Computer Stupidities (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ <comment><USER3> Once a user called about a floppy drive that was eating up his floppies. Support was perplexed, so they sent someone to look into it.

It turns out that the user did not have a floppy drive, but that his machine had an open drive bay through which he inserted floppies. There was a pile of them at the bottom of the case.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this, gave me a really good laugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are funny, but I do want to make a meta point that I take extra care to not make fun of or otherwise belittle anyone who is extremely non-tech-savvy.

I try to apply incredible magnitudes of patience in these cases. Usually these people are older and may feel left behind, self-conscious, or embarrassed. I don't want to add fuel to those anxieties. I just want to help them achieve their goal.

<comment><USER6> At this point anyone who works in a office has had a computer on their desk for two or three decades. If they decided not to learn how to use it I don't have much sympathy. Much of these situations are what is called performative ignorance, where someone pretends to be ignorant in order to get someone else to work for them.

<comment><USER7> > anyone who works in a office has had a computer on their desk for two or > three decades. If they decided not to learn how to use it [...]

Knowing how to operate equipment and understanding how to troubleshoot it are very different things. It's exactly why IT support, car mechanics, or electricians still exist.

Some people think that knowing how to use a computer makes them experts, then they start spreading that "knowledge", and IT support ends up with all kinds of seemingly stupid calls where someone is (or took the word of) such an expert. Other times people just want to be helpful and play back what they heard from the IT personnel during the last case because that appeared to be similar for them, even if the issue was radically different.

<comment><USER8> > Knowing how to operate equipment and understanding how to troubleshoot it > are very different things.

While that's certainly true, there's plenty of stories out there (and I've experienced a few myself) of people who just refused to use basic common sense, reading comprehension, or understanding of physics 101 when dealing with computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm, IMHO most of the ridiculed under "paranoia" would not be ridiculed anymore post-Snowden. Government listening on all your Internet activity? Remotely destroying hardware? I mean, not only are these things possible, as we now know, they actually happen.

Joke's on us?

<comment><USER10> The very first item on the paranoia page is ridiculing someone who heard on TV that loading a random disk into their computer could open their machine to remotely located hackers. Laughable in 1985, perhaps, but this threat has existed for real since the mid 90s for almost every computer user(!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My mother in law (may she RIP) once called for help, saying her computer had stopped working. Partway through the series of troubleshooting questions, she started laughing hysterically -- having realized her hand was on a stapler next to the mouse.

<comment><USER12> Well at least she was honest and self aware. There are legions of tech support tales of users just lying their mouths off about having taken troubleshooting steps they hadn't, techs started making up workaround so users had excuses to do the thing they'd said they'd done.

"Unplug it and blow on the connector" is a classic, the point is not to blow on the connector, it's to give the user an excuse to actually check the connection / fit after they've told you they have already despite there being 99 chances out of a 100 they have not.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, I have often had the opposite problem where tech support "lies"* and claims my internet is fine when it clearly is not, trying to get me to go through pointless troubleshooting steps. Mysteriously, it starts working midway through the call.

*I used scare quotes because I strongly suspect the first line tech support don't know it's going on. I suspect someone is frantically fixing things in the background and no one has officially reported any outage.

<comment><USER7> > trying to get me to go through pointless troubleshooting steps

There is a double edged sword here. IT support people are taught (or learn quickly) not to trust the user. In the sea of users who think they know better there will be occasional user who knows what they're doing but it's hard to tell them apart. So in comes the script, applied as a matter of procedure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember one of my far relatives tried to drag document from one computer to another, by drag and keep pressing the mouse, in the meantime, he disconnected the mouse to one computer and then connected to another. It really confused him why this move didn't work at all.

<comment><USER15> Your relative was before their time: [https://www.logitech.com/en- us/product/options/page/flow-mul...](https://www.logitech.com/en- us/product/options/page/flow-multi-device-control)

<comment><USER16> As far as I know, this does not allow dragging files from one computer to another one. Logitech is not the first one to do this though, I already combined my Windows laptop and Debian tower into one triple screen computer 10 years ago, using Synergy[1] and an ethernet cable. There was no noticable delay, I miss that setup.

[1] [https://symless.com/synergy](https://symless.com/synergy)

<comment><USER7> I remember using Synergy to link my Windows desktop and my PowerMac since this was the only tool I could find to bridge the 2 platforms.

For Windows to Windows I made extensive use of Microsoft Garage's Mouse without Borders [0].

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=354...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=35460)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here is a stupidity I did back when I was a kid and just got my first computer.

I had some pre-installed games on my PC. I noticed shortcuts to games are only 1-2kb while the executable files are in MBs. Since both things have same icons, same names they must be the same thing right? I deleted the executables and copied shortcuts to where they were to save some precious space for my PC. And I didn't even test things before hand, I permanently deleted all my game exes and then tried starting running a game, which obviously failed.

Thankfully the place where my parents bought our PC reinstalled my games.

<comment><USER18> Here's one from my whole family.

We got an Amiga 500 back in the late 80's, it's all setup with word processing and spreadsheets working fine, the games were incredibly hard though. Most games had these dark patches where there were hidden pieces of floor, except sometimes they'd disappear and you would die, so for these games you had to memorize exactly where all the floor was. For some games it was mostly fine, for others it made them almost impossible. I was only 5 or 6 and it was the only games machine I'd ever played.

Fast forward a few years and the computer is no longer an expensive investment, or threat to children, or whatever it is that made my parents have it in their bedroom, so we moved it. As I picked up the monitor I accidentally pressed a button on the back the toggled the graphics mode and when the machine turned on I could suddenly see all my games in full color. In retrospect it affected many other things too.

The only saving grace during that period was that so many games were ports from the speccy or commodore 64 with a limited color pallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does it somewhere have the classic about tech support finally learning after about 45 minutes that the computer wasn't working due to the power being out? He loses it and says "Put the computer back in the box and take it back to the store because you're too fucking stupid to use a computer!"

(Of course, the tech support guy was promptly fired.)

<comment><USER16> Honestly, if it took the support guy 45 minutes to notice the cable not being plugged in...

<comment><USER20> No, it was. There was a power cut to the entire building, but the person calling thought that somehow their computer should continue working even though nothing else had power. And they only mentioned it to the support guy after 45 minutes of trying different things to make the machine boot up.

<comment><USER21> I don't see why the support guy should be fired for this. There should be limits to the depths of stupidity they should have to deal with. Computers are complicated instruments, and if someone is _that_ idiotic, maybe they shouldn't be using a computer. You can't expect everyone to be completely unflappable no matter how frustrating their job is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ah memories. Twenty years ago I worked a few cubicles away from the guy who runs this site. He had a handmade Rube Goldberg machine made from cardboard perched on the edge of his cube wall that accepted coins as payment for candy he kept in a dish.

<comment><USER23> Was it some kind of special or expensive candy? I just give candy to my colleagues for free.

<comment><USER24> They're paying for the thrill of the cardboard contraption's operation! The candy is just the denoument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since people are sharing their stories. I can add some.

I alone used to be "The IT" for a small e-commerce company, but it was young (very few people over 30).

People can just be absent minded sometimes.

One person contacted me claiming that they couldn't get new email. After going to their PC and asking her to show me, she opened her mail client and then closed a dialog asking for her new password since she has changed it.

Another had "weird mouse behaviour" she had a Mac and couldn't click on anything without a context menu popping up. I came over and assumed that the mouse had its right button stuck, but, no. A stack of papers was resting on the control key.

</comment><comment><USER26> A relative once had to send an invoice to several people.

He got he invoice by email, printed it, scanned it, and then attached the thing in a new email.

The weird part is that he's been using computers for years, even before the Internet. I can't imagine the trouble he had finding out how to scan, where to find the file and how to attach it.

Actually he still doesn't understand the difference between email and a browser.

</comment><comment><USER27> I liked this gem:

>Tech Support: "Tech support. May I help you?"

>Customer: "Yes, my microwave isn't communicating with my computer correctly anymore. I'd like to bring in my microwave and my computer."

Sadly with IoT this may be a true case nowadays.

From - [http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml](http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_misc.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER28> > My coworker (who uses Windows 95) was having trouble downloading a self- > extracting archive off the net. In an attempt to make it easier to open the > file with WinZIP, he associated *.EXE with WinZIP.

> Nothing worked after that. Every program he tried to run would load WinZIP > first. He couldn't even run REGEDIT to delete the association.

Happened to me.. :) One of those Windows 95 days!

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a very old website (still no TLS). I remember reading it first time in the end of the 90s. Even though the older anecdotes are more difficult to relate to these days, I'm glad it survived. It made my day (and lightened up my mood) during periods of depression.

</comment><comment><USER29> These are hilarious and bring back so many memories of my time in IT. But as another commenter said, it helps to be extra respectful of people who are not too tech savvy. I've had many of those examples play out and the people involved usually felt very stupid and awkward. I always tried to go to great lengths to reassure them that it has happened more times to more people than they suspect, even if it weren't true, just so they didn't feel shitty and stupid. I'd also try to tell them about the stupid things I'd done to lighten the situation which always seemed to help.

</comment><comment><USER30> Bottom of: [http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_amnesia.shtml](http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_amnesia.shtml)

That just has to be made up.

</comment><comment><USER31> I feel genuinely bad for the people caught in this transition.

