Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/netflix-why-att-bought-time-warner-and-comcast-and-disney-want-fox.html <comment><USER2> These companies are obsessed with fragmenting the market for the sake of owning content from production to delivery. I have bad news for them: you're going to lose. People don't want to go back to paying $100/month for a dozen streaming "channels" with one or two good shows and a the same crap the rest of the other "channels" have.

We want an on-demand nexus. A single hub. Just the other day I had the urge to watch ghost in the shell. Not available on any of the major streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, Prime) but available on stars via prime. So I have to pay an addition $7/month to watch a single show? No thanks. Off to a torrent site or asking around to see if someone has rips or a box set. I have better things to do with $7 like buy dinner.

<comment><USER3> People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it anyway (for decades) and continue to do so. Now we're being asked to buy a bunch of streaming services and we'll bitch and moan, but ultimately we'll pay because every major platform will have at least one show that justifies their existence.

I associate CBS with bland procedural crime dramas and awful three-camera sitcoms. CBS All Access would have been doomed without Star Trek: Discovery. Admittedly, the show isn't particularly good, but I'm a trekkie so it doesn't matter. On the plus side, I discovered The Good Fight (a surprising smart, entertaining and well written show) so I now I have a legitimate reason to give a damn about All Access.

And then Apple will offer their own gateway drug (Lord of the Rings?) and Disney (...well they could just offer their back catalogue alone and still be a major player) and so on.

<comment><USER4> > People don't want to pay $100 a month for cable TV either, but they did it > anyway (for decades)...

In the absence of alternatives, it seemed like what entertainment cost. The alternatives for free or cheap are enough that many, many, many people are opting out.

> ...and continue to do so.

Evidence[0] suggests otherwise.

Leaving evidence aside, I think that each service will likely have something to attract some number of subscribers, yes. Amazon is doing LotR, Disney wants a piece, CBS has Star Trek, etc. I don't think it follows that a large number of people are going to subscribe to more than one or two on an ongoing basis. People subscribe to CBS All-Access for one month, perhaps a trial month, and binge all of ST:D, then cancel. They already have a subscription to Amazon Prime for non-TV reasons. Maybe they share subscriptions with friends, or maybe they turn to piracy, or maybe they just shrug and go back to watching Netflix and YouTube, which is enough. Most people never had all the available channels, including premium channels, anyway. Going without a show or two isn't a problem for most people when the marginal cost is so high.

[0] [https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high- cos...](https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cord-cutting-2017-high-cost- cancellation-pay-tv-1202728922/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I teach a startup course at a public university. We had a class on disruption, where we specifically talked about Netflix. I polled my students and asked how many have cable or satellite. A single hand went up, out of over 30 students. I then asked how many had Netflix. Every hand went up. AT&T can buy Time Warner and Comcast can buy NBC and Fox. It's not going to matter. Millennials and Gen Z aren't going to pay for bundled linear content via cable and satellite with heavy amounts of advertising. The model is in process of being disrupted. Within a decade or so, I bet traditional cable and satellite goes the way of AOL and landlines.

</comment><comment><USER6> Companies focus on buying _content_ while ignoring the quality of the broadcast experience. I am tired of competitors that skimp on this.

Netflix doesn't shove ads in your face, works on every platform and almost never has mysterious transmission failures. And _now_ they have excellent content too. They have figured out so much more than some of the last-century providers.

<comment><USER7> Amazon prime shows ads for other prime shows occasionally and it just pisses me off. I'm seeing less of them, so maybe they got the message.

Prime is also very much a superficial copy of the Netflix interface.

<comment><USER6> Pre-ads on services also don't play well _at all_ with failures. Even a short crappy promo for 15 seconds gets old if it keeps _replaying_ the crappy promo every time my actual show fails to play. So the experience goes: $ad, $error, $same_ad, $same_error, and before you know it you're muttering about how much you're over-paying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a simple man: if I the music isn't on Spotify or Bandcamp I'm gonna torrent it. If the movie/show isn't on Netflix, I'm gonna torrent it. I'm not buying any dodgy channel subscriptions full of crap.

<comment><USER9> This is my view (except I don't pirate the content). In my eyes, content creators know that these services exist, and how many people use them. So if they make a decision to cut out a large portion of the market, then I guess it's not important for them to be enjoyed by everyone.

I don't want to manage and pay for dozens of services. I use iTunes/Spotify, Netflix/Prime, and Steam/GoG. Any new service is going to need to displace one of those. This probably means being 10x better at 1/10th of the price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If those company think it's about content libraries they're going to lose.

All those companies think: we own a lot of media, we can just build a streaming media platform. And I think they're way underestimating how hard it is to build the technology stack and processes that Netflix has.

Netflix has an engineering team and a development and deployment process that has some production studios attached to it.

Disney can probably copy what Netflix has today, but by the time they've done that, Netflix will have updated their platform hundreds of time, and I don't think they're going to be able to build an engineering team that can keep up.

<comment><USER11> Getting the engineering to scale fast would be difficult, but IMO isn't a fundamental issue. Streaming video is basically a solved problem and is not where the money is.

People subscribe for the content, not the technology. HBO isn't a tech first company but is probably doing a disproportionate amount of subscriptions thanks to Game of Thrones.

<comment><USER12> People do subscribe for the content, but the tech still has to work well for people to continue subscribing. If the stream stutter or otherwise fail constantly, the user experience is gonna drive customers away. Tech is a functional requirement, not a feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Loads of comments regarding what "I" want or someone else wants. I think it's irrelevant and perhaps even dangerous to have the focal point on such popularities because the matter at hand is far more simple. Copyright grants a distribution monopoly >> Monopolists makes money monopolists style >> Internet breaks the distribution monopoly >> And now: copyright distribution monopolist buys ISP's ( distributors ) in order to regain control of the market. This is not about you, me, "people", it's simply business.

</comment><comment><USER14> A large part of the initial appeal of Netflix, in particular for foreigners, was that they seemed to house digitized versions of straight-to-VHS movies that never left USA.

But after the initial raving success, the big studios have been clamping down on giving blanket access to their back catalog of obscurities. Looking for those extra percentages of leaving out the middle man.

<comment><USER15> Netflix got the rights to stream the entirety of Starz's cable library for peanuts back in 2007 or 2008 -- that deal put them on the map since they got some high-quality content for basically nothing. The movie and TV distributors learned from the record labels -- they're deathly afraid of how iTunes basically took over the market, and will go out of their way to make sure the system stays as decentralized as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this market segment will evolve to be similar to the games industry, where market leadership shifts along with customers interests.

In the games industry a few big exclusives can shift fortunes significantly. The Playstation 4's significant success has come at the expense of the Xbox, and a driving factor of this success has been a superior exclusive content library.

</comment><comment><USER17> The rhetoric by these gaint media companies about how "we're merging so we can compete with Netflix" is a con.

They say "we have to get more vertically integrated like Netflix to survive", but Time Warner Cable is _already_ as vertical as Netflix! They have their own production and distribution already, and Netflix isn't an ISP.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why does cable TV cost money? Wouldn't the advertising cover the distribution/production costs?

<comment><USER12> If they can charge for it, they are going to charge for it. Since there's no competition, there's no pressure to not charge the highest price.

Now that Netflix or other streaming services threaten this business model, the old guard is scrambling to get back to the same business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting it took ATT and Disney this long to figure out that this is a thing.

<comment><USER20> They were hoping Netflix would die or be acquired and lose it's edge.

It's possible they did know but couldn't replicate what Netflix has done with any reliability or profitability. Innovators dilemma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The two main pricing models, today, are: 1) fixed monthly fee for one providers' content (e.g. Netflix) 2) pay-by-the-drink (e.g. $3.99 for this episode)

I spend a lot less on pay-by-the-drink services than I do on recurring subscriptions. Cognitively, every time I initiate a purchase, I pause, and decide whether I want to spend the money. With a subscription service, I only have to make that choice once.

What about a recurring 'credit' service? e.g. sign up for a $30/month recurring service, and you get 50 credits to watch content from a variety of providers?

</comment><comment><USER22> With ISPs becoming content companies, and with Net Neutrality dead they can charge companies like Netflix higher data rates....

Seems like Netflix needs to buy an ISP.

