Intelligence is a text-based application.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/02/Wrong-About-the-iPad

<comment><USER3> If intelligence really is text-based, why have college lectures?

Not a rhetorical question by the way, I'd genuinely like to know if anyone has evidence for the information-richness or otherwise of audiovisual presentation.

<comment><USER4> Lectures were originally spoken text. Then the lecturers got famous and started publishing their text as books. Text books. Now we have lecturers who often lecture from those words written by someone else.

The best teachers I've known spend an inordinate amount of time writing out their original lesson plans. It's still text-based even if there are bells and whistles.

<comment><USER5> I have a different experience. The best teachers I've had generally spoke without notes (although I'm sure they'd thought about what they were going to say beforehand).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good piece. Text is great because the information density is so much higher. The content in a thirty minute video can be absorbed in under five minutes of reading.

(On a side note, whenever I read someone promoting rich e-books with sound and video embedded in the text to increase it's value I can't help but feel that they don't own or enjoy many books.)

<comment><USER7> I enjoy reading, however sometimes when I'm trying to learn something I pick it up much faster if it is explained to me by another person, rather than reading about it... and that includes watching video.

Surely there are others in this community who function similarly?

<comment><USER8> Video is great whenever I want to learn and do something, but it's hard to skim a video to find a certain piece you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect that intelligence requires a composable interface. That is, composable in the functional programming sense, where each new element can transform the entire structure.

But, as far as I know, we only have two really good composable interfaces: speech and text.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would extend Tim's comments to include voice and speech as modes for interacting with computers. My wife and I got new Android phones recently and we both adapted instantly to speaking commands as often as possible instead of using the touch screen. For low bandwidth output, speech generation is good also. But in the large sense Tim Bray is right: text may be low bandwidth in a Shannon-sense, but is high in information bandwidth. As an example, I got more out of a 5 minute read of the New York Times online newspaper this morning than 30 minutes of watching any news show that I can think of (even the Colbert show :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> I tend to agree that intelligence is text based and that touch is great - <USER2> have a sony reader touch and I absolutely love e-ink. Why? It's not luminescent!!! I can't go from a luminescent screen doing dev work all day to reading another luminescent screen for fun.

<comment><USER12> But didn't you read his great counter point?!

 _Oh, and by the way, I consume a moderate amount of video, and I really like doing it on the 1080p LCD TV just the right distance in front of my comfy leather chair with the great footstool. Among other things, I can balance my computer on my lap and write seriously on it, just like I'm doing right now._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Intelligence is a text-based application."

Entertainment is an imagination-based application.

While Tim is right, Marc is right too. You can't look at the iPad as an intelligence tool, it is an imagination tool instead.

For the couch, and that is exactly what Jobs intended when he started the demonstration back in january sitting in a comfortable couch with an iPad on his lap.

Games, video, and everything entertaining is the first and foremost intention of the iPad.

Programmers and geeks? not so.

Intelligence will be relegated to a distant second this time. And there is exactly where Tim is wrong and Marc is right.

 _edited_

<comment><USER14> The iPad is not at tool at all, it is a distribution channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First sentence of the article:

 _Anybody who says they know how the tablet drama in general and iPad narrative in particular are going to play out is blowing smoke._

Interesting, as the rest of the article is their theory of how it's going to play out. And the link title here is a rather random sentence from the article that has little bearing on anything else, and isn't qualified in any way.

<comment><USER16> So, he's pre-qualifying his remarks by saying nobody can know for certain, but then gives his thoughts anyways. I don't see a problem with that.

<comment><USER15> * shoots self in foot __*

It's burning your own straw-man-bridge behind you, and then going back for your keys. If you can walk on water, go right ahead, but for _people_ this means you're going out of your way to say you're wrong before you say something.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but I know what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "intelligence is text-based" is a very over reaching statement. But the idea that touch based computing favors analog input, I think is dead on.

</comment><comment><USER18> s/Intelligence/Civilization/

And yet: I've been surprised how many successful people barely (or crudely) read or write. One such recurring type is the dyslexic entrepreneur. They are very intelligent -- but also very verbal/kinesthetic and not at all text- oriented. (I also suspect, without ready examples, that other great artists/performers/craftsmen are awful readers/writers.)

These types of intelligence will be underrepresented in a forum like this -- where 98%+ of our projected presence is writing.

So even while our giant enterprises (sprawling corporations, large governments) and engineering projects (bridges, computers) are dependent on the written word and text-based intelligence for coordination, we shouldn't forget the widely-dispersed and valuable non-textual intelligence we also rely upon.

<comment><USER19> Is that intelligence valuable if it had to be reinvented every generation because it is lost though?

<comment><USER18> Accepting your premise: maybe that need-for-reinvention makes it more valuable -- it can't be mass-produced by the printing press.

Contesting your premise: these intelligences are passed down in other ways -- including ways that we hyperlexics barely perceive well enough to properly value.

<comment><USER20> I've often wondered if enabling the capture and transmission of this type of knowledge would be one of the killer applications for ubiquitous-ish wearable computers (or to put it more fancifully, one of the advantages of the Borg).

Someone who is good at something but isn't good at explaining how they do it could wear the rig and the task could be recorded a few times through from their perspective (they could say how they think of the task's steps or whatever if they felt like it, but it wouldn't be needed). Other people, better able to describe things, could annotate the replays, break them into steps, explain motivations, put in branches for various cases, etc. A kind of first-person wikihow.

That seems to be along the line of translating the non-verbal into video and text formats, making the non-textual wisdom more like text so we hyperlexics can sift it our way.

Various trials using wearable computers to aid inspection and maintenance tasks have been done, but I guess we are still waiting on the tech and interfaces (or maybe more the social acceptance or right marketing) to catch up to the idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


QuackOverflow – StackOverflow's Listening Duck Assistant This April First - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Lower-right hand corner.</comment>


What motivates an investor to say "yes" - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/10/what-motivates-an-investor-to-say-yes/

<comment><USER2> > He wanted to make the investment and we started working together to make it > happen X convincing his colleagues and other investors.

So convincing their friends first is the less obvious secret. I've used this method with great success in everyday life. Or, well mostly to win girls.</comment>


Debugging Your Operating System: A Lesson in Memory Allocation - <AUTHOR> https://lukasa.co.uk/2016/12/Debugging_Your_Operating_System/?hn=1 <comment><USER2> The article has been updated at this point to have a long header talking directly to Hacker News commenters, and explicitly asks us to challenge HN's censoring of political content. This is quite strange, as that experiment has already ended and HN is no longer censoring political stories.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        void *calloc(size_t count, size_t size) {
            assert(!multiplication_would_overflow(count, size));

            size_t allocation_size = count * size;
            void *allocation = malloc(allocation_size);
            memset(allocation, 0, allocation_size);
            return allocation;
        }

Should really return (void *)0 on overflow, instead of asserting.

<comment><USER4> I think assert() is usually used by people who are going to just turn them off during a "production" build (with -NDEBUG).

<comment><USER5> And GP is right that in that case, you really want calloc to return NULL rather than an overflowed (short) non-NULL allocation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not sure I would call this a bug. Is _" call calloc, free, and calloc, without ever touching the memory"_ really a use case one should optimize for? One could argue that improving performance for this case only is worthwhile if it can be done in a way that barely impacts anything else.

Edit: apologies for being somewhat ambiguous. The "bug" I refer to is the Radar issue the writer of the blog created, not the performance issue with the Python code.

<comment><USER7> The author had a bug report in front of him. The behavior was repeatable and certainly unexpected. That is worth tracking down.

I've tracked down corner cases like this myself and been correctly told by developers that they're not worth fixing. But you don't know that _a priori_.

<comment><USER2> The bug report wasn't caused by calloc, free, calloc being expensive. It was caused by making a call that did "malloc + memset" when only malloc was needed. The code in question wasn't even invoking calloc at all, it just ended up being an excuse to investigate zeroing memory behavior.

Incidentally, the blog post asks "why was the memory being actively zeroed at all?" but never actually answers it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may be over-optimization. Allocating all-zero pages as copy-on-write doesn't reduce zeroing overhead. It just postpones it until the page is used, at which time zeroing takes place. Possibly at a higher cost, because you now have to take a page fault, allocate a page, mess with the MMU, and only then zero the page. Only for programs which allocate vast amounts of memory which they then never write is this a win.

Is that common?

<comment><USER9> If you zero upfront, you have to do all of that save the page fault anyway, but for large allocations you also thrash the cache zeroing stuff that's immediately evicted to memory. It really is faster in general to zero a page when the program actually touches it, since that's when the program wants it in cache (for certain thresholds of "large allocation")

<comment><USER10> "Thrashing to memory". Man, we must have different SLOs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article mentioned testing on macOs and Linux implementations. I was curious and I tried the author's demo program on Windows Subsystem for Linux; it performs quite well, running almost instantly on a low-end Surface 3.

