Ask HN: What is an alternative to Google? Really. - <AUTHOR>

Seriously, I am inclined to stop using Gooogle just because of their "Net neutrality" posture. I want to find alternatives, I know about Bing, Yahoo, but want to find out what people are using besides Goooogle
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-green/breaking-google-goes-evil_b_676021.html <comment><USER3> I have tried DuckDuckGo, Blekko and Bing, all for about a month each.

I recommend Bing.

The thing that you almost forget after using Google forever is that they can always pull up relevant links to what you want, even from ancient forum posts if it's a really esoteric issue that only 5 people have ever had.

DuckDuckGo is decent, but it's no where near Google in that capability. Blekko not even close to DDG. (I have been using Blekko for my default search engine for a week or two now, but I almost always have to revert back to Google, except for really obvious results that I could probably pull up without a search engine entirely. I feel bad saying it, but it really isn't that good. Hopefully they keep working on it, though. )

Bing, on the other hand, was almost neck and neck with Google; it was only very occasionally that I would revert back to Google, and I used Bing for perhaps a month. I theorize that this is because Bing has millions (billions?) of Microsoft dollars behind it, way more than any other competing search engine.

I think I'm going to go back to DDG for a bit. I only used it a few months ago; I'm interested to see if it's gotten better.

<comment><USER4> We now use Bing and BOSS so that if you're looking for obscure stuff that Bing has, you will find it in DDG. Please give me your feedback if you try it again.

<comment><USER3> I just switched my search to DDG a few hours ago. This might be preliminary, but I don't think I'm going to switch back. The jump in quality in the last few months since I last used it is immense! I love all the programmer friendly features too (scraping from stackoverflow, etc). Really nice job.

<comment><USER5> Add to Firefox:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?q=duckduckg...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?q=duckduckgo&cat=all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well you gotta try DuckDuckGo: <http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58>

I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.

I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.

<comment><USER7> Seconding this. DDG is awesome. The zero-click info is often very nice, I love the keyboard shortcuts (though there's a google keyboard shortcuts experiment), and !bang[1] is really awesome. There's a bunch of other occasionally-useful goodies[2]. It'll do disambiguation if you search something with many meanings (eg. Ruby). Infinite pagination.

I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :)

1: <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

2: <http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html>

<comment><USER8> !bang is the most useful search feature since I'm Feeling Lucky. I submitted this exact feature to Google years ago, and DuckDuckGo's implementation of it caused me to switch search engines.

<comment><USER4> Thx! Note that we've had I'm Feeling Ducky through !bang for a while (!+space+sarch), but the last few days I've made it even easier.

You can now do /+search, e.g. /slashdot or whatever. Also all the !bang commands now will take you right to the site if you don't follow them with a search, e.g. !a takes you to amazon.

<comment><USER8> Nice work, as usual, Gabriel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Search: DuckDuckGo works well, only occasionally do I revert to Google for general searches.

Image search: ? Devilfinder can be useful, sometimes, but mostly gives NSFW results.

Voice: ? Voxox is such a bloated piece of software, but also offers Fax (when will it die? please?)

Mail: oh there are plenty of alternatives, none half as good. Then again, I'm a proud mutt user ;)

Calendar: Airset? Nah, only desktop apps compare.

Reader: I guess I'll go back to my Sage Firefox plugin.

Browser: Opera or Firefox. But to run Webkit on Linux what? Midori? that crashes every other page load.

<comment><USER10> Arora. <http://code.google.com/p/arora/>

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I had tried to install Arora before but couldn't find a package for Ubuntu (Hardy at the time). I just installed it, and crashed it too :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bing is actually a very nice search engine. It occasionally outperforms google in certain aspects of search, and has some extremely useful features that google doesn't have, although you'll have to dig around the site to find these (such as farecast, and the visual search).

I still recommend google for things such as technological search. For the majority of tail queries google still does better.

DuckDuckGo on the other hand is a nice search engine. However, it is objectively not as good at finding results as the other too. You can use statistical measures with RMSE and human rated errors to measure the accuracy of the machine learning and results pages that turn up in a search engine. DuckDuckGo is not even on the radar for google or microsoft because its core product--search--isn't even on the same level as the other two.

</comment><comment><USER12> Try the English version of Yandex (<http://www.yandex.com/>) - the Russian search engine. They just released it one day fully functioning. It's not a complete alternative, but it's interesting and worth a try...

<comment><USER13> Yandex is popular and also Baidu (<http://www.baidu.com/>) - the Chinese search engine, no english version, but the search appears to work well regardless of language. You may see evidence of these two search engines crawling in your web server logs.

<comment><USER14> If you have moral objections to Google, you don't want to be using Baidu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Bing for search on both desktop and my iPhone, ever since it became an option in Safari. It's actually pretty good. At first I would flip back to Google pretty often when I doubted the quality of the Bing results, but the Google results were rarely better (subjectively) and were sometimes worse in such cases.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's been almost a year since I switched to DuckDuckGo ([http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary- se...](http://www.cloudknow.com/2010/04/duckduckgo-as-my-primary-search- engine/))

Heck, if Gabriel started charging users for the service, I would gladly pay him.

<comment><USER17> What makes it worth paying for?

<comment><USER16> Privacy for one. <http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think people aren't looking at the bigger picture here... In 5 years the internet is going to look incredibly different than it does today - <USER2> of Google's, Verizon's or the FCC's position on "Net Neutrality".

Whether it's IBM's laser/light data transfer technology ([http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_t...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/202018/intel_turns_to_light_to_transfer_data_inside_pcs.html)) or something we haven't even seen yet, the power of innovation will make the net neutrality argument (almost) irrelevant.

You should choose the product that best fits your needs. Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google? I'm driven crazy every day by Microsoft products and their business practices!

<comment><USER19> "Also, do you really think Microsoft is less 'evil' than Google?"

Both Microsoft and Google are too big to be given a blanket judgment of "evil" or "good". There are so many people, projects, locations, etc. involved that it's probably more constructive to talk about specific products or policies that you do/don't like.

For example, here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Microsoft has opened their New England Research & Development Center. They've opened up their private office space to tons of public tech meetings (JavaScript meetups, web design meetups, startup-related events, Ignite Boston, etc. etc.). They offer great facilities and even provide food. As a result, they're really enabling the startup and tech community here. Google also has an office here in Cambridge, but I can't think of anything that they're doing here to help startups.

So is Microsoft good and Google evil because of this? It's just one glimpse of two vast empires...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many people in this thread recommend Bing, which may be a good search engine... However, the reason you are switching is not to find a better search engine, but to make a political statement. In that light, recommending a Microsoft search engine seems a bit odd. I don't want to go all Slashdot "Micro$oft sux" here, but... if one thinks Google is evil because of this net neutrality thing, then what is Microsoft, whose track record is about ten times worse?

<comment><USER21> Could you elaborate a bit more on "Microsoft's track record"? Most people complain on Microsoft just to complain, without any valid reasons...

<comment><USER22> In Ye Olde 1990s (and some early 2000s), they were somewhat notorious for trying to exclude competitors from retail stores and OEMs, e.g. by pricing Windows in a way such that anyone who sold non-Windows machines was penalized (somewhat similar to the stuff Intel got accused of doing in the AMD settlement). Vaguely in the same class as the net-neutrality issue, of trying to control the distribution channels rather than just competing on a level playing field.

<comment><USER23> ...and nothing has changed in a decade+, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bing is fine for search most of the time, and the odd time when it isn't I revert to Google. The thing I don't have a replacement for is Google Calendar which is great. But: I don't like Google knowing exactly what I'm doing every day!

<comment><USER25> not exactly sure about calendars specific features but you probably wouldn't have too hard a time running your own calendaring server

<comment><USER24> I'm happy to run the server but I don't know what software to use.

<comment><USER25> <http://www.davical.org/> maybe an option, but getting a web based front-end may be a problem, if you need that.

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately the "web based front-end" part of Google Calendar is the whole reason I use it.

<comment><USER25> you may have luck with phpicalendar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you use the search engine, but no other feature including clicking on their ads, you are actually costing them money, are you not?

That said you should probably search for inconsequential things rather than not use them at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Blekko has been awesome for me when Google fails. The reason I use them is that DuckDuckGo and Google have a very large overlap in the result set, while Blekko does not, so it is a perfect site to go to when Google is being hit by too much SEO spam.

</comment><comment><USER28> IMHO, I am more concerned about Google Apps. If they decide to do something "evil" on it, then I am dead.

Google Search on the other hand; I can use Bing or other alternatives easily without actual loss.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've seen a lot of responses recommending Bing. What is Microsoft's stance on net neutrality? Aren't they the company that tried to prevent other web browsers from being installed on their OS back in 98?

Don't get me wrong, my business is enmeshed with google now and I'm looking for alternatives, but if the problem is with Google's political stance on net neutrality wouldn't all these recommendations be incomplete without including a statement on the company's political stance with regards to net neutrality?

