Mark Zuckerberg is either lying, incompetent,or an inept CEO. What do you think? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/mark-zuckerberg-is-either-lying-incompetent-or-an-inept-ceo-what-do-you-think-abb790c2c110 <comment><USER2> There's a strong bias against Zuckerberg and Facebook around here so I expect that my comment will down-vote into negative territory, yet this won't stop me from expressing my opinion.

Mark has transcended from hacker-programmer to entrepreneur and ultimately CEO of one of the world's largest, most successful tech-media companies. He's done so before turning 40 years old. The world is watching him testify for days on end with the most highly elected lawyer-politicians who don't understand his business, technology, nor policies. He's responding to aggressive lines of questioning to the best of his ability, with integrity, and yet in a way to protect his best interests. That is no simple feat.

Mark is showing the world that he's earned his position and is a real leader. His actions while testifying are commendable.

Those who continue to grind their axes will be left with nothing but a worn handle soon while Facebook and its social media empire will continue on, but hopefully changed for the better for society.

<comment><USER3> This is one way to put it, but another way would be clarifying that Facebook is a dark-pattern filled, dopamine-tuned, unethical, illegal, and sometimes wilfully criminal social network.

While this was back ages ago, Zuckerberg used failed logins from Facebook to hack into a reporter's email. Yes, Facebook captured plaintext passwords of failed logins, and Zuckerberg personally used them to hack a reporter's email account who was digging into FB.

[https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-mark-zuckerberg- hacke...](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into- the-harvard-crimson-2010-3)

The problem isn't scaling pains as you try to wrap. The problem IS Facebook, and almost everything about it.

Examples: Pledge 99% (for-profit, tax structuring), Internet.org (locking in of Facebook; closed intranet as 'internet'); anticompetitive actions against Snapchat through copying of stories; and the 999+ privacy scandals that have continuously plagued Facebook because it is the core business model.

For you to call Zuckerberg commendable, is almost an insult for every founder with a moral compass.

He is certainly competent, but "commendable" is the exact antonym of what I'd use to describe him.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for commenting. After reading your response, I added "his actions _while testifying_ " to be more clear, although I was speaking to them in the rest of my piece.

<comment><USER3> Ah, that is fair and I agree with you. His actions while testifying is what I'd call respectable, especially since the session is really just for show - partly for both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not even a serious question.

He is lying because he is a competent ceo. He has objectives in an hostile environnement for his business but knows it will pass and that as long as he holds, people will move and forget.

Lying is necessary if you want to keep doing something for your benefit that people would think you should not.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point. Bore them to death and watch it fizzle out

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> None of the above.

He wasn't likely lying as he was under oath, and his very competent lawyers would've advised him strongly against perjury.

He's obviously neither incompetent nor inept. He successfully navigated a Congressional sideshow and delivered the expectation that shareholders had, much to the chagrin of end users.

The only ones lying, incompetent and inept are us - those who continue to use Facebook fully knowing next to nothing has changed from the hearing. If you haven't already deleted Facebook, think hard

<comment><USER7> Have they finally implemented a delete account feature? I deactivated my account and deleted the app from my devices many years ago. But there was no delete account or "forget me" feature. Even if you get rid of fb you aren't really forgotten by fb

<comment><USER8> There is deactivate and delete option for years now.

Zuckerberg stated that they delete all of the data after user deletes their account (not deactivate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're surprised Zuckerberg didn't quite tell the full truth outside of oath or deferred the more controversial answers to a time his answers weren't livestreamed to millions around the world?

"My team will get back to you on that" can be replaced with "I'll tell you, but not live" because he knows social media will be burning like magnesium before he's even done with the next question

</comment><comment><USER10> 1\. Facebook have just come out with an entire release about what data is and is not tracked when you're not on their site[1].

2\. Armchair developers always throw out things like this: "A few if-else statements would remove most of them and would provide at least a temporary solution.". Sure, you could do a keyword search for "pills" and delete all of those ads. How many legitimate ads will you take down in the process? How many extra support requests will they have to deal with because of the change? How long until the spammers change the wording ever so slightly to defeat Facebook s naive workaround?

3\. Facebook doesn't directly give data to advertisers, that's what Zuckerberg was saying, and OP acknowledges as much. The fact that advertisers can infer data about users by using the system is a feature, not a bug. The very fact that you can do targeted advertising is of course going to leak some data about users to advertisers, it's not Zuckerberg's job to explicitly state that.

[1] [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/data-off- facebook/](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/data-off-facebook/)

<comment><USER11> 2\. Bollocks. A few if-else statements to flag the ads, then have humans approve/reject them. This could, and in fact is, done today (but not by facebook obviously).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> this writer who founded a social network is in no way biased in his article.

/s

<comment><USER13> Puts them in a good spot to call a lie, grey truth, or incompetence.

Still biased of them of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All of the above: lying, incompetent and inept.

</comment><comment><USER15> To my mind I think he's following in Bill Gates' foot steps.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think you are not looking for an open discussion

</comment><comment><USER17> "Either"...</comment>


How British universities spread misery around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9589072/how-british-universities-spread-misery-around-the-world/ <comment><USER2> bit of a biased rag? no?

". Naturally he was surrounded by leftist academics and apparently 'encountered Fabian thinking' in particular. "

<comment><USER3> Also, the bit about Nehru and India ignores the successes of the early Five Year Plans and the fact that the entire Indian business community supported the _mixed economy_ model.</comment></comment>


Observer (Node.js KO 2011) - Observe and learn from your visitors in real time - <AUTHOR> http://observer.no.de/

<comment><USER2> Seems to be way too slow to be useable right now. Did you get "knocked out"? ;)

My JS says

<script type="text/javascript" src="[http://observer.no.de/deploy/observer.js#{observer:undefined...](http://observer.no.de/deploy/observer.js#{observer:undefined}></script>);

Is 'undefined' correct? Seems wrong. :(

<comment><USER3> I'm currently experiencing some scalability issues as you might have noticed. The machine I deployed on is limited to 128mb. But Joyent is actively resolving it.

You can try going to <http://observer.no.de/sign-in> to sign in again and see if that resolves your issues.

If not just create a new account :p

<comment><USER2> logging in from a different browser made it work - the 'undefined' was there right after I'd created an account.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for the information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm. Sounds familiar: <http://observerapp.com/>

<comment><USER3> Yes I noticed that as well, but I found that the name observer really suited this service. But I'm still searching for alternate names to avoid potential confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice. You need to clean up the homepage blurb though and there are just a few spelling errors (changed sections are in italics):

Observer allows you to follow and _observe_ your website visitors in real time _. Ever_ wondered what they _were_ clicking on or how they are navigating on your website? _Then_ Observer is ideal for you, it's a 1 script installation and you are done.

<comment><USER3> Hey,

Thanks for pointing out my grammer mistakes. English isn't my native language so I was hoping that vim's build in spelling check would fix most of the issues.

I have corrected the spelling mistakes and they should appear online soon when the cache expires. (luckily I decided to build in a small mongodb driven cms during the contest so I could fix these silly mistakes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd freak out if that second example from the feature-list would happen to me while I was browsing some site. "Hello I see you are having issues finding the 'free account' button?" ... "are you spying on me?"

edit: ok, maybe not "freak out" but i'd certainly feel at unease. Specially if it was a site enabling some form of PIM/im/private-ish activity.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is really incredible. Im testing it out with my sites and this is groundbreaking. Expect great things V1, im almost speechless. I need a guy like you on my startup!!!

</comment><comment><USER8> I clicked around, but could not work the demo. Will try again later.

Also, just FYI: <http://www.clicktale.com>

</comment><comment><USER9> These is a great way to analyze site usability with real customers, I hope you plan to keep this alive after node.js KO?

<comment><USER3> Yes I plan to continue development of this application after the competition, there are still some rough edges that needs to be fixed. So I see this a great working prototype to iterate on.

I still have some amazing ideas planned :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess you're being "slashdotted", the site is very slow...

*bookmarking and i'll check on later, i'm curious.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, i really wanted to see this in action, but i guess your site is getting a lot of traffic at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really awesome idea! I cannot seem to click any of the links on my phone though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Really nice, gonna check this out</comment>


Diary of a WebObjects Developer (1998) - <AUTHOR> https://www.irt.org/articles/js100/ <comment><USER3> Dude was truly hardcore doing all these things: [https://www.irt.org/articles/js156/index1.htm](https://www.irt.org/articles/js156/index1.htm)

Fond memories and a reminder, how far we came. Access 97 as a database - <USER2> remember that this was the Gold Standard when I worked part time at Centfox.</comment>


Ask HN: Do start ups need finance people? - <AUTHOR>

So, I have this passion for programming (yes, I have my side project in flask), but I was wondering if my day job skills as a finance controller might also be helpful for start ups.
To be clear, I am not talking about accounting here, but rather more about modelling/understanding the company financials: budgeting, cost tracking against the plan, sales planning, margins, cash flow, account receivables, etc.
This is especially important if you get pushed on profitability or if you want to show a company in order to increase its acquisition value. Another example could be if you are considering giving up equity or getting a borrowing. Etc.
Do start ups do this? If they do, do you think they could benefit from external advice as hiring a person for that might just not be worth due to their size? <comment><USER2> That depends on your definition of "startup".

