have a pinterest account, and my wife and I used it when looking at houses last year. She'd find a house online, pin it to a board, and if she really liked it, would send me the pin.

I think of it as a bookmarking service meant for collections of similar things.

</comment><comment><USER27> The problem should be to attract more users in general, be they men, women, or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm a man using Pinterest to study design, fashion, art, astronomy, and other visually oriented subjects. I follow boards for UX/UI design elements and animations which would be relevant to the HN audience but, honestly, I'm not super eager to have more "men" on the site. In this case, imho, the problem isn't Pinterest the problem is men and I'm fine with that problem; it keeps a lot of subtle porn and memes away from the site. Pinterest should be focusing on the men they do have and growing that audience instead.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm male and have a Pinterest acccount -- it is used solely when I plan on spending time baking with my girlfriend or my mother.

</comment><comment><USER30> A visual bookmark is only an advantage when the sight of something is better for your memory than a title and/or tags.

</comment><comment> V-2 As a non-native English speaker, and a programmer, I thought this was a piece about version control at first</comment>


A New Statistic Reveals Why America's Covid-19 Numbers Are Flat - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/ <comment><USER2> The fact that who we aren't testing means 99% of Americans has left me in despair.</comment>


Does the App Store violate net neutrality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/does-app-store-violate-net-neutrality/2009-06-22 <comment><USER2> They forbade an app for on-demand streaming but allowed one that does live streaming? I wonder whether they're relying on multicasting in each cell, which is only a win when many users want the same content at the same time.</comment>


Ask HN: What installer technology do you use - <AUTHOR> I've recently been tasked with blowing up our desktop applications' old Windows installation method and rebuilding anew. We've dabbled with Install Shield and WIX. I've had minimal experience with Install Shield which was overwhelmingly negative but I am genuinely unsure if that was because I inherited this terrible homunculus or if Install Shield is just a nightmare.
Is Install Shield worth sticking with? Is there something better out there?
Thanks -Hal <comment><USER2> I used Qt installer framework.

[http://doc.qt.io/qtinstallerframework/](http://doc.qt.io/qtinstallerframework/)</comment>


Bitcoin is the Segway of Currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/bitcoin-is-the-segway-of-currency/281625/

<comment><USER2> Wow, what a misinformed article.

\- the author doesn't realize irreversible transactions is actually a benefit for merchants

\- the author incorrectly uses the term "ponzi scheme" (he applies it to gold as well)

\- the author is unaware of rapid adoption of Bitcoin by merchants (BitPay's 10,000 merchants...)

\- the author is unaware of many practical benefits of bitcoin (people escaping their country's inflationary currencies, sending money abroad with lower fees, etc)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bitcoin allows capital flight out of sovereign states that would otherwise not allow it; if it is never used for any other purpose, it is more historically impacting and meaningful then the Segway.

This article is like a Segway: It is quite smug, and it falls a bit short of useful.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm saving this to repost in 5 years. Ha.

There is a lot of uncertainty in establishing a value relative to the dollar because the positive Senate hearings on Monday injected ebullient chaos into the market. Wherever the value temporarily settles it will definitely be "more than last Friday."

Not to mention that most price stability mechanisms for other currencies and commodities don't yet exist for Bitcoin. There are arbitrage opportunities galore but few ways to technically implement them due to the nascent and fragmented market. That will change.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author seems to think "governments can't tax" gold and that Bitcoin users aim to avoid taxes as well, which couldn't be farther from the truth.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Because, as Y Combinator's Paul Graham puts it, you can't ride a Segway without looking like a "smug dork." And people generally try to avoid looking like that. "

Thinking about Google Glass, I feel like the author may have picked the wrong new tech to compare to a Segway. I still wouldn't agree with it, but he would have a better argument.

</comment><comment><USER7> People can use escrow for some customer protection. It worked out well for me the last time I ordered from bitmit.

</comment><comment><USER8> Segway _wishes_ it was the bitcoin of transportation.

</comment><comment><USER9> Segway failed. Segway was new. Bitcoin is new. Therefore, bitcoin will fail. Because PG.</comment>


EasyDNS Imposes "Social Justice Pricing" Today - <AUTHOR> https://easydns.com/blog/2019/04/01/easydns-social-justice-pricing-goes-into-effect-today/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice if we could all start laughing about this stuff again.</comment>


Direct Sales for Bootstrapped SaaS Startups: From $1,300 to $725,00 MRR - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/sales <comment><USER2> is it $725,000 or am I reading it in the wrong locale ?

<comment><USER3> Your locale is fine, and it's also mis-written on the post itself. He mentions having ~25 employees in another post I clicked through to, so I'm going to say it's probably supposed to be $750k.</comment></comment>


Most Employees aren't Focused on Startups - <AUTHOR> http://davidcummings.org/2011/01/13/most-employees-arent-focused-on-startups/

<comment><USER2> I've always found there are two types of employees.

Employees who do the tasks in their realm of their responsibility and that's it. I think that's fine. In a company, you need employees who reliably work in their realm.

There are also the "entreprenurial" employees who want to create value in the company and go above and beyond.

