A Good Vimrc - <AUTHOR> http://dougblack.io/words/a-good-vimrc.html <comment><USER2> Rebinding jk to escape because escape is too far away seemed like a fairly ugly hack to me, especially because you can't type it anymore without waiting.

Why not simply rebind caps lock to escape? Caps lock is used awfully little, considering how prominent its position on the keyboard is. On Linux, you can rebind it by adding

      setxkbmap -option caps:escape

to your .profile. If instead of an additional escape you prefer it to be swapped around, use

      setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape

This is perhaps the most impactful change on my vim workflow.

<comment><USER3> Hi! Author here.

Fair points. I'm gonna start out on the defensive: I didn't post the article, which kinda stinks because if I knew it was going to get such attention I would have updated it to my current setup. Anyways as the 1.5 year old article states:

      This article will almost certainly fall out of date with my vimrc in the very near future

I don't do jk escape anymore. I have since abandoned custom escapes because I work often enough on remote servers with vanilla vimrcs that don't have custom escape bindings set that the penalty I pay having to stop and consider which environment I'm in before every escape wasn't worth the small quality of life enhancement from having it set locally.

Good tip on caps lock, though I currently have it set to control which I find is a much better use of the key. Especially once you know about ctrl-o.

<comment><USER4> ctrl+] will act as escape in any vim out there. At least that I've encountered.

Having caps as ctrl makes it really easy to hit.

<comment><USER5> Ctrl-C seems to work in any vim (though, I think, not actual vi), and at some point my muscle memory rewired itself to that. It's usually directly under my left hand, and it's a keyboard shortcut I use elsewhere, like in the shell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't use vim as my go to editor so I may be asking a silly question; does it just use idiotic defaults or something? I've only met a couple 'vim users' who could just hop onto someone else's vim setup and be productive, and I've never met a single vim user who could use someone else's setup without making comments about everything being different.

I guess the question is do people modify vim cause they can or cause they have to?

<comment><USER7> Vim's default are indeed dumb, but what you described is not a vim-specific problem. Walk into any room full of coders and try to use their computers; you'll discover tons of weirdness that can't be explained by anything except by a desire to be treated like a princess.* Things like rebinding basic shortcuts, reversing the scroll direction (Mac users will get this), swapping Cmd/Ctrl, using some obscure shell or even infecting other people's machines with some haphazardly scp'd dotfiles.

This kind of overcustomization is fine if you live in a basement and work on a project alone. As soon as you become a part of a team, please stop. You're making cooperation unnecessarily hard and spending company time on an optimization that isn't.

*I sometimes joke that coders who refuse to conform to the industry standards should wear a tiara as an indication they are, indeed, unique snowflakes free from the usual social expectations. It seems to work.

<comment><USER8> > that can't be explained by anything except by a desire to be treated like a > princess

Do you mean a desire to be more efficient?

Am I some kind of princess because I decided to use a different keyboard layout than the default? That I decided to learn a different language than the one I was told to learn in school? That I wanted to install a different operating system than the one that came with my computer?

Your comment is not just hostile, it is unbelievably pretentious. You quite clearly don't understand why people customize things. If you want to live in your undecorated, perfectly square single-room house you're welcome to do so without telling others they're not "part of the team" for having different preferences than you do.

Damn...

<comment><USER9> Realistically, what justification is there any more for working on somebody else's machine, being force to use their config? Ok, if your machine explodes and you need their's for a bit fine. But in the long run, the amount of times where you need to actually edit some code by typing on another person's machine should be vanishingly small.

I'm all for standards when it comes to collaborating on code. But when it comes to text editors, vim configs, even using emacs (get out your crosses, holy water and sliver bullets), it shouldn't really matter from my perspective.

<comment><USER10> How do people who like to customize their environment do pair programming? I belong to that group, and I like the idea of pair programming, but I've never had the chance to try it in practice...

<comment><USER8> tmux/screen sharing work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those just getting started or using vim only occasionally, Tim Pope's vim- sensible is a good, conservative starting point. It just sets some reasonable base configs instead of Vim's crazy default settings. No custom keybindings or fancy plugins included.

Vim is by default intended to be compatible with some historical implementation of vi. In my opinion, it doesn't make any sense any more, but I guess there is some reasoning behind the decision.

[https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible](https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible)

<comment><USER12> neovim has some saner defaults, by the way.

<comment><USER13> Mostly based on vim-sensible's (with some input from the community): [https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2676](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2676)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very nice write up, but the tabs/spaces part of it makes no sense at all.

"I like it, since it means my source code looks the same on every machine."

That reason just makes no sense at all.

There's only one reason for configuring tabs to be anything but tabs, and that's because someone else set the standard. So if you're editing python or bash, and you don't feel like being a rebel with a cause, you set expand tab.

But obviously you shouldn't be doing that manually every time you open a file, so you should configure Vim to detect what's going on.

You can do that by adding the `ciaranm/detectindent` plugin and then setting the following line:

        autocmd BufReadPost * :DetectIndent

To detect the indentation any time you open a file. That at least for me makes the headache go away most of the time.

<comment><USER15> Why would either tabs or spaces be better than the other? Isn't that one of those pedantic style debates that often come down to a matter of personal preference? I'd get rather annoyed if someone on my team was constantly changing the indentation from tabs to spaces or vice versa every time they opened a file.

To elaborate on the author's reasoning for using spaces, people sometimes mix spaces with tabs in the indentation unknowingly. If you're not using the author's tab size on your machine, the code doesn't format well at all and if you want to convert to spaces you'd have to manually edit a lot of things. There's also the issue with aligning things as well, which spaces are more consistent for as well. At least with spaces you can see the author's original intention and then reformat it as you wish.

<comment><USER14> You're mixing up arguments. No one on your team should be changing indentations. You should decide as a team what your settings are going to be, that's why I suggest using DetectIndent to make sure your settings match whatever the project guidelines are.

It's not a matter of personal preference though. Tabs are simply superior for encoding indentation. If you use tabs for indentation you can configure their width in your editor to match your personal preference, spaces doesn't allow for that. That's the only significant difference, and the only good reason for using tabs instead of spaces.

None of the arguments you made about spaces make sense. What's the fact that sometimes people mix up tabs and spaces got to do with anything? The whole idea of using tabs is that the code _does_ format well regardless of what tab- width setting you have on your machine. Converting tabs to spaces _does not_ require manual intervention _at all_. Alignment should be done with spaces, no one is argueing to use tabs for alignment. You can't use tabs for alignment because their width is undefined! The whole idea of using tabs is semantically encoding the authors original intention to allow you to reformat as you wish! At this point.. are you just trolling me?

<comment><USER15> Oh sorry! I completely misunderstood what DetectIndent was doing, that's a good tip.

I did want to point out that there's some sense to forcing the code to look the same on every machine though. Of course converting tabs/spaces is automatic, but my point was that the mix of the two requires either manual editing or conforming to the width of whoever made the error. It does happen, and I've been on at least one project with a professor who would occasionally mix things up while in the throes of editing (and they used a tab width of 8 which made it especially irritating for others!). With spaces you at least force whitespace to mean only one thing and if you absolutely can't stand someone's indentation width you can still change it like you can with tabs.

This really is personal preference though. Spaces explicitly represent the author's original intention including their indentation width, while tabs make it more convenient to others while conflating whitespace to mean two different things. Both are entirely reasonable though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Disabling the search highlight seems like a rather lowly use for leader+space. Great guide though, didn't know about quite a few options in here, wildmenu is great.

I switched to vim from subl about a month ago - it took a bit of getting used to but I'm loving it now. I still use subl for some multi cursor wizardry but that's less and less common now.

I found the disabling the arrow keys in normal mode was the point of no return!

<comment><USER17> > I found the disabling the arrow keys in normal mode was the point of no > return!

Is there any reason to do this when you have a keyboard that has easily reachable arrow keys? (Kinesis Advantage, in my case.)

<comment><USER18> Yea, it forces you to use the vim bindings. This is advantageous, since your hands don't leave the home row. It seems minor, but when you actually "get" vim, you'll actually see speed improvements. It sounds silly, the half second saved here and there, but once you've done it long enough, you get into a flow that you just can't get moving your hands to the arrows or mouse.

<comment><USER16> ^ this. I could likely reuse them for something now but when your muscle memory has you going there all the time at the start it's better if they just do nothing. I think it is at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great writeup and thank you making it clear that you want people to understand what's happening. I love the clean style of your site.

Let me also recommend some of my favorites:

      set matchpairs+=<:>     " match < and > as well
      set ignorecase          " case-insensitive search
      set smartcase           " upper-case sensitive search

If you already use ctrlp, you might also cpsm [0], a better matcher for it and ctrlp-funky [1] which allows you to go to methods and other symbols in a ctrlp style.