<comment><USER32> Yup. You're 80. You spend your money on a modem, because some marketing guy tells you that's all you need to send e-mails. Then there's this thing in your room, you still have no idea how to send an e-mail, so you call tech support. Then suddenly _you_ are the idiot, and get ridiculed.

Reminds me a lot of how narrow-minded a lot of people are in tech. Everyone who knows a bit more than you is a wizard and everyone who knows a bit less is a moron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Had this one multiple times at my job: Do you know your email password?I'll need you to enter it when I'll finish setting this one up..Blank face...So what's the password?Emmm...Emmm..I didn't know my email had a password,I just turn on my PC and it's there...Blank face.. There's no money on this planet that could force me to do IT support,as full time job.

<comment><USER34> Doesn't sound stupid to me. Someone forgot their password since it is stored in the email client. They once went through the steps of setting up the email client or email account with a password and had the right intuition that the whole procedure is reasonably save. The email client is on autostart and looks different to how they read email on their phones. If they follow your instructions to recover the password, then that's fine.

This seems to reside in a different category than some of the other stories here in this thread. I'm trying to make this distinction since, if we're honest, the UIs that we're all building are not always as good as they could be for the common user.

Edit: Reading through some of the stories on that website I see real user issues described as stupidity:

Under "Email Magic": I actually had this emailed to me once: "Help! I can't find your email address. What is it?"

Modern email clients and web interfaces hide known email addresses and just show the name. Good to know that I typed the address correctly, but actually finding out the actual address may not be intuitive.

<comment><USER33> It wasn't the case the user forgot the password - that's normal, instead she was genuinely surprised she had one at all. As for UIs, I have to agree, a lot of the are so ridiculous..For instance JIRA, especially the settings section...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Classic website. The thing that gets me is that at this point, in 2019, there are so many users who have been using windows every day for 25 years, and have forgotten that eg Start -> All Programs exists. I truly don't understand how you can use a computer for that long and not learn basics like that.

<comment><USER7> I haven't used it this way in years. I click Start or Win key and start typing. And this basically works on any OS and the "Start equivalent" (like Spotlight on MacOS, or Dash on Ubuntu). It's far more efficient that visually scanning a list that can potentially have dozens of shortcuts in folders and subfolders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Holy crap -- Rinkworks is still up and around. I had a classmate who was obsessed with that site

</comment><comment><USER37> Ah Rinkworks...so sad it doesn't update. Like crank.net...

<comment><USER38> Still looks like it did 20 years ago when I first stumbled across it.

<comment><USER39> I thought this looked really familiar. I've definitely seen this sometime years and years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Blast from the past ^_^ I wonder if there are any new stories coming out, or if things have been prepackaged so well now that nobody is able to break them?

</comment><comment><USER41> I know those stories are supposed to be midly amusing, but they always put me into a mild state of depression.

First, most of them are probably urban legends, and I'm not too keen on them. (That's a slippery slope argument, so feel free to dismiss it, but I don't know how far 'that grandma overthere who sued to put her cat in the microwave' is from 'that pizzeria basement where people run sex rings')

Second, the overal tone of stories is "IT people who know about computer stuff" vs "clueless non-IT people who don't know about computer stuff".

Now, there is a huge source of humor and irony in people who _claim_ to be expert at something, when in reality they don't have a clue.

And sometimes, the misinterpretation of computer jargon by non-IT experts can be rather poetic. ("It said I would have 98 windows. Where are the windows ?")

But I claim, that, most of the times, in those stories, the joke should be on _us_ (IT-people), not on _them_.

Especially since those stories are from the mid-90s to early 2000s the non-IT people were not "clueless". They were _never taught_ how IT "works".

And let's face it, IT does _not_ work.

They probably had references to how things are supposed to _work_. 60s household technology. Toasters. Light bulbs. Vaccuum cleaners. Fridge. TV sets. Washing machines. Even cars.

Those things "worked". The vendor would show you the thing, you would turn around it for a while, get how it works, and go on with your life. And you would be able to explain it to you kid, and your neighboor.

And yeah, you might have no idea how your car engine worked in the details. (Although, you probably did. Your military instructors explained it to you, because your car and the jeep with which your father freed Europe worked the same.)

But you knew rather intuitively that if it started making weird noises, you would bring it to a technician who would be able to do something.

And car do not break _that_ often unless you do stupid things like running into a tree or mixing up gas, right ?

Introduce 90s computers.

You would pay good money to buy it. No one would explain it to you (because vendors were probably as clueless as you were.)

You would not be trained how to use it - cause it would change in 2 years anyway.

You would be _required_ to know how to use it, or you would start to fear loosing your job.

(Remember when we 'high-salary experts' had 'javascript fatigue' ? Don't you think everyone had some sort of 'computer-nonsense fatigue' at some point ?)

You don't have the words to talk about the things. You have no mental model about the "normal behavior". Or what made a machine "better" than another. Or what made a machine "compatible" with another.

And, let's not forget one tiny little details: THOSE THINGS BARELY WORKED AT ALL !!!!

The number of hilarious bugs, stupid behavior, counter-intuitive UX, border- line ripoff software should be humbling to us.

Anyone read "The insane are running the asylum" as a programmer and wanted to cry ?

Anyone had to explain to their father that "yeah, now that I have installed Windows 95, if you want to switch the computer off, you need to click on 'Start' first..." ?

So, yes, confused people were calling customer _support_ to try and get _support_ , because they had other things to do with their life, and for some reason, the market had decided they had to do it through one of those computer thingies that are slow, expensive, buggy and talk to me like they don't know the meaning of _words_.

In an ideal world, we would have made computers simpler. More compatible. More standards. Maybe a bit less powerful, but basically more _real-people_ friendly.

The market had no incentive for that.

But now, at least, we have trained people no to bother calling IT support anyway - because IT-support people are expensive, and it's better to have clueless minions on _that_ side of the phone to, only paid to make user waste enough time to accept that the insane behavior of the computer is actually normal, and that it's really their fault.

And, since software eats the world, people have now graciously stopped expecting _anything_ to work at all.

To paraphrase Stroustrup:

"If only my computer was as simple as a my car", one wished ! "If only using my computer was as easy as using my phone", one prayed ! "If only software was as straightforward as laundry", one lamented !

"Careful what you wish for", said the programmer.

"Your car is now a computer with wheels, that will show your speed to be `NaN mph`." "Your phone is now a pocket computer, that will let you make lousy phone calls if you're lucky, between software updates." "And your washing machine is now a computer, so now you won't know with program to use - <USER2> that's okay, you don't know at which temperature you're supposed to wash that shirt anyway. Go ask your mom."

We taught them that.

So yeah us ! Let's have some fun mocking the peons!!

Or maybe re-read 'Fondation' on our e-reader - provided the last DRM software update did not break it, of course.

<comment><USER42> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Microsoft Internet Exploiter

I would file that under technically correct.

Cool site. Reminds me of the daily wtf. Haven't visited that for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER44> Oh no! This is almost as bad a time sink as tvtropes! I haven't seen it in years and it is a shame it no longer gets updated.

<comment><USER45> According to the site, last update was in 2013, which I'd still consider "relatively recent" in terms of computers being generally available (and well on their way to being locked-down appliances, but I digress...) --- although the bulk of the content there looks to be from the early to mid 90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Father in law (verbatim quote, deadpan):

"I went on the internet, and I downloaded so fast I blew out my printer."

<comment><USER46> Oh, so that's why some surge suppressors have a phone jack!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Book-a-Minute is the best [http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/](http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/)

<comment><USER48> Even in that space, one stands out from the rest.

ANGST!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A lot of these seem fake.

<comment><USER42> I'm sure a lot of them are fake. Stories told by tech nerds huddled around the glow of a CRT to convince themselves that they're better than everyone else because they know some computer stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> computer does not turn on even connected: UPS connected to itself

</comment><comment><USER51> Mostly what I'm seeing here is tech support people who either don't explain things well, or are severely lacking in empathy.

Example:

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

I had a customer with a problem getting his mouse to work. So I tried asking him about his COM port settings and so forth.

Tech Support: "Ok, do you have a internal modem?"

Customer: "I don't know."

Tech Support: "Um...do you have a modem at all?"

Customer: "I call the Internet sometimes."

Tech Support: "Do you plug a phone line directly into the back of the computer?"

Customer: "Yes."

Tech Support: "Ok. And is this a serial mouse that isn't working?"

I explained to him what a serial mouse was, and he agreed that his mouse was a serial mouse.

Tech Support: "Ok, do you know what COM port your mouse uses?"

Customer: "No."

Tech Support: "Ok, well do you know what COM port your modem uses?"

Customer: "No."

Tech Support: "Uh, do you have any other serial devices that plug into the machine, like a graphics pad, external modem, etc?"

Customer: "I don't know."

Tech Support: "Uh. Well, I'm gonna have to guess here, but your mouse should be on COM 1, and your modem is probably set for COM 2."

Customer: "What do you mean guess? I told you everything you need to know! Now quit messing around and just tell me what I need to do to fix it!"

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

Anyone who concludes from this exchange that the customer is an idiot should NEVER do tech support.

It shouldn't take more than a couple of questions to gauge the customer's technical knowledge, and then adjust your questioning to match. For example:

Tech Support: OK, first we need to find out what kind of mouse you have. Follow the cable going from the mouse and take note of where it's plugged into the back of your computer.

Customer: OK.