Before raising any money or selling something, there's little point in a finance person being involved. Startups should be concentrating on building a product and putting it in front of people, defining a strategy for putting it in the market somewhere and doing everything they can according to that strategy. NOTE: That's _not_ a business model. You can't really have a business model until you know who wants the product. You can guess at one, but that's pretty worthless in my opinion because you'll just throw it away once you get some market data.

Once you have a product and some knowledge of how it fits in the market though, then you can start doing financial projections and business modelling. That's when a financial advisor is very useful. Still not much point in hiring someone though because there isn't _that_ much to do and most startups can't afford the tools to do it. Advisors bring their own tools.

Then one of two things happens - investment or sales (or both). If there are sales after the product gets some traction, then a financial controller is a very good idea. The thing is though, then the company isn't really a startup. It's a "proper business". If the startup goes down the investment route though, then there's very little for a financial controller to do outside of the actual capital raising exercise - so they should still only be an advisor.

tl;dr There's not much value in a financial controller unless you have sales, at which point the business is beyond what I'd define as a startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have access to the kinds of modeling you're talking about through my part time CFO, but have nothing I would be able to do with that information at this stage.

For me, all that matters is burn rate and cash in the bank. The rest won't be relevant to me until I've got revenue as well as expenses.

For slightly larger startups, they will hire someone like you to assist in these tasks, but since you already do that as a day job I doubt that is what you have in mind.</comment>


8 sec voicemails on twitters - <AUTHOR> http://hackety.org/2008/04/23/yourEightSecondCallingCard.html <comment><USER2> Is there anything that Why The Lucky Stiff touches that doesn't turn to gold? He should surely be called the Midas of the Web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. He writes plenty of stuff that no one's even heard about or doesn't use. All in all, very few people use his stuff. He's a niche within a niche. Only people that play with language even know or care what he's up to.

That said, he has the mental playfulness to come up with interesting things.

<comment><USER2> Innovation in any niche could, ultimately, propel forward an entire branch of science. Few people used or heard of scientists or innovators who went on to break significant barriers. Let's hope Why is the same :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Making of a Corporate Athlete - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.peak4.nl/the_making.pdf&pli=1

<comment><USER2> The nutritional recommendations they make (don't skip breakfast, eat 6 times a day , 60% carbs diet) are complete bullshit if you are looking to have energy during the day.</comment>


How Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, Restricted Advertising for Trump's Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff#.6cjs8pcmm <comment><USER2> And cost the firm millions of dollars (granted, revenue does not seem to be their problem), and I note, painted a big red bulls-eye on the firm once God Emperor Ascendant, excuse me, President-Elect Trump assumes office.

And before you say "Oh, they're a private company that can do whatever they want", tell me when I can run a segregated lunch counter or refuse to bake a gay wedding cake.

You would think that companies like Google with their awful anti-customer (paying and not) policies would realize that they're handing Team Trump golden opportunities to make plays against them that are both good policy and good politics. SF/SV has had a long run without major interventions from the government, I suspect that's going to end.

</comment><comment> angry-hacker God I didn't want Trump to won, but what happened with Twitter that it became such l self censored echo chamber?

And that one guy with zero charisma was the only one in the Valley to fight back... Who is this Peter I'm interested?</comment>


Ask HN: Choosing Between Electron and QT for a Cross Platform Desktop App - <AUTHOR> Hey, I'm a novice developer gunning to make a cross platform (Windows/Mac) commercial desktop application. I am deliberating on which GUI framework to use, and it seems the only modern frameworks available that could meet the bar for documentation, reliability, and ease of use are:
   - <USER2>
   - Qt with C++
   - WPF for Windows + Cocoa for Mac :(
My application would be relatively simple: The brunt of the application would involve an offline multi-user password login system, some basic longform writing functionality that includes simple version control and save file obfuscation, as well as the capacity to convert to pdf. An aesthetically pleasing GUI is a priority (I currently have little experience in GUI development). The password system and save file obfuscation do not have to be perfectly secure.
I have read the scorn and criticism directed towards Electron. I'm unconcerned about the RAM characteristics as my app would not be a background application, but I am concerned about the potential battery and speed performance drawbacks. On the plus side, it seems Electron allows for beautiful GUI development, and I might be able to leverage Markdown to simplify development.
On the other hand, many developers who dislike Electron suggest I use Qt, but it seems this has its own set of drawbacks. The commercial cost is prohibitive and the open source LGPL licensing requirements make me nervous. I am struggling to find Qt showcases that don't look kind of ugly. While I would much(!) prefer to learn and develop in C++ then a web stack, from my understanding Qt forces non-idiomatic C++ and would likely be less valuable on a resume in the future.
Hacker News, what do you suggest? I'm reluctantly leaning towards electron, but I would prefer to make a performant app and to use a lower level language that is more aligned with my long term passion of game development. <comment><USER3> Sounds like a great project for you to learn a low level language, and some UX and GUI design at the same time.

Game development is done in several languages and frameworks, so it's not a big deal what language you go with as long as you learn to write good code and document it well.

Every tool, language, and framework has downsides and quirks, literally every single one.

Over your career you'll use dozens of languages and tools, if not more.

Stop fretting and start doing :)</comment>


Twitter begins testing Reddit-style nested conversations - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/28/twitter-testing-nested-conversations/ <comment><USER2> Twitter hasn't reached its full potential. It's just not intuitive enough to most people. When a new user signs up, they don't know:

\- Who/what to follow, except a handful of celebrities and sports teams

\- When to compose tweets vs. passively consume them

\- The esoteric grammar of the intimidating Twitterverse

It seems like one must be a celebrity, CEO, or super user to use Twitter at all. Clearly, that's improving, albeit at a glacial pace. Worst of all was how long it took for Twitter to add Twitter Topics.

<comment><USER3> > Twitter hasn't reached its full potential. It's just not intuitive enough to > most people. When a new user signs up, they don't know:

What? Twitter's selling point was how simple and intuitive it was.

> It seems like one must be a celebrity, CEO, or super fan to use Twitter at > all.

That's because Twitter changed from a "user" focused to a "celebrity/journalist/CEO/etc" focused platform.

If seems like you got introduced to twitter in the past 2 or 3 years. Twitter was nothing like it is now. You are describing what twitter was 5 or 10 years ago. I don't think twitter is going back towards a "user" oriented site. The same with youtube, instagram, etc.

<comment><USER2> For Average Joe or Median Marsha:

YouTube —> watch videos

Instagram —> see and share photos

Reddit —> discuss whatever you want

Facebook —> share thoughts and experiences with friends

Twitter —> ???

I know what Twitter can be, if you really optimize it, but it takes patience which a lot of people don't have.

<comment><USER4> If I use twitter again, I will use it as a news source. I will follow news outlets, IT personalities, sports personalities, sports clubs, and Presidents. I won't even tweet. Tweeting when you aren't a celebrity or public figure is a waste of time.

<comment><USER5> I never understood the point of twitter until I started following journalists, professors, lawyers, etc. I still wish Twitter had Google+'s circles feature, so I could group those (along with engineers) and flip between them. I don't personally want to deal with multiple twitter accounts.

<comment><USER6> Twitter's list feature might help you a bit to get that, as might the tweetdeck client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reddit is being credited with usenet style nested threads?

the old is new again...

<comment><USER8> Same thought I had when I read the title, forums have been using nested threads for the longest time.

<comment><USER9> i mean, hellooo, we are in a nested thread

<comment><USER10> _echoes_ N E S T E D _echoes_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those who can't wait, I wrote an open-source FireFox and Chrome plugin that gives a tree view of a conversation: [https://treeverse.app](https://treeverse.app)

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone got a mirror of this article? I can't click this link without ublock complaining about being passed through advertising trackers

<comment><USER13> Me too, it tries to redirect me through "guce.advertising.com" because I have enabled the list "Peter Lowe's Ad and tracking server list".

You don't actually need to click, this is a preview:

[https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1199446847560880128/pho...](https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1199446847560880128/photo/1)</comment></comment>


How we nearly doubled driver reliability - <AUTHOR> http://aarjav.summon.com/2014/08/04/how-we-nearly-doubled-driver-reliability-at-summon/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting article, and I dig the message of measurement and iteration. One big question that is left unanswered though is why drivers reject riders in the first place. Is it with the hope of getting a better rider soon (better rating, closer departure, longer trip), because they're busy and can't take a rider at the moment, some sort of prejudice or discomfort with some visible attribute of the rider?

Presumably drivers get paid per ride, so a 50% average ride acceptance rate seems like a strange situation to be in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rictic: I should have addressed this in the post! Our _minimum_ reliability rate is 50% but a vast majority of our rides are done by what we call our exclusive drivers who have a 70% (soon 80%) reliability rate requirement with additional perks. I will update the post to clarify this!

