We're heading for AOL 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/aol-20 <comment><USER2> I absolutely agree with this, and I'm not looking forward to the near future of the internet, but it's inevitable. We will hit AOL 2.0, well a few of them. We'll have the Apple internet, the Facebook internet, the Google internet, etc. but it won't last.

The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death. People will start to see cool new things happening outside their silo, or get fed up with them and the silos will eventually fall. These trends seem cyclical, we go from mainframes and silos to personal computers and an open network, then back to the same mainframes, this time called the cloud, and the same silos. It's not gonna be a fun time for those of us who don't like the confines of the new internet, but the handful of us who care won't stop the inevitable.

Me, I still run an irc server because I can, because there's a million clients to choose from, and everyone can have their own interface, and the protocol is so simple a decent programmer can hash out their own in a day. Nothing has come close to it yet (xmpp was great in theory but too complex for its own good). If you want a pretty ui and emojis and images, well there's a client that can do it, if you just want text, plenty of those too.

I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be, hoping that in time people will notice that you don't have to just accept your preferred silos interpretation of it.

<comment><USER3> The problem with that is the network effect.

None of my friends use IRC, 95% have never even heard of it. Most of my friends are on Facebook Messenger.

For more public conversations; a lot of that is now taking place on twitter. Twitter gets promoted by the media with hashtags at the start of TV programmes. I never see any reference to IRC or other protocols.

I'm sure people will get bored with these current silos and move on but I doubt they'll move to something more open. The financial incentive just isn't there to develop the protocols and clients for an open system, whereas there is clearly big money to be made by creating the next big silo.

<comment><USER2> Oh I don't disagree with you, I'm not delusional enough to think that people are going to move to irc, or that it'll become mainstream, it's just a bit saddening. But the thing is it doesn't really matter because irc is a protocol. I don't ever have to worry about support getting dropped because someone wants to monetize it differently. The protocols will never get closed down all of the sudden because it's not popular enough. I can keep running my server as long as I want, independently of any company's decisions. I got a few friends set up on it years ago, and new people join from time to time. It's versatile enough that I just run bitlbee and have access to a bunch of other chat services over irc, all in one client.

I think people will get tired of not being able to communicate between their silos and if they get locked in enough, won't want to leave their own service for another one. It happened with AIM/MSN/Yahoo messenger, for a little while everything was moving to xmpp. Your AIM account could talk to people on gtalk, etc. It was nice while it lasted.

<comment><USER4> I think something like Slack but aimed groups of friends rather than development teams.

I play chess and I ride a bike, I have clubs with both of those things and they currently use facebook to co-ordinate and it works well enough but slack would be _considerably_ better I think.

IRC is awesome but it only really handles the talking to people side of things well, sharing files (well), setting events and calendars - the stuff slack does is a huge multiplier.

<comment><USER5> Slack has exactly the same problem.

How could one connect to Slack, without using Slack? What open protocol does Slack use for its internal communication?

Convincing everyone to switch to Slack is just as bad as convincing everyone to switch to Facebook Messenger.

<comment><USER6> It's not just connecting that's the problem: How do you implement your own server for slack, without using slack?

Because if that's off the table, the rest of the discussion doesn't matter. Now, of course not _everyone_ will write their own irc-server, or port one to a new architecture -- but without free and open source implementations, any alternative is just another dead end.

Considering slack is doing so much right, I wish they'd realize this, and just either open up slack, or publish a new free/open slack server implementation, along with protocols for federation etc.

As I understand it, many people are getting weary of having to choose between IRC -- which have a number of issues, not the least of which is its (lack of) security architecture (even with TLS bolted on), and "extensions" being limited largely to bots -- and XMPP which is over-engineered.

I suppose the natural next step is something that is to IRC/XMPP as JMAP[1] is to IMAP -- a lightweight protocol, probably json (or: capt'n'crunch)-based -- that tries to combine strengths from IRC/SILC and XMPP without being complex.

If I were running slack, I'd worry about if it was easier to "own" the new protocol, or to port slack to support it after someone else releases a Free alternative to slack.

[1] [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Internet has been raised on the shoulders of giants - people who basically devoted their lives to it.

The current wave is brought up by these trying to grab a piece of the Web and keep others at bay, the game is ruled by investors. This bunch only understands walled gardens, no hope to talk them into open thinking. At all.

We've already had this discussed more than once that people themselves do not care about any particular approach, people just want something to work. As long as commercial services do the job people will use them.

Like with any freedom movement there should be the underlying philosophy that will live long enough for others to finally catch on.

But going just head on like the author suggests will not help. If you start a new service the last thing you want to spend your resources on is a RFC. And you won't ever get more resources than the investors of AOL 2.0. Unfortunately.

<comment><USER8> _> The current wave is brought up by these trying to grab a piece of the Web and keep others at bay, the game is ruled by investors. This bunch only understands walled gardens, no hope to talk them into open thinking. At all._

Sadly, my experience has been that this is true. Walled gardens allow the companies that control them to capture all of the value created within them, which is far more attractive to a VC firm than a company that's looking to create an open standard/platform that others will be able to use.

<comment><USER9> It's the reason why long-term, VC firms (like Y Combinator) and the US startup culture have to fail. All of them focus only on short-term, exponential growth. That is not sustainable.

The only question is if humanity will die due to the environmental effects of exponential growth first, or if these companies default first.

<comment><USER10> The unfortunate (or maybe fortunate) part is that data shows that occasionally, short-term exponential growth creates massive companies (ie - Google and Facebook) with relatively minimal marketing charges. I remember when Facebook was first available at my University. Seemingly overnight, all of the LiveJournals died and Facebook absolutely took control.

<comment><USER9> It's unsustainable growth, though.

Facebook is even today far overvalued. Their price has to crash at some point.

And even Google is stagnating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Technically, it would be not too difficult to use Facebooks API and some scraping and make it connect to gnusocial for example. But it is explicitly against the TOS (of the API and Facebook itself) to do so, so you can't.

I would be really, really happy if lawmakers would realize that Facebook (just one example of many) has now become infrastructure, and has to be regulated as such. What to do? Make every service with more than, say, a million users required to offer federation. There must be an API, and everybody must be able to get their data in and out free of charge, and there should be no limitations (except for fighting spam).

This way, Facebook would loose their network effect which makes it impossible for a competitor to be successful. They would still have their users, rich features, mature codebase, and infrastructure as an advantage, so this will not drive them out of business. But they will be forced to compete with others on terms of user-friendliness, features, non-invasiveness and so on.

Here's an idea. The next time you invent a nifty protocol for social, don't make it proprietary. Don't release the source under copyleft either. Make a license such as: "You may use this protocol / implementation free of charge in any way you like (source closed or open) under one condition: you have to offer federation."

(* Federation means that users with accounts on different services can communicate freely, like it is the case with email. Imagine you could use your Twitter account and write to a friend's Facebook wall. Or you could even host your own gnusocial instance and use it to take part in other social networks.)

<comment><USER12> The problem is that Facebook is not _essential_ infrastructure. Government has no business regulating it.

<comment><USER13> Anything above the first tier of Maslow's pyramid is not _essential_.

Ask yourself: do we as a society benefit if Facebook uses open protocols? Law should facilitate society's needs, not the other way around.

<comment><USER14> This is an incredibly dangerous position to take. It can be used to justify almost any law.

A law is a threat of force or violence. Law is the code executed by people with lethal weapons and the authority to use them. Choose them accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > when the last user of it finally gives up and moves to gmail so they can > continue to communicate with their contacts or maybe they give up entirely

Between the title and the quoted, I think you have used up your hyperbole quota for one day.

I guess I don't see the issue. The internet is a large piece of infrastructure on which citizens and companies can publish (almost) anything they want. Lamenting that for-profit ventures have tried to wall off their parts is curious, as I am not sure how that impacts me or my decisions. I don't facebook, I don't tweet, and I could not care less that these things exist. (Not entirely true, but my objections to them would be off-topic.) The world is a very large place, and there will always be people who hang out in the more distant corners of the net, you can go be with like-minded people and talk about the good ole days of (insert bygone era here).

Now if you are lamenting this because you want a piece of the action and the big kids are being bullies, then I suppose my answer isn't going to comfort you any. But for just simple usage, I think this is a tempest in a teapot.

<comment><USER16> The issue is anyone with a web browser (even ones provided by the ones with walled gardens) can use the HTTP protocol to see hypertext documents. But Facebook users aren't using a public protocol in the Facebook messenger, so they can't easily communicate with Twitter users, who also don't use a public protocol.

