Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-announces-react-fiber-a-rewrite-of-its-react-framework/ <comment><USER2> I'll repeat the comment I made in the "React 15.5" thread a couple weeks ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14063818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14063818)):

For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that's going on, Lin Clark's recent talk on "A Cartoon Intro to Fiber" at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There's a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 migration is at [2], and the follow-up issue discussing the plan for the "addons" packages is at [3].

I'll also toss out my usual reminder that I keep a big list of links to high- quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links) . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at [https://www.reactiflux.com](https://www.reactiflux.com) .

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs)

[1] [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master...](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links/blob/master/react-implementation.md#react-fiber)

[2] [https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854)

[3] [https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/9207](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/9207)

<comment><USER3> I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control.

Its amazing to me that the autoconf/automake/libtool system for making write- once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today's standards.

Every year the hot libraries change, the build tools change, the metalanguages, the data formats, even the damn paradigms change. Each generation requires more layers trying to fix up the underlying evil that nobody who soaks themselves in the matter will admit: the browser is a bad app platform and javascript is a bad language. Both have been pressed into serving a purpose for which neither were designed.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about others but I tire of these comments chiding the "out of control" front-end ecosystem. The situation has already changed years ago. We aren't going to get off of your lawn while you continue to beat a dead horse. The web is built on open standards and there are billions of pages and apps out there. To expect web development to be a perfect monoculture is a failure of your imagination and ability to adapt rather than a failure of the ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> Not the OP, but I expect the web to be a thing where documents (i.e. mainly text) don't have any issues rendering on my 5-year old phone or on my 8-year laptop (both of which work very well, still, and which I don't plan to replace anytime soon).

The recent web practices (I'm talking mostly of the last 2-3 years, since more and more people have started copying Twitter with its launch of its "every website needs to be a JS-app" thingie) have practically destroyed how most of the websites are displayed by the 2 devices I own. Sites like Hacker News or Wikipedia, which still work perfectly fine, are very far and few between. I sincerely deplore this.

<comment><USER6> A web limited to textual content is a pretty quaint and uninspiring vision, IMO.

The web started that way because static documents are relatively easy to represent, but the future (and present, for that matter) is rich experiences that can be distributed in the same way.

But there are many steps left to get there, so either buckle up and help build that future, or get used to an ever-shrinking ecosystem of the purely textual Web.

I'm personally very excited by the convergence of mobile and web development, PWAs, improved functionality for layouts, self-hosted app architectures (like Tent and Sandstorm, language-agnostic runtime via Web Assembly, better serving performance via HTTP/2, low level multimedia APIs, encapsulation of rich UX via Web Components, and so on and so on.

Sure, it's bewildering right now, but in the future, this will all be knit together in a cohesive way.

<comment><USER7> My opinion happens to differ. Textual content is incredibly rich and is likely a target for all content in the future. Consider, we are literally training models to accurately caption things today.

Why? Because language is a hell of an abstraction. More, it is approachable and can often be bounded. Consider, I am not even remotely skilled in art. However, I can adequately describe, for me, a picture by saying who is in it and the event. Try doing the same without language. Often "quaint and uninspiring textual" language.

Do I opine for the what we had in the 90s? Not necessarily. But I do grow weary of folks reinventing frameworks that merely further complicate the very abstractions that they created and now require these frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The company hasn't previously talked about React Fiber

Except, you know, the entire presentation on it at React Conf back in March.

<comment><USER9> It's TechCrunch... I won't say anymore because I'm also a member of the press... but it took me 3 seconds to find this on Google: [https://gist.github.com/duivvv/2ba00d413b8ff7bc1fa5a2e51c61b...](https://gist.github.com/duivvv/2ba00d413b8ff7bc1fa5a2e51c61ba43)

Somebody forgot to fact-check his article. That's for sure.

<comment><USER10> Most reporters these days don't appear to fact check anything anymore. It's too important to get the first story out.

<comment><USER9> I always imagined that a company of TechCrunch's size would have interns that do all the fact-checking... similar to VICE: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/editorial- intern-...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/editorial-intern- motherboard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://isfiberreadyyet.com/](http://isfiberreadyyet.com/)

<comment><USER12> > This page is rendered with it.

Yep, I can tell from the 5 seconds of blank screen while my phone browser loads all that JS.

<comment><USER13> I think it runs the test suite live... It's not meant to be fast, but to demonstrate compatibility.

<comment><USER14> Are you sure? Because that's a waste of resources. I'd imagine they would cache the results, which would make the GP's concerns about speed valid.

Edit: Found the github repo - [https://github.com/tomocchino/isfiberreadyyet](https://github.com/tomocchino/isfiberreadyyet)

Looks like it fetches from the umbrella issue[1]

[https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7925](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/7925)

<comment><USER15> It fetches from GitHub. The website was built in a weekend by our manager to make the task of a complete rewrite a little more fun for the team. Sorry it's not perfect! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> React Fiber was beautifully described by Lin on the last reactconf. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs) Congratulations to the release.

<comment><USER17> It is one of the most accessible talks for someone like me who doesn't even know anything about React.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great. I was waiting for React to stabilize before I learned it.

I've been cleverly waiting since 2006 to learn jquery. Will start next year.