</comment><comment><USER30> Search is one thing but what I'm uncomfortable with is how much of my personal stuff is stored on Google, stuff like mail, rss feeds (and the current read/unread state), calendars, docs, etc. I was a bit uncomfortable before and the Buzz fiasco and the recent uproar over Net Neutrality hasn't exactly eased my mind.

I would like to run my own servers for the above functionality but don't want the overhead of managing machines and backups. I could be interested in a package of products that runs the software in the cloud and configured to use my own domain name and stores data on my own S3/dropbox. In a perfect world it would be easy to switch providers for the various layers. I'm sure this is technically feasible today but I'm talking about an easy to use setup, ease of use being totally subjective of course.

I wouldn't necessarily object to using Google for one of the above layers or services, I just don't like one company having all of it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been trying to wean myself of the google habit but I find myself returning to them over and over again. So far nobody seems to do search as good as they do.

Maybe the only way to get rid of google is to accept that you won't be finding things as easily any more. But that would automatically give everybody a competitive advantage over you.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious to see the quality of Blekko search which is supposed to be launching soon...

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the- blekk...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/techcrunch-review-the-blekko- search-engine-prepares-to-launch/)

<comment><USER33> It didn't take me long to get into the beta after following them on twitter.

So far seems pretty nice, though I haven't used it that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few months now, after having given it a second chance. At this rate, I find the result sets good enough that I only turn to Google for maybe 1 in 40 searches.

The number one reason to use DDG: The developer is friendly and accessible. I don't expect you could get a personal response to a feature request or comment from Bing or Google.

Mailwise, I recently set up my own mail server, so that has let me begin phasing my GMail account out. As far as spam control goes, Bogofilter has served me extremely well for years.

</comment><comment><USER35> This doesn't exactly answer your question, but this Bing-based live search is pretty awesome: <http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/>

<comment><AUTHOR> this looks very nice, is it getting results just from Bing? Would be nice to get results from different search engines. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Search is easy. Just use Bing. It's good enough and better in many respects. The bigger problem is finding replacing Gmail, Docs, Reader, GCal, Maps, Analytics, YouTube, Finance, Picasa, Android, etc. My life is tied to Google. Search is tiny compared to the other invaluable services I use.

Even if I find replacements for all these services online, there is also the desktop and mobile integration question. MS talks a lot about "cloud computing" but I've yet to see it from them. With Google, however, I am able to access all my data across multiple devices.

</comment><comment><USER37> I did an experiment on this last year. Both Y!S and ask.com (of all things) came out as reasonable alternatives. Bing didn't. Things may have changed by now.

<http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html>

</comment><comment><USER38> Have been using DDG for more general info and Google if I need to look something up (Errors, movie quotes etc)

</comment><comment><USER39> This seems more and more like the Quit Facebook movement, and will inevitably fail in the end. There is no real alternative to Google. DDG and Blekko are nice for a change but can definitely not replace it. And for me, Google > Bing.

</comment><comment><USER40> I like Bing myself. i don't use it much yet, but when i do, it seems to work pretty well.

So far, Bing is kind of like the lifeboat on the good ship Google. I don't use it on a daily basis, but I'm sure glad its there.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://gigablast.com/>

</comment><comment><USER41> If you're going to switch search engines, you should start blocking out Google advertising and analytics services as well; AdBlockPlus and an /etc/hosts killfile are good places to start.

</comment><comment><USER42> Honestly, the biggest thing that stopped me from using Bing was the interface and the left navigation bar. The subtle thing prevented me from transitioning from Google.

</comment><comment><USER43> while there's not a solution for plain web search yet, unscatter.com has a great interface for finding the most recent information about topics. Web search is actually the next large piece I will be adding. It is primarily powered by Bing because of their API limits, ie: none. For web specifically the real advantage will be the tab based user interface I am working on

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm seeing quite a lot of discussion like this. What is the probability that Google notices the trend and changes their behavior?

</comment><comment><USER45> i've been using duckduckgoose for 6 months due to google's evil. but, now, it is because duckduckgoose is so good!

<comment><USER46> I think you mean duckduckgo.

<comment><USER47> <http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html> \- What's with the name?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> and any other good webmail alternative to gmail? HN Startup anyone?

<comment><USER49> well there is zoho

<comment><USER50> Zoho Writer's docs are available offline as well as online which Google Docs aren't at the current time. And Zoho Creator is awesomely handy.

<comment><USER50> In addition, Zoho mail is ad-free and has offline capability using, oops, Gears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like DDG and Blekko as alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER52> Go with Microsoft. They're huge, and with their Office software going online, they're your best bet. Plus, Bing is excellent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> All these links are awesome, any more?

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://mamma.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://lycos.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://altavista.com/>

<comment><USER50> Ah, nostalgia. But also I did a couple of searches on there and it appears more up-to-date than Yandex at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you politically disagree with the company. BTW, "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing. Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government regulations tend to not end good.

<comment><USER54> Hmm. I found this a little confusing.

> That's a mistake to stop using your favorite tool just because you > politically disagree with the company

Why would you continue to support a company whose policies you no longer support (if that was the case)?

> "Net neutrality" by itself is not necessarily a good thing

Can you explain a bit here?

> Enforcing "Net neutrality" requires government regulation, and government > regulations tend to not end good.

Almost any sort of "enforcing" requires government support for it to be legal. This includes property rights. So I am not sure what is the exact point here

<comment><USER55> If you're using Google without clicking on their ads you're not exactly supporting them...

<comment><USER56> If you're giving Google data, you're most certainly supporting them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two Dangerous Fault Lines Under San Francisco Are Connected, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a23449/fault-lines-san-francisco-connected/ <comment><USER2> Direct link to the journal article:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1601441.full](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1601441.full)</comment>


Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6HLjpj4Nt4 <comment><USER2> This is the physical experiment that finally made me accept that quantum mechanics was a better description of reality than classical physics. There is basically no way an intelligent experimentalist can look at this simple experiment and not conclude that QM is a more reasonable theory of reality.</comment>


Lie to Get Ahead - <AUTHOR> http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/the-various-uses-of-honesty/

<comment><USER2> Your post suggests that honesty is not only not the best policy, but will lead to personal failure, and should not be used. I agree with you that messages/information need to be delivered tactfully and with thought. But I disagree that the solution is to offer a lie.

Why isn't the obvious solution to offer honest, meaningful "message-level" answers instead of blunt, uninformative answers?

With your example, the spouse can answer that 80's leggings make anyone look terrible, that he loves her, and will plan to continue loving her, that he finds her attractive in ways that were not present when they were both younger. In business, you can answer "No our product doesn't do H, but it does J." You can answer "No I can't be sure that the lights will stay lit in the morning, but I believe that it will, because of X Y and Z." If your customer walks, and your business fails, then so be it. Your business did not fail because you spoke the truth, it failed because you couldn't keep the lights lit. There are many ways to appeal to people without resorting to lying.

I would encourage you to "conquer fear and embrace possibility": being honest is hard, it will cost you, but it is the only way for human beings to become "authentic and complete".</comment>


Sylvia Earle and her work to protect the oceans - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/2030946/marine-biologist-sylvia-earle-profile <comment><USER2> I have worked with her and she is inspiring. Big time.</comment>


Researchers Reconstruct Speech Recorded in the Vibrations of a Potato Chip Bag - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/08/04/researchers-reconstruct-speech-recorded-in-the-vibrations-of-a-potato-chip-bag-no-seriously/

<comment> dj-wonk This is a duplicate post from a few days ago.</comment>


Anybody else compete in RailsRumble? - <AUTHOR>

If so - link your apps - I'd love to see what other HN readers were able to pull off.  Our team submitted the following site:
http://meetinbetween.us/
The wrap-up of the event can be found here: http://andrewkavanaugh.com/?p=12
If you competed, let's see your apps and hear your stories.  If you didn't compete, don't forget to go vote on http://railsrumble.com <comment><USER2> I did.

<http://inspiresme.r08.railsrumble.com>

Solo developer, started 24 hours late. Was quite the experience though.

I'm thinking of organizing a distributed hacking weekend every few months that isn't with a competition or prizes or anything but it's more like a environment where there are a bunch of various hackers working on projects, with an IRC backchannel as the community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe hackerweek - the 48 hour constraint was a bit too tight for anything with decent scope. I'm happy with what our team cranked out, but looking back, I wish we would have had more time to iterate the views further.

Either way - count me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked with a few awesome folks in Providence, RI to produce <http://twalala.com> \- Twitter with a mute button.

All four of us are avid Twitter users, and had frequently run into situations where we wanted to put a muzzle on some of the folks we followed, without going so far as un-following them. Whether you want to block all tweets containing spoilers for your favorite TV show, or if you temporarily want to mute a drunk co-worker, twalala gives you that power. (We also added a whitelist, so things like mentions of your name can always get through.)