There are multiple reasons why a driver might not accept a ride but they all revolve around the fact that drivers are not our employees and they often are unable to or forget to become unavailable when they should be:

\- She just took a break to have lunch (should have turned the app to unavailable but forgot)

\- She is a taxi driver (we have both taxi and personal drivers on the platform) and just picked up a ride on the street and got a 2nd ride before she could turn unavailable (we measure volume in rides/second at busy times)

\- She drives for other platforms as well and accepted a ride request on it before she could turn unavailable

\- Each driver has 15 seconds to accept a ride before it goes to another driver. Sometimes the real world intervenes and you can't accept the ride in 15 seconds, especially if you are driving and not pulled over.

One more data points:

\- I can't speak for Uber/Lyft but if you talk to their drivers you will see that their requirements are similar if not lower.

<comment><USER3> 15 seconds seems a bit low considering it can take a few seconds to open the app, have you tried testing other times? I know it's a balance between getting the rider an answer quickly and giving the drivers time however you may force an available driver to miss the dispatch if it's too low.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have! It's an interesting tradeoff between making the riders wait too long for their ride to be matched to a driver (in many cities the waiting threshold after which a rider gives up on the app is firmly in seconds) and giving the driver enough time to safely accept the ride.

I see you work for iCracked =) I am a user, and have been seeing your iCracked cars around. Really interested in how your system works in analogous aspects!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clicked to read how to increase the reliability of device drivers. Looks like neither one is an easy task.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only device driver I wrote was in my advanced operating systems class in grad school nearly a decade ago, but I'll say amen to that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if I fully understand how the RR is calculated. I'm assuming that when a user requests a driver, the app pings 2-4 drivers nearby. If one driver out of the 2-4 pinged accepted, all but one should have their RR lowered, lowering the average RR across all drivers.

Is there a primary potential driver who gets docked in this case or have you guys simply reduced the number of pings to potential drivers per request (i.e. go from making 4 driver requests to 2)?

<comment> swagasaurus-rex I'm also confused by this. My guess is either

1) Only one driver is pinged, and they have a narrow window to accept until the offer is removed and given to a different driver.

2) Multiple drivers are pinged. If any one of them accepts, the other drivers are not penalized (but lose the opportunity for accepting this offer). If no drivers accept, all of them are penalized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > We offered temporary monetary incentives for drivers

Ah, so paying drivers more made them more interested in accepting rides?

<comment><AUTHOR> Initially, yes. The incentive was more because we had screwed up in explaining the system to them the first time, and we wanted them to take a second look at our improve iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article makes me almost sure that this company will not exist for much longer. Such a complicated and twisted thinking about a conceptually simple microeconomic question is not a good sign.

Why not just force drivers to accept any ride? Congratulations you now have 100% reliability.

<comment><AUTHOR> JHH: Sorry you feel that way. We can't force drivers to accept a ride because they are not our employees, because they sometimes work with both us and another app, and because the real world intervenes to make 100 percent reliability impossible. However, I should definitely have explained this better in my post. Here's what I said to another commenter below.

Our _minimum_ reliability rate is 50% but a vast majority of our rides are done by what we call our exclusive drivers who have a 70% (soon 80%) reliability rate requirement with additional perks. I will update the post to clarify this!

There are multiple reasons why a driver might not accept a ride but they all revolve around the fact that drivers are not our employees and they often are unable to or forget to become unavailable when they should be:

\- She just took a break to have lunch (should have turned the app to unavailable but forgot)

\- She is a taxi driver (we have both taxi and personal drivers on the platform) and just picked up a ride on the street and got a 2nd ride before she could turn unavailable (we measure volume in rides/second at busy times)

\- She drives for other platforms as well and accepted a ride request on it before she could turn unavailable

\- Drivers have 15 seconds to accept a ride before it "goes away". Sometimes the real world intervenes and you can't accept the ride in 15 seconds, especially if you are driving and not pulled over.

One more data points:

\- I can't speak for Uber/Lyft but if you talk to their drivers you will see that their requirements are similar if not lower.

<comment><USER7> Sorry. I regtretted my comment the minute I sent it.

I wish you all the best for your product.

I meant the thing about forcing the driver in a sarcastic way.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. Appreciate the good wishes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Ceiling Fans Allowed Slaves to Eavesdrop on Plantation Owners - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/punkah-project-fans-antebellum-south <comment><USER2> The Indian nawabs and maharajas preferred deaf punkah wallahs for this very reason. They were using them long before the British Raj vassalised the princely states.

Interesting that the American version seem to be usually wood. In India and the Middle East they're usually cloth held by a lightweight bamboo or wood frame.

I pity the poor soul who had to operate that huge contraption in the last photo.

<comment><USER3> it sounds like the weight was the point:

>Many of them, including a scrollwork mahogany slab at Melrose mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, seem to have been designed to look particularly weighty, so that visitors understood the effort required of the operators.

it wasn't just a fan, it was a way to show off your power to dinner guests - "look how much effort my slaves are putting in to keeping you comfortable".

I found this really interesting in the context of current discussion around automation - whether this work was being done by slaves or by paid servants, it still seems shocking to me that human labour would ever be wasted on something so trivial. i wonder what people 100 years in the future will be shocked that we wasted effort on.

<comment><USER4> ... perhaps that we burned oil to generate electricity that we then consumed huge gobs of during the summer to keep our homes and businesses at a frosty 21C?

There's a direct analogy to the discussion at hand: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave)

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty good comparison, actually

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was thinking this was going to be some sort of accidental primitive microphone. Still an interesting article about something I haven't heard of, but the eavesdropping part of the article wasn't the hook I thought it would be.

</comment><comment><USER6> slightly off topic: amazing how far we have come, and how much more we have to go. You could walk into a market and go home with slaves, totally yours, to do whatever you pleased with your property.

<comment><USER7> And we're not _that_ far removed from it - my grandmother knew former slaves and her grandmother was a slave.

<comment><USER8> In many places in the World, we're not removed from it. Slavery is still an issue almost everywhere, even in the United States[1], it's just that it now takes the form mostly of domestic slavery and sex trafficking. Other parts of the World still openly practice forced marriage and bonded labour.

1: [http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic- se...](http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic-servitude)

<comment><USER9> What part talks about the US?

<comment><USER8> The section titled _Domestic Servitude in the United States_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still vestiges of this today:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover-w...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5850053/Undercover- worlds-elitist-secret-society.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Did not know this was a thing, reminds me of the turnspit/underdog which also had it rough [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog)

</comment><comment><USER12> Apparently I am not allowed to read this article without consenting to being tracked. Not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of my racist extended family and it makes me sick

</comment><comment><USER14> The title makes it sound like there was some interesting technical trick or something. As far as I can tell, the article basically amounts to, "humans have ears, and putting slaves in close proximity to their slave owners allowed them to hear their conversations." Am I missing something, or is this just clickbait?

<comment><USER15> There is no technical trick but I don't think this constitutes clickbait. What would you suggest as a better headline?

<comment><USER16> Maybe, "slaves eavesdropped on plantation owners while operating manual ceiling fans." Then, it wouldn't be implied that something about the ceiling fans in particular helped with the eavesdropping.</comment></comment></comment>


How Hipster Are You? test - <AUTHOR> http://www.howhipsterareyou.com/1575676

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a hilarious test! If you or a friend drinks too much PBR, take a few minutes and check this out.

</comment><comment><USER2> ... wtf.

requires facebook.</comment>


The end of road rage? A car which detects emotions - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/23/a-car-which-detects-emotions-how-driving-one-made-us-feel <comment><USER2> The next level is for AI self-driving cars to bluetooth a pissed off binary message to other AI self-driving cars.

<comment><USER3> No need for bluetooth, just use the horn.</comment></comment>


In times of change, make tires - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/new-media/c8adfdd884cf

<comment><USER2> This is at once a brilliant and useless post. The brilliance is that of course you should provide something that people need that is risk averse, and using the analogy of making tires during the transitional period of wagon to automobile works well. The uselessness is both that everyone cannot make tires, literally or figuratively, and it is very difficult to know what the modern day "tire" is. Is it long lasting, high output energy source? Is it an internet-independent lifestyle-enhancer? Does it make me more energetic without unwanted side-effects or risk to my long-term health?

<comment><USER3> _"...and it is very difficult to know what the modern day "tire" is."_

And this difficulty resolves your first point about not everyone being able to make tires!

My guess at a couple of tires: bags/cases and notebooks. Every new shiny device needs a case and people seem to be carrying more than ever around with them. Paper notebooks of various types have _really_ taken off recently.

<comment><USER4> Another guess: batteries

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nokia started out as a tyre manufacturer:

[http://www.nokiantyres.com/history-in- brief](http://www.nokiantyres.com/history-in-brief)

1898 The Finnish Rubber Works is founded

1904 Factory set up in the town of Nokia

1967 Nokia Corporation established - Rubber, Cable and Paper Divisions

2003 Nokia's ownership in Nokian Tyres ended; Bridgestone Europe NV/SA became the largest shareholder

</comment><comment><USER6> The article is incorrect in stating that "But actually, of all the automotive entrepreneurs of the turn of the century, only Ford and Mercedes survived"

Off the top of my head automotive companies that were around at the turn of the century and are still around: Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, MAN and Opel (the latter two are owned by other companies now)

<comment><USER7> Out of your list only Opel really qualifies as an "autmotive entrepreneur". It may have been left off the list because it has been owned by General Motors since the 20's.