      [0] https://github.com/nixprime/cpsm
      [1] https://github.com/tacahiroy/ctrlp-funky

</comment><comment><USER19> The `ToggleNumber()` function may be shortened to

        :set invnumber

There two kind of prefixes for `:set` variables: `no-` and `inv-`, the first one turns the variable off or empties it, the second just toggles between states.

<comment><USER20> Cool trick.

FYI, you can do the same with :set number!.

Adding ! at the end of a variable will invert it. Adding ? at the end will echo its value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice tutorial. While I understand the pleasure of configuring stuff — being a Gentoo-lover I'm throwing stones in a glass house here — I always stuck to a very simple Vimrc file. I find it better to learn how to use the standard settings than forever me tinkering on my own. One could always wish the standard settings were more sane, though…

</comment><comment><USER22> Came here to say "Don't put anything in your vimrc that you don't understand". Pleasantly surprised when I clicked the link!

</comment><comment><USER23> I, too, wondered about $ and ^ - they are rather inconvenient to type. But instead of B and E, why not map <Space> as leader, then have <Leader>b and <Leader>e?

Space seems like the perfect leader key. Mapping , means you lose prev-finding for some searches (f).

<comment><USER24> I actually map H to ^ and L to $. In my head it's like "h is left, H is far left"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've played around with vimscript and my .vimrc many many times, and always found it very unwieldy. I've started using a new and very different approach, which involves using the amoffat/snake library to write my new .vimrc functions in python. This is definitely not for everyone, but I've been able to do some pretty cool stuff with it, like creating a function for writing trace like debug statements, or sending the currently selected vim lines to a shell via the window manager/os level, rather than a terminal multiplexer like screen. If anyone else is interested, an example can be found at gist.github.com/sac2171/ce7b086421e8387193fd

</comment><comment><USER26>
        syntax enable           " enable syntax processing

        The comment should be enough to describe this one.

Sorry, no it's not. The syntax processing of what? The syntax of the current file loaded? Some sort of commands?

<comment><USER27> A good example of a completely useless comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just realized something - my vimrc is 12 years old (carried on from my college). It has all my quirks and shortcuts that doesnt make sense to anyone but me. Every now and then, I pick up sone cool stuff from other vimrc and it becomes part of my own.

What I just realized is that my Dockerfile is becoming something like that. Everything from the way the file system is laid out to the supervisord config is something that has become familiar. I do my development in it and its already a year old. All my various production servers use the same base Dockerfile (it includes Ruby, Python, Nginx, Openssl, Golang and Java!).

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand why you'd want to map leader to anything but space.

<comment><USER30> I fully agree. I think it seems like this key that people think is special like caps lock. The symmetry afforded by the space key and every other key on the keyboard is phenomenal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The first line is what I wrote about on my blog [http://ricardolovelace.com/blog/2015/01/11/vim-is-not-a- blac...](http://ricardolovelace.com/blog/2015/01/11/vim-is-not-a-black-box/). Oddly enough there aren't more articles like these, just repos with a couple hundred line long blobs with every plugin, "hack" and keybinding known to man.

</comment><comment><USER32> One thing I've added fairly recently is:

        try
                source ./.vimlocal
        catch /^Vim\%((\a\+)\)\=:E484/
        endtry

which lets me tweak my settings (project specific key bindings, &c) by dropping a .vimlocal file in the directory I'm editing from. The try-catch ignores the error raised when the file is absent.

<comment><USER33> Why not check for file existance, instead of try-catch:

      if filereadable(expand("~/.vimlocal"))
          source ~/.vimlocal
      endif

<comment><USER32> I've no strong objection to that - it's racy but not in any way that probably matters. Otherwise, it's mostly just a question of forgiveness vs permission...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good tutorial. Looking forward to combing over my vimrc tomorrow when I have some time. It's similarly copied from somebody else's many moons ago, and there are things that it does that I don't really like but haven't been bothered to change (eg. sometimes I want 2 space indents instead of 4).

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice writing. One point/one question:

. section titles can be finished with {{{1 and then no closing brackets are necessary. It will just wrap to the next {{{1 occurence.

. regarding nvim: how can I find out what the defaults are there? Probably I have quite a lot of definitions which are no longer needed...

<comment><USER35> Neovim Defaults

From the current docs:

[0] [https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-option- default...](https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-option-defaults)

From the GitHub issues page:

[1] [https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2676](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2676)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've been testing your recommendation of using ag in ctrlP (let g:ctrlp_user_command = 'ag %s -l --nocolor -g ""'), but the performance seems to be pretty much the same. Do you notice that much of a difference?

Disclaimer: I'm using a SSD.

<comment><USER37> I'm using command-t and it works fine for me even in large code base.

AFAIK, ag shines for searching code in large code base, if you are just doing matching with a list of file paths, ag is an overkill.

EDIT: And if you set `wildignore` correctly, you wouldn't have a lot of files. Getting node_modules/ out of my Command-T result made it much faster. I actually wrote a plugin[0] to extract patterns from `.gitignore` and apply to `wildignore`, so that Command-T and CtrlP could have a shorter list to search for.

[0]: [https://github.com/octref/RootIgnore](https://github.com/octref/RootIgnore)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Nice writeup, give Sift a chance - [https://sift- tool.org/info.html](https://sift-tool.org/info.html) \- a nice replacement for the silver searcher

<comment><USER39> Offtopic. But still: Thanks. Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Heh, I store my entire config in a Github repo: [https://github.com/Diablo-D3/config](https://github.com/Diablo-D3/config)

</comment><comment><USER41> A must have plugin for moving to the middle of a word:

[https://github.com/bkad/CamelCaseMotion](https://github.com/bkad/CamelCaseMotion)

</comment><comment><USER42> nothing special about this vimrc.

This is what I have:

[https://gist.github.com/halayli/ef3dd268986914ed77d5](https://gist.github.com/halayli/ef3dd268986914ed77d5)

At the very least, you need vim-session if you work on multiple projects (or branches)

vim-airline is a nice to have

Ag is a must have. it allows you to search files and preview the results directly.

I've also written a small function SwitchHeaderSource to switch between .c/cpp files and their headers. ,s is the shortcut.

</comment><comment><USER43> can anyone suggest similarly helpful resources for those of us stodgily using nvi?

<comment><USER44> This one's a bit older but I based most of my .vimrc on it: [http://unlogic.co.uk/2013/02/08/vim-as-a-python- ide/](http://unlogic.co.uk/2013/02/08/vim-as-a-python-ide/)

and

[http://www.sontek.net/blog/2011/05/07/turning_vim_into_a_mod...](http://www.sontek.net/blog/2011/05/07/turning_vim_into_a_modern_python_ide.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Great guide, thanks for sharing. Although that B and E remapping.. man, it hurts!

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm seriously interested in such an article for Emacs. Anyone?

<comment><USER47> Check out spacemacs

<comment><USER46> I'm a relatively long time Spacemacs user, and just recently dropped it exactly because it abstracts too much, and I wanted Emacs keybindings. I've failed to comprehend how it answers my question. Thank you anyway.

<comment><USER48> A couple times a year, I'll scour a few .emacs.d repos on github and see if I can find something interesting in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> My advise is to migrate to spacemacs

</comment><comment><USER49> the best vimrc is the one that doesn't exist, so that vim runs in compat mode

</comment><comment><USER50> Badwolf is great

</comment><comment><USER51> goods

</comment><comment><USER52> what is the benefit of representing tabs by 4 spaces?

<comment><USER53> one argument for spaces > tabs is that with tabs you cannot see if you have (mistakenly) added spaces to indent a particular line (without :set list which can be annoying to some). If someone else opens the file and their tabstop setting was set to a different number than you, they'll see different indentation on those lines. If everyone uses spaces, everyone will always see the same thing.

I think tabs settings as something that should be agreed on by a team or project lead - too easy to screw things up. Same with line ending settings in version control if you're working with a mixed OS team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Did he mention pathogen, vundle, youcompleteme, nerdtree, and powerline?</comment>


The Most Misread Poem in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/ <comment><USER3> David Orr did a talk on NPR that was far less overwrought ([http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weve-gotten-wrong-robert- fros...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weve-gotten-wrong-robert-frost- classic/)) It got to the point quickly:

"DAVID ORR: He claims that he wrote it because he used to go on walks with the English poet Edward Thomas, because Frost spent a brief time in England. It was actually the beginning of his career as a poet.

And what he would like to say at readings afterward is that he and Thomas would go on these walks, and then Thomas, who has a somewhat more romantic sensibility than Frost, Thomas would always regret whatever path they had taken.