I think you need both.</comment>


Show HN: RLSL – Reinforcement Learning for Skip Lists (DBs and AI) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cioc/rlsl <comment><AUTHOR> Author here! Would love to answer any questions and get your feedback. We think that intersection of systems and ml has a lot of potential and would love those thoughts as well. Thanks!</comment>


Debian votes for Proposal B, "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives" - <AUTHOR> https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/results.txt <comment><USER2> A couple of details for those who did not follow the discussion and are not familiar with Debian's voting system:

* Proposal E "Support for multiple init systems is Required" has been firmly rejected. (In the Debian voting system, rating an option worse than "Further discussion" effectively means considering it even unworthy of being in the ballot.)

* The core of Proposal B is «The Debian project recognizes that systemd service units are the preferred configuration for describing how to start a daemon/service. However, Debian remains an environment where developers and users can explore and develop alternate init systems and alternatives to systemd features. Those interested in exploring such alternatives need to provide the necessary development and packaging resources to do that work». The full text can be found at [https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textb](https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textb)

* In case the message were not clear enough, the runner up option is Proposal E "Focus on systemd". Proposal E is also the most voted option.

<comment><USER3> > the runner up option is Proposal F "Focus on systemd". Proposal F is also > the most voted option.

I'd say that in this voting system a statment like that is not really important in any way. You'd have to compare it to sum of options that don't focus on systemd as an example or some other combinations.

* fixed proposal letter in the quote

<comment><USER4> I don't think so. Looking at the most voted option tells you what the majority thinks. The voting system is designed to promote a most agreeable resolution not simply the majority's choice, but knowing what the majority wants is still _interesting_.

<comment><USER3> > knowing what the majority wants is still interesting.

Totally agree.

> Looking at the most voted option tells you what the majority thinks.

My point is that the options are designed specifically for this type of voting system.

Here it is possible that anti-systemd votes are spread across many options and pro systemd votes are concentrated in only one or two. So even if you have most votes on "Focus on systemd" it doesn't mean that it is what most people want.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > Here it is possible that anti-systemd votes are spread across many options > and pro systemd votes are concentrated in only one or two. So even if you > have most votes on "Focus on systemd" it doesn't mean that it is what most > people want.

As I said in my above reply which you've ignored, that is not how the voting system works. It is not possible to split votes like that in Condorcet. Everyone who opposes systemd can vote for all of the non-systemd options and not diminish the chances of any of them.

<comment><USER5> They are talking about the result of the majority vote, not the result of the Condorcet method.

<comment><USER6> The result of the "majority vote" is done preferentially, which means that there is no situation in which vote splitting will occur. It makes no sense to refer to the "majority vote" in this context, because the whole point of preferential voting systems is that (usually) no option wins outright on first preferences alone. Thus the result of the Condorcet vote is the order which the maximum number of people would've been most happy with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope that "exploring alternatives" isn't code for dropping sysvinit. Even with the latest debian, switching away from systemd is easy as:-

      apt-get install sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
      cp /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab /etc/inittab
      reboot
      apt-get remove --purge --auto-remove systemd

Our reasons for doing this are we run stripped-down systems that go for years (even decades), but which we absolutely must be able to fix ourselves with the proverbial rusty hairclip. The general bloat of linux distros (due to gnome/systemd and others) really doesn't suit our use case (although obviously it suits others, even the majority).

<comment><USER8> I hope it does involve removing sysvinit. Compared to alternatives like runit or s6, sysvinit increases bloat (because every service needs to include it's own daemonising and logging code) and makes systems brittle and difficult to debug (because the classic daemonisation process is subtle and easy to get wrong). If I had to build a stripped-down, ultra-stable, long-running system, I definitely wouldn't want to build it on sysvinit.

<comment><USER7> Well, seems to have worked for us for 20+ years. I wonder where gnome and systemd will be in 20 years?

Horses for courses.

<comment><USER9> Systemd can do things that were not relevant 20 years ago.

<comment><USER10> That's true but what we're hoping for is that Debian doesn't change things so much that sysvinit is unusable. Systemd does have its advantages but some people _like_ sysvinit.

<comment><USER5> > but some people _like_ sysvinit

Is that really true, or is it just that some people have a grudge against systemd and sysvinit is the only other practical option?

<comment><USER11> sysvinit is simple, and I didn't have any major issues with it.

On the other hand, systemd is too big, takes on too much responsibility (really I need a system to retrieve logs in it? or a way to run local dns?).

Since last update on my ubuntu desktop I can't get dns to work from DHCP, I need to overwrite /etc/resolv.conf with correct nameservers after each restart (BTW. Why would anyone think that running local DNS is a good default option - I see `nameserver 127.0.0.1` in the overwritten file).

And the second one on Debian on my laptop, when I run VPN (openconnect) name resolution fails, and I need again - ovewrite resolv.conf.

I didn't have such problems with sysvinit.

systemd is so controversial that I'm astonished why it is used in any distro.

<comment><USER12> > sysvinit is simple, and I didn't have any major issues with it.

How do you encode service dependencies? If a service dies, what happens to services relying on it on your system?

<comment><USER13> At least on my desktop machine, there aren't a whole lot of services that directly depend on other services. Usually, a service will provide some functionality (e.g. sound) used by _applications_ I launch. As far as I know, systemd doesn't help with that, and I don't really want it to--imagine if systemd suddenly killed and restarted your browser!

Also, maybe I'm just lucky (or using popular hardware, or something), but services on my machine don't just randomly die for no reason. NetworkManager, sshd, etc all seem pretty well-written and stable.