Companies like Peugeot, Renault, and Fiat produce a very wide array of non- automotive products. MAN Group was founded in the 1700s and while "truck building activities" commenced in 1903 it was hardly the lion's share of their business.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think today's entrepreneurs are chasing hot trends too much. So the article was pretty refreshing.

<comment><USER8> The article didn't do anything for me. What's the takeaway?

Good freelance journalism work will probably always be in demand? Certain industries are more stable than others? Amidst all the encouragement to think outside the box, sometimes thinking inside the box is thinking outside the box in it's own way? Someone has to make the tires of the world and someone has to make the cars? Making the tires is less exciting but more of a sure thing? Hacker news will up-vote bad articles that insinuate some kind of profundity? lol.

I think the actual "lesson" is to seek stability and safe bets in times of change and upheaval. That's advice for the unambitious though. I would say, in times of change, make your move. When the car industry was being born, i'd like to be on the forefront figuring out how to make cars. Old media is dying, new media is rising? How about figuring out how to capture the power of new media to democratize and inform(and monetize) the public.

<comment><USER9> When you're trying to work in an industry going through change, look for the smaller aspects of that industry which remain stable even during the big changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Correction: Levi Strauss was one person, not two.

I do like orthogonal thinking, and a lot of businesses don't "get" the concept.

My former employer flailed about trying to adapt to Amazon's competitiveness (and anti-competitiveness in some cases) in both the print on demand and eBook market. They kept trying to do with Amazon does (deep discounts, free shipping) and failing to show an improvement on the bottom line.

They could have made a common eBook format that publishes to every platform and done well with it. eBooks tend to be nearly pure profit as opposed to the overhead of dealing with printing and shipping physical product.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the saying - "When there's a gold rush, sell pickaxes and shovels."

</comment><comment><USER12> I blame VCs for making entrepreneurship an easy way to money, fame, and/or success.</comment>


Regression analysis of test scores reveals: Massachusetts is smartest - <AUTHOR> http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2006/07/better-state-iq-estimates.html <comment><USER2> From this "analysis":

"This time around is better. Taking the regression equations produced by running the numbers in the data table put together by Richard Lynn in _Race Differences in Intelligence_... "

Hm, that would be _this_ book by Richard Lynn:

 _The IQs of the races...can be explained as having arisen from the different environments in which they evolved, and in particular from the ice ages in the northern hemisphere exerting selection pressures for greater intelligence for survival during cold winters..._

-475, Inane and Racist. This is the mother of all trolls. Do not feed it.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Inane" and "Racist" don't seem to be synonyms for "Factually incorrect due to bad data," or "Untrue because the statistical techniques in use are misapplied." Perhaps you want to rephrase so you're discussing the article, rather than whining that it doesn't confirm your prejudices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> People who take the Tickle test are probably wasting time, so all this shows is that Smart people are more likely to be sitting around idle in Massachusetts.</comment>


A Gentle Introduction to Attribute-Based Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dbkats/a-gentle-introduction-to-attribute-based-encryption-edca31744ac6 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author and can answer any follow-on questions here.</comment>


Ask HN: What would make you excited about email?  - <AUTHOR>

I am part of a team that is already building a new kind of email app, which we're calling an Email Browser. We will launch a "public proof of concept" after Christmas.
We want to know what you value (or don't) about email.
Please comment below, or do our quick survey: http://bit.ly/T088MN
I am happy to take questions or feedback via: joel AT joel marsh DOT com.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would like to know which messages expect a reply and by when.

<comment><USER3> Seconded! I'd like to see it as a "due date" for an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just filled out the survey. Small gripe: under "benefits" it was unclear if I should consider whether each feature is _currently_ valuable, or _would_ be valuable if I had it.

Edit: I'd also like to second DanBC's comment about super easy encryption. Having a diagram to indicate which parts of the transmission are secure would be great, too. (For instance, visually display that the email is mainly secure during transit, but is still plainly viewable by the recipient's email server.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Surveys have their limitations, of course, and after years of experience I have found that (depending on the goals) it is sometimes better to allow the respondent to "interpret" a little for themselves rather than restricting them too much. Thanks again (and I have noted your encryption comments too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> * Very simple, very easy, almost idiot proof, encryption and cryptographic signing. This does not have to be free.

Or

* Very simple, very easy, almost idiot proof anonymous email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Can you elaborate a little more on the signing suggestion?

<comment><USER5> PGP or GPG offer secure cryptographic signing of email.

Taking a quick look at the GPG page we find some mentions of this:

(<http://www.gnupg.org/faq/GnuPG-FAQ.html#sec-8>) ('Advanced topics'!)

([http://www.dewinter.com/gnupg_howto/english/GPGMiniHowto-1.h...](http://www.dewinter.com/gnupg_howto/english/GPGMiniHowto-1.html#ss1.2)) (mini how to in English, they have other languages available).

([http://www.dewinter.com/gnupg_howto/english/GPGMiniHowto-5.h...](http://www.dewinter.com/gnupg_howto/english/GPGMiniHowto-5.html)) Signing and checking signatures.

Just from these short snippets you can see that there is a lot of documentation for GPG; and that installing and using GPG[1] will be beyond most users.

[1] Importantly it is crypto, and thus it's trivially easy for users to get this stuff wrong. Small mistakes do not necessarily mean anything visible to the user. The output could look real and useful, but actually be worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mail Pilot is pretty exciting in the email space: <http://www.mailpilot.co/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. We have been watching them closely. We have an entirely different approach than them though. If you're interested, there is a little sign-up form for updates at www.getremark.com. We'll be releasing more info in a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love for it to organize my mail automatically depending on who sends it. For example, if it's personal, work related, _unsubscribe_ -able, or none of the above.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! If that's what floats your boat then I definitely suggest you sign up at getremark.com. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think I'm getting everything I need out of email right now, but I'm also a very disciplined email user (an empty inbox is a healthy inbox).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Easier link: <http://bit.ly/T088MN>

</comment><comment><USER9> If it could do my laundry</comment>


Show HN: Download any song without knowing its name, now in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://anysong.io <comment><USER2> The website refuses to open, says "The page isn't redirecting properly". I guess you have set up redirect from anysong.io to www.anysong.io and vice versa, so both keep redirecting the user to each other and the request is never completed.

EDIT: The site works now. Seems like you have used Instant-Music-Downloader by yask123. Is that right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I think DNS is still propagating so might be a little up and down for the moment.

Yep, yask123's python script is what prompted me to put the site together and it and uses the same simple idea, but it was written from scratch in javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really nice and the speed is impressive. A useful feature for me would be a subtle drop down of close matches/other possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can it build a playlist of songs if many match (say I search for an artist name)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's fantastic - good work, love the stripped down nature of this too.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is simplicity at its best.

Hope you won't corrupt it by inserting Ads.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it mobile friendly?</comment>


2 Days Loss From Transfers Out Of Godaddy.com: 37,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedomains.com/2011/12/24/2-days-loss-from-transfers-out-of-godaddy-com-37000/

<comment><USER2> Seriously misleading title.

GoDaddy, with 50,000,000 domains, has lost almost nothing, about 1000 domains, when you factor in new registrations and new transfer-ins.

We would need the historical records to see more into this.

Hell, it might even look like their registrations and transfer-ins are up due to being in the news.

I seriously doubt that GoDaddy gives a shit about this.

Their domain business is a complete "loss leader" operation that costs them about a dollar of loss on each domain they sell.

Hosting accounts is where it counts the most for them and I can tell you few, if any, people will be transferring hosting accounts out as it's a complete pain in the ass.

<comment><USER3> _I seriously doubt that GoDaddy gives a shit about this._

If by _this_ you mean literal outflow of domains, then I agree. But if you mean public relations impact their support of and then half ass retraction of support for SOPA then I disagree. I think the long term effects of all this calamity are something they very much care about.

<comment><USER4> In general you don't want to piss off your best customers. The type of person who owns 20+ domains is the type of person you want as a customer (lower support costs, lower cost per customer acquisition).

The person who owns 20+ domains is the type of person who probably is someone who cares about SOPA.

I don't think these numbers, really mean anything, to be honest. But I do think that pissing off the people who are the cheapest customers to acquire and support and the people who people are going to ask where to register their domains at is probably not the best business strategy long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like GoDaddy didn't actually withdraw their SOPA support: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/npair/godaddy_ha...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/npair/godaddy_has_not_withdrawn_its_official/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is surely just tracking nameserver records (pointing to the Go Daddy domaincontrol.com domain), the actual number of domains transferred in or out may be higher.

<comment><USER7> Also, unless people are on top of it, it takes more than 5 days usually to transfer a domain. I'd imagine most people who transferred will be waiting through that window of time rather than digging for the hidden confirm quickly option.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention many major sites are taking a while to transfer because they want to avoid downtime.