Tech Support: Alright, now, you need to remember where it's plugged in because you have to plug it back in the same way, and be careful not to plug it in upside down because it won't fit that way. Now I want you to unplug it, look at the socket it was plugged into on the back of the computer, tell me whether the socket is rectangular or circular, then plug the mouse back in the same way you found it.

Customer: OK... It's rectangular

And now you know it's a serial mouse. Now you can ask things like "Do you have a phone line connected to your computer? or is it connected to a box that's connected to your computer?", etc, then lead them through looking at Trumpet Winsock configuration and COM port config and even IRQs if necessary.

How you ask your questions makes a BIG difference to how helpful the responses are likely to be. Good tech support people ask good questions. It's a skill that can and must be practiced.

<comment><USER21> >How you ask your questions makes a BIG difference to how helpful the responses are likely to be. Good tech support people ask good questions. It's a skill that can and must be practiced.

You're asking for people who are both good with computers, and good at talking to people who are clueless with computers, and very patient and empathetic on top of that. And finally, you want to pay them peanuts for this job.

Exactly how many people do you think you're going to find who are actually good at this, and want the job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The design of this website brings so many memories. Where did the old internet go?!

<comment><USER53> In this case, its right there where it's been forever. How many generations of "front end stack" have happened while this site has existed? Is there any real feature any of those could have offered to enhance it?

<comment><USER54> Server side rendering of course! I bet those amateurs are just caching that page on the file system like cavemen!

<comment><USER40> The HTML files are on the filesystem, the rendering is what turns that HTML into graphics and letters on your screen, and it happens on your computer, like god intended! ^_^

<comment><USER54> > the rendering is what turns that HTML into graphics and letters on your > screen

I use a series of -1-days in conjunction with websockets to deliver the latest hemmorhaging-edge experience, streaming the rendered byte stream straight to your monitor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hack a Tesla 3 Pwn2Own to own a Tesla 3 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/14/tesla-is-entering-the-model-3-into-pwn2own-one-of-the-worlds-toughest-hacking-contests <comment><USER2> Nice way to discard a hackable car which would diminish its sale.

<comment><USER3> Except as soon as a the issue is found it'll be patched...</comment></comment>


The Purpose of Life Is Not Happiness: It's Usefulness - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/art-of-practicality/the-purpose-of-life-is-not-happiness-its-usefulness-65064d0cdd59#.uamuz4l1r <comment><USER2> Fascinating, like this a lot, thanks for sharing</comment>


Cljsfiddle performace upgrade - <AUTHOR> http://escherize.com/2016/03/31/more-cljsfiddle-improvements/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maintainer here. Here's the link to cljsfiddle itself: [http://cljsfiddle.com](http://cljsfiddle.com)

Also it looks like the dns server hasn't updated so if that link is broken try: [http://126.96.36.199/](http://184.108.40.206/)</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best ideas for employee schwag? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have better ideas than tshirts, hoodies or Patagonia jackets? <comment><USER2> Microsoft has these cool socks. My friend from google helped another friend prep for an interview at Microsoft. When they got the job at Microsoft they gave Microsoft socks to the googler. Like I know company swag is supposed to be visible. But sometimes it's fun to have swag not many people will see.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's for employees and not potential customers/partners then you can go full functional!

Mouse pads, pens, notepads, letterhead. Coffee mugs, beer glasses, or water bottles depending on which beverage is on your perk list.

</comment><comment><USER4> The corporate swag I've kept longest was a company-logoed duffel bag. I still use it whenever I travel.

Backpacks are always handy as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Real estate.</comment>


Transitioning to Scala - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/d1818f25b2b7

<comment><USER2> I think this is a well-thought out article. We use Scala quite extensively at Hulu, and it is important to use its more powerful features only when they really make sense. You can do quite amazing things with the language, but it doesn't mean you should.

I think a classic example of going overboard with Scala is a dispatch library - even as someone who writes Scala extensively, it is incomprehensible to me. On the other hand, for certain tasks, being able to craft an internal DSL is a great thing. For a hobby project I once wrote a DSL for a simplex solver in Scala, turned out pretty neat: [https://github.com/ZenBowman/AIMA/blob/master/src/test/scala...](https://github.com/ZenBowman/AIMA/blob/master/src/test/scala/org.zenbowman.linearprogramming/LPLangTest.scala)

And then there's a great version of embedded BASIC in Scala: [https://github.com/fogus/baysick](https://github.com/fogus/baysick)

With great power comes great responsibility, and it is important to remember the Perlis rule: Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article.

Reminds me of the fact that though Thoughtworks has Scala listed as a language to adopt, they narrow it down to "the good parts": [http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and- frameworks...](http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and- frameworks/257)

I really wish the language was less like C++ in that you need to know 1000 things to read other people's code. But other than that, a really wild future for Scala.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article. I'm puzzled by one example, though. When the author says he favors the signature:

        def reverse[A]: List[A] => List[A]

while Tony Morris would argue for:

        def <-:[A, B](f: A => B): List[A] => List[B]

I'm puzzled. They are not two different styles of writing the type signature for the same function! You can tell at a glance that the type signature for "<-" allows functions more general than "reverse". So he is not talking about the same function.

Or did I misunderstand something?

<comment><USER5> Good point! I should have clarified that example, I didn't make it clear enough that I wasn't comparing apples to apples. Both are examples from a blog post of his and I didn't want to rewrite either, more or less point out that "he likes functions that look like this" and "he doesn't like functions that look like this" while I had the opposite preference. I guess the spirit is that un-opinionated languages can always benefit from a good debate about style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > That's the beauty of Scala. Tony is right. I am right. There's no wrong, > there's simply a matter of personal and team preference.

That's not really a good thing; at least not for maintainability. You have to learn a new grammar for every codebase.

<comment><USER5> Valid point and one I've thought a lot about, especially before pitching Scala.

IMO, most non-trivial codebases require learning new grammar. I spent a few years working in Capital Markets and those guys were hacking together their own DSLs in Java for foreign exchange trades, etc. Looked nothing like Java. Libraries like that are almost guaranteed to be written/rewritten in Scala as more banks adopt it. Grammar is as much a business domain concept than a programming language concept, so cool that Scala supports different lingos so well. Hopefully in the future we won't see as many poor workarounds for language inflexibility, Ie, all the horrible duck programming done by IBM with WebSphere Commerce.

Grammar aside Walmart is a different beast than most apps. Handling huge spikes in traffic (Ie, Black Friday) was more a factor than new hires learning new grammar. We also had to handle massive amounts of data for catalog processing with Akka which wound up nearly being a DSL in itself. Pairing and a solid dev process is so important. That said if I worked on a different app with different reqs, less spikes in traffic, more developer turnover, etc, I may have used something else. Lots of factors to consider.

Grammar is definitely something to watch with open source Scala projects though. We'll see if a more canonical lingo develops over time.

<comment><USER6> Speaking of grammar: "i.e." means "that is" and "e.g." means "for example".

Sorry, it really bugs me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Groupon Editorial Manual - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/View?id=dmv9rbh_2g92x4scj

<comment><USER2> It's pretty remarkable to see something non-technical (e.g. broadly- appealing/humorous marketing) put into a framework like this.

I just wonder if it dilutes the value a little bit. I've always enjoyed the jokes in their emails, but now that their cookie-cutter nature has been revealed, I might look at them differently.

<comment><USER3> Essentially all large publishers have official internal standards to put their corporate voice (and use of English -- or whatever) somewhere where it can be standardized, taught, and reproduced effectively. The New York Times Manual of Style, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to see Trader Joe's stylesheet/writing manual. You can find a lot of similarities in Trader Joe's quarterly newsletter to Groupon's tounge in cheek writing. I have always thought that Trader Joe's pioneered this sort of marketing. In fact, if you read their newsletters, you'll also see cute illustrations of animals posing questions or asides.

For example: "Much as Hemingway captured the spirit of Paris in the 20's, Trader Joe's Pork Roast Florentine captures the spirit of, well, roast pork on your dining table. (You didn't think we'd compare ourselves to Hemingway, did you?)"

[http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/flyers/state- flyers/az_flyer.p...](http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/flyers/state- flyers/az_flyer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> As an enthusiast of pagan mythology, I am offended by their calling Zeus a Roman god.

<comment><USER6> Etymologically, "Jupiter" is a contraction of "Zeus pater", but still, it itched my concealed mythological smugness as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thesaurus is hilarious. Definitely worth a look - this should be compiled or something.

<http://docs.google.com/View?id=dmv9rbh_9f7rf2vfs>

<comment><USER8> Variety is proud enough of their editorial "slanguage" to share it with the rest of the world: <http://www.variety.com/static-pages/slanguage-dictionary/>

<comment><USER9> It's a shame that this list doesn't properly differentiate between the terms they claim to have coined, and all the rest.

Some are specifically highlighted as being coined or not coined by Variety, and the rest are just left ambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have confirmed with a friend who works at Groupon as an editor that this is legitimate, also that it getting out isn't really a big deal.

This is a cute look into a fun company.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is just a good guide for people on the internet in general

</comment><comment><USER12> Groupon is bordering on spam.</comment>


Aaron Swartz: Unequal Justice for Web Activists vs Health Care Executives - <AUTHOR> http://hcrenewal.blogspot.ca/2013/01/the-tragic-case-of-aaron-swartz-unequal.html

<comment><USER2> And, of course, none of those bankers are in jail, where they should be rotting.

Even if a company is "too big to fail", its executives are NOT "too important to jail"!