<comment><USER22> ... or stop allowing these mega-mega-mega-mega mergers :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Verizon wanted to divest itself of HuffPo almost immediately. The service provider(s) who ignore content and focus on the network infrastructure (Internet pipes, if you will) and practice(s) "net neutrality" as fundamental to the business model will come out on top. The vertical integration of service providers and content producers will only end poorly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Netflix isn't that good, with such a crappy lineup and limited old mainstream movies. It's just cheap. Our household and people at work (california) struggle to justify paying for it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This post's title is a nightmare. Original from the article:

>How Netflix sent the biggest media companies into a frenzy, and why Netflix thinks some are getting it wrong

</comment><comment><USER26> I think maybe the title could use some punctuation or reworking

> Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner...

Ok, yes, they bought Time Warner

> Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast...

They bought Comcast too?

> Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney...

And Disney!?

> Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast and Disney want Fox

AT&T bought Time Warner and Comcast; Disney want Fox?

<comment><USER27> "Want" disambiguates to plural subject, so it can only be "Comcast and Disney want Fox".

<comment><USER28> You're absolutely right, but that still leaves it a garden path sentence ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence)) and thus a poor title.

The measure of good writing isn't that it's possible to parse unambiguously with sufficient dedication. Good writing gets the idea across without placing any undue burden on the reader.

(And it's easily fixed by adding a second "why": "Netflix is why AT&T bought Time Warner and why Comcast and Disney want Fox".)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for this, I didn't realize there was a term for the issue I was taking with the structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This re-written headline could really use some punctuation for clarity, moderators.

<comment><USER30> It's the HTML doc title as well as the URL slug, so not technically rewritten, but let's have a disambiguating comma.</comment></comment>


This WebGL Shader somehow brokes android/iOS chrome and safari both - <AUTHOR> https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltSfzz <comment><AUTHOR> Hope somebody figuring out why this thing happens.

EDIT: Even more serious thing is, the link below will make your entire iOS device FREAZE, so you will need to reboot.

BE CAUTIOUS: [https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=newest&from=96...](https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=newest&from=96&num=12) (This page is sorted by "newest order", so may not be work in future.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Worked fine on my copy of Chrome 63.0... running on a Nexus 6 with Android 7.0.0, and I could scroll horizontally to view the editor.

When I visited the page with Firefox Beta 58.0b12 it ran, but I couldn't view the editor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing wrong in brave on my Pixel running Android 8.1.0</comment>


Atom.io discussion - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.atom.io/

<comment><USER2> No SSL? Even for login? What year is it?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a discourse instance!

</comment><comment><USER4> Explain Atom to me like I'm 5?

<comment><USER5> It's a code editor.</comment></comment>


Hawking to Be Buried in Westminster Abbey - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/146ff458-2c96-11e8-908b-95a753c47952 <comment><USER2> It seems a little ironic though, to inter Hawking in a religious center considering his Scientific world-view:

"I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

[http://time.com/5199149/stephen-hawking-death-god- atheist/](http://time.com/5199149/stephen-hawking-death-god-atheist/)

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen- hawking/851...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen- hawking/8515639/Stephen-Hawking-heaven-is-a-fairy-story-for-people-afraid-of- the-dark.html)

<comment><USER3> I can think of no better place than to inter Hawking than in the same place as Isaac Newton, to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A rightful honor Among giants.</comment>


Canadian Police Raid 'Orcus Rat' Author - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/canadian-police-raid-orcus-rat-author/ <comment><USER2> RAT = Remote Admin Tool or Remote Access Trojan, as specified in the article. Therefore, as an initialism, this word should be should be shown here in the subject line in all caps — just as it does in the article at the linked site.</comment>


Find Your Engineering Dream Job - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/find-your-engineering-dream-job

<comment><USER2> Cute quiz, but they needed a broader range of people for comparable results. My best match was only 68%.

Plus, there are presumptions in some of the answers that'll push you elsewhere than where you might really be.

But hey, still a pretty good quiz for the internet. ;)</comment>


Machines will do more tasks than humans by 2025 - <AUTHOR> https://www.afp.com/en/news/2266/machines-will-do-more-tasks-humans-2025-wef-doc-19554a1 <comment><USER2> Machines already do 200 times more work than human today!</comment>


Ask HN: How do we secure our current system of 'electronic money' - <AUTHOR> I'm a bitcoin fanatic and I've even started to use the blockchain for non-bitcoin purposes. It's s fantastic ledger for financial transactions and it's exciting to see a multitude of companies investigating ways to use it with our real currency.<p>My questions is simple. If only a couple percent of our currency exists as cash what (if anything) is stopping a hacker or unethical banker from just adding $1,000,000 to their the database entry for their account? The government isn't keeping logs of total balances are they? If not, who is? If I've learned anything in this world it's that if you aren't watching, someone will be exploiting... <comment><USER2> _If only a couple percent of our currency exists as cash what (if anything) is stopping a hacker or unethical banker from just adding $1,000,000 to their the database entry for their account?_

Double-entry bookkeeping, distributed financial controls, routine accounting audits, and the certainty of a long stint in jail once that is discovered.

Double-entry bookkeeping is a technology which should fascinate anybody whose buttons Bitcoin-qua-ledger pushes. It enables a 1920s grocery store to detect a quarter missing from the till at the end of the day. The key insight is that "all money came from somewhere and all money goes somewhere; those two transactions should _exactly_ balance; if money ever spontaneously appears or disappears then mistake or malfeasance is afoot."

The government does not routinely directly keep logs of the accounts of businesses, but requires that they do in a variety of circumstances. Companies which do not keep adequate logs face a variety of sanctions, including e.g. punitive tax rates, fines, and criminal prosecution. This keeps the average level of accounting competency at most businesses in the real economy rather north of that at e.g. a typical Bitcoin exchange.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great answer. I spent quite a few hours using double-entry bookkeeping while in business school so I understand the concept well. Thanks</comment></comment>


Electronic voting machine taken over with new programming technique - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/08/10/computer.scientists.take.over.electronic.voting.machine.with.new.programming.technique <comment> onreact-com Closed source voting machines will never be safe, in fact not even open source ones would always be safe. Paper is the voter's friend.

<comment><USER2> There was plenty of election fraud in the days of paper ballots, too.

I'm actually a fan of purple dye. It seems effective at stopping one form of election fraud. Preferably accompanied by a bank of cameras to show every ballot went into the box (and no others).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best tools for remote work? - <AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'm composing a list of the greatest tools for remote work. Found 350 already =)
I'm wondering, what are your favorite ones? In return, I'll share an aggregated file here.
Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> Discord

If you are a solo founder it's a great way to problem-solve since you can drop in screenshots and links which get parsed instantly and clearly.

It's particularly useful because there can be total strangers on you there (most of them are) who can still help you even though they're not on your team or colab software.

Probably one of my most embarrassingly used features is the fact that Discord saves messages for quite a long time actually, depending on the server. I've gone back months, sometimes over a year looking for how I built something and found the thread. I would even find the screenshots I placed at the time and the solution. (and also the user who helped me so I can contact them again if I needed to)

<comment><USER2> Forgot to mention, text markdown, do you can post your code and format it to the specific language

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I made a list of these recently, here are a few that come up often.

Slack for communication

Trello for project management

Github for engineering workflow

1Password for password security

Google Docs for document collaboration

Quip for document collaboration

Hellosign for legal contract signing

Helpscout for customer support

Donut for culture-building

Small Improvements for feedback

Lever for hiring

World Time Buddy (to manage timezones)

Typeform for feedback and surveys

Zoom for video chat

GSuite for spreadsheets & email

Zenefits for HR

Discourse for searchable communication

Okta for password management

OfficeVibe for team surveys and check-ins

CultureAmp for career growth

Zoom for video calls

Groove for customer support

World time buddy to see people's timezones

Teamweek for high-level team tasks

I'll throw in a plug for Holopod - it's a Slack add-on that improves visibility and communication for remote teams through automated status updates and message queuing.

The full list is here: [https://holopod.com/blog/remote-work-team- tools](https://holopod.com/blog/remote-work-team-tools)

</comment><comment><USER4> Zoom: it's the only video conference platform that just works without any hassle

Google Apps(Docs, Sheets, Slides): these win over MS Online b/c you can actually work live in the docs with a team.

Figma: I've come to love this, after a steep learning curve, for sharing design ideas in an open collaborative space.

Phone: it's still the best way to break through the noise and get someone's attention right away. With all the messaging apps, it gets noisy and messages get lost. Phone cut right to the top.

<comment><USER5> My beloved zoom no longer works in mainland China like so many things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At 6nomads, we have developed a tool that helps hire remote workers, because we firmly believe the future lies with distributed teams.

We select the best talents around the world and match them with fast-growing tech startups.

