What Kindle Means for Android - <AUTHOR> http://blog.geekli.st/post/32424443957/what-kindle-means-for-android

<comment><USER2> It's kind of amusing to me how every now and then someone proclaims that Google has "lost control" of Android and how this must be some kind of crisis and portends a looming disaster.

Then we will have a series of people proclaiming how Android is not really open and what a farce Google's pretense of openness is, and what fools we were to ever believe that Google intended to make an open source operating system.

Frequently this will be followed by people lamenting "fragmentation" and demanding that Google put a stop to it by putting tight controls on who can implement Android and how they can do it.

These are all different sides of the same coin. Openness = fragmentation, openness = loss of control, openness = diversity, choice, innovation and endless possibility. It has benefits and downsides to be sure, but to think Google didn't know they were giving up some control of Android when they released it as open source is absurd - open sourcing something is by definition giving up control of it.

<comment><USER3> Actually I think Google's openness is a quasi. Otherwise you wouldn't see them blocking the acer phone.

<comment><USER4> And yet they aren't blocking the Kindle. So how do you square that?

<comment><USER3> I'm sure they would if they could. Amazon is not a member of OHA so google has nothing to enforce that ban with.

<comment><USER4> So you agree with the flip side argument that Google is just enforcing existing business agreements to which all parties are signatories, you just choose to interpret it as uncharitably as possible for Google.

Yawn. Business is business. Using open source software doesn't magically absolve you of responsibility to your contracted partners, nor give you the right to jerk your suppliers around. The simple truth is that Amazon handled this gracefully and produced a great product, and Acer screwed it up and wrecked things for their partner Alibaba. Making Google out to be the bad guy is just fanboism.

<comment><USER5> >Business is business

Funny, that reminds me of the scorn heaped on Apple for the patent lawsuits against Samsung. Or on Oracle and Microsoft. Business is business, right? Regardless of other companies getting hurt?

Also reminds me of this post by Gruber supporting Apple on in app purchases:

<http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent>

It's really ironic how people claim their favorite company is better than the others because of blah blah blah reasons, but when it comes to power plays hurting third parties like this, support it by saying "business is business".

<comment><USER6> Samsung didn't violate a contract it signed with Apple. The situations really aren't very similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First, can we stop with the FUD about Google "banning" Acer from releasing a phone. This ArsTech article covers most of it but basically Alibaba was planning to release an OS that could run Android apps but was not certified by the OHA. And Acer as a member of OHA has to enforce Android compatibility on their devices to enforce consistency in Android. The same thing people complain about Android (fragmentation) is what they were trying to avoid.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked- acers-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/google-blocked-acers-rival- phone-to-prevent-android-fragmentation/)

Regarding the article, whatever Google has controlled since the beginning they have never lost, which is providing the "Google Experience" On Android.

<comment><USER8> I think this is an extremely naive view... Devices that don't have gmail, maps, chrome and play is a huge loss for google. It's very much in google's interest to discourage these types of forks, but that's the nature of open source.

<comment><USER7> The article talks of "losing control" not "losing revenue" hence what my post was talking about.

There will obviously be some lost revenue, but not really enough for Google to care. At least for now. Mainly Kindle hasn't done much to scare Google.

I remember when the first Kindle Fire came out and people were hailing it the end of Google and Android. Silk was going to eat Chrome for breakfast. Amazon Appstore would be the defacto "Android Marketplace". etc etc. I've yet to see any of that come to fruition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe this is just me, but if they have their own app store, their own UI, their own idioms and their own devices.... from any useful user or branding perspective, how are they Android phones?

And so more importantly, why does it matter for Android? It doesn't mean Android is more fragmented, because those phones _aren't Android phones_ , it just means one more competitor in the smart phone market.

If anything, it makes it easier for developers, because Amazon phones will be easier to port to than another random smart phone brand.

<comment><USER10> It is, essentially, a completely different OS which happens to run the same applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The way android is used by Amazon is essentially how apple used unix core to get the basics right when creating a new software platform. A smart move obviously. What surprises me is how none of the big android players have not seen an opportunity here and created their own experience on top of it. That is the easiest way to differentiate yourself from the myriad of other cheap android device makers.

Im sure there is a lot of hand wringing going on behind the scenes for this to not have happened yet but its inevitable.

<comment><USER11> > What surprises me is how none of the big android players have not seen an > opportunity here

I guess you haven't heard of HTC Sense, Motoblur, Samsung's Touchwiz, etc. and how users mostly hate them.

Savvy users seem to prefer taking Amazon's Android Kindles and installing vanilla Androids on them.

<comment><USER12> Amazon has what the others (including Google) don't have--an established digital commerce solution that people use and amazing customer support. Goggle falls flat but sort of seems to be trying to work on it, but I don't trust them the way I already trust Amazon. There's zero reason for me to purchase a book on Play instead of a Kindle as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER13> You forgot to mention that the kindle app is available free on stock android.

<comment><USER14> And do you realize that you can't download kindle books on to them unless you already own a kindle device. That app was only designed for portability of your existing library. Amazon in no way give up their biggest advantage over android devices.

<comment><USER15> That's not true. I don't own a kindle device yet I have books I purchased on the Kindle store (when Amazon had a sale in the past) appear in the Kindle app on my Nexus7.

Maybe it's just that the app does not allow purchasing (never looked)?

<comment><USER14> How do you manage to get the books the at the kindle sale price when you don't own a kindle? Strange, when I got my Nexus 7, I did give the kindle app a try but it wouldn't let me purchase any books unless I paid the hardcover price. I have amazon prime, but without owning a kindle device, these ebook sales are meaningless to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fortunately for developers Amazon hasn't forked the OS too much. The APIs for the latest release are the ICS APIs which is OK since most devs will still be targeting Froyo or Gingerbread for another year or so. The only problem is if you use some of the Google APIs, mainly Maps, in which case you'll have to get clever, either with reflection or your build system, to include Amazon's maps in your app.

If Amazon ever tries to do a major fork at the API level we'll be in trouble, but they have shown no sign of that as of yet.

<comment><USER3> There is a reason they haven't forked because there is a value in the ecosystem. What they have done is that the have starved Google of the revenue it makes out of android and that is where the opportunity is for major device makers which I don't get how they not see it.

<comment><USER16> I'm not following...why would major device manufacturers want to starve Google?

<comment><USER3> so that they can eat Google's lunch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes. Google lost control of an operating system which they consciously decided to release as open source and free software.

Somehow, I don't think they were trying hard to retain control of the OS.

<comment><USER18> they're trying very hard these days:

<http://marketingland.com/google-acer-android-aliyun-21631>

<comment><USER17> No. That's not trying hard. They could have just made Android closed-source, which is easy and simple.

In this case, they don't want an OHA member to ship products with Android forks that break app compatibility. Amazon is neither an OHA member and its OS does not break compatibility. Even if it did, why would it hurt Google or Android anymore than, say, using a completely different OS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Charlie knows what's up! Amazon has all of the pieces in place to remain a disruptive force in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER20> But didn't Google block Acer pretty recently? I understand that Acer was part of an industry group, but if Google is delivering a stream of improvements to Android can't they just lock up future updates?

<comment><USER21> Well, until 2017 there's a pesky promise to Chinese regulators: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-32969_3-57437774-300/china-to- goog...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-32969_3-57437774-300/china-to-google- android-must-remain-open/)

Of course, Google's willingness to make that promise says something about their current plans and the contingencies they foresee.

<comment><USER20> that's interesting — i'd assumed they wrote off china, but that really goes the other way

<comment><USER21> There's a limited market for Google's services in China (if only because the government generally blocks them), but Motorola sells plenty of phones in China and makes even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The whole point of Android from Google's perspective was to give them the ability to control search on mobile without having to buy their way in like they did on the Windows desktop and they do on iOS. Every year Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple, Mozilla, Dell, HP, etc. to be the default search provider, have their toolbar installed, have Chrome be the default, or whatever way they want to be the search default, and it is worth every penny, but owning their own platform in Android means they control their own destiny on the future computing platform - phones, tablets, tv's, and other embedded computing systems.

Fragmentation is not a problem because Google still is the primary Android services provider. If Samsung or HTC started doing what Amazon is doing and selling Android phones without Google apps and search as a default, then Google's in trouble.

Google's biz model is to give away Android for free, but make up for it in money from the Play market, mobile ads, and mobile search.

<comment><USER23> "Fragmentation is not a problem because Google still is the primary Android services provider."

Doesn't the article point out that some of the bigger companies using Android, like Amazon and (in the linked article about TVs) Lenovo, are doing their own versions of Android that use none of Google's services? So Google is left high and dry - the other companies have taken the Android code but given Google nothing in return. This is how I understood the claim that Google has lost control of Android.</comment></comment>


Is Rovio In Trouble? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/danieltack/2013/06/05/is-rovio-in-trouble/

<comment><USER2> Seems to be working for Rovio if you ask me. Branching out to toys, soda (which is outselling Coke and Pepsi in Finland), TV shows and partnerships with franchies like Rio and Star Wars is super smart. Why put all of your eggs in one basket when you can make money potentially 4 or 5 times per app downloader.</comment>


Can Facebook Be Cut Down to Size? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/opinion/facebook-china-privacy-data-security.html <comment><USER2> The majority of Facebook's users are outside of the US, and it is smaller than other big US tech companies ([https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap](https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap)).