<comment><USER6> When you transfer a domain and keep the nameservers the same, there will be no downtime at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. And their typical daily transfer-out rate is...

2\. It'd be interesting to see where these domains went? Namecheap, Gandi, etc.

<comment><USER8> "It should also be noted that for the three days prior to the call for the boycott on Thursday, Godaddy had this amount of transfers out:

that being Monday (8,800), Tuesday (13,000) and Wednesday (14,500)."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not a very useful statistic considering they must process thousands of transfers a day due to regular business activity. A better stat might be % increase or at least the number of transfers above the average. Admittedly, that would make for a far less catchy blog post.

</comment><comment><USER11> Whether 37,000 is a big number or not: Kudos to the community for making themselves heard.

However, godaddy is a pimple on the economy. Somehow, someway, this kind of activity needs to be multiplied 1000x.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ok.. This is either just way off or I'm not reading this correctly. They had nearly as many transferred in than transferred out yesterday.

Transfered In (20,034) Transferred Out (21,054)

1020 domains is nothing particularly comparing it to the total pointed there: 32,159,050

</comment><comment><USER13> if I interpreted the source of the article correctly, then the article makes a big mistake, they count the domains that change from godaddies nameservers. If you don't host with godaddy it wouldn't show in the statistics. Check the link to which the article refers.

</comment><comment><USER14> in domains not dollars.

</comment><comment><USER15> how long until they realize that it's not spelled reditt?</comment>


How to Survive a DNS DDoS Attack – Consider Using Multiple DNS Providers - <AUTHOR> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/tech-matters/2016/10/how-survive-dns-ddos-attack-consider-using-multiple-dns-providers <comment><AUTHOR> This is my own article I'm submitting. I would be very interested in any feedback on the points I raise from HN readers. I'll note that a discussion here ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772993) ) helped in some of my thinking around the topic.

Thanks in advance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would also appreciate a sanity-check from any Windows users who can confirm the "nslookup" syntax that is equivalent to `dig ns <domainname>`. I haven't used nslookup in many years and I don't have any Windows boxes around. I believe it should be:

nslookup -type=NS <domainname>

(in the non-interactive mode of nslookup). Do I have that right?</comment>


IDE WTF - <AUTHOR> http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/idewtf/ <comment><USER3> There is certainly room for IDEs to improve. But there's no way we can ever have the level of automation and abstraction that photographers, video editors and other creatives enjoy.

Take the photo clone tool mentioned. Why does that work? Because human vision is lossy and forgiving - the difference between 95% correct and 100% correct is around 5%, depending on how closely the person is looking at it.

Programming on the other hand... code is either 0% correct or 100% correct. Anything less than 100% correct is _broken_.

Media is also far less complex. How do I know if my video is correct? I simply play it. If there any errors, they are all possible to detect in the minutes it takes to play the video.

There will never be an equivalent for code. You can't visualize an arbitrary algorithm over all its inputs - that's undecidable. It's hard enough to see what a function in three variables does, let alone quicksort.

The best we can do is have editors for specific tasks. GUI editors, markup editors, etc. For everything else, code is the only option. We can patch the awkwardness with better languages and better IDEs, but it will never, ever, go away.

<comment><USER4> This would be fine if it were obvious to all of us that GUIs have advanced as far as they can, and the remainder of the problems we see in them were inherent to the complexity and nondeterministic nature of the systems they manage.

But it's not like that. My IDE occasionally gets confused and forgets how to rename a file. Eclipse takes 3 minutes to refresh a source-file tree. People still use vim and emacs for things! There could be no clearer sign to me that IDEs are rubbish pieces of software than the fact that people keep falling back on tools that have barely evolved in 30 years.

<comment><USER5> vim was released in 1991. emacs did exist 30 years ago, but it's certainly evolved quite a bit since then.

My personal emacs installation evolves regularly, although I will admit that it hasn't evolved at all today.

<comment><USER6> vi was released in, apparently, 1976. <http://www.linfo.org/vi/history.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We attempted to solve a lot of these problems in our online HTML/CSS/JS editor/prototyping tool, <http://quplo.com>. We also wrote about our frustrations with IDEs earlier this year: <http://blog.quplo.com/2010/04/the- modern-ide-sucks/>

Some things we tried to fix:

\- The file system; you don't need one when you're building an HTML prototype. Instead you have sheets, where you can organise multiple "files" (URIs, basically) based around how you want to organise, not how some arbitrary hierarchy of nested folders wants you to.

\- Code completion; intellisense and other completion usually pops up an alphabetic list of everything available in the namespace. In the case of CSS, typing "a" presents you with autocomplete starting with "azimuth". When do you ever need azimuth? So instead, we built "common sense code completion", where the likely most-used properties are surfaced at the top of the list. Now, writing HTML and CSS is mostly a case of pressing tab a lot, and up or down when you don't want the auto-suggested default.

\- Browser-based; why even write code in a desktop IDE, especially HTML/CSS? Doing in the browser has so many advantages, such as web browsers' awesome tab features or, since it's a web app, everything you write being instantly available online.

\- Collaboration; as a web app, no more checking in and updating. We handle version management and you just work on your code with your team (long term: Google-style realtime collaboration?)

There's a lot to improve about today's IDEs. We got started on one specific for simple HTML development. Someone else should solve this problem for programming languages.

<comment><USER8> If you change your mind and consider doing Python or Ruby as well as HTML, count me in as a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Visual Studio with Resharper does half of the things mentioned in the article.

Some of .Net, LINQ for example, was built _with the IDE in mind_ hence LINQ's 'backward' seeming query syntax (you say what you're querying over up front, so the IDE can provide typed autocomplete/information).

Even with VS and Resharper, there's still so much that could be done. It's a massive problem though, I think.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. With ReSharper, I don't recall a time where syntax was incorrect at compile time. It immediately indicates any syntax errors at coding time.

However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is something I have also wanted. The two closest features are:

1) Visual Studio has a 'Code Definition Window' ([http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/f5yx24a6%28v=VS.100%29.aspx)) that dynamically displays the contents of a method in a separate window pane. Although it is not inline, at least you can visually see the code without navigating away from the current source file.

2) In ReSharper, you can sort of fake it by calling the command 'Inline Method' and unchecking 'Inline all usages' and then Undo when done inspecting the code. However, that is a hack with its share of problems. I'd prefer a feature to toggle the inline method content in a preview mode without actually modifying any existing code.

<comment><USER11> > However, the inline method/function definition that the OP mentions is > something I have also wanted.

Eclipse actually does this. If you hover your mouse over a function name, it will pop up a tooltip showing you the code for the function. I find it extremely handy - it's one of the things I think I'm really going to miss, having just given up on Eclipse because of its frustratingly bad performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the author forgets that the medium of code IS text. Not graphics, or sound, or a 3D model... but code is text, and for now text is the most concise representation of code.

But actually, a textual representation means that you need to rely less on fancy GUI's to write code. There are also added benefits like ease of search. If you're using a nice editor like Emacs or Vim, the medium is very easy to manipulate.

<comment><USER13> _It seems like the author forgets that the medium of code IS text._

In fact, it isn't. Code is better defined as a tree. The "impedance mismatch" of writting a tree using sequential text strings is what makes fragile the tools that IDEs feature.

That code is seen as text is just a historical accident. I believe most serious programmers have been beaten by some incomplete implementation of graphical interfaces and accepted to fall back to good old plain text.

But we are in 2010. This acceptance of this state of matters is very unfortunate. Specially sad is when the author says that IDEs are no more than text editors with some extended capabilities. They shouldn't! They should load the code in all its glorious shape... that by no means is a chunk of text.

<comment><USER12> I did say "medium". The form with which we interact with.

Text is the best medium right now. No one's discovered a better method of representation.

Are you saying we should represent code in a more graphical tree-like way? Even in that case, you still need text to fill in the tree.

Or are you saying we should program in visio-style diagrams?

<comment><USER14> > Or are you saying we should program in visio-style diagrams?

Yes. It _should_ be possible to develop an interface that is actually faster and cleaner to program in than text. I'd love to see what touch interfaces can do in this regard.

It's never been done, granted. But it should be possible. I hope developers aren't dissuaded from attempting graphical programming interfaces just because everything that has existed up to now has sucked.

<comment><USER15> Syntax highlighting is pretty much it. Adding much more would blow out our ability to handle complexity and just be too busy on the screen for anything to make sense.

Go look at a language parser sometime; we've actually put a _lot_ of work in any production-ready language into that "low tech" text interface. The tree approach is useful for macro writing, and if you don't know Lisp maybe you should go check one out, but I'm very unconvinced there's a better way to actually interact with the code even in theory. It may be visually unimpressive but it's actually incredibly, incredibly sophisticated under the hood. If it's good enough for human speech, it's more than good enough for programming.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I love lisp - I'm a huge Clojure buff. And that's exactly what makes me think a graphical programming interface _could_ be done well. As languages get more lisp-like, it seems as if they would become _more_ conducive to a graphical programming environment.