Its definitely interesting to see these very low-level implementation details bubble up to the surface from time to time.

<comment> this-dang-guy I find the optimizations tend to derive from real use cases.

In this case, both Windows and Linux are used for huge server farms. MacOS not so much. Apple probably doesn't spend the energy optimizing this sort of thing since it's less likely to cause trouble for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Zeroing a 100MB buffer is pegging the CPU? It takes ~30ms to zero such a buffer on my machine, which seems to imply that `iter_content` here is allocating a buffer on each iteration of the loop. But if `iter_content` is just returning a bytes object, this would make complete sense.

One could perhaps pass in a bytearray object, or even have it return the _same_ bytearray object each loop, with a very large warning on the tin about how you will want to take a copy if you want to keep it outside the loop's body. (i.e., the returned bytearray is owned by the iterator, and you're merely borrowing it for the loop; this is a potentially confusing API but would reduce the memory allocation churn significantly: you'd only alloc your buffer once, instead of O(download size) times.)

<comment><USER13> At gigabit Ethernet speed (in pps) setting big chunks of memory per packet happens to be expensive. At 10GbE you actually may need specialised hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > It is clear that the original intent of calloc is to allocate heap memory > for arrays of objects in a safe way

This again? Just 4 days ago there was an article making up the same nonsense.

<comment><USER15> >This again? Just 4 days ago there was an article making up the same nonsense.

Seems perfectly reasonable. Care to enlighten me?

<comment><USER14> Please give historical evidence that the original intent behind calloc was to allocate heap memory for arrays of objects in a safe way.

<comment><USER16> That was the tiniest of point in this article (unlike the last one). This article is far more useful and accurate to the average person.

<comment><USER14> I agree. It's interesting that two seemingly independent sources make the same unfounded claim about this obscure C function so close in time. Since I replied in the first case, I was sensitive to the second case. Perhaps someone should make a third attempt so that we can conclude that it's a conspiracy to rewrite the history of calloc.

<comment><USER16> I am pretty positive they aren't unrelated. Both mentioned Python's requests library and PyOpenSSL if memory serves.

If I had to hazard a guess, it felt like the first one was potentially written by the reporter of the initial bug, the second by the actual developer who investigated it. This is just a guess, but I bet if you reread both you'll likely agree with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> seems to me the more accurate title would be "debugging a function in libc"

</comment><comment><USER18> We merged comments here from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110615) because of an annoying limitation of our software. Feel free to check that thread if you want the gory details, but let's keep this thread on topic.</comment>


Noam Chomsky: We're no longer a functioning democracy, we're really a plutocracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/27/noam-chomsky-were-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-were-really-a-plutocracy/

<comment><USER2> > He also disagreed that a platform in the mainstream media was necessary to > influence the debate.

> "If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the > country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the > antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women's movement, the > environmental movement and so on – they're not led by any debate in the > media," Chomsky said. "No, they were led by popular organizations, by > activists on the ground."

I strongly support what Chomsky is doing, not because I agree with him (I often don't), but because he spends most of his time convincing (young) people that grassroots movements and protests are not useless. Most of my peers in their twenties or thirties have strong values, but have a incredibly fatalistic/defeatist approach to reality. They are often very conscientious about their food, their (local and global) social and ecological environment, slavery, social injustice, and other issues. They actively participate in volunteer work too. But they consider protests pointless, they consider fighting for any kind of value they hold pointless (or 'inappropriate') and any other kind of activism pointless.

Chomsky is one of the voices that makes some of 'us' believe that the battle is worth fighting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well... I think what is really happening is that we are globally hitting the resource production rate limits.

The only globally sane option is austerity, to balance the monetary reality with the physical reality. If you really have only ten cows, it does not matter whether your bookkeeping says you have 100 or 10000. You still only have ten of them. Unfortunately it is _only_ winning move if all governments implemented it simultaneously, without any of them defecting.

Artificially stimulating economy is massively beneficial for the defecting greedy governments (ie. most of them), at cost for all those whose budgets match physical reality. This makes austerity always the losing move for the few who do implement it (think Greece).

The probable end result on the current path is massive unemployment and a nearly total economic meltdown or reset.

Tragedy of the government commons.

</comment><comment><USER4> No comments? My impression is: "Ouch".

Good (if brief) article. I've always thought that Chomsky was a bit of a kook. But he makes some very good points! The "ouch" is because he makes sense, which contradicts my previous impression of him.

The headline seems a bit alarmist or dramatic. However, let's consider recent events. Given the sequester, government shutdown, "nuclear option" in the Senate, and many similar things, it appears to me that we're less of a "functioning democracy" than at anytime in at least the previous 50 or so years. (The article uses much different events to come to this conclusion).

<comment><USER5> > I've always thought that Chomsky was a bit of a kook.

If the past six months have taught us anything, it should be that sometimes the kooks are right.</comment></comment>


Distraught people, Deadly results - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/06/30/distraught-people-deadly-results/

<comment><USER2> "Minutes later, Page's death wish was granted. Two Clay County sheriff's deputies arrived to find that he had taken a neighbor hostage. They opened fire, striking him five times in the torso and once in the head"

I'm not sure what you would like the police to do other than this. They are here to protect us. If someone has a gun or a weapon and will not put it down, they need to be stopped.

I would rather have this than innocent people getting hurt in the process.

So, we are blaming the cops for doing their jobs and at the same time trying to put more and more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners. Innocent and law- abiding citizens are the only ones getting hurt with this mindset.</comment>


How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old-illinois-man-is-distorting-national-polling-averages.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as:

1\. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls.

2\. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to another.

Or at least, so he claims. Obviously, he runs a poll aggregator, using a model that heavily weights the trendline of individual polls, so he has a dog in this fight.

<comment><USER3> His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.

<comment><USER4> I think it will be really interesting to see what happens in election forecasting if Trump wins this election -- doubly so if there's no major scandal for Clinton between now and election day.

<comment><USER5> If the polls stay as they are and the election goes the other way, it means that polling as practiced is somehow fundamentally broken, which would be very surprising.

If there's a gradual shift in the polls, I'm not sure what that would mean. Which scenario did you have in mind?

<comment><USER6> BRexit will likely want to have a word with you.

I have a feeling that polling is used now a political weapon not a measure of reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they are ordinal variables.

Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

[0] [http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf](http://epub.ub.uni- muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf) and [http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf](http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Side rant: what the heck did they implement on NYtimes.com ?! When I quickly click the text (which I compulsively do to select a paragraph etc.), it _changes the font size_ (sigh)

<comment><USER9> Ugh, what were they thinking? I can't even imagine what this _feature_ would be for!

<comment><USER10> I think it's some sort of idiotic tap-to-zoom, like for mobile/touch browsers? Since browser zooming is hit and miss, they probably thought they were oh-so- clever. As Raymond Chen says, someone probably got a raise for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really fascinating. I get why the poll creators made these decisions, but the results of the weighting lead to a ridiculous result compared to other polls. Supposedly this poll was extremely accurate in 2012, so who knows?

<comment><USER12> Then the poll creators made bad decisions. Even with transparency there's no reason why a poll can't be constructed specifically to heavily favor a particular candidate which it seems is just the case.

It's very humorous when Trump cites this poll considering what an outlier of civilized humanity he is. Matches nicely.

<comment><USER13> Interesting use of the word 'civilized' that I wasn't previously aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure if he doesn't know his role, and I'm curious how tracking polls like this try to account for the large media attention paid to the poll and its methodology. This guy is known to stats nerds, and they've been tracking his moves and (rather mean-spiritedly) calling him "Carlton" for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Will the era of click-bait titles come to an end?

<comment><USER16> As soon as it stops working, it will stop being employed.

<comment><USER17> Sadly, when I first clicked on this, it had a much better headline. Something like "LA Times poll, how sample sizes make it an outlier".

Maybe clickbait++, or maybe the NY Times felt better about fingering a young black guy than a competing paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.

<comment><USER19> It's not that the cell is small. It's that it has a single respondent representing it, so his weight is increased enough to be the equivalent of 30 respondents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This makes me feel so much less confused about that poll

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm posting under a throwaway account just to say I agree with you; if that says anything.

<comment><USER22> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let's go find the really heavily weighted members of _all_ the polls and dox them too. This way we can screw them all up. Not just one that is influenced by a potential Trump voter.

<comment><USER24> This isn't doxxing.

<comment><USER23> 'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll though.