</comment><comment><USER3> To put this in perspective, the people who have received similar sentences to what Aaron was facing were folks such as John Rigas (Adelphia), Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom), Ken Lay (Enron), or Michael Milken. Folks who maliciously defrauded thousands of people out of totals of billions of dollars, for their own financial benefit.

<comment><USER4> No, the _maximum_ sentence under the Constitution and the statute was 35 years. The sentence he was likely to receive was 6 months if he took the plea bargain (and there are rumors that a no-jail plea was considered), or less than a year if he went to trial and was convicted.

There's a huge difference between the statutory maximum sentence and the sentence people actually receive. Shoplifting is petty theft and in almost all states that's punishable by up to a year in jail, but most first-time offenders get off with community service.

Aaron was charged with wire fraud, which covers crimes ranging from skimming a few bucks off a credit card reader to trying to take down the stock market as a whole. The _maximum_ sentence Aaron faced was 35 years, but there was no way that any judge would ever sentence him to that.

In fact, the United States Sentencing Guidelines [1] were introduced about 20 years ago to make sure that judges were issuing sentences that were proportional to the crime committed. In short, the severity of crimes is ranked on a scale from 1 to 40+, and the criminal history of the defendant (i.e., how many prior convictions) is rated from 1 to 5. From those numbers, a sentencing range is calculated.

Here, the crimes Aaron was charged with are a severity of 7 (of 40) and he has no prior convictions (so he's a criminal history of 1). On the big old matrix [2], that's a sentencing rage of 0-6 months. Even if you assume he picks up a few more points along the way, he'd have been looking at 4-10 months. Judges can only exceed the Guidelines in extreme cases and most sentences higher than the Guidelines are struck down on appeal.

For the gory details, see here [3] where the full Sentencing Guidelines analysis is performed.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentencin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentencing_Guidelines) [2] [http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2012_Guidelines/Manual_HTML/5...](http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2012_Guidelines/Manual_HTML/5a_SenTab.htm) [3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5063435>

<comment><USER3> The fact that Aaron faced jail time that was appropriate only for people who maliciously defrauded others to the tune of billions of dollars for personal benefit is the problem. The fact that the only way to receive a fair sentence was to give up the right to a trial is the problem.

If the outcome of a trial was potentially 6 months in prison then the likelihood he would endure a trial would be far, far higher.

Instead the criminal justice system was abused, and a disproportionate punishment was put on the table to scare Aaron (as it has been used to scare so many other defendants) into taking a plea bargain and give up on having his day in court.

That's a perversion of justice and something that we should in no way be comfortable with.

<comment><USER4> Any attorney Aaron hired would be able to read the sentencing guidelines manual (it's published in a convenient softcover version that any federal criminal attorney has on his/her desk) and inform Aaron that the maximum realistic sentence was less than a year, and that as long as the sentence was on "Zone A" on the chart I provided, the judge would be free to give probation with zero jail time.

The maximum sentence was 35 years because that's the maximum penalty for all forms of wire fraud. The prosecutor is constitutionally required to inform the defendant of the maximum sentence. If you ever sit in on a plea colloquy you'll hear the prosecutor tell the defendant the maximum sentence and the defendant acknowledge the maximum, even if everybody knows that the sentence will be time served, or probation, or just a fine/restitution.

I don't know why Aaron's lawyer dropped the ball on this.

<comment><USER5> _> I don't know why Aaron's lawyer dropped the ball on this._

We don't know he did.

From his (and Lessig's, who was also involved) statements, it looks like he got the feeling that Heymann and Ortiz were not bluffing, that they wanted to make an example out of Aaron and lock him up for real. We can only second- guess their motives (and many have done just that, in the last four days), but from what it has emerged until now, there was a real sense in Aaron's legal team that the prosecution was bent on throwing him in jail, even just for one day, and would have had it from any judge in the circuit. For sure, there was no incentive for the prosecution to be lenient: no loot to recover, no co- conspirators to turn, no scandal to keep quiet, nothing.

I guess we'll know a bit more about all this in a year or two, when investigative books will come out and people in the US Attorney office will start unbuttoning, or maybe after the next Presidential cycle if there is a party switch at the top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hard to give this article the benefit of the doubt when it comes to get details and particulars right with this line:

> _Aaron Swartz was a prodigy who developed the RSS system for disseminating > updates on web-site contents_

He worked on the spec at a young age. But he did not develop the system.</comment>


Ask HN: Are There GPL-Like Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, etc for Webapps? - <AUTHOR> If I wanted to release a software package, I can use the MIT/BSD/GPL/some FLOSS license with a strong warranty disclaimer in it to cover my butt from legal problems. Is there a similar solution for web applications? It seems that as soon as I accept any data from the user I have to worry about data security regulations, privacy laws like CA's Consumer Privacy Act or GPDR in europe, child protection laws like COPPA, DMCA if I want user submitted content, etc. etc.<p>I'm not going to have a lawyer draft legal documents for each side project I want to put up. Googling shows a bunch of options, I can't tell which templates are any good for protecting me against liability. My greatest fear is some legal troll taking everything I own because of some side project. Any thoughts/advice? <comment><USER2> I don't have an answer, except for "accept as little data as possible, avoid having centralized control". Basically decentralize all the things, especially control. It is unlikely that empty words will help you if taking down your site could stop something illegal from happening.

Due to this I disabled comments on all my websites, because I no longer had the time to moderate them. My GNU social instance only shows others the content I explicitly like or re-share — that's active moderation with a white- list.

If unsure, don't run the service. Just provide the tools others could use to run it and allow the others to accept money to fund their due dilligence.

I'm working on Freenet, and the kind of change I would reject off-hand is one which would give me more power. If some sort of control is needed, find a way to implement it without getting power yourself.

Besides: From your title I expected to see a question about copyleft — there the answer is: Use the AGPL which requires people who use your code to provide the code to all their users.</comment>


Does anybody knows how to search for HTML-ENTITIES? - <AUTHOR>

Hello people. Sorry is this too dumb a question. I'm trying to find information about an encoding in PHP that can be used with mbstring related functions. The thing is, it seems ALL search engines act as if the hyphen doesn't exists.
I tried Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing, similar results in all of them.
PHP site's search is powered by Google. Too bad. If you search for HTML-ENTITIES, found here:
http://ar2.php.net/manual/en/mbstring.supported-encodings.php
In the first page of results that page is not listed. In the second page you start to get pages in other languages (like, you know, Japanese, or German). Shame on you, php.net.
So, does anybody knows if there's a programmer-friendly setting or engine around?
Thanks in advance.
P.S.: Again, sorry if this a stupid question. But I think it's even more stupid spending more than 2 minutes trying to find out how to do a search. <comment><USER2> Are you asking for an explanation of HTML entities, or a listing of HTML entities that browsers recognize, or some third thing I cannot imagine?

Also, now that (new) Web pages are nearly all UTF-8 encoded, HTML entities are no longer used, sometimes even deprecated in favor of Unicode plain-text. The advantages are smaller size, easier editing, and a solution to the question about which browsers support which entities.

> But I think it's even more stupid spending more than 2 minutes trying to > find out how to do a search.

So you think it should be someone else's two minutes? But seriously, ask yourself if you should even be considering using entities in 2014. Doesn't your HTML development environment support UTF-8?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

HTML-ENTITIES is an accepted value in the list of accepted encodings for mbstring related functions in PHP; some of the functions accept an encoding on one parameter or two whenever there is some sort of conversion (from one encoding to another).

I am trying to find some examples online (or in the php.net site) and explanation of its usage.

> Also, now that (new) Web pages are nearly all UTF-8 encoded, HTML entities > are no longer used

I'm totally aware of UTF-8 and encodings; I'm responsible for fixing an incredible amount of encoding related bugs in the site.

But I'm working on a fairly large site, that sends the info to the browser in ISO-8859-1 (Can you feel my pain now??? :P ) and there's no way I can change that (at least not in one go). Legacy code and all that stuff. I cannot go to my boss and tell him "We need to change the whole encoding of the site" when all that he wants is this bug fixed, pronto.

I found a bug where some chars (Hungarian, in this case) are not properly shown in the page: ę >> &#amp;#281;

To add insult to injury, the strings are being truncated in some cases, so you could end up with Ksi&#amp;#2...

Finally, I don't think it should be someone else's 2 minutes: I was just asking if somebody knows the answer to that.

I hope this clarifies the matter, feel free to ask anything else that you think would help (I reckon I didn't put much information up front).

Also, I apologize if some of my sentences are difficult to understand; I'm not a native English speaker.

<comment><USER2> > I am trying to find some examples online (or in the php.net site) and > explanation of its usage.

There are any number of examples of entities, and lists of them. They are a terrible hassle because not all browsers understand the same ones or treat them the same.

> I'm responsible for fixing an incredible amount of encoding related bugs in > the site.

That should be fun. :) There will be times then you won't be able to decide whether you're fixing an error or introducing one.

> I found a bug where some chars (Hungarian, in this case) are not properly > shown in the page: ę >> &#amp;#281;

The reason should be obvious -- the original code needed to be preserved unchanged, but a post-processor escaped the ampersand -- and incorrectly as well. I wish there were some fast and easy rules, preferably scriptable, but the examples you show are too varied, as though there was more than one cook in the kitchen (an English idiom).