I imagine looking at something that looks a lot like lisp - it shows the high- level structure of the code as a tree. But it could allows me to change the level of abstraction I'm viewing on the fly. Also, it could reveal (or hide, at my preference) lots of metadata about the code... is it pure, is it stateful, is it parallel, etc.

In essence, it allows you to look at your code as an n-dimensional entity instead of a 2 dimensional file.

Basically, I'd like to see what happens when you decouple the code from its presentation. Then, you can choose alternate presentations (including plain text!) depending on the task at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could not agree more.

Given that IDEs are the primary tools of programmers, and unlike Photoshop users our primary skill is to build software itself, why are IDEs not the most advanced pieces of software that exist? It seems logical. They have the most advanced users; they don't need to worry about scaring the kids at home. They should be constantly adopting the latest and greatest in performance and UX.

Instead we have vim and emacs which, beloved as they are, still have as their primary interface a grid of characters -- not just the code itself, but the _user interface_. It's like nothing has changed in terms of the graphical output capabilities of computers since the late 1970s. (And yes, there are WIMP versions, which add drop-down menus. But the primary interface mechanism is still keyboard shortcuts.)

Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly _seems_ like it should be able to do everything in the world, certainly the download takes long enough and there are enough configuration options. Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal that frustrated coders return to vim and emacs so they can get something done.

Version control -- a _critical_ function for all modern programmers -- is still largely handled on the command line. Maybe, if you're lucky, you get a side-by-side comparison in Eclipse (but not for git, yet!), but as far as tagging and branching goes, graphical representations are out. WTF?

I'm so glad to see this article, because I have spent so long in the company of programmers who hear me ranting about IDEs and just tell me to "use vim", as if that were the problem.

<comment><USER16> > Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be > able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin > architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal...

I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...

<comment><USER17> I used Eclipse daily for about two years, along with an internal C code plugin. I'm not sure which I can attribute to Eclipse and which I can attribute to the plugin, but my Eclipse workspaces were frequently getting randomly corrupted, global search-and-replace was not trustworthy, and for a while it was running so unstable overall that there were times I could launch Eclipse, load my workspace, and within a few minutes of just sitting there it would crash. This was running on Windows XP.

So I tried Eclipse at home on my Mac. I saw that it came with a utility for auto-packaging Java programs into OS X bundles. I made a simple Java Swing "Hello World" program and tried the bundle utility. It didn't work. I tried a few more times, and it never worked, but in fact got progressively worse in its output. Uninstall.

Some months later I thought I'd try Eclipse on the Mac again; surely it had improved. So I downloaded it again, created a new project, clicked through to add a new source code file and I got an error, that it could not create a new file.

I'm guessing that my experiences must be abnormal, since Eclipse is so hugely popular, but I now avoid it whenever I possibly can.

<comment><USER18> Yes, your experiences are extremely abnormal. I've used Eclipse extensively (I think since 2002 or so) and apart from the very early days I have never had a corrupted workspace, I have never ever had a problem with inconsistent search results and I can't remember an occurrence of it crashing (unless you count an out of memory, which is just from bad config).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. This is a high profit, low complexity situation. Most developers are not willing to spend $700 on an editor, and the gamut of programming language source code syntaxes is too broad for a single editor to work uniformly across them. But really, comparing anything to Photoshop is silly.

Some music sequencing programs will in fact allow you to create measures with the wrong number of beats, and have annoying, unproductive interfaces. Premiere is actually really annoying to work with, which sent a lot of people over to Final Cut. Even extremely similar programs like Adobe Illustrator are fraught with miserable design and crappy storage formats.

The OP has valid points, but these apply to most software, and not just IDE's.

<comment><USER20> I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment.

For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.

<comment><USER19> A few programmers will pay a lot of money, but most programmers seem to be uninterested in paying more than $70. Compared this to photographers, who will almost universally pay $700. The market is much larger.

<comment><USER21> I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx> )

I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.

<comment><USER19> That's only like 35 copies of Photoshop. Not to downplay the money you spent, but the market for Visual Studio is smaller than Photoshop. Also, the customer of Visual Studio is team leads and management, not actual users. This might explain why more expensive VS packages emphasize collaboration and team features.

<comment><USER20> VS.NET is something of a special case, since Microsoft would like nothing more than to give it away for free. They don't, because if they did it would make toolmakers like ReSharper and CodeSmith seem unjustifiably expensive.

If you're a small shop, you can get in thru BizSpark and get a pack of MSDN licenses big enough for your whole team for something like $400, all in.

So sure, you can pay $2500/copy retail if you're big enough to do so. Or if you're small, you can pay peanuts. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they go out of their way to take care of their developers.

<comment><USER19> Another great reason why selling a premium IDE is difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> ====QUOTE

How come I can still have syntax errors? How come it is ever possible to have a syntax error in a program? Shouldn't the IDE at least be helping me to have a valid program all the time? Finale doesn't let you write a measure with the wrong number of beats and then complain when you push play. It just fixes it for you — "oh look, you need a rest there."

====/QUOTE

Oh Luke Palmer, no.

NO. The absolute last thing I want from my editor is for it to be modifying the code without my explicit request. Then if something breaks, I need to worry about whether I broke it or whether the editor broke it. (And yes, yes, I know, the compiler "modifies my code", blah blah.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it is a case of apples and oranges here. Yes we need to make progress on IDEs, and of course we can borrow inspiration from many sources. I've used every application the author has mentioned: Photoshop, Premiere, Maya, AutoCAD, ProTools, Finale, Reason, PageMaker, and the reasons the tools succeed have more to do with the necessities dictated by the media you are editing rather than some kind of profound innovation.

</comment><comment><USER24> If I remember correctly, in one of the SICP video lecture, Hal Abelson says that s-exprs are equivalent to the the syntax tree of the program and, given a graphical interface, we would be manipulating this tree directly. AppInventor for Android is the most similar thing we have today, and not surprisingly it's based on Kawa scheme. It would be a very powerful mode of code editing, if it wasn't centered around click and drag operations (and limited to android). I think that a modal editor ala VIM, paired with a graphical code-block environment and fuzzy text autocompletion, would be a nearly perfect IDE.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm perfectly happy with the tools I use when programming.

The tools I use to manipulate images and photos on the other hand... they're big and clunky, force me to use constipated shortcuts, are tedious to install, cannot be run remotely (well, effectively), they crash and aren't that easy for me to extend.

I'm, sort of, working on the opposite problem: I'm tossing a few hours towards a way to manipulate images without the "IDE".

<comment><USER26> How about things like ImageMagick?[1] Command line or from a programming language. No IDE at all. I've used it in the past, and it's useful for batch operations.

[1]<http://www.imagemagick.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My first guess was that the programming market was just too small for commercial tools to make a profit. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

"Graphic designers held about 286,100 jobs in 2008."

<http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm>

"Computer software engineers and computer programmers held about 1.3 million jobs in 2008."

<http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm>

So now I'm thinking the main problem is that it's hard to compete with open source. There are just so many good-enough open source programming tools out there. Commercial tools not only have to better than the open source stuff, they have to be _way_ better. This is because of all the costs involved with adopting a new IDE: Not just the price of the software, but the time spent learning a new environment and getting it configured right are significant time investments.

So open source eats away at the margins of commercial tools, which leads to less people working on commercial tools, which drives more people to the open source incumbents, etc.

I believe pg says open source is bad at design. That seems right to me. Open source is good at copying existing tools, but not so good at innovating. So we end up at a local maxima where all programming tools are decent, but not great.

</comment><comment><USER28> The author really is understating the power of things we already have, Visual Studio and Emacs in particular (and I suppose he would clump Vim in as well). While they aren't the holy grail of syntax checkers, they are still extremely well tuned tools for creating software.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. I'll throw in my vote for Emacs; you can get very far with autocompletion (M-/) and tags. Autocompletion will complete the word you are typing with other words from all your open buffers, and it works 95% of the time. Tags allow you to jump to definitions easily.

The way Emacs implements these are so dumb but in reality they work great, and it's all really fast. The problem with large IDEs is they can be really slow if they are having to constantly analyze large codebases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The author overestimates the quality of designer tools.

<comment><USER31> Agreed, as an occasional user of After Effects, I can state with certainty that buggy software in media editing definitely exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Haha, only yesterday I mentioned Interlisp sedit on HN. Welcome to the world of the 1970s: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor>

There's a reason these things weren't all that popular.

<comment><USER32> Oh boy, and who could forget DWIM. I'm sure if the concept of refactoring existed back then (it didn't; apparently L Peter Deutsch would just throw out your code and start again if he didn't like it) there would be some really cool tools for that too.