<comment><USER25> The article does not question the authenticity of the poll. It complements the pollsters on their documentation and sharing of data:

 _It's worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey._

It does point out an aspect of the poll that may undermine its utility in accurately predicting the result of the election, but it's a pretty dry fact, the repeated inclusion of a heavily weighted voter.

If Trump takes 10-20% of the black vote, then the poll did a good job predicting the results. I don't expect that to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Regarding the _Times_ ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".

<comment><USER27> Does it matter? The point is that they published an article that is factually accurate. If they were publishing an opinion piece based on such motivations there might be an argument here. But they aren't.

<comment><USER28> You're completely missing the point. Publications show bias _all the time_ based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today, even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage.

This is what your parent comment was referring to.

<comment><USER29> Either that, or you are the one with bias, and the news outlets you go to and/or the people you associate with feed into that bias. You can see just as much bias in the opposite direction on any number of news sites. They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly.

Individuals are usually even more imperfect than most news outlets when it comes to having limited sources of information and unexamined preconceived notions about things. No one is off the hook for being personally responsible for trying to understand all sides of a debate or being as educated as possible on all sides of an issue. I only say this because I see huge correlations between people complaining about bias in news outlets (regardless of political leanings) and people who don't see just as much bias in their own preferred media inputs.

<comment><USER30> "They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly."

All are biased _knowingly_. We don't live in utopia, newspapers/media are _paid_ enterprises.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Want More Entrepreneurs? Make College Cheaper - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/07/research-want-more-entrepreneurs-make-college-cheaper?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=harvardbiz <comment><USER2> Would'nt that suggest a higher amount of entrepreneurs in all those fancy countries with free education? I have no numbers, but i always assumed the U.S. to simply have way more entrepreneurs because of the "American Dream"-Mythos

</comment><comment><USER3> who needs college to be an entrepreneur?

</comment><comment><USER4> People are entrepreneurial <i>because</i> they have no other options. There are other reasons but that is the main one. Let's call it an environmental factor!

They are also entrepreneurial when they feel like being creative and the downside risk is low because they have the bank of Mom & Dad to lean on. Which is fine, there is nothing wrong with that. Much like poverty it's just not a sexy story.

Tiny Houses would make more entrepreneurs. If you didn't have to worry about food, rent and utilities but otherwise were, um, money free, that would make you pretty entrepreneurial. Especially if you had access to tools, workshop, computer resources. That's my own plan at least.</comment>


Show HN: Video link-up with remote teammates that allows you to feel at ease - <AUTHOR> http://videoworklink.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, guys!

I'd like to share with you an experimental product for remote teams.

It allows your remote team to communicate as if you are sitting together around one large table divided by translucent privacy panels.

It is called VideoWorkLink (VWL): [http://videoworklink.com](http://videoworklink.com)

Remote workers often feel lonely and disconnected. This product helps to solve that problem: it links you up with remote teammates via video in a way that allows you to feel at ease.

It saves your bandwidth consuming only 1% of 100 Mbps bandwidth network.

I would like to invite everyone to try it (it's free) and write your thoughts about the idea and the product itself.

Please, go to the website I posted above, try the product and write what do you think!

Thank you :-)</comment>


Private Equity Should Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should-not-exist <comment><USER2> This article really overstates the importance of private equity.

 _private equity, the financial model in commerce which more than any other defines the Western political landscape_

That doesn't seem accurate. Public companies controlled by the stock market, a board of directors, and a CEO are far more important, both politically and overall, than the small number of companies which have been taken over by private equity.

</comment><comment><USER3> I might well be biased since I do work in an investment bank that caters mainly to private equity clients, and having spent a decent amount working in a PE fund, but this article also conveniently focuses solely on the bad part of the industry. Of course, not all PE is perfect, and not all are the same. There are high leverage funds, debt funds, distressed investment funds, large cap funds investing billions of dollars, small cap funds financing companies worth just about 10m. The fund I worked for, for example, focused on buying only a few companies (3-4 portfolio businesses) and then building these up over 5-10 years to become market leaders, by investing in the companies capabilities both through add-on acquisitions and R&D spending. Of course, PE can also mean that in order to improve the company, some parts of it have to be restructured or shut down, but the blame for that cannot go only to the fund, but also to the management of that company letting divisions become lethargic. Not all PE is the same - some funds are bad, focusing on just stripping as much money out of a business as possible and then getting rid of whatever is left. But generally, PE's make most money with businesses that grow beyond their original scale, and innovate more than their rivals. Also, thanks to the investment time frame and relative freedom that investors give the funds, a lot of good can be done with capital, such as investments in emerging economies and local champions.

The point is, the PE landscape is infinitely more complicated than just saying it is good or bad.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but there are definitely a number of popular behaviours that are very clearly bad. Buying companies with borrowed money, then offloading that debt to those companies, and driving them into bankruptcy while sucking them dry, does not create value for anyone except the PE company itself. Funds that do that are vultures leeching on otherwise perfectly healthy companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> (FWIW, I'm in VC, but I know very little about how PE works.) As a general observation, businesses like PE usually don't exist unless somewhere down the line they create some value. So if a PE firm makes a buyout offer to a CEO and the CEO takes it, then presumably that buyout offer was better than the CEO's alternatives (like other offers, or staying private, or etc). The problem here is not the PE firm, but the lack of better alternatives.

One could make similar observations about the payday loan industry: most of the firms are predatory and their offers suck, but 1) because of high default rates, the loan offers will necessarily be poor, and 2) creating more alternatives to payday loans would be great. But banning payday loans would be a net negative, because the choice of "very high interest rate loan or nothing" is better than having "nothing" as the only option.

<comment><USER6> > The problem here is not the PE firm, but the lack of better alternatives.

Were the alternatives better for the stockholders or the CEO? And, were the alternatives better for which stockholders?

The number of firms that have started public, gone private, and then gone public again seems to indicate that private equity doesn't seem to be adding business value.

In addition, a lot of private equity seems to be about stripping cash from companies in creative ways--effectively the endgame of the "hostile takeover and then partition the company" from the 1980's. Toys R Us, Sears, K-Mart sure didn't seem to benefit from private equity.

<comment><USER7> If the alternative was better for the stockholders and the Board disregarded it, then the shareholders will sue, and win. There were some recent cases where Delaware courts awarded some pretty significant damages using hypothetical valuation models that were extremely favorable to the shareholders (Dell is a famous recent example [1]).

PE firms, once they own the company, can strip all the cash they want to from the company they own. There's no law saying a company can't be harvested for its assets if the shareholders believe that's the most effective way to extract value from the asset.

[1] - [https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/19/analysis-of- delaw...](https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/19/analysis-of-delaware- supreme-courts-dell-appraisal-decision/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Toys R Us, Sears, Radio Shack, Montgomery Ward, and dozens others failed because they didn't sufficiently adapt to the business climate and competition.

It's not like "but for Private Equity firms, these would be vibrant, competitive, going concerns". At most, PE was a specific _acceleration_ of their demise, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that the reaper was coming for them anyway...

<comment><USER9> "Toys R Us, Sears, Radio Shack, Montgomery Ward, and dozens others failed because they didn't adapt to the business climate and competition." Not really, they could have survived and had run way to make changes if PE didn't burden them by taking out loans against the company's assets and taking that out of the company in the form of management fees. Leaches.

<comment><USER10> But who is making these loans to companies that will be obviously unable to meet their payments? I never saw that part in the PE-sinks-companies story properly explained.

<comment><USER11> Who? Easy: banks. Bank debt generally has first call in the event of a liquidation, so if everything goes to hell the assets will be liquidated and banks will be the first to be paid back. They likely don't end up losing a lot, if anything at all.

The article makes it seem super obvious that these deals won't work out. But that is actually not the case. Many / most PE deals actually do work out, and end up making the sponsors a lot of money.

And why would banks allow this? Because private equity are huge profit drivers. They use lots of debt. They also acquire many companies, so there is an ongoing relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The theory is wrong.

Perhaps you can do it for pension funds, although most pensions are government backed anyway.

But investors are taking a known risk. These are all sophisticated adults. If a bank _wants_ to sign a contract that they will lose money if the company goes under, who is Warren to say they shouldn't? They're getting well paid for that risk, they know it's a risk.

If you ban debt-funded PE, you'll just have banks in-house the PE firms or any number of other structures that have the same result - people buying companies with other people's money and only sharing in the upside. Because that's a structure that benefits both sides (the banks and the PE companies) and they both want it to work.

<comment><USER13> Nice theory, but in practice many banks do not actually carry risk, because they are "too big to fail". LBOs fall in the same category as credit default swaps - useful in theory, huge moral hazard in our version of a "free market".