<comment><USER12> >As far as I know, systemd doesn't help with that

It depends on the service in use and how is it defined. I have an embedded system in production, which have quite a complex graph of dependencies, some of which should be restarted on sudden death of others, some of which should persist anyways.

Needless to say that systemd provides an incredible, robust and easy way of solving that, I had to write just a few 10-line long unit files for in-house software and use standard units provided by standard daemons.

>imagine if systemd suddenly killed and restarted your browser

Because your browsed doesn't rely on them. But my web interface definitely depends on NetworkManager, because it speaks to it via d-bus.

<comment><USER13> To clarify, by "systemd doesn't help with that", I meant "systemd does not attempt to manage, track service dependencies of, or restart applications I launch through my desktop's Applications menu or in a Terminal window".

Which is a good thing! Even though my browser uses/"depends on" audio, I still don't want systemd to restart it without warning if PulseAudio dies.

<comment><USER14> Your browser can encode that it doesn't have to restart if pulse dies. Wants= will try to ensure Pulse is started but if Pulse cannot start or crashes, that's fine. Requires= will ensure pulse is started but doesn't do anything if it crashes. Only BindsTo= will stop the browser if pulse crashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the event that the vote calculation is new to anyone else (it was to me), it looks like this [1] is what they are doing

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

<comment><USER16> This is considered one of the most democratic systems, it tries to make sure that the preferences of most voters are met in an optimal way.

However, I would claim that with a list of 8 options it is close to impossible for a human to come up with a stable ordering. If you were to vote 3 times or 5 times without being allowed to look at your previous ballot sheets, how much would the votes change?

<comment><USER17> Is that stability actually an issue? It would seem to indicate that the voter has no strong preference for the items that they could not remember how to order consistently, and so either outcome would be roughly equally acceptable to them.

<comment><USER18> It could mean that in a close vote like this, the result was due to random chance and not the will of voters. This does happen in fptp as well but not to this extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FYI - here the full text of the winning proposal:

[https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textb](https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textb)

Choice 2: B: Systemd but we support exploring alternatives

Using its power under Constitution section 4.1 (5), the project issues the following statement describing our current position on Init systems, multiple init systems, and the use of systemd facilities. This statement describes the position of the project at the time it is adopted. That position may evolve as time passes without the need to resort to future general resolutions. The GR process remains available if the project needs a decision and cannot come to a consensus.

The Debian project recognizes that systemd service units are the preferred configuration for describing how to start a daemon/service. However, Debian remains an environment where developers and users can explore and develop alternate init systems and alternatives to systemd features. Those interested in exploring such alternatives need to provide the necessary development and packaging resources to do that work. Technologies such as elogind that facilitate exploring alternatives while running software that depends on some systemd interfaces remain important to Debian. It is important that the project support the efforts of developers working on such technologies where there is overlap between these technologies and the rest of the project, for example by reviewing patches and participating in discussions in a timely manner.

Packages should include service units or init scripts to start daemons and services. Packages may use any systemd facility at the package maintainer's discretion, provided that this is consistent with other Policy requirements and the normal expectation that packages shouldn't depend on experimental or unsupported (in Debian) features of other packages. Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd and may include alternatives for any systemd-specific interfaces they use. Maintainers use their normal procedures for deciding which patches to include.

Debian is committed to working with derivatives that make different choices about init systems. As with all our interactions with downstreams, the relevant maintainers will work with the downstreams to figure out which changes it makes sense to fold into Debian and which changes remain purely in the derivative.

<comment><USER20> >It is important that the project support the efforts of developers working on such technologies where there is overlap between these technologies and the rest of the project, for example by reviewing patches and participating in discussions in a timely manner.

This part directly addresses the current issue; people were just ignoring those that were working to make non-systemd debian possible and were refusing to even talk about the issue. It will be interesting to see what happens now if those people continue to behave in the same way.

So this actually ends up being a victory for the non-systemd faction, at least in a political sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get why people are so against systemd. I'm very happy using since it became available on debian. It's simply a clone of Apple's launchd.

If it's about 'choice', go swap out your kernel for hurd or sth.

<comment><USER22> The issue I noticed are

\- systemd supporters are mainly desktop users, so their opinions are irrelevant because as a desktop user the only thing you might do is restart a service, is important to listen to server admins that know what they are talking about

\- GNOME (other Red Hat tech) depends on a systemd component and refuses patches to make it independent, so basically GNOME is forcing systemd adoption and is trying to block alternatives by refusing patches

\- systemd projects and fans will ask you to create a better alternative to systemd if you don't like it, but if you try to promote an alternative they will try to block the alternatives by refusing to accept patches to keep projects systemd independent.

Monoclultures are bad, when systemd will o longer be popular and we want to implement a better succesor we will discover that many things are hard coded to depend on some it's many components.

About what is the best init system, I don't know , I am desktop user, and as I said all desktop users opinions are probably "it works for me so you are wrong"

<comment><USER23> > systemd supporters are mainly desktop users

> is important to listen to server admins that know what they are talking > about

Huh?

I got on the systemd train when race conditions with pidfiles caused essential services not to restart correctly for the umpteenth time on a small subset of the thousands of bare metal servers I managed.

Not a single sysadmin I worked with liked anything about sysvinit. Nearly every distro-provided init script for the services we cared about had some sort of subtle bug which we had to manually fix with our configuration management.

Or maybe somebody had been diagnosing an issue and manually run "sudo /etc/init.d/someservice start" and now congratulations, the service inherited the cwd of the person who ran the init script.