<comment><USER32> Classic: [http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o4niyIQ6_O8J:www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp/Teitelman- FCJJ1972.pdf+programmers+assistant&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShJgKd9Srkt1d1ks_l5JJIQe7Hf4KtT_GVHoHPhmL3MShAYgqrRCr1t1WXoOhg2wa65I7aN244UFvbWAhvJL2IKv0lVTEjSCNGKhWoPVxvniC- gc3go5S7uduKgcMNQrFSGvxYH&sig=AHIEtbT8xcDYio5z9BYceJ7o0c5FXsds4A)

For all the hating, automating programming is an obvious thing to do (the idea is both trivial and quite profound: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645338>), and there are some really cool ideas there (reversible debugging being one).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "At least I've heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I've never used it." & "How come I can still have syntax errors?"

Well, I think you answered your own question dude.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some creative apps are dataflow systems. Dataflow maps very well to GUIs and intelligent tools. For the parts which aren't dataflow, you end up with the same manual labour that you have in code editing.

Video editing, for instance, is quite similar to code editing. Juggling large libraries of assets, trying to make things fit together on the level of details and taste while maintaining an intelligible and manageable whole and keeping to a deadline. You have tools to help you keep track of things, but you're still mostly on your own.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's funny, when I use the programs he mentions, I always wish I had some code to manipulate rather than use some esoteric GUI.

</comment><comment><USER36> My personal IDE wish list below (some simple, some not so, and necessarily incomplete) -

1\. Copy-paste abstraction - When you copy a snippet from one part to another, automatically lift it out as a function first. If it can't be abstracted for some reason, alert!

2\. Path finder - I have A,B,C and I want to get X,Y,Z. Find me a path through the libraries please. We created Prolog. Can we use it for this? Even guesses are useful. Hoogle is a start (thanks Curry and Howard!). The ABCXYZ can be abstract descriptions like type, or example data.

3\. Debugger time travel - move back and forth in time freely, allowing code modification. Me got tons of RAM+disk for history and branching. .. and why can't something get unwritten from a file?

4\. Breaking news - when I modify a function that could break something else, tell me now.

5\. Link function arguments to in-source example data for testing and exploration. I love to start with data first _before_ writing anything.

6\. Embed images and live code snippets as documentation. Ever drew ascii diagrams in source code? Mathematica notebooks have solved this and more already.

7\. Function grapher - select an expression and show as graph. At least what "Grapher" on MacOSX provides. The IDE should know basic mathematics - <USER2> mathematica.

8\. (extension of 7) Design at least simple functions graphically.

9\. Spell check myIdentifierNames dammit!

<comment><USER37> Currently working on (4) from the SCM angle. My buddy and I have been lazy bloggers, but we're still coding.

<http://timunionsteve.posterous.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ah, the grass is always greener.

The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with.

Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have.

Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release.

You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs.

Always greener. I'm just sayin.

</comment><comment><USER39> He's focusing on tool support (for manipulating representations of code), but languages (representations) could do with improvement as well.

Or perhaps you could think about both together. How would you coevolve a language with tools? If you could make assumptions about the tools people have, how would that change the language?

Ah, that's just smalltalk. Done.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd rather spend my working life in Emacs than in Photoshop, but I guess just as anything else, UI preferences differ.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oddly, I have been thinking exactly the opposite - what aspects of IDE's are missing from graphics programs.

Among the features of IDE's that programs like AutoCAD and Photoshop lack are continuous error checking and validation. They provide little feedback regarding proper document organization or standards and specifications compliance as part of a typical work flow.

In addition, some IDE's offer direct visual feedback regarding user interface design along the same lines (though not necessarily to the same degree) as graphics software.

edit: I'm not saying that these features are impossible to implement, rather that implementing them is not feasible for the typical user(victim).

</comment><comment><USER20> Any other VS.NET/ReSharper folks get halfway through his list of things that IDEs don't do, quietly noting that our IDE does in fact do them, then quit reading?

That's one of the big benefits of a compiled language like C#. The IDE can be continuously background-compiling, making things like Refactor/Rename work like the author wishes it would instead of replacing strings. Same with Find Usages, Find Declaration, and Automatically Import the Stuff I Need.

Every time I wander off into Ruby or Python, I end up coming back a little bit sad. Such nice languages, but the tools just can't hang.

<comment><USER42> Which brings up a good point: Where are the Javascript IDEs?

<comment><USER43> This might sound heretical, but I find that current Eclipse 3.6 for Javascript is not bad at all. [http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide- javasc...](http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-javascript- web-developers/heliossr1)

Since hard drive space is cheap, I have different Eclipse installations for each language I use. This seems to cut down on plugin hell and slowdowns that people often complain about.

I can't comment on how good Eclipse is actually for web development, but for embedded Javascript scripting it works splendidly. Most precisely, it lets me zoom in and out of abstractions in a large project with multiple files with ease.

<comment><USER42> Does it have properties and method autocomplete?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The Code Bubbles Project is an attempt to rethink the UI of IDEs:

<http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm>

</comment><comment><USER45> I really wonder how much time the author has spent with a modern IDE like Eclipse. For Java development, it really does have all of the features on his wish list, or something equivalent.

<comment><USER46> That was my thought too, Eclipse JDT at least is pretty impressive, some of the other plugins not so much. I was surprised to see IntelliJ mentioned as supposedly good too, I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I find it somewhat lacking in comparison to JDT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Why do you complain about IDEs when most popular languages are Java, C, C++, ecc.? (see [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html))

IDEs can't be better than languages they deal with, because languages shape the way programmers think. Clunky languages call for clunky IDEs.

</comment><comment><USER48> _but languages are written in text and IDEs are basically text editors with a few extra features._

Not necessarily. The text editor features of most Smalltalk IDEs were pretty gimpy, but the text editing was _never_ the exciting part! It's the whole environment being like iPython on steroids everywhere and all the time.

</comment><comment><USER49> Per Apple, Xcode 4 will have a feature that auto-fixes certain coding mistakes, like missing semi-colons:

[http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats- new.html...](http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html#fix- it)

</comment><comment><USER50> I've worked on java projects in both vi and eclipse. While ramp up on larger projects generally takes longer in vi, I feel like the payoff is worth it. What eclipse does for you in suggesting classes become memory muscle pretty quickly in vi. At which point, eclipses slowness is just crippling. If someone could make an IDE that was fast, and could figure out the project completely from my build tool without nudging, I might enjoy it. I just don't see how a more feature rich IDE is going to be faster and less buggy.

<comment><USER18> How do you do refactoring in vi? Do you really search and replace?

<comment><USER50> Yes. It depends on the case, but sed, awk and grep are also useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> a lot of it has to do with programmers bitching about bad programs way more than users of those other programs. he has obviously never used protools or any audio editing program. protools is one of the best out there, but it is still awful, as are the rest of them. it took digidesign almost a year to add support for leopard and then they charged $150 for the update.

</comment><comment><USER52> "At least I've heard IntelliJ IDEA is great, I've never used it."

That's like complaining about image manipulation software when all you've used is GIMP.

I'm a vim guy from way back, I always avoided big IDEs because of the bloat. IDEA is the first I've tried where the IDE doesn't feel like it's getting in the way, and actually makes the job easier.

<comment><USER53> And the IdeaVIM plugin isn't half bad either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> _"click a little [+] next to predict(p) and see it right there inline, with its argument replaced by p? Oh, that's how that works, cool, [-]."_

While I like this idea, I fail to see how having to use my mouse to navigate to and click the +/- would be more useful than using a keyboard shortcut to jump to definition..

<comment><USER55> I also think I would find this "inlining" quite confusing in an OOP language, where the "predict" method was a member of an object instance, containing code that referenced this/self.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > How come I can still have syntax errors?

Google's App Inventor prevents you from making syntax errors, since you use code blocks instead of writing source code. Actually, if you use code templates that any modern IDE has, it helps you to avoid most syntax errors as well...

</comment><comment><USER57> just learn to use a good text editor like emacs or vim, I use emacs and it fits me like glow whatever text based activity I am currently engaging at that moment.

And yes there can be better IDEs but I wont be using them.

</comment><comment><USER58> I don't think it's a good comparison. And the author just comes across as "wah! programming is hard! _sob_ ".</comment>


The SoftBank Effect: How $100B Left Workers in a Hole - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/technology/softbank-startups.html <comment><AUTHOR> [https://outline.com/6vbYzr](https://outline.com/6vbYzr)</comment>


Swift: Turn the Net into a single data cloud - <AUTHOR> http://libswift.org/

<comment><USER2> Dead? [https://github.com/triblerteam/libswift](https://github.com/triblerteam/libswift)

Is it related to tribler? [https://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/whatIsTribler](https://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/whatIsTribler)

It seems to be more active in the triler github pages: [https://github.com/Tribler/libswift](https://github.com/Tribler/libswift)

<comment><USER3> Yup, seems closely related to Tribler. Same people, same research program under same funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did this lead to anything or is this project abandoned? It looks very interesting, but the repo shows the latest work being a year ago.

<comment><USER5> I left the project in 2011. Heard some improvements were made since, but no great activity. synctext may know better.