<comment><USER19> Not sure if serious, but this update swaps out the internals without affecting users/developers, the API is fully backwards compatible

<comment><USER20> It's actually not. There are some lifecycle changes, potential modifications to setState (async only), etc. That's why it's being released as a new major version.

<comment><USER19> I think we may be splitting hairs over the definition of API compatibility

<comment><USER21> it's one of those 99% compatible except for a few small quirks that only developers using it on large applications will notice.

The React devs have also been great with releasing codemods for breaking APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lin Clark's talk makes this sound like they implemented a scheduler in React -- basically JS is single-threaded, so they're implementing their own primitives and a scheduler for executing those on that main thread.

Sounds neat, but it also seems like an explosion in complexity -- perhaps there will be a bunch of weird scheduler bugs the operating system folks more or less figured out a long time ago?

<comment><USER2> New code certainly carries risks that old, known code doesn't. And yes, this does carry over towards OS scheduler territory.

That said, the early feedback from others in the React community is that the Fiber implementation is simpler overall and easier to work with than the "React Stack" implementation. Fiber is also explicitly built to support additional renderers on top of the core reconciler, while building renderers on the Stack implementation apparently required some levels of monkey-patching or reaching into internals.

<comment><USER23> I'm an author of a custom renderer and yes it's so much easier to make a renderer to work with fiber :) I'll do a write-up on it eventually but I'm sure others with more time will beat me to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ... that was pretty uninformative. The first 4 paragraphs the author is just talking about nothing.

React Fiber is nothing new. It's more than an year old. Facebook has talked about it many times. Anyone who uses React would know this.

Shouldn't we prefer official sources instead of articles written by third party content writers that are clearly not that knowledgeable? Seriously, this article looks like the author was being paid by character count and not quality.

</comment><comment><USER25> See, Google should learn from Facebook: total API compatibility with the previous version.

They saw what happened with Angular and Angular 2—which Google named the same despite it being a totally different framework—and made a smart move.

<comment><USER26> That's a luxury you only get when your API is good. With Angular, the problem _was_ the API.

<comment><USER27> Angular 1.x was never meant to be an MVC initially. It was mainly for _templating_ then they started adding stuff to it (services, directives, digest cycle, dependency injection...) leading to API bloat

By the time Angular 2 was released, Ember, Vue and React have devoured the market

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is this the rewrite of the diffing engine that we've known about for a good while?

<comment><USER29> Yep - if you are interested in learning more technical details, check out [https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber- architecture](https://github.com/acdlite/react-fiber-architecture) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this as big a change as Angular 2 for you react devs?

<comment><USER31> Not at all, nothing incompatible changes on the surface. There are more features and no breaking changes. It's mostly all under the hood!

There will be new public api's to build your own custom rendering engine, ex how there is react-dom for browsers, react-native for mobile, and it will get easier to target new platforms thanks to fiber.

<comment><USER32> For those who have side-effects in their component lifecycle methods might have some problems when they turn on async fibers.

<comment><USER33> Which, in Facebook's defense, they've explicitly and often warned against

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been working with react for a bit more than a year, and I am trying elm. I think elm is the best thing that happened to the web in general. It's really daunting at first, but I highly encourage you to try it.

<comment><USER35> Elm blows me away. It's everything I saw that React was trying to do, but bound up in an actual language that has strong Haskell-ish types, is fully functional, and mind-bendingly fun to learn.

Elm really could be the future of bullet-proof web development. It has everything it needs except for runaway popularity.

<comment><USER36> "Mind-bending" being presented as a feature could possibly explain the lack of popularity.

<comment><USER34> I dismissed elm about 10 times. But once I tried it, it was great. The pure functional approach of elm is like solving an equation. Once it is solved, it's done, you can go home. In the sense of that you write elm code only once, if it work, it will always work. And if it doesn't work, it won't compile anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Neither the comments nor the article mention this, so I figure I'd ask here -- the React team has been promising performance improvements for stateless functional components (I think because they require less/no overhead + lifecycle management) for some time now, but I don't think it's moved beyond that.

Does Fiber introduce any of those optimizations, or nah?

<comment><USER38> Not yet. Seems like there is a loose plan to start implementing some of those optimizations once fiber lands in React 16.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm excited for relay's new core api to be released, as well.

<comment><USER40> Me too! More info is available in that blog post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14142196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14142196).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Anyone have a link to some benchmarks? As much as I enjoy the hype train sometimes, I'm not finding hard data on how much faster this is than the current React/Preact/Inferno .

So much hype and no words about performance... I'm wondering if it's slower.

<comment><USER15> Please see my reply in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14144042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14144042).

Regarding benchmarks, you might enjoy reading this: [https://medium.com/@localvoid/how-to-win-in-web-framework- be...](https://medium.com/@localvoid/how-to-win-in-web-framework- benchmarks-8bc31af76ce7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sorry, it wasn't entirely clear to me from the article. Is React Fiber going to be a completely new project, or is it just a name for the new release? It seems like the latter to me since there's no API changes...

<comment><USER2> It's a rewrite of the internals, particularly the diffing/reconciliation algorithm. React Fiber involves effectively re-implementing the JS call stack using a data structure called "fibers" to track work that needs to be done.