And then afterward, he would say, well, we really should have gone to the right. I could have shown you something over there. We should have gone to the left. I could show you something over there.

And Frost was very amused by this. And so he wrote the poem as a kind of joke at his friend's expense."

In other words, it's more about regret than making the right choice, or that you deceive yourself sometimes by dwelling on a choice that is actually perfectly random. Or a million other interpretations...

<comment><USER4> Fun Fact: The poem also directly lead to Edward Thomas' death as he took it too seriously and decided to enlist in the army [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)#War_servi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_\(poet\)#War_service)

<comment><USER5> A poet's death. (Edit: nope, fiction.)

 _On Easter Monday, 1917, the first day of the Arras Offensive, he paused for a moment to fill his pipe. A shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart; he died without a mark on his body._

[http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/edward- thomas](http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/edward-thomas)

Thomas was an astonishing thing, an established literary critic who suddenly morphed into a great poet. All his poems were written in the three years before he died, and he kept getting better. _The Other_ is hauntingly good: [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239754](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239754). WWI famously killed many poets, but I wish Thomas hadn't been one of them. He had pure English in his veins, and I like him better than Frost.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting what people like. I've never been able to identify well with WWI poets. This is a good example. It's clearly well-written: the opening stanza captures me and takes me back to times hiking, when you emerge from the trees and the sunlight. But the rest is just something I can't understand or identify with. Perhaps it was intended to feel alienating, but it doesn't make me feel anything, not even alienated. It's just there, a thing I'm not that interested in.

I'm not criticizing your taste, by the way: I think everyone is entitled to look for what they want in art. I'm just interested in what you see here.

For comparison, here are some poems I like:

[http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996)

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/fools- errands](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/fools-errands)

[http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-turning- ten/](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-turning-ten/)

<comment><USER5> If the main idea of the poem—a man who follows a strange version of himself through the countryside—doesn't resonate with you, then yeah there probably isn't much of interest there. But I find it haunting and mysterious.

Then there is the melody of the language and the original way he puts words together that sounds modern and old-fashioned at the same time. And how he can write about nature in a way that brings it to life, which is super rare—most nature writing is boring, and the way Thomas does it seems full of feeling, something that was about to fall out of modern poetry. And then it's just perfectly executed, except I wish he hadn't rhymed "mirth" with "earth".

To me that poem suggests a modernism that was possible but in the end never happened. I like Eliot and Pound, but their virtuosity is altogether different and they are far more detached and alienated. Of course we can't say what Thomas would have been like after WWI, which had a shattering effect on all art.

You're certainly right that we needn't all like the same things. Thanks for sharing those links. I admire the Elizabeth Bishop poem for its construction—it's clever how the middle lines all rhyme—but I'm somehow not convinced she means what she's saying. The Billy Collins poem is beautiful, though. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone considered that the roads are equally travelled precisely _because_ every traveller chooses the less travelled path?

Could the poem actually be a commentary on load balancing?

<comment><USER8> That is exactly the sort of thing some pseudo-highbrow twit would have given me a 'D' for in high school after assuring me that "there are no wrong answers".

I love it.

<comment><USER9> I once got a D for an essay on "how does the symbolism help us understand the author's message" when I said that, frankly, it didn't, and that if the author wanted to send a message, he should have come straight out and said it.

Sorry, but that's the way my brain is wired, and I was exasperated by the teacher going on about a bunch of stuff that to me seemed like you could just make it up as you go along. "Well, the boat symbolized her relationship with her father, and when the anchor broke, it meant that her affair with her uncle was doomed from the outset because the barnacles on the boat were symbolic of the calluses on his hands, because he was a factory worker, rather than one of the landed gentry..." or some horse shit like that.

You can downvote me, but I won't apologize for loathing that kind of thing.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it.

Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?

<comment><USER11> What if there were really no signs of metaphor, and the boat trip was just a boat trip? How do you know you didn't just read a bunch of things into something the author didn't intend?

<comment><USER12> My favorite Hemingway quote:

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse."

<comment><USER13> Citation? I find it hard to believe this quote came from the same man who invented the Iceberg Theory [0]. I recently read Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants". This short story _begs_ for symbolic interpretation. If we assume a lack of symbolism, there's no plot. Ostensibly - literally nothing happens.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory)

<comment><USER14> I don't see how the Iceberg Theory would conflict with a lack of intentional symbolism at all.

Separate from that: There's plenty of literature with no plot.

When I was younger I loved writing stuff with no plot. My best grades were on works with no plot whatsoever. I wanted to write a novel-length work with no plot, in part because of the challenge, in part because I immensely enjoyed reading stuff with no plot.

I haven't read "Hills like White Elephants". Maybe it's full of intentional symbolism. Maybe not. But the absence of a plot is not the evidence of symbolism.

<comment><USER13> Hm, the wikipedia article contains a similar quote at the very bottom.

> _When asked about the use of symbolism in his work, and particularly in the > most recently published Old Man and the Sea, he explained: "No good book has > ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck > in...That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin > bread is all right, but plain bread is better....I tried to make a real old > man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them > good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to > make something really true and sometimes truer than true."_

After reading the wiki more closely, I think there's a middle ground. It seems the Iceberg Theory operated on Hemingway's omission of _explicit_ symbols. Hemingway never outright mentioned the larger themes in his works. But the holes left were suggested by the context.

I think it's like instead of painting a mural of a deer in a forest, he'd paint a mural of (what appeared at first glance to be) an empty forest. Except on closer inspection, there would be a trail of disturbed vegetation, accompanied by fresh deer tracks.

The deer clearly exists somewhere in the scene's vicinity even though the audience never sees it. Similarly, I think Hemingway let the themes influence the story, but never let those themes manifest themselves as symbols the reader could easily point to. Instead, the themes manifested as a vibe the reader couldn't explain on a conscious level, or manifested as a series of convenient coincidences. Maybe we can compromise that Hemingway achieved symbolism without the symbols.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

I suspect much of our disagreement concerns the definition of "plot". In my mind, I can't see a short story or novel without a plot that would be very interesting. It would be equivalent of watching a film which showed nothing but paint dry for the entire duration. Even if there's no physical action, any halfway interesting movie is bound to have at least some sort of psychological action.

If there's no plot, then I would probably classify it as poetry (which "Hills like White Elephants" clearly isn't).

Maybe a better idea would be to point me to an example or two of successful stories which omit symbolism.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is truly meta is that this entire "misunderstanding" is CENTRAL to the Poem's popularity.

Variations of this story and headline have been popping up for years - like in the wonderfully informative "Top 10 Most Misunderstood Lines in Literary History" (1)

Or heck, as a monologue in Orange is the New Black (2)

Didn't see it there because you're too high-brow and busy, so saw it in business insider last year like me (3)?

The poem's dual-meaning is central to its popularization - similar to the "big reveal" that drove the Six Sense to become one of the top 100 grossing movies of all time.

(1) [http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-misunderstood-lines-in- li...](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-misunderstood-lines-in-literary- history.php)

(2) [http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/15/orange_is_the...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/15/orange_is_the_new_black_on_road_less_traveled_show_gets_robert_frost_poem.html)

(3) [http://www.businessinsider.com/frosts-road-not-taken-poem- in...](http://www.businessinsider.com/frosts-road-not-taken-poem- interpretation-2014-3)

(3) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken)

<comment><USER16> >The poem's dual-meaning is central to its popularization

I'm not sure about that. Ask 100 people at least peripherally familiar with the poem what its central point is and 99 would answer something along the lines of "taking the less popular path."

I agree with the author's point though. I remember a Dartmouth English professor talking about this years ago and once he pointed out what the words actually said, the actual meaning seemed obvious in retrospect.

<comment><USER17> > he pointed out what the words actually said, the actual meaning seemed > obvious in retrospect.

> Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

This section negates the "actual meaning" being derived by the author. The reference to the future aspect of having traveled the choice he did not make is imaginary. Once we make a choice, rarely do we change it. The poem is not about choosing the less traveled path, for sure. It is lamenting the possibilities offered, unknown, and therefore attractive in hindsight for a choice made and likely never faced again...allowing for exploration of the reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never felt like the Road Not Taken was about individualism, even when I first read it in high school. To me it's about the fact that sometimes you have to make momentous decisions in life, in which neither choice is clearly right or wrong. Either way you choose, the choice is defensible, but once you make the choice, you can't go back. I decided to go into computers, instead of joining the Air Force and becoming a pilot, for example. Sometimes in life you will meet someone who clearly could have been your soulmate, but you decide to let the acquaintance lapse. I wanted to spend a couple of years in the Peace Corps, learn another language, and help people build power plants in remote locations, but I chose to get married and start making babies instead. And I look back on these kinds of choices and say I made the right choice. But no matter what choice you make, it makes all the difference. Isn't this what the poem is about?