There's no need to pass formal multistage interviews in each company, our expertise is trusted, so, having spent 1.5 hours, you'll get many excellent offers from employers and a lot of saved time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please add Slack [https://slack.com/](https://slack.com/) And take 'some inspiration' from [http://remote.tools/](http://remote.tools/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, already did that ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a good bare minimum setup is:

Video chat (Zoom, Slack, GoToMeeting, etc)

Text chat (Slack, Zulip, etc)

Design collaboration (Miro, Figma, Invision, etc)

Document collaboration (GSuite, Microsoft, etc)

</comment><comment><USER9> Any decent solutions for a whiteboard replacement?

Maybe an iPad Pro with the pencil?

<comment><USER10> I use a Wacom Intuos tablet because I'm good with not having to look at my hand while drawing/writing. My hand eye coordination got tuned a long time ago. Others struggle with looking at a monitor while their hand is writing. For these folks, the iPad Pro with a pencil works good.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b Damewars is pretty great for virtual desktops.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tomato timer

</comment><comment><USER12> A laptop.

</comment><comment><USER13> usepastel.com

</comment><comment><USER14> You should go check Blind (teamblind.com)

<comment><USER15> Do they also have website? I use their APP normally</comment></comment>


Libmill: Go-Style Concurrency in C - <AUTHOR> http://libmill.org/index.html <comment><USER2> The macro should be called _select_ , since that's what Go calls it. (Of course I know there is a POSIX function (not C) by that name; so what).

This "choose {" "end }" business is an awful way to design the macro. If you need nesting that involves a block, with prolog and epilog material on either or both ends, you just have to hide that into the macro:

      selbegin;

        out(ch, int, 42):
          foo();
        in(ch, int, i):
          bar(i);
        otherwise:
          baz();

      selend;

I don't understand the downvotes. I have 30 years of (continous!) C experience. This is the best practice for doing a macro like this.

This "end }" business has improper nesting, visually. The _choose_ is outside of the braces, the _end_ is within; it is scatter-brained. There is no error checking for a forgotten _end_.

I'm looking at the implementation and it's looking quite weird! _choose_ simply expands into _mill_choose_init___ , and _end_ expands into _mill_choose_end___. The definitions of these seem as if they should pair together:

      #define mill_choose_init__ \
          {\
              mill_choose_init_(MILL_HERE_);\
              int mill_idx = -2;\
              while(1) {\
                  if(mill_idx != -2) {\
                      if(0)

      #define mill_choose_end__ \
                          break;\
                      }\
                  }\
                  mill_idx = mill_choose_wait_();\
              }

But, oops, look at the obvious lack of balance in the braces.

       mill_choose_init__ {

       mill_choose_end__ }

we are putting a brace after the if (0) which balances the one after break, and the final missing brace that balances the one opened internally in mill_choose_init__.

There are best practices to design this sort of macrology that don't require the user put braces in weird places to balance the inconsistencies in macro expansions.

Speaking as a professional, I would not pass this in a code review.

That we have to use a flaky preprocessor in order to get a half decent syntax is already a significant regret. We must not compound the regret by allowing the macrology to be less than as good as it can be.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty ludicrous to alias _select_ since it's the sort of thing you're likely to be calling in a concurrent program.

<comment><USER2> It's not really the sort of thing you'd use in a modern concurrent program. There is no reason to use select on a system where you have _poll_. As of 2001, POSIX moved select into its own header, so you shouldn't be getting a declaration of it any more from <sys/time.h>.

libmill provides some wrapping for polling mechanisms; you'd probably be going through that in libmill-based sources.

The clash, if it happens, has very easy, localized workarounds.

Note that the library has a macro called _end_ , which is a very common identifier in programs. Why didn't the author consider that a problem, but switched Go's _select_ to _choose_?

<comment><USER4> _select_ is super well known in C, as I'm sure you're aware. I have over 20 years in it myself.

sure, workarounds are easy, but that's not the point. your suggestion that it should be named the same as Go is a bit ridiculous. why is that even important? what is important is potentially confusing developers, and adding a new "select" into C would do just that.

the only mistake is Go using the word _select_ to begin with.

<comment><USER2> _select_ isn't in C; it's in POSIX.

I worked in Windows development shops where nobody knew select; but they could write WaitForMultipleObjects code in their sleep.

A strictly conforming ISO C program can use the _select_ identifier however it wants, including as an external name for an object or function.

> _your suggestion that it should be named the same as Go is a bit ridiculous_

It's not any more ridiculous than wanting to have a library which imitates Go concurrency down to macros that imitate some of the syntax.

<comment><USER5> >I worked in Windows development shops where nobody knew select; but they could write WaitForMultipleObjects code in their sleep.

That's hard to believe considering the fact that POSIX-compatible select() is a part of the winsock API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is something that would be extremely useful on microcontrollers, where you do lots of event-driven programming. Any sane design ends up with a state machine (or a hierarchy of state machines) driven by events generated in interrupts.

Coming from Clojure, I wished for something like core.async on microcontrollers for a long time — a way to convert most of my state machine into sequential code, with the complexity hidden, all while keeping everything in C (converted/generated during compile).

<comment><USER7> Have you considered C++ coroutines? Imho they struck a really nice tradeoff in making it a language feature and letting you swap out the underlying infrastructure.

<comment><USER8> C++ coroutines, being a feature of C++17/C++20, are not present in most if not all micro-controller toolchains, so I'm not sure if it would be relevant for the parent

<comment><USER7> What processors are you referring to? Everything ARM is well supported by LLVM/Clang which implements the coroutines TS.

<comment><USER8> AVR and PIC? Maybe things have improved since the last time I've explored compilers alternative to those supplied by manufacturers. But from what I understand avr-gcc is the standard for avr, and PIC is just targeted by the manufacturer's compilers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's was an episode of the This Week In Tech podcast from 2015 that interviewed LibMill's creator about its design concepts:

[https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/358](https://twit.tv/shows/floss- weekly/episodes/358)

And HN discussion from 4 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585505)

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems like development stopped a few years ago. There were steady releases almost monthly for a few years and then it just stops in 2017. Did the author lose interest?

Are there any plans to support multicore? I noticed one of the examples addresses this by using fork(). Multicore is something goroutines > 1.5 support.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this something already provided by libtask? Libtask was written by Russ Cox.

<comment><USER12> Based on a _very_ cursory check, it seems libtask doesn't do channels. Libmill does, in the style of Go. So libmill seems to be more a superset of libtask.

<comment><USER13> libtask does have channels[1].

libdill (also by the creator of libmill) has some features that libtask does not.

[edit]

Also one should note that libtask predates Go, and so the API definitely feels very different. Libmill seems to specifically have a goal of making the usage feel "go-like"

1: [https://swtch.com/libtask/channel.c](https://swtch.com/libtask/channel.c)

<comment><USER14> It's amusing to note that the rewriting of a concurrent language as a C library has happened before in Bell Lab's history (by some of the same people who worked on Go and its precursors).

Specifically, the same thing we're talking about here already happened with Alef[0], a CSP-based language, which was scrapped in favor of a C library[1] (man 2 thread) in the third edition of the Plan 9 OS[2].

[0] [http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/)

[1] [http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread](http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread)

[2] [http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/release3](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/release3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is libmill safe with garbage collectors (like Boehm GC)?

</comment><comment><USER16> How does this compare to boost:Fiber (other than the obvious "it's in C, not C++")?

</comment><comment><USER17> I actually really like the syntax for how they're emulating sending and receiving from channels. I like it better than Go's way of doing this with the <\- operator.

What would be nice would be a defer function for closing channels and things.

</comment><comment><USER18> The out and in functions should be swapped to match the go example?

</comment><comment><USER19> What is Go style in this context? Isn't it CSP?

</comment><comment><USER20> who is using libmill by the way? like other open source projects using this library?

</comment><comment><USER21> Go is Go-style concurrency _almost_ in C.

</comment><comment><USER22> How come neither libmill nor libdill sites have TLS. It's almost a chore to set up a site without it nowadays.</comment>


AI Model Fundamentally Cracks Captchas, Scientists Say - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/26/560082659/ai-model-fundamentally-cracks-captchas-scientists-say <comment><USER2> Seems like natural language processing would be an interesting direction for captchas.

\- _A man is running. A dog is behind him barking and growling._ What does the man think might happen?

\- _A man goes up the stairs to the roof. He walks to the very edge of the building. He takes one more step._ What is the man trying to do?