AFAIAC, the big wins were (a) working with a team of friends that I hadn't had the chance to collaborate with before, and (b) building something that we all wanted to exist... and now that it does exists, we all use it every day. Winning some contest prizes would be great, too, but we all agree that the experience was well worthwhile, regardless.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was in a team of four, we built Twippet: <http://railsrumble.twippet.com>

It's code sharing over the twitter network. Throw up some code snippets, enter your twitter creds (pass not stored) to verify your twitter account and scrape your followings, and then you get a twitter-feed-esque list of searchable, taggable code snippets.

<comment><USER4> (the irritating html-escaping bug will be fixed as soon as voting's over - couldn't squeeze the fix inside 10 lines!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We also competeted, our app is <http://myconfapp.com> \- It's a social conference management platform.

Our experiences about the Rails Rumble is here : <http://vesess.com/blog/2008/10/21/rocking-with-rails-rumble/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Solo here, on <http://foreverhome.r08.railsrumble.com/>

Several of my coworkers also competed - details here: <http://www.viget.com/blog/viget-rumbles>

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't compete in it but I was very impressed with what some of these people pumped out, and some of them looked like they didn't even really have any history on the scene and they still made impressive apps.

<comment><USER8> I think its an awesome way to try out and idea and throw it out there. The time constraints make it accessible to those without a lot of spare time. Love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a nice app - <http://www.quotag.com> It has been an inspiration for some apps competing in rails rumble.</comment>


How we increased our email newsletter subscriber base by 4X - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextbigwhat.com/design-lesson-how-we-increased-our-email-newsletter-subscriber-base-by-4x-297/

<comment><USER2> Email template design is important to optimize click-through rate, but by definition it cannot increase subscribes because people who are not subscribed cannot see the great new template.

To grow a subscriber base you need to market and optimize the sign-up form, not the newsletter. One great way to do that is to wrap it in a catchy-titled blog post and submit it to Hacker News. :-)</comment>


Firefox 48 Beta, Release, and E10S - <AUTHOR> https://asadotzler.com/2016/06/06/firefox-48-beta-release-and-e10s/ <comment><USER2> Notably, it'll remain disabled by default if you're using extensions (pretty much everybody here who is running Firefox?): _The groups that will have to wait a bit for E10S account for about half of our release users and include Windows XP users, users with screen readers, RTL users, and the largest group, extension users._

You can manually enable it, though[0]: _However, if you want to permanently opt-in, you can do so with a simple pref change. Just go to about:config and toggle browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. On your next restart, e10s should be active. To verify that it is active, go to about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in "Multiprocess Windows"._

I didn't realize they had this kind of fine-grained control over A/B-testing in their Firefox beta population, as Asa puts it: _We have all the knobs._ I understand where they are coming from, but it feels a bit weird to have a piece of software running on my computer checking in with a remote server to enable/disable functionality.

[0] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis)

<comment><USER3> Any reason why it won't be enabled for people using extensions? This makes me worry that there's some significant incompatibility with extensions, and that when they do enable it for everyone, it'll break some of the extensions I use. I suspect that splitting the UI and content into multiple processes would make certain things very difficult.

<comment><USER4> It is exactly that. Some extensions (it used to be "many extensions" before E10S was enabled on the Nightly and Aurora channels) assume that they can call back and forth between page content and browser chrome, which is easy when they're all JS objects in the same memory space, but which doesn't work nearly as well between processes.

It might be worth downloading Firefox Developer Edition (which uses a separate profile) and installing your usual suite of extensions to check they all still work.

The only extension I personally know is weird under E10S is "It's All Text", where the edit button doesn't appear on textareas until you switch to a different tab and back. Other extensions like uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, Open In Browser, HTTPS Everywhere, Document Font Toggle all work fine.

<comment><USER5> How about vimperator? Vimfx is OK as a stop-gap but that's one extension I wouldn't want to lose permanently.

<comment><USER6> Here is the Firefox bug report for Vimperator don't working with e10s:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100918](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1100918)

The Vimperator developers are working on it here:

[https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator- labs/issues/211](https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/211)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is E10S going to replace the current model? I mean - is the plan to drop the choice when E10S is stable/works for all known scenarios?

I'm asking because I might have a bit of a problem with my tab addiction (my phone regularly reaches 60+, my laptop or desktop probable sit around 2-3 times that for weeks at a time) and I don't think that'll translate well into a process-per-tab model.

Yes, I know about bookmarks, read-later tools and that this isn't the healthiest habit.

<comment><USER8> When they first announced this model I ended up in the group that had this "feature" enabled. It was completely useless. I was almost about to change the browser for Chrome because I could barely broswe a few minutes before it crashed due to excessive CPU and memory usage. And then I got another update which reverted back to the old single process architecture.

If it's as messed up as it was back then, it looks like I'll be having to switch broswer. I have a similar usage pattern as yours, with the added disadvantage that I group my tabs in windows, and every window seems to carry a big overhead.

Btw, I'm not "memory constrained", I always have 2 to 5 GB free memory, but once the firefox process is over 1,5 GB then trouble begins, at 2 GB it's about to crash, and over that it can sometimes survive as large as 2,5 GB, but I've never seen it use more -- it always crashes before reaching 3 GB.

<comment><USER9> It has improved dramatically since then. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think you should give it another shot instead of complaining about how bad it used to be.

<comment><USER8> I'm still using Firefox, just dread the day this feature comes back. It is now disabled in my settings, I just wish they make it optional instead of mandatory, because for my use case it brings serious stability issues.

<comment><USER10> I remember that phase, it was below-alpha quality. It's now okay, no fear to have, only some occasional hiccups like asynchronous errors (click somewhere at time T, click action triggered regarding the element at time T+x).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are interesting data and comparisons without E10S on [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria) and [http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox- with...](http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/11/memory-usage-of-firefox- with-e10s-enabled/)

</comment><comment><USER12> People blame chrome for being memory hog and it's probably exactly for this reason. I fully expect mem usage to go up for E10S release as well... As a daily FF user both at work and at home, I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

<comment><USER3> Most people still claim Firefox is a memory hog, but from my observations Chrome uses a lot more from it's one process-per-tab model compared to Firefox's single process for many tabs. It might not be significant for a small number of tabs, but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem), I'm concerned at how much this could increase things.

That said, memory usage isn't my biggest concern, I generally have no shortage of memory, and don't particularly care if my browser is using 1GB of RAM. If this improves stability and performance (which seems to have gotten much worse recently on OS X in particular), then it's a fair trade off.

<comment><USER13> > but as someone who frequently has 50 tabs open (I know, I have a problem)

How do people get work done WITHOUT having 50 tabs open? It's a pretty regular occurrence for me, between having MSDN, the PostgreSQL handbook, documentation for a half dozen libraries, my "read later" list, etc., there's almost never a day I am not drowning in tabs. Thankfully, the Tree-Style Tabs extension saves the day here!

<comment><USER12> I don't know why people do that. Having 50 of them open does not increase your brain processing capacity, you probably still work with like 10 at maximum. My day typically consists of 6-7 pinned ones and 10 tops dynamic. As a rule, if the tabs reach the end of 1920x1080 screen, it's time to close something :) No tree-style required.

<comment><USER13> I am normally flipping between groups of them over the course of 15 minutes, I may not touch them all within the same window of time but they all have a purpose - and beyond that the tree helps me keep track of my thought process as I typically open most links in a new tab, so I can see the hierarchy I am working with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The main issue I find with E10s (nightly user here), is on some heavy sites which requires firefox to load on a specific tab, will often get the dreaded "swirl arrow reload" animation on other open tabs until the site is loaded.

<comment><USER15> FWIW, I use multiple processes (the number of cores * 2 + 1, it's a magical number I grabbed from somewhere), and get that far less frequently.

<comment><USER16> Is that number of physical cores? Or would you use 8 with an i7?

<comment><USER15> I guess I use full number of logical cores

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My biggest issue with FF is Firebug - it just can't compete with Chrome dev tools. On the other hand, FF has one huge advantage - Pentadactyl.

<comment><USER18> Does Firebug has anything over the built-in FF dev tools at this point?

<comment><USER19> The built-in dev tools have improved drastically in the latest versions of Firefox and that's also why [Firebug.next]([https://getfirebug.com/downloads](https://getfirebug.com/downloads)) (aka Firebug 3) isn't a standalone panel any more, but is integrated with and built upon the native dev tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is not important, but how did they arrive at "E10S" when they went about shortening "electrolysis"? Anybody know?

<comment><USER21> It's similar to the naming convention used by other long, hard-to-spell words for projects. First letter of word, number of letters in the middle, last letter of word.

e10s = electrolysis

i18n = internationalization

l10n = localization

k8s = kubernetes

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I really dislike that though as I prefer to just learn how to spell the word instead and probably even more mental acrobatics involved. I can see the usage for a product codename to differentiate electrolysis from codename:e10s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could someone running e10s load up newegg.com and see if it freezes the browser for about 30 seconds? Separating processes is supposed to mean that chrome stays responsive, but that hasn't been my experience with it.