Regardless of what the poet says, I think the important thing is to be out there on that road, travelling, and doing your best. It's all too easy to stay in your comfort zone forever rather than travelling.

Edit: corrected title. Apologies!

<comment><USER19> How do you get the title of the poem incorrect when commenting on this story?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep's clothing."

Not sure about that. I suspect Springsteen's _Born in the USA_ takes that crown, or perhaps any number of satires that have been taken at face value (looking at you Paul Verhoeven).

<comment><USER21> There is an interpretation of Born in the USA other than how the system beats down the common man with its useless wars and arbitrary bosses?

The lyrics are pretty unambiguous. Unless I guess you only listen to the chorus and ignore literally everything that isn't "Born in the USA"?

<comment><USER22> > The lyrics are pretty unambiguous. Unless I guess you only listen to the > chorus and ignore literally everything that isn't "Born in the USA"?

Which is exactly what happens.

<comment><USER23> And here's dave grohl illustrating how true that is.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFHD7kuAqu4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFHD7kuAqu4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is in fact my favorite poem.

I've never thought of it as a triumph of choice, "See, it's because I chose thus!"

And I've never thought of it as self-deception, which I think is what the article says. A poem is in some sense our own, but to the extent that you can be wrong about a poem, I think this article is wrong.

I think it's merely a wonderful acknowledgement that choosing different paths do make a difference, even when it doesn't appear to matter at the time. Frost's character wasn't making an obviously important choice between the paths. But way did in fact lead to way, and life was probably different, partially determined, because of this metaphorical inconsequential choice of direction.

My other favorite Frost poem is "The Hired Man," from which we get the line "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in."

<comment><USER25> I don't think that your interpretation is wrong, but I think you also have to acknowledge that poem is about how when we look back at these choices, we romanticize and assign meaning to these choices that were essentially random.

The man in the poem while reminiscing says 'I took the road less traveled by' but the narrator explicitly says that travel had 'worn them really about the same'. So the self-deception part is fairly explicit.

<comment><USER26> >The man in the poem while reminiscing

This is not true. This may be the reason for the misreading! He is not reminiscing. he is commenting about reminiscence itself. The author says that in the future he will look back with a sign and state that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Robert Frost himself wrote about this intentional light mocking [0]:

"I suppose I was gently teasing them." [1]

"but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other." [2]

\--

[1]

"On one occasion he [RF] told of receiving a letter from a grammar-school girl who asked a good question of him: 'Why the sigh?' That letter and that question, he said, had prompted an answer. Amherst Mass April 1925

"Dear Miss Yates:

No wonder you were a little puzzled over the end of my Road Not Taken. It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life. I suppose I was gently teasing them. I'm not really a very regretful person, but for your solicitousness on my behalf I'm your friend always Robert Frost"

[Finger, L. L.: "Frost's 'The Road Not Taken': a 1925 Letter come to Light", American Literature v.50]

\--

[2]

"(a) One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: Was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way. (RF, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 23 Aug. 1953; tape recording)."

"(c) Frost said that he wrote the poem, 'The Road Not Taken' for his friend [Edward Thomas] and sent it to him in France, getting the reply, 'What are you trying to do with me?' (L. Mertins: Robert Frost)"

[Thompson, Lawrance: Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, Notes.]

\--

[0] [http://www.retiredtractors.com/Frost/Roadfrost.html](http://www.retiredtractors.com/Frost/Roadfrost.html)

</comment><comment><USER28>
      The Fork Not Taken

      Two spaces forged in the obscure core
      And sorry I could not both address
      And be one stream of loads and stores
      Blocked while tables copy, bored
      Yielded to the next process(0)

      I got the new one, once unblocked
      And having perhaps the better claim,
      Because it was COW(1), not yet untwained(2)
      Though as per that POSIX doc,
      The two should look about the same.
      ---
      0. Not accurate.
      1. Hay, cows like it grassy!
      2. Naive misconception that there is a difference.

</comment><comment><USER29> Clicked thru expecting it to be about "The Mending Wall" [http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost- mending.html](http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html)

"Good fences make good neighbors." is often misused to mean the opposite of what it does in that poem.

...at least I guessed the poet correctly.

<comment><USER30> But Frost didn't invent that phrase. I hadn't read the poem since school, so I didn't consider it before. But looking at it again now I notice that the phrase is presented in an ironic way. So I turned to the power of the internet and found that, indeed, "good fences make good neighbors" predates "The Mending Wall" by about 30 years.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=zAgTAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22good%20...](https://books.google.com/books?id=zAgTAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22good%20fences%20make%20good%20neighbors%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=%22good%20fences%20make%20good%20neighbors%22&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My wife -- who has taught poetry at the college level as well as writing a whole lot of popular novels -- reminds me from time to time of the "intentional fallacy". What she means by that -- I think :) -- is that the author isn't the sole determinant of a work's meaning.

So (while she's unavailable to be asked at the moment) I'm pretty sure she'd agree that the poem is about both the things it's often claimed to be about. Indeed, some of the works she and I both admire the most are ones that work on several levels at once.

<comment><USER32> That's precisely what the author of the article determines by quoting from private correspondence from the poem's author:

> "I'll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit > by my Road Not Taken," he wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Distantly related, _The Road Not Taken_ is also an excellent short story by Harry Turtledove that the HN crowd would probably appreciate: [http://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf](http://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf)

<comment><USER34> That's my favorite Turtledove story.

He also wrote a sequel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Similarly lost in meaning is Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" which is a beautiful poem, but many people don't see the suicidal undertone. I've had it memorized for years and only just learned about this.

<comment><USER36> I just reread it and don't detect that undertone. Could you explain it?

<comment><USER35> Like all literature, it is easy to draw different meanings from the same words, but most of the suicidal undertone is simply in the last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

The narrator has been traveling far to fulfill the promises he made to others. He's looking at the lovely, dark, deep woods and thinking how peaceful they are. The woods are a metaphor for death, which is dark and lovely because you don't have to worry about life's hardships. The miles are not distance, but a metaphor for time. The narrator decides he has to continue on, because he cannot sleep/die before fulfilling his promises to those he made them to.

Frost was an amazing writer whose poems beautifully described rural settings. But I think because of his brilliance, it is likely that his poems had deeper meaning than their face-value imagery. But it's also possible that they were one-dimensional, I just doubt it.

<comment><USER36> That's a very interesting explanation. It's much clearer now, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fantastic. It's not about tredding your own path. It's about how we embellish our own pasts. I didn't know.

<comment><USER38> A good insight. The key is the middle line " _Though as for that the passing [travelers] there / Had worn them really about the same_". Yes, he chose the path less travelled, and the poem itself is remembered for extolling the choice of the less travelled path - but that path was not barely used as we all tend to recall the poem's point (and the author's future listeners interpret), but instead was quite nearly the same and chosen only because it hadn't been trampled quite as badly as the marginally more popular alternative.

<comment><USER26> this is exactly the misreading!!

The paths were the same. He is saying that far in the future he will look back and say that whatever path he took was less travelled, whereas in reality it wasn't.

<comment><USER38> " _Then took the other, as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear_"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Also presented here by John Green - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snQvRZ2vDHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snQvRZ2vDHE)

</comment><comment><USER40> I may be ignorant, but I find weird that this is reported as the most famous poem of the 20th century in America, and possibly the world. In fact, I had never heard about it at all.

Honest question: is it that well-known? I don't think in Italy it is all that common. Or again, it may be just me...

<comment><USER41> It's well known in America, but I think in the UK something like "If" (Rudyard Kipling) might be better (equally?) known. Or perhaps something from Shakespeare ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")

What about Italy? What's the most famous poem everyone knows of there?

<comment><USER40> I guess that apart from the "Divina Commedia", it could be "L'infinito" by Giacomo Leopardi. But "If" is pretty well-known, as well as many things by Shakespeare

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's already been well explained in Orange is new black. Here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAkYlhhFvbk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAkYlhhFvbk)

</comment><comment><USER43> Frost's duplicity (sometimes triplicity, maybe more) is part of his charm. Yet if there were not also insight and beauty, I think the charm--the mere pleasure in being as clever as the speaker (if not as clever as the poet)--would wear thin.

I truly love Frost, but I love even more Gerard M Hopkins. One gets the feeling Hopkins resorts to dense layers of images not to share a joke with the sufficiently-clever reader, but in desperate earnestness to show what can't be said in prose. "Look--look! See this beautiful/terrible/mysterious thing!"

</comment><comment><USER44> If you have only the poem, the common interpretation is perfectly reasonable. Frost said the poem was "tricky", which is a clue from the poet that the common interpretation could be wrong. But what gives the poem meaning? Are you allowed to interpret it yourself? Or does the poet's obscured intent trump that?