Or you have to deal with inconsistent log rotation behavior, or the service coming up before the network was ready on boot (better rename the symlink to 99_myservice!)

I don't know where people get the idea that sysadmins prefer sysvinit. Maybe ones that only run one or two servers? After having managed tens of thousands of them across many datacenters, systemd is a clear and obvious win.

<comment><USER22> I am not saying that all/most sysadmins hate systemd , I am just annoyed but the random Joe Desktop Linux users throwing his opinion. I like reading sysadmin experience and what issues they have like you but also ones that had issues with systemd bugs and behavior and a random Fedora user will show up and repeat something he has no clue about.

I personally had no issue with systemd or upstart or any other I used so I would wish desktop user like me would read more and comment less about what is better.

<comment><USER24> Are the uninformed opinions of joe user really influencing decision makers? The internet is mostly filled with people spouting uninformed opinions, it does not seem worth it to spend any energy caring about it.

<comment><USER22> I don't think the decisions made in Debian were influenced a lot by the average joe user, my complaint is about the discussions, my complaint is that say if I find a thread that compares all the init systems I would prefer to read expert opinions on it, people that had success with systemd but also people that had trouble with systemd , but you get average joe pasting same shit all the time on both sides.

But yeah you are right(this always happens on the internet), I was also guilty of this, I remember back when C# appeared and I was sure is the best thing ever and it will soon replace all the other languages. I think at my past enthusiasm for C# when I see Rust/Go/CoolLang evangelizing why X is better and in 3 years it will dominate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those of us who have forgotten the details [https://lwn.net/Articles/806332](https://lwn.net/Articles/806332)

</comment><comment><USER25> The "graphical" page is a bit more interesting, I think, with a graph of how each option fared compared to the other ones:

[https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/](https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/)

The ballot graph looks a bit strange to me. For one, votes seemed to come in all the way through the voting period, and actually _increased_ just before the deadline. For two, nearly 20% of the ballots -- 100 out of 550 were rejected. I hope that's not evidence of "voting irregularities" \-- the top 4 options were all within 50 points of each other.

EDIT: From the bottom of the page: "Most of the bad ballots are due to the presence of a non printing character (usually one that displays as a space) in the ballot that confuses the parser. "

<comment><USER26> > For two, nearly 20% of the ballots -- 100 out of 550 were rejected.

Of 552 ballots receieved, 548 passed "MIME Decoded" and 459 passed "Sig Check", with 452 Votes Tallied and 7 Bad Ballot - so, the vast majority of the failed ballots had invalid GPG signatures.

This data doesn't tell you how many of the valid ballots were re-sends from voters who had previously sent in an invalid ballot.

<comment><USER27> Note that you get an e-mail either saying that your vote was accepted, or that your vote was rejected and why (bad GPG signature, unrecognized GPG key, mangled ballot, etc.)

So if someone screws up, they know and can resend.

Also, you're allowed to send in a second ballot which supersedes your previous ballot, up until the deadline. So if you change your mind during the voting period, you can update your selection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Dropping Option 6 because of Majority. > (0.8084112149532710280373831775700934579439) 0.808 (173/214) < 1

Not particularly relevant, but is there any reason to include that many digits, especially when the source-of-truth fraction is right there?

<comment> fake-name 99% chance it's just some calculation tool not truncating.

I wouldn't be surprised if that text is machine generated from a template.

<comment><USER29> It's obviously tool-generated.

I think the question was, why does the tool show the non-truncated value for that one line, considering it put the truncated (%0.03f) version right next to it.

<comment><USER30> Here's the repository. Look it up and tell us.

* [https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/devotee.git/](https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/devotee.git/)

<comment><USER29> What do you want me to tell you?

dvt-rslt:367-368 the ratio is interpolated into the string output without any format specification (resulting in the full decimal expansion), whereas in the passing case (line 382) it is not.

The ratio is formatted with %6.3f in both cases (369-372, 384-387).

That's what it does. Doesn't tell us why (though it looks like a simple oversight on the programmer's part).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > alternate init systems

Yeah, I am just end-user and I don't really care what is under the hood as long as it works, but isn't the biggest complaint against `systemd` is that it integrates a lot of other functions/subsystems that are not part of other init systems? And you kinda have to take whole package?

<comment><USER26> The only non-init part of the systemd that is required is systemd-journald; every other part can be disabled at build time via configure switch, or at runtime by disabling the corresponding unit files. Whether optional parts can be disabled on any particular distro is the distro packagers' responsibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a theoretical matter, non-systemd alternatives are as important as the HURD is to the Linux kernel.

Practically, I'm booting Linux and using systemctl like a boss, chiefly due to that 24hour/day invariant that nobody escapes.

</comment><comment><USER33> Man, I feel like the Linux world is moving to systemd but this whole process has been like pulling teeth. I'm totally unaffected by this but even I'm feeling worn out on it. Feels like brexit, honestly -- nobody's enthusiastic about either systemd or sysv init, ok, fine, its happening but... ugh.

<comment><USER25> The real problem I have with systemd isn't the technology itself, as much as the attitude of the people who run it.

Off the top of my head, issues I've seen with systemd:

* At some point there was no way to say, "bring up this service once the network is up". I mean, there was technically a "network" target, but it considered "localhost" as a network. So if, say, you have automounted NFS, the automounter starts running before your main interface has DHCP. This setup been a widely-used configuration for decades; the systemd maintainers didn't care.