It's not the end of the world, but allowing more people to connect more easily is a good thing. The larger issue is that people are less likely to connect once they find their comfortable niche. You don't use Facebook or Twitter but someone who does and would be interested in your thoughts are less likely to stumble across you.

<comment><USER17> I think there are practical concerns too that push away from openness and towards silos - it isn't just about money.

Open protocols can be slow to improve because of the very nature of their openness - they have dependencies and need to remain interoperable.

Closed protocols can adapt faster because one entity controls the entire thing. In the case of chat XMPP was in the lead for a while, but the mobile situation was terrible - connections were constantly dropped and even though there were clients that supported multiple accounts (Meebo) it was a pretty bad software experience. The current messaging products are not open, but they are _better_.

This is a shame I think - because it'd be a lot better if the open products were actually better, not just better because they are open.

Maybe the trick is to hack on a better open protocol, but even then it could similarly be outpaced. Maybe the path to this is defining an open 'social' protocol and fixing the internet identity issue at the same time. Maybe keybase.io can do this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The key (IMO) to a distributed and decentralised Internet is a net-equality for upload:download speeds. There used to be an argument that we download more than we upload. To phrase it another way: we used to consume more content than we published. The fact is, we individually produce more content now than we consume, much more than the traditional media companies of the previous generation, as evidenced by the content on Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, et cetera. But the Internet in 2015 is an AOL-2.0-like one and we need to nudge it in the direction of a distributed one again.

The solutions are within our grasp because they exist already. The software and the communication protocols exist, and are open and tested. A small change at the root, like Net-Equality, would result in an avalanche effect change in how we communicate and store information. The Internet of 5 years from now could be vastly different (and better in my opinion) than the one we have today. It could fulfil the 1990's predictions of people like Bill Gates and Mark Andreesen, who now sing a different tune, but used to preach the power of a distributed Internet.

<comment><USER19> But what happens when my home internet connection goes out, or I don't have an always-on desktop machine?

That's also an inequality in upload/download, and it's far more important than just a bit of imbalance in total bandwidth. Especially when most of that download bandwidth is watching popular (and probably commercial) videos.

I'm not sure which side I'd put the typical "no servers" TOS, since if enough people ignored that it would probably go away.

<comment><USER20> _But what happens when my home internet connection goes out, or I don 't have an always-on desktop machine?_

The content can get distributed and hosted right after you publish it, ensuring access even if your machine goes offline. See Freenet, Bittorrent, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > That document would then be sent out to various parties that might have an > interest in using this protocol who then would supply their feedback and as > a result of that a more complete version of the original document would be > released. And so on until the resulting protocol was considered mature > enough for implementation.

Is that so? The early IETF process was, "Rough consensus and running code."

Protocols were implemented first, then revised and described in RFCs later, weren't they?

</comment><comment><USER22> I blame firewall admins for this. If app was using port 1234, it was simpler just to block this port. After while this make app unusable so app creators tunneled everything through port 80.

<comment><USER23> And I blame lazy software developers who had security holes in their apps that endangered enterprise networks. I'm an app developer and we shouldn't be placing blame on someone trying to do their job and protect their internal network. We need to own up and start making security a priority over yet another feature someone wants in their app. Yes we were quite clever to tunnel things through port 80, but we're just delaying the inevitable.

<comment><USER24> I partially agree but isn't the port blocking mostly about reducing the attack surface? If I were managing infrastructure (I never did), just trusting a browser and its security model sounds better than following bunch of white- listed apps for zero-days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In some ways, it may be worse than the OP suggests as we apparently race towards mobile apps. Seems about the right time for PointCast+. Its the proverbial technology pendulum. It seems obvious that we'll continue our momentum and maybe even abandon the generic browser and revert to the (now mobile-based) fat client past.

Much of the article seems devoted to concerns about proprietary protocols and closes with a plea to keep protocols open with a published specification. I think this is a reasonable concern and a noble plea, but yet also an (unfortunately) unreasonable request. Companies are developing their protocols to support their needs, not yours.

Its reasonable to want access to the data companies are collecting. Its valuable data. But these companies are not in the data services business. And if they were, its reasonable for them to charge a handsome price for the access you are looking for. Imagine the black eye a company would get for trying that approach.

Perhaps there's a view that says, users freely give the data so they should be able to freely get it back. But there's a counter argument that users are "compensated" for contributing their data in the form of free access to the services it provides. Given the amount of time people spend on social apps, its reasonable to think they value the "free" service highly.

IIRC there was a start-up that attempted to build an alternative social network based on open standards... It didn't go very far. Perhaps people need to learn to vote with their actions. Maybe we need to try that again and convince more of the influential technical folks to jump ship. Maybe through competition the non-open establish players can be shown the value of openness.

<comment><USER26> I agree that user data is driving the "free" service of social media. But I don't see your point when you say an open social media implementation failed because it was open. You imply that Facebook succeeded since it was a closed protocol implementation.

Why did Facebook succeed? Would have it succeeded if it was open? Perhaps market needs and competition scene has more to do with success than the nature of protocol. What percentage of users even care about protocols?

<comment><USER25> For the open facebook alternative, I believe I was thinking about Diaspora (apparently it's still alive and kicking).

[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/)

Maybe its worth investigating.

As for the "failed because it was open" comment. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that it failed _because_ it was open. Merely that it was open _and_ failed (apparently maybe not so much failed).

I had thought it failed for the obvious reason: not attaining the necessary critical mass that a social network needs. One of its primary propositions was an open data policy. Apparently this might not have been sufficient to launch it into success. Again, there's still something there so maybe its still rumbling on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We're in a world of APIs and de facto protocols now. The bulk of the interesting communication at this point is about data. REST over HTTP provides a decent mechanism for interacting with arbitrary nouns. Anything significantly more structured would, I imagine, essentially be an exercise of modeling a particular domain of data. With rapid innovation, it becomes difficult to codify a particular data model ahead of time, so we end up in a world of RESTful APIs, some well-documented and some not-so-well-documented, and, when one emerges as the winner, it becomes the de facto protocol.

That said, the walled garden approach of all platforms today (especially Apple) certainly endangers future innovation. Though, I see that as a content delivery problem, not a protocol problem.

<comment><USER28> >we end up in a world of RESTful APIs, some well-documented and some not-so- well-documented, and, when one emerges as the winner, it becomes the de facto protocol.

Can you give an example of a proprietary RESTful API that then became a de facto standard protocol that was supported by a wide variety of software (both clients and servers)?

<comment><USER29> Microsofts "flavour" of WebDAV?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _And please never do what twitter did (start open, then close as soon as you gain traction).

Posted by Jacques Mattheij August 5, 2015

If you read this far you should probably follow me on twitter:_

Is there a contradiction here? Why do you use twitter? (Rather than following you on twitter, I have your RSS feed in my newsreader.)

<comment><USER11> If I want to use twitter-the-thing, I have to use twitter.com-the-service. No other service offers decent twitter. There is gnusocial.de and quitter.se, but their twitter is not as feature rich as twitter.com's twitter, and also twitter.com refuses to federate with their accounts. That means you have no access to twitter.com's biggest asset, their user base, which is pretty rude if you ask me.

(I hope someone gets what I'm trying to say :-))

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It might be me, but the article seems to make the same point as "The Web we have to save" [https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to- save-2eb1fe15a4...](https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to- save-2eb1fe15a426)

<comment><USER6> HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994653)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Related: [http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no- ide...](http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre- using-the-internet/)

</comment><comment><USER33> "Since then there has been a lot of movement on the web application front but none of those has resulted in an open protocol for more than one vendor (or open source projects) to implement."

I know of several RFCs that are in the process of being created/approved that specifically detail protocols over REST/JSON. Probably the most impressive is the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) [1].

In general I agree with the sentiment of the OP - that we should have more standardized protocols if HTTP is going to be the new TCP. I should also mention that HTML is a data specification for pages transported via HTTP, so there's definitely precedence.

[1] [http://www.simplecloud.info/](http://www.simplecloud.info/)

</comment><comment><USER34> AOL seems to think they're on version 9.7: [https://help.aol.com/articles/upgrade-to-the-latest- version-...](https://help.aol.com/articles/upgrade-to-the-latest-version-of- the-aol-desktop-software)

</comment><comment><USER35> The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs strongly outlines that this pattern is a problem of segregation in almost all communities. The best superficial designs are static and proprietary. The best, long living designs are open and engage with inevitable chaos at scale. High end segregated suburbs eventually die, as people move to open, less segregated environments that provide more serendipitous opportunity.

It seems to be natural in complex networks that proprietary systems that don't serve the entire population function better due to like-mindness, conservation of resources by the wealthy, and bias.

Apple is like a private community for those who can afford it. Systems and resources can be allocated centrally, and designed for a limited number of static requirements. Its great, until requirements change.