<comment><AUTHOR> The question still stands; will we be bumping a version number, or changing a package name?

<comment><USER2> It's a major version release. v15.5 added deprecation warnings, v15.6 will add a few more warnings and fixes, and v16.0 will be a major release that includes the Fiber internals turned on. (This release path is described in the issues I linked in my earlier comment, particularly [https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They "announced" this ages ago, didn't they?

<comment><USER44> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So they have created a kind of map/reduce system to distribute computation over a tree, except everything still runs in the same Javascript main thread.

<comment><USER20> Not at all. Fiber is a method of divvying up the work the reconciler is doing so the main thread can process higher priority updates ahead of ones that matter less. There are other benefits, but this is the central one.

<comment><USER45> UI updates seem to be only possible in the main thread

<comment><USER46> My understanding is that it's a prioritisation system. If all of the UI changes can't be completed before the next render, the lowest priority changes are deferred to the next render.

It should help with things where perceived lag is undesirable, like typing in an input field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Fiber sounds like a micro tasker for React? Ember had been doing this for years through Backburner run loop

<comment><USER15> With the ability to pause large updates in the middle without committing them to UI, doing some higher priority updates, and then "rebasing" lower priority updates on top of them and continuing the work. So it's a bit more sophisticated.

<comment><USER47> Does Fiber yield control back to the js engine when doing the "rebasing"? Or are all of these synchronous in one frame?

<comment><USER15> Yea, it does. We are using requestIdleCallback to do the work "while we can", and then yield the control back. Again, this won't be a part of React 16, but it's part of the bigger picture we are moving towards.

Relevant code if you're curious: [https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/233195cb6bc632ade61a8...](https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/233195cb6bc632ade61a8f64569b4d94061860d6/src/renderers/shared/fiber/ReactFiberScheduler.js#L815-L818)

<comment><USER47> Interesting...

Since requestIdleCallback leaves the scheduling out of your hand, how do you ensure nodes are still updated when you need it? Like tests?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is great news. Definitely merging css animations with React prop/state changes has been the biggest friction point with React (ie managing DOM state from 2 different sources).

</comment><comment><USER49> Feels like every month they [re]announce React Fiber... there's no reason why this needs to be repeated again and again. And every time it shoots up to #1 on HN.

<comment><USER40> Sorry! Definitely no intention to bombard you with the same news. It's true that we had a couple talks at last month's React Conf but Facebook's conference F8 is this week which comes with a wide publicity push. Hopefully the next time you hear about it will be the final open source release later this year!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> any news on bundle size? and maybe Closure Compiler compatibility for dead code elimination?

<comment><USER40> No final numbers yet, but we recently switched to Rollup for our own builds which will be part of 16.0, and we'll do some more work on file size in the next few months.

For DCE, we've started splitting some features like createClass out of the main package ([https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2017/04/07/react-v15.5...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2017/04/07/react-v15.5.0.html)) which will reduce the bundle size for anyone not using them, regardless of how they compile their JS.

<comment><USER51> What bundle size range can we expect?

Many mobile users are on throttled connections, due to low data caps, and research has shown users stop loading a site usually after 1 second of loading time.

That means with a throttled connection, less than 8KiB overall CSS, JS and HTML can be transmitted, and with a 1Mbps connection, 128KiB can be transmitted.

How many minutes will users have to wait with React Fiber? And can it be improved in any way to get below a few seconds? Or will I have to continue to write vanilla JS to get responsive apps?

<comment><USER51> Answering @vote-for-pedro: Yes, currently, a working React installation takes around 6-10 seconds to load on dialup or throttled internet, without caching. Which is pretty good.

But React Fiber is doing a lot more than legacy react, so it'd be interesting to know how much larger it will get - and if it would still be performant enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Will React Fibre be utilising WebAssembly for a performance increase, particularly for their virtual DOM? (falling back to JavaScript when possible, of course)

<comment><USER53> WebAssembly isn't some magic bullet that's going to make every piece of code faster. Anything strongly connected to the DOM is still going to be slow, because the DOM slows things down a lot more than JavaScript does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > It's already in use on Facebook.com today

What's preventing us from using it in our apps then ? Do they limit the use of the API to what's implemented in Fiber in some parts of the website ?

<comment><USER55> As far as I know the server side rendering isn't done yet.

<comment><USER15> Server rendering is missing, and a few other things. (You can check React 16 umbrella issue in [https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854.](https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8854.))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is fiber similar to what glimmer is to ember? Is it a big enough improvement to reconsider using react instead? (I was stoked on the glimmer stuff).

<comment><USER57> React is mostly an API contract (React.Component) and it didn't change. If you didn't like it for this reason, you won't like more.

If you left React for performance reasons especially related to real-time updates or animations, well this version is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Good to read that React is faster now.

Can we write an efficient rich text editor like Google Docs in React? Or would it still be too slow?

</comment><comment><USER58> how this will affect react native?

<comment><USER59> Looks like it will be a big help to RN. However, I can't confirm that it's a drop in replacement.

[https://facebook.github.io/react/contributing/codebase- overv...](https://facebook.github.io/react/contributing/codebase- overview.html#fiber-reconciler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Awesome sauce

</comment><comment><USER61> How does it compare with vue.js? I never worked with any modern JS framework like this but on paper I did not like writing CSS in javascript and vue.js had a normal way to write CSS and to me it looked superior in other ways as well.