I'd rather see antitrust brought against a company using other kinds of anti competitive tactics. Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform...

And extracting 30% on every transaction, including your competitors? Imagine if Microsoft tried taking a 30% cut of every transaction that passed through Internet Explorer, or Windows, in the 1990s

Apple's market cap is bigger than Facebook's. Almost twice as big.

[https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap](https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap)

[https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap](https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap)

<comment><USER3> Apple is not a monopoly, even google is not a monopoly. facebook is. Fb is either buying or using its reach to enter into other markets. Messaging, videos (youtube), stories (snapchat), crowd sourcing (gofundme), marketplace (offerup). In all these it is using its existing dominance in one market to enter into other which is classical case of antitrust.

<comment><USER4> Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search. That has been the case for over a decade now.

The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.

Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.

When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.

<comment><USER5> > _Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search_

Tough thing is it grew to a position of dominance, on the user side, organically. (On the ad side, the story is more complicated.) Facebook grew on both sides by gobbling up potential competition, _e.g._ Instagram, WhatsApp, _et cetera_.

<comment><USER4> I agree. I regard Google search as one of the greatest technological accomplishments in world history. The service it has been to humanity can't be overstated. It wasn't just slightly better, it was radically better in every way. It was faster, it produced better results, it even had greater integrity (less clutter & junk, less abusive ad approach by not mixing results & ads, etc).

A dominant, extreme majority market position by itself isn't valid justification to break a company up or apply anti-trust (in the US). Monopolies are of course not illegal in the US. Google's search product remains superior and it's unlikely to be directly, seriously challenged by a threatening competitor. It's the change in integrity that might take them down. Call it greed. The greed eats the ecosystem, pushes for a greater share of the pot, then the ecosystem cries foul to regulators, identical to Microsoft's mistakes derived from greed. If a monopoly platform can't control itself properly - in terms of human nature, it's probably extremely difficult to restrain that level of economic power while existing in a low feedback, low consequence bubble - then the authorities will probably step in and do it. When it comes to monopolies, you can eat this, _maybe_ you can eat this and that, you can't eat this and that and that and that and that. It's pretty much that simple, you control yourself or eventually the guys with the guns will do it for you (if only out of concerns for preserving their own power).

<comment><USER6> I sincerely believe that with a little shoe polish, a little more sincere effort into information retrieval mathematics, and better marketing, DuckDuckGo would be a superior search product.

Currently I use DuckDuckGo for probably 85% of searches. There are specific search cases that don't work well, and specific types of automatic categorization and presentation (e.g. sports scores, rich location data) that Google is well ahead on.

But in many mundane searches, the result quality is indistinguishable and the lack of personalized tracking would break any ties strongly in DuckDuckGo's favor, so strongly that it's obviously worth it to split searches between two different engines on a case by case basis.

And in fact, I like some things about DuckDuckGo better, particularly I like the visual experience of its Open Street Maps results better. It's not as information rich as a Google Maps result, but Google Maps is visually too cluttered and often suffers performance issues that a lower-tech maps service doesn't. (DuckDuckGo also lets you select from a few choices for the maps backend, including Google Maps).

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure Google will remain far ahead as the search product leader.

I only mean that in terms of the implementation and actual user experience, DuckDuckGo doesn't have far to go before it would be entirely a substitute product that completely replaces an average search experience on Google.

(I'm speaking as someone who had worked on all types of personalization features for an Alexa top 400 site's product search engine — so I have a lot of work experience informing my opinion that the actual distance, in terms of the investment to reproduce feature parity, between DuckDuckGo and Google is not that high.)

Google's original efforts to create internet search were amazing. But now the underlying search tech is totally a commodity, including most of the fancier machine learning and information retrieval features. It's why they have to integrate advertising so tightly to it. Search features alone don't differentiate it as a product anymore.

I do hope a service like DuckDuckGo invests in that last 10% of the squirrly little extra features it needs to provide to seriously compete for overall market share.

<comment><USER7> I wish DDG would include a button in the search results that says "Search in Google instead".

That way, I would actually use DDG as my main search engine because it would be easy to resort to Google in specific cases.

<comment><USER8> Check out Bangs on DDG [1]. Just insert "!g" into your search text and it automatically redirects your search to Google. It works for thousands of other websites too. (Wikipedia's !w is one I use all the time)

[1]: [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I know about bangs, but on mobile they are cumbersome to use: I have to tap my screen 7 times to change from DDG to Google:

        1. tap DDG search bar
        2. tap space
        3. tap shift key
        4. tap "!"
        5. tap shift key
        6. tap "g"
        7. tap enter key

If DDG included a simple button, it would be 1 tap. Of course, I can't blame them for not linking to Google, but this way I will stick with Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This op-ed argues the question "Should Facebook Be Cut Down to Size?" but doesn't really address whether it can, or how.

Can it? What would work? How would you do it, if you could?

<comment><USER10> It can.

The root cause of a lot of problems Facebook creates is the like count next to every utterances, article or behaviour on the net. This has to be regulated much more than private data/friend graphs/location data/what you view/search for etc etc.

Psychologists will tell you the most effective way to influence behaviour of an individual is to show people what the herd around them is thinking, saying or doing. This is how society has always created "social norms".

If people around you don't smoke, you are less likely to be a smoker. Teen girls who see other girls get pregnant are more likely to get pregnant. There are literally thousands of examples that can be cited about how seriously we take this signal.

In a world with too much info that no one is trained to handle or are too busy or distracted to handle, we look at what what the majority of people around us are doing and do that blindly. This is signal influences behaviour. Both good and bad.

Facebook has fucked that signal up for society. In every sphere of life. And we are currently dealing with the fallout. The signal is being delievered too fast and too much imho. And this speed is highly overrated in its value to society.

Whether these counts should be displayed, to who, how quickly, next to what type of content, for different communities, education levels etc needs to be debated and regulated.

<comment><USER11> Good point. While we're at it, let's get rid of Amazon and Netflix recommendations, Google search results ordered by quality and relevance, and email spam filtering.

<comment><USER12> So you think the like counts don't have negative effects on people's beliefs and behaviours? Please read Nudge by Richard Thaler to understand how easily misguided the herd is when following the wrong signals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why does Facebook seem to be everyone's focus? Look at the control Google has over the web. Why would you start with Facebook?

<comment><USER14> The social tie-ins of FB make it much "stickier" than Google. Google has a ton of power, but very little of it locks an individual in. The "chase you around the internet" bit is a problem, but addressing that is not that complicated.

The service FB provides is much closer to a natural monopoly. The value of FB's service derived entirely from the sheer volume of people who use it. Saying "I am not going to use FB" is a cost to everyone around you.

<comment><USER15> This can be a problem with Google, at least if you consider baby duck syndrome[1].

Google Docs is often the only comfortable and familiar way to collaborate on documents for many groups, and YouTube is often the only source of video content on the internet.

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

<comment><USER16> Right but deciding not to use Google services doesn't cut you off from everybody you know. My family uses Messenger, my US friends use Instagram, my European friends use Whatsapp...

Even though I don't have a Facebook profile anymore, I'm still very much a Facebook user because it would be difficult for me to convince everyone else to switch to some alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One could argue that a social network must necessarily be a monopoly to be useful to users unless cross site communication between multiple social networks was mandated.

Just as 5 different companies each listing 20% of the residential phone numbers wouldn't make sense. The more completely a social network covers the population the more useful it becomes to users.

<comment><USER18> But it'd be a poor argument. Email does multi-provider interop well.

<comment><USER19> If you have rather low standards. Email works just well enough, but it's turning into walled gardens, has no de facto e2e encryption, still has a spam problem and has a terrible UI for non-technical users in group settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If facebook is in danger of being cut down, why doesn't facebook just not higher so many employees? It seems like a win win situation: less cost, more profit and if fewer products get built as a result of the lower employee highering then there's less chance of blowback from the public

</comment><comment><USER21> Facebook just needs to have enough unsuccessful attempts at buying out it's competitors. This displaces power. With enough power and media displacement facebook falls. It's really that simple. Facebook is betting on people to sell out (which they always do) and for users to pay the price.

</comment><comment><USER22> I doubt it can be reigned in. No government has control of the money flow, how can it possibly have any real control?

</comment><comment><USER23> My first reaction was to be shocked. The NYT? Advocating for the death of a major corporation? What's in it for them?

My guess is they've sensed the national mood is shifting. If something isn't done, then people will start to demand something more drastic than simply breaking up a large world spanning company.