<comment><USER23> Loaded 2,875KB over 107 requests in 168 seconds and no visible freezing on newegg.com with e10s enabled.

<comment><USER9> So just me then :( I've tried it on two machines, with and without extensions installed. On my poor laptop it locked up for over a minute.

<comment><USER24> R/Firefox is doing a performance AMA today, asking/helping people to run a profiler extension while hitting flows that cause sluggishness. You should stop by and see if they can help you out and get a bug report started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm trying Firefox about once a year because I want to like it for being independent and privacy minded. But every time I find myself going back to other browsers for seemingly minor reasons.

The most important one is that firefox opens new windows a few hundered milliseconds too slowly (on Mac OS X). Just a little bit too slowly for me to just hit Cmd+N and blindly start typing a url. I have to stop and pay attention to when the window is ready, hundereds of times a day.

Another annoyance, a much less important one, is that Firefox wastes a lot of screen real estate at the top.

<comment><USER26> You open new _windows_ hundreds of times a day?

<comment><USER25> Yes

<comment><USER26> Can you explain why? I'm genuinely curious.

<comment><USER25> The primary reason is that I search for everything instead of navigating to it on individual websites. That includes function signatures and other API stuff I need all day long.

And I don't keep windows or tabs open because they are hard to find again and start to pile up. So I open and close them a lot.

I don't use the bookmarks menu directly. I just open a new window and start typing. Either the page I'm looking for is in the auto complete or I hit enter and it goes to the search engine.

To sum it up, I have trouble remembering hierarchies and various navigation and UX ideas that web designers come up with. I have trouble visually grasping what's on a page (it's a kind of disability I always had). So instead I search.

In fact, that's also one of the great things about Firefox. Typing in its location bar lets me find other open windows and tabs. I love that.

<comment><USER27> > Typing in its location bar lets me find other open windows and tabs. I love > that.

Prefix with % and it will return only that kind of result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wonder what happens when the ui process crashes with the backend process still running? Or vice versa? It seems like killing Firefox just became a whole lot more difficult.

<comment><USER29> I just tried - the "Firefox Web Content" process was automatically killed quickly after the "Firefox" process was killed. No surprise there, it would be weird if they hadn't considered that scenario.

If the "Web Content" process is killed while the main Firefox process is running, Firefox asks if you want to restore the tabs - which is half the point of e10s.

"killall firefox" would be easy to do anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Since a couple of years I can't use firefox anymore with the usual must have privacy extensions. It's super slow and laggy compared to chrome ;( I wish I would use firefox but I can't see it freeze completely everytime I click on a link.

<comment><USER31> Firefox got to be much better a couple of years ago. In my experience, it's generally equal to or better than Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Will it be enabled on Linux too?

<comment><USER33> Yes.

<comment><USER32> Good, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am still patiently waiting until unloaded tabs have a memory footprint of 0KB instead of 0.7MB.

<comment><USER24> Serious question, why does that matter? If you've got a thousand tabs open, that's 700mb, or roughly 4% of your (probably) 16gb of memory. Why worry?

<comment><USER34> I have a pretty old machine without memory upgrade options. Of course, it would not be an issue on a machine with 16 GB. I've been following the bugs with tab-related memory and perf issues for quite a while, but maybe you are right that Moore's Law fixed them by now and I should upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great. I've been using Firefox since Phoenix and it only continues getting better!

</comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like even though it's been delayed for years, Electrolysis is still not anywhere close to being ready for prime time. And it's not even a full process sandbox. How many more years are we going to wait for that?

</comment><comment><USER37> That sounds awesome!!! 7-years-late awesome, but still great news!

</comment><comment><USER15> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER38> >Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer's processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won't lock up too.

Finally. Every browser I use does this when I load a huge reddit thread while RES in enabled.

</comment><comment><USER39> Tried it, still not as responsive as chrome

<comment><USER40> In what way?

<comment><USER39> hangs on js intensive pages, like jira

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your > computer's processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won't lock up too.

Well, for that particular problem, there is a much simpler solution than splitting application into two distinct processes. It's called multithreading. Moving UI into a separate thread would not only be simpler than moving it into a separate process, but also wouldn't result in 20-50% memory usage growth.

<comment><USER42> That's what they're doing now and it's the problem, not the solution.

Multiple threads run in the same process address space. This creates security and stability issues. One website can affect the complete experience. That's exactly the problem they're trying to solve, the same way Chrome did, by using multiple processes. That way, for example, when one process misbehaves and gobbles up too much memory, the OS won't kill the entire browser but just the offending tab. (The OS won't kill individual threads.)

<comment><USER41> The author justifies introduction of e10s using an example of inter-tab CPU contention. Yes, this is a real problem, I experience it using Firefox. But for that particular issue, a sufficient solution is multithreading.

As you wrote, separating each tab into a different process will bring security and stability benefits. But blog post author does not mention any of them. The only justification for e10s he brings up is CPU-UI blocking problem (which is not a justification for e10s at all, because it can be solved with multithreading).

And there is a reason why he doesn't mention security and stability benefits: They do not plan [1] (at least for now) separating each tab into a different process. All tabs will still share the same content process. This means that e10s would not bring any security and stability benefits you wrote about.

So one may ask: what's the point in introduction of e10s at all? I ask myself this question as well, not only regarding e10s, but also many other Mozilla decisions from last few years.

[1]: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes)

<comment><USER42> Have you ever seen the source base of a browser like Firefox or Chrome? You must do small incremental improvements if you want your software to continue to work. The hardest part is disentangling everything from a single process architecture to multiprocess. That's what they're doing now. Switching from a single content process to multiple content processes is significantly easier.

I don't understand how you conclude that "they do not plan separating each to into a different process" from the link you posted given it opens with "After e10s is enabled for all users, the next step is to introduce multiple content processes." To answer your question, then, the point of introducing e10s is to make it easier to switch from a single process to multiprocess architecture.

<comment><USER41> Yes, but few lines below they wrote: "The (practically) unlimited process count is on some platforms not a realistic goal, and having a separate process for each open site instances or even sites does not seem like a reachable goal (for now at least)."

So per-tab content processes (which btw is the only way e10s can result in security and stability benefits) is not a realistic goal for them.

<comment><USER42> Technically speaking, it's a lot easier to do a separate process per tab, and let things crash just like any other running process. If they don't stop there and try to actually manage processes by themselves according to some messed up logic, then yes, I agree with you that there's no point to e10s and probably Mozilla.

<comment><USER27> > and let things crash just like any other running process

People always say that as if crashes would be a regular thing happening every few minutes. I don't experience browser crashes for days, so I find it kind of odd that such a relatively rare failure case is considered a good justification for using a process per tab.

<comment><USER31> I stopped using Chrome a couple of years ago because of multiple crashes per day. The browser itself didn't crash, but individual tabs did. Or else Chrome tabs failed to load (giving just a pale blue background) presumably because it had run out of RAM.

I used OneTab for a while, to reduce memory use, but still found Firefox more efficient and more stable with hundreds of tabs, mainly because the vast majority weren't actually loaded until I needed them.

It's not hard to crash Firefox -- just keep loading an infinite page of gifs etc. But once you know that, you don't do it.

Under normal working conditions, I agree: none of the main browsers crashes often enough for it to be a problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mountain Beavers and Control of Mountain Beaver Damage (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20181202200300/http://icwdm.org/handbook/rodents/MountainBeaver.asp <comment><USER2> We have a number of urban beavers in our neighborhood, and their work is quite impressive to watch (the animals themselves keep out of sight). Within a few months, they've managed to thoroughly decimate the trees around them, and remodel the creek they live in.

Of course, the beavers would reject the idea that they are causing "Damage". At least in the longer term, the landscape they live in turns out just fine. It's just that beavers have rather different ideas how that landscape should look, in terms of flooding, tree mix, etc, and have the means and the determination to impose their preferences on their habitat.

I can see how that would distress some owners, but I'm glad they are being tolerated in our city.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have the dam beavers at my place. Sometimes they are more active, sometimes they are less. When they are active we find we can usually avoid problems if we take unwanted dams apart early. If you go out every morning you can take them apart in under five minutes, but once the water level rises they get faster at building and you will have to work a lot harder.

From time to time they try to block our culvert pipe which breaks the usual rule of "remove sticks from the downstream of the dam and then dig out the clay" because getting downstream of the dam means working inside the culvert pipe which is more tiring than working outside of it.

I had a nice pond which was choked with freshwater seaweed, then I got triploid grass carp to eat the plants, and the year after that the beavers moved in. I tried swimming around and noticed a lot of beaver turds, then I felt an explosion and realized that one of the beavers slapped his tail ten feet from me.