In Blade Runner, Is Deckard really a Replicant just because Ridley Scott said so later? There's a few clues in various cuts of the film, but nothing is a slam dunk.

<comment><USER45> If you are careful, and parse the whole poem instead skilling the parts with especially nonstandard grammar, you see the inconsistency between the path- walkers thinking and the narrator's thinking and the "ages hence" perspective. You have to reconcile those inconsistencies when reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It seems to me that the poem is more about regret than the stories we tell ourselves about our lives to make us feel better about the randomness of the universe. The poet desperately wants to know what would've happened (if anything) on the other side of the 'difference' but can never know.

<comment><USER47> Since becoming reacquainted with the poem a couple of decades on from 8th grade English, I've read it as regret at the way age reduces your choices. That comes from interpreting the fall woods as being the autumn of the narrator's life, and focusing on

         "Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
         I doubted if I should ever come back."

That is, when you're young, you can choose one path and presume you can come back and take the other path sometime; you've got lots of time. When you're getting old, a lot of choices are more or less the only shot you will get; you cannot count on having the time to come back and try the other path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The NZ ad mentioned: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wwXfAFQoh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wwXfAFQoh8) (NZ isn't a large country: those roads probably ran to the same town anyway).

</comment><comment><USER49> I like to think that Roland Barthes would have loved to use "The Road Not Taken" in his piece "Death of the Author"[0]. Truly, at a scale that's frankly staggering, agency has been given to the reader—though one could also argue that the clipped version of the poem often remembered is a case of remixing and rewriting and that the agency isn't merely passive interpretation but a very active creative endeavor.

0: [http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes)

</comment><comment><USER50> Ok, a honest question here. And English is my second language, so maybe this is why, but this middle part sounds like compleat nonsense to me. Is it just me and I don't know how to read poems? Is it how people used to talk back in the day?

> And both that morning equally lay > In leaves no step had trodden black. > > Oh, I kept the first for another day! > Yet knowing how way leads on to way, > > I doubted if I should ever come back.

I think I can understand the rest of the poem pretty well, but that 3rd stanza just sounds like random words just tossed together. No? Maybe I just don't get poems.

<comment><USER45> English poetry alters word choice and order in order fit the pronunciation into patterns of rhythm and rhyme, and to convey emotion by putting certain words together or apart. It is nearly ungrammatical, or you could say that each poem has its own nonstandard grammar.

Here is what it means:

On that morning there were two essentially similar paths, not walked on so much-- none of the fallen leaves were crushed into dirt. I decided to leave the first path, and walk on it another day. Yet knowing how one path leads on to another, I doubted that I would ever return to this place and have a chance (to walk on that first path)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> ITT: many well-spoken comments reflecting how different personality types (or if you prefer, ways of thinking, or, viewing or understanding the world...) have very different relationships to poetry.

No such codification is perfect, but I find the Meyers-Briggs binning a useful shorthand for understanding how different colleagues relate to the world (and respond in different ways to different kinds of problem, management strategy, social environment, etc...)...

...and in this thread there are comments which would make me bin people immediately. :)

(There are no good or bad bins; just differences.)

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm particular struck by the part

"...long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;"

It reminds me of my over-analysis in developing software. Sometimes, I over think things, try to predict the outcomes of things, spend lots and lots of time considering what's behind the 'bend': what's the perfect solution. Analysis paralysis.

But, at a certain point, the analysis gives way to intuition. I choose the path that 'feels' best, knowing that many different paths could have been just as right.

<comment><USER26> ...and five years later we justify to our peers "yes NodeJS was the right choice after all!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In a different category, the "most too-literally-applied" poem in American administration, however, is Emily Dickinson's _Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--_.

<comment><USER53> I love that poem. And Dickinson. This case reminds me of Plato's Allegory of the cave. Beyond that - the quick transition from Truth to 'success'. And the telling of fairy tales to kids to make the lightning less scary.

Wonderful monad of a poem.