The correct answer should be pretty easy to parse out. And I'd expect a better success rate for humans than some of the captchas today that increasingly are looking more like magic eye puzzles than character recognition. But of course the big question is generation. Can these sort of implication based stories be generated in a way such that the final text can not trivially be reversed to the answer (without even considering the 'meaning' of the question)? And for that matter can these even be realistically generated in mass?

<comment><USER3> You're in a desert walking along the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortise. You reach down and flip the tortise on it's back. The tortise lays on it's back, it's belly baking in the hot sun but you're not helping. Why is that leon?

<comment><USER4> * Tortoise

* its back

* its belly

* Leon

(in case the mistakes were not for comedic effect)

<comment><USER5> Found the simulant.

<comment><USER4> ;)

Or maybe later Android versions know they should turn the Tortoise back on its feet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This [1] is the article they're citing. Note that a cursory search turns up similar claims from back in 2013; it might be worth waiting for someone with more experience and less bias to express their opinions before dumping your captcha-related stocks.

[1]: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/26/scien...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/26/science.aag2612.full)

<comment><USER7> > captcha-related stocks.

Are there companies relying only only selling captcha for revenues?

<comment><USER8> There are captcha farms in Asia where hundreds of people are sitting in the building and solve captchas non-stop.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Maybe captchas could be implemented as opinion polls re: tiananmen square or something

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this the same old news from Vicarious? They announced this four years ago and raised about a $100M since then...

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/28/captcha_c...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/28/captcha_cracked_startup_vicarious_claims_artificial_intelligence_breakthrough.html)

I thought the world moved on.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since when was captcha not broken? Sites like [http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/user/order](http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/user/order) have been around for ages. Yes, a mere $6.95 gets you 5000 captchas solved by OCR and humans in an avg of 6 seconds. Imagine that job.

Sure, AI can break captcha, but it can be done at scale for far less than an AI research and GPU rig costs.

Google's approach to bot recognition is training their own bots incidentally, so even an adversarial network attempting to bypass it would give it a ton of training along the way to breaking in.

<comment><USER11> >Imagine that job.

I don't believe it's a job. Isn't this the thing where captchas on target sites are simply mirrored on other sites like sketchy filehosts? Real human users are solving captchas to access some content hosted by this service, and the solution they enter is passed through to the target site.

<comment><USER12> Actually, you can make money by solving captchas. [https://2captcha.com/make- money-online](https://2captcha.com/make-money-online)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vicarious demoed cracking captchas at least 3 years ago.

Dileep George, cofounder of Vicarious, is the former Numenta CTO, and claimed to use probabilistic graphical models as a basis for their tech.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H185jPf-7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H185jPf-7o)

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't see how captchas are "fundamentally cracked" if they only claim a success rate at best around 2/3rds. Nor do they give an explanation for what they mean by fundamentally cracked.

<comment><USER15> Before you can say that a 66% success rate isn't good enough, you need to compare it to the human success rate. I barely get 2/3 myself.

<comment><USER16> This is my experience as well, very frustrating being locked out of your account when you need to take care of business. Nevermind cracked, they are fundamentally broken if a human can't get a nearly perfect success rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 10 points to the first person to hack up a CAPTCHA using Winograd schemas.

<comment><USER18> Why not cut out the middleman? Make the captcha be controlling a paperclip manufacturing device.

<comment><USER19> This comment is referring to this deceptively simplistic game: [http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html](http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html)

Trust me this is nothing but simple and will take you on a wild ride.

<comment><USER17> Oh, I thought it was in reference to the Paperclip Optimizer referenced every now and then on lesswrong.com :S

<comment><USER20> (It is, and so is that game.)

<comment><USER17> Oh, of course. Duh. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the fundamental problem with captchas is that writing a bot that defeat captchas is a very interesting exercise for teaching AI.

<comment><USER22> I always understood this to be a feature. Captchas seem to be used as public signposts for tasks that AIs are not yet good enough at.

So, given the financial incentives on both sides, I'd like to believe that continually creating and overcoming these tasks is a possible route to AGI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there more to this than "text captchas can be broken by deep learning"?

</comment><comment><USER24> What's the human pass rate for captchas? I bet I've personally failed at least 20% of the captchas I've solved in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER25> At a certain point it will be impossible to create a working captcha. Are we basically engineering a Turing Test?

<comment><USER26> Some of the captchas I get lately have honestly made me think I'm probably not a human as far too often I can't make heads or tails of the letters.

At a certain point I just give up and refuse to use the worst sites that use this junk.

<comment><USER27> I just assumed the test was that if you can decode that mess, clearly you're a bot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many types of CAPTCHA systems can be defeated with machine learning models and OCR. Google provides its own called Google Vision API. Here is a brief example how this is done in practice: [https://blog.websecurify.com/2017/10/cracking- captchas.html](https://blog.websecurify.com/2017/10/cracking-captchas.html)

Perhaps this is an old news as this technique has been out for a while but I find that it is still relevant in the many cases I have encountered.

Furthermore, in my experience, I attribute Google's failure to improve reCAPTCHA's "I am not a robot" visual appeal as one of the key factors why many organisations are simply not using it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think rather than being broken, captcha models are just going to be made more complex. Maybe they'll start asking you to write a poem or play a mini problem solving game.

<comment><USER30> I'd expect adversarial images to take off in captcha space. Don't try and avoid the models, exploit them.

<comment><USER31> Adversarial images need to be made with knowledge of the model.

<comment><USER32> Actually, no [1]. From the abstract:

 _We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation, which is found by maximizing the network 's prediction error. In addition, the specific nature of these perturbations is not a random artifact of learning: the same perturbation can cause a different network, that was trained on a different subset of the dataset, to misclassify the same input._

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199)

EDIT: Also interesting: "Universal Adversarial Perturbations" [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08401](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08401)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> a lot of services use facebook to verify that someone is a human. there should be a service that exists only to manage peoples identities online. sign up, provide some id, an address and last four of your social. later, maybe a letter is sent to the address and returned with a verification code. then, every other service on the internet could use that service to prevent bots, spam and other things.

<comment><USER34> I can foresee absolutely no potential problems with this plan...

<comment><USER33> then what do you propose?</comment></comment></comment>


A few words on Doug Engelbart (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/ <comment><USER2> The failure to replicate Engelbart's vision of collaborative UI plagues me every day. I have to think of it every day I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus Notes, Excel and a bunch of different screen sharing services. Google Docs is probably the closest we got, but I'm not allowed to use it for my work anymore for now.

The fact that we have ubiquitous cameras, microphones, bandwidth, input devices and compute power, but can't even achieve the level of integration they had back in the 60s - it's just mindboggling.

<comment><USER3> [https://notion.so](https://notion.so) gets pretty close. They even cite Engelbart's demo as a main inspiration.

<comment><USER4> They're also a sponsor of Dynamicland [1], Bret Victor and Alan Kay's attempt to reinvent how humans interact with computers.

(I've been using Notion for the past few weeks and I love it)

[1] [https://dynamicland.org/](https://dynamicland.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was fortunate enough to meet Doug Engelbart at a Hypertext conference years ago, where he was a keynote speaker. Very friendly and soft spoken man. From the his keynote, I got the distinct impression that he was disappointed and a little saddened that we had not progressed further than we have. His vision of augmenting the human intellect through the use of computers was both bold and hopeful, but instead we are barraged by click-bait, fake news, trolls, and social networking sites carefully engineered to keep us hooked—not much of an augmentation.

<comment><USER6> At least we know that negative augmentation (a) works, (b) is profitable. Now we need to show the same for positive augmentation.

Apple could develop privacy-oriented augmentation demos for their AR glasses, e.g. using local-only analysis of user data and preferences.

<comment><USER7> Should the recent focus on privacy be projected onto Doug Engelbart's aims on positive augmentation?

Can you have positive augmentation without privacy? In the demos it brings to my mind this idea where everyone's terminals are stitch-together as one massive desktop, rather like a pen-and-paper office you can go around browsing other people's desks.

And perhaps a lack of privacy helps in a corporate office environment?

ADD: it makes me wonder if my team couldn't have some kind of modern 'pc anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops. So people don't feel spied on you could have the camera feed of those who are currently sharing your desktop just like in the demo shown in this obituary.

<comment><USER8> While it's not the same, one of the best development setups I've worked with was really low tech, literally ssh-ing into commodity pc's running our app in a closet (production and staging were cloud hosted).

Because everyone was comfortable on the command like and connected via tmux sessions, we could attach to that session from any computer we brought our keys to.