The capitalist system must give the appearance of health to forestall further demands. It is looking very ill at the top of the tech sector. The tyranny (iron rule by a minority) inherent to private enterprise is flowering atop an incredibly concentrated sector and it's becoming obvious to anyone that looks.

<comment><USER24> You're right to be shocked about the NYT calling for the breakup of facebook, but I think your a bit off on the 'why'. I say you're right to be shocked because Facebook is run by a person who some on the left were previously calling to make a presidential run, who was previously a shining beacon to the world's left-dominated media (including the NYT) ... so yeah, it's kind of shocking to see how quickly they've turned on Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The real story of 'why' the about face has to do with Cambridge Analytica, though. Many in the media still feel that the election 'should' have gone the other way (regardless of how people actually voted), and now they blame FB/Zuck. The irony is that in 2008 Obama's team did all of the same things that Trump's did. The media was OK with it then (in fact, celebrated it) because it was for their side.

<comment><USER23> I would say FB was celebrated by liberals, not by leftists. CA is a media project of the liberal media, not the leftist media. I've been very skeptical that CA had a large impact when FB's ad categories are so often blatantly wrong.

[https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference- betwee...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-between- liberalism-and-leftism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> fake news

</comment><comment><USER26> Not with this Congress.

</comment><comment><USER27> No need, they're going the way of AOL, friendster and myspace.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you can use different social network than Facebook, then Facebook is not a monopoly.

<comment><USER29> Not necessarily disagreeing, but doesn't that basically invalidate the idea of a monopoly in a free and open internet? Perhaps the definition of a monopoly from analog era doesn't apply to the internet?

<comment><USER28> Yes, in the free market monopoly is impossible to form. You only get anomalies when you start adding socialism into the mix.

<comment><USER30> Do you have a scientific resource that proves your statement? Like a model that was run in a computer and resulted in a perfect free market?

Maybe it would be true in a perfect free market, where people would act rational and won't be jerks,

I don't have proof but intuitively I can see a free market simulator where some actors will find a small loophole and exploit it to maximize it's profit destroying everyone else.

<comment><USER28> It is just common sense. Regulations give one advantage and restrict competition which is a breeding ground for monopolies.

<comment><USER31> That only shows that regulations may create monopolies, not that they're the _only_ reason for their existence.

<comment><USER28> Sure, but that is the main reason.

<comment><USER30> Is this a fact or your intuition, in a perfect society we do not need laws, in such a perfect society communism would also work fine, but since the world is not perfect we need laws or revolutions to fix the problems,

I would really love some economist to team up with some game developers and run some economic simulations with different level of regulations, it would be interesting to see how well the model would match the reality.

<comment><USER28> This is my observation and so far it has not been proven wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is facebook still a problem? I don't know anyone around me who didn't tell me they ceased to use it.

<comment><USER33> You're in a bubble.

I quit Facebook on principle but I'm suffering for it. I'm trying to meet new people, strengthen friendships, get out more, etc. Literally everyone I know except for one person does eventing and communicating on Facebook, so that's pretty rough.

Facebook's network effect should not be underestimated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a fundamentally wrong question.

Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder.

It is fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important to civil society.

We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death.

Splitting it will only lead to normalization of sale of user data.

<comment><USER35> > fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important

No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities.

Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.

<comment><USER36> I for one don't understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private.

I've always considered what I enter as being _given_ to Facebook rather than somehow _mine_ despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it's theirs. If you don't want something known I don't give it to Facebook...

If I give my friend my phone number, that's their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they're a bad friend. I don't tell bad friends important secrets.

<comment><USER37> _I've always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers._

There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Textpattern CMS 4.6.0 beta released - <AUTHOR> http://textpattern.com/weblog/388/textpattern-cms-460-beta-released <comment><USER2> Didnt know this was still actively in development. Used to be nice 7 years ago, somehow lost all its buzz.

<comment><AUTHOR> Personnel changes a-plenty in the last 7 years, including:

* Dean (founder and TextDrive chap) Allen going off-grid

* Alex Shiels (former developer) departing for Automattic

The software itself is solid. Sure, development is sometimes slow, but the core team is three (smart, busy) people.

Most years, there's a somewhat tense period when the textpattern.com domain comes up for renewal and fingers are crosses that Dean renews it. Happy days.

<comment><USER2> That last line is hilarious & sad!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fond memories of back then when WordPress was the fancy new kid :P

//edit: apparently they both came out in 2003 - but Textpattern seemed more solid and underdog even back then, even though I can't exactly remember when the Wordpress craze started.

</comment><comment><USER4> Textpattern was the first CMS that I "got" as a front end guy- after wrangling crap like PHPNuke and FusionPHP or whatever it was a breath of fresh air. Glad to see it's still kicking</comment>


How to get America to walk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17107653

<comment><AUTHOR> The signs with walking distances utilize QR codes in a functional way by bringing up google walking routes.

In the wild I have only seen QR codes deployed by marketers pointlessly sending you to a company or movie's main website which provides no utility or reward.</comment>


Fascinating Mathematical People (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~tondeur/Albers-2011.pdf <comment><USER2> What's the legality of this? That's a PDF of a recent, in-print book, on the site of someone who is not one of the authors but who is one of the interviewed mathematicians, and there do not appear to be any links on the site leading to this file or any mention of it.

My guess is that this is a courtesy copy of the ebook given to the site owner because he was interviewed in the book, and he probably did not intend for this link to be circulated.

BTW, this is one of a series of books of interviews with mathematicians by the same interviewers/editors. They are all very interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found in on mathoverflow in one of the comments posted by a prominent mathematician not featured in the interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are sixteen interviews each of them about 18 pages long. The interviewers are really good and the answers are long and detailed and reveal a lot about how universities have changed over the last century among other things.</comment>


Ask HN: Ex-blockchain engineers, why did you get out? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to understand more about blockchain technology, but I struggle with seeing where it's useful and where it isn't. Would love to hear from people who have actually done some work in the area. <comment><USER2> Blockchains increase trust and immutability at cost of scaling, speed, expense, over other digital systems. If you don't have people trying to fool you by doublespending (it's like a race condition) then you don't need a blockchain.

Blockchains aren't just for currency, but their best use case is surely currency, for only the currency project can recuperate the massive externalities (costs) of running the system, for the profit margin is almost 100 percent. What that means is, for a blockchain to make sense for you, you really, really need to need the anti attacker parts of it for it to make sense over any other system.

Current real world uses are timestamping, (recently Peter Todd timestamped all of archive.org, so people can't go back and make changes to fool people.) Bitcoin (currency). And as a tier 1 trust layer to support tier 2 protocols that have faster, cheaper, more stateful transactions (counterparty, mastercoin, rsk, sidechains, lightning, etc. a few of those need opcodes added to the btc network.)

Trust is expensive, bankers hours are comedic, much of the world loses large percentage of currency value every year, bitcoin can solve much of that. Databases and merkletrees already do a great job if you don't have advanced attackers. Blockchains are much less exciting than bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I can tell the only current real-world use case for blockchain technology is flight capital from China ([https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/01/19/2182669/chinese- capit...](https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/01/19/2182669/chinese-capital- flight-is-back/) \- see graph at the end).

<comment><USER4> ... and bitcoin of course.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand your comment, because that's the entire point of the person you are responding to: that only current real world product of blockchain technology is Bitcoin, and the only real world use case of Bitcoin is flight capital from China; like... what exactly do you mean by "and"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Black and gray uses only? Create a temporary environment, allow two users enter by blockchain, let them exchange their sh*t inside and destroy the environment after that. Financials from the beginning to the end then, insiders job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you explain the idea a little more? What's an example of an environment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm considering entering the space as a NCG, luckily I have good connections and experience in the space. My alternative is to leverage my startup experience and just work in some other industry that interests me. My one doubt with blockchain is that there isn't a ton of non-enterprise money in the space. Seems like founding in just about any other industry is likely more profitable and more technically reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> What interests you in starting a blockchain company then?</comment></comment>


Google launches two-factor authentication - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-two-step-verification/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+mattcutts/uJBW+(Matt+Cutts:+Gadgets,+Google,+and+SEO)&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> No mention of how this affects POP/IMAP access. I guess this really only helps if you only use web access on all your devices, otherwise the attacker simply accesses your account through POP or IMAP.

<comment><USER3> You create unique passwords for each program you use within your account settings. You have a list of all of the accounts, and you can revoke the token at any time

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in China, I dont want to tie my email to my phone number because my phone number is tied to my real identity( requirement to get a phone number here).

Can I opt out of this?

<comment><USER5> You have to opt in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love a key, certificate, or fob based system. But as I learned while living in Japan, any verification method which depends on your home-country mobile phone is a bad idea.</comment>


HTML5 Form features you should know - <AUTHOR> http://www.dotnetbips.com/articles/b0a33a0e-b4c2-43db-9f54-8de55c105fce.aspx

<comment><USER2> And so post 3333333 went away unnoticed ... not!</comment>


Kainoa: Device Rental and Testing Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.getkainoa.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> pretty interesting idea. sourcing devices for cheap is a pain. I hold on to my testing devices though.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks interesting, how is this different from Amazon Device Farm?