<comment><USER62> What was your objection to writing CSS in JS? It would seem like a fairly trivial syntactic transition to go from one to the other? It's just selectors with a dictionary of properties right?

<comment><USER63> Writing CSS in Javascript brings back memories of pre-2000 web development, table based layouts and more horribly inline styles inside HTML tags. CSS was a breath of fresh air, it meant separation of concerns.. HTML the content and CSS the visual representation. With the advent of jQuery it allowed separation of behavior as well.

With frameworks like React these days, content+behavior is in JavaScript already, and with writing CSS in JavaScript, we've gone back 1.5 decades I think.

<comment><USER64> I had this same initial reaction, but concluded as others have that this architectural approach was not actually a separation of concerns but merely an unwieldy separation of technologies: [http://blog.andrewray.me/youre-missing- the-point-of-jsx/](http://blog.andrewray.me/youre-missing-the-point-of-jsx/)

When you start thinking in components it becomes much nicer to have the styling, logic and layout all in one file, isolated from the rest of the application and easy to edit, move around and apply to any page.

The previous 'best practice' of having these coupled aspects in separate files now seems quaint and tedious.

There are of course trade-offs, and CSS-in-JS has not triumphed yet, but if you've held off from considering this approach simply because you've had 'separation of technologies' drummed into you in the past you might be missing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Building your project upon an framework means abstraction, idoms on top of the programming language one has to learn and the pending migration-horror when the framework changes the API or gets deprecated.

Often it makes sense to think at least about alternative solutions like using libraries instead of a framework. Libraries are a different concept that is more flexible. In any case stable API is prefered to moving targets. A real probem is when project move so fast that one has to update to every new minor version of the framework/library, if he skips one he might be left out of the supported upgrade path (frameworks) - lot's of maintanance work that could be spent elsewhere (coding new features, etc).

</comment><comment><USER66> Does this mean something for someone starting in React Native or the changes in that regard are just under the hood?

<comment><USER67> The maturity of the code base has been reset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Another day another JS Framework.

<comment><USER69> another day another dude that didn't read the article in the link, and also didn't read the link title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Does it the Frontend ecosystem has yet another new framework? Do we have to retire the old one and learn the new one all over again?

<comment><USER71> No, because React Fibre is more or less a rewrite of the internals with no API changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> No thanks I'll stick with plain html and jquery for the frontend of my small projects. Plain javascript works perfectly fine as long as you namespace your functions and separate them into different files. All these frameworks end up creating much more problems than they solve.

<comment><USER73> As someone who has worked on a truly large React project, I can assure you this is not true.

I cannot _imagine_ the shitshow that project would be using jQuery to track the state.

Nearly as soon as you progress from 'backend rendering html' to single-page- app, it behooves you to use React.

<comment><USER74> What's the major advantage of moving from "backend rendering html" to single- page-app?

<comment><USER73> There are trade-offs. In very broad terms, single-page-apps are better for something that behaves more like an application (has a lot of user interaction or real-time behavior) than something that behaves more like a website (a page is loaded and the user views that now-static page for a period of time).

I try to fit the more traditional paradigm when I'm allowed to architect an app myself. I like rendering a page on the backend.

Anyway, you can read arguments by smarter people than myself: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21862054/single-page- appl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21862054/single-page-application- advantages-and-disadvantages)

That's just one thread of many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> React will die by the weight of the frameworks and libraries that have duplicated effort and created more confusion and divide amongst the developer community.

<comment><USER76> It's made my life infinitely easier writing front end apps that need to keep state and update when the data changes. Remember the old days of backbone and marrionette? Remember even older, having horrible jquery sprinkled around everywhere?

<comment><USER77> jQuery is just a library, it never told you how to write code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Everyone working on JavaScript right now lives in a bubble. Take a look at how back end languages have evolved and that's your future, you can try to deny it but your going to go the way C did and Java did. You can cite openness and the web and all these other things that make some kind of sense but history is against you.

In reality those arguments don't hold water. In reality our field is 30 years+ old and there is some maturity in the way things are done. All this crazy shit of rewrite everything all the time will just eventually tire people out and people will cut this redo an entire framework just because out.

JavaScript is one of the most important languages around right now and pretty soon the adults are going to be taking it away from the kids. Just as an FYI, this is another example of that. Too many important decisions are happening without much thought about what's there already.

I don't know maybe I'm wrong and maybe this time will be different but I've been around long enough. I learned the ins and outs of angular only to be told "fuck that" shortly after. It all seems very wrong too me but maybe you can tell me otherwise?</comment>


Pglite: A tiny script to manage ephemeral Postgres databases - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/solidsnack/pglite <comment><USER2> great idea, i currently use harelba's q wrqpper for sqlite, which loads files and queries in one command.

Could your readme include some examples of your common use cases?</comment>


Sprint's snazzy, speedy 4G iPad case - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/17/sprints-snazzy-speedy-4g-ipad-case/ <comment><USER2> So, the issue is that this is significantly more expensive than getting an iPad with AT&T. Sprint charges $99 for the Overdrive 3G/4G hotspot and then $60/mo for service. While Apple charges $129 more for the 3G iPad, that's only $30 more than the Overdrive and service is only $30/mo. After one month, the AT&T service is cheaper.