I would argue that Google should continue to support the open environment it is designed on. Its software is inherently linkable (you can link to documents, G+, youtube videos), it is mostly open to non-logged in experiences, and it is free for anyone.

It comes at great cost to support those ideas, sometimes in the form of money, and sometimes resources, but I think its absolutely worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER36> Abstracting problems is not always the right solution, but for some reason (I think it's mostly a social effect) seem to have an overwhelming desire to abstract away problems.

"XMPP support is slowly but surely being removed (just imagine a phone system where every number you call to may require a different telephone)"

So what happens in these kinds of cases is that somebody invents an abstraction (a metaprotocol) that cross-connects all of these. And then somebody comes up with yet another protocol that doesn't fit into the metaprotocol (or some slow moving standards body can't fit the new one in), so somebody else comes up with a metametaprotocol that bundles the metaprotocol and the new one in....and its abstractions all the way up..

Until somebody realizes that the tower of abstraction is introducing 300ms of lag into things and we all pine away for the good old days of just XMPP or whatever.

There's nothing that prevents technically oriented people from setting up ftp, nntp, smtp, mtp, etc. servers and so on _except_ that these things really tend to rely on some kind of software running on the user's OS and these days people pretty much just run a browser and not much else.

The answer then is move the functions those protocols supported into the browser (like in the way that most browsers support ftp), but it's just not worth trying to shove telnet or whatever into browser support, so people just replicate whatever telnet is supposed to do into a web app that's access over http.

I think more troubling though is non-browser server-server communication is now just http. Sure it's pretty simple, but for server-to-server communication there's almost always a better protocol to use, but people can't be bothered to come up with one.

<comment><USER37> The whole problem goes back to the early days of the web when everybody was focusing on making it easy to _consume_ the content rather than making it easy to _produce_ the content. To this date there is no application equivalent to Mosaic 1.0 that does not require either some 3rd party service _or_ the capabilities of a systems administrator.

How hard could that be? And is it still possible (with the TOS of many providers now stating flat out that you can't run any servers on your line).

<comment><USER36> I was just thinking this morning, _way_ back in the dial-up internet days, I used to go around helping people setup web pages on their free 5MB of space the company I worked for offered. A surprising number of our customers, even elderly ones, went out of their way to learn basic html and put something up there.

Over time we got geocities and various CMSs and such to fill that, but the _function_ of what most of those people were putting up is just their facebook wall these days, only it's a bit more transitory.

I remember one old gentleman, a WW2 vet, who spent hours every day building a page about his dog so that he could share it with his friends and family. It was a bit odd, but my FB wall is full of similar kinds of things.

So I guess it also comes down to "what's the end goal the person is trying to achieve?" if it's just to keep people updated on their dog, FB more or less fills that function. Most people actually _weren 't_ interested in building random webpages, it was in communicating something to people.

<comment><USER37> A friend of mine said: people have an unlimited capacity for wanting to communicate. And I guess facebook is the end-result of following through on that desire. Which answers what will replace facebook: something that makes it even easier to continuously communicate. Definitely not something federated but something even more siloed.

<comment><USER36> Something that's frustrating with FB is that it _is_ so temporary and continuous. This is fine for most day-to-day updates (news, gossip, etc.). But it's not great for long-term reference material. You might notice that people don't really write long FB posts, part of it is likely that it just isn't worth it as it it'll be off everybody's walls in the next 24 hours.

If FB added some kind of "archive this post" so people could save particularly great posts or conversations, it would fill this gap. But I have a feeling somebody else will get to it first.

<comment><USER37> I think you (finally!) nailed why twitter is successful. Updates are short by nature, real content requires more space and has a much longer 'best before date' and so does not fit either facebook or twitter.

That should have been the thing that google+ aimed at rather than doing the same thing all over again. The content would eventually achieve critical mass all by itself.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the world is ready for Google Wave now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I agree that it would be helpful if we had more open protocols but I disagree with the conclusion that _not having them_ inevitably leads to AOL 2.0.

First, I think it's helpful to clarify what jacquesm is saying. My interpretation in concrete terms of URI[1].

      URI:  <scheme>://<location>:<port>

As of 2015, the scheme is almost always "http" or "https" and the port is almost always "80" or "443".

Because of many factors (I'd say mostly social dynamics[2], not technical), companies end up layering their proprietary/opaque protocols on top of "http".

I believe the essay asserts that the web would be more "free" and "open" if we pursued more "schemes"[3]

For example, if you're starting a new company that lets people crowdshare cooking recipes, the 1980s mindset may have been to submit a new RFC so everyone could then do:

      cooking://johndoe.com

_(and default port for "cooking://" would be 867 or whatever)_

Instead, we now have a situation where we have a cooking REST API or cooking iPhone/Android app that sends proprietary undocumented bytes over "http". Yes, the "http" is open in an academic sense, but for practical purposes, the cooking data is "closed" because the bytes over it are proprietary. Related to this is that the bytes go to a central entity that has self-interested economic motives instead of a peer-to-peer situation like "ftp://" or SMTP email.

I don't have to time at the moment fully explain my disagreement but I don't believe this leads to AOL 2.0.

Instead, what happens is that the proprietary protocols simply become more _inefficient_ by "tunneling" or "layering" in or on top of "http". We collectively waste lots of HTML/MIME overhead bytes to send opaque data. We also expend a lot of security effort with cat & mouse "deep packet inspection" of "http" because of this. Lots of cpu cycles are burned up to pay for these inefficiencies.

As for pushing for the ideal of more schemes with public and transparent RFCs, this is a goal that's couched in technical terms and it hides what we're _really_ asking of each other: we are asking economic actors to forego their economic interests. That is a very tough sell.

For example, in the USA, there's Intuit Quicken and they have a proprietary transport for downloading financial transactions. I loathe Intuit and their business practices but I do understand why their protocol is opaque instead of being an RFC. They are the ones that did all the legwork of convincing the banks to open up their mainframes to facilitate data downloads. The government didn't grease the wheels; Intuit did. Now they want to be rewarded economically for it. Can't blame them. That's why it's not an open RFC.

Contrast Intuit's situation with the public RFCs for "ftp://" and SMTP. The people creating those protocols were economically secure. They had stable jobs at universities or government institutions.

Today, the opaque protocols are made by actors in a different economic landscape. If a YC2015 company takes $130k from ycombinator and several million $$$ from VC rounds, defining a transparent RFC that harms their economic interests doesn't make sense. This goes against human nature. The essays pushing for a more open web are not addressing the hard-to-resolve economic interests.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Generic_syntax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Generic_syntax)

[2]corporate firewalls and network appliances policies of restricting ports, users' home computers' firewalls default config of blocking ports, etc. New software can't expect to reverse the conservatism of Cisco admins, etc. Also look at why residential SMTP mail servers are blocked by others even though SMTP is theoretically "open". That's a social problem caused by spam.

[3][https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri- schemes.xht...](https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri- schemes.xhtml)

<comment><USER39> It's shocking that so few people in a forum that is basically dedicated to the business of information technology have such a blind spot to the economics of our industry. Yours is the only mention of the word "economics" out of many dozens of comments.

You'd think by now that we'd have a way to treat digital media as property that can be bought and sold on a marketplace. This price discovery would then make a great entry in to a book of accounts.

The current info-economic system is mainly selling advertisements to pay for nothing more than servers and other operation costs. The content itself is worthless, not because it doesn't have costs in making it or is something that consumers don't value, rather because we've purposefully kept it out of a marketplace.

These VC funded information technology companies only have one business model: create and exploit a private monopoly. Control identity. Authorize the use of any and all interactions with data.

I'm not going to discuss my thoughts how to fix this because my opinions on the matter are incredibly unpopular on HackerNews and frankly, I'm sick of feeling like crap after getting a bunch of silent downvotes after I've spent time writing something thoughtful.

<comment><USER40> I can't remember your other opinions but I agree that the economics is a serious problem.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been saying the same thing, but I feel this goes too far into an alarmist view.

When Facebook, Google, and Apple hold all the cards the creators, the developers, will move back out and create the 'old' Internet again. Then the people will follow to the new creations. Eventually we'll hit AOL 3.0 and the cycle will continue.

At least that is my hope.

</comment><comment><USER42> There are many reasons for this, but a big one only hinted at in this article is the firewall. Firewalls and NAT effectively break the Internet. They _require_ centralization -- two devices cannot communicate without it. We've adopted a topology that forces centralization, and now we're surprised at the result.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the author makes a lot of good points, but misses a key point. We're not shuffling off into walled gardens because Google and Facebook want to "own" their users -- they do, of course, but users aren't just being herded like cattle by Facebook. Users are getting into walled gardens because walled gardens offer users a lot of advantages right now.