<comment><USER3> The HN software detected this as a sockpuppet comment. If that's true, please don't do this here—it's not allowed.

It's particularly a bad idea when the post is about good work, like this one seems to be. Good work can speak for itself here, and trying to game HN only risks tarnishing it.</comment></comment>


Is Facebook Our Digital Pope? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> What does that even mean?</comment>


How Habits Hold Us - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204795304577223200657284394.html

<comment><USER2> Former Madison Avenue ad executive here, limiting the scope of my comment to the Febreze story.

This part accurately reflects the kind of thinking process the strategists went through:

> What's most interesting is that instead of focusing on removing bad smells, > the ads set up Febreze ... satisfying the desire to make things smell nice, > not just look good.

The rest of it is totally ridiculous:

> The ads taught consumers a new habit, training them to associate the > rewarding positive cue—a spotless space—with the use of Febreze.

I would believe the ads were effective at setting cultural expectations that a clean space also needs a clean smell, and that Febreze helps make that possible. But the "rewarding positive cue" of cleaning? A "reward for a bout of cleaning"? That's overstating the power of advertisers and understating the common sense of consumers, and awkwardly smashing this example into a story that isn't related to it.

Madison Avenue "manipulates" you, but it's done by setting your expectation for The Way Things Should Be. It isn't with a subliminal cue and a Pavlovian reward. The carousel scene from Mad Men [1] is really what the meeting where they sold this idea was like. Trust me, I've been in many of them.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUUyx0d7qw>

<comment><USER3> Just want to say thanks for your great link (the video)!

Having been in similar meetings it almost hurts how close to home this hits. All the way down to the charismatic narrator and his carefully crafted speech.

Truth is, advertising agencies work with 0,1% psychology and 99,9% bullshit. And most of the psychology is focussed on squeezing the maximum campaign budget out of the customer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This New York Times article by Charles Duhigg (whose book is mentioned in this story) is a much better read: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?_r=4&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER5> It requires a subscription, unfortunately.

<comment><USER6> Type the URL into Google search. NY times will let you view it as long as google.com is your referer.

<comment><USER7> Wow, excellent tip. Thanks! I used <http://www.google.com/#q=new+york+times+shopping+habits> and it was the top result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bad science journalism.. clearly trying to oversimplify and the author, didn't seem to have re-read it at all...I wish i had downvote on HN :(

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article for ordinary users because its simplistic. But it's a bad fit for HN; People here want juicy information...</comment>


Five surfers drown in the Netherlands, getting into 'avalanche-like' sea foam - <AUTHOR> https://www.foxnews.com/world/netherlands-surfer-deaths-severe-weather-storm-sea-foam-the-hague <comment><USER3> The problem with sea foam is that it's mostly air, so you sink in it. If they were experienced surfers in storm conditions, they were almost certainly on shortboards or mini-guns, which barely float them to begin with, by design. They would have leashes holding the board to their ankle, so they would have their flotation device but if the combination of board and body don't float, the leash won't help.

I suspect some light seafoam got sucked under denser foam by currents and then, as it upwelled, basically opened a hole under them. I can't say I've experienced anything at the scale that would drown 5 men, but falling into upwelling foam is definitely a thing.

<comment><USER4> Looks like they were super experienced body surfers wearing swim fins - <USER2> guys that would usually be doing the rescuing.

It sounds like the bigger problem was that they got lost in the sea foam - couldn't see where they were going.

You're absolutely right about the suffocation risk due to foam/bubbles though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find the Fox article to be rather short, so have another link with links to more details and news if you're interested in what happened: [https://nltimes.nl/2020/05/12/rescuers-find-fifth-dead- body-...](https://nltimes.nl/2020/05/12/rescuers-find-fifth-dead-body-rough- seas-scheveningen-coast)

<comment><USER6> More coverage [https://regio15.nl/nieuws/lijst- weergave/31-waterongevallen/...](https://regio15.nl/nieuws/lijst- weergave/31-waterongevallen/31716-live-grote-inzet-hulpdiensten-bij- scheveningen)

[https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/ungluecke/mindesten...](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/ungluecke/mindestens- fuenf-surfer-kommen-vor-hollaendischer-kueste-um-16765845.html)

[https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2020/0512/1137952-surfing- deat...](https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2020/0512/1137952-surfing-deaths- netherlands/)

[https://regio15.nl/nieuws/lijst- weergave/31-waterongevallen/...](https://regio15.nl/nieuws/lijst- weergave/31-waterongevallen/31718-zoekactie-naar-vermiste-personen-bij- scheveningen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > two of the surfers were internationally trained lifeguards that had worked > in Australia.

Wow. That adds a bit of an extra dimension. What a sad event.

> "They were busy training," he said Tuesday. "They then disappeared under the > foam like it was some sort of avalanche."

.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sea foam can be natural... But a lot of it has artificial origins from various pollutants.

I really wouldn't be surprised if the extra foamyness leading to these deaths couldn't eventually be tracked back to some heavy nitrogen fertilizer applied to local fields a week ago, and a rainstorm...

</comment><comment><USER9> The way this picture was shot (like tilt-shift) makes it look like a miniature scale model.

[https://twitter.com/regio15/status/1260070967822503936/photo...](https://twitter.com/regio15/status/1260070967822503936/photo/1)

<comment><USER10> Why do you think it's TS and not just shallow DoF?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe a stupid question but why don't surfers carry a small emergency air supply on their body? Not anything big, I'm thinking just about the size of a soda can or something.

SCUBA divers may carry "spare air", but I've never seen surfers do this.

<comment><USER12> 99% of Scuba divers don't carry spare air. It is hard to imagine it being worth it for surfers.

<comment> reason-mr When you get really drilled by a large wave, you get ragdolled. Getting to an air supply could be hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me it's clear that natural conditions _appeared_ safe for experts, but in fact were not.

Since while surfing, communication and group behaviour are tricky, I'd say it's likely each of these people individually made their (incorrect) danger assessment.

That effectively puts the fatality rate in these specific conditions at 5/7, or ~70%.

So, to prevent this reoccurring, the specific conditions need to be identified, and other surfers need to be trained to avoid them. I'm thinking something like "Whenever waves are over 5 feet, there is an onshore wind, and a water sample maintains foam for more than 5 minutes, you are unlikely to survive"

Sadly, I doubt very much this will happen.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, is this a big deal statistically? I have surfed for a very long time and I've never heard of this. Am I just ignorant and this is not uncommon (presumably in areas/conditions I don't surf in)? Or is this just some sort of freak occurrence? Unless this is much more common than I believe I think we really should just file this under "really bad luck" and move on and focus on the more statistically dangerous problems surfing.

I mean I guess we can all think to ourselves "deep foam can be a dangerous", but I wonder if anyone given that message would ever end up saved by it given how unusual (my assumption) it is.

<comment> reason-mr I lived in Hawaii and surfed there for some time.

I had a conversation with a well known shaper (surfboard maker) about this and some of the things which went on on the North Shore. He said : "In your 20's you try a bunch of stuff and you don't die. So you think you can get away with it. Most of the time, you don't die. Then as you get into your 40's the law of probabilities catches up with you and your either die or have a near-death experience, and then you back way-the-hell off".

I.E. the probability of a serious problem is moderate to small, but you can have long runs of winning at dice. But eventually, unless you change, it will get you. Several famous people have gotten this message, including Jack Johnson (who was on the trajectory as a pro surfer before he became a musician - incident at pipe). Jamie O'Brian, etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't see how any of this contradicts my point. If the probability of something like this occurring is extremely small, then why focus on it over other much more likely problems? Is this foam issue a statistical fluke? If so, then no, it won't eventually get you. At least not until the huge number of other things get you first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> More young healthy people in the Netherlands have died from Sea Foam than from COVID-19.

</comment><comment><USER15> Man against Mother Nature - - - too often man looses.

Surfers, especially in that geography wear wetsuits which give some buoyancy, but not like a life jacket does, and I don't know any surfers who wear life jackets.

I was a WSI, a life guard trainer back in college, still swim 5,200 yds a week which really is nothing compared to swim team, and I scuba dive down to the bottoms of our nearby lakes to set submersible pumps for a living (diving 41 years), my dive gear has a BC vest that can act as a life jacket (if) it is not damaged and (if) my regulator is functioning and (if) I have still have air in my tank and (if) I have not blacked out by like a boat hitting me, too many ifs, but I absolutely will not venture out onto surface of bodies of water on watercraft without wearing a life jacket for a whole host of reasons (surfboards are some sort of watercraft).

I assume they were more or less "drowned" in the foam, unable to breathe, suffocated.

The most professional solution for fighting most fires is foam which puts out fires by sort of drowning them too.