And it isn't just more expensive. The battery life on these personal hot-spots isn't so great and it would mean carrying around two chargers and constantly plugging in two devices rather than one. You even get saddled with a 2-year contract and early termination fee which AT&T's month-to-month iPad service doesn't come with.

Sprint and Verizon are pushing their mobile hot-spots as a way to get iPad owners on their service, but they're requiring two-year contracts, twice the monthly fee, and the hassle of carrying around an extra device and charger. I don't think they'll get a ton of takers.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that is exactly why I found the whole fiasco amusing :-) What I don't understand is why Apple didn't leave an 4g option open for other carriers (clear, etc).</comment></comment>


The Inevitability of Apple's Current Predicament - <AUTHOR> https://alexstern.me/daily-insights/the-inevitability-of-apples-current-predicament <comment><USER2> I disagree with this article's fatalistic tone.

IMHO the Apple ecosystem was always about getting people hooked on one of their products and then up-selling them other products and services and thus set them up for a lifetime of buying the latest and greatest from Apple at regular intervals.

In the past few years, I've seen many long time Apple users opt for alternative brands. And not just because of the price points. I have friends that now have Android phones and windows/linux laptops where just a few years ago they would have been de-facto iphone and macbook owners as well as own a whole range of misc apple branded products. Apple had a really nice business tapping into these people's disposable income and it has been evaporating for a while now.

By squeezing their iphone and mac book user base too hard, they have started to bleed users. This is bad news because it means the upselling business is going to dry up as well. People with an Android phone are not going to want an iWatch or iCloud subscription. They are also not going to order anything in the Apple store or sign up for Apple Music. And raising prices there is going to shrink the user base even harder.

Apple has neglected some of their core product lines and especially their recent desktops have not gone down well with users. The pattern is the same across their product lines: sales revenue is up but volumes are down for the last few years and not just because of the price. They make more money with fewer users. Except, now they are making not as much money as they hoped with even less users than they expected. They squeezed too hard and the numbers no longer add up.

The fix is simple: they need to change course and get volumes up again by making sure that they have attractive premium products that people can afford. You don't get service revenues up if your user base keeps shrinking. A few well positioned products at the right price point could easily bring back lots of users that have dropped out of the ecosystem. More of the same is not what is going to make that happen.

<comment><USER3> >and get volumes up again by making sure that they have attractive premium products that people can afford.

Another thing would be to offer entry-level products that get people into the ecosystem. Like the iPhone SE - smaller and less capable, but profitable at lower prices than newer models. Basically, keep a lower step on the ladder - it makes it easier to get aboard.

<comment><USER4> Jacking up the price on the Mac Mini the same year as ditching the 5S speaks volumes about how much they care about creating 'affordable' anything.

<comment><USER5> Apple's hardware is affordable because it lasts so long. The Mac Mini I bought in 2012 can run the latest OS.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if you know this but a pc built in 2012 can also run the latest os...

<comment><USER7> Running the latest os is one thing... does it run _well_ , though? Probably depends on the os!

<comment><USER8> _Running the latest os is one thing... does it run well, though? Probably depends on the os!_

a decent new PC 2012 has a quad core ivy bridge CPU, a 600 series Nvidia Geforce card and quite possible an SSD drive. What latest OS won't run well on that hardware?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't help when manufacturers are raising prices while actively eliminating features people want. Headphone jack, expandable storage, replaceable battery (that's been gone for a while, but still), hardware buttons...

My current phone is getting old but it has dual-SIM slots AND microSD. Today's dual-SIM phones force you to give up the 2nd SIM if you want to use microSD.

As far as headphones, 2 pairs of bluetooth earbuds, fully charged, won't last a complete trans-Pacific flight. And now you've got 2 additional devices to charge while on the road with limited chargers/wires/plugs.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand, you still have a Samsung Galaxy S9, which is dual-SIM, has SD card slot and headphone jack. Did you buy it? (Because according to Samsung, they didn't sell well.)

<comment><USER9> No, not "on the other hand." This phone is exactly what I described. The microSD uses the 2nd SIM slot, so you can choose either dual-SIM, or a microSD, but not both.

[https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s9-8966.php#g960f-ds](https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s9-8966.php#g960f-ds)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, their current predicament was inevitable and obvious. Apple's relatively low P/E ratio means that the market has been predicting this would happen for a quite a long time. Which makes their failure to diversify unfathomable.

Steve Job's focus on a small number of products executed perfectly made sense for his time.

But to continue to grow using this strategy borders on impossible. They would need to enter and dominate a market bigger than smartphones. Self-driving cars, for example. But that's really hard, as they found out.

The knowledge and experience that must have accumulated inside Apple must be incredible. There must be dozens of proteges of Jobs, Ives & Cook. The CEO does not need to micromanage every project, as Jobs did. Give that responsibility to many of these proteges!

If they diversify, some projects will fail and tarnish their brand. But some won't, and will burnish it. You cannot grow without taking risks.

They may never find "the next iPhone", 500 billion dollar markets are few and far between. But there are lots of billion+ dollar markets, Apple could enter and dominate many of them.