1) Internet users are becoming less technical as the number of Internet users increases, and they want things to just work. They don't want to know whether their mail server is POP or IMAP, they just want to send and receive e-mail. They don't want to have to try and figure out which IRC server to get on to get a decent ping or to avoid a netsplit, they just want to chat. Zero setup, zero installation, just go to a webapp and all those details are handled for you.

2) Internet users are becoming increasingly mobile, and most of our pre-HTTP Internet protocols scale poorly over mobile. Mobile devices are power and bandwidth constrained in ways that protocols didn't envision. Chat applications not written with mobile in mind are giant battery hogs.

3) The open web is a dumpster fire. SEO makes a lot of Google search results difficult if not impossible to wade through (try searching for information on a particular printer or lawnmower and see how many results you can find about anything other than someone who wants to sell you one). An article with pictures that measures under half a megabyte comes with four megabytes of ads and trackers. If you peek behind the spam filters, something like 90% of the e-mail anyone gets is best described as junk. Some of it's malicious junk at that. Most open forums quickly degenerate into a showcase of the worst humanity has to offer -- go check the comments on a newspaper or TV news website if you don't believe me.

4) Nobody can make any money except through advertising, and even that's becoming problematic. The problem with things like subscriptions is that they reduce the value of the hyperlink towards zero. And you can say, "for just the price of a cup of coffee you can keep this website open," but having to buy 50 to 100 cups of coffee every month to support all the websites you like to visit at some point during a month quickly becomes untenable. And so advertising comes to dominate the web in increasingly perverse ways (which explains about half of point three). Walled gardens are one way to offer a respite from the worst abuses of advertising -- Facebook doesn't need to send you 5mb of JavaScript to track you, they can do a much better job of tracking you with a lot less overhead than third-party trackers can.

If you want to fight walled gardens, you need to find ways to solve these problems in ways that don't involve walled gardens or offer ordinary users (users who don't share this community's convictions that open is inherently better) benefits that a walled garden doesn't or can't.

<comment><USER44> In fact the walled internet gardens remind me more than a little of the walled communities in Snowcrash. In that story the USA has been 'Balkanized' across commercial lines, marginalizing the federal government in favor of security and stability.

Folks use the part of the internet that works for them. Its the largest crowdsourced community-building experiment of all time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I remember AOL it was a dial-up network with its own custom GUI that set up a TCP/IP stack at the time that getting on the Internet with WINSOCK programs was difficult because you had to configure a SLIP or PPP profile with other ISPS.

AOL made it easy for anyone to get on the Internet, they mailed out floppy disks for a free month for example. The hard part was canceling the service and getting them to stop billing you once you stopped using their service.

AOL software grew and went on CD-ROMs, at least with floppies you could reformat them and use them for other stuff, the CD-ROMs were drink coasters and made wind mobiles out of them.

AOL software grew when they merged with Time Warner, the AOL software was a web browser and media surfer and email client.

When broadband began to take over there was a $20/month option to add in your AOL account to it and use it over broadband.

If you want AOL 2.0 today you have to have a phone company or cable company bundle their broadband service with the software that is part web browser, chat client, email reader, news reader, media surfer, stock ticker, and other stuff rolled into one app.

Google or Apple if they wanted to do this would have to lay down some fiber optics to provide broadband Internet access and then bundle their AOL 2.0 software with it. It is not a cheap thing to do, the dial-up modem was better because you could plug a modem into any phone line and get Internet, but it was slow. Today you need a high speed phone line and a DSL modem, cable modem, some sort of high speed modem that uses fiber optic, etc. They company has to send someone to install the high speed cable and modem to hook you up, and it is not so easy to do that these days. You have to wait for someone to be available to do that, and hope there is no technical delays.

AOL was killed by broadband Internet and Web 2.0 sites replacing what AOL software did.

Oddly enough you still find the elderly using AOL dial-up for $35/month on really old Windows PCs. They don't want to lose their aol.com address.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think one solution would be for internet providers to upgrade their offer. They started by offering you an email box, then stopped. Some offer storage space, and a few of them offer blog platform, but they've all surrendered against facebook.

Why wouldn't internet providers offer your own personnal profile page and news feed, only instead of being stored and owned by a company whose respect for private data and business model seem contradictory, let someone you already pay something for handles it.

Then we would need protocols again, because internet providers are numerous, and don't need to dominate the world to be profitable.

Note : i can think of many other services that would be good candidates for an isp to offer : youtube, linked in, photo sharing, etc.

<comment><USER47> I would not be excited about my ISP offering these extra services. I just want them to be dumb pipes- deliver my data without messing with it in any way. That should be their only business concern, and all innovation efforts should be spent on improving their network.

<comment> yoz-y Being relegated to a dumb pipe status is the nightmare of all ISPs though.

<comment><USER48> Why? It's what they are (well, should be).

<comment> yoz-y Because being a simple provider of infrastructure removes any added value from your product and opens you to a price race to the bottom. Of course there will not be a slew of new ISPs given the cost of the infrastructure but it is never a good feeling when you know that people can simply ditch your service and go elsewhere without any cost.

This is what happened to the mobile market, to the PC market, is currently (somewhat) happening in small scale public transportation and (at least in Europe) has happened to food producers.

<comment><USER48> > price race to the bottom

You can only race if you have competitors.

<comment> yoz-y But there are several ISPs out there. Granted, it is a very hard market to get into but nevertheless there is (most of the time) more than one. Personally I'd like the Internet infrastructure be handled more like roads (i.e.: the infrastructure is technically owned by the government but built by and rented to private companies)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I see what he's saying, and he makes some good points.

But I think he's too pessimistic. There are still some bright spots of open protocols on the Internet, even if they're now predominantly used through web browsers and/or HTTP.

I'll name two that are more recent than the last RFC referenced in the article, from 2009:

JMAP - the JSON Mail Access Protocol, here to save us from the dark ages of IMAP. [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/)

WebRTC - cross-browser, cross-platform voice and video chat without being locked in to a single provider like Skype. [http://www.webrtc.org/](http://www.webrtc.org/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Heads up, this post is great but it really needs a once over editorially:

 _NNTP has been 'mostly dead' for years (though it still has some use the real replacement usenet for discussion purposes appears to be Reddit and mailinglists) and so on._

<comment><USER37> Thanks, I'll fix that and read it carefully once more. Really annoying no matter how often I proofread I _still_ mess up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good post! Protocol Handlers aka chrome://settings/handlers are really really badly done or utilised. If there were done better, maybe we would see some more interoperability between the silos.

I created an example showcasing mailto: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeE9XPmYcq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeE9XPmYcq8)

Though for example ICS: [http://sg.hackandtell.org/ics/](http://sg.hackandtell.org/ics/) I've not managed to make it work with Google or Fastmail Calendar.

BIG SIGH.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sandstorm[0] and projects like it are the future of the internet and the digitally connected world. Data silos, privacy, inability to interoperate, data ownership will all collude to bring down the wall. At the same time, virtual compute providers and software like sandstorm will become ubiquitous and intuitively easy to use. I, for one, am long term optimistic.

[0] [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

</comment><comment><USER30> ISTM this is just the end-to-end principle taken one step farther. Instead of intelligence residing in the endpoint node, now it resides in an app running on the endpoint node.

That isn't to say that the "aol2" phenomenon doesn't pose the risks to users described in TFA. I only observe that the same factors that encourage end-to- end (flexibility, reliability, loose coupling, etc.) probably encourage "aol2" as well.

<comment><USER53> No, it's a moving of the "ends" and insertion of a middleman. If I write some text and publish it to people, rather than sending it from my computer to theirs I send it to an intermediary, who reformats it and presents it to other users of that intermediary.

<comment><USER30> TFA is really talking about two things. I responded to the "layered on top of HTTP" point, while you seem to be talking about the "silos of end user data" point. _Perhaps_ the first point contributes to the second, but I'm not convinced. Users could choose http apps that don't silo.

<comment><USER53> It strongly tends to, because having your own computer (especially a phone) set up to answer inbound HTTP is both administratively difficult (fiddling with NAT and dyndns, etc) and a security risk.

This is Schneier's argument about "security feudalism". And to some extent touched on by the article - people build on top of well-understood transport layers in order to reduce risks, and novel protocols are firewalled in case of novel risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I had a similar feeling the moment I started seeing browsers hide the protocol in the URL bar as much as possible. The protocol is important and I didn't like them munging the protocol and address together.

</comment><comment><USER55> AOL never sold hardware, but google, apple do. It's going to be worse.