<comment><USER12> If you think the risk of debt is too high, then require banks to be capitalized higher against that kind of debt. Don't ban them from funding certain kinds of debt.

There are no banks that failed due to defaults from LBOs.

Besides, the plan goes well beyond banks. If a private investor wants to lend money for an LBO, this still prevents it.

<comment><USER13> I am not arguing for a ban, nor am I saying that LBOs cannot work. I am saying your bank risk argument in favor only works in theory and therefore we will have for more LBOs that cannot work.

Of course LBOs are not significant enough to single-handedly cause a bank to fail. However, they can still cause companies to go bankrupt that would have otherwise survived.

In any event, in a system where banks are not allowed to fail, I cannot see how they should be allowed to finance LBOs.

<comment><USER12> >However, they can still cause companies to go bankrupt that would have otherwise survived.

If a company's operations aren't profitable, it wouldn't have "otherwise survived". If it is profitable, then bankruptcy will wipe out debt and permit it to continue operations, hence it will continue to survive. It's the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.

>In any event, in a system where banks are not allowed to fail, I cannot see how they should be allowed to finance LBOs.

What work is LBO doing in this sentence? Financing LBOs carry some risk of loss, as does everything except Treasuries. Why would LBOs be special as something banks shouldn't be allowed to finance? Why are banks uniquely bad at risk analysis of LBO debt as opposed to, say, regular corporate debt, or junk bonds, etc?

<comment><USER13> > If a company's operations aren't profitable, it wouldn't have "otherwise > survived". If it is profitable, then bankruptcy will wipe out debt and > permit it to continue operations, hence it will continue to survive. It's > the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.

Debt is wiped out after _liquidation_. Most companies do not survive this. Debt service can make the difference between profitability or unprofitability. Remember, this is debt that was forced on the company externally.

> Why are banks uniquely bad at risk analysis of LBO debt as opposed to, say, > regular corporate debt, or junk bonds, etc?

I never said they are bad at risk analysis, I am saying they do not truly carry the risk in the first place. The difference is in the outcome. An LBO that should never have happened is worse than a corporate loan that should not exist.

<comment><USER12> >Debt is wiped out after liquidation.

Nope. I get the feeling you don't know the difference between chapter 7 and chapter 11?

>An LBO that should never have happened is worse than a corporate loan that should not exist.

Why?

<comment><USER13> > I get the feeling you don't know the difference between chapter 7 and > chapter 11?

Same here.

Chapter 11 doesn't "wipe out debt", that's what Chapter 7 does. Chapter 7 implies liquidation.

Chapter 11 may reduce debt obligations, entail partial liquidation, and so on. It _doesn 't_ just wipe out the debt.

> Why?

Because of the moral hazard. If I can just get a loan for an LBO to buy a company and squeeze it out like lemon, that's highly destructive. Unlike when issuing a junk bond, I have no real interest in the companies long-term survival. I guess you can make an argument that debt-financed stock buybacks have similar issues, but that's a topic for another day.

In the short term, even a bad LBO looks good for both the bank and the PE firm. Meanwhile, the company has a debt burden that paid for nothing but the privilege of having been bought out, likely requiring them to charge higher prices, which is a strong competitive disadvantage. This leads the whole argument of "restructuring companies to be more efficient" ad absurdum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >But that one's for my book, [...] which you can pre-order here.

Well that was an impressively elaborate sales pitch

</comment><comment><USER15> Kudos to Elizabeth Warren for trying to tackle this problem. But the entire financial services sector would lobby against her in many ways legal and illegal just so that she wouldn't become President.

</comment><comment><USER16> The banks who agreed to lend so much debt that they were barely able to make payments get off relatively free in these cases. There are plenty of instances where PE levers up and the companies do well but we don't discuss those. Plus PE makes way more growth oriented investments then LBO type investments because there are more smaller companies than larger ones.

</comment><comment><USER17> Markets with imperfect information exist. As in the Pentagon example they need to put in contracts that the Petntagon may outsource parts to prevent gouging as long as an IP fee goes to the owner of the original design.

</comment><comment><USER18> A good proofread is arguably not as important in a 5 minute blog read, but in a 20 minute read it really adds up.

</comment><comment><USER19> Further, private equity should not be involved at all in healthcare.

I'm in healthcare and they tear it apart.</comment>


Web development is changing to meet mobile needs - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelhughes.co.uk/blog/2009/09/web-development-is-changing-to-meet-mobile-needs/

<comment><USER2> All I can say, after several years of Mobile development, is: Thank God.

We've been relegated to the dusty corners of the consumer market for so long. It's amazing to see the mainstream web services community catching on. Now we mobile guys just have to keep up...

</comment><comment> rm-rf I've always thought that building an iPhone specific version of a site is the wrong path to take, and that site operators should create a mobile friendly version that works on iPhones and other PDA/Mobile like devices. It seems to me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can cover a handful of mobile platforms instead of just one.

I'm especially annoyed when the sites iPhone version re-directs Opera Mobile and Fennec browsers to the main site. A decision like that limits the usefulness of non-Apple mobile users.

<comment><USER3> > It seems to me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can > cover a handful of mobile platforms instead of just one.

As pretty much everybody who tried it discovered (and PPK is currently documenting, see <http://www.quirksmode.org/m/table.html> and <http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html>), while this is simple in theory it's extremely difficult in practice, because there's much more variance within the mobile space than within the desktop one (if you think 10 browsers -- including variants -- over 3 platforms is difficult, consider an order of magnitude more on as many low-power low-perf platforms).

Even if you restraint yourself to fairly advanced phones (and don't have to deal with WML, cHTML or XHTML MP) anything beyond basic (unstyled) markup is risky.

Thank science the space is currently coalescing into either Webkit or Opera browsers, but it's still a pain.</comment></comment>


Intel's Plans for 3DXP DIMMs Emerge - <AUTHOR> https://www.realworldtech.com/intels-3dxp-dimms/ <comment><USER2> It seems obvious in retrospect, but persistent memory adds a pretty exciting new advantage for persistent data structures.

Another thought: As potentially paradigm changing technology like this becomes available will it ever make sense to redesign the OS?

<comment><USER3> Zero serialization. Imagine installing a program and always having it "running". It may be swapped out but littetally everything in it is ready to go when you switch to it's window.

<comment><USER4> We have that right now, do we not? You don't _have_ to quit apps except on reboot.

Except that many apps are so buggy you have to restart them often in practice. NVM won't change that, sadly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While there are some analytics workloads that will benefit tremendously, the main use case will be improving server utilization.

Currently RAM is not a compressible resource like CPU. However many applications don't have a fixed or if easily predictable RAM footprint and so you have to overprovision. Swap has been there to solve that but with its performance impact, it often can't be used for server applications.

These DIMMs will blur the boundary between memory and swap and make swap again viable.

<comment><USER6> I dont get your logic. CPUs have a finite number of instructions they can do in a timeframe, its not compressible. In the other one someone could compress the memory, works great for storage. Sure, it'll be slower but compressing seldomly used memory pages like macOS does is indeed possible

<comment><USER7> I think his point is that you can "run" a large amount of applications at the same time on a CPU. It will execute everything, albeit slowly. This might not be acceptable for performance concerns, but it's doable.

He's not talking about actual data compression in RAM. Because even with compression, with current OSes, if you try to fit more than 20GB of data, let's say becoming 10GB compressed, into 5GB of RAM, it's not possible. You have to swap and at that point your performance is completely gone.

The performance gap between an overloaded CPU and swapping is humongous. One is annoying or slightly troublesome, the second is a death knell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One interesting thing for databases is that as nonvolatile storage latency decreases, traditional btrees get more attractive relative to newer log- structured designs. Especially if the write endurance is increased as well over current SSDs.

<comment><USER9> Or to put it another way: there's not a lot of reason to have two layers of log-structured storage. Your SSD already needs its own log-structured flash translation layer, and if that's tuned properly for your database workload, then another layer of the same kind of thing may not help much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's so much amazing stuff I could do with this. Imagine persistent redis? Huge huge pages? Booting from a DIM?

The possibilities are endless.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why can't we just put a battery onto DRAM that maintains state if the power goes out, and be done with it?

<comment><USER11> Because the power consumption to keep DRAM refreshed is fairly high so you'd need a pretty big battery, and because it would still be more expensive than 3DXP. It's just not practical for most use cases.

<comment><USER12> I figured that, but can we have some numbers here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I guess in a theoretical NVM-only system you could pull the plug at any time, and instantly resume it when the power is back on? If I'm reading right though the latency of 3DXP is somewhere in the 10-20us ballpark, still 100-1000x slower than DRAM.

<comment><USER14> Yes but it's also cheaper than DRAM.