Then I went in and read that swimming around in a pond full of beaver turds was how you get Giardia so I quit swimming there.

<comment><USER4> We have a spillway with same beaver situation. Damn aggravating things if you ask me. Actually I think the beaver family we hosted for 20+ years may have moved on as I haven't seen them or their work in years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those unacquainted with mountain beavers, they are only distantly related to the beavers that build dams. They are also the host to the world's largest species of flea, which can reach sizes of ~1/4"!

Here is a surprisingly hilarious account of the search for a live mountain beaver flea specimen: [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/science/the-great- giant-f...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/science/the-great-giant-flea- hunt.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I knew about the dam beavers but had no idea there was a species that didn't build dams but instead burrowed. I would probably mistake them for marmots if I saw one.

</comment><comment><USER7> California subspecies is endangered, and I can attest, having grown up in Tahoe on a street named Beaver Dam Trail, we haven't seen beavers in the valley for decades.</comment>


A History of the Future in 100 Objects - <AUTHOR> http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> His essays appeal to me because they feel like very direct, creative, and believable extrapolations into the near future.

See also a recording of his presentation at the Long Now Foundation.

[http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/jul/16/history- future-100-...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02014/jul/16/history- future-100-objects/)</comment>


Facebook Helped the FBI Hack a Child Predator - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gd9b/facebook-helped-fbi-hack-child-predator-buster-hernandez <comment><USER2> Good, they should do it more often.

If the technology exists to put people known to be terrorizing people, and hurting people online behind bars then we should absolutely be doing it.

<comment><USER3> "people known to be terrorizing people"

Just sit and think about how these words could be tortured.

At what point do a prosecutor, judge, and jury get to weigh in on "known to be" in your world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure that 'child predator' is not an annoying civil rights activist.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR:

Facebook saw they had issues with a child predator who used Tor via Tails, so the FBI tried to hack him, but their de-anonymization failed on Tails. Facebook gets more concerned and commissions an 0day (for $$$$) and hands it to the FBI to do the work the FBI should have done.

FB has no guarantee that the FBI didn't keep using the exploit for the last 3 years for any other purpose.</comment>


"Instant" instant search - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=creative+things+to+build&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= Check it out!<p>It searches for what you're looking for, before you even knew that's what you wanted. <comment><USER2> I know what the author means when he describes the flaws on the various readers. Been there too.

Nowadays I just follow my news sources on twitter (if they have accounts) or bookmark their RSS feeds on Firefox.

This is probably not very practical if you follow a lot of blogs. I try to curate my sources as much as possible, so it works for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh, I was just feeling snarky when everyone built their responses.. Nothing critical of the few people who went through with building what are actually some pretty nifty widgets.</comment></comment>


The problems of modern academic anonymous peer review - <AUTHOR> http://gmyuriy.blog.com/2014/10/28/the-problems-of-modern-academic-anonymous-peer-review/

<comment><USER2> This reads like a kid whining in a candy store. The guy got a bad review, it happens to everyone in academia. Best thing to do is address the review in a clear manner in your rebuttal. Yes the review processes needs some changes but all this guy cares about is his paper.</comment>


Show HN: Bootstrap Icons Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://bootstrapcreative.com/resources/bootstrap-icons-cheat-sheet/ <comment><USER2> this is amazing!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to review it. I appreciate it. If you have ideas on how it could improve please let me know.</comment></comment>


[SURVEY] Your energy consumption behaviour - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1KA5KE4_vXTmAwHjN8jrmgaExCNLHgT9dGYmGq6daFo8/viewform

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, have you considered also that the size of the house may be a factor? Or, to rephrase that, who are your potential clients? Even if I tried to waste energy, I don't have enough space to forget something on. But that's because I don't have a house. So I'm guessing mid-high income?</comment>


Alberta government to support feasibility study for Edmonton-Calgary hyperloop - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/transpod-alberta-hyperloop-mou-1.5697848 <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a related previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24137127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24137127)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This would allow TransPod to develop the longest hyperloop test track in Canada to my knowledge.

I'm surprised to see this level of interest by the Alberta government on tech that is very much unproven.</comment>


Samsung fined for hiring people to post fake comments on online forums - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/113117251731252114390/posts/TZDyvQSA1xL

<comment> do-do who cares about comments ??

:-)</comment>


Show HN:Our StartupWeekend hack,music fingerprinting,on the desktop,all the time - <AUTHOR> http://soundbite.co/

<comment><USER2> This hack takes on two products I love. On one side, last.fm which needs support from the player to send the correct data to the server, on the other Soundhound/Shazam which go with you but are impossible to have running permanently.

The only downside I can think of is that my playlist would become cluttered with Let The Bodies Hit The Floor whenever I start spending too much time on Youtube

</comment><comment><USER3> This fits perfectly when I'm listening to online radio, and "that" song I want to know, SoundBite will tell me! It will increase sales for companies, maybe you should sell the songs recognized by SoundBite.co

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds nice!, When I'm listening to online radio, I tend to forget the name of a song I liked (so I can download it later). If this does it automatically, it'll solve a huge pain for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is exactly what we are doing, we have a very good proof of concept/very small MVP going on and working really hard to have a v1!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a good idea. Frequently I listen for some combo of the lyrics and then google it when I hear a cool new song I don't know. Soundbite could make that easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, sometimes u are hanging on your friend's home listening to music and u just wanna grab what your hearing and take it home to buy/or listening the music later.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds really great! Personally I watch everything on the PC so keeping track for all the songs sounds great, movies n' stuff...

</comment><comment><USER8> Hey! it was 'about time to have something like this!!

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow! that's a great Idea! I can't wait for using it!

</comment><comment><USER10> I´m actually quite amazed this did not exist.

</comment><comment><USER11> The astroturfing in this thread is amazing.

<comment><USER12> Oh. You noticed? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Music related hacks are my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yey! :D help us to spread the word!

</comment><comment><USER15> Great! Would gladly test it!

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome. Very good idea!

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't wait to use it!

</comment><comment><USER18> Love the idea!

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome idea

</comment><comment><USER20> Great it!!

</comment><comment><USER21> Great idea

</comment><comment><USER22> wow this is awesome</comment>


Commodore Peripheral Bus: Commodore DOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1038 <comment><USER2> From the article: Commodore DOS has been in existence since the Commodore 2040 drive from 1978, and new firmware code for Commodore DOS devices is being developed to this day.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, efforts I am aware of (like jiffydos) are not OSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This design is clearly inspired by Mainframe I/O design, channel based with intelligent devices, with very little abstraction. It is very simple in that it deals with bytes, memory addresses, and the disk blocks/sectors.

It really is almost a naked I/O KERNAL (to be user friendly another layer of abstraction should have been built over it by the time the C64 came out and memory was cheap).

Still, super impressive what was crammed into the PET disk drives. For 1977 this is very sophisticated stuff. Apple's DOS was easier to use, but less flexible and bound closely to the disk hardware.

I can't comment on the third leg of the Trinity, having never examined TRS-80 DOS in any detail.

</comment><comment><USER5> The summary table isn't quite right: the 1581 does allow subdirectories, just of a comparatively limited type.</comment>


Fair Source License - open-source-ux https://fair.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Bob owns a company Bobsoft employing 50 people and can't use the software.

He renames it Alphabob with two daughter companies Bobsoft and Bobworks each employing 25 people. He now can use the software.

"Fair source" is proprietary freeware with pseudo-opensource flavor.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I don't understand what problem this is trying to solve.

If you want to stop massive money-grabbing corporations from using your software for nefarious purposes, a strong copyleft like AGPL will ensure they release their improvements so the open source community can compete. Certain big companies avoid AGPL'd software because they don't want to play, which seems to be working as intended.

"With open source, releasing source code and charging for the product is virtually impossible." Red Hat would disagree.</comment></comment>


Introduction to k-nearest-neighbor (ML in Javascript series) - <AUTHOR> http://burakkanber.com/blog/machine-learning-in-js-k-nearest-neighbor-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Burak Kanber

Hi . Though I have just started to read it at full I guess in advance it is worth deserving full attention. It is very glad to find such a kind of research and development like this one. Let me encourage you to go ahead

                Warmest regards from

                 Rodolfo Davicino  (Buenos Aires ,Argentina )

                  ongratulations</comment>


Running Java in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/running-java-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> Ok, so it's kind of cool as a demonstration of programming skill, but I have to ask why. Is there that much existing Java code that people want to run inside web pages using Javascript? Are there that many people who would rather develop using Java instead of Javascript plus a library that abstracts away the browser differences?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is about as useful as that Ruby interpreter written in JavaScript. Without the libraries that help make a language good it's nothing but a neat trick.</comment>


From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-to-thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over <comment><USER3> Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees.

Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems.

In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays.

And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department.

In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber.

Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance .

Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.