I still think you should simply take out entities wherever you can and use ordinary Unicode characters. That also solves the problem of figuring out what prior editors had in mind -- assuming the resulting spelling is unambiguous. But you can also write regular expressions to solve most of the syntactically correct cases, including:

&(string);

\-- and --

&#(number);

The first is obviously more difficult because you have to create an associative array (what Python calls a dictionary) to do the translations. The second case is easier, and I have seen example where the enclosed number was a normal Unicode code point, or a sequence of two.

Here is a big list of entities:

[http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref](http://dev.w3.org/html5/html- author/charref)

If you hover over each entry, the equivalent Unicode is given, so it seems multiple forms are embedded in the page. You could scrape the page and create a master list / translation table.

The final problem is that you will need to establish which encoding each page has, and don't mix encodings. From your comments, some pages are UTF-8 and some ISO-8859-1, and those two are obviously incompatible.

> Also, I apologize if some of my sentences are difficult to understand; I'm > not a native English speaker.

As usual in cases like this (in my experience), your prose is better than that of many native English speakers.

Sok szerencsét!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Say Yes or No? - <AUTHOR>

We are RoR team with 4+ years expertise.We get projects through an intermediary. Every project we work on is brought by him. Few days back he spoke to us that the client is coming to visit the team and he wants to introduce my team as his company. The only benefit we get from this is that he has promised more projects in future.How do you think we should react to this? <comment><USER2> Personally, I like simple things. Like my life; I like to keep that simple. I try not to lie or mislead people because I found that that leads to no end of complications and painful situations.

If I were in your place (from what you have said), I would not agree to misrepresent your relationship with this person and furthermore I would seriously reconsider whether I would want to continue to deal with someone who is willing to do this. It would be hard to believe that I was not being mislead by him. A reputation is easy to lose and hard to recover.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get all the people saying "never lie" and what-not, and by and large I agree. But in this case, I'm not sure it _is_ much of a lie. If you subcontract through this person, and through him only, and aren't making any effort to do independent work, you are effectively part of his company. OK, you can argue about the semantics of what words mean, but that's all you'd be doing.

In this world, it's not uncommon for people to present sub-contractors in this light. I personally don't think this is the optimal setup, and if I were in your shoes I'd not want all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. But as long as things are what they are, I don't see much harm in going along with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even I dont see any harm in this. As developers it gives us few advantages

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least in the US, you would be giving him the right to commit your company to legal obligations by making a representation like this to the client. Check out the law of agency.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency)

</comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like it _is_ his company.

</comment><comment><USER6> Allowing him to present your team as his company puts him in control with the client: he'll get more credibility with the client and he will probably be the main communication conduit with the client. If it were me I wouldn't do it: the same way he is misrepresenting himself in front of the client he could be misrepresenting the client's wishes in front of you. From what you wrote it's seems pretty clear that he sees a clear distinction between his interests and your team's interests and I'm pretty sure he'll be looking after his interests primarily.

Let's say you agree to his wish. What's in it for you? A promise for more projects in the future? Maybe, as long as you agree to present yourselves as his company. The only reason I see why you would agree to his wish is fear (of loss) and there's something I learned with great pain: when I act out of fear, I end up regretting it.

Then there's the fact that by agreeing with his wish you would essentially be lying. I read an essay on NH a couple of months back about an entrepreneur that had a golden rule: never lie! His reason for adopting this rule was that by lying you are telling your brain that things are different than they are in reality and so your brain starts operating with false assumptions and soon enough your thought patterns adapt to the lies and you disconnect from reality in various ways. After the disconnect occurs your brain cannot offer you solutions to the problems you face in reality because it has accepted the fake reality you've presented to it (the one created by the lies). That's it in a gist. Here's the link[0].

Best of luck!

[0] [http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/the-surprisingly- la...](http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/the-surprisingly-large-cost- of-telling-small-lies/)

<comment><USER3> _Allowing him to present your team as his company puts him in control with the client <snip> ... he will probably be the main communication conduit with the client._

That's probably the case anyway. Client A hires Agency Z to do project Q, then Agency Z subcontracts (some or all) of the work to Team D. Agency Z is always going to be the primary interface to the Client anyway in a situation like that. If he's got the pipeline and can bring work in, and Team D doesn't have the sales/marketing mojo to bring in work on their own, they might as well just go along with it.

That said, I'd encourage them to look for ways to break their strict dependence on this one intermediary... I've seen Bad Things happen when a company overly depends on one customer and then that customer goes away for whatever reason. Building a sales funnel and getting deals takes time, especially starting from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm assuming the reason he does this is because he is either skimming money off the top beyond what you've agreed with, and/or he is building 'his' portfolio with intention of hiring more teams. Either way this is a bad long term proposition for you.

If you need the money now, you can say YES but eventually you will have to either replace this guy or look for projects yourself.

It sounds like he's getting paid by the client first and then he'll pay you? If this has been the arrangement in the past and he paid as agreed, maybe. But if this is a bigger project, as the client wants to visit, you should hammer an agreement to get paid promptly in stages. You don't want this risk of him simply running off with a big payday.

<comment><USER8> If he wants his client to _meet_ the development team it almost certainly means the exact opposite: he's pushing for larger agency deals with clients offering projects big and complex enough for the client to want some line of communication with the rest of the dev team, and trusts the dev team isn't going to cut him out of the loop altogether.

A guy that brings you random spec work that includes you as "his company" in his pitch is a lot less likely to ditch you than a guy that brings you random spec work who represents himself as a one-man band whilst subcontracting the work to you, or for that matter a regular small business client contracting with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty standard way of working in many other industries. For example when the cable person comes to install your service a good proportion of them are self employed contractors branded as the cable company being paid a fixed fee for every install they complete. The only dubious part of what you have described is how the other party has communicated this, should have really agreed these terms at the beginning of the relationship.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why operate under a False Flag?

Sadly, the intermediary's request shows his true colors. Suggest you make it a top priority to find a new Strategic Partner/Rain Maker/Business Development executive to represent your team. Frankly, this could be a great opportunity to up your game. Adios Intermediary!

<comment><USER11> Or, if he's been doing a good job at it, make it official.

<comment><AUTHOR> Waste of money

<comment><USER10> Every successful business model (even consulting) builds in client acquisition costs. How is your intermediary compensated now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's funny that no one mentioned the following:

This guy is going to lie to his client and wants you to lie too, but you feel like you can trust him (to provide you with more work).

</comment><comment><USER13> In the future contract dispute, how will you explain lying to the customer? IANAL, but it's usually not legal to lie so blatantly about business relationships.

You are his partner.

</comment><comment><USER14> Say you're strategic partners, and you specialize in RoR development, and have a business relationship.

</comment><comment><USER15> He may have already been presenting you that way, without your knowledge or consent.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, We know he is doing that. But unable to do anything

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> NO. Imagine how betrayed the client is going to be when, not if, but when the client finds out he's been lied to. All it takes is one lie to set up an atmosphere of distrust.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the term artificial-intelligence drive you up the wall? - <AUTHOR> This might be unpopular. There is no such thing as AI, there's only machine learning. Can intelligence even be artificial? So much misuse of this term. <comment><USER2> _There is no such thing as AI, there 's only machine learning_

That's a pretty bold assertion given that the field of AI has a history[1][2][3] stretching back 60 some odd years. What's your basis for making the claim that there is "no such thing as AI"? And for that matter, why would you make a bright-line distinction between "machine learning" and AI in the first place? Most people consider ML a subset of the broader AI rubric, meaning ML _is_ AI.

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence)

[3]: [https://aitopics.org/misc/brief- history](https://aitopics.org/misc/brief-history)

<comment><USER3> > What's your basis for making the claim that there is "no such thing as AI"?

Intelligence created by the man (or a group of) is not artificial intelligence, is human intelligence in a canvas. It might be books, paintings or code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's the same thing as saying "reverse racism". Intelligence is all the same, irrelevant of where it comes from or who has it.

It's just another example of humans elevating themselves above the, so far, non-sentient, intelligences in the world.

Yeah currently nothing we have encountered is as intelligence as us, so I'd say yeah we haven't created anything that mimics human level intelligence or sentience yet, so yeah everything thus far has been an artificial attempt at some aspect of human intelligence, but eventually we will create something intelligent, and it won't be "artificial" or mimicking intelligence, but it will be an independent source of sentience and intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Can intelligence even be artificial?

Why don't I just answer "yes" and then you can stop worrying about it?

<comment><USER3> You could create a bot to answer this kind of question. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have "natural" intelligence, intelligence that arose from natural processes. Artificial intelligence is intelligence we produced. What is so confusing?

</comment><comment><USER7> > Can intelligence even be artificial?

Well, yes. "Artificial" first and foremost means "man-made". The point of terming intelligence as artificial is to explicitly differentiate between the intelligence/cognitive modules developed over millennia of natural evolution and, well, man-made attempts at mimicking this.

Moreover, as another comment mentions, ML is a subset of AI.

The term "Artificial intelligence" is not what drives people up a wall. It's actually the fact that it is _sold_ as capable of more than reality is what angers people.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yea! And while we're at it, I'm livid that we're still calling them REfrigerators! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

<comment><USER9> Whhhoooaaa, like, mind blown man! I'm fully woke now and will never look at that silver box in my kitchen the same!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well ... if you're going there ... there's no machine "learning" either. It's just a clever kind of numeric optimization. It's nothing like human learning, which is incredibly adaptable. No comparison.