<comment><USER16> I've been in foam that was similar to this (at least by description) and no pfd will have buoyancy that will float you out of it. It's also less turbulent than the water, so if it were swimmable they would have done it. I expect they were in the surface of the water and engulfed in foam too dense to swim up through and disorienting enough that they couldn't just head for shore in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unrelated, but I could have sworn foxnews.com domain was shadow banned on HN? Not trying to troll at all, just honestly thought so.

<comment><USER18> Not sure if it's a matter of the overall submission count that's giving this impression, but in the last year, users submitted:

6,612 articles from nytimes.com [0]

91 articles from foxnews.com [1]

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=nytimes.com&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=foxnews.com&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

<comment><USER19> The way it should be, only one of those is a news site and it's not the one with the word news in its name.

<comment><USER20> NYT produces plenty of "fake news" and biased hypocritical trash. All of the big media outlets are flaming dumpster fires, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVzG_6jsZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVzG_6jsZE) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18b5ip95Es](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18b5ip95Es) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewXzRxRen0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewXzRxRen0) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxHG6yM5Fs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxHG6yM5Fs) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIGH7J5CLtQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIGH7J5CLtQ)

There's been a few occasions where I've found an interesting article on Fox News and I won't share or link it here or on Reddit, because I know that the bias is so strong against Fox as an organization that few people would consume the content with an open mind. So I go and track down another outlet covering the same story and link that instead. I'm sure other members here do the same sort of self-censorship, essentially. That's part of why you'll see 6000 submissions from NYT and only 90 from Fox.

<comment><USER21> > So I go and track down another outlet covering the same story and link that > instead.

That's exactly what I do on Reddit. I haven't had occasion to share a Fox News link here, but I think I would do it because I trust this place more to make judgements based on the content of the article.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Objections are goals - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/objections-are-goals-9c9c2f27069 <comment><USER2> Then we complain about the sad state of the industry.

What about empirically proving that something works instead? Like in serious professions.

Imagine going to a doctor and the doctor saying: "The cure to your illness is eating a big warm turd every morning. I know you will object but turn it into a goal and you'll see its value".

Better to use guru status and force people to use an objectionable idea (turn objections into goals) until they are invested in it and hence start to find value in it. This is Machiavellism 101. Once you get invested you get emotional and you will defend it, no matter if its shit.

As another example go find the original scrum papers by Sutherland. Every claim is pulled from his rear end. No serious studies, metrics, none, whatsoever.

Luckily this people does not promote brain surgery procedures and techniques.

<comment><USER3> I have a new baby. There is a metric ton of guesswork involved in figuring out what's going on with her health and well-being at any moment. The pediatricians have better more targeted hypotheses and ideas for things to try than us or our books or the internet, but I would _not_ call what they're doing empirical in the sense you're using it. I honestly don't find it very dissimilar to the type of iterative hypothesis testing informed by past experience we do when building software. I think a similar thing is true for most (but perhaps not all) of the "serious professions" you're thinking of.

<comment><USER2> But this is a problem of magnitude. What would you think of your baby's pediatrician if he/she starting pushing his/her unproven ideas as good practices that should be followed by the medical community and writing about pushing against the objections when someone objects them?

<comment><USER3> This is totally how it works! There are also people trying to apply more empirical rigor, and presumably (or hopefully), once that's available, people switch to it. What I'm saying is that we aren't the only field that uses experience-based best practices as a way to get things done without making perfect the enemy of good.

<comment><USER2> Can you point me to a blog where a well know surgeon pushes the medical community to use some novel techniques he devised and supposedly uses but that have not been peer reviewed at least once?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paradigm: Death Based Development (DBD). If the tests fail, the software engineer who wrote the code is executed.

Step 1: I can't do DBD because I don't want to die.

Step 2: I _can_ do DBD if I'm willing to die.

Step 3: When I'm willing to accept death as a natural part of the software development cycle, I can do DBD.

Nice, I like this.

<comment><USER5> I'm very confident my tests would be very simple under this system.

<comment><USER6> I'm confident the Volkswagen unit test system would become very popular: [https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen](https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this post, even though it gives even more evidence that the original TCR proposal is unworkable in practice. Namely, because all the bullet points at the bottom define different conditions that all have to be satisfied for TCR to be workable (and many more are omitted), you end up needing your unit test situation to be the intersection of a huge number of special cases that are almost never true in practice.

You need (TCR doesn't fragment commit history && tests are fast && confidence of test accuracy is high && ....). As you AND more things in there (and there are many more things to AND into the list of conditions necessary for TCR), the probability that it all applies to your working situation is going to drop rapidly except for some extremely isolated cases, and then one might question if it's a good idea to adopt an extreme practice like TCR even when the heroic assumptions are satisfied, because it will mean mixed development practices in cases when the assumptions are / are not satisfied, and that inconsistency itself costs you, especially in a team setting.

But the idea of reversing objections into statements of conditions is brilliant and I plan to practice thinking this way for sure!

<comment><USER8> I have the opposite reaction, I'm skeptical that the abstract "objections are goals" rule has significant value. But the concrete points about TCR are interesting.

To address the objections about fast and trustworthy tests, you could limit its use to code that already has good tests. To address the version history objection, you could use "git commit --amend" to limit it to a single commit. So in some situations TCR may actually be usable (and in fact it's not too far away from the process I often use! Frequent small commits with --amend)

<comment><USER7> I envy your ability to use that workflow. Across three enterprise jobs over the last 7 years, all places using git and GitHub, I've never worked on any sections of code where this could be tractable, except maybe for the process of using —amend in some rare cases where we wouldn't want this history of those commits to be well separated for later purposes of bisecting to find regressions and bugs.

<comment><USER8> This is not something I'd do on master, of course -- just on my own branch while working on stuff that will eventually become a single PR.

I like to curate my commit(s) as I go, so that the final PR is easy to understand.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I see. Yes, that is a very standard workflow. I also commonly address PR change requests in isolated commits as well, and then link back in the PR review page with something like "fixed in <commit hash>", so that reviewers can see isolated commit changes fixing itemized requests, and also so that no review comments ever go without some explicit reply, either demonstrating the fix or explain why to not do it or table it for later.

I guess in this sense, these items don't have much to do with whether the big conjunction of conditions necessary for TCR are satisfied or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another way of looking at this is: all advice is conditional. It only works for people in certain setups and environments. People rarely specify their conditions, and may not even be aware of the other possibilities.

So when offering advice or suggestions for process improvement, always try to add at least a couple of sentences describing the context at the front. It'll reduce the amount of objections you get.

<comment> default-kramer I think it goes a little deeper. Kent's original post (test && commit || revert) describes the strategy as just a curiosity. "I'm not arguing for "test && commit || revert" nor even describing its trade-offs. I'm saying it seems like it shouldn't work at all, it does, and I hope you try it (if you're the sort of person who just tries new programming workflows)."

But the problem is Kent has probably never been on the wrong side of a CxO's dictum: "This company is using agile, starting now. Thank you." Programmers who have felt that pain want to make sure that a random musing from Kent Beck doesn't turn into a "movement" that ruins their work, so they try to shut down his idea hard. I don't blame them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The stated goals are not tied to any business value. This is putting the cart before the horse. TCR is a means to an end, not an end itself.

Dale's essay on "Resistance as a Resource" is very good, but this is not how I would apply it.

<comment><USER11> Right. I designed a workshop/coaching game 15-minute FOTO (from obstacles to outcomes) [1] which does a similar "flip" from the negative to the positive; however by construction the input obstacles are with respect to some kind of objective. 4-Oh if you like - objective, obstacle, outcome, more outcomes. See also the classic coaching model GROW (Whitmore)

[1] [https://www.agendashift.com/15-minute- foto](https://www.agendashift.com/15-minute-foto)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Huh, I was bullish on "log-driven programming" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18165472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18165472)) but this one strikes me as fairly obvious common sense. Is it any more than "try to respond to objections in a positive way"?

If someone objects "I can't use this TCR process because it will mess up version control history" it seems pretty clear that either TCR or version history will have to change.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a terrific article. I've used some similar techniques to reduce negativity and reflexive opposition to change (mostly borrowed from sales techniques), but this logical formulation is very clear and easy to use.

<comment><USER13> And how do the people you do this to feel about it? The idea of enthusiastically applying sales techniques to interactions with one's coworkers feels appalling. A group of colleagues is ideally a marketplace of ideas and, yes, one needs to _sell_ ideas from time to time, but who wants to be _sold to_?

People often oppose something but raise (being uncharitable here) spurious objections, either because they don't want to share their true feelings — or don't even know what their true feelings are. It's worth getting to the bottom of these issues, and worth doing with a great deal of respect for other people's feelings.

If you're dealing with an issue that is _not_ emotionally contentious, if you're trying together with a group to achieve a common goal, using this "objections are goals" approach can help bring a team together and encourage positivity in the face of obstacles. When applied where there is disagreement about the goal, people will feel bulldozed.