You could resume after pulling the plug as long as things are consistent. If you commit data in the wrong order you could have trouble!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Price. Remember the current DRAM is 2.5x the price of what is was two to three years ago. So the XP DIMM being 4x cheaper then DRAM Now isn't that much different if DRAM dropped back to its median level.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any tech that's faster than DRAM and cheaper than SRAM? There's a need to fill that gap.

<comment><USER17> L2/L3 cache?

<comment><USER16> That's SRAM usually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> website times out. Also, this story hasnt been reported by any other news source. Is there some other site I can see the story at?

<comment><USER19> Website should be up, I just rebooted AWS :)

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately it's still timing out :(

<comment><USER19> Should work now. apache was getting freaked out.

<comment><USER20> Yup it works, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On a few occasions I've found myself in the presence of a senior engineer at a large defense company who would never stop talking about how persistent memory will change everything forever. Fair enough, but he'd go on about it in the weirdest ways. I think his impression is that the CPU registers would also be nonvolatile. I'm concerned that guy might be a few electrons short of a full orbital.

<comment><USER22> Saving and restoring CPU registers and flushing caches into non-volatile memory doesn't require much time or energy.

<comment><USER23> Specifically, you can normally do something like that between when you notice the power dropping and when it drains too much and you have to shut down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The initial release was really underwhelming, given the hype around this. So my personal (uninformed) expectations is just incremental improvement to the initial product.

<comment><USER9> Moving 3D XPoint memory from the peripheral IO bus to the memory bus is way more than an incremental improvement.

<comment><USER24> Says the company that claimed it would be 1000x faster than NAND flash, it isn't, and moving the location of the bus isn't going to change that.

<comment><USER9> > Says the company that claimed it would be 1000x faster than NAND flash, it > isn't, and moving the location of the bus isn't going to change that.

Using the IO bus instead of the memory bus is exactly why existing Optane products haven't delivered latency that's 1000x better than NAND flash. NVMe transactions take at least 5-10µs even with DRAM as the SSD media rather than NAND flash or 3D XPoint. Moving to the memory bus is a prerequisite to 3D XPoint fulfilling those original performance claims.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676857)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original New Yorker story about how 16-year-olds are sent to jail for years to wait for trial is chilling:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the- law](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law)

</comment><comment><USER3> Truly terrible.</comment>


Sparrow made downloadable to conform to LGPL - <AUTHOR> http://sprw.me/lgpl.php <comment><USER3> Is that just their changes to the LGPL components or the whole app? My understanding is that if you dynamically link to an LGPL library you're only required to distribute changes to that library not the whole app.

Also I don't get these two license clauses. If the point is to conform to the LGPL they can't just add another license on top.

Could this be a clumsy excuse for opensourcing Sparrow without having Goolge complain?

Also didn't the Apple Store license explicitly prohibit GPL code? Does that include the LGPL as well I can't recall off-hand?

Edit: As pointed out in the responses this is really just a bunch of .a files (static libraries), a couple of diffs against the libraries code and a script for linking sparrow together. The page provides little details and I though it was a source release This is apparently a way to conform with the LGPL on a system where dynamic linking is impractical.

<comment><USER4> Apple doesn't prohibit GPL. It's the other way around, GPL prohibits certain aspects of the App Store distribution model (I forget precisely what). In any case, this is LGPL, not GPL.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clearing that up. Indeed the GPL forbids further restrictions on the rights it provides. Which makes it incompatible with app store distribution.

I though I saw something in the App Store rules as well. I double checked and they mention the GPL and basically say that you should respect FLOSS licenses such as the GPL and avoid those licenses that would have an effect on Apple's code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure why everyone is so gung ho about Sparrow, the reviews haven't been good and my personal experience using it was that it was a very underwhelming product. It doesn't offer the whole set of gmail features, and for anything other than gmail it's even worse. I thought we'd all moved on from thick-client email apps. Admittedly gmail on IOS is awful, but since gmail supports exchange access, it's possible to use the built in email client and get push notifications. Even before Sparrow was acquired, teh reviews were less than stellar.

Everyone keeps trying to change email, let's leave it alone, it works fine, its one of the few technologies that has lasted any length of time and still be on top. nntp, gopher, etc all faded away, but pop, smtp, and then imap have flourished and become the de-facto way the world communicates.

<comment><USER6> > _I thought we'd all moved on from thick-client email apps._

No, "we" haven't.

<comment><USER5> We must know different people. I think (aside from the iOS built in email client) I don't know anyone that would even think of using a thick client, except to keep a backup of their gmail. Obviously it sounds like your experience is different, depends on the crowd we hang out with I suppose.

<comment><USER6> > _We must know different people._

Yes. This is likely.

> _I don't know anyone that would even think of using a thick client, except > to keep a backup of their gmail. Obviously it sounds like your experience is > different, depends on the crowd we hang out with I suppose._

All my friends used webmail when I was 20, too. That was in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you play with LGPL you have to stick to the terms, it's a fair trade off. What I don't get is why Sparrow doesn't OSS it to save some face and allow it to be run under community guidance as they've obviously decided to mothball it.

It's not like Google is a stranger to the world of OSS anyway, might salve some annoyed buyers.

<comment><USER8> Google might have also bought some of the code.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure all the assets, including the code, were part of the acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not the entire source of Sparrow - just the binaries required to relink with the LGPL libraries if you should choose to modify those.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the downloads appear to contain just .a files and other related stuff, not source code of Sparrow itself or of the dependent libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How were they able to use LGPL on the iOS?

Okay to put in less licensing, more technical-wise way: As far as I know on the iOS dynamic linking is possible, but not allowed (I could be wrong). For my pet projects (luajit on the ios) I'm using it without problems, but I don't plan on publishing anything.

So back to the licensing - LGPL is about dynamic linking...

<comment><USER13> Why can't you use LGPL with static linking? The LGPL license specifically mentions both:

"Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules...."

<comment><USER12> Maybe we are reading different licenses (I much prefer BSD or MIT, or even public domain myself - like sqlite/zlib).

But according to this:

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html>

1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.

It's possible that I'm posting something out of context, or that the Tokyo Cabinet authors have changed their permission.

Another thing is that whatever was submitted by the Sparrow folks - <USER2> precompiled .a static libraries and some frameworks - not source code changes. Well there were few diff files, and that was it.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, copied from the wrong place: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_Licen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License) says:

"Alternatively, a statically linked library is allowed if either source code or linkable object files are provided." But with no citation.

From reading on it, the consensus is that if your wrote your code such that it was possible to replace the LGPL part with a different (API compatible) library, and all you would need is a recompile then it's legal.

But if your code is written such that the LGPL parts can not be replaced then it's not.

<comment><USER14> the citation for that should be LGPL 2.1, section 6.a

"a) Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above); and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library. (It is understood that the user who changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified definitions.)"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Presumably this came out of the Google due diligence before purchase.

<comment><USER16> Almost certainly true. I doubt the Sparrow developers were deliberately misusing the libraries (which LGPL code was used, btw?). It's just that packaging and shipping a relinkable binary was way, way down the priority list and they probably just never got around to it.

But for a big corporation with an established IP policy, that's a big no-no.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly right. I was part of a similar audit at a past company during their exit. We essentially had to inventory the license of every Rails plugin, script, etc. we had ever used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> <quote>If you do not or cannot agree the license[sic], please do not download the files.</quote> Sounds like they're trying to enforce an LGPL-incompatible license on the changes to the LGPL'd libs, and pass it on as complying.

<comment><USER19> Quite funny they write that they release to conform to LGPL 2.1 part 6.a. But by writing "You may download those files only for your own use. Customer may not redistribute any work based on those files." they are quite clearly in violation of at least LGPL 2.1. part 2.c "You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." and part 10 "[..] You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.[..]"

<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1>

<comment><USER14> You are confusing two completely different sections.

Section 2 deals with the _Library_ , that is, the LGPL code.

It says this quite clearly "2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:..."

Section 6 deals with a _work that uses the library_ , and combining it with the library, which is the combined work of the LGPL code + whatever else.

<comment><USER19> You're right, I overlooked how they restricted their license restriction "The following restrictions apply to everything [..] in these downloads, except for the open source pieces. ". Now it starts making sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, what prompted this decision was their use of Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Dystopia.

</comment><comment><USER20> These are patches to the LGPL'd components they use, not Sparrow itself, right? (The LGPL specifically requires that you only release your modifications to the library, not your own code.) The only interesting things are some images, and some patch files inside lib/ -- nothing appears to be Sparrow's own source code.

It looks like they also toss in some compiled versions of Sparrow-proprietary code for debugging reasons, which I _think_ explains their incongruous licensing terms, but they're still strange.