</comment><comment><USER56> But open protocols still happen.

JSON-API[0] for example, is layered on top of HTTP and an open protocol.

[0] [http://jsonapi.org](http://jsonapi.org)

<comment><USER37> That protocol does not describe an application or aspects of an application but is rather of the 'transport' variety.

<comment><USER8> Oh, so you're advocating more open standards at the _application_ layer?

<comment><USER57> Calendaring is a great example. At least it's _possible_ to get a unified view of my work Exchange calendar and my Google personal calendar, as well as manage both through the web, Siri, or any number of apps on every platform.

That's not possible without an open application protocol. I can't get a similar unified view of my Twitter and Instagram follows, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Slack.

</comment><comment><USER59> And http is not a plumbing protocol nowadays?

Or maybe you expect twitter to write a rfc about its api, which for obvious economic and strategic reasons they don't want to open? WhatsApp maybe? How would benefit them to have 3rd party clients they wouldn't be able to control? Or having to justify or change their protocol decisions with an rfc?

I don't understand, I'm genuinely confused, this article sounds very naïve, very delusional, so probably I am just misunderstanding it.

<comment><USER60> Remember twitter and the discussions when they nuked third-party clients?

And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user- unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients.

<comment><USER20> _And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user- unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients._

I think that's somewhat misleading. MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, etc didn't use standard protocols, it's just that people would reverse engineer them. Third- party clients did just stop working from time to time whenever the providers changed something in the protocol.

<comment><USER61> I really have to wonder what happened to all the people who used to reverse- engineer chat protocols.

Did they all just give up?

<comment><USER20> They're still around - WhatsApp has had multiple unofficial clients pop up, for example, though the company is much more heavy-handed in taking them down (DMCA takedowns against libraries that use the API, banning users of unofficial apps, etc).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please review my site - Goaltastic - <AUTHOR> http://www.goaltastic.com

<comment><USER2> * Design & colors need the touch of a designer.

* You're asking me to take 2 steps... 1) fill out form on home page... 2) fill out 2nd much larger form after that... however I don't know what your app does so it feels like why should I go through the work of filling these in when I don't know what I'll get for it.

* "You Just Took The First Step to Success!" on the second step makes no sense there. I know I took a step. You don't need to tell me that. Move "Now, let's further define your goal." above the line and make that the main headline.

* The light yellow box is a bit too tight. There is not enough padding. It's a bit cramped feeling.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is hugely valuable feedback. Thank you.

In regards to your second point, any recommendation on how I might be able to communicate to the user that it's worth their while to fill out the second piece of the form?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Validate idea - Twitter client that filters your stream - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
Help me decide about my product idea. I'd like to make a twitter client that is able to do two things:
- filter stream noise "I waked, I ate" etc based on ML methods
- show you most popular discussions that your followed people are carrying (by means of my super secret algorithm), popular discussions based on topic etc. that you normally loose in a sea of noise
- maybe even organize your tweeted links under some taxonomy, or the tweets themselves, make graphs about what you tweet, etc.
Are these ideas on par with twitter client development laws? Should it better be a plugin to a popular client (which?, I never used any!)? Would you find it useful? How should I monetize it? Should I make it a web service? Anyone doing the same? Are these things profitable?  Can twitter cut my string afterwards? <comment><USER2> pretty sure twitter won't allow any more twitter clients

[http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/03/11/twitter-tells- devel...](http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/03/11/twitter-tells-developers- to-stop-developing-new-twitter-clients/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It says "curation of content" is allowed</comment></comment>


Quotes about Programming - <AUTHOR> http://saying.co/topic/programming

<comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure they're all about programming, huh [http://i.imgur.com/xixID8k.png](http://i.imgur.com/xixID8k.png)</comment>


Microsoft's Xbox Kinect Sets The World Record For Fastest Selling Device - <AUTHOR> http://techhogger.com/microsofts-xbox-kinect-sets-the-world-record-for-fastest-selling-device.html

<comment><USER2> but.. but... isn't microsoft dying?</comment>


Logging: Unsexy, Important, and now Usable. - <AUTHOR> http://www.roadtofailure.com/2010/01/25/logging-unsexy-important-and-now-usable/

<comment><USER2> "We want to be like Geordi in Star Trek, who can see everything on the Enterprise with a few finger presses. I wish there was such a thing! The closest we can get is ganglia, which monitors OS-level events (it can be hacked for apps)."

I disagree. Large software companies already exist in this space: Splunk, LogLogic, Arcsight, etc. The author Sounds like they reinvented Splunk in particular. (disclaimer: I work for Splunk and can see everything in your datacenter with a few finger presses. Call me Geordi LaForge.)

<comment><USER3> I hope it's not as painful as Geordi's visor.

<comment><USER4> The client app is called BananaClip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi I work in the log importation services business.

From my perspective the main hurdle to log aggregation/correlation is not scalability. If splunk doesn't cut it for your performance needs, you have probably hit the price point to where you can afford a loglogic or similar appliance.

Instead the barrier to entry is in the number of applications supported by a particular log archival product, and the ability to correlate across the different applications.

As I'm sure you know at this point, adding support for log types is a painstaking task. Most vendors punt on this and tell customers to do it themselves.

If there is a niche available to you as a startup I would think that it would be in offering a very low turnaround time in supporting new log types. For example: give us some log sources and we'll support and categorize your logs with our service.

As for running in the cloud on large datasets, I think you'll find that most customers are not going to want to double or triple their outgoing bandwidth -- In addition to concerns from a security compliance standpoint.

That being said, good luck in your venture. Logging is a mess, and could certainly use some clean up. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> For 99% of all companies a simple unix box that collects log files and moves them along for permanent storage a few days later (S3/Tape) is enough. At Shopify we use Clarity which is a web frontend for Grep and Tail that we released as open source: <http://github.com/tobi/clarity>

</comment><comment><USER7> FTA: _This means in order to find what you want, you need to explore the data: you need to search it. The only tool most of us can use is grep_

Um... what? Have the authors gotten stuck in a time vortex and been dropped off before, y'know, awk? Much less perl, or any of those new-fangled toys.

I mean: writing scripts to do log analysis is a pretty fundamental problem for server-side development, and lots of very smart people have spend the last two^H^H^Hthree decades working on tools to address the issue.

I don't even see how this (indexing the entries across a Hadoop cluster) is all that useful. In general, you don't do log analysis by asking "give me all the entries that match this pattern", you do it by walking them in order and extracting one or two fields from each line and building some kind of result data structure. This thing would be fine if you were asking for all the logs messages that mentioned "coffee", I guess. But what if you wanted a histogram of hit counts per page per day-of-week?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for providing this valuable perspective. I sort of group grep/Perl scripts/everything else together as manual processes. What I was getting at is the whole "roll your own" scripts is a royal pain in the ass.

For analytics, you're right, search is only part of the equation. That's why we make MapReduce easy to use on a cluster. You can write Pig or Hive scr

We also have templates for common data formats (and ways to roll your own) so you can turn unstructured log text into structured data, so that a histogram of hit counts per day-of-week is just a few lines of a script (or maybe even a search).

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like I got cut off in the middle. *You can write Pig or Hive scripts to generate interesting analytics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, can you be more specific on what scalability, analytics, and ease-of-use improvements LogSearch offers vs. Splunk in particular? We use Splunk internally and have not found it to be significantly lacking in these areas but are always open to alternatives. Additionally, what is the advantage of relegating log management to a cloud application? Typically log data is relatively sensitive; do you provide assurances that the data won't be misused, lost, repurposed, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Actually our software runs in the cloud _or_ in your datacenter. If it's in the cloud, it can be encrypted in trasmission (or stored encrypted if you're willing to take the performance hit).

If it's sensitive data, I'd recommend just spinning up your own cluster and installing the tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and as far as scale-wise: we run on the "web scale", which means a dozen to hundreds or more of computers, each generating tons of logs. It's why we're built on Hadoop. It's the main complaint our customer research indicated people have with tools like Splunk.

<comment><USER2> Cool. Splunk also does this and it's good to know that people don't perceive Splunk to be capable of operating this way so we can fix this perception.

<comment><USER9> Or you can use a tool that has already scaled for ages and has been in production since 2002. SenSage ... <http://www.sensage.com/customers>.