My personal frustration point was the fact that data is moved within large corp data clouds these days. Customers are spoon-fed by HTTP. Seemingly, no niche to start from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The page mentions that the project will hit a milestone in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER7> I love UDP for sketchy business because nobody is looking for it.</comment>


Attorney Generals from 35 States Call on FCC to Stop Illegal Robocalls - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/attorney-generals-from-35-states-call-on-fcc-to-stop-illegal-robocalls/ <comment><USER2> Shouldn't that be "Attorneys General"?</comment>


Apples and Oranges: What AppLinks and Unbundling Can Tell Us About the Mobile Web - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/8c621b2be404

<comment><USER2> Specially like this part: "App Links is not the panacea but it could be an important first step towards unlocking the gates around Apple walled gardens."

Just to kind of close the circle, suggest further reading here: [https://medium.com/p/53e4de6c1630](https://medium.com/p/53e4de6c1630)</comment>


Why Europe's Regulatory War Against Silicon Valley Will Backfire - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-against-silicon-valley-will-backfire.html

<comment><USER2> > European regulators and other government bodies have become obsessed in > recent months with using every legal tool at their disposal to harm American > technology companies like Facebook, Apple and, above all, Google.

Yeah, this article is not going to be great.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get out of the Facebook cycle, keeping the good parts - <AUTHOR> I think I'm finally done with Facebook. I want out. The noise is too high, and I'm sure that, if I'm able to pull out, my quality of life will increase. So much idle time spent on the useless flux of futile blabbering, so many minutes (hours and days, over all these years) spent on a virtual place where everyone's entitled to an opinion nobody else really cares about. Facebook's original mission, i.e. "connecting everyone in the world", is utter bullshit. Intentions were good, maybe they still are, but that's all bullshit nonetheless.
But: 1) I've got a ton of work contacts that I met there and I should keep in touch with; 2) I love groups. If you pick the right well-managed ones, there's a lot of added value to discover there.
To the question: has anybody here implemented a successful "soft leave" from Facebook? I would love to deactivate my account, but if I do that I won't be able to use the messenger and groups apps anymore.
Please, don't say I should simply let go of that too. I know, you're right, but currently I cannot do that without impacting my professional life.
I'm eager to hear your opinions--I would listen to them, here. <comment><USER2> Check out this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550465). I wrote a response in there about how I "soft left" FB. You can still use messenger and groups but you won't have to deal with the noise anymore. Just takes 2-3 weeks to get used to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't you just only check it every few days and only for a sensible amount of time...? I'm not understanding the problem, nobody is making you read what's on there.

Also, how are you using Facebook for your professional life? I thought most people only used it for their social/private life? Friending people who are actually your friends and using email or LinkedIn for work colleagues sounds more sensible to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can always use this _place_ instead of facebook one [https://www.facebook.com/messages/](https://www.facebook.com/messages/) to use only facebook messanger and if i still get distracted i use greasemonkey script to not let topbar and msg popup to distract me [http://pastebin.com/3VL88ihe](http://pastebin.com/3VL88ihe)

<comment><USER5> I can also recommend using www.messenger.com, as that is the facebook messenger only, and no topbar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> love your comment in my blog! Specially this --> "because the whole discovery process did not involve Facebook at all. There's hope!" Yes! I'm quite happy with my new empty and zero friends profile. For groups its bad, I have to login back with my profile and oops all notification bling bling is coming up... On GitHub you can try out the quiet facebook thing: [https://github.com/maxfriedrich/quiet- facebook](https://github.com/maxfriedrich/quiet-facebook)

<comment><AUTHOR> Trying the quiet Facebook route right now, with a little add-on:

#fbNotificationsJewel { visibility: hidden !important;}

This will silence also the notifications, so you won't be tempted to check them and be sucked in.

Franz on my Mac is taking care of the pages I have to manage, and I'm using only the groups and pages apps--I removed the main FB app from my phone.

Not interested in removing content right now, but I'm thinking about putting some text in my cover image to explain why I won't be posting anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I let it go and it happened as you are predicting: worked very well personally and very bad professionally. It was a good tradeoff, but now, 1 year later, I'm planning to get back and do a better use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback, and for confirming that, unfortunately, there's some professional fallout to be expected from quitting Facebook.

I'm so excited that another post on HN actually had some great advice on this very problem. Here it is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13062063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13062063)

I'm planning on exploring this more and write something on a way to "softly quit" Facebook, maybe over the next weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> but to be clear: I want to leave this thing completely. Of course I need it for biz reasons and also to stay in touch with people. The way out might take a while but I'm on this way.</comment>


Bitcoin Startup Circle Secures $17M Venture Financing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-26/bitcoin-startup-circle-internet-secures-funding-for-17-million.html?cmpid=yhoo

<comment><USER2> if bitcoin is going to be successful, there's room for more than one major player in the merchant services space. i would agree that coinbase seems to have a big lead - they are operational - and have a clear path to success. circle more vague, perhaps the pitch is that they are more "seasoned" \- although doing much the same thing.

i will admit, that when i wrote circle just now, i almost wrote "color". freudian slip perhaps. we'll see.

<comment><USER3> BitPay existed before Coinbase, so there are at least two players in the market now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great news. They want to make digital currencies easier to use. We won't see big jumps until bitcoin gets past the crude stage that it's in now.

<comment><USER5> What dies this company even do? It looks like they're competing with Coinbase (and have raised more money than them!), but do they have any traction?

<comment><USER6> They haven't release a product yet.

So, no. They do not have any traction.

<comment><USER7> They haven't launched, but today they announced their products: [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/start-up-unveils- bitc...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/start-up-unveils-bitcoin- payments-product-and-additional-financing/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw- share&_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish all these millions of investment dollar would go to a better version of BitCoin. BT is a major breakthru but it is still in an alpha stage. The main problem is that it is deflationary, to support a global economy it needs to slightly inflationary.

<comment><USER9> The Economics Of Bitcoin – Why Mainstream Economists Lie About Deflation: [http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/06/11/the-economics- of-b...](http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/06/11/the-economics-of-bitcoin- why-mainstream-economist-lie-about-deflation/)

I'm not convinced either way. The main problem I have with bitcoin's supply, which it shares with many alternatives, is that supply is decreasing exponentially over time, making early adopters rich. Then again you could say the same about people who invested in google before its IPO, or even soon after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If someone figures out how to make it as easy as going online, entering your debit card number, and supplying a Bitcoin address to send to, I could see Bitcoin gaining momentum.

</comment><comment><USER11> Announce you are a bitcoin startup - get millions in VC. Foolproof. Or proof there are always fools ready to hand out money for trendy things?

<comment><USER12> Don't you mean:

Sell your company for $360M. Join the new company as CTO, and sell for $3.4B. IPO your next company. Get millions in VC. Foolproof.</comment></comment>


Swatting Could Soon Be Illegal - <AUTHOR> http://mic.com/articles/128931/swatting-could-soon-be-illegal-in-all-50-states <comment><USER2> This sounds like something that's already illegal. How would fraudulently calling law enforcement NOT be illegal?

<comment><USER3> Yeah sounds like this is about a new law that is more specific and provides harsher penalties.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I think it would fall under "making a false report" or something, in most states. In California, that's a misdemeanor that gets you up to 6 months in jail.

Edit: California has a specific anti-swatting law that's still a misdemeanor and can get you up to a year in jail and $1000 fine if nobody gets hurt, or a felony with up to a $10000 fine and up to 3 years in jail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would seem like this law will only be useful if it's also very specific about how juveniles are charged. Most of the offenders are likely to be underage.

</comment><comment><USER6> Now, how are they going to enforce it will be interesting to see. Our current telephony system looks pretty much like the first days of the internet. Most telcos will happily say "Ah, you're a service provider and send us a call from 011111111111, we'll route it right away!". Add a voip channel or two with a redirection set up and you're unlikely to ever get caught.

<comment><USER7> It's certainly hard, but apparently not impossible. Here's a story about how a particularly prolific swatter eventually got caught: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial- swatte...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatter.html)

While following the trail was hard, another big obstacle was simply to get more law enforcement agencies interested in stopping this guy. It also makes clear that an international approach is necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Swatting is far worse than merely expensive and embarrassing. The swatters know how easily US cops shoot when faced with a potentially dangerous situation. Many swatting calls mention guns, bombs, etc. I'm pretty sure at least some swatters hope their victim gets shot.

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't see the article through the ad. Seriously annoying.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is this a thing? I don't understand this world anymore.

<comment><USER10> Technology is empowering teenage stupidity. Some kids go through a bad mix of negative emotions and a naive understanding of danger. In time these issues can become resolved and the teenager becomes a responsible person. This phase though has become more dangerous with the things technology lets kids do.

In my opinion as long as teenagers are a thing this is an inescapable trait of human life. Unless you are law enforcement, try to stay out of their way and not be a target.

<comment><USER11> I fear there might also be a component wherein developing empathy for other people requires, or is at least accelerated by, seeing their faces and hearing their voices and taking censure from the people around both of you, when you hurt them.

The possibility is the primary reservation I maintain with a world full of anonymity and pseudonymity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Internet piracy is illegal and yet people are rarely apprehended for it. Obviously swatting is a much more serious crime, but it faces the same or greater enforcement issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> The attached audio is pretty good.</comment>