<comment><USER12> Who wants to be sold to?

Everyone. Everyone wants to be sold something. Because when someone sells you something, it means they have listened to your problem (and maybe helped you discover/understand it), and offered you a solution using resources you already have. Sales, _done right_ , is one of the best parts of human social behavior. It's mutually beneficial, a win-win.

Sales has a bad reputation due to bad actors, not due to sales itself. Smarmy behavior, dishonesty, and taking advantage of others is not inherently part of sales, and it's definitely not part of _good_ sales.

"Objections are goals" is a sales technique. Overcoming objections is Sales 101, and a big part of that is turning negatives into positives.

<comment><USER14> No one wants to be sold to. Not a single person in the world. There's a reason used car salespeople are the universal object of derision: no one wants to interact with someone that wants something from them and is willing to obfuscate, misdirect, and even lie to get it. That is a fundamental to sales: the sales person is trying to maximize their returns, and in most cases there is zero structural incentive for them to take the interests of the other party into account. This isn't something that you can imagine away any more than you can imagine away incentives in other areas of human interaction. People recognize that immediately, even if they can't put their finger on why.

<comment><USER12> No one wants to be cheated. _Everyone_ wants to be sold to. That's because everyone has problems they can't solve on their own.

"I don't want to be sold to, because I think I'm being cheated" becomes "If I'm not being cheated, then selling to me is okay". Or to put it more abstractly, "Selling bad because yuck" becomes "If yum, then selling good".

It comes back to the win-win, to mutually beneficial relationships. I disagree that there is "zero structural incentive" to consider the needs of the customer. In most cases, there's plenty of structural incentive. If your business depends on repeat customers, not considering their needs costs you their business. If your business depends on references and reputation, then not considering your customer's needs costs both the current customer and future customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As the author admits, this isn't how logic works. Next time, use the Law of Contrapositives, which at least works when the Law of Excluded Middle is assumed.

Suppose, for example, I object to cats; I might say, "If cats are in the house, then they will bring me mice as tribute." The contrapositive is, "If I am not being brought mice as tribute, then there are not cats in the house." Plural logic aside, this is pretty close! And now we can turn it into a goal: "If I want mice to exist in my house in non-dead states, then I should avoid cats." Now we've managed to refactor this into a goal: "I should get cats if I want fewer mice."

I'm not sure if anything was gained from this exercise.</comment>


Is IE8 already a legacy browser? Google thinks so. - <AUTHOR> http://jasonbos.co/ie8-a-legacy-web-browser-0 <comment><USER2> Compared to the latest browsers from everyone else, yes.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's style seems to be to release browsers that are obsolete before they're even available. IE9 is a nice step ahead, but it leaves out a lot of nice technologies that could have moved the web forward. As Mozilla shifts to faster releases, and Chrome, Safari and webkit in general steam ahead, it's sad to think that we won't see IE 10 for another couple of years at the soonest.

The way IE is developed is a relic of the desktop software era. Mozilla recognized that to keep up with Google, they needed to change how their browser is developed and released - I pray that something vital is changed to make that possible for MS and IE as well.

<comment><USER3> There are already previews of ie10 floating around, and it was shown on mix'11. I think it's going to be released with Windows 8

<comment><USER2> Which will be released in... 18 to 24 months? Will the adoption rate of IE 9 even be 25% of IE users by then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing that surprises me is how when MS comes up with non-standard technologies for IE it makes them look like the bad guys, but when Google comes up with non-standard stuff (aka bleeding edge innovation) everyone embraces it. Imagine Microsoft launching something like the IE App Store.

<comment><USER4> IE's worst sins were MS-only extensions for which standards _already existed_. Goog, on the other hand, at least aims for backwards compatibility and standards compliance (see SPDY and false start SSL handshakes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Modern browsers share several things in common. If you're not a modern browser, then you're a legacy browser.

Modern browsers have most of these:

Super-fast JavaScript engines Hardware acceleration for graphics and text HTML audio and video elements and APIs SVG for vector graphics ForeignObject for bringing HTML into SVG HTML canvas element and API for 2D Some useful CSS 3 support like border radius, text shadow, transforms and transitions, etc. HTML History API WebGL for 3D graphics Web Workers Application Cache

These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web applications. IE 9 is a little bit short on some of these items, but I think it's got enough to qualify it as being part of the gang of Modern browsers.

IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.

So, yes, IE 8 is a legacy browser. It's the new IE6 -- the boat anchor around the necks of Web developers who want to move the Web forward.

Even worse, Microsoft is leaving behind hundreds of millions of users who are currently running IE 7 and 8, saying that IE8 is the end of the road for Windows XP. It's pretty clear that Microsoft is making the big break with legacy between IE8 and IE9. 8 is the past, 9 is the present.

<comment><USER6> > Modern browsers have most of these:

Well, modern browsers have some form of most of those, often different to the form in any other modern browser.

HTML5 video is a great example. It's a nice idea, but as long as everyone is having childish arguments over which formats they're going to support, many of us who have to produce real world applications for real world users are still going to use Flash. (Sorry, Apple.)

If and when the sorts of features you described are standardised such that web developers can write one version of their code and have a fair chance of it running on all modern browsers, then you'll have a case. Until then, I'm afraid it's just your personal, and inevitably biased, wish list.

> These are the features that let Web developers build a richer caliber of Web > applications.

Can you give us some examples?

> IE 8 has none of this. IE 8 was really not much more than IE7 with improved > CSS 2.1 support, and IE7 wasn't much more than IE6 with tabbed browsing.

Writing silly things like that makes you look rather foolish. For example, you've just defined "super-fast JavaScript engines" as a necessary criteria for a modern browser, and then immediately glossed over orders-of-magnitude improvements in real world JS performance between successive versions of IE. Of course faster JS engines are never going to do any harm, other things being equal, but IE8 runs JS fast enough to be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good. IE9's failings are annoying but not _nearly_ as annoying as IE8's.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, being that it only runs on a legacy OS...

Seriously, though, isn't 9 current and 10 expected soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> IE 9 is already out there. It works on Vista and 7 only though. If only Google comes up with a way to work fully with MS's Group Policies, Chrome will most surely take over the enterprise world. I think the big enterprises which use MS technologies keep IE still going. It's not like they have a choice though.

<comment> 911-inside_job IE 6.0 is the perfect browser for the enterprise or at least the perfect stable platform for enterprise web applications.

Chrome updates are released every few days, who is supposed to test if all internal apps still work?

<comment><USER9> Selenium? Are you saying you _don't_ have automated testing in an enterprise situation?

<comment><USER6> Automated testing of UIs will only ever cover a relatively limited range of observable behaviour we might care about. Like a lot of unit testing, it's one of those ideas that works really neatly if you're writing a simple database front-end or calculator that deals only with easily parsed/rendered data that is input and output via well-defined, programmable interfaces.

Unfortunately, most UIs aren't built with that kind of code. Tools like Selenium aren't going to help you spot that the browser is rendering your page elements with a z-order bug, the canvas/SVG output has an aliasing problem, and your entire page design is getting a flickering scrollbar effect because of a change in the font rendering when the underline for a link appears. (And those are just examples of possible browser bugs, not even counting testing your own code to make sure the UI is rendering properly to a human looking at a screen.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From a developer standpoint it feels like IE8 is closer to IE7 than the modern browsers, still needs hacks plenty of hacks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Considering IE9 is one whole generation behind the other browsers, it too should be considered a legacy browser.

<comment><USER12> Douglas Crockford said : "I have good hope for IE10, but all previous IE should die".

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Silhouette and 911-inside_job: You guys should really read this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2575632>

</comment><comment><USER13> Do you know some big websites using the Google Chrome Frame in production ?

If you're using it, any experience to share ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Using Chrome Frame is just a matter of adding "<meta http-equiv="X-UA- Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=1">" to a page. I haven't used it yet, but the Chrome team recently announced at Google I/O that users can install Chrome Frame without the need for admin rights. Given that Google is taking an effort to promote Chrome Frame and making it accessible to several users restricted by corporate IT policies, there should be more adopters soon.

<comment><USER6> Google are actively encouraging people to circumvent corporate IT policies?! No wonder so many corporate IT departments are sticking by Microsoft: at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace.

I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion, but the basic suggestions at <http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/> sound a lot like "This page best viewed in $BROWSER at $RESOLUTION". Didn't we learn that lesson yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> "I hadn't heard of Chrome Frame until this discussion"

> Google I/O 2011 - > [http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/html5-today- > wi...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/html5-today-with- > google-chrome-frame.html)

> Google I/O 2010 - [http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/using- > chrome-f...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/using-chrome- > frame.html)

"at least they make it reasonably straightforward for sysadmins to manage policies across a whole workplace."