<comment><USER8> Also not wanting to sound like a mouthpiece, but choice of log management system is a very interesting topic to me... scalability is only one concern and may not trump everything. We actually looked at both LogLogic and Sensage during our initial evaluation both of which scaled better than Splunk did at the time. My memory of the evaluations is dim (2+ years ago), but I recall that both products seemed more brittle in our environment (education), where we have very little control over incoming log formats due to somewhat chaotic organizational structure and infrastructure. Splunk seemed more able to accept unstructured or unexpected data without complaint and to deal with the parsing at search time rather than index time, and was a more natural fit. The other decision points/tradeoffs we ended up making were a) no additional licensing cost for Splunk agents, b) prioritization of real-time perusal for troubleshooting purposes over long-term reporting and canned reports. Sensage excels at the latter since it amortizes the cost of reporting by caching periodic results, and provides a large set of prebuilt reports, if I recall correctly. Splunk's "summary indexing" serves sort of the same purpose as the cachign feature of Sensage and has been improved in v4.0. And c) no additional cost for users (we have over 50 people looking at data indexed by Splunk). The "search" metaphor is also very easy for people to grasp which was an added benefit of the Splunk GUI.

My sense has been that at least the low end of the market is increasingly preferring a search-oriented log management architecture versus a database- backed, query-heavy architecture because organizations are familiar with the search metaphor, the overhead of managing a search index is less than the cost of database administration, and the unsophisticated use case (i.e., free-text search rather than advanced query syntax) is increasingly common. Smaller organizations also rarely have the maturity to deal with logging systematically since it requires a pretty systematic approach to infrastructure. That said, the tradeoffs we made may or may not apply in a terabytes-per-day environment, I unfortunately can't speak to it directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The main thing is: we focus on bringing a cost and performance advantage to the small and medium companies, to make their lives a little better.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's true that LogSearch is similar, but we focus on cloud, analytics, ease- of-use and scalability -- each of which we'ce heard Splunk lacks.

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to come off sounding like a mouthpiece for Splunk, but Splunk does work with "cloud" data (hurray for buzz words), it is dead simple to use out of the box and recognizes many special fields like timestamps without any configuration (and also provides extensive configurability when needed) and scales like the distributed monster it is, capable of handling 10-15 MB of data / sec. on a single machines and GBs worth of data per day when scaled out across multiple machines. You should try it before you judge it on hearsay (and I'll maintain that you should also try any Splunk competitor before judging them as well).

<comment><USER10> I have tried Splunk. It's a great concept and I commend the Splunk team for building such an easy to use, polished product. However we found the query performance to be... ahem... not well geared towards large data sets. This combined with the licensing model meant it wasn't an option for us.

I just wish Yahoo would open source Everest (their multi-PB column store DB based on PostgreSQL) -- this would be ideal for building an open source Splunk competitor.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Do you know which version of Splunk you were using? Our latest version has vastly improved our query performance over large datasets.

Re. an open source log indexer: Agree, this is a space that will eventually become dominated by open source tools, used particularly by startups and small businesses. I think most people ignore this use of a MapReduce-like framework because they conceptually understand how it could be used, but 99% of all work is in the implementation, not the idea. And as of yet, I don't believe there has been a specific implementation beyond what companies like Shopify are doing where they add nice GUI tools on top of awk and grep (which admittedly is probably good enough for most people / business on this forum).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> See also: <http://developers.facebook.com/scribe/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I worry, like the other posters, that cloud logging + search is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not only the cloud, it's also in the datacenter :)</comment></comment>


Free cross-platform UI kit by Invision - <AUTHOR> http://www.invisionapp.com/now <comment><USER2> Looks quite nice generally! Especially the line graph with the shadow is something I haven't seen before.

Sidenote: Would be cool if there were alternatives to the Photoshop and Sketch packages. On linux, both are not great to use.</comment>


Rise of the American Professional Sports Cartel - <AUTHOR> http://systemsandus.com/2014/06/09/the-american-professional-sports-cartel/ <comment><USER3> The article mentions competitive parity in the NBA, but that's not true at all. There is no competitive parity now, and has never been. You merely have the same teams passing the title around.

In the last 30 years, only eight teams have won a title. Seven teams combined for 29/30 of those. The same teams are winning over and over and over. So examining the last ten years is meaningless when that is what's happening, you'll get a false sense of parity by seeing it shared among six teams in ten years (as though six different teams win every decade).

The bottom 15 to 20 teams in the NBA can never, and will never win a title under any circumstances. There is zero competitive parity. In 30 years, only one team has won a solo stand-out title, and that's the Dallas Mavericks.

One other problem with this article, they say that U.S. sports gambling has been estimated at $800 billion (it hasn't), and then they link to an article that doesn't say that at all. That number doesn't even come close to passing a common-sense test. The link is referring to world-wide sports gambling.

<comment><USER4> Because the Miami heat and the San Antonio Spurs were such great teams back in the 80's and 90's? From Wikipedia: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_franchise_post- se...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NBA_franchise_post- season_droughts) "Of the 30 current NBA franchises, 13 have never won the NBA championship. The oldest such franchise is the Suns (46 seasons), while the Royals/Kings and the Hawks have even longer championship droughts (63 and 56 seasons, respectively). Only 7 franchises have never been to the NBA Finals, the oldest of which is the Braves/Clippers (44 seasons), and again the Kings and the Hawks have appearance droughts that are even longer (63 and 56 seasons, respectively). The longest a franchise has gone without appearing in the playoffs at all is 15 seasons: the Braves/Clippers franchise from 1977 to 1991."

Only 7 teams have not been to the finals. That's not awful.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't change anything about the fact that only eight teams in 30 years have won the title, and seven have taken 29 of those. That's an extreme dynasty system. They clearly have nothing but an illusion of competition in which the radical majority of teams can never win.

Compare it to the NFL of the last 30 years. 16 individual teams have won Super Bowls during that time.

Or compare it to the MLB. 17 teams have won the World Series in 30 years.

That 30 years represents the modern NBA, since the merger, Magic and Bird sent ratings soaring, and Jordan + the rise of global media changed everything about the league.

Now you've got Chris Paul shuttled off to LA in a market-stuffing trade, you've got star players like Melo eager to join up with dynasties like the Heat, and other players like Kevin Love that can't get out of the backwater fast enough. They all know how the league works now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article could be applied to the organizers of huge international sporting events like FIFA and Olympic committee. I would love to see the books of those organisations checked.

<comment><USER3> It's exactly what you'd expect:

"The 2010 World Cup generated $3.66 billion in revenue for FIFA while expenses equaled just $1.30 billion according to their own financial documents. That is a nice little profit of $2.36 billion, up 7.3% from 2006 and 22.8% from 2002."

"If the 2014 World Cup shows a similar rate of increase, FIFA will profit approximately $2.61 billion from the tournament."

[http://www.businessinsider.com/fifa-profit-world- cup-2014-6](http://www.businessinsider.com/fifa-profit-world-cup-2014-6)

<comment><USER6> And pay no tax! Thanks FIFA!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These truly are cartels. The big change that happened years ago was the owners realized that they weren't in competition with each other on the field - <USER2> important competition was with other leagues and recipients of entertainment dollars. Then they started to cooperate, collude, exclude entry....

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, if the competition is with other leagues, where is the cartel?

Maybe the problem is lack of competition in the market. It isn't easy to turn a basketball fan into a football or ice hockey fan, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For all the crap they do, they still deliver a better end product to the fans than what we have here in Greek football. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_league](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_league). Just look at the statistics section. Why bother being a sports fan if the outcome is so easily predicted? Parity between teams should be the goal of all league head offices.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, I as a longtime NFL fan have become weary of watching live games b/c of the ever increasing volume of advertising. They changed the rules some time back in order to shorten games which were stretching beyond 3 hours. Naturally, playing time was shortened and not ad time. Since my team plays on the east coast and I live on the west coast, I can take advantage of NFL game rewind service and watch Sunday games at 9pm ad-free for 35$ for season. What a steal. Can spend entire Sunday with family.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would actually argue that professional sports are a great example of a situation where free markets are inferior. Between strong players unions, owner cooperation, and agreements with the cities they play in, professional sports have created and environment with an incredible value for the fans. The players are well compensated and the owners and cities are successful as well.

If anything, professional sports have proven that models outside of pure free market forces can be very successful for everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article defines many of the reasons that I've been disillusioned about American "sports". They are just a money making vehicle at the expense of society. Just recently (like an hour ago) someone from MLS was on ESPN talking about making MLS the best league in the world (seriously?) "so that our fans get ENTERTAINED by the best players in the world". It's football (or soccer), a sport, a passion, a social endeavor, not an entertainment, corporate money making vehicle. No wonder MLS is a laughing stock for the rest of the world. There is nothing wrong in making a profit, but at the expense of society?

P.S: Sounders and Timber fans, you guys rock!!

</comment><comment><USER12> >> None of these leagues' playoff tournaments have overlapping dates.

H The NHL doesn't exist? Their playoffs happen alongside the NBA's

<comment><USER13> They are not scheduled on the same day though.