And there are great images of angles in her works.

``` There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes – ```

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'd like to think that those who appropriate the poem for car commercials and such and fully aware of the poem's meaning, but are exercising a subversive irony.

</comment><comment><USER55> YES. I love the fact that someone has written about this.

I remember reading the full poem in high school and we were like, "That's... not the poem I thought it was."

<comment><USER56> And it's a much better poem because of that!

<comment><USER57> Is it? I much prefer the interpretation about rugged individualism. It's not surprising to me that that's the interpretation that caught on in America.

This other interpretation seems so cynical. "Yeah, choices in life don't really matter because you always end up at the same place, but I tell people I picked the less obvious choice anyways!"

Sometimes it's actually good to believe in something, you know?

<comment><USER58> Even believing in a lie?

Not saying our choices don't matter, but we often attribute too much of our own success to our choices, and not our circumstance. Gives off a distorted view of reality. Coming to terms with the truth would be easier.

<comment><USER57> I'm not convinced that believing in something false is always bad. For example, there's a concept in psychology called an "internal locus of control", which basically means believing that you have control over aspects of your life. It turns out that having an internal locus of control is very negatively correlated with depression, so it might be that holding these beliefs actually help people's mental states. Another example would be people turning to religious beliefs to cope with tragedy.

Anyways, I'd like to believe that the belief isn't false. I do believe we do exert some substantial control over our own destinies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> American nihilism is so often mistaken for something else

<comment><USER53> Interesting - but too cryptic - point. The article mentions a scholar, Richard Poirier, who was at Rutgers when I was a lit student there. I vaguely remember lectures on "Emerson as the American Nietzsche", etc but that was a lifetime ago.

American nihilism is terrifying. Philip Dick has created indelible images of it. Minority Report and also a book which was recently made into a series for Netflix a "what if the Nazis won WWII" story.

I remember growing up and having a hugely idealistic idea of the 60s. I saw MLK, Bob Dylan, etc as these incorruptible, anti-commercial fonts of wisdom. And in my lifetime they are used to sell khakis and Chryslers.

This poem fits into that narrative. Everything is ultimately for sale - <USER2> is American nihilism?

Leonard Cohen gets at something in the poem/song "Democracy" describing America as the cradle of the best and of the worst. The same engine that powers innovation and imaginative leaps also fuels the intolerance and wackiness so visible in our political process.

The poem in question says in short - you can choose any path; just come up with the good story and an advert slogan to explain it later.

American nihilism?

<comment><USER59> Sorry that was kind of cryptic and vague. I meant that the poem talks about two things that are more or less the same, and then championing the more-or- less equal path you chose to take as some great defining decision. To me American nihilism is the championing of non decisions. Taking pride in your political party, car brand, part of the country you live in, etc. Americans tend to see meaning in the meaningless, morality in being content, identity in pre-selected choices, and they do it with a smile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> We spent a week discussing the possible meanings in college. And each was as valid as any other interpretation, this one was mentioned, but it was clear that none were more valid than any other. You can't get a poem wrong, just like you can't interpret a painting wrong. And artist will be inspired to create, but what that means to the observer, is personal between them, and the work.

</comment><comment><USER61> Why should I believe David Orr? His argument is slim and I disagree with his conclusion. I read the poem again after reading Orr's article and it has the same meaning as it always has for me: go your own way and it will make all the difference. We will never know Frost's true intentions and, frankly, it doesn't matter. The words are the words regardless of what he intended.

<comment><USER62> You can know Frost's intentions by reading the letters he wrote to his colleagues about the poem. He makes his deception clear there. This was alluded to in the article and you can go read the source material yourself if you're not satisfied.

You are really making a statement about yourself and not about the poem. You want to read it a certain way, and intend to keep reading it that way, because that's the way you've always read it. The "words are the words" sentiment says nothing about the words, but rather how you read them.

The sort of traditionalism you're expressing fascinates me, as the psychological phenomenon appears to me to underpin things like climate denial- ism, anti-vaxxing and religious fundamentalism.

At the very core, I suspect, is a tendency to be defensive about our limitations. To apply enough critical analysis to the poem to divine Frost's true intent, to become informed enough about science to accept the basics of climate change, it takes a lot of time and effort, yet we treat people who can't / refuse / just don't have the time to do these things as if they're stupid.

So they retreat into defensive positions, that the evidence is suspect, why believe Orr, I / we had a way to interpret the poem / organize society so why should we change? Changing is cognitively expensive, just understanding that we need to change is the expensive part.

<comment><USER63> I'm reminded of an amusing incident Asimov wrote about. He came across a large class where the teacher was discussing the meaning of one of Asimov's works. Asimov slipped in and sat in the back, and then afterwards went up to the teacher, introduced himself, and said that the interpretation was interesting but in several parts it was not what he had meant at all. The teacher replied, "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?"

<comment><USER61> It's an important point, however. If the teacher had said "Asimov means X" the teacher would be wrong. But, if the teacher is saying that he interprets the words as X he is right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'll allow myself a semi-related tangent, just for the heck of it.

Another similar example of misunderstanding well-known lines from literature is Shakespeare's "Now is the winter of our discontent..", which everyone quotes meaning we are in dark times...

Except it is the opposite - "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this Son of York.." is the full line.

</comment><comment><USER65> This or that? I would bet: either way, one regret.

Until now, this thought will vet — a better look.

The past is done; the future not set.

Just keep on going, and watch your step.

</comment><comment><USER66> And here I am. At the end of a comment feed with many opinions about a poem everybody knows. Wondering if I should have known this poem before I read it today for the first time. Or if I could wave it away as just a USA thing. Written by USA who falsely claims everybody outside US also knows the poem. Pondering, which road did I take?

<comment><USER26> The more faithful comment would read:

And here I am at the beginning of a 278 comments thread where they are all alike. And although they do seem to be saying the same thing, it appears they get the same amount of upvotes. Anyhow, when I'm finished, I will give a sigh and say I, I read and spent my attention better because the other unread comment was not read by me and that made all the difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The whole argument of the article establishes a false dichotomy. While I'm sure there are some people who can play the role both of the sheep and the literary insiders (as in the author's description), I'm sure most people, like the author, fall somewhere in the middle with their interpretation.

<comment><USER26> Well, (as seen in a few comments in this thread) the idea of the individualist ploughing their own way is strong - and the misreading fits in really well with it. I certainly used to follow this also. So I would get the idea from the poem via pop culture or an idle hearing in an advert, and that would stay with me. I wouldn't read it with the same attention as a literary person of course. Perhaps thats the false dichotomy?

I now have more delight knowing that it is a commentary about how, when dealing with a change, we can look into the future and see ourselves justifying our actions regardless of which action we take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> It is like they started the essay before they knew they could actually come to a coherent point.

</comment><comment><USER53> Tangentially saw this in Quanta magazine. [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150903-the-road-less- travel...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150903-the-road-less-traveled/)

</comment><comment><USER69> looks like the annotations on genius have this interpretation as well: [http://genius.com/46404](http://genius.com/46404)

</comment><comment><USER70> If art has a downside, it may be in the fact that there is always some very smart person at hand to analyze it for you and explain why you don't understand it.

</comment><comment><USER71> Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one that was less popular on Google

That was not a smart move

(With apologies to Frost fans).

</comment><comment><USER72> I tend to love articles that tease a bit before revealing what they're about, but I found this one a bit overwrought.

tl;dr: it's about Frost's "The Road Not Taken" ( _Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference_).

This article, at its clearest, says:

> Certainly it's wrong to say that "The Road Not Taken" is a straightforward > and sentimental celebration of individualism: This interpretation is > contradicted by the poem's own lines.

However, the thrust of the whole article is better captured by its soggy, everybody-wins non-conclusion:

> The poem both is and isn't about individualism, and it both is and isn't > about rationalization. It isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing so much as a wolf > that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf

<comment><USER73> > I tend to love articles that tease a bit before revealing what they're about

Could you give me some insight about why you like this? It's one of my least favorite aspects of journalism. Most articles are bad, so don't you find that you waste more time sorting through chaff?

<comment><USER72> hmmm I can try.

Sometimes a bunch of drifting around, talking at length in detail about seemingly unrelated minutiae, and blatantly teasing the reader along can set a mood or an atmosphere. If it is done properly, it can convey more than what the words on the paper are explicitly saying, it just makes an impression.

An example that would maybe work for the HN crowd is this old essay about Earthbound [0], where the writer (Tim Rogers, translator) "reviews" the game by just going on long detours about fishing, being sick in bed, things that happen in other games, etc. As a huge fan of Earthbound, it just captures a lot of it for me.

An absolute master of this kinda thing was the well-known rock record critic Lester Bangs (who, again, may be vaguely known to some; Philip S. Hoffman played him in "Almost Famous"). His rock album reviews are barely recognizable as such by the "8/10 graphics, 6/10 sound" crowd. He just goes on and on about completely esoteric topics, from politics and his life philosophy and little vignettes about his personal life, and occasionally relates it back to the record. I don't know why, but I dig it. I've read "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung", an essay compendium, a couple of times.

I don't know if I'd want something like that if I was writing an essay for university, or trying to decide which laptop to buy, but it can occasionally be a very nice piece of journalism.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20100102165201/http://www.largep...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100102165201/http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=mother2) (ps: it opens up with a really weird line about games being like prostitutes, which I think feels stupid and dated, but it gets better after that)

<comment><USER74> Thanks for that description, it helps me appreciate the practice more. The success of that technique entirely depends on the talent of the writer, apparently, because I've come across a few too many "long form" articles after "longform" became an internet buzzword, and where the writing just seems to alternate between the topic and an unrelated topic in almost an algorithmic fashion, before they are weakly tied together.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Logo designer - <AUTHOR> http://logo.thatsaspicymeatball.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks buddy, but $500 is a bit too much for me. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like how the Paypal link actually works.</comment>