People consider the watch or appleTV to be failures, and perhaps they are, compared to the iPhone. But if they had a lot more of these types of products it would add up revenue that's more than a blip compared against the iPhone.

A company with > 100,000 employees can focus on more than one thing successfully.

<comment><USER12> Lots of articles have been written on this but I wanted to point out that Apple is unique among the tech companies because it is organized horizontally instead of vertically: there are divisions for hardware, software, services, etc instead of product divisions like google maps, google search, Android, etc. This makes it hard to scale to more products at once but it makes it easier to integrate across the products.

<comment><USER13> Can't shake the feeling that future companies will organize as graph, not tree

<comment> david-gpu I used to work in a matrix organization. My two VPs had completely different goals and strategies. Unsurprisingly, they did not cooperate, meaning I was being pulled in two entirely different directions.

I quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" Now, if the market isn't growing fast enough anymore that means that there are generally only two ways to continue to grow — either increase your market share by drawing the customers away from competitors, or raise prices."_

Incorrect. There is a third way: reinvent the smart phone.

Back in 1899 the Commissioner of US patent office stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." No doubt there are plenty of people thinking the same thing about the smart phones we have today. i.e., every feature that can be added has already been added. They are wrong.

Keep in mind that right before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone people thought the same thing about the mobile phones we had then. Then Jobs reinvented the phone. Can Apple do it again?

<comment><USER15> > Incorrect. There is a third way: reinvent the smart phone.

The name "phone" is mostly an accident of history at this point. Its primary use for most people is not as a telephone. Starting from a classic telephone, via incremental improvements, you would never have gotten to the iPhone.

(It's also a compass, a pedometer, a camera, and a dictionary, and you never would have arrived at iPhone by incrementally improving any of those objects, either.)

It's a handheld computer. Telephony just happens to be one of its dozens of features. So what you're really saying is "reinvent computing". Apple has several products in other areas (Watch, AirPods, HomePod, etc) which may or may not be successful in the long run but they're definitely trying to take their computing platforms beyond "Mac" and "iPhone".

The "smart phone" is done. I've seen people trying to "reinvent" that since 2007, and I haven't seen anything promising. We're already at a local maximum.

<comment><USER16> In the early 2000s I was excited about the potential of networked handheld computers. It was disappointing when it became clear they'd be phones, basically owned by the app stores instead of the user.

<comment><USER17> This depresses me too. I think we got off into walled gardens where it's easy to use time wasting things we don't need like candy crush and Facebook.

A computer on my wrist that ran something like Linux and gave the user control and had peripherals would be geeky but nice. You can do a lot of this with various droids, but it is a bit of a shallow experience and not too many enhancements can be made.

I think the main problem is that hacker news is an echo chamber and few others could even use such devices. Smart phones are simply made for the least common denominator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, they got a decade out of a new product. That's not bad. But the glory days of the iPhone are over. Where's the Next Big Thing?

It's not just Apple. It's consumer electronics generally. There's no Next Big Thing. 3D TV? Flopped. VR goggles? Niche market. There's nothing in the pipeline on the scale of the smartphone, the cell phone, the video game console, the DVD player, the VCR, or the iPod. No "must have" product.

<comment><USER19> I think it is still too early to call the market on VR goggles (which I will bundle with AR). They did find a niche; and that means the technology will continue to be developed and grow organically. It might never find a place in the mass consumer market; but if it does, we might look back at today as it being in the pipeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I recall discussions with friends about wanting a good wearable computer, years before good smartphones came out. Innovation has an overlooked requirement, which is that there has to be an unmet need (or at least an unmet want). I don't doubt that there are unmet needs/wants still, but they may not be for a new type or class of hardware. If the next innovative class of product is, say, something in 3D-printing or a better way to communicate electronically than email and social networks, then it may not be something that Apple is well positioned to provide.

Or, you know, maybe it is. But it's not necessarily the case. The Apple Watch was made because it was within Apple's domain of competence, and it has not taken off because it wasn't also in the users' domain of need/want. It is possible that the two don't overlap.

<comment><USER21> There are many reasons why the watch hasn't taken off, but I don't think they have to do with the product itself, but with the market. Digital watches are only recently catching up and most folks prefer the cheaper fitbits than forking out > $200 for a "watch".

Compare that to iPad. When it came out, it was an instant hit. It wasn't replacing an analog iPad. The competitors just didn't match up.

<comment><USER22> Actually I think Apple's decision to have a rectangular watch face was a major unforced error.

Here are two smart watches from almost 4 years ago: [https://m.imgur.com/V9YZ5Kz](https://m.imgur.com/V9YZ5Kz)

The Moto 360 looks beautiful and classy while the Apple watch looks like a cheap casio from the 80s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like the real problem at Apple is a lack of vision. Apple's current management is very adept at execution at scale and incremental product improvements. But I don't see anyone at Apple who can sell me a version of the future like Jobs could.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1) Take the dev market seriously again. Ship with stock Linux containers out of the box. Stop breaking Mach linker ABIs etc.

2) Durable version of the MacBook. Like you can pour sand over the keyboard, swap a cracked display by hand. Comes with a backup hard drive appliance.