* At some point, if you typed "reboot ; exit" in an ssh session, the "reboot" would hard-kill your ssh session and your shell before the "exit" would be run; so your ssh connection would then hang until the machine came up again and refused a TCP resend request.

* The whole thing with systemd reading the kernel's command-line, deciding that "debug" was meant for it, and spamming the logs making it completely unable to boot; and forcing the kernel to introduce a work-around to hide "debug" from systemd.

* The whole interface renaming thing that's happening in Debian now; every time our project has upgraded our test systems from jessie to stretch, and then stretch to buster, we've had to spend dozens of man-hours figuring out why our network configurations aren't working.

The problem here isn't so much that there are these sorts of bugs; the problem is that there seems to be an attitude of, "Well my set-up works; yours doesn't matter." That's not the attitude such a core piece of infrastructure should have.

Compare this to Linus' nearly fanatical insistence that things in userspace should continue to work. If Lennart Pottering had the same attitude towards breaking existing systems that Linus has, systemd would probably be incredibly popular.

<comment><USER34> well the first point is fixed when using networkd. the problem is/was that many systems used their own network solution, like networkmanager (RedHat) which did not fit well into systemd

<comment><USER35> But that's a big problem: if the scope of systemd is just to be an init system, its answer to everyone who wants to make their tools work with systemd shouldn't be "just use our loosely associated tools instead".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More statistics [https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/](https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/)

</comment><comment><USER36> The raw ballots are available at [https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002_tally.txt](https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002_tally.txt)

It would be helpful to also have that shared in in a way that makes it easier to see how many top-ranks each choice had, how many bottom-ranks etc. But note that it seems that equal rankings are allowed, and many common ranked-choice cast vote record formats don't represent equal rankings.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone recall a similar situation with a different piece of system software?

Where it was shipping as a default and then was publicly questioned as to its utility?

<comment><USER38> Gnome

Bash shell

Pulseaudio

The earliest days of grub bootloader, which is baroque complex compared to the LILO everyone used for years previous.

Classic nvi as default vi (as opposed to vim)

Some of the turn of the century weirdness around xfree86 and x.org fork battle

Frankly, worship of POSIX was always tiresome to deal with.

<comment><USER39> And the classical egcc vs. gcc, but this one is older than Debian.

Anyway, Gnome was eventually downgraded into "an alternative"; Bash is not the default Debian default shell anymore, it's only default for interactive sessions; Pulse is impossible to get ride of nowadays and still impossible to use; the Grub one kept going until Grub2 that was actually better than LILO; vim won, hands down, as it should; everybody gave up on xfree86 once x.org become better.

Except for pulse, as soon as the preferred alternative became better than the one the change-resistant people wanted, resistance simply vanished. Pulse is outed on the above example because well, it never became better than the alternatives, but still there was never any sizeable resistance, just some noise or lack of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> First resignation:

[http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-init- dive...](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-init- diversity/2019-December/002888.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> I am curious about the "exploring alternatives". Anything known about that?

<comment><USER42> Basically it just means "if somebody proposes something better we won't tell them to go screw themselves by default". Which I think is very important, as the future of operating systems like Linux is where it has been for the past 2 decades: in distributed computing.

For non-desktop computing, what we really need are distributed operating systems. We have been poorly cobbling them together for decades, yet only a few research operating systems actually ship the needed functionality. Currently we use an array of layers of things, like hypervisors, container schedulers, service meshes, etc to sort of fudge together something that can do distributed computing in very specific ways. But they're all very complex, costly, and time-consuming to set up, and usually tailored to specific use cases.

What we need is for Linux itself to natively ship all a distributed OS's features, so that apps can simply take advantage of them without having to be strapped into 20 layers of glue. But at the current pace of kernel development, I imagine it'd take 10 years to get all those patches developed, tested, and merged. So instead you could merge only the most core functionality, and extend the rest into the userland, and you'd get something kinda resembling systemd, but actually oriented toward running apps and services on a distributed network. I believe that would make most Linux- specific "cloud" technology obsolete, and in the process greatly simplify the entire technology stack, reducing TCO, speeding up development, and simplifying operations.

Assuming that gets developed, "exploring alternatives" is a necessity to eventually get it adopted into Debian, so I'm really glad at least the option is there.

<comment><USER30> According to Ian Jackson, it was other options and not option B that were the options that encompassed not telling people to go screw themselves.

* [https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/3482.html](https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/3482.html)

* [https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/3999.html](https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/3999.html)

<comment><USER43> Though he insists on claiming to be "neutral" Ian's position explained in the latter link was to rank E (the only thing rejected more firmly than Further Discussion in this vote in the end) near the top. Option E purports to force every Debian contributor to do the heavy lifting for the systemd refuseniks, their desires are "Required" by the project to be implemented.

Actually, with a tiny amount of human insight, what Option E forces is really either: Another vote to kick out the refuseniks because this is intolerable OR most Debian contributors quit and the project gradually stagnates.

The Diziet sobriquet seems appropriate. Diziet Sma is the Special Circumstances agent "running" the win-at-all-costs mercenary Zakalwe in Iain M Banks' novel "Use of Weapons". Win-at-all-costs is a reasonable strategic choice in the last place we see Zakalwe (the War on Hells in "Surface Detail") but it's probably a bad idea in a volunteer project like Debian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think I understand the way Debian's Condorcet voting works, but my word it is not at all obvious!