<comment><USER4> As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing for as long as I've had a professional career. I worked in the aerospace industry as my first programming job and saw so much bullshit flying left and right, and identified that at least 60% of my coworkers and 80% of my bosses did exactly nothing but bullshit like reporting and summarizing on things that were already reported or summarized, or creating useless documentation that had to be created because of some arbitrary standards. We were very top-heavy and at one point I saw a hilarious org chart where there were more managers than engineers. Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. Now, 20ish years later, I'm pretty damn jaded and the bullshit has only increased, but now it's just more cleverly disguised in management methodologies like "SCRUM" and "Agile", with all of that deeply-imbedded culture and terminology baked into our everyday tools like the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Kahnban boards, etc.). Bullshit is here to stay, but in a sense it saves us from our own incompetence.

<comment><USER5> > Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically > equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had > envisioned it to be.

This is precisely why I have loathed the cult of "pay per performance". Bonuses, salary bumps and promotions become a sort of (I wish this were an exaggeration of terms but it isn't) conspiracy to pass wealth and prestige to buddies. But they fill it with phony paperwork and propaganda about how the buddies have been objectively evaluated and are all top performers. If you are an honest worker doing good things but not in a management in-crowd, this can have crippling effects on morale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see a pattern, based on this article and in my daily life. A lot of these processes and ridiculous terminologies are usually created by managers who have no real hard skill. Instead of doing any real work this is what they come up with in order to validate themselves. What does the delegator do when the work has all been delegated? Nothing absolutely nothing and that's where all these ideas, terminologies mentioned in this article come from.

IMO the best managers are the people who have hard skills and leadership skills as a combination. They are able to solve their own problems and help other people solve their problems, and are able to ensure everyone on their team comes out with a net positive on happiness.

<comment><USER7> > What does the delegator do when the work has all been delegated? Nothing > absolutely nothing and that's where all these ideas, terminologies mentioned > in this article come from.

Delegating work is still work which needs to be done. In a large organization, figuring out which work to delegate to who is a full-time job. Just creating the (ever-changing) structure of the company - what positions you have, what responsibilities they take, etc - is also a pretty hefty effort, done by managers.

It's difficult for me to not parallel your "no hard skill" complaint with how farmers in my country complain that programmers "don't create any physical product" but get paid more. Organizing even small numbers of people(10-20) calls for someone with quality soft skills, otherwise the efficiency of everyone drops significantly.

<comment><USER6> I think you misunderstand my point about 'hard skill'. When I say 'hard skill' I mean any kind of skill contributing to the product (by product I mean the actual product and working with the customer). Whether it's physical goods or providing some kind of service.

As for the point about farmers complaining programmers don't create 'physical' product that's a whole different discussion. That complaint is coming from someone who due to whatever constraint hasn't taken the time to understand, the nature of the software business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a Peter Drucker quote, I believe, that I can't manage to find, but goes something along these lines (totally paraphrasing):

Businessmen tend to use fancy jargon for mundane things, which gives more exciting and important trappings to what is, in reality, a tremendously dull job. We should let them have it -- somewhat obfuscated language is a small price to pay to let them feel a little bit better about the boring tasks they accomplish day in and day out.

<comment><USER9> What about those whose jobs are boring & mundane under management positions? I understand the quote isn't yours, but what makes management so special?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this article to be of little utility. Some random history about corporate management, crapping on an entire layer of the organization, because they are called "management" (there are good managers and they serve a purpose) and in the end not suggesting a single thing to help improve the clarity of one's own language.

All to sell the author's book. Wish I had passed.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, nothing really of substance here, which is impressive, given that there's plenty to say on the topic... and it's a much wider topic than management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This how I feel about most "Agile methods" going around like SCRUM.

<comment><USER13> I often see complaints about Agile and SCRUM met with, "You're just not using it correctly." In some circles, it's almost like a religion that you're not allowed to criticize. After all, it's _The Process(TM)_ , I guess.

But from where I'm sitting, "correct" SCRUM looks like a whole lot of weird not-overhead-but-totally-overhead that seems difficult to manage across multiple projects. For example, what a "point" represents is constantly in flux.

Instead, I actually prefer subsets of the methodology. When the company I work for was young, we all worked from home, and so daily standups were _extremely_ effective at keeping us on task and productive while maintaining good balance (once you're done, you're done -- no creep). The board has been effective as organizing tasks and their progress.

What would not have helped, or been in any way productive, would have been spending time trying to figure out how many "points" my tasks for the day are worth. I still don't see how that system is actually different from just using hours beyond philosophical arguments.

Basically, I prefer a more focused and leaner version of the approaches.

<comment><USER14> > I often see complaints about Agile and SCRUM met with, "You're just not > using it correctly."

To be fair, this is true _a lot_. Agile has quickly become "whatever you were doing before Agile but now with stand-ups and kanban boards."

The real problem with Agile is that it's kinda stupid to assume that companies will radically change their development process and that they won't just do "whatever we were doing before but with a couple bits and pieces from this other thing."

It's way easier to keep doing whatever you were doing before and just say that it's "Agile." See, for example, the number of teams that have long-winded standups even though that's pretty explicitly discouraged.

> What would not have helped, or been in any way productive, would have been > spending time trying to figure out how many "points" my tasks for the day > are worth. I still don't see how that system is actually different from just > using hours beyond philosophical arguments.

Totally my take on the whole point system, but:

They're definitely related (hours and points), but basically the whole idea is vagueness. Figuring out if something will take 3 hours or 5 hours is kinda meaningless, because you really have no idea until you get into it. Saying it's worth "5 story points" might suffice as a rough representation of that 3-7 hour chunk.

If it ends up taking 20 hours, oh well - good to know for next time!

The idea is not to bicker over whether something will take 3 hours or 5 hours or 7 hours, but to just slap a vague label on it as "low-to-moderate difficulty." It's supposed to save time in that regard.

> Basically, I prefer a more focused and leaner version of the approaches.

I think any reasonable Agile advocate would tell you to discover what's working for your team and what isn't, and to adjust accordingly.

The point is mostly to move away from that extremely long-winded waterfall process and move towards rapid iteration. Story points and stand-ups are just tools for accomplishing that (by estimating velocity and having regular check- ins).

<comment><USER15> > Saying it's worth "5 story points" might suffice as a rough representation > of that 3-7 hour chunk.

> If it ends up taking 20 hours, oh well - good to know for next time!

The idea behind points in this situation is to start equating that 5 points = 20 hours (for this type of problem, for this team). If you think of it in terms of "this story is about the same complexity as this other one". Whether you call that 5 or 15 or 50 points is largely irrelevant, so long as all 5 point stories are roughly equivalent and a 10 point story is about double the work of that.

The rest of the uncertainty around complexity and people is supposed to wash out in the averages of the team: for example the fact that one person may typically do 12 points a week while another does 30 does not really matter for figuring out the overall velocity (team points per week), assuming the team does dozens of points per week total.

Now that said, I've never successfully used points. Sometimes it was due to endless discussions trying to equate hours to points (mostly from management and others outside the dev team), poor estimates, radically different estimates or skill levels, and probably several other reasons I'm unaware of.

Now my team does t-shirt sizes for long term things, and hours for the stuff in sprint (basically as it's started), but it's still often way off.

Does anyone have successful (long term) experience using points? What did you do to make it work? Does it actually have material advantages over other methods?

<comment><USER16> Yes, we have been using them successfully for quite a while. We only use it to estimate roughly what fits into a sprint.

No comparisons to time or between team members are made. I think that's really important. Management is on board with that. If it wasn't, it probably wouldn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great article, until the very end when it sounds like he wants to come up with with some anti-bullshit bullshit. However I really did enjoy the read especially learning about the history of bullshit and how we got here.

I think the fundamental problem he mentioned has to be solved - "As factories producing goods in the west have been dismantled, and their work outsourced or replaced with automation, large parts of western economies have been left with little to do" This is the key issue. There just isn't enough actual productive work to get done in many jobs and people can't just leave when the work is done due to being payed by the hour or being seen as lazy by their coworkers and bosses.

I'm not smart enough to give solutions to big general issues like this but I certainly see it as a problem in my own life. I have no idea what people actually do in most jobs these days and therefor when trying to decide on my next career move, I have trouble estimating how competent I would be when considering a job. Also it seems hard to develop any real skills in most jobs these days other than learning how to fit in and bullshit. However, those skills do not transfer to a new position with a different 'culture'. I've mostly worked blue collar labor type jobs in my time and had a clear task to complete but you end up getting pushed around by management types and are at great risk of personal injury for very little compensation. In my last job at a warehouse I worked my way up from a temp labor grunt to getting pretty close to management but I couldn't handle it. The higher up I got the less there was to do other than bullshit consumption and production, by the end I wanted to just go back to working with the guys on the floor (but again you aren't making enough and risking injury every day). I hope to find a job that I can actually do things and gain clear skills over time, but if I can't figure that out I'll have to become another sellout bullshitter since I'm not getting any younger and my body isn't gonna be able to handle the hard labor in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reads like an Adam Curtis piece: starts with an obscure historical reference, and builds it up to dramatic ripple efect on the world, usually by way of a cultural shift.