</comment><comment><USER11> Every AI engineer is well aware of the bad taste of the name. AI is just advanced technology. Either search, dynamic problems, advanced algorithms or linear algebra used on generic problems. As soon as a formerly AI field becomes main stream it is not under the AI umbrella anymore. Such as search, backtracking, game strategy, planning, bignum arithmetic, symbolic interpretation, ...

Verbatim interpretation of AI has nothing to do with the field of AI, only with science fiction.

</comment><comment><USER12> The way you write "artificial-intelligence" with an hyphen drives me up the wall, if that helps.

</comment><comment><USER13> Artificial as opposed to natural, doesn't mean it would not be as real as ours.</comment>


Girl Talk and why your company should give away something for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.fuzedmarketing.com/marketing/how-to-improve-your-business-with-a-free-product/

<comment><USER2> The example is misleading. Girl Talk is unable to sell his music beacause clearing that quantity of samples would be obviously hard. Also he is a great mashup producer if you are into that genre.

</comment><comment><USER3> _4\. By giving away a free valuable product, you create an imbalance in the relationship between the business and customer. The customer now feels indebted to you._

Works sometimes. But other times it creates an expectation of "free" that doesn't always extend to the larger sphere.

First impressions count for a lot, so it's not always easy to decide whether to give away a mediocre product for free, or to wait until you have something you think people will pay for.

We're running into this right now at the start-up I work for. It's a bit of a challenge to convince people that we are justified in the decision to charge money for this product we previously gave away for "free".

<comment><USER4> Yes, you can't sell something people won't buy anyway. We raised our prices a year back with a little warning, and almost no complaints, on a product that we felt was worth more to the customer than they were initially paying. It was a really good decision as it's not only increased our bottom line but led to less customers paying little and expecting a lot (and much less support to deal with).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He did not give his product away for free. He charges decent money (probably hundreds of dollars an hour) for the shows I imagine, judging from the picture it looks like he puts in quite a performance.

The free music files are just marketing to get people to come to the shows. They are adverts. Of course they are free.

This is the way the entire music industry has run for years now. The part of it that matters anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that the idea of giving away something for free as a business plan will only work in music and other verticals which do not require you to provide support for the something. This has been a key point in the recent articles on the pitfalls of Freemium.

<comment><USER7> Disagree for the most part. There's always _something_ that can be given away for free: blog posts, free trials that lack support and require a paid upgrade for it (e.g. Magento), ebooks, contest giveaways, etc. If you can't give something away for free as part of your marketing, you're probably not thinking creatively enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "How did he do it? By giving away his work for FREE"

That has less to do with it than the fact he is really, really good at what he does.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article and all, but why has he tagged it "Wedding Day Diamonds" at the bottom?

<comment><USER10> "Wedding Day Diamonds gives away pop and cookies."</comment></comment>


Welcome to the new Police.uk website - <AUTHOR> http://police.uk/news/welcome/

<comment><USER2> Simple, clean and to the point. Exactly what a emergency service website needs to be.</comment>


How to re-enable java in safari if you really need - <AUTHOR> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5559

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't use my internet banking without java</comment>


The 12 Do's and Don'ts of Web Design - <AUTHOR> https://theblog.adobe.com/12-dos-donts-web-design-2/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if Adobe is in a position to be giving advice on web design, especially when they seem to ignore their own advice.

One of their Don'ts is to avoid generic photos of people, yet the same post has a generic photo of a guy using a computer. That adds absolutely no value and just makes for a heavier payload. Not every blog post needs to have a big stupid header image. Stop pulling that manipulative crap.

"Don't show automatic pop-ups too early" should be "Don't show automatic pop- ups". They're always annoying. If you want to get users to sign up to your newsletter or whatever, you can just provide a link at the end. This is something that this blog got right.

"Don't use too many typefaces" should be "Don't use custom typefaces". Your website is not special. There's certainly exceptions to this, but in general I'd say it's better to completely avoid custom typefaces. This also has the added benefit of allowing your site to load faster.

Not gonna go over each individual point. But one extra criticism of the blog itself: holy crap, why is there this stupid fixation of having a huge fixed header that scrolls along with you? That header is gigantic and serves no purpose, as I can scroll to the top just fine.

Another point: your blog has absolutely terrible accessibility. I can't navigate it with my keyboard. You specifically removed outlines on focused links, effectively killing keyboard navigation. This is literally prioritizing the designer's fantasies over the user's needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> > 5\. Don't show automatic pop-ups too early

How about don't show automatic pop-ups at all?

These things have become a plague on the modern web. I'm so fucking sick of every single website pestering me to sign up for their newsletter. No, I don't want your newsletter. I want to read your article and move on. I'm probably never coming back to your site anyway. And no, I'm not turning off adblock either. So blocking me from entering your site because I'm running an adblocker means I will most certainly _never_ whitelist your site, I will leave and never come back, and no matter what your content is, you're never getting ad revenue from me.

TL;DR: Stop with the pop-ups. Period.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Don't show automatic pop-ups too early

Imo, showing popups at all is a design sin. It wasn't cool in the 90s when it happened with separate browser windows, and it isn't cool now embedded in your page.

<comment><USER5> It's actually worse now because there's no easy way to block them!

<comment><USER6> NoScript does wonders. Some might say this isn't easy, as it will break some sites, but in my experience you can get pretty far with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 13/ make sure your webpage doesn't depend on Javascript just to display an article and its title, like 99% of news websites and blogs today...

14/ avoid sticky headers,like this page has, that take 1/8 of the screen real estate on a laptop and even worse on mobile.

15/ A reader should be able to increase/decrease the size of the text without destroying your layout.

16/ Stick to simple "websafe" fonts for the body of your articles. Some fancy fonts that look good on your MAC look really bad on Windows.

17/ the most horrible thing designers do: light text on white background. Please stop. Just because it looks good on your calibrated $2000 screen doesn't mean it will on a $250 laptop with limited contrast settings.

<comment><USER8> 14a/ avoid sticky footers too, like that page has

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, there's some nice advice here. Okay, it's not exactly revolutionary, and most web designers should probably be aware of everything on the list already, but in a world where certain bad design ideas seem to be making a comeback, it's a nice refresher none the less.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty good stuff. My wife is an Art Professor who's trying to learn basic web-design so she is eligible to teach it to Art students. The schools mostly use Dream Weaver and Muse (both from Adobe) and to be honest I think its a good idea (Though I've convinced her that the first few weeks they should go through codecademy's HTML lessons so they at least have an _idea_ about how HTML and CSS works).

I feel like web design is mostly a solved problem. These do's and don'ts highlight the fact that we know what the heck a web site should do, and there's so much crappy experiments to try and make it more that what it is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for innovation, but sometimes I enjoy turning javaScript off and seeing how much easier life is by being able to just read the text without being assaulted by shitty attention grabbing cruft. If you're a web dev, I suggest you spend an afternoon each week turning off JS and seeing what it's like.

</comment><comment><USER11> The creators of Flash have some nerve running that article :-)

<comment><USER12> FutureWave and Macromedia created Flash

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about 'dont ask for permissions to send push notifications to my browser' for everyone who gets to your page? or 'Dont overlay fixed ads on the screen'.

It used to be that I only had to clear one popup, now every news site its ok, I do want to continue my life in agony without your newsletter, close this ad overlay so I can see the content, no don't want you pushing notifications to my browser". Skip!

Can I disable that little popup in Chrome asking if I want to allow it?

</comment><comment><USER14> Is u/babich a bot? I don't understand the possible purpose of posting so many low quality articles about design that usually don't generate any discussion.

<comment><USER15> The author of the article is named Nick Babich - looking at his past submissions, it looks like he's just sharing his own articles here

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ...from the people who brought you Flash. And continue to bring you Dreamweaver. And so so many other web atrocities.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1) don't use flash 2) don't use coldfusion 3) don't ????

</comment><comment><USER18> At least the page is designed reasonably so the reader view can strip all their crap and show just the story.</comment>


Scale Fail (part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/441790/ <comment><USER3> The bit about metrics really rang true.

At 1 company, we had a situation where 2 of the 3 webservers were out of service for various reasons. I knew from past experience that even a single web server should have a load less than 1 with all our traffic. The others were just there in case they went down. (Like they did!) In the middle of that, the 1 working server suddenly starts spiking load to 40 and misbehaving.

There was a really smart new guy there that was usually right. But this time, he said there was no way 1 server could handle our traffic and that was the problem. He refused to listen to reason and eventually I gave up and started working on the problem alone. I eventually found the code that was going crazy and fixed it... And voila. 0.4 load.

The point is that people get things in their head that 'have' to be true, but they aren't necessarily. He assumed that the existence of 3 webservers meant we had that much load, but it was just for redundancy. If I had had metrics to prove my case, it would have gone a lot smoother... But instead I just had my experience.

<comment><USER4> I think having numbers to prove your case is generally a good way to approach things. If you can get objective numbers that really show and prove what you are talking about, you can swing most people your way.

If not, they are probably not the best of people to work with.

<comment><USER3> I want to reiterate that the guy was really good at his job. One of the best people I've ever worked with. He was generally pretty easy to get along with. But my lack of hard data meant I couldn't sway him on that problem, no matter how right I was.

That company had a history of not having metrics to work with. Every new sysadmin or db admin came in and asked for metrics and we'd shrug and laugh nervously. (I mean, there was a reason why hired so many new ones!)

<comment><USER4> Oh, no, heard you very loud and clear. Was just reinforcing your anecdote by saying that it's applicable to a lot more than just scaling apps. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a phenomenal article. After wading through bullshit "X HTTP server beats Y HTTP server at serving 40 bytes of static content!!!" articles this is a breath of fresh air. This is clearly written by someone working in the real world.