This also applies to the regular season - again, so as not to split attention from fans, and the other simply logistical (some stadiums - being used for both NBA & NHL - need more prep time to setup the ice rink).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Garbage in garbage out.</comment>


NetflixOSS: Announcing Hollow - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/12/netflixoss-announcing-hollow.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping they'd give some examples with the heap size needed for a given dataset size, but I never found them (looked through [http://hollow.how](http://hollow.how) also).

I also wondered what you do when the heap cost gets too large. The Tooling section has a section on splitting/sharding I think answers my question.

Finally, I wonder if/why keeping all the local data in RAM is a hard requirement. For example, I suspect you could build a similar producer/consumer delta/snapshot mechanism, and shove all the data into something like a local SQLite db. Or even just serialize their heap format to disk, and then mmap it. I suspect the answer is latency, and that they have the $$$ to spend on RAM and machines for sharding.</comment>


Free-range parenting outside the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-parenting-outside-united-states.html <comment><USER2> It's easy to tell people to "chill" when you live in a high trust society like Tokyo (where I've called home for over 3 years; I can't speak for the other cities mentioned).

I've not once feared for my own safety. Children as young as ~5 or 6 walk on my street alone or in small groups regularly, and they, likewise, have no reason to fear. There's even a culture of teaching your kid at a very young age to do things on their own. A regular TV show documents it (link with English sub: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4lme5a](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4lme5a)).

I spent 3 and a half years in San Francisco, and the difference is stark. People riding the bus grab their phones hard with one hand while using it with the other, for fear of it being stolen (as happened to a friend of mine). You would never leave your phone on a table while going to the bathroom unless you were with someone to watch it. If you lost your wallet, you'd be lucky if you got your driver's license back in the mail.

Are American parents overbearing as a group? Likely. But it's easy to criticize from afar if you've never lived in a low-trust society.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you but then again the US is a massive country; it cannot be the same all over. So something gives the parents the idea they need to be (over?)protective or we just do not hear from the regions where that is not needed because it is not newsworthy?

<comment><USER4> I suspect there are places where you wouldn't and shouldn't leave your 5yo alone in the playground a short walk from home. And I assume that the culture will spread within a country (shared news etc) so that people in areas where this would be perfectly safe don't do that either. I'm not sure what to do about that their than encourage people to make their own judgements and also see the cost of overprotecting. I think that's a key here: parents think that watching over kids is invariably best, and don't assign a value to independence.

<comment><USER3> > suspect there are places where you wouldn't and shouldn't leave your 5yo > alone in the playground a short walk from home.

You have that almost everywhere; sometimes depending, unfortunately, on color of skin or social standing. But I am just surprised because of the size of the US; in the Netherlands, which is miniscule, 'people in the south' think Amsterdam and Rotterdam are Sodom and Gomorrah which is mostly not true. I thought it was because it is such a small country that people would have such ideas about cities which are basically less than 2 hours drive from them, but then you see this in massive countries too. The tabloid press seems to do a lot of harm really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Denmark, and probably elsewhere, we have the term "helicopter parents" for parents who constantly hover near their kids, never letting them out of sight. Similarly, we also have the term "curling parents", because they do everything to clear the path of their offspring (to the point of going to job interviews with them).

Both are obviously used in a teasing-not-quite-nice way to signal that maybe these parents should take a deep breath and assume that they raised their kids well, and that scraping your knee or getting frightened is something that happens in life sooner or later, and the parents' job is to guide and comfort their kids when they do happen.

There was a very high profile case (in DK at least) from 1997 about a mother who left her child outside the restaurant where she was eating (with line-of- sight to the stroller): [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2017/nov/26/anette-soren...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2017/nov/26/anette-sorenson-denmark-new-york-baby-left-outside)

I might not want to do the same in New York, but in Denmark no one would bat an eye if this happened.

<comment><USER6> I recently visited a friend in Copenhagen and when I got to his place, a condo on the third floor, he mentioned that his kid was outside sleeping. I thought that he mentioned on the balcony and I thought "weird but ok". About half an hour later we left and I learnt that the kid wasn't on the balcony bit out, in the common garden of the building, where anyone could have just came in because the main gate was simply always wide open... I am not a parent yet and I don't want to be an helicopter parent, but that still kind of shocked me. Can't decide if in a good or bad way.

<comment><USER7> That's how it works in a high-trust society. The idea that someone would just waltz into a courtyard and snatch a baby is just preposterous.

<comment><USER8> Tony Judt outlines some observations on the dynamics between social trust and cultural homogeneity in "Ill Fares the Land".

I guess the differences between America and Denmark are one manifestation of these differences

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The single best thing you can give your kid is the confidence to face the world alone.

Consequently, its one of the few things you can exert a modicum of control over as well ;-)

Let them burn their fingers, let them fall, let them do stupid shit and just be there to advise, help and guide them in a loving matter after the fact so they can learn and grow to become a confident, decent adult.

</comment><comment><USER10> I walked to school 3 kilometeres one way since the first grade (6 years old). Nowadays I've seen kids of the same age who can't even tie their shoes. It is even more concerning considering authorities are actually reinforcing this. The world did not become more violent or dangerous, but somehow people became more scared and paranoid.

<comment><USER11> The one thing that has got much worse is traffic, there are many more cars on the roads and they tend to be much bigger. I liked to let my kids road around when they were young but playing with the traffic didn't seem like a good idea.

<comment><USER12>
        > The one thing that has got much worse is traffic

Where has traffic gotten much worse? E.g. here's the US statistics on traffic deaths since the 1920s:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/US_traff...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png)

In terms of absolute numbers traffic deaths today are at the same level as the 1950s, but as the chart also shows the population has more than doubled. Statistics in any developed western country are likely to look the same.

Traffic deaths per million people are down to the levels of the 1920s, where there were much fewer cars, and the 1920s are a period where it would have been typical to kick your kids out at sunrise and expect them to be back before sundown.

We live in the safest period in human history, parents are just being paranoid.

<comment><USER11> Vehicle miles travelled has gone through the roof in that time, look at the blue line on your chart.

 _parents are just being paranoid_

Or perhaps they are behaving rationally given the amount of traffic on the roads, those figures might have been worse otherwise.

<comment><USER12> Distance traveled has gone through the roof, but at the same time deaths per million people has been going down. Clearly "the amount of traffic on the roads" isn't a rational indicator for how paranoid you should be about traffic.

<comment><USER11> No it isn't clear, the obvious answer is parents reacted to a risk and in doing so kept their children safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm Australian and my wife Norwegian. Norwegians are very very relaxed with their kids, and so are Australians for the most part...

That said my wife, left unchecked, is a helicopter parent... it's inherited by her mother who is the most anxious person I've ever met, my sister in law is also as anxious. So I always have to try and help my wife relax and have less anxiety with our daughter.

One thing is when our daughter falls over... my wife and her side of the family's reaction is to run over and repeat in Norwegian "you poor thing" or something to it's like. Where as my side of the family.. we almost celebrate falling over, we treat it like a positive. "Ohh come on get up" said in a very positive tone. Then we clap our hands and say "yay" when my daughter gets up.

The difference, my daughter almost never cries when she falls over. If she really hurts herself of course we will go to her, I'm not a monster... but other kids could fall over and scream for an hour over the smallest of falls. Why? Because their parents run to them and try to wrap them in cotton wool.

My point with all this, is parenting styles from what I've witnessed isn't really based on nationality.. but more the cultural norms, and how you were brought up.

I have read that the great generation, had a very very hands off parental approach. The boomers had a more hands on approach, and then gen X and gen Y seem for the more part to have a much more hands on approach than their parents.

I'm gen Y, my wife gen X.

I think there's a lot more factors involved here than just nationality.

<comment><USER14> Reaction to a child falling across cultures is so interesting in its differences. In a lot of countries in Latin America, when a toddler falls, all adults look away, to pretend as if we did not notice the child fell. The logic goes that if the child has an audience, they will cry, otherwise, they will just dust it off and keep playing.

<comment><USER13> I've had other parents explain to me that if you run to your child and make a huge fuss, that they will react as such. So in future if they fall and don't hurt themselves, they will cry.

I don't know what the efficacy of this is, but it doesn't hurt to try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a father from The Netherlands, I can tell you that no parent would let their 5 year old have a birthday party unsupervised by adults. If they did then you expect social services to get involved.

What actually happens is that the HOST PARENTS supervise the group. So if your kids are invited to a friend's birthday party then yeah, you don't stay. I assume that it's the same in the US and pretty much every other country.

We also don't leave our four-year-old kids in the car alone. Well, some people do, which is why the local newspapers have been full of stories about the parents getting arrested for it and social services getting involved.