<comment><USER19> cones

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As someone not in the corporate world, I'd love to see more examples of bullshit speak.

What are some "favorites" from the HN crowd?

<comment><USER21> Many are mentioned in the article. One I particularly loathe is 'reaching out'. In my generation, 'reaching out' is what someone with a serious drug or alcohol dependency did when they hit rock bottom and it was either get help or die. I cringe, I cringe....

A few years ago, it was 'at the end of the day', which my boss said 42 times in one 60 minute meeting. Yes, 42. I counted.

<comment><USER22> This one I struggled with. What's the alternative to 'reaching out' in the context of sending a message to a third party?

<comment><USER21> Call, e-mail, text or otherwise contact them.

'Can you call Bob's surf shop and see if they carry Mr. Zog's Sex Wax?'

<comment><USER23> The reason reach out is used is to give the individual being asked some autonomy / responsibility in the action.

Eg if you ask someone to call bobs surf shop and they don't answer they might stop there or call back later. If you ask them to reach out they might go down there and see them, set up a meeting, speak to a friend that works there, etc.

<comment><USER24> _If you ask them to reach out they might go down there and see them, set up a meeting, speak to a friend that works there, etc._

That's where you can use the more general and succinct term, "contact".

<comment><USER25> Only if you like using words incorrectly. "Contact" isn't a verb if you really are the pedantic prescriptivist you are presenting yourself as.

<comment><USER26> Both Wiktionary and dictionary.com list definitions of "contact" as a verb. I don't have access to the OED at the moment, but I assume they would have it listed as a valid verb as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Management consulting has got to be the pinnacle of corporate bullshit...some favorites of mine are "synergies, deliverables, alignment, collaboration, circle back"

Also this is fun: [http://www.atrixnet.com/bs- generator.html](http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html)

<comment><USER28> It only seems that way for those who don't understand it:

\- Synergy: savings due to economies of scale when joining organizations or due to vertical or horizontal integration

\- Deliverables: whatever product you agreed to deliver at the end of a project

\- Alignment: getting a bunch of higher ups to agree on something

\- Collaboration: duh

\- Circle back: when you're trying to get a lot of the higher ups to agree (sadly, through individual meetings), and one of them has big concerns, you have to relay that to the other higher-ups

Programmer phrasing all sounds like bs to someone who doesn't know it. _" Let's do our daily scrum standup and get the scrum master and the product owner to agree on the architecture for the data storage module"_.

<comment><USER29> "Scrum master", "daily scrum standup", and "product owner" aren't programmer phrasings, those are mangement phrasings in the field of software.

There's plenty of other actual programmer phrases you could have put here, but it's somewhat telling to me that your sentence of programmer phrases actually has more management phrases.

<comment><USER28> "Somewhat telling"

I see what you did there, nice ad hominem. But don't worry, proper Computer Engineer here, with a capital E.

But the example holds, despite your ad hominem.

<comment><USER29> It is somewhat telling in that management phrases being passed as programming phrases shows how widespread the problem is.

Not that you are a manager. At least, that is what I assume you mean by calling it an ad hominem.

I probably could have worded it better.

<comment><USER28> Even manager doesn't mean much. There are managers (manage people) and manager (managed a business, process, product, etc).

"Management" is manager (business). An engineering manager isn't management, is just a people manager.

Engineering phrases made it to business, and business phrases made it to engineering, that is normal. Berating a profession because you don't understand their lingo is pointless.

And the issue isn't you accusing me of being a manager, but implying that that is bad in some way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Many of us have strong reactions to some kinds of business jargon. But use a programming term metaphorically and we have no trouble with it, even though people who don't have the background won't get it.

Perhaps this cringing at certain terms is not entirely rational?

</comment><comment><USER31> > Some Pacific Bell employees wrote to their congressmen about Kroning. > Newspapers ran damning stories with headlines such as "Phone company dabbles > in mysticism"

[https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company- dabble...](https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company-dabbles-in- mysticism/4737543560400/)

> "The Californian utility regulator launched a public inquiry, and eventually > closed the training course, but not before $40m dollars had been spent."

[http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_p...](http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_pacific- bell)

</comment><comment><USER32> [https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809](https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809)

</comment><comment><USER21> Makes me wonder how the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor would have reacted. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner... How much bullshit would they have tolerated in 1960?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media/File:The_Traitorous_Eight.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER33> I am essentially the highest ranking officer of my family's business (Business Unit Manager, overseeing 333 employees) here in Italy and I have to say that local (Italian) native corporate culture seems to have remained largely unaffected by the creep of such meaningless language into everyday intracompany discourse. It is on the rise in infracompany communication, however.

I have an acute disdain for empty verbiage and what I like to think of as a very critical mode of thinking, so I spend my time nipping these things in the bud and doing what the organisational machinery beneath me cannot, by its very axioms, be relied upon to do: cut down on bureaucracy and eliminate pointless paperwork and/or circular processes whenever I come across them. Not to eliminate people, but to free them up to do what they actually are here to do (and presumably/hopefully enjoy doing). Lots of cogs in the transmission is not something that the company needs or can make use of.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm trivialising it a bit but at its core the bullshit speak and the like gives hollow people a shield to hide behind.

</comment><comment><USER35> My personal favorites: 'downsizing', 'to better serve you' and 'you are important to us'.

There's nothing new about this though, at bank I worked for in the mid 80's (Chase Manhattan) there were plenty of such business bullshit words. I wished I had thought of cataloging them.

</comment><comment><USER21> I particularly enjoy 'calling bullshit' on my fellow mush-speak managers.

Now, back to first principles.

</comment><comment><USER36> > During the course of an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate > claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as "doing a deep dive", > "reaching out", and "thought leadership"

With 64 nuggets, you could've created some 8 x 8 grids and put one nugget in each square. Photocopy them, pass them around the office, and next time there's a meeting called by management, play "Bullshit Bingo". First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally on their grid, wins the pool.

<comment><USER37> But..if you photocopy them everyone in the meeting will have the same grid.

<comment><USER36> > First person to _hear_ a line of 8 nuggets spoken

It's so difficult to stay awake in these meetings that just taking in what you _hear_ is an achievement. I've a theory Bullshit Bingo was actually invented by the managers themselves as a way to keep the attendees awake during such gatherings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Prefer audio? This actually is available here: [https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from- inbo...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from-inboxing-to- thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over-podcast)

</comment><comment><USER39> They were making us do some Six Sigma training at work a few months ago, and the entire time, it felt like nothing more than business porn.

</comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone have advice on how to resist this bullshit? Recently, I've been moved away from software into an operations role where my entire propose is to create bureaucracy and make numbers look good for managers' managers. I lack experience and data for my voice to be heard when I point out that we're obviously going backwards.

<comment><USER41> One thought that I have it to refuse to use any neologism that substitutes for an already-existing word or phrase. The problem I have is that business BS has been going on for longer than I've been alive, so I don't have a good sense for _old_ BS neologisms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> For one seeking to truly understand the origin of the "Dilbert" cartoons, this article nails it.

 _down voters_ : the article includes a short anecdote on how Dilbert began, and it's humorous/entertaining/informative. please read/enjoy before flaming me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Orwell, of course, covered the political dimension of this in "Politics and the English Language."

</comment><comment><USER44> Ahem, 'moonshots' anyone?

</comment><comment><USER45> > After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so > easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory > way of speaking become so successful?

Because there's no solid link between inputs and outputs. For most management techniques it's almost impossible to measure the output of a given management function. It's unfalsifiable. Like any other domain of human endeavor when operating in an unfalsifiable space you can neither confirm nor debunk a particular technique. The only thing you can do is _assert_ and flit from one fad to the next.

The paradox here is that while management seems to be required for corporate structures to function properly so much of it is fluff or outright BS. I have to wonder if a properly trained ML algorithm could replace 90% of management decisions by cutting out the cruft and ambiguity.

<comment><USER46> > there's no solid link between inputs and outputs

> a properly trained ML algorithm

#ThinkingFaceEmoji

<comment><USER47> OK, maybe an improperly trained ML algorithm?

<comment><USER48> NOOP?

It would be really efficient, too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> How much of the hatred of business speak is driven by resentment of the fact that the business people usually make more money than the people they supervise?

<comment><USER50> A lot of it, and in the tech industry it's usually accompanied by resentment that their particular skills don't get them either the worship for intellectual prowess they so strongly believe they deserve or the money and prestige.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Another seasonal article variant from the FT (paywall)

Embrace failure and shoot for the moon — tech cliché bingo

[https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e4537...](https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec)

</comment><comment><USER52> The irony is that while the words are stupid ("alignment", "intentionality" and "end-state visions") - this pretty good actually.