<comment><USER21> The LGPL requires you, if you static ally link against such libraries, to release all of the rest of the build environment required to rebuild a working program from changed LGPL components; this involves releasing binary objects.

<comment> alok-g Does it require the entire build environment (as in all the tools used for building) or just the binary objects?

In other words, do the build scripts become subjected to the LGPL?

<comment><USER14> No. The LGPL requires you release them, it does not require you release them under the LGPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if the guy that made the Windows version will release his...

<comment><USER23> If he never distributed it he hasn't to release anything.

<comment><USER13> Yes, the rule is source must follow binary.

You can even sell the binary for money, distribute the source with it and simply ask your client to not-redistribute the source to someone else and it's fully legal.

<comment><USER24> not under the gpl, you can't

<comment><USER25> Well, ask and compel are different. I'm pretty sure you can ask them to do anything, up to and including barking like a seal. You can't compel them to do it under GPL though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g Possibly a naive question:

These LGPL clauses say the binaries for the work that uses the library must be released with the modified source code of the library itself. Does that imply that people would be free to use binaries (and thus the product)? Am asking for the general case, not specifically for Sparrow.

<comment><USER26> They only have to distribute these binaries to people who already brought the product. My guess as to why it is public ally accessible is that due to selling it through the app store they can't tell who actually brought it and the amount of people who can compile this, would pirate it, couldn't pirate from somewhere else and would have brought it if they couldn't pirate it is pretty minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Customer may not redistribute any work based on those files

Well it's a good thing I'm not a customer!

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it only me but my Sparrow.app (that I built from source) has ads in it?!

</comment><comment><USER29> Directly launching Sparrow.app in the zip causes crash (maybe because I already have, I don't know why). Anyone else observed this?

Anyone else managed to build a bundle from .sh file?

<comment><USER30> Edit the Build-mac.sh file at the top to /applications/xcode.app, I was able to build after that.

<comment><USER29> I already fixed that but ld couldn't link -lcrypto, I believe it is about libssl which should be present by default.

What's size of your produced .app package? The one I purchased is around ~48mb.

<comment><USER28> I couldn't get it to build at all, since it can't find ` -lcrypto`...bugging...

<comment><USER31> Have you installed the XCode command line tools? Also have you updated to a recent (4.4+) XCode version?

<comment><USER28> I believe I have xcode 4.3, time to snatch the new one I suppose! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yeah, they open sourced like... two files...

</comment><comment><USER33> "Customer may not redistribute modificatin to source code"

"customer may not reverse engineer"

oh joy.</comment>


Ask HN: Best cross platform desktop application framework thats not electron? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to build a cross-platform desktop application and want to avoid electron for various reasons.
Any suggestions?
Key requirements are:
1. Easy native packaging 2  Preferably use java, c# or kotlin 3. Modern Look <comment><USER2> Haven't been following it recently, but probably [https://proton- native.js.org/#/](https://proton-native.js.org/#/) or Qt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Qt/QML is the obvious choice. Xojo is another option.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went for GTK3 in Go (Gotk3) and kind of regret it. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with it, but I'd go for Qt if I could start afresh.</comment>


Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor To Governments - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/story/12/01/08/069204/leaked-memo-says-apple-provides-backdoor-to-governments <comment><USER2> Please, just because Slashdot uses a biased headline, we don't have to copy that biased headline here.

Should be "Leaked Memo Says RIM, Nokia, Apple, Etc Provide Backdoors To Governments".

<comment><USER3> It would also be nice to link directly to an article that provides some actual information (e.g. [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have-rim-nokia-apple- provide...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have-rim-nokia-apple-provided- indian-military-with-backdoor-access-to-cellular-comm/838)) rather than just to another "hacker" conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I missing something, or does this appear to be claiming that Apple (etc...) conspired with the government of a foreign country to spy on the U.S. government?

Or was the spying on the U.S. government just a happy accident in the process of spying on everyone else?

<comment><USER5> I also find something amiss. If apple did provide India with secret access to confidential goverment information, would that not clearly be a treasonous act? And would that not require the immediate arrest of any apple employ involved? Things may have changed but as far as I know treason is still a capitol offense. I find both the article and the discussion on slash dot very strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So no one really is safe. Android users have to contend with secret keyloggers, RIM, Nokia and Apple have secret backdoors, and from what I've heard even the fabled "security" of BlackBerry messenger is just a global cypher, it's not even an encryption...

When will be masters of our own devices? When everythign is fully open source and free?</comment>


Beta govt.nz - <AUTHOR> https://beta.govt.nz/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pleased that the open-source approach gov.uk has taken is paying off.</comment>


Show HN : Review my startup : Risely – Filtering your social news - <AUTHOR>

Link: www.rise.ly
Hey guys,
We just finished building our site, and would be very grateful if some of you guys could test it out.
Basically, Risely is curation platform that filters the noise from your social stream and only shows you stories on topics you care about. You just need to connect your social networks and select your topics. Trending stories get bigger as they get more popular.
We are in private beta right now, but I have made arrangements and you will receive an invite 5 or 10 minutes after you signup.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Nice design! Clicked on create an account button thinking I will be able to create an account and customize my feed. But it just added me to your waitlist. Found it a bit deceptive - maybe you should change the text to request an invite.

Its a crowded space with many options. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, you should have received an invite. Check your spam folder.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the invite! But thats not my point - a create an account button should exactly do that - start me with account creation process. I am not questioning the approach but merely the wording on the button and messaging after entering my email account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "only shows you stories on topics you care about." "Trending stories get bigger as they get more popular."

These two statements are in conflict, stories that are bigger and trendy are not necessarily stories that I care about. You have to analyze me, my actions, my social graph interaction to find stories in my social feed that I would care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry my statement is confusing. You only see stories from "topics you care about". We don't really need to analyze you because when you signup you select your own topics (We got around 170 atm) which you can change at anytime.

Then when people you follow on social networks (or Risely) have shared a story that has generated a lot of interactions, we make it bigger.

<comment><USER3> Okay cool, I really like the layout so far. The question now is, since this is a solved problem, you already have competitors, how are u going to get me to move from Zite, flipboard and pulse? I do use all especially pulse and Zite.

You need a hook, a story that will get me to use you. I am not motivated to add you to my iOS home screen or use you on my desktop.Therefore if u can differentiate your product enough to get me(someone like me) then u onto something. Test some crazy stuff since u have nothing to loose and the status quo will kill u. Maybe become the zappos of curated content or priority inbox for your social links.

Another thing is copy Zite and let me explore the site without signup. Create a session Id in browser, let the user select their interest tags, then refresh the page with the curated view. If they sign up just us their session Id to match them. Also allow them to push the articles to Evernote, Dropbox and drive. This is how Zite got me to try and test them out and I was hooked afterwards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice, Marketing has been quite a struggle for us and I started working on a landing page that integrates some of your points. However, we got high differentiation points with Pulse, Zite & Co.

3 points: \- Contrary to our competitors our users mainly get their news by filtering curated stuff from their existing social networks. Let's say you have selected 'Baseball' as a topic filter, and your FB friend shares an article on 'Soccer', well you won't see it. Basically, you can filter all the stuff your friends shares on your social networks (or Risely) and only see the stuff from topics you have selected. The effect is really good with Twitter, where I follow people that are known experts in their field but often curates stuff I don't care about. That's a very different approach than Zite where they suggest you stories, or Pulse where you directly follow certain blogs.

\- Second, Risely is curation platform but also a social network with built-in popularity mechanism. The more your curations generates interactions, the more you become popular and recognized: you get to be featured in "Topic boards" but one of the most radical effect is that it directly influences the layout of the stories you share to your followers. They get bigger, and thus you get more chance of being read.

\- Third, you will be able to make money based on a revenue sharing program. How it works is that we provide some information on terms of the article you are reading. For e.g. if we detect a link to a product from one of our partners, we show you some information about it (small image, price, title, brand). If you click on it you are of course redirected to the merchant. How it comes to play is that if you share this article to your followers, and you make a lead, you will get a cut out of it. And if one of your followers shares it, and makes a lead, you still get a cut. We are extending that to "Personalities", Places etc… This feature is limited for the moment, because we don't have many partnerships.

<comment><USER3> U really need to interview your target market, use an empathy map. This will save u a lot of time in getting your MSG across and will get u to focus on a few hardcore problems "Solutions over Ideas". You should have drawn up an empathy Map before building your product but on the bright side u have a prototype so go an interview people, try Starbucks, lots of people will let u interview them there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure how you can compete with the competition, which is focusing on tablets & mobile at this point. I don't use any social news 'apps' (I won't consider HN or Reddit an app but a destination) on the web, I either go directly to a blog or use Twitter.