<comment><USER6> LWN is pretty great, I'm quite happy I bought a subscription. Very few other publications will have long articles with diagrams explaining a kernel memory corruption bug a day after it happens.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, I'd consider getting a subscription just for this:

 _"When I was at Amazon, we used a squid reverse proxy ..."_

 _"Dan, you were an ad sales manager at Amazon."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It continues to surprise me how much IT/sysadmin work is done by heuristic rather than actual measurements.

Applications slow? -> Add RAM

Database is slow? -> must be network/load

Service failures? -> reboot

It becomes very problematic in large IT organizations. Teams will play hot potato with issues, and all use excuses. Desktop support will blame the DB team, DB will blame the server team, then they all blame the network. All the while no one is actually measuring anything.

<comment><USER9> Surprisingly almost no one cares about performance. When was the last time you have seen a webframework or a database that routinely does performance benchmarks at each iteration? In fact, I don't know any. I was very impressed with the continuous measurements that PyPy does.

<comment><USER10> <http://django-speedcenter.djangozoom.net/>

<comment><USER11> The site is great, but ironically a bit slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Comments > the article:

 _So to avoid these ends, let's avoid these beginnings: avoid multi-threading. Use single-threaded programs, which are easier to design, write, and debug than their shared-memory counterparts. Instead, use multiple processes to extract concurrency from the hardware. Choose a communication medium that works just as well on a single machine as it does between machines, and make sure the individual processes comprising the system are blind to the difference. This way, deployment becomes flexible and scaling becomes simpler. Because communication between processes by necessity has to be explicitly designed and specified, modularity almost happens by itself._

<comment><USER13> "Use single-threaded programs, which are easier to design, write, and debug than their shared-memory counterparts."

Not really. Well, only true in simple cases. Let's say I have a 16-core box and I want to crunch some data using all the cores. What's easier, clojure with a single shared memory data structure that collects that stats, or a multi-process system where we not only have to manage multiple application processes, we also have to use something like redis to hold the shared state?

<comment><USER14> Here is a link to the commenter's full comment: <http://lwn.net/Articles/441867/>

He's precisely considering your 16-core case. Now think about what happens when your dataset grows and you need more cores than you can reasonably fit in a single machine.

<comment><USER13> It's not when, it's if, and often you know it won't happen. Being a good engineer requires understanding when k use which model. acting as if there aren't a lot of cases where singel process, shred memory, concurrency is the only good choice for almost all cases is wrong

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What I do appreciate about this article is that it doesn't just give anecdotes, but actually quantifies and explains the problems. In fact it even explains why not to use anecdotes!

Seems like most of the tips here could be applied to all sort of problems, not just scalability, and I think that's probably what the author was going for. To show that scalability isn't some special problem that needs special solutions, but that if you think hard about it, and use data to back up your findings, then it's just like any other problem you want to solve.

Can't wait for part 2.

<comment><USER16> Part 2 is already available - see <http://lwn.net/Articles/443775/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does everyone here gather and analyze their metrics? What do you have always deployed and what do you use when shit hits the fan?

[Edit for typo]

<comment><USER18> <rant> The "standard" ways are all very outdated, ugly, unscalable, and brain dead in implementation. nagios, cacti, munin, ganglia, ... -- all crap. </rant>

People end up writing their own [1]. They rarely open source their custom monitoring infrastructure. Sometimes a private monitoring system gets open sourced, but then you see it has complex dependencies. The complexity of monitoring blocks wide-scale deployment. People stick with 15 year old, simple, dumb, solutions.

I'm working on making a new distributed monitoring/alerting/trending/stats framework/service, but it's slow going. One weekend per month of free time doesn't exactly yield the mindset to get into hardcore systems hacking flows [2].

[1]: [http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/rainbird-realtime- analyt...](http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/rainbird-realtime-analytics-at- twitter-strata-2011)

[2]: Will develop next-gen monitoring for food.

<comment><USER17> I'm getting the feeling that with all the unique server setups in use, monitoring and metrics systems are going to be just as unique and specific.

There are some interesting process monitoring projects out there like god, monit and bluepill, as well as ec2/cloud specific stuff from ylastic, rightscale and librato silverline. Have you ever used any of those tools?

Fitting all these together for my setup is trial and error, but it really does force me to think hard about my tools and assumptions even before I get hard data.

<comment><USER19> I hack on the aforementioned Silverline at <http://librato.com>, and we provide system-level monitoring at the process/application granularity as-a- Service. (We also have a bunch of features around active workload management controls, but that's out of scope here). It actually works on any server running one of the supported versions of Linux, not just EC2. Benefits of going with a service-based offering are the same as in any other vertical, you don't need to install and manage your own software/hardware for monitoring.

Here's an example of the visualizations we provide into what's going on in your server instances: [http://support.silverline.librato.com/kb/monitoring- tags/app...](http://support.silverline.librato.com/kb/monitoring- tags/application-monitoring-versus-server-monitoring)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Single-threading is the enemy of scalability.

Multi-thread programming is hard. Everyone already knows about Node.js, but if you're on the Java I suggest you check out Akka (<http://akka.io>) - <USER2> concurrency much easier

<comment><USER21> Is it hard? Always? If it is so hard then why is it around. How would you go about parallelizing even mildly CPU heavy work loads on node.js?

Node.js and the like are awesome, but only if you have no blocking calls and your CPU usage is tiny. Otherwise you get the performance of a single threaded server. You know, because that's what it is.

<comment><USER20> >Is it hard?

Yes multithread programming is difficult (for most people - like me). Hence the popularity of stuff like node.js, and also why people highlight Erlang's Actor model.

> How would you go about parallelizing even mildly CPU heavy work loads on > node.js?

I'm not sure I understand your question, since (I believe) node.js has an event based concurrency model and not thread based (at least for its users).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Part 2 has been released, for those who have subscription. <https://lwn.net/Articles/443775/>

</comment><comment><USER11> The talk is very amusing especially the use of Jason Fried in one of the slides.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPG4sK_glls>

</comment><comment><USER23> Well written article and funny, too. Nice job.</comment>


Mindfulness Meditation Trumps Placebo in Pain Reduction - <AUTHOR> http://www.wakehealth.edu/News-Releases/2015/Mindfulness_Meditation_Trumps_Placebo_in_Pain_Reduction.htm <comment><USER2> I can't find a link to the original paper but it would be good to check the details of the analysis. Firstly, they'd have to take care doing comparisons between the 4 different groups - it's not enough just to do multiple- comparisons as the probability of a false-positive result escalates with each comparison (I would expect them to have done this). Also, the sample sizes seem low and it would be good to see how they estimated the variances (say by using boot-strapping) and shown that this is indeed not just a result by chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Look at the source of this article.

This should not even be on HN.

This is just spam.

<comment><USER4> Why do you say that it's spam? It looks like a press release from the institution that conducted the study. Such articles are not always great, but they tend to be a bit better than the science-farm sites that crib from them. The standard for information like this on the web is unfortunately rather low.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Paper: [http://m.jneurosci.org/content/35/46/15307.short](http://m.jneurosci.org/content/35/46/15307.short)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what the placebo "sham meditation" looked like.

<comment><USER6> Same, this is far from double blind standards</comment></comment>


Sign your work in GitHub using Keybase keys - <AUTHOR> http://agonzalezro.github.io/signing-your-github-work-with-your-keybase-keys.html?test=1 <comment><USER2> If anybody needs an invite I will gladly invite =)

<comment><USER3> Could I get an invite please!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tips for First Developer at company - <AUTHOR> 	So technically I am a junior developer at my company but I am the first one so I am deciding a lot of the architecture of the platform. They contracted alot of work before, in Laravel. But I only know Rails with a React frontend. What should I be looking for dev workflow? We dont have a dev, staging, prod environment flow setup (contractors straight push code to production)- should I be thinking about that? Docker? Cronjobs? So many questions I thought a senior developer would know but its just me haha <comment><USER2> This is an awesome opportunity for learning!

Much of what you should do depends on your specific situation, company type, and if you anticipate other devs eventually joining you.

The specific stack and container technologies that you choose for the architecture will vary greatly depending upon your scenario, but I will say that picking something stable, with a large community that other devs are familiar with will make your life easier in the long run.

Since you are currently alone, something that a solo developer can be quickly productive in (like Rails + React) would be ideal!

For workflow, you need some sort of beta/staging environment so that code isn't going directly to production. This is simple to setup and has big pay offs: you can use it to showcase new features to stakeholders and gathering feedback before "pushing to production", as well as increasing stability. In the future with other devs you could scale this to a full pipeline with auto CD/CI etc

I would also recommend trying to keep fairly decent documentation. If other devs join you in the future, they will greatly appreciate this. If you leave this job and they hire another contractor or dev, they (and hopefully your company) will appreciate this.

If you have to manage a lot of cloud servers or network architecture, I would highly recommend taking the "Infrastructure as code" approach. It's pretty simple to get up and running on Digital Ocean with just a few lines of Terraform, and the benefits to devops are huge

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> my priority would be to get a staging area setup, having anyone push directly to production is going to cause you endless stress if something breaks in the future and you can't rollback to a stable release.