Are there better examples of ways in which results like this can be presented more intuitively?

<comment><USER45> Voting systems basically break down into two main processes: runoffs and Condorcet. In a runoff, you basically throw out failing candidates from the vote until you get a winner, with there being different criteria for who gets thrown out. In a Condorcet voting scheme, you instead consider all possible two-way races simultaneously. If one person wins all those races, they win the vote (Condorcet majority criterion). If such a person doesn't exist, different methods handle this scenario differently.

A good way to think of it is like this. Runoff-style systems have the goal of maximizing happiness: prioritize giving more people their high-rank options. Condorcet-style systems have the goal of minimizing unhappiness: minimize giving people their low-rank options. If you have an electorate between two partisan candidates and a centrist candidate, most people are partisans who prefer their partisan candidate, and the partisans are roughly equivalent in strength, a runoff system is going to eliminate the centrist candidate first and give the election to a partisan, while a Condorcet system will find that more people prefer the centrist to the wrong partisan and give the election to the centrist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Rather than "considering alternatives", couldn't Debian invest time and money to make a public study of init systems with their pro and cons, then draft a spec of what they would like to have that doesn't already exist ?

<comment><USER26> Recommended reading: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=1729;bug=7...](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=1729;bug=727708)

In case you don't have anything better to do for a week, the entire discussion can be read here, but be warned there's quite a bit of trolling in that thread: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> God thank you for not switching again. Nothing is worse than changing habbit all the time.

</comment><comment><USER48> I was hoping uselessd would gain some traction. The thesis of the project started well</comment>


Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER3> I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.

I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

<comment><USER4> I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is _very_ different.

Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many.

If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).

<comment><USER5> Perhaps _that_ is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales?

If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody _really_ has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

<comment><USER4> I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely.

There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..

There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

<comment><USER6> Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....

<comment><USER7> Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together, centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.

<comment><USER8> _" centralize it"_

So... don't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, there goes my weekend/week.

As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-(

To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like all 4000+ employees are doing now.

Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/

<comment><USER10> Is there enough demand in the San Francisco area to absorb say 20% of Twitter employees? It always feels like everyone is hiring out there.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. And _if_ this is a sign of a few unicorns starting to drop, you're better off being one of the first ones to go than the last.

This is probably a very wise move. _4000_ employees is just insane for what they do. Grow wisely.

<comment><USER12> > 4000 employees is just insane for what they do.

Yes and no. Twitter will make ~$2 Billion in revenue this year (and it's their massive revenue growth that's kept the stock price where it's at). That takes a LOT of sales and marketing people to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What _is_ out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.

Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.

Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents- per-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-share-vs- expected-eps-of-4-cents.html)

<comment><USER14> > What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction?

But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).

Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).

Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.

<comment><USER15> > Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is > very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as > it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.

I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.

Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.

<comment><USER16> They no longer allow sign ups via Tor, so I don't think it's as dissident friendly as it used to be.

<comment><USER17> That's more due to stupid retards abusing tor for spamming... with tor you have to draw the line somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".

<comment><USER19> Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not.

Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.

Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

<comment><USER20> And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin.

All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.

The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.

> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been > showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and _still_ get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.

Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.

<comment><USER21> How do you block in app adds?

<comment><USER22> Most apps use 3rd-party libraries and servers to show those ads, so they can be blocked at the network connection level (e.g. the hosts file) if you have control over your phone's OS. Having Android helps with that.

The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any worse with blocked ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants.

Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

<comment><USER24> Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me...

Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!

<comment><USER25> it's because you're not their target. Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.

<comment><USER24> > it's because you're not their target

Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.

> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to > acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.

Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.

I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This sort of thing can happen when society insists on building multi-billion- dollar businesses around stuff that should have been an RFC.

On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.

</comment><comment><USER27> A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment.

Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.

<comment><USER28> Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.

<comment><USER29> >I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet.

It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?

Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of twitter.

Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?

<comment><USER30> That analogy doesn't hold up as well to tools. I mean we're still using E-mail right? Twitter is basically a format in its own right at this point

<comment><USER31> No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of a single company.

<comment><USER32> A format like Twitter requires major infrastructure to work well so being under one company makes complete and necessary sense. This doesn't detract from the fact that it's become a format that a lot of the Internet now depends on for communication and news. Simply saying "no, it's not" doesn't prove anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made.

Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.

Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.

If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.

<comment><USER20> I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.

<comment><USER34> You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone.

For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username.

Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.

This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see.

They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a very living community through those tools. I now use twitter as my exclusive medium for both mainstream and "niche" news. I appreciate the wide availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with their user experience. The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a pain. The inability to connect with the right people and build a discussion about topics you discover and find interesting. Basically twitter should have a chatroom. And propose you conversations about (your) trending topics.

<comment><USER36> So a more public/global Slack with recommendations and intelligently aggregating channels by hash tag?

<comment><USER37> the limitation of which is that most content on a user stream is pulled passively by the users or is a paid advertisement.

as a discovery/exploration tool sucks.

if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond 'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag

I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go by preference into feedly, not twitter.

on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game developer :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Has someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30% "join the flock" tweets.