<comment><USER16> > I assume that it's the same in the US and pretty much every other country.

No, in the US all parents are expected to stay. Not just the host parents.

<comment><USER17> Please tell me this is a joke. A birthday party (in Australia) is an invitation for you to dump your kids for 3 hours. How do the kids have any fun with so many adults around?

<comment><USER16> no, that is not a joke

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _I have three kids. I've left them home alone since the age of 7 to drop off dry cleaning, grab a coffee or pick up milk at the local store. My only requests were no cooking, fighting or using the iron. Read, play or clean your room. Never a problem. And if one goes missing I still have two left._

This made me laugh.

<comment><USER19> Me too - I wonder if that is actually an important cause though. 100 years ago people regularly had 4-8 children and expected some to die. Now its common to have 1-2, so its both more life altering to lose one, and easier to track them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I stuck around for my kids friends birthday parties when he was 2-3 and didn't want me to leave. Once I could leave him there without him crying (or even noticing), of course I got the hell out of there. Being in a room full of 5 year olds isn't really my idea of a great Saturday. The parents hosting the party do the suffering, those are the rules.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a parent in Germany I can say that there is a trend towards the American model. People watch their kids more closely on the playgrounds (helicopters parents), bring their kids to school by car. The latter has spark a lot of discussion here because roads around schools get blocked a lot and school principals are annoyed.

<comment><USER21> And ironically, the biggest danger to children on their way to school is all the cars around the school...

<comment><USER22> I'd say it's not ironic at all. It's part and parcel of auto dominated society.

<comment><USER23> It's ironic in that by trying to create a safer environment for their kids they're actually creating a more dangerous one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-saleh T.b.h. as a young parent with a 4yo daughter, I am kinda affraid to give her more free reign. Currently, I am fine with she doing whatever if a) I know where she is

b) I know there is at least some obstacle between her and the traffic.

c) if she hurts herself, I would know, and could get to her in 3 minutes

So I am fine with her being inside of a 100x100 m playground mostly unsupervised, as long as I know it is fenced and I have at least some idea where she is.

So my question would be this. Today, I wouldn't let my 4yo kid cross the road without adult supervision. In 15 years she will probably be in college somewhere, having to pay her own rent. How do you handle the progression?

I.e. I remember that from the school when I was 11 years old was a Big Deal™ .. but by the time I was 14, taking bikes with my friend and disappearing for half a day was normal.

<comment><USER24> Why the concern about fences?

I remember being taught to cross roads both at school and by my dad aged 4ish. IIRC they would teach you first, then they would start to ask me 'how do we going to cross then?' and make me lead the way. I had to stop, look both ways to check for traffic, then walk not run. And I had to talk out each step to my dad. After a few months he trusted me to not talk it out but if I missed a step, say not looking right, he'd point it out and make me do it again. Then a while later he let me cross roads myself but would watch. For example let me go to the park but watch from the front door. By 7/8 I was trusted to go to the supermarket and shop alone via some occasionally busy roads - the only really busy road had a lollipop lady to help you cross.

So yeah, make sure they know what they are doing. Make them prove it to you. Then give them a bit more freedom step by step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'll note that helicopter parenting in America is very much an affluence thing.

In poorer parts of the country kids spend lots of time, from a young age, unsupervised. Because their parents and care givers don't have a choice.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how much urbanisation plays into this. If your city is designed entirely around cars there's far less opportunity for kids to go out themselves.

I've always lived in a walkable places (ie in the UK) and growing up was told to walk everywhere. From a young age (maybe 8?) I could walk faster than my mum so she let me power off on my own to school. Naturally I became very independent.

But if there are no sidewalks, if your town is car centric and drivers have no regard for pedestrians? How in those places do you create opportunities for independence?

</comment><comment><USER26> I grew up in the US but my parents are both Italian. They pretty let me run around unsupervised, and it was wonderful. I remember though my mom receiving a lot of flak for that however.

</comment><comment><USER27> There was an interesting map posted here a while back on how children lost the right to roam. In 1919 the grandfather could walk 6 miles to go fishing but today the son is only allowed to walk in the street where the family live: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How- children-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children- lost-right-roam-generations.html)

<comment><USER25> That's largely an outcome of additional cars/lack of green space not a parenting mindset change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Didn't France just ban phones in school.

I wish the legal age would be lowered to 12 or 14. At least then kids could be given more financial and contractual independence. Children can't participate in movie pass, take Uber...

I wouldn't attend most meetings / talks where they refused to let me in without my phone. I don't know how we let kids suffer through the humiliation.

</comment><comment><USER29> American child and parent here, can report that American is a large and varied place. In my experience most children and parents here behave appropriately and American child raising is not some dystopian nightmare as these articles would have you believe.

The kids will be alright.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Some have called the police or child protective services after witnessing a > parent leave a child in a car to run into Starbucks or attend a job > interview.

I get what the gist of the article is about however isn't this a real risk?

Maybe in the other countries they leave the windows down but in America windows are up for security fears?

[http://noheatstroke.org/](http://noheatstroke.org/) (hopefully not a sensationalist website, just first thing that came up in google that seems to have numbers)

edit: For the down voters I'm talking about the job interview, not 5min to go get a coffee. It just seemed like a bad example to prove the articles point

Plus it was just a question...

<comment><USER4> Leaving a child in a car for a long time is a bad idea everywhere. It's fine to do if you have to pop into a store and the child is old enough to understand (and it isn't hot and sunny, and/or the child can handle the door on their own). But for a job interview??

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> cue the people needing to chill.

<comment><USER32> Exactly. People raise their children differently in different places. There are plusses and minuses. Who cares?

My frustration with tjis article is that it is tge epitome of anecdotal fluff. It is an article about the commebts on an article. Why is this tripe on hacker news?

<comment><USER33> What are the pluses about how we raise our kids in the US? I'm not really seeing any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I live in Portugal, right next to a school from 5th to 9th grade (10-15 year old kids).

In the morning, you can see parents and grandparents outside the school fences watching the inside like it was some zoo! It's painful to watch. I went to that school and I know I would HATE it if my parents did it, and I live right next to it!

It's explainable if it's the kids first day of school, but you see this year round. I think this is happening more frequently, I don't remember seeing it as much some years ago.

I believe the cause is the same as in America: the news on TV focuses only on the crime and scandal, increasing the perception of danger, when it's actually decreasing.

<comment><USER35> but do they stay there watching all day? what would be point stay and watch for few minutes or even hour? don't these people need to go to work? maybe they just enjoy seeing child happy with classmates?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Some have called the police or child protective services after witnessing a > parent leave a child in a car to run into Starbucks or attend a job > interview.

Not sure why they included this little nugget in the article. Letting your child roam free is just a little bit different than locking them in a car and possibly forgetting about them. Parents absolutely need to make arrangements such that this situation can be avoided, and I can't fault anyone who calls the police if they see a child left unattended in a car. They don't know how long they've been in there or will be in there.

<comment><USER12> The article isn't talking about parents leaving infants in their cars, one example cited is a younger kid being left in a car with their 10 year old sibling. If you're passing buy and concerned about those kids, it's going to be pretty easy to see if they're doing fine.

Much of the article is also discussing countries where the predominant weather is such that even if you left an infant in a car for 3 hours to sleep without AC they'd be fine. Sweden isn't Los Angeles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37>
      High Trust Society

I love the snobby ring to that term. Very elitist.

I grew up around dirtbag kids, scummy weirdos, freaks and fuck ups, during an era and in a zone where people are still uncertain about what the effects from lead poisoning were, immediately prior to my childhood.

I have older siblings with... stories.

I look around now, and I have to admit, the world does not seem to be strewn with the human wreckage that existed prior to the crack epidemic that emerged in the 1980's, but I do remember what people were like back then.

I really think leaded gasoline, coupled with alcoholism, drunk driving and many other drugs, ripped the banality of the 1950's to shreds, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, who still remember what that looked like.

The world was not "safe" or anything that looked like it. People were scary.

I'm not going to go into details, because HN winces to think of such things, but really, I could paint vivid pictures of the fears people have.

I'll say this much, illicit gambling was rampant and normal in dens of vice, rendered an impenetrable haze of cigarette smoke that hung four feet off the ceiling, right down to the tops of the door jams. That gambling atmosphere was pervasive. Everyone just felt like the abandon of wagering it all, any old time was normal. Such was the case with so many freaks on the loose.

Things aren't like that now. But it's not as far away as anyone would love to claim.

Helicopter parents seem uptight, and relative to the world as it has been for but a pair of decades or less, they are. But a lot can happen in a single generation.

We'll see how things go.</comment>