I love this story of how a junior delete the whole production database. [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/accidentally_destroyed_production_database_on/)

imagine in 2 years that happens to you when you're not the junior anymore.</comment>


The Heart of Silicon Valley (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/07/07/228653/index.htm

<comment><USER2> What would be even more helpful would be an article about the Heart of Silicon Valley from 2017.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) "During a break, when asked how she [Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad] finds time to devote nearly an entire day to hearing student presentations, she says, 'I love this. This is such a great day. It's all part of a _great_ _food_ _chain_.'"

2) "Anyone could have said to me, 'Wait, this isn't academic work,'" Clark [of SGI, Netscape, Healtheon] says. "They don't get all huffy about the _purity_ _of_ _academia_."</comment>


Wcswidth as a service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xiaq/wcswidth-aas <comment><USER2> What would happen if posting sth in Unicode private area?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your will be located and FBI will break into your house.

Seriously, the algorithm uses 1 as a default width.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> WoW, this is awesome! Save my days!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, excited!

</comment><comment><USER5> Good job! thanks.

</comment><comment><USER6> wow, save my night!</comment>


Netflix boss says DVD has two years left - <AUTHOR> http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/152659 <comment><USER2> Anyone has numbers on how much bandwidth (a range..) it takes to stream a movie in close-to-DVD quality?

I don't have personal experience with streaming from Netflix (I'm in Canada), so I'm not sure how they do it. But back of the envelope, I would assume that with a modern codec (f.ex. h.264) you could compress the average 2-hour movie to about 1.5 gig without losing too much quality. That's about 750 megs/hour, or about 210k/s. Certainly doable.

But if you want HD that's another story...

<comment><USER3> The latest x264 can get away with about 800-1000kbps average bitrate for nearly-perfect rips of a DVD (and down to as low as 300-500kbps if you're willing to lose the film grain). Most web services are worse--since they don't use x264 (a large number still use ancient formats like FLV...). There are some exceptions: Vudu, for example, uses x264 and is able to get tolerable quality 1080p in 2.8mbps. But I personally wouldn't bother with that--at 2.8mbps your 1080p certainly won't have any more detail than 720p. Of course, most people don't notice this because most Blu-rays don't have more detail than 720p either.

Note that DVDs themselves are already highly lossy; most DVDs have been lowpassed before encoding, so they have significantly less detail than their resolution would suggest. This is rather unfortunate, as the tradition has stuck with Blu-ray, despite it being completely counterproductive when using a good H.264 encoder.

Broadcast is an even worse situation; most broadcast television is atrocious quality-wise. This is usually because of outdated technology (MPEG-2), highly- lossy transcoding to save bandwidth (Comcast is a huge offender here), or just plain absurd bandwidth restrictions (a major television station in Japan uses 4mbps H.264 for 1080i). Of course, this is all aggravated by the requirement of constant bitrate and short keyframe intervals for broadcast streams.

<comment><USER2> > Note that DVDs themselves are already highly lossy; most DVDs have been > lowpassed before encoding, so they have significantly less detail than their > resolution would suggest. This is rather unfortunate, as the tradition has > stuck with Blu-ray, despite it being completely counterproductive when using > a good H.264 encoder.

Could you explain what you mean by "lowpassed"?

Any idea what keeps the adoption of modern x264 codecs? Are they expensive to license? Is it just inertia?

You just made me wonder how good things would look if they did it right... Do you think it would make a big difference to the untrained eye (you sound like someone in the video business)?

<comment><USER3> Lowpassing means performing a frequency transform and removing the highest- frequency coefficients. It has a similar effect to taking an image, downscaling it, and then upscaling it again (except without the aliasing that the latter produces). Wikipedia probably has more information.

You can tell the difference yourself easily: get a DVD and Blu-ray version of the same movie and downscale the Blu-ray to DVD resolution. You'll notice the Blu-ray is still a lot sharper and has more detail.

Also, note that x264 is not H.264. H.264 is an international video standard published by the United Nations; x264 is a particular open-source implementation developed by Loren Merritt, me, and a few others. Not all H.264 encoders are very good, in fact, a lot are quite bad. See <http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102> for a comparison I did a bit back and <http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164> for some technical information on _why_.

The reason that adoption of newer video formats has been slow, at least on the internet, is primarily that there is a huge (server-side) install base of old technology that would take effort and expertise to convert to use new technology. It wouldn't be expensive--in fact, it would save billions of dollars a year in bandwidth--but inertia is a powerful force, as is simple lack of knowledge and awareness. Of course, many sites have already converted over; Youtube and Facebook now both use x264 for most of their videos.

<comment><USER2> One more question; do you know if the movies we see on TV have been encoded from a "master" provided by the studios or something like that, or if it's a re-compression of something like a Bluray or a DVD..?

<comment><USER3> Usually it's from a master. But the quality loss due to broadcast compression is great enough that the difference between a master and Blu-ray source would hardly be visible.

HDTV is usually better than a DVD though if it's a premium channel from a good provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As great as streaming is, there will always be the need for a sense of ownership, or paying for digital content will be dead too. Streaming works because it seems like you are paying for the stream. But I don't think this is the replacement for DVDs, since physical media adds value and sense of ownership to digital content so that people may feel justified towards paying for a digital copy. Streaming is a great way to watch most movies but what about the movie you are a die hard fan? Blu rays are basically DVDs, but they still don't solve the issue of price, instant gratification, and versatility (since it's still hard to find bluray players everywhere).

I think digital downloads may be a possible solution. While it may not be physical, a download might provide sense of ownership, especially if it is not DRMd, and it certainly can provde instant gratification. So it could be the counterpart to streaming for those die hard fans that want their own copy. Maybe supplement it with a bluray disc that comes in the mail and you're set.

</comment><comment><USER5> i often wish i could stream books. if the kindle allowed me to check out from a digital library and return books, even with a _very low_ monthly fee or _very low_ price per book, that would be sweeeeeet.

<comment><USER6> This break the economic model for books. It works with libraries because of limited quantity.

This could work if we had a fixed number of digital library books per a zip code.

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate? Why do you need to fix the number of digital copies in a geographic area?

When we all went from using Blockbusters (=akin to library) to using Netflix (=akin to what is being proposed upthread), did it break the economic model for DVDs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If anyone knows a way to take the over on this, please let me know. Even if the claim is that DVD rental revenue will be streaming revenue just for Netflix, and it's not a general industry claim, I'm still taking the over. I can buy claims that actual streams may be higher, because the high utilization early adopters will stream more. But revenue? Overall userbase? General market? I laugh.

No, seriously, I'd like to do a two-year LEAP/long bet on this.

<comment><USER9> Why? It only took ~4 years for DVD to obliterate VHS, and even less time for DVD sales to exceed those for VHS [1]. Hastings doesn't say if the replacement for DVD will be BluRay or streaming, but I think rapid consumer uptake of new delivery technologies is a reasonable prediction to make.

[1] <http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/wvprodretail.html>

<comment><USER8> If the studios are smart, it's Blu-ray. If they're not, it's streaming. _BUT_ I'm willing to take the long bet and say DVDs last longer than two years, regardless.

If you are willing to take the other side, let's make a bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This link is locking up Safari before it even loads. Can't even get the menu bar to activate. Works fine in Firefox. Anyone else experiencing this?

<comment><USER2> Works fine in Safari 4.0.3 on OSX 10.6.1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My old laptop isn't fast enough to play newer video formats, so I need DVDs.

</comment><comment><USER12> So let's get this straight: consumers of movies are going from low-bitrate DVDs to BluRay and even 3-D TV in the future, and this guy is predicting consumers going for _lower_ quality movies because the delivery mechanism is faster?

Hell if I know, but it sure looks like hardware manufacturers are making different bets looking at the same market. Perhaps NetFlix spins off into a low-end video-at-any-quality delivery service and another part of the market goes 3-D?

<comment><USER2> I'm constantly surprised by how many people can't tell the difference between HD and standard DVD. I even know some people who don't really care if it's VHS or DVD (well, one girl at least).

Maybe their research shows that a big portion of people are fine with DVD quality, and that the others will just rent the blu-rays via mail while waiting for streaming HD?

<comment><USER12> That's the thing of it -- obviously there is a market for "video at any speed" and a market for hi-fi/prosumers.

For instance, research has shown that more people actually like hacked-up, low-bandwidth mp3s over higher-quality ones. So perhaps this guy is thinking the video market goes the same direction? That the price for bits will always trend towards zero?

If so, this will be a major shift in the movie business -- as big as MP3 file- sharing was to the music industry.

<comment><USER2> It's probably better business for Netflix to buy servers and big fat pipes than to buy more gigantic warehouses full of discs.

The cost of handling and mailing discs probably stays fairly constant, while the cost of handling bits goes down (as you said).

Netflix certainly isn't an uninterested observer in this. Things might naturally trend toward more streaming, but Netflix is probably pushing hard too.

<comment><USER12> I think we're on exactly the same channel. Netflix is betting on a market split between prosumers and casual movie watchers, (where, of course, casual movie-watchers are the biggest share and they pick them up). Hardware vendors (and moviemakers like Cameron) are betting on a trend towards more realism, both in sound and video.

Hard to say where the market goes. For me, I'm always into more and more fidelity with reality. But I think there are a huge chunk of folks who only want bragging rights to have seen the latest flick first.

The problem, of course, is that if NetFlix is right and the market only wants something-right-now, that it might take anything-right-now: that people get stuff for free and NetFlix no longer has any market at all.

Very interesting quote. Not sure if he realizes the implications.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>