Windows code-execution zeroday is under active exploit, Microsoft warns - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/attackers-exploit-windows-zeroday-that-can-execute-malicious-code/ <comment><USER2> Some additional points from [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/new-remote-code- execution-win...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/new-remote-code-execution- windows-zero-days-actively-exploited-539730)

* Attackers can exploit the vulnerability by embedding the Type 1 fonts into documents and convincing users to open them

* The vulnerabilities lies in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library ATMFD.DLL

* disabling the Windows WebClient service blocks what Microsoft says is the most likely remote attack vector, through the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) client service.

* local, authenticated users can run malicous programs that can exploit the vulnerability (I presume this is a privilege escalation).

<comment><USER3> or you can link to the actual MSFT advisory instead of all these articles rewording the same thing: [https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security- guidance/ad...](https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security- guidance/advisory/ADV200006)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ATMFD strikes again, and undoubtedly not for the last time.

More info on the history of ATMFD (and some previous vulnerabilities): [https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-font- vuln...](https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-font- vulnerability-to-rule-them-all.html)

<comment><USER5> Is there no way to simply remove this DLL or is it too widely used in core Windows?

<comment><USER6> This is part of the huge and unending clusterfuck of vulnerabilities that people find in the Windows graphics stack, which was wisely moved to kernel space early on in NT's life, which makes all these vulnerabilities much more critical than they would be otherwise.

<comment><USER7> Graphics hasn't been kernel mode since the Vista days FYI. It's now in userspace.

<comment><USER8> It was moved out in Vista with great fanfare. A side effect was GDI was no longer hardware accelerated. With windows 7 and later hardware acceleration was added back necessitating parts of it return to the kernel. For obvious reasons this wasn't as widely publicized.

This makes exploits like this possible: [https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/abusing-gdi-objects-for- ring...](https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/abusing-gdi-objects-for- ring0-primitives-revolution/)

<comment><USER9> I seem to recall having a discussion with you a while back where Windows would just leave kernel pointers out in userspace, which seemed to do with GDI as well.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I think we debated the whole concept of GDI being in the kernel as well.

The Vista experience shows you it was and still is necessary for perf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Elsewhere the advisory said: "For systems running supported versions of > Windows 10 a successful attack could only result in code execution within an > AppContainer sandbox context with limited privileges and capabilities."

[https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security- guidance/ad...](https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security- guidance/advisory/adv200006#ID0EMGAC) :

Windows 10 1709+ All fonts are processed in fontdrvhost.exe in user mode appcontainer. ATMFD.DLL status: Not present

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always wondered why fonts are rendered programmatically...

Usually, font renderers are Turing complete in some way, and usually this opens up security concerns, and rightfully so...

One of the primary reasons why fonts are rendered programmatically is because there's a theoretically infinite set of sizes/styles that might be required...

Well... why not make fonts with glyphs that are say, 5000 x 5000 pixels... and then instead of rendering for a particular size, line by line, stroke by stroke, curve by curve, why not instead use an interpolation algorithm to shrink that 5000 x 5000 pixel glyph to the exact size you want?

If a font provider program were made to operate that way, then all that would be needed to audit the program for security - would be to audit the shrinking/interpolation algorithm -- which could be as simple as possible (it's just a function which shrinks a bitmap of size A to another bitmap of size B... not a Turing machine which ingests other programs...)

Yes, fonts would consume much more memory (I suppose they could be compressed), but doing things that way might make font-providing programs more secure. And yes, you'd need to provide extra glyphs for italic, bold, bold italic, etc. (much more memory), but you'd be making a trade-off for a simple, security auditable font-provider... (we assume it's open-source...)

<comment><USER11> A bunch of interesting comments, to be sure.

All I know is, the fonts (in ROM) in the original IBM-PC, or the Apple ][, or the C-64, or the Atari 800, or any other of the 64K computers of the 1980's -- _never had a security issue with their (ROM bitmap) fonts_.

That, and:

 _I challenge all of the naysayers to come up with a better solution than the one I have proposed_...

Not all font-renderer/language experts, here, are we?

Neither am I.

That's the whole point.

A graphical shrink routine I can easily audit for security holes.

A font description language (an entire _language_ mind you!) with lots of nuances -- how is any normal human being (much less rockstar programmer) supposed to audit one of those, with all of its possibilities, for security holes, in a single human lifetime?

We've seen some _very subtle_ manipulation of these (evinced by this article), whether intentional or not...

A simple graphical shrink routine -- is orders of magnitudes more transparent and auditable than font description languages, or their interpreters...

You want a better solution?

Come up with one and tell me what it is!

I'm listening...

<comment><USER11> Actually, I'll come up with a better option... don't render any fonts locally... instead, get them when/as you need them as precisely sized bitmaps, from a font server, somewhere else on the Internet...

Now the security for the font server becomes the problem of the server its running on, not your local PC... and while the font server runs the risk of compromise, you, by only using pre-rendered bitmaps, should ideally not...

Of course, the drawback to this approach is, what if you want to work offline and have not downloaded the necessary fonts?

<comment> core-questions > Actually, I'll come up with a better option... don't render any fonts > locally... instead, get them when/as you need them as precisely sized > bitmaps, from a font server, somewhere else on the Internet...

This sounds like:

\- a latency nightmare \- a performance nightmare \- a privacy nightmare

> Of course, the drawback to this approach is, what if you want to work > offline and have not downloaded the necessary fonts?

I'm calling Poe's Law on you, friend

<comment><USER11> A latency and performance nightmare... yes, quite possibly.

A privacy nightmare? I don't see how (unless you had to register on the font- serving machine and it tracked fonts downloaded -- but is that really privacy invading?)

Yes, there would be trade-offs (didn't I say that a couple of times?), but such is the price potentially paid for font renderer security...

That is -- get rid of the font renderer software component...

Hey, one other idea, while I'm at it... run the font renderer in a virtual machine... that could possibly work too... although given that virtual machines have the same issues with complexity and security bugs, I'm sort of 50/50 about that...

Another idea: You could have a completely sandboxed language VM -- (e.g., JVM), and if that language VM is provably secure -- run the font renderer code on it...

But again, we've seen JVM security bugs so...

I'm going to have to go with either "shrink a big bitmap" or "put the font renderer on an entirely different server and serve exact-sized bitmaps" ideas...

Or... use a 64K computer from the 1980's where the glyphs are in ROM... <g>

<comment><USER12> Yes, font downloading is privacy invading - You can make a "totally unique" font like "timesoldroman-adfssdg" and then track everyone who's downloaded it, for each webpage you want to track. It's just like any other tracking cookie, except a font.

<comment><USER11> Didn't think about that, but yes, that makes sense...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 2 points:

1 - article has wrong info. Under Windows 10 the name is ATMLIB.DLL. ATMFD.DLL is the name for older version of Windows

2 - rename it. Here is the script to be used under an elevated command prompt (change name accordingly if Win10):

cd "%windir%\system32"

takeown.exe /f atmfd.dll

icacls.exe atmfd.dll /save atmfd.dll.acl

icacls.exe atmfd.dll /grant Administrators:(F)

rename atmfd.dll x-atmfd.dll

cd "%windir%\syswow64"

takeown.exe /f atmfd.dll

icacls.exe atmfd.dll /save atmfd.dll.acl

icacls.exe atmfd.dll /grant Administrators:(F)

rename atmfd.dll x-atmfd.dll

<comment><USER14> Please keep in mind that you need to localize 'Administrators' to make this work on non english systems. When deploying this, it would be better to replace the name with the groups sid. I am on mobile right now but some fellow hacker can surely provide them.

<comment><USER15> Looking up your local Administrator name:

wmic path win32_group where (LocalAccount=true AND SID="S-1-5-32-544") get Name

edit: that's just the name of the local Administrators group, here's how to get the Admin-accountname:

wmic useraccount where (domain='localhostname' and sid like 'S-1-5-21-%%-500') get sid /value

wmic useraccount where (domain='localhostname' and sid='sidfromfirstcommandhere') get name /value

<comment><USER16> Hmmmm,

That will just return the name of the built-in Administrators account. If you wanted to find all user accounts in the administrators group you could do:

powershell -c "$([ADSI]'WinNT://YOUR_MACHINE_NAME/Administrators,group').psbase.Invoke('Members') | foreach { $_.GetType().InvokeMember('ADspath', 'GetProperty', $null, $_, $null)}"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When has someone ever thought there wasn't a Windows zeroday under active exploit?

<comment><USER18> No one. They are adding emphasis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why should a kernel even have the slightest idea what a font is? this is absurd

<comment><USER20> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28532190/why-does- window...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28532190/why-does-windows- handle-scrollbars-in-kernel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > For systems running supported versions of Windows 10 a successful attack > could only result in code execution within an AppContainer sandbox context > with limited privileges and capabilities.

Which is still not good but not as bad as it could be.

<comment><USER9> Isn't this code running in Windows Explorer? That sounds like it could potentially be pretty bad.

<comment><USER22> Explorer doesn't render arbitrary user selected fonts and Segoe UI is not a PostScript font, so I don't think Explorer itself uses this component at all? (A lot of Windows should be using DirectWrite now? I don't think DirectWrite uses this component either?)

Also, the way this is written is sounds like system isolates this DLL into its own AppContainer separate from specific apps that use/rely on it (and I guess remote to it)?

<comment><USER22> I found answers to some of my questions on my own:

\- The AppContainers thing sounds like it directly refers to the Panes in Explorer referenced, and it sounds like it is Explorer creating the sandboxes, so they wouldn't bubble out of the Pane, so it probably is correct that versions of Windows 10 doing that don't have a lot to worry about that as an exploit vector. That probably doesn't apply to other possible vectors such as evil PDFs/Word Documents, though those generally have warnings for PostScript fonts at this point. (I glossed over the Panes as the concern for the idea it might be running in the Explorer process. Their an "extension point", so Explorer moving them into sandboxes sound like exactly what it should have done, and not surprising is what it is doing.)

\- DirectWrite is considered to have parts forked, but entirely independent, from ATMFD. Some CVEs have been caught that also impacted (lightly) DirectWrite, but this doesn't sound like one.

<comment><USER23> AppContainers have nothing to do with panes, see here: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/win32/secauthz/appc...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/win32/secauthz/appcontainer-isolation)

It's a sandboxing method, and atmfd was moved into a sandbox to reduce the risk of people exploiting bugs in it. At this point it is clear that sandboxing it was worth the effort.