> Google recently came up Administrative templates for Chrome. But I wonder > why they didn't push it enough to IT departments - > [http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=146164#Technical_Overview)

<comment><USER6> I appreciate the links from a personal perspective, but they don't seem to contradict the advice on the Google Chrome Frame project page I mentioned, which actually suggests redirecting users to an installation page if they visit your site in IE and don't already have GCF installed. That sort of tactic is usually associated with either malware or the 1990s where I come from...

In any case, there is something very shady about the whole project. If people want to use Chrome, let them use Chrome, but please let's not start making IE pretend it's Chrome (or was it the other way around?). How on earth are corporate IT support people supposed to deal with requests for help from non- technical people once we start down that path?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> IE8 does not do html5. Therefore, it's a legacy browser. Makes perfect sense to me.</comment>


Employees Suck - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/johnbuckman/employees-suck-presentation?type=powerpoint

<comment><USER2> The real title of this should be "The traditional employment model sucks", and I agree with that statement.

I spend 60+ hours a week on the clock as a Japanese salaryman. It kills me. It kills everyone else even more than me because a) I'm the slacker American who actually leaves after a mere 60 hours and b) I don't have a wife and kids.

And looking at my paystub, oh boy, the incentives at the margin make me weep. Monetarily and otherwise. A starting Japanese engineer makes $2,200 a month plus biannual bonuses of something like $4,000 plus benefits. I've got 4 years professional experience so I'm above that but not grossly above it and, anyhow, treble it and it wouldn't make a difference.

The incentive at the margin, on a professional level, is to spend one hour slowly working through the 473rd unit test case on a feature that will be used once a year that isn't crucial to any client anywhere. The feature exists largely to keep up the appearance that the company is working hard for their money. I love programming but I don't love _this_ programming.

The incentive at the monetary level is, well, "less than motivational".

Now I also own a small business selling software. Its no great shakes, but I get to pick the features I implement and the marketing/etc direction I choose. And when I do stuff right, its not the 473rd bullet point on a spec that may never see the light of day, its fifteen paying customers sending me Christmas cards with pictures of their kids. Or if I kick butt and take names for two weeks, rather than getting a pat on the head from the boss, a new stack of busywork, and $60 added to my Christmas bonus (yaaaaay), my sales increase by $400 a month FOR FOREVER.

Is it easy? I don't think anything worthwhile is easy: I've been part-timing this for 2.5 years now and am just creeping into the $20k a year sales range. But someday, in the not so distant future (certainly not 5 years from now like the slideshare presentation suggests), it will be enough. (It actually would cover my burn rate at the moment but I'm a bit of a cautious type.)

And then I will calligraphy-up my resignation letter, make my bows, and walk out of the office while the sun is still shining for a change.

And, as God is my witness, that will be the last time I ever deal with a company as an employee. If they want to be business partners, we can be business partners. If they want me to live my life for them out of a sense of obligation, ho ho ho, I will be happy to introduce them to service providers who are more appropriate to their needs.

(This isn't really a Japan-only thing, incidentally. There are any number of American companies which could be my company, easily. And there are Japanese companies which are better but, really, none is ever going to be as good to me as I would be.)

<comment><USER3> Just curious, given the long hours and low wages, why do you choose to work in Japan as a "slacker American"?

<comment><USER2> I choose, for the moment, to _live_ here, in a little town I rather like, close to friends I rather like, attending a little church I rather like, etc.

For better or worse, choosing to live here (or really, anywhere) generally means you get to work nearby as a package deal. I'm working on making that more of an a la carte selection.

(Edit: Incidentally, I don't dislike my job. Parts of it are actually quite fun -- it has made me a much better engineer, I've learned quite a bit, and it has done wonders for my ability to read web application stack traces in Japanese.

Its just that, well, I have a finite number of years to live and hours in my waking day. They can have a few years and many hours. Or they can have many years and few hours. But I'm not willing to sell many years and many hours.)

<comment><USER4> I'm curious as well as to where you live... and also, about your experiences doing software over in Japan. I've never really had the chance to live there for an extended period of time, but I'd like to give things a go in a year or two... just to get that nagging monkey off my back, and to do something different.

Hopefully, the stack traces don't just read 'エラーが起きました。たいへん申し訳あります。' _grin_

<comment><USER5> I think you mean 申し訳ありません (inexcusable).

Though I've tried using 申し訳あります (literally, there is an excuse) before as a joke to lighten the mood when apologizing. I'm not sure they got it.

<comment><USER4> Damnit, I can't believe I typed that, and didn't catch it. Goes to show how bad my Japanese has gotten over the past year. I really need to start studying again, and not just chattering with my girlfriend.

Yeah, 大変申し訳あります sounds like something you'd see in 漫才.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does slideshare offer a printable version that just extracts all the text into paragraph form?

While I was interested in the topic, about 30 slides in I got tired of clicking through the "presentation" and gave up. I'm getting tired of slides with huge text and no design. Makes me almost miss bullet point monotony!

<comment><USER7> I couldn't agree more. That's a terrible interface.

If he had just put his thoughts on a web page I would have read them. By putting the onus on me to waste my time clicking over a hundred times and only feeding me a sentence or two per click, he just drove me off. Unless people who like clicking a lot while reading slowly are his target audience, this is a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> My guess is the presentation was originally given to a live audience, and then the slides posted online. However, an online-formatted version would've been much more helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit self-contradictory and misleading.

1) It's more about "being an employee sucks" than "employees suck"

2) It gives the very dangerous advice that "you don't need more PR/marketing" and the follows that up with the saner "you need to get people blogging about you". Oh, so now, getting people blogging about you isn't a marketing exercise? Really? What is it then?

<comment><USER9> I think what he means is that you need geurilla, viral marketing that's driven by _genuine interest_ from real people about the product.

As oppose to a slick ad copy written by (very expensive) professionals.

The gist of it is that if your product isn't cool enough to the target audience that they want to tell all their friends about it, then it's probably not good enough to make serious money.

<comment><USER10> It very strongly depends on what kind of product you're developing, and who your target market is. For a Web2.0 social app, skip the salespeople.

For an app that capitalizes on your MS in material sciences and love of python, and targets big manufacturing companies, an experienced sales team is worth quite a lot. Viral won't cut it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this underestimates the degree to which even the most talented programmers are creatures of habit. Most are able to find a job that is reasonably satisfying and very secure, and so long as they make enough to buy all the Diet Coke and Subarus they need, plus some equity upside, they do not go out looking for new jobs just to increase their pay.

I also think an overwhelming majority are downright allergic to the notion of becoming a contractor. Having to sell yourself every 6 months to 2 years, with all the uncertainty in between gigs? No thanks! The proposal to quit and sell "intellectual goods" just doesn't appeal at all to people who place the value of an extra dollar far below the value of extra stability.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the high level information. Unfortunately, that's all there is. I'd love to hear the actual presentation.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the comments indicate he spoke at the Le Web conference. Are there any videos or was that banned like everything else?

<comment><USER14> <http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/961379>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Employee - ESOP = Wage Slave

Employee + ESOP = Motivation

</comment><comment><USER16> Long but worth skimming.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a directory that lets you find nonprofits that you can support? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes, for example here: [http://www.finanse.mf.gov.pl/pp/wyszukiwarki/wyszukiwarka- op...](http://www.finanse.mf.gov.pl/pp/wyszukiwarki/wyszukiwarka-opp)</comment>


Ask HN: What's in the Firefox future? - <AUTHOR> I use Firefox since version 0.8. I'm a great fan. Still, in the last months, I started asked myself if Firefox will still be the best browser for me.
First it was Chrome interface mimic, then DRM, then ads in the new tab page, then Pocket, then... what's it going to be the next bad news? In the past, I was hunger to get a new Firefox update, because of the new features, better performances etc. Now it's more like "ok, let's check what they twisted this time" or "let's hope everything I like it's still there".
I understand Mozilla can't live on thin air and it has to get money to survive, and I also understand that "normal" people are more excited about something they can actually see or use instead of something under the hood; for example: normal people don't care if Firefox on iOS is not the real Firefox but just a skin, as long they can access they bookmarks, tabs, history etc.
It's not clear at all to me what are Mozilla plans for Firefox. Do they have a real strategy? Or they are just going to keep putting patches at random in order to limit the users-bleeding to Chrome? They say they are committed to privacy, so why Pocket is still hard-coded in Firefox source and uneasy to remove like other addons?
Is there any hope Firefox will still be a slim and solid full-featured browser in the future or it is just doomed to be a bandwagon of bloatware?
I really hope the answers to this question will reassure me. I don't want to have switch to Chromium or have to use Opera or Vivaldi because Firefox is sinking. <comment><USER2> I'll probably get a ton of hate for this, but I was disappointed with their latest announcement regarding add-ons. When one of the most prominent developers for add-ons for their platform came forward (DownThemAll!, with more than 1.3 Million Users), instead of publicly asking which APIs that developer would need to allow their add-on to continue working, it was basically "oh well, sucks for you I guess". That attitude really doesn't jive with me, so there's no doubt that I'll discontinue my use of their browser, purely over idealogical reasons. But hey, this is just my own opinion.