On mobile I use Prismatic which fixes this problem aptly and Flipboard (for visuals).

<comment><AUTHOR> We have more a news filtering approach. If you select for e.g. "Ruby on Rails" we will analyze your twitter feed and only show you stories from people you follow on twitter that have curated this kind of stories. You can of course set multiple topic filters.

Prismatic has a different approach, where they try to figure out your interests, then they suggest you stories. Those are not stories curated directly from people you follow on your social networks.

With Flipboard, you follow blogs or curated magazines. No detailed filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are a quite a number of sites providing more or less the similar service. You need to carefully analyze them and proceed.Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very nicely done. I like the interface. I would suggest that you should let the users play with it without asking them to signup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, when you login you get a menu on left where you can filter your news by topics pretty much like on the new Facebook design.

That's a good point and we were actually thinking about doing that at the beginning, however it could also make Content Publishers very unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good work, this reminds me of the concept for something I'm building :)</comment>


FireEye Exploitation: Project Zero's Vulnerability of the Beast - <AUTHOR> http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/12/fireeye-exploitation-project-zeros.html <comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting because it's actually a vuln in JODE, which is used by FireEye's devices to decompile and inspect JARs for malicious code.

I'm curious as to the thought process behind JODE's developers when they decided to execute code from the JAR they're decompiling, since decompiling is almost always done against untrusted JARs, it seems like an odd move to explicitly execute code from them. Yet another reason to do all your RE in a VM/locked down environment. I think it's kinda funny that FireEye have made a dedicated environment for scanning malware but aren't even taking advantage of basic chroot/jail/whatever to at least mitigate an RCE such as this.

There's also a privilege escalation issue at play here that seems to be non- trivial to fix as it's been weeks since disclosure and FireEye has requested more time to fix it. I guess FireEye really doesn't want its customers to have root access to their devices? I'm not sure how the devices are sold, but I suppose if they're rented or leased that would make sense.</comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I delete my HN account? - <AUTHOR> I would like to continue using the service, but I have no interest in maintaining my account. Why is account deletion not an option? <comment><USER2> On a related note, I'm annoyed at sites that typically let you delete your own content, but it's possible for you to get blocked from seeing it and then you can't remove it any more.

For example, if you post or comment in a Facebook group and then leave it, you can't remove those comments. Same if you comment on someone's post and they then block you.

On Reddit if you post in a private sub or a gold-only sub and later don't have access you can't delete or access it. I think you should at the very least be able to see your own content at any point, and if deleting is typically allowed you should be able to delete your own content.

<comment><USER3> Similarly if you delete your reddit account but don't spend the time to delete all your posts and comments before you do, they won't go away.

<comment><USER4> Deleting a comment on reddit also doesn't delete the content. For that to happen you first need to edit it to be blank, then remove it.

<comment><USER2> Can't edit comments over 6 months old or so

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an unofficial FAQ by Jacques Mattheij, with an answer to this very question:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn- faq#deleteacco...](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn- faq#deleteaccount)

There is also indeed the official FAQ:

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

<comment><USER6> Yes but times have changed and I think, depending on where you live in the world perhaps, that there is a growing expectation that you should be allowed to delete your digital tracks.

There's a certain level of hubris to an attitude in which a given site that feels it's needs are more important than users.

Saying you can't delete all your posts/account is the same as saying "you do not have the right to control your own posts here".

I think it should be OK on HN to delete all your comments on your account if you want. I appreciate that this would degrade the quality of impacted historical comment threads but hey that's the price for giving people back control over their digital lives.

It happens on Reddit and whilst every now and then I encounter a reddit thread with deleted items, in general it has not destroyed reddit, and I respect the right of those users to have deleted their digital comments.

I rate respect for user wishes over the importance of maintaining historical threads integrity on HN.

<comment><USER7> _There 's a certain level of hubris to an attitude in which a given site that feels it's needs are more important than users._

There's even more hubris in expecting individual rights to outweigh the value of a community in every instance.

<comment><USER8> By "community" do you mean the website forum operated by Y Combinator Management LLC? That's some hubris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also always wondered why is there no option to delete submissions and comments?

That is an awfully exposing experience IMO.

<comment><USER10> You have the opportunity during the first two hours of them being submitted, unless there's a response to them, if I remember correctly.

Being exposing is a bit of a benefit for HN, in that it's a very good way to serve as a snapshot of culture at any given time. People can't just whitewash their histories or wrong actions on HN.

<comment><USER11> The proponents of the EU's right to be forgotten would like to have a word about that.

<comment><USER12> HN doesn't enforce real names so it's rather different.

<comment><USER13> From a legal standpoint, I don't think it makes a lot of difference. Especially since unless you are specifically trying to make a throwaway, figuring out who you are is trivial, especially if you use a chunk of your RL name in your username. Or in my case, if your username is commonly identifiable as you and tied to your RL name on other sites.

I don't think anything about Right To Be Forgotten leaves it to the individual's responsibility to mask their identity.

<comment><USER10> From a legal standpoint, HN doesn't sell products, use user data for profit, or operate in the EU. Both it and YC have made it rather clear they don't want to touch the EU.

Complying with GDPR would basically be an act of goodwill more than anything, and even that's debatable.

<comment><USER14> _Both it and YC have made it rather clear they don 't want to touch the EU._

Not sure where you are getting that. YC have funded a lot of EU companies, and some partners are from the EU.

YC certainly has revenue (from investors). HN isn't some separate legal entity - it's right there in the domain name.

<comment><USER10> They require every founder to come to the US and register as a US company. That's not particularly touching it.

<comment><USER11> Unless they IP ban the whole of the EU, they will still be subject to the GDPR once any EU citizen accesses their site. (Which, agreeing with AmericanChopper, is a purely theoretical thing - until the moment where YC wants to conduct any kind of business in the EU)

<comment><USER15> Simply being accessible from the EU does _not_ automatically mean the GDPR applies to a site. See Recital 23: [https://gdpr- info.eu/recitals/no-23/](https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-23/)

<comment><USER11> Ah, that's a fair point, I didn't see that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've had a comment deleted long after I posted. I had to email them. I'm sure they'll delete your account if you do the same. I don't know _why_ they make you contact them though.

<comment><USER17> No they will actually refuse to delete your account as well. They did however present the option of renaming the account, but then it turned out that's not possible either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The policy is explained quite clearly right here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt](https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt)

The internet is forever.

</comment><comment><USER19> > I would like to continue using the service, but I have no interest in > maintaining my account.

Just do "logout"

> Why is account deletion not an option?

Because, each submission & comments posted by you should be stored for historic reason - somebody already bookmark or quote it.

Think, HN has something like "Hemingway Mode"[0], there also related XKCD[1].

[0] [https://blog.ghost.org/hemingway-mode/](https://blog.ghost.org/hemingway- mode/)

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1540/](https://xkcd.com/1540/)

<comment><USER11> The can have all my posts they like - but that's no reason to also store my email address and force me to secure/manage the password of an account that I never intend to use again.

<comment><USER20> I agree with you. However as a workaround in the meantime what you may be able to do is:

1\. Change the email address to a disposable one. There's so many services, no way HN can prevent you doing this.

2\. Update the password to a unique, complex password. Store it or don't, your choice.

3\. Walk away from the account.

<comment><USER11> Even then the password and/or throwaway address could be leaked in the next data breach - which in the worst case could allow all kinds of trolls to access my account and impersonate me without me having a way to recover it or lock them out. So of course I'd have to store my password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> this really should be as easy as a database DELETE operation, why is it so difficult? guess the design for HN site is not "user-first".

recalling facebook etc was impossible to remove your account but now it seems feasible and quick, though not sure if facebook/etc indeed flushes the deleted-account cleanly.

<comment><USER22> Hacker News doesn't use a database - data is stored in Arc Lisp closures in flat files.

I'm not certain how it handles usernames, though (I've played around a bit with Anarki, but can't remember) but I suspect it would probably involve a lot of file parsing and editing, assuming each username is literally just copied into a field in each thread file.

<comment><USER23> > _data is stored in Arc Lisp closures in flat files._

Are you sure? What the word "closure" usually refers to isn't an externalizable object used for persistent storage.

<comment><USER24> I can't speak to this particular detail, but it's written in ARC LISP, which itself is written in Racket, which has serializable closures ([https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server- internal/closure.htm...](https://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server- internal/closure.html)) so it's at least possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reminded me of a task I undertook sometime last year in which over the coarse of the month I attempted to delete my accounts on a number of sites that I no longer used. The experience was completely crazy. It ranged from a few sites that had a basic account deletion page that functioned correctly, to both automated and human confirmations of deletion after which I was still able to access my account. Sigh...