We also had a couple pairing stations with one pc but two keyboard/mice and monitors so each person could take turns driving. The upshot of the tmux thing was that if we wanted to hop onto a pairing station it was as simple as taking a usb stick with your keys and then attaching to the tmux session you had at your desk.

Same went for interviews, we'd just have a candidate attach to a tmux session and we had an interactive collaborative editor.

There's some pretty obvious problems with this, but I think it's relevant since our setup used standard unix utils to achieve a modern 'pc anywhere' type setup, and if there's one thing I'll always think about when it comes to Doug Engelbart is how many of our new and shiny tools aren't really as new as we think. He really had it down with The Mother of All Demos way back in '68.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is always this tension between idealism and realism within engineering. Victor descries the ignorance we show the idealism of Engelbart, and Englebart, in turn, expressed "sadness" at how little progress we've made.

And yet, consider someone else Victor considers a hero, Seymour Papert, inventor of the Logo programming language. When we learned it on the Apple IIe, it was without connectivity to any other device, and usually with just the manual to guide us.

Collaboration was happening, but on a much longer time-scale. It wasn't milliseconds, but rather months and years. It wasn't mediated by network packets, but by shrink-wrapped software boxes and expansion cards purchased at big-box retailers. A remarkable amount of progress happened on that slow, physical time-scale, but much of it was _incompatible_ with shorter time- scales and global messaging. For example, Windows, having grown up in the slow time-scale, was hit hard by the fast time-scale, it's immune system non- existent.

It's too easy to wave away the problems we really experienced (and experience) with malware. Englebart made simplifying assumptions that people _wanted_ to collaborate, and were _not malicious_ and did _not want to harm_ each other. But these assumptions are all false, and a large, possibly majority proportion of modern engineering effort directly and indirectly addresses these unfortunate realities.

<comment><USER10> Very well said.

Also just think about the open source community and how much of that is built collaboratively. Not by sharing a screen but by sharing a repository and developing ways to work on the same project.

The _intent_ of Engelbart I still have been fully realized just in different ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a pretty fascinating set of videos from the 1995 Vannevar Bush Syposium [0]. Vannevar Bush's atlantic article [1] was one of the main inspirations of Engelbart.

It has Douglas Engelbart talking about 'The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ' and collective IQ seems like a good description for what Bret Victor was trying to talk about as one of Engelbart's goals.

However it also has presentations from Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Kay amongst others. It's at a cross over between the world that Engelbart and Kay imagined and what the internet and the web became as we know it now.

[0]: [http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush- symposium....](http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush- symposium.html)

[1]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice piece, but let me defend the headlines. Did Engelbart envision the computer mouse? Yes. Is he highly regarded as a public personality for that? Yes.

Hoping that a headline could convey the complexity you need an entire section of a blog post to explain in a complex way is never a good critique of journalism.

For that you need to run a special feature, or you promote a book. You can't expect the New York Times to illustrate the true nature of Doug Engelbart on the first three lines of his obituary.

Same applies for every scientist or "big mind" kind of person.

<comment><USER13> Engelbart did not envision the brain dead point and click thing apple introduced (with a single button[0]), or microsoft slightly improved version (with two buttons[1]) and that we have made ever so slightly better since then [2] [3] [4].

What he envisioned was a 32 state machine (or 256 if you count all the non- keyboard buttons) which could be positioned anywhere on a screen:

[https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2014/12/1450065_1...](https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2014/12/1450065_10154835434955223_600605115474172169_n1.jpg)

Something that would cause you to switch modes completely between typing and using it. A modal input mode for the gui, in the same way that vi is for the keyboard.

The closest thing today is the razer keypad for gaming [5], and even that is not integrated into the OS a tenth as well as what Engelbart had and by default barely supports chording.

[0] [http://dynamis.no/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1984-Apple- Maci...](http://dynamis.no/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1984-Apple-Macintosh- Mouse.jpg)

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Mi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Microsoft_Serial_Mouse_2.0A-8521.jpg/1280px- Microsoft_Serial_Mouse_2.0A-8521.jpg)

[2] [https://www.technologyuk.net/computing/computer- systems/imag...](https://www.technologyuk.net/computing/computer- systems/images/mouse08.jpg)

[3] [https://files.pccasegear.com/images/1459844620-RZ-NAGA- CHROM...](https://files.pccasegear.com/images/1459844620-RZ-NAGA-CHROMA- th.jpg)

[4] [https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2009/11/oomouse...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2009/11/oomouse- proto.jpg)

[5] [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/817GlmVDffL...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/817GlmVDffL._SX425_.jpg)

<comment><USER14> Well, are'nt you missing the point here? Conflating features with intent?

<comment><USER13> No.

The mouse introduced in 1984 was philosophically incompatible with Anglebarts mouse like device. Watch the mother of all demos and see the difference.

Apple: [https://youtu.be/S7AL7tkQ7d0?t=13m8s](https://youtu.be/S7AL7tkQ7d0?t=13m8s)

Mother of all demos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree that modern products are far away from the original vision of collaborative hypermedia. But it is important to remember that these are research prototypes and not popular commercial products; in that way they lack the finish and the real-life validation a commercially succesful product has.

Why has collaborative authoring not been taken further? As far as I can tell it is not for the lack of trying.

Maybe the vision of two people working simultaneously on the same document is wrong? In the way that is not actually what people do; rather if you do something together the natural process is splitting it up and delegating.

<comment><USER16> I'm on a team of 4 people working on a giant accounting spreadsheet simultaneously. It wouldn't be possible without collaborative editing. Previously, the same team has worked on white papers simultaneously. In theory, we could've done that by merging documents near the end, but we were adding, dropping and moving sections while writing everything, so the end result wouldn't have been the same.

There are other areas where I sorely miss collaborative editing. I want every piece of application software to support it. I hate transferring files. I love sharing live documents. My problem is that few people outside of this team I'm talking about seem to understand how powerful collaborative real-time editing can be. People of all ages are still emailing me Word documents like it's 1997. My head is in the future, the world is living in the past.

Same goes for smartphone usage, really. Try sending calendar invites to someone who's barely aware of the calendar on his phone because he only uses it for Instagram and calling his mates. Technologies to augment the human intellect are all around us, but most of us are really bad at using them.

<comment><USER15> Just to clarify; I am not saying that there isn't a use case. I am just questioning whether it is the general case that products should designed around and maybe that is the reason why we don't see more of it.

If you have 4 people writing a book together would you really sit there in realtime with 4 cursors and typing away on the same document? Or would you structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space (doing most of the work) and then later edit and merge it together.

<comment><USER17> I work in a team of 15 people where our last offsite was planned mostly on a single Google Docs document where we all edited sections, marked checklists, added comments at the same time. The other day I was in our company flat that doubles as occasional office, and three people in the flat and one remote all edited the same document at the same time. This is business as usual for us.

We'd still structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space, but why should we need to do it in separate documents? It adds effort to copy and merge things and shift things around. Sometimes one person writes a part and passes it off to another person (or three) to proofread and edit, and they may move paragraphs around, or copy in paragraphs from another section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Our hypertext is not the same as Engelbart's hypertext, because it does not > serve the same purpose.

Tim Banners-Lee is pretty upfront Engelbart's hypertext was a direct inspiration [1]:

> I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one > document to another had been thought about lots of people ...

> Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that > it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. > Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, > and didn't link all the way across the world.

> I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS > ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.

1\. [https://www.w3.org/People/Berners- Lee/Kids.html](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't help but point finger toward academia - CS is concerned with intersection of technology and math and the result is "applied" to users. Augmentation of human intellect just won't fit into this paradigm.

<comment><USER20> ? "Human Computer Interaction" is a subfield of academic CS.

<comment><USER19> "Human Computer Interaction" != "Augmentation of Human Intellect"

<comment><USER20> Your comment says that nothing in academic CS would allow for such a study. Clearly HCI does. It has not yet achieved Engelbart's vision, and it might not be trying to anyway, but it's clearly a framework that cares about how humans can and should use machines, not simply math.

<comment><USER19> No, the comments don't say that. What I'm trying to say is: HCI has not yet _recognized_ Engelbart's vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a way to get all of Brett Victor's blog posts? One's like this don't seem to be linked from his main page (unless I'm missing something obvious)

<comment><USER22> You can try a google search with:

      site:worrydream.com -vimeo -youtube

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tangentially related: Squeak has long included a remote collaboration tool called Nebraska ([http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356)) that, if I recall correctly, supported multiple mouse cursors (referred to as 'hands' in Morphic).