<comment><USER3> It's true that we communicated badly. But we didn't answer "oh well, sucks for you I guess" either. The plan is at [https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ) and [https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions#Additional_APIs](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions#Additional_APIs)

<comment><USER2> No one may have written those words exactly, but the sentiment was surely there. In this[1] thread, every comment from a Mozilla employee was a justification of the decision, no one offered support to that developer or asked for feedback regarding which APIs were important. That absolutely has the effect of telling someone they're SOL.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099240)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most of the roadmaps are linked from [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Roadmap](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Roadmap) . For instance, take a look at the Platform Roadmap at [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap) and you'll see that there a huge effort ongoing on non-visible parts.

Nice troll about pocket compromising your privacy... you know the code doesn't run _at all_ (it's lazy loaded) until you click the icon that you can remove from your location bar right? and of course you don't get an account by default etc.

I'm not sure either what you mean by a "slim" browser. All modern browser codebase are huge because the api surface is huge. Firefox & Chrome are in the same ballpark, IE/Edge may be smaller since they are not multi-platform. Pocket is a very, very small part of the codebase. At the same time, we are working on making some core parts of Firefox (un)pluggable, see [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster#Project_1:_Ship_f...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster#Project_1:_Ship_features_as_system_add- ons)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't want to troll about Pocket. I'm not discussing technical details. I'm referring to the fact it is a piece of software with a license VERY different from Firefox that has been integrated INSIDE Firefox. Why is that? Normal people doesn't read licenses, if they see a button they press it and they start using the feature. They do not pay attention that this is a different service offered by a different company. Saying "you can remove it" is not an answer. First because I CANNOT remove it, since it is integrated, secondly because it's like saying that you can uninstall bloatware that comes together a new PC. Pocket, integrated and offered in this way, is in my opinion bloatware and should be removed as soon as possible. There already is the pocket add-on, for anyone that decide to use it. There is absolutely no reason to integrate it inside the main browser. And from a company that puts privacy at the first place, offer a product TOGETHER with another that comes with awful license, is a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I share this sentiment, in regard of -pretty much- everything.

And like you, I don't like some of the Firefox novelties. Still I feel they are doing well, and attentive to complaints like yours.

Lets look back to the 2008, for example: [http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/ubuntu- firefox-...](http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/ubuntu-firefox-eula- dustup-reignites-oss-licensing-debate/)

The outrage was high, and Baker, Mozilla CEO, ended up admitting they did not even know if that box was legally useful or not ("gray area").

In the end, they settled on a perfectly acceptable nagging bar on the bottom of the window, and everybody was fine with it and happy and drinked jack morgan's and rode ponies.

I'm not saying we will for sure settle everything, but I feel the chance is high.</comment>


Show HN: Festivilia: Filmmakers best option for effective festival distribution - <AUTHOR> http://www.festivilia.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Festivilia allows filmmakers get into over 500 film festivals just by filling one submission form. This automatically saves filmmakers the stress of submitting blindly to film festivals by matching and submitting their film to only film festivals that are a perfect match for the film thereby increasing their chances of selection, saving them time and money.

Started as a result of my own frustration in having to comb through numerous film festivals rules and regulations from the other submission platforms available before deciding which is a perfect fit for my film. I will rather prefer to use my time for other valuable things. Unfortunately, that can't happen because I have to do all the work, so the idea of Festivilia was born to help other filmmakers like myself spend less time scouting and submitting to film festivals and focus on creating more amazing films.

Festivilia covers festivals both from major submission platforms like Filmfreeway, Withoutabox, Shortfilmdepot etc, as well as the growing number of festivals that request direct submission. It's an independent database made by filmmakers for filmmakers. Our team is constantly researching and reviewing festivals and only adds competitions worth submitting to!

Will love hear feedbacks from the community

<comment><USER2> I _just_ wrapped up post-production on my first short film, "Mead" and was looking for a resource like this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you could find us! We will be very excited to watch and review your film. Feel free to try out the service.</comment></comment></comment>


How to focus amongst all the noise - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mashhoodr/how-to-focus-amongst-all-the-noise-47d75f8dae44#.dpyt3qkva <comment><AUTHOR> Focus is a thing hard to come by in our offices these days. We are constantly badgered by people and apps, and this is my take on how we can control a bit of the app part and a bit of the people part. This is essentially a movement towards creating a culture where you can get to focus on the important stuff for a greater time period.

This was partly inspired by Jason Fried's talk on TED ([http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work#t-760426)) and his amazing book "Remote: Office not required".</comment>


Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/avoiding-game-crashes-related-to-linked-lists

<comment><USER3> _Then I'm going to share techniques (with source code) to make your game engine code simpler, faster, more memory efficient and more reliable. Wow!_

But it doesn't. It makes your engine slower and more complicated. The reason is because of the CPU cache.

The author tries to brush this under the rug:

 _When traversing objects stored on an intrusive linked list, it only takes one pointer indirection to get to the object, compared to two pointer indirections for std::list. This causes less memory-cache thrashing so your program runs faster — particularly on modern processors which have huge delays for memory stalls._

They assert the importance of avoiding memory stalls, but then proceed to recommend a technique that will directly cause them: lists.

Particularly troublesome is his recommendation that ZeroMQ should adopt such a strategy. That would mean any app that uses ZeroMQ will inherently suffer from memory fragmentation and cache misses due to this technique.

Here's a conversation about the technical details of why lists are a bad idea: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8939737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8939737)

An explanation of how CPU caching works, and why lists will ruin your cache performance: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940270)

Lists made sense before CPU pipelines became so deep. Nowadays, once you eliminate algorithmic bottlenecks, the only other bottleneck you can attack is cache performance. And the overall pipeline speedups are sometimes as much as a factor of 2x-5x when you layout your memory allocations to take advantage of caching.

<comment><USER4> The article is comparing intrusive (see linux's list_head as an example) vs non-intrusive (std::list) lists.

Given that comparison, intrusive lists (which the article appears to argue for over std::list) are almost certainly better (barring some type of list node allocator that can somehow obtain locality with other nearby list nodes).

Once you throw std::vector (or similar dynamic arrays) in, it is a bit different (different trade offs), but that _is not what this article is comparing_

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. My apologies.

I was only trying to say that in the context of gamedev, when choosing between list vs vector, list is almost always the worse option due to caching.

But after re-reading, that's completely unrelated, as you say. Worse, ZeroMQ was going to be using list structures either way, so my point about ZeroMQ was both mistaken and irrelevant.

I guess I should take a break for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how the double-checked locking recommendation is safe. Someone asked about it in the comments, but the response didn't make sense to me. It seems that the call to IsLinked would introduce a data-race with adjacent deletions, and cause undefined behaviour, unless there is already locking at an outer scope. If there is such locking, the lock inside the destructor is redundant. Have I misunderstood?

It has generally been my experience that if control enters a destructor while other threads are concurrently accessing the object, you are in a world of pain. For one thing, this makes it near impossible to safely subclass the object. (Because the subclass destructor will run first, rendering its invariants invalid before the base class has done whatever it needs to do to unlink the object from the outside world.) Anecdotally, I've also found code like this to be deadlock-prone, but I couldn't say for sure if the two are causally linked.

</comment><comment><USER6> >Why not use boost intrusive lists?

Yeah, why not? "The implementation is complex" is not a sensible reason not to use them; it's the complexity of the API one should worry about, and it seems as simple as adding a link subobject. I wonder if the author of this article actually bothered to test the Boost implementation and its performance.

<comment><USER7> Most C++ hard core game developers don't even use the STL that comes with the language ... Why do you think they will even consider linking the huge Boost library with their game ? Also, the use of templates is usually a big no - <USER2> for most game dev studios.

<comment><USER6> >Most C++ hard core game developers don't even use the STL that comes with the language ... Why do you think they will even consider linking the huge Boost library with their game ?

Boost has libraries that address specific efficiency concerns like the one the article discusses; the standard library containers don't. You also don't link with the entire Boost library. You link with the components you use, which in the case of a library like intrusive/list is whichever member functions you use from each container instantiation you use. That's a static link, too.

But no, I don't really expect anyone who considers themselves a "hard core" programmer to consider using a library like Boost.

>Also, the use of templates is usually a big no - no for most game dev studios.

Do you have a specific example?

<comment><USER8> Well, I know for a fact that the Unreal Engine doesn't use STL. There used to be quite a large variance in the quality of any STL implementation and when you care about each single instruction that gets passed to the CPU, you turn a bit into a control-freak.

Some gamedev's also dislike interacting with STL code because of the metaprogramming in there and the associated error messages produced. Heavy template use makes compilation terribly slow, which is undesirable when you're trying to do a couple of quick iterations of code.

These are issues that can be avoided simply by just not using STL and templates in general, or very sparingly. The downside is that you need to roll your own of everything, with all of the bugs and devtime implied...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was part 3 ever written?</comment>