<comment><USER39> I got an email from a Twtr recruiter two days ago and now am trying to word my polite reply that now doesn't look like the best time to be quitting a good job to join a company that's in the middle of layoffs. I guess they didn't get the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I see this as a good sign (other than for those laid off of course), Twitter is fantastic but they don't need half as many people as they currently employ for their product. As companies get larger their agility and ability to change decreases. What's important is if they're laying off the right people.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is it true that they will - to further cut down costs - also limit the number of characters per tweet to 72?

</comment><comment><USER42> ...I heard they're gonna fire 140 characters

</comment><comment><USER43> Oh god. My roommate was literally offered a position at their Boulder office last week. I wonder how systemic cuts will be?

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm sad for my friends at Twitter but, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

<comment><USER45> Is indeed sad for the people that are let go, but at least the market is hot and they will probably find new jobs soon.

<comment><USER46> That is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a general downturn

<comment><USER47> There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?

<comment><USER48> What makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for IPO. Just wondering.

<comment><USER19> Twitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.

<comment><USER49> Profit is not a problem as long as you have growth. Twitter doesn't have that, and neither does Square.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> When Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been- damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by- in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.

But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco- system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.

But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.

<comment><USER51> Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.

<comment><USER50> Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now:

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

<comment><USER51> Ha, similar stories - I'm aware of Technorati, they really should have been the firehose of their day (I guess Wordpress.com is the closest thing now). I was building a feed reader that would cluster conversations around the blogosphere so you'd get a better sense of the daily zeitgeist than just following quotes or trackbacks. Which brings me to the more direct comparison - comments and trackbacks to replies and retweets. Finding new content branching from what you're already reading, and frankly the experience was just clunky and terrible compared to Twitter. And that's assuming you've even _found_ a feed reader and subscribed to some feeds. And even if _that_ was easy, where are you yourself publishing? Every task was harder, and only Tumblr has really come close to replicating Twitter's level of integration on a blog-like platform.

Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.

This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Non paywalled article at [http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning- company-wid...](http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-company-wide- layoffs-for-next-week/)

</comment><comment><USER53> So it is possible the ceo switch happened now since the board was willing to reduce company size, instead of the other way around? I can imagine markets to take it better if this appears to be the first wise move of a very capable ceo.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?

<comment><USER55> Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it.

Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.

<comment><USER54> Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.

<comment><USER56> Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.

<comment><USER57> @pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw doing it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002)). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast.

But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.

<comment><USER39> But how many engineers if they were still on Ruby? Perhaps they can drop Scala for Erlang and get down to 100 engineers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Honestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build fast teams that learn even faster".

As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.

<comment><USER60> When the creators of Bootstrap framework left Twitter, I took that as a bad sign. Creative people easily get bored and need to challenges.

With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - <USER2> though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if this will have an effect on private equity for startups immediately, and have an effect on what some see as a VC bubble. Twitter was often hailed as an example of a company that didn't need - not just profit - even a monetisation strategy, because growth! Ads! User data! You're the product! It's becoming more obvious that this may be a hollow way to speculate about returns.

</comment><comment><USER62> Genuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is laying off?

<comment><USER63> They don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would:

\- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut

\- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average

\- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs

\- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs

Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.

<comment> finance-geek This is a good list. Two more reasons: \- Corporations are inefficient, sometimes the HR department is not even aware layoffs are coming \- Corporations are sometimes unethical, they don't care about the unfairness of hiring a new worker rather than trying to re-place a worker about to be laid off

<comment><USER64> One more reason - new hires can be cheaper.

Or can appear cheaper to bean counters, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Oh.. Twitter who lobbied the crooked mayor of SF, Ed Lee, to kick the Chess Players out of Market and Powell?

HOW THE WORM TURNS.

<comment><USER66> They kicked chess players out of Market and Powell? As a chess fan this interests me. Please link me to more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> finally.

completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.

all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.

i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.

<comment><USER68> Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.

<comment><USER19> Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> That's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?

<comment><USER36> Yet.

<comment><USER70> Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark.

And they are already reporting profits.

I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

<comment><USER36> Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me _profits_ from those users if you want to count them.

<comment><USER66> If you think profits are still the driving force of what matters, then you will never build an Instagram or WhatsApp at the exit values they achieved.

This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base.

Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.

<comment><USER71> That is the exact cargo cult bullshit thinking that got Twitter and many other companies into this situation in the first place.

<comment><USER66> Was Google cargo culting by turning down efforts by its early investors to have them show banner ads like Yahoo?

Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need to post immediate revenue.

Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> In the public markets, you announce your bad news after the market closes on a Friday. If this were good news, it would have been announced on a Monday, Tuesday or Wenesday and before the market opens.

</comment><comment><USER73> > costs and expenses totaled $633 million

WTF do they spend that much money on?

</comment><comment><USER74> > A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

That made me giggle. Their entire existence is communication.

<comment><USER75> i wonder if you think there is another kind of existence?

<comment><USER74> OK then "the Twitter Corp. business model" to be more accommodating to the pedant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'm surprised it took so long. Hopefully the other social-networking giants follow suite and we start getting more companies that have actual sustainable business models.

</comment><comment><USER77> Its not about Twitter. The whole economy is shrinking because people have taken the idea of sustainability to heart.

Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.

</comment><comment><USER78> I think it's a good moment for Twitter to get back in track, Moment is a great feature and it shows that more good stuff is coming.

</comment><comment><USER79> And yet no one avail to fix the mobile Twitter website. It just does not work. Get enraged everytime I click on a tweet from Safari.

</comment><comment><USER80> Do they have 20% time?