Most white collar jobs are full of 'waking sleep' \- and if we focus on outcomes, and drive them forward with intentional work - we would be more productive.

"Bullshit jobs" \- if you doing anything to move the ball forward - <USER2> working a checkout or pumping gas - your job may feel meaningless, but it's not BS by any means. Middle management tends to be the most BC. And many gov. jobs.

"US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings."

This is part of the job. Communicating is work, and we can't be 100% efficient at all times.

</comment><comment><USER53> It really exploded when George Carlin passed.

<comment><USER54> I thought he faded away... (?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> First off, great article.

I'm finishing up my accounting degree, a field which I honestly have no interest in pursuing. But, screw it, I didn't know I wanted to be a programmer when I started it and I have less than a year left.

I take issue with the idea that business BS started in the 80s. If you read material from the 20s and 30s, it was likewise filled with meaningless jargon and memes. Motivational posters are very old and they're filled with vapid and empty sayings, with the belief that by some magic hanging a sign that says "work harder" will make employees work harder (whatever that means) and make you more money that way.

What I've learned is that when you teach a soft skill, you get people teaching garbage. In an accounting class or a supply chain and logistics class, there can be some real meat to be learned, even when there's not science per se. But for most things, the books are full of arbitrary enumerations of "types of managers" and acronym to make it sound like we're being taught something. But, sadly, the attitude people have in business is that they want to be in charge of people and so they don't have to worry about the details. The details are for the expendable people you make money off of. The way you get rich in America is by being so awesome, because that's what the rich people told us is how they made their fortune.

And the problem is that they're kinda right. At the top of the food chain, everything breaks down into politics. There's little to no way of evaluating quality, and so this self-serving culture of bullshit develops. Everyone thinks they're a great judge of character and that they have these ineffable skills that cannot be measured that justify why they've gotten to where they are. But it's all just marketing. They're doing their job, sure. But there's bullshit in business for the same reason there's bullshit in marketing and politics. You're selling something and the product is interchangeable with a thousand other ones.

<comment><USER56> I agree with your assessment, and came to realize these things when I did my first internship in a company, as my university requires this to graduate (that was almost 10 years ago now).

At the time, I felt quite depressed by it. The person who was my boss's boss would regularly say completely technically incompetent things, and yet here she was running a dev team and making tons of money too.

As I've moved forward in my career, I've slowly come to feel better about things. It might take a few painful failures, but over time you become good at spotting the people who are all talk and no skills/knowledge, and you know to avoid them. Conversely, you learn how to spot the people who know what they're talking about, and know to accept their job offer instead of the employer who gave you a higher offer but gave you a bad impression during the interviews. And because you are (hopefully) getting better at what you're doing, you have more options, and more leeway to say no.

It's almost empowering to tell yourself that if these idiots can make bank, then all you have to do is learn their ways and bend them to your advantage.

Good luck!</comment></comment>


At Google and Mozilla, Bug Bounties are Big Successes - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/blog/at-google-and-mozilla-bug-bounties-are-big-successes <comment><USER2> I suspect that the amounts they are quoting are extraordinary bargains for Google and Mozilla, given how many highly skilled person hours went into discovering and fixing those bugs.

I fear that if they increase the amounts, it will damage the free software ethic a bit -- people will _expect_ to be paid for work they were doing before!

<comment><USER3> Quite a lot of open source stuff is written by paid-for professionals nowadays. That may or may not be a good thing, but it's not new.</comment></comment>


SourceForge Blocks Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea & Cuba - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2010/01/following-clintons-internet-freedom-speech-us-based-sourceforge-blocked-syria-sudan-iran-korea-cuba-is-open-source-still-really-open.html

<comment><USER2> It's hard to say SourceForge is in the wrong, given they're subject to US law. On the other hand, I can't say they're in the right, because it does clearly violate the principles of open source/free software. Such situations are unfortunate, but the best solution seems to be 'hope the law doesn't come for you'. Not a long-term option.

<comment><USER3> You could argue then that they are in breach of the GPL on stuff they do use themselves.

You can hardly take GPL source, modify it and refuse to distribute it to certain groups - wether this is your choice or a rule imposed by your country

<comment><USER4> _You can hardly take GPL source, modify it and refuse to distribute it to certain groups - wether this is your choice or a rule imposed by your country_

A particular country's law takes precedence over the GPL.

<comment><USER5> So if your country's laws says you can't full fill your obligations in the GPL then you can't use it?

<comment><USER6> What section of the GPL do these rules keep you from your obligations under?

Remember that the GPL does not require that you distribute to anyone. Instead it says that if you do distribute then you must provide source and cannot prevent the recipient's freedom to further redistribute. But regulations saying that you cannot personally distribute to person A don't prevent you from distributing to anyone else, so long as you follow the requirements of the copyright license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Proxies can be used to get the software from SF in these countries.

The issue is about principles: freedom to innovate, free access, and to follow open source principles that SF preaches:

The Open Source Definition Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.

The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: … 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

The blockhead action is a direct Discrimination Against around 200 million innocent people in Syria, Sudan, Iran, N Korea and Cuba.

<comment><USER8> Somehow I missted that point in history when Open Source, from just an idiom and good philosophy for programmers, turned into big and dirty politics. This is all very disappointing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused, can't the source be downloaded from a mirror in another country? I always use heanet.ie when downloading from SourceForge.

<comment><USER6> Why yes it can. Following laws leads to people doing silly things. A US based mirror is supposed to not distribute to certain countries. But it can distribute to a third country that can distribute anywhere it wants. So no transmission of data is actually stopped, but the US based mirror has successfully followed US law and caused some annoyance to a handful of countries the USA does not like.

<comment><USER10> Handful of countries? More like a handful of people in a few countries.

<comment><USER11> What if those handful people had started/contributed to some open source project? Now they don't have access to their own code.

<comment><USER10> My point was that the laws don't even hamper countries the law's implementor doesn't like. They just hamper a very few select people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Banning them actually has the opposite effect - aren't we trying to spread democracy? Dictators _want_ their people to be isolated, so that they don't know that there is a better world out there. I won't be surprised if China welcomes Google's departure.

By arming the people with tools, anything to spread information, we're actually helping take down the dictators. Have you guys heard about the people near the border of North Korea (on the "safe" side), attaching radio receivers to balloons and flying them into North Korea? The citizens of North Korea are walled off from the rest of the world and don't have access to information.

By giving them information, and allowing them to share it among themselves, we can sow seeds of dissent (so to speak), so that they can organize an uprising (so to speak) to demand a better quality of life ... and take down the government.

I'm not so much advocating starting a riot, I'm just saying that our sanction on tools and information to them is having the opposite effect of what is genuinely good for the folks in the country.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is probably just one of SourceForge's lawyer's overzealous misinterpretation of the law. (That's what lawyers are paid to do, of course.)

My question is, is SourceForge really "exporting" anything? Last time I checked how the Internet worked, SourceForge sent the packets to its ISP, and the ISP handled it from there. (Repeat until the packets are at their destination.)

(If the law says, "you must not transmit a packet addressed to a host in <list of countries>", then I guess that makes sense. But I have a feeling there is no such wording.)

Anyway, people in those countries should definitely be using Tor. So this will just remind them of that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't it ironic? They block the page to a specific group of people based on "5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".

They also potentially cut off the access for people who have their main project site at sf.net - which leaves everyone using the software without updates from a trusted/original source in case of security issues.

<comment><USER15> Not really because a software license agreement can't supersede the laws of the country in which it is executed. Also the license only stipulates that you make the source available to people you distribute the compiled binary to so if they block the whole site it's hard to argue they are breaking the letter of the agreement.

<comment><USER7> aha what about clinton's Internet freedom speech? US secretary of State Hillary Clinton few days urged Internet freedom! as she said: "We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas," said Clinton in a major address that cited China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among countries that censored the Internet or harassed bloggers!

Long live equal access dah!

<comment><USER15> Well, maybe that speech was the first step toward a proposal to change the law. That's hypocritical of Clinton to say that, I agree. That is besides the point though, here we are talking about the actions of SF as they relate to the law and the GPL, not the actions of the American government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a direct violation of the freedoms of Free Software and section 5 of opensource definition: "5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".

</comment><comment><USER17> Github is US-hosted so presumably it has to follow suit?

</comment><comment><USER18> This sounds like SourceForge trying very hard to be relevant. The policy makes no sense whatsoever.

<comment><USER19> It's to comply with US laws that state that nothing can be 'exported' to the aforementioned countries. In this case, software downloads are considered exports.

<comment><USER18> Those are bizarre laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And why it is ok for Facebook to launch a Parisian version and to Twitter to postpone its maintenance few days when there was unrest in Iran? Iranians revolting against their government where not terrorists? but when they use Open Source they are terrorist!

<comment><USER8> This is politics. Politics has no common sense, it acts in favour of small group of people whose intenations we can hardly recognize.</comment></comment>