3) Apple cloud. Wordpress/Shopify product, AWS S3 clone, AWS Lambda clone, AWS SQS clone, AWS RDS clone, Siri API. Make it all run on localhost too for edge and testing. Cross compile out of the box to Apple hosted GCP/Azure/AWS instances. Extend and embrace :)

<comment><USER25> I doubt any of these would happen soon (I'd say "ever", but that's a dangerous thing to say about a technology company). Apple might do a mild version of some of these: make their development tools better, have more durable computers, or improve iCloud. But I don't see them becoming the next Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This piece is pretty circular. It talks about the maturing hardware being a reason people don't upgrade, but at the same time doesn't accept a lack of innovation as a criticism.

People buy new iPhones when they offer something new and meaningful they they are going to appreciate.

The iPhone XS simply doesn't offer a significantly better experience than the iPhone X.

It is better, for sure, but not in any way that the iPhone X doesn't already excel.

In previous years, even S models had significant new features. And speed used to really matter to how the device felt.

Both of these seem like rectifiable conditions.

<comment><USER27> _doesn't accept a lack of innovation as a criticism_

It's really hard to fault a company for not innovating when nobody else is innovating either. It's a mature product category which means all the low- hanging fruit is gone.

For Apple to really innovate their way back into massive growth they're going to need to find another new product category. I have a really hard time seeing what that may be, as do most observers, I would imagine.

<comment><USER28> An Apple electric car would have ridiculous earning potential. Real estate and cars are (I think) the two biggest expenses that most consumers have and one of the few ways to earn much more money than with an expensive, great selling smartphone brand. Apple reportedly tried but somehow didn't pull it off. If I were Apple, I'd put all my energy into it.

<comment><USER27> I don't see Apple being able to build a car. Look at all the struggles Tesla has had. I don't see Apple as a fundamentally more innovative company than Tesla. I don't see what advantage Apple would have in automobile manufacturing. Apple doesn't even manufacture their own products right now.

<comment><USER29> The biggest advantage Apple would have over Tesla is "cold, hard cash". They have far too much money to throw at problems than Tesla. Even if they are 2x less efficient than Tesla in setting up infrastructure to manufacture Cars, they have more than enough cash to make up for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Much as the gap between Windows and MacOS has narrrowed in recent years, for a user there just isn't a meaningful difference between Apple and more commoditized competitors to justify a massive price point. I pay it because a few hundred dollars every 3 years is less pain than spending a few days migrating my life off the Apple ecosystem (like Photos and Music) but at some price differential it becomes compelling. Apple has failed to extend the ecosystem. The Watch is a very limited use product. There hasn't been a must have software or service introduced in how many years?

<comment><USER7> > Much as the gap between Windows and MacOS has narrrowed in recent years

Except that it hasn't - if anything, it has _widened_ with Windows 10 being such a massive dumpster fire. And most computer users have no idea that you can wipe Windows 10 completely if you want, and run a free Linux distro on your PC.

<comment><USER31> It's really a matter of opinion, not ignorance.

I run macOS, Windows and Linux on a daily basis, and find macOS and Windows very much equivalent in use. (Linux less so for my particular use, I find Linux desktop environments ugly, so I'm CLI only.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It is all to easy to call some result inevitable but doing so simply obscures the road(s) not taken. Apple was an innovative company. It is no longer innovative it is exploitative. It is trying to optimize its current market and product without doing the hard work required to innovate. The iPod was a remarkable innovation that few people could understand even after seeing it. (Here's looking at you Zune). Tim Cook is not an innovator, Steve Jobs was. It would be interesting to discuss the why and how of Apple not finding or developing another Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER29> With growth slowing in hardware sales, more and more of Apple revenue might come from services in the future. Services are currently a minuscule amount compared to hardware for Apple, but might become huge one day. Would Apple be able to resist giving in to the same "Data Industrial Complex" Tim Cook was talking about sometime back. It would be interesting to watch what direction Apple takes from here.

</comment><comment><USER33> Apple has pretty hugely increased prices on their biggest product (the iphone) in the last few years without adding anything to justify the price increase. Is it really a surprise to anyone that sales are down? What did they expect to happen?

Anecdotally stores near me were heavily advertising the iphone 6 still during the christmas/new years period as it seems to be the only model with a sane price.

</comment><comment><USER34> Imagine someone somewhere has the big and great new plan that will be as big as the iPhone. How does he convince a 500 billion dollar mega Corp that his way is "the way"?

Not to mention he would be smart enough to form his own company....

</comment><comment><USER35> There was nothing inevitable about Apple's dilemma. A lot of this boils down to the choices they made and their own vision in the company.

Definitely the biggest most recent disappointment was the HomePod which has the technical potential to be a pillar of their home and business market.

It's a nice speaker. It's a nice speakerphone. It has most of the hardware necessary to serve as a WiFi router. It could _replace_ Apple TV, or serve as a higher end version of the Apple TV.

What it is lacking is good I/O options and the ability to integrate into, even become the centerpiece of peoples' existing A.V. systems. Not to mention there's entire classes of Apps that don't entirely need a GUI front end to be operated and used (podcasts, music, VoIP, meditation, metronomes, et cetera).

With just a bit more vision and a voice lock, you could have a nice speaker/mesh router/home automation hub/conference speaker/personal assistant and hell, game console. If they played their cards right, you're potentially talking several HomePod products (higher end and lower end models) per customer.