This of course may be due the original development of Squeak as a direct descendant of Smalltalk-80 (via Apple) by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls among others who were I'm sure more than familiar with the work of Doug Englelbart.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Ah, so like Google Wave"

<comment><USER14> You know, I think google wave was so close to this augmenting human intellec thing, perhaps the product was killed because it threatened to cannibalize other segments of up and coming products from google, I have no idea.

But I clearly remember the feeling I had when discovering it.

<comment><USER25> It also didn't really perform well at all.

<comment><USER18> This was the major barrier to use for me. Every new message in a thread made performance a little bit worse. A thread with 100 messages in it was distinctly laggy and unpleasant to use on my Core 2 Duo laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's something very organic about the system in his demo that feels almost surreal

</comment><comment><USER27> This is from 2013, if anyone else had a double take on "Doug Engelbart died today".

<comment> a-saleh I almost had. It actually really hit me. Even though it was 5 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Coming down from the mountain with the tablets to find a brand new golden calf is not a new thing. And Engelbart, as good as he was, was still no Moses.

It's like, even if we had an actual implementation of his vision, what would we do with it? Cure cancer? Or, would a bunch of corporate d-bags use it to sell more opioids to people who don't need them? I'd put my money on the latter.

<comment><USER29> Not everything has to have an impact as grand as cure cancer to make peoples day to day lives better.

<comment><USER28> That is not the point.

Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain.

<comment><USER30> @jstewartmobile wrote: "Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain."

That is a brilliant insight that more intelligence may be a bad thing if your heart is in the wrong place. Sorry to see your comment being downmodded and greyed out. At the risk of the same happening to me, here is support for your point on "heart".

Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

More by Einstein: [http://www.sacred- texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm) "But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

And Lewis Mumford said in the 1930s: "As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase: we are still living between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, in a cultural pseudomorph.... Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means, that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order." (Technics and Civilization pp. 265-267)

Thus my own sig standing on the shoulders of giants: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

I participated in Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium run by Stanford. I brought up some similar ideas there as well. Like in this email thread I started: "[unrev-II] Is 'bootstrapping' part of the problem?" [http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/216...](http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html) "This is one reason why I think just stating the Bootstrap's Institute's (or the colloquium's) goal of "bootstrapping" human or organizational ability as a goal is not adequate. It has to be a question of bootstrapping towards what end? There has to be an accompanying statement of human value."

I've continued to develop that theme elsewhere, like: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism (2010)" [http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing- irony-is-a-key-to-tran...](http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a- key-to-transcending-militarism.html) "The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

The dangers of increasing intellect unmatched by increasing heart was also a underlying theme in my book-length essay "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (2008)" [http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the- lines.html](http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html)

A lengthy extract from there:

"""

Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more challenging article that explains PU mythology.

Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do.

PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians.

In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in DeNunzio Pool [...] Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard to keep in captivity. :-) [...] Still, are those PU scientists and engineers doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten? That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-(

Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark "smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a bigger problem? :-(

For example from a review of "Deep Blue Sea": "So, in an effort to save their funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule! And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten."

Also [from another review]: "Some scientists are out in the middle of the ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists. Hooray."

I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made horror film. :-)

"""

To be clear, I feel Doug's heart was in the right place -- even if he maybe took that for granted in others.

<comment><USER31> I disagree with nearly all of this post and its parent. It has much conflation of ideas, but I will argue that this is the thrust:

"When bad actors are made more capable they are made more destructive, therefore, no one should be made more capable."

This idea represents stagnation and fear of one's fellow man. We prevent ourselves from improving our understanding because we worry someone will use it against us. Today's society as an example, this is almost an inevitability! The comments above focus _exclusively_ on the potential negatives. This is not a useful way of conceptualizing the problem.

.

 _Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance._

These are examples of intellectual augmentation by collaboration of scientists and engineers. However, the resulting destructive technology is made available by the _concentration of material resources_ and therefore is wielded by a select few in powerful positions. Note that the former cannot easily create such technologies without the latter. Note that the former are nearly always NOT the ones operating the technology!

 _PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific" library.

Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists._

These are simply good intentions and unintended consequences. In the example of shark scientists, augmenting their intelligence by collaboration result in them getting eaten. However, in both examples, a sufficiently augmented intellect could have recognized and avoided the unintended consequences altogether.

.

Critically: do not conflate the consequences of _acting on knowledge_ , with intellect or the augmentation thereof.

The material results CAN be negative. The phenomenon of intellectual augmentation itself is only of positive consequence: problems CAN be solved more effectively. Problems can be solved poorly and have unintended consequences but this is unrelated. The wrong problems can be solved and this is also unrelated. The problems solved can be for the sole purpose of killing and this is also unrelated.

The sentiment is that intellectual augmentation should be discouraged in general because The Few that have the resources to produce destructive results will be made that much more dangerous, by intent or by mistake. This is FEAR, not certainty. The far more dire consequence is that your fellowman, who wishes to collaborate and solve all sorts problems for the greater good and otherwise, is DENIED the tools to facilitate his problem solving. And subsequently, humanity is DENIED all the good that could arise from such a scenario.

I don't intend to deny those who are pessimistic about the overall effect of augmentation tools in the hands of present-day humanity, nor am I an optimist on the subject. But to state confidently about net loss or gain to humanity from such tools is FOLLY. I would say: make intellectual augmentation tools and have them available to everyone. Not because bad things won't happen, but because good things WILL happen. This is where the heart lies and where it GROWS. And don't we agree it's _this_ that is lacking?

<comment><USER28> We apparently have two entirely different observations of reality. I will share a little more of mine:

Kay and Papert did fantastic research on computing and education. Apple takes the idea, and turns it into something that Kay describes as:

" _Think about this. How stupid is this? It's about as stupid as you can get. But how successful is the iPhone? It's about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time._ "

and:

" _Yeah. We can eliminate the learning curve for reading by getting rid of reading and going to recordings. That's basically what they're doing: Basically, let's revert back to a pre-tool time._ "

Or take the web. Berners-Lee. Smart guy, great intentions. Early days were just plain text or the MS Frontpage goodness rocked by our professoriate. Not pretty, but plenty of actual content that you could learn from. Contrast with today where all of that stuff is buried several pages deep. What's link one? Some bullshit content farm like WebMD full of popovers, dickbars, and ads for pills nobody needs. Then there's the Facebook/Twitter awfulness, where enumerating the breadth-and-depth of it would span several books.

Or television. Higher-minded early execs tried to use it as a tool for raising the cultural bar--operas, great authors, polite debates. Those guys got their clocks cleaned by the guy who put on " _Gilligan 's Island_," and that guy would have had his clock cleaned by the assholes who made " _Survivor_ " and " _The Apprentice_ ". How long before they just straight-up show porn on broadcast? I do not know.

Or automobiles. Very practical inventions. What did we do with them? Urban sprawl, 5-lane highways, white-flight, drunk driving, global warming, etc. Many Europeans lucked-out by lacking either the cash or the empty space to follow us in that particular mistake.

Obesity, opioids, mcmansions, etc. _pdfernhout_ nailed it on the scarcity mindset in a post-scarcity world. There is a trajectory here. If you can show me how I'm wrong about that trajectory, I would love to hear it just for the sake of my own sanity.

I would also assert that _will_ and analytic brain power are entirely different things. Take Kalanick. Obviously plenty of analytic intelligence. Technology is like steroids for analytic intelligence. It let him become tech- bro master of the universe instead of some two-bit engineer. It did not stop him from becoming a total asshole.

<comment><USER31> I agree and share the same sentiment about all your examples. And I would say the trajectory will get worse before it gets better. In fact, I feel collapse is _likely_.

But this is confusion of ideas once more. Your examples have everything to do with the _relentless pursuit of money_. This is a separate problem, and is directly related to _heart_ NOT intelligence. Collapse will come to all degenerate societies _regardless_ of intellect and technological prowess.

<comment><USER28> My examples are ones of technological society _still_ making loaded 21st century weapons while the typical mindset (for both geniuses and fools) had already been baked-in thousands and thousands of years ago. Too much change, too much power, entirely without baked-in evolutionary heuristics for dealing with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why does America still use Soyuz rockets to put its astronauts in space? - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/10/16/why-does-america-still-use-soyuz-rockets-to-put-its-astronauts-in-space <comment><USER3> I wish the article analysed the differences between the space programs in more depth. The US space program has had several new rocket and spacecraft designs where the Russians (and Soviets before) have concentrated on progressive refinement.

The Soyuz rocket is a refinement of the R7 ballistic missile - the world's first - and the spacecraft has been continually refined since 1967. The first stage engines still use hydrogen peroxide to spin the turbopumps as they're iterations on the V2's engine.