<comment><USER22> Fair, that link points out the Kernel hosts some sandboxes directly. I had assumed they mostly had to be opt-in at the application level (opt-out in the case of the UWP platform), given the name, and those Panes are open third- party extension points and it does seem like sandboxes should apply to anything running in them as well, so it seems a fair assumption to believe that is where they were applied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The second workaround—disabling the WebClient service—blocks the vector > attackers would most likely use to wage remote exploits. Even with this > measure in place, it's still possible for remote attackers to run programs > located on the targeted user's computer or local network. Still, the > workaround will cause users to be prompted for confirmation before opening > arbitrary programs from the Internet.

... why doesn't WebClient also prompt users before opening programs via things from the internet then?

It basically makes anything that calls an internet service in authenticated apps, like Windows Explorer's image preview pane, a vector for loading arbitrary programs without warning.

Am I missing something here? Some way this would be really annoying or pointless?

I know Android never bit the bullet with making _any_ internet access require a privacy confirmation, which I'm guessing might be overwhelming to the average user. But I still think it should be an option, like an opt-in Little Snitch for network access that includes embedded webkits.

</comment><comment><USER25> The larger your kernel the bigger the chance that it will get hacked. This stuff should have never been in the kernel in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER26> "For systems running supported versions of Windows 10 a successful attack could only result in code execution within an AppContainer sandbox context with limited privileges and capabilities."

<comment><USER27> Anyone running around actively exploiting a zero-day Windows font parsing exploit likely also has a sandbox escape exploit too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> No patch available but one of the recommended mitigations is to:

      Rename ATMFD.DLL

would it be possible to have a patch that renames this file for me, if that is indeed a desirable and workable solution.

<comment><USER29> In the meantime:

        Right-click C:\Windows\System32\atmfd.dll
        Properties | Security | Advanced | Owner, take ownership.
        Close dialogs, go back in and give yourself Full Control.

Now you can rename the file.

<comment><USER30> Would renaming cause issues with Office 2016, perchance?

<comment><USER29> Haven't encountered any definitive ones yet.

I renamed it, then used Outlook 2016 successfully for days (mostly Outlook, Word and some Excel). After a reboot, I did get an error code 0x426-0x0 trying to start office apps, but I'm pretty sure that was just due to disabling the Click-To-Run service a long time ago and (possibly) having gotten new updates pushed to me during the reboot.

I did an SFC /SCANNOW which restored the original atmfd.dll, and I immediately deleted it.

If you bump into any OpenType fonts it might be a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> MS should consider including the freetype library instead of Adobe's type manager

<comment><USER32> Someone posted this comment in the arstechnica article:

 _To be clear and despite its name, this is not Adobe code. Microsoft was given the source code for ATM Light for inclusion in Windows 2000 /XP. After that, Microsoft took 100% responsibility for maintaining the code._

 _Microsoft has added additional code and removed code from that DLL (they shove all their Type 1 handling and Open Type font format handling into that one DLL)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It says Adobe... So there is a component from Adobe in the core windows? Or does the DLL come with a PDF reader installation?

<comment><USER34> It's needed for displaying Postscript Type 1 fonts. I believe Adobe owns the licensing for everything but it's up to Microsoft to update the Windows 10 DLL.

<comment><USER35> Then they (Microsoft) should deliver an update that disables this functionality, within the the next three hours.

Then re-enable it when the fix is in.

<comment><USER36> I demand to speak to Adobe's manager!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I really wish (hope) that Microsoft is working on a brand new OS with a VM like thing for running legacy stuff (like Apple did with OS9 to OSX)

They really do need to start over from scratch, get rid of all the cruft, design the APIs not to suck, design in security, permissions, and sandboxing from the beginning. Make root kits and other spyware much harder. Get rid of installation scripts (more like iOS/Android/Some Mac app) and a million other things.

I don't hate windows but I hate that every app I install including every game on steam or the oculus store or humble bundle can basically own my machine.

<comment><USER38> > They really do need to start over from scratch, get rid of all the cruft, > design the APIs not to suck, design in security, permissions, and sandboxing > from the beginning.

Security model is still better than what POSIX provides. As for sandboxing: "For systems running supported versions of Windows 10 a successful attack could only result in code execution within an AppContainer sandbox context with limited privileges and capabilities." From [https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security- guidance/ad...](https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security- guidance/advisory/adv200006#ID0EMGAC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Could web fonts (CSS font-face) allow exploitation by merely visiting a browser page?

</comment><comment><USER40> It is a good time for exploit (even the ones that can be patched) as people work from home and can't access enterprise WSUS servers to fetch updates

</comment><comment><USER41> Where is ATMFD.DLL ?

I am not seeing that in c:\windows\system32\ATMFD.DLL in multiple different windows10 machines I've checked.

<comment><USER13> this is a mistake in article. atmfd.dll is for older version of windows. Windows 10 has it under name of ATMLIB.DLL.

Search for that one instead and rename it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So does this mean that Windows 7 will forever be stuck with an easily(?) exploitable font engine vulnerability?

<comment><USER43> That's what end of life generally means. Look at what happened to XP...

<comment><USER44> They fixed dangerous exploit in XP after EOL. I think that they'll fix this exploit as well, unless it's not very dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> von Neumann saw that code is data. Now what? We like the power of computation too much to give it up, and yet cannot avoid the pitfalls of complex interpreters. Compartmentalize though we may, control is not easy to tame.

</comment><comment><USER46> What is a good way to keep up with active vulnerabilities and zero-days?

<comment><USER47> Requires a Microsoft account but I subscribe to their email lists.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/technical-security- noti...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/technical-security- notifications)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Again?

</comment><comment><USER49> Thanks Microsoft!!

</comment><comment><USER50> Win10 is supposed to be evergreen, aggressively auto-updating, etc. so how come there are years old versions around!?

(Win10 1703+ is already not using this DLL, that came out years ago.)

<comment><USER43> Because idiots do everything they possibly can to stop their os updating

<comment><USER51> When you have an OS that updates out from under you, takes 45 minutes to shutdown or start up, shuts down without your control etc. it's no wonder people want more control over their updates.

<comment><USER43> Not to be callous, but if your computer takes 45 minutes to restart you need to reinstall Windows because there's clearly something wrong with it.

<comment><USER51> It takes 45 minutes to shutdown or start up when updates are being installed and at least on windows 7, you wouldn't even know it was going to happen.

<comment><USER43> In my experience of running windows 10 on a 7 year old laptop, you get a persistent status icon telling you updates are available. If you ignore that for a week you start getting intrusive notifications saying "your computer needs to restart, do it now?" and if you put that off for a few days you start getting a popup with the options "restart now?" and "ask me in 10 minutes".

If you put that off for long enough, it will restart the next time you close the lid.

I cannot imagine anyone going through all that and then going "wow I wasn't expecting an update!"

On top of that, it generally takes 5-10 minutes tops to actually do the update, more usually it's a standard restart that takes like 30s.

the only "45 minute" update I've had was one of the big service pack updates and that was opt-in with an up front warning.

<comment><USER51> These are pretty common complaints, servers, signs and many people get updates forced on them. Windows 10 was forced on many, many people. Just because you don't care doesn't mean lots of people haven't been burned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is there a search and destroy program that can 100 percent remove anything with even a hint of adobe code? Windows should banish adobe PDF from being utilized in the is and actively treat it as a virus.

If it's zero day on Windows it is pretty much a guarantee that adobe or Oracle was involved

</comment><comment><USER53> > The security flaw exists in the Adobe...

Imagine my surprise. Geez maybe it's not the best idea to allow Adobe to entirely run the font game?

Source: worked at Adobe years ago

<comment><USER54> I imagine you're getting downvotes because of your _smug_ hyperbole, but in essence, I wouldn't deny that that is a legit question (not the entire fontgame, I guess, but a core part of it anyway).

It's also one of the reasons to reduce use of proprietary software to a minimum. Especially, if it's a core component of the system. Flatline, it's an increased security risk you can't verify.

On a serious note: Are there legit reasons to have it being a core component?

<comment><USER53> Yea... worked at Adobe. It's not smug hyperbole. That company doesn't have any sort of culture of responsible coding.

Without question one of the worst companies to be put in charge of anything important anywhere.

That's all I'll say about Adobe. Dark times, glad I moved on.</comment></comment></comment>


With Drawl - <AUTHOR> http://bittersoutherner.com/with-drawl <comment><USER2> Wow, these videos sound like home. Born and raised in Kentucky and I lost a bit of my accent moving to 'the city' for college but it's amazing how strongly it comes back when I call family. Now that I'm in California, people seem to find it entertaining for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER3> Call centers for a while were teaching agents to talk with a southern accent as it was believed to be more welcoming.

</comment><comment><USER4> To me, a drawl sounds like home and kindness.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you support the United States' disengagement from ICANN? - <AUTHOR> On October 1st, certain antitrust exemptions granted to ICANN under the US Department of Commerce will expire.  Subsequently, ICANN will no longer be legally able to administer the root zone while under US jurisdiction, and will seek stewardship under a different government entity willing to provide similar exemptions.
Do you support or oppose this change?
The formal proposal: https://www.ianacg.org/icg-files/documents/IANA-transition-proposal-final.pdf <comment><USER2> Do I trust the US? Sadly, no, I don't, not any more.

Do I trust somebody like the UN? _Absolutely not._ Do I trust a "Global Multistakeholder Community" to not become the UN? No.

So the US running ICANN seems to me to be likely to end up less badly than having somebody multinational run it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole rationale behind it is [0] to thwart attempts at creating a U.N.-run IANA or countries creating their own IANAs. Most seem to believe that governments or government-influenced entities won't really gain any significant, disconcerting powers. If so - is it reasonable to believe that in the long term it will have the desired political result?

I don't feel like I fully understand what's going to happen. So I'd definitely feel more assured if we went for a probationary period as suggested here [https://www.lawfareblog.com/icann-and-iana-transition- procee...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/icann-and-iana-transition-proceed- caution)

[0] is it?

</comment><comment><USER4> <canuck> Definitely, who wouldn't? </canuck></comment>


Failed startup to a trending open-source project: A one year followup - <AUTHOR> https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot/ <comment><AUTHOR> Chatwoot is an open-source omni-channel customer support solution. Today marks a year since the initial commit for Chatwoot's resurrection as an open-source project. It has been an amazing journey after we open-sourced the code base and the success in HackerNews([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139)). Thanks to the community.</comment>