<comment><USER81> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

<comment><USER82> > 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character > messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.

It's pretty trivial.

<comment><USER56> OK, I'm hearing a lot about hardware there but not seeing where thousands of people are needed to keep it all up. Again, WhatsApp -- 50 employees.

<comment><USER82> In 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison, Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems reasonable for a post-IPO company.

Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.

<comment><USER83> Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout.

Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?

<comment><USER84> > Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 > BILLION payout.

Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.

<comment><USER83> What do you mean? This is just a fact.

The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.

<comment><USER85> The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.

<comment><USER86> No, it doesn't. I strongly believe there are many other important factors like user base, growth ratio and active users than define the real value.

<comment><USER85> Sure, lots of other factors are important, but ultimately factors like user base growth and active users are just showing WhatsApp gaining a larger revenue stream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Scaling twitter is fucking overrated if you look at the work engineers at WhatsApp did. There's a reason why a whatsapp engineer is worth 100 more than the average twitter engineer.

The twitter tears are flowing in this thread

<comment><USER88> You've posted many uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban accounts that do this. Please read the site guidelines and follow them from now on:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.

<comment><USER90> @dmritard96, care to elaborate a bit on your post?

<comment><USER89> sure. There was what seems to be a correction in the PE market where funding become a bit more difficult to get a hold of. As such, an article came out suggesting that unicorns would have problems but cockroaches would survive. While the unicorn portion is a bit silly, the cockroach part is reasonable. Essentially, the companies with low burn rates and actual, real, cashflow will be more likely to survive.

<comment><USER90> @Dmritard96, thanks for clarifying:).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone

<comment><USER92> Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non- revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)

<comment><USER93> Maybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming, but not sure when...

<comment><USER92> Definitely. Now, if you're an evangelist who hasn't written production code in years, then maybe you should start brushing up on your skills :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Maybe it's finally dawning on investors that nobody wants to pay money for #sarcastic #selfpromoting #hottakes #mixingcontentandmetadata

<comment> finance-geek I would not go that far, but I can certainly say -- seems like half the accounts are re-tweet bots and random products I have no interest in trying to follow me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Twitter is undervalued, Jack Doresey can't run two stagnating companies in parrallel. Cut jobs, merge the companies (because Square's IPO isn't going to be successful and combine core competencies.

Square has been __focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others __[0]

Strip these companies down to core competencies:

* Communications

* Real time information broadcasting

* Financial infrastructure

* Global penetration

* Advertisers/Brands/Companies

Not PG's _What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? ", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"_* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:

* both sides of the market in one place

* financial infrastructure

* customer tracking

* brand participation.

Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.

[0][http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo- dorsey/](http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/)</comment>


Ask HN: Would Musk's SEC lawsuit still be valid if Tesla goes private? - <AUTHOR> Now that Tesla stock is down. Wouldn't it be an opportunity for Musk to go private with a big discount. If so, it would prove Musk was for real all along, and the SEC lawsuit would therefore become invalid. What's wrong with these reasoning? Your opinion is welcome, thanks! <comment><USER2> No because Musk already said that there was no plan to do so, going private now would make it even worse.</comment>


Why Stallman is wrong when he calls cloud computing stupid - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080930-why-stallman-is-wrong-when-he-calls-cloud-computing-stupid.html <comment><USER2> Stallman is to Open Source what Ralph Nader is to Liberals or Ron Paul is to Conservatives/Libertarians. He has a well-formed, strongly held but atypical opinion aimed at solving a particular problem, often at great cost in other areas.

In other words, he's the kook that says stuff that blows our credibility with moderates leaning the other way, but does so with good intentions and a kernel of truth that would go a lot farther if posed more pleasantly.

Likewise, he provides good food for thought and frames the situation clearly for people who agree or want to incorporate more of that line of thinking.

<comment><USER3> He's a monumental figure, working for something extremely important, and surrounded by people who are very wrong. While Nader is much less respected than Stallman, the magnitude to which their respective fields are ungrateful for their respective contributions is about the same. Stallman's contributions I would argue are much bigger than Nader's. Come on he invented the OS that is now the basis of the majority of internet business. I think he deserves a little more respect for that contribution. If Nader had done something equally big in his work of keeping rogue corporations in check, we would have gone on a more Canada-like path than the Reagan-led path of decline that we did go down. Free Software has become a major force that continues to grow and improve our lives. Nader's contributions were not lasting, and have mostly been reversed by decades of corporate think tank astroturfing and lobbying that has whittled away the rights and protections of individuals.

<comment><USER2> You contend that the creation of the GNU utilities -- differently licensed but by and large feature clones of an existing software package was a more important contribution to society than the American automobile safety regulation changes brought about by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed> ? Don't forget that BSD was already walking a similar course by that time. Emacs is pretty important, as well, but I think it ranks behind the GNU utilities, as well.

I haven't really tried to contrast them before, honestly, but I don't think it's quite that cut and dry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article would have been better if it actually addressed the "very real" concerns Stallman raises instead of babbling about a bunch of things that don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really didn't need an article to explain why Stallman is wrong. It's usually my default position until he convinces me otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminded me of this post by Seth Godin:

It's easy to be against something that you're afraid of. And it's easy to be afraid of something that you don't understand.

([http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/its-easy- to-...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/its-easy-to-be.html))

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was rather well-established that RMS has some severe paranoia- like syndrome.</comment>