I guess there might be something there with high tech analysis vs traditional iterative engineering.

<comment><USER4> It is generally accepted that the USSR/Russia is more iterative in weapons development, while trying crazy one offs now and again (high speed, high depth, double-hull titanium submarines, supercavitating torpedoes, plasma stealth, 3D-thrust-vectoring on fighters, PESA radar on the MIG31, etc, etc). They keep what sticks, for example high off-bore, helmet queued IR-missile targeting on the MIG-29 (it took a while for the US AIM-9 to catch up), but go for the cheaper versions on everything else.

While it is a budgetary necessity now, it simply "worked" in the past.

The same can't really be said for their rockets though, Musk is going to "crush them" to quote our friend Khruschev, and then Russia has no technological lead left, at all. Maybe niches in cybersecurity and new nuclear power generators, but that seems to be about it. Tragic really.

<comment><USER5> There is one other area of their economy that has gotten interesting in the last decade. Thanks to a leap in modernization, their wheat production doubled over ~15 years and it looks set to continue expanding. They have the potential to be a considerable agriculture power.

Their oil industry, which used to be towering, is 'only' worth about the annual sales of Apple, or Google + Microsoft. With their current approach to political leadership, it's hard to imagine where the economic growth is going to come from to enable them to devote a lot more resources to their non- military space industry.

<comment><USER4> It's good to hear about wheat production - that wasn't exactly going well for them after losing Ukraine.

"Their oil industry, which used to be towering, is 'only' worth about the annual sales of Apple, or Google + Microsoft. "

This isn't a good thing though. There is no credit to be given here - <USER2> causes an over-reliance on oil prices, and any time there is a market crash, they slash budgets. Pretty horrible.

"With their current approach to political leadership, it's hard to imagine where the economic growth is going to come from to enable them to devote a lot more resources to their non-military space industry."

Yea, I actually think Putin did a good thing in cleaning up low level corruption. But for some delusional reason I thought he would invest in education, tech, and small business once he reduced some corruption at the low level. That never happened. Pretty disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Korolev and von Braun are the most important pioneers of space flight. Korolev was brutalized and nearly beaten to death (he could not even turn his head to look to the side) in his stint in the gulags resulting from false accusations; and meanwhile the American efforts, like the Vanguard program and others, injected so much politics, beauracracy and corruption that we were actually losing the space race until Kennedy put a literal nazi--who had been rotting away with nothing to do in Texas--in charge of the Apollo program.

There's often an extreme ugliness to human history that we dont want to look at, and An Economist word salad can read relatively like a nursery rhyme. The reality is just that simply the main obstacle to what humanity can accomplish, and the answer to the article's question, is just _people_ screwing things up.

<comment><USER7> _Kennedy put a literal nazi--who had been rotting away with nothing to do in Texas--in charge of the Apollo program._

Who?

edit: Ah, this guy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun)

<comment><USER8> The USA put a lot of Nazi's to use after the war.

1,600 of them went off to be part of the CIA. We can see how successful that integration went ..

EDIT: Yes, I know, it makes you feel uncomfortable, Americans. But it is an uncomfortable _truth_ that has to be confronted sooner or later - Nazi's helped build the CIA.

[https://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/31/the_nazis_next_door_...](https://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/31/the_nazis_next_door_eric_lichtblau)

<comment><USER9> Post WWII (and even before the end) the US quickly pivoted towards the "cold war" with the Soviet Union. From the interview you linked:

"...Dulles was one of the intelligence titans of the 1950s, one of the original cold warriors. And he was someone who believed that there were, quote-unquote, "moderate Nazis," his words, who the U.S. could use to its advantage in the Cold War. And he actively recruited them himself and, in a number of cases, intervened on their behalf when they were facing accusations about their past, about their involvement in Nazi war crimes. And he and J. Edgar Hoover were really the two linchpins in this, in developing this strategy of recruiting ex-Nazis as cold warriors, as anti-Soviet assets who, they believe, could gather intelligence for the U.S."

Dulles was not a perfect man, and holds much of the blame when it comes to US/corporate colonialism but to suggest the CIA was "built with" Nazis is taking it too far. To suggest that the Nazi legacy of the CIA somehow is connected to current day abuses of power is an even further leap of logic. Dulles saw former Nazis as valuable tools in his war/wars - there's not much else to it.

Recommended reading if you're curious about the CIA and it's origins, and how it effected/effects US policy: [https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Foster-Dulles- Allen-Secret/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Foster-Dulles-Allen- Secret/dp/0805094970)

<comment><USER8> >To suggest that the Nazi legacy of the CIA somehow is connected to current day abuses of power is an even further leap of logic.

On the contrary: MK ULTRA. Agent Orange. Secret torture sites.

<comment><USER9> Torture and abhorrent behavior is not exclusive to Nazis. How many other intelligence agencies have used barbaric tactics to extract information to keep their homeland safe? I just don't see the direct connection - doesn't make it any less wrong, I just don't see the evidence that it's directly influenced by this connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who works in mission control, monitoring the electrical systems and solar panels for the ISS. She said in her opinion, canceling the shuttle program was the right thing to do because using a space shuttle to fly to the ISS was the equivalent of using a mercedes to drive to the end of your driveway to get mail.

<comment><USER11> So the space shuttle couldn't even replace the Soyuz for taking people to the space station and back. The Soyuz capsule stays at the space station for the duration people are there so it can be used to get everyone back if needed.

The space shuttle has a maximum mission length of 16 days so it could not fill that same role, while the Soyuz capsule can go about 6 months.

[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/extend_dur...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/extend_duration.html)

<comment><USER12> The shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem; the design never really made a lot of sense in the first place. The US would almost certainly have been better pursue a scaled-down Apollo-derivative (ie a Soyuz clone).

<comment><USER13> >The shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem;

I don't think that's entirely fair. At the time, when it appeared space may become weaponized, it made a lot of sense. A craft that could potentially fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home? Worth the cost and then some many times over.

<comment><USER12> > fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home

(NB. Provided that it was in an accessible low earth orbit and that very simple countermeasures weren't used)

I mean, realistically, putting a small bomb in each sensitive satellite would be enough to dissuade anyone from trying this, and most sensitive satellites wouldn't be in orbits that the shuttle could make anyway. The military applications always seemed like the most fantastical part of the concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is from October. A recent unmanned launch of Soyuz went well and the next manned launch with ISS crew is scheduled for December 3rd.

<comment><USER15> Roscosmos must be pushing hard in order to pull this off. If they can't make their launch, the current crew will still need to depart on time. Should this happen, it'll be the first time in 18 (I think) years that the ISS has been unmanned. The Soyuz's hydrogen peroxide supply slowly denatures, so the spacecraft literally has an expiration date.

<comment><USER16> Roscosmos where very quick figuring out what went wrong and everything is business as usual now.

[https://www.space.com/42319-soyuz-launch-abort-russia- identi...](https://www.space.com/42319-soyuz-launch-abort-russia-identifies- cause.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All very good comments from fellow HN-ers (the ones regarding the Economist's accuracy).

My first thought on the title of the article was "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". As it goes for 'commuting' people back and forth to ISS (and previously to Mir - Mir means both 'World' and 'Peace' in Russian language) Soyuz was the favorite means of transportation. I am not against upgrading, but if it does the job, leave it alone :)

<comment><USER18> > _" if it ain't broken, don't fix it"_

Cost is always an inseparable part of the equation however. Going to space for $10000/kg vs $5000/kg vs $1000/kg vs $500/kg all mean very different things for what missions become feasible and the safety factor and performance of said missions too (since the latter both have mass costs). SpaceX or BO ultimately doing the job much more cheaply, carrying more mass, with simpler designs made possible by modernized ME and knowledge, and that are more adaptable to other missions (methalox for example is a favorable compromise fuel for Mars surface launches and orbital refueling), doesn't mean Soyuz would be "broken" sure but it will make it _obsolete_ for most of the world. Ground manufacturing capability and best practices change too. Long term standing still isn't a great idea.

<comment><USER19> It all depends if you own the whole space programme. Even the $10000 vs $500 per kg difference you named will make a small difference for the cost of a whole programme. The LV cost for a manned mission is 1/10th of the whole launch cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that USA launched people on LOX-ethanol (Mercury Redstone), LOX- kerosene (Mercury Atlas), N2O4-Aerozine (Gemini), LOX-kerosene-LH2 (Apollo), solids-LOX-LH2 (Shuttle) - and Russia (previously USSR) always actually used R-7 LOX-kerosene with almost the same launch pad...