</comment><comment><USER26> You can ask about it every year and it won't change. Over the months I have resigned myself to not being able to delete my account. Sometimes I post comments here...just out of boredom when Reddit has changed his design again - just accept it, go outside to the park and take a long walk. There should be important questions you can deal with.

</comment><comment><USER27> Might be a good question for firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER28> 4/20/2016

Me: I'd like to either change the username (jasonkostempski) on my account or delete my account completely. Can help me do that?

HN: Account renaming is something we plan to implement but haven't yet. You're welcome to email back in the future and check if it's done yet.

HN doesn't delete accounts. We do sometimes delete specific comments when users are worried about getting in trouble from them. Would that help?

I realize this isn't a very satisfying answer and am sorry.

Me: I didn't say anything nasty so I'm not too worried about it :) I'll just wait for the feature. Thanks.

7/26/2016

Me: Just want to check in and see if account deleting or username changing has been implemented.

HN: Not yet, sorry. There are some technical difficulties because YC uses HN IDs in its internal systems, which are separate, so we need to be extra careful not to make a breaking change. But we'll get there.

2/19/2017

Me: I need my account deleted immediately. It's a matter of national security, cannot explain in detail, orders from the President of the United States.

HN: That does sound urgent, so I'm sorry to have to reply this way, but we don't actually have the ability to do this. At some point we will have the ability to rename accounts to something anonymous, but unfortunately we don't have that yet either.

Me: Damn, now he's gonna make me go work on that wall :/

2/22/2018

Me: Are you able to change user names or delete accounts yet?

HN: Not yet, sorry, but it is coming. Do you want to be on an email list to get notified when it's ready?

Me: Yes, that would be cool, please add me.

HN: Ok, you're added.

<comment><USER17> Facebook--the most insidious and intrusive data harvester in history--at least lets its users ostensibly rename their profile and delete their account. Why does HN give less of a fuck about its users than Facebook does?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Billionaires vs. BrandonM [http://zedshaw.com/2018/03/25/the-billionaires- vs-brandonm/](http://zedshaw.com/2018/03/25/the-billionaires-vs-brandonm/)

<comment><USER30> > Did you know YC startups have special privileges on Hacker News? Nobody > knows what they are, but rumor has it they can delete stories they don't > like, delete comments, and have the ability to get their stories to the > front.

Rumor is completely wrong. We don't even bypass the spam filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If I post a comment, and a dozen people comment on my comment do I have the moral right to delete my comment? In most cases, the answer should be a big NO.

A deletion of a parent comment breaks the flow of discussion. Unless a service makes a point of deleting historical comments, letting users delete their comments will worsen its historical record.

<comment><USER32> 1) Usually users own the copyright of their comments. They do have the moral right at-least to disallow continued propagation of comments.

2) It should still be possible to delete accounts, without removing comments -- but reassigning those comments to a temporary/anonymous account id. This solves for account deletion, but not content deletion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's now owned by Mark Zuckerberg. Surprise.</comment>


The Droid fails as a product when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/08/droid-palm-pre-iphone-product-comparison/

<comment><USER2> Pretty much every reason that he gives against the droid makes me want it more. Hairdressers have iPhones. I'm a geek, I want a geeky phone. "a phone an engineer could love" sounds good to me.

So the best (3rd party) twitter app on Android isn't as good as the best (3rd party) twitter app on iPhone? Well wait a bit, there will be more apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't care. There are multiple phones running Android, unlike the Palm Pre and iPhone.

<comment><USER2> There are multiple models of iPhone too. It's fair to compare the latest, top- of-the-range flagship model to its counterpart. Right now, Droid is that for Android.

Sure, the Android ecosystem is probably going to get richer than Apple can allow for iPhone, but right now, that's the comparison.

<comment><USER4> I think he's talking about the different manufacturers and brands behind Android. Think of Android's business model as a loose coupled architecture, with the creation of hardware and software as separate components. This is the same strategy Microsoft took with Windows - they didn't make Windows hardware, and hardware manufacturers didn't succeed in making their own OS to compete with Windows. Apple, on the other hand, is in business of consumer devices end to end - responsible for creating both the high-level hardware, the OS, and some of the software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's wrong about the lack of HD Youtube videos. It's not on by default; you have to enable it in the menu, but the functionality is there.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what he means by "AS A PRODUCT." If it had failed in the areas he praised but succeeded in the areas he slams would it still have failed? Is this just a list of cons?

</comment><comment><USER7> I think his problem with websites was a simple matter of screen size. On my Android phone, the right navigation wraps, because there's no room for it otherwise. On the much bigger screen of my Archos 5 media player (Android also), it displays fine -- it looks like it does on my desktop.

Turn the text size down, and things are fine on both.

Also, what does Twidroid Pro not do that anything on the iPhone does? I can post photoblog entries to Twitter and Posterous right from the home screen and I can go into the app to see messages from people I follow. I get a background notification when someone direct messages me or says my name. It also supports multiple accounts and multiple providers.

I am not sure what more anyone could want.

I think he just like to whine.

<comment><USER8> I think he does just like to whine, but I remember Gruber linking to this piece a while ago that mentions twidroid: <http://notes.torrez.org/2009/08/android-software-day-3.html>

Summary: a bit clunky, options that should be disabled/omitted are enabled, slightly buggy. Lots of little cuts, rather than missing features. Things may well have improved since then; I don't use twidroid.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like his main complaint is that there's no Apple logo on the back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read the comment from thomas marban about developing software on Android, who explains why the Android SDK means apps have worse UI.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why does he have to scream so much?

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like an Apple fanboy to me, I love my Droid.

<comment><USER12> What's your experience regarding battery life?

<comment><USER13> So far, looks pretty good. Yesterday was heavy with browsing and used about half the battery, so I would say that it is as advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most of the gripes seem to be software problems that should be fixable in short time.

I wonder about the browser: aren't there browsers that are common to all Android phones? Or does each Android phone need a customized browser?

<comment><USER7> It's the same browser as the other phones have. It's also the same rendering engine that the iPhone's browser has. (But there is no Apple logo on it, so clearly it's inferior!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And another thing (just got back from downtown having my wife drive so i could "navigate")--he does not mention the turn-by-turn navigation provided by the android, out of the box, no charge. Or the separate but related functionality of plotting your route on google maps and have it pinpoint your location within 6 meters (maybe better).

Oh, and the surprise at the end of the journey when doing the navigation by home is that it showed a street view of my home as we turned into the driveway. I did not expect that.

I don't know, but don't think the iPhone has that for free, but I could be mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER15> "My first reaction was "boy is the screen beautiful but boy am I overwhelmed by the complexity." What do I mean by that? the iPhone has a far simpler UI. You can only drag it one direction, left and right. On the Droid you can drag the UI left and right and up and down. This introduces a LOT more complexity."

I laughed my ass out because this guy is stupid idiot posting his idiotic ideas on idiot's blog! For instance, if I could drag mouse in Windows only left and right would it make the over all Windows UI better and much easier to use ? Would it make Microsoft a better company ? Of course not.

<comment><USER16> There's no need to ridicule the writer for his opinion.

There's a big difference between a moving a mouse in 2d space with a device moving on a 2d surface and navigating in menus. A better comparison is navigating in a 3D game vs a 2D (platform) game. The latter is easier for most people.

<comment><USER15> I will say it again, this Scobler guy is moron and complete idiot! He proves this with every post he makes. Somehow the idiotism he posts makes his blog even more popular, so I conclude that ppl who read him are in same coherent "state of mind".

<comment><USER7> Looks like you will make -4 on this post, but you are so right. He actually convinced his staff to work for him for free, all because he has a lot of Twitter followers. The world is a sad (but amusing) place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, I got one Saturday, and tried his techmeme test, and it works fine on my droid. ESPN works fine, other sites work fine.

I appreciate his input, but to call it a failure is really begging the headline.

Now I don't have an iPhone, so I can't compare, but the screen is astonishing, and the verizion service has always been better, so I think it is a great product.

</comment><comment><USER17> His bit about a lack of pretty applications should be the cue for every software entrepreneur to start salivating. Miss the iPhone app-craze boat? Now's your second chance...

</comment><comment><USER18> Says who? Well Mr. Scoble, we already won the server farms, and it just a matter of several years until Desktops, Mobile Phone and Netbooks would all be running Open Source Operating Systems.

Signed \-- Open Source Fanboy

<comment><USER19> I agree that he's completely missing the point. Of course the iPhone is a far more polished product.

However, it is a far more locked down platform than Android.

This is the reason I bought my Samsung Galaxy, though it is sluggish, and crashy. That's the current tradeoff you have to make if you operate a more open platform. In future, I hope the pain will subside.</comment></comment>