> Russia's willingness to ferry passengers—including space tourists—gave NASA > and other agencies a useful fallback option

Remember how much NASA opposed the Dennis Tito flight. Doesn't look like a useful fallback.

> the date by which the three astronauts presently on the ISS must use a Soyuz > descent vehicle before its corrosive fuel renders the craft unusable

I believe it's the fuel itself which deteriorates, not the craft. Peroxide is slowly self-decomposing.

</comment><comment><USER21> kind of a disappointing article from the economist. Click-baity title with the obvious answer in the first line of the article. They fail to directly compare the cost per flight for shuttle v soyuz. No follow up sentence on the possibility of actual sabotage on the soyuz return lander.

<comment><USER22> > They fail to directly compare the cost per flight for shuttle v soyuz.

That would be a difficult but interesting comparison: You'd have to compare a single SpaceShuttle launch with the cost for launches of 1) Soyuz crew launches and 2) cargo launches that could be covered with the SpaceShuttle's 16t payload capacity.

<comment><USER6> And not to mention the article _does_ mention cost problems with the shuttle without going into such detail--which the editors may have cut out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "because trillions of dollars still doesn't beat russian technology"

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone have a workaround for the paywall?

<comment><USER25> NoScript.

<comment><USER24> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best cloud ERP system for startup? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> OpenERP is on top of my list. Has lots of plugins too.</comment>


How to build your own LTE network over Wi-Fi frequencies - <AUTHOR> https://insights.hpe.com/articles/you-can-build-your-own-lte-network-over-wi-fi-frequencies-well-not-quite-yet-1705.html <comment><USER2> This could become the new free internet..</comment>


F# 4.0 Released for All Platforms - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/08/fsharp40 <comment><USER2> This language deserved all the attention it could get and now since it is OpenSource it certainly does much more!!</comment>


Happy 25th Birthday, Classic 8-bit Nintendo NES - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomsguide.com/us/nes-famicom-miyamoto-mario-snes,news-8368.html

<comment><USER2> don't forget to make a wish when you blow out your birthday cartridge!</comment>


Donald Knuth – Fun with Binary Decision Diagrams (2008) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQE21efsf7Y <comment><USER2> Don't have the attention span to watch the whole video right now, but I love that now with youtube and people posting lectures online I can come back to it later. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER3> They've posted a whole bunch of Knuth videos on their channel in the past couple of weeks [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordonline/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordonline/videos)</comment>


Steps to Getting Users' Insights while Avoiding a Bruised Ego - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/development/a-developer-and-a-user-walk-into-a-bar-5-steps-to-getting-users-insights-while-avoiding-a-bruised-ego/

<comment><USER2> I've long used the quote "end users don't know what they want until they _don 't_ see it in the final product". I don't remember where I picked that one up, but it's been proven true time and time again.

This is why you can discover, design and wireframe something until you're blue in the face, but nothing compares to putting something functional in front of your users.

Even if it's just something as basic as clickable wireframes (something Balsamiq Mockups does pretty well), or a super basic first pass HTML (for web apps), you will get much better feedback from your potential users.

Sometimes developers and designers forget the huge amount of domain-specific knowledge and skill that their opinions and insights are built on top of, and that the end user doesn't have this.

<comment><USER3> I think its more common that developers forget the huge amount of domain- specific knowledge the users have - not about development but about the problem the software is trying to solve. Always focus user research on what the end user is trying to accomplish. Then design the simplest way to solve their problem and present it to them in some kind of prototype/mock/wireframe. Ask them to walk through it mentally with common situations, then ask them to evaluated it in their less common scenarios. Then finally you can ask if they have any suggestions. Take this new information back and repeat.

Designing an interface is not a technical problem like configuring a server - it is about communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the idea of having the users compare/contrast two sketches is useful. As you said, they have trouble telling you what they want, but have no problem telling you what they don't want. Especially if they're visual thinkers.

ob.: A Developer and a User walk into a Bar. User says "Why aren't you done yet? Those screens look fine to me." The Developer replies "Fuck you, I'm fully vested."

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't usually do this, but the timing is just so perfectly aligned with today's SMBC:

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3188#comic](http://www.smbc- comics.com/?id=3188#comic)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was expecting a list of developer jokes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. If you're looking for a laugh, I actually do have a few developer/QA comics that I published to the same blog a while ago:

[http://blog.smartbear.com/cartoons/so-i-heard-you-guys- like-...](http://blog.smartbear.com/cartoons/so-i-heard-you-guys-like- software-comics/)

[http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/5-software-cartoons-to- get-...](http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/5-software-cartoons-to-get-you- through-friday/)</comment></comment>


Largest Contentful Paint - <AUTHOR> https://web.dev/largest-contentful-paint/ <comment><USER2> Front end development is insane. Are there any other GUI implementations across any other industry (native, embedded etc) that has to implement this level of granularity and optimisation to make meaningful and responsive UIs?

As a developer I don't want to have to optimise my code based on the first meaningful paint, I don't want to have to piss around to optimise my code based on when the browser determines it needs to redraw and I don't want to have to understand how a browser rendering engine works and why. Does nobody else realise this is insane levels of micro-optimisation? I used to think being a front end developer only was a silly role as the skills are easily learned. Now it's so complicated, the top front end engineers should be getting paid the same salaries as senior backend.

<comment> yoz-y > As a developer I don't want to have to optimise my code based on the first > meaningful paint

You don't have to implement this anywhere, not even on web. This is only because people making web frontends want to measure the performance to this granularity.

The web is different from all other native frameworks in that it is highly asynchronous: your text comes first, your images come later, css gets applied somewhere in between, then come in the third party content (usually ads but not necessarily, it could be embedded video for example).

> I used to think being a front end developer only was a silly role as the > skills are easily learned. Now it's so complicated, the top front end > engineers should be getting paid the same salaries as senior backend.

Wow. Reading this I get the impression that you think that currently backend engineers deserve more money intrinsically. Why? Depending on the program the frontend might be way more important than the backend. Making good interfaces _is_ complicated, even if the tooling would be perfect a good interface requires a lot of thought.

<Rant> I've seen many threads and discussions dissing backends made by 'frontend devs' as if it were an insult. But please realize that frontends made by devs unskilled in this domain are equally bad and prevent your programs from being used by a lots of people. </Rant>

<comment><USER2> Regarding your last point, yes I used to believe backend engineers deserved more pay.

Usually they had higher education, and were solving more complex problems with all kinds of dependencies and integrations.

Frontend, 10 years ago, was about knowing jQuery, how to make an XMLHttpRequest maybe, and a little bit of domain knowledge on browser bugs and using floats to implement your layout. Back then you weren't even doing responsive layouts on all projects. People usually filling these roles were not required to have the same amount of domain knowledge as a backend engineer - no way.

Nowadays it's a different kettle of fish. The tooling is insane. The dependency tree is insane. The amount of granular optimisations and obscure browser APIs you need to know to work on big-tech frontends is nuts.

So yes, I used to think this was the case. Not anymore.

<comment><USER3> I've definitely had to fight, as a frontend engineer, to prove that my job is just as demanding (and in many cases more so) as any other engineer.

I have the education, knowledge, and problem solving skills required for backend engineering; I just find the front end much more interesting. Building a complex, intuitive user interface for an application/website is a huge challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Largest Contentful Paint metric is otherwise known as the Time To First Accept The Cookies Dialog Paint

<comment><USER5> Or first time to Ad impression

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the article notes, the largest element on the page isn't always going to be the most important one. In the first example[1], I would actually consider the page to be loaded by the second-to-last frame. In the second example[2] though , I'd agree the page isn't fully loaded until the end, despite that being a very similar situation to the first example.

Maybe a better metric would be something like "last DOM reflow" or something along those lines? Usually I don't consider a page to be usable until its content stops jumping around the screen.

[1]: [https://web.dev/largest-contentful-paint/lcp-cnn- filmstrip.p...](https://web.dev/largest-contentful-paint/lcp-cnn- filmstrip.png)

[2]: [https://web.dev/largest-contentful-paint/lcp-techcrunch- film...](https://web.dev/largest-contentful-paint/lcp-techcrunch- filmstrip.png)

<comment><USER7> There is a new metric for that, too! [https://web.dev/layout-instability- api](https://web.dev/layout-instability-api)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a Google dev site, so it's heavily weighted to pushing Chrome and features that may not be the best approach for small/medium businesses.</comment>