The Apple TV, which has all the requisite hardware and software to be an excellent game console, and upgrade path, but a blindingly stupid set of policies which inhibit its appeal as a game console to both developers and gamers. This is a big market of potential customers that Apple could get a nice slice of, but intentionally choose not to target. They don't bundle a game controller, they don't have a SKU which bundles a game controller, they don't market it towards gamers, they actually require developers to support the Siri remote which is anemic even by remote standards, let alone game controller standards. There's no Apple Game Studio, there's no attempt to build relationships with large game studios and publishers beyond just being appealing enough of a platform to have a few games ported to iOS, and maybe a few free to play spinoffs of some IP.

In short, the only reason the Apple TV isn't a powerhouse gaming platform is because Apple has no interest in owning a segment of a lucrative market.

The whole deal with their desktop Mac lineup, and their professional Mac lineup has been a shit sandwich. The fact they eventually had something to show isn't an excuse for the years of _not_ communicating to a set of customers willing to pay a lot of money for professional Apple hardware and professional Apple software. Now we know a Mac Pro is coming. Now we have the iMac Pro. Now we have an updated Mac Mini. Now, where is the roadmap? The sign of commitment to maintaining an up to date lineup so professionals, the ones that didn't leave for greener pastures, might have a sense that there is some commitment from Apple to keep their Pro line going?

</comment><comment><USER36> Apple is not only iphones. What about the i-watch / i-echo / desktop, laptop, siri, appstore etc ... Obviously, none of them are as succefull as iphone, but maybe together with other new lines of productrs, they can add up.</comment>


Obscene Losses: YouPorn, Silicon Valley, and the Future of the Adult-Entertainment Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile/

<comment><USER2> After online advertising start growing rapidly and more importantly Google introduced Adsense a lot of sites were now able to generate a lot more money by simply offering their sites for free, and in return have higher traffics, (therefore, more money from advertisement). I believe also one of the very reasons why blogging grew out of a simple diary into a very profitable business, and a full time job for many people.

But the interesting thing here is that the porn sites can't really take advantage of this fact, since google and many other people avoid advertising on porn sites. Therefore, a site like YouPorn will have problems generating profits although it has such huge traffics. I guess the people in the online porn industry really need to get creative and come up with a new model for their business. But whats more interesting and ironic is that free porn sites like YouPorn are becoming more and more popular, and are killing the old media businesses (exact same thing that happened to the music and movie industry, and as mentioned in the article) but are not able to make money themselves either. Clearly the users are the real winner here, LOL

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that the 51st most popular site on the internet cannot be sold for even a few million bucks, despite repeated attempts. pg has said YC (and the vast majority of other investors) wouldn't fund a porn venture, not due to any ethical qualms, but because there is no good exit option, and I guess this is pretty solid proof of that.

<comment><USER4> ...I think what they are attempting is closer to "extortion" than mere selling.

<comment><USER3> How so? It seems to me that the YouPorn folks are at far higher risk of being sued out of existence...yes, all of the traditional pay-for-content sites, and buy-our-DVDs companies, are in serious trouble, because of sites like YouPorn. But, taking YouPorn out of the picture through acquisition wouldn't solve that problem--though I guess I can begin to see the extortion angle if we follow that through to one possible conclusion: Every 20-something nerd in the world will suddenly think, "Hey, I can build a killer porn video site, and some poor schmucks at a billion dollar porn company will have to buy it to prevent competition!"

Hard to say how the targeted buyers view things. But they're (currently) in the position of power. They have hundreds of millions in revenues, versus a few million for YouPorn. And, now that YouPorn is known to have revenue, and has forced itself onto the radar of lots of people, it's going to attract lawsuits...

<comment><USER2> agreed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems obvious that people want something that is not so professional, Vivid in the article doesn't seem to be getting that they can gain market share if they would change there tactics, maybe put together a compilation cd of amateur content or create there own amateur content using models who are not so worked over that they are impossibly perfect looking.

<comment><USER6> Just out of curiosity: do you use speech recognition software, or do your fingers just naturally tend to type "armature" instead of "amateur"?

<comment><USER5> I can never spell amateur right so I copied and pasted my text into open office then somehow proceeded to pick the wrong word to replace my mispelling.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Compiler development - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently developing a compiler for Oberon (x86, x64, MIPS) and also a compiler for C.
https://github.com/rcorcs/OberonC
https://github.com/rcorcs/rcc
Contributions are welcome. <comment><USER2> Maybe try [http://reddit.com/r/compilers](http://reddit.com/r/compilers)</comment>


Essential Startup Growth Metrics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/gabor/essential-growth-metrics-a083d4af3a7a <comment><USER2> These are pretty useful. There's another reference one like this that I like: [https://clevertap.com/blog/app-retention- stats/](https://clevertap.com/blog/app-retention-stats/)</comment>


Apple rings in new era of Services following landmark year - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/01/apple-rings-in-new-era-of-services-following-landmark-year/ <comment><USER2> > Apple News draws over 100 million monthly active users in the US, UK, > Australia and Canada and has revolutionized how users access news from all > their favorite sources. Apple News+ offers an all-in-one subscription to > hundreds of the world's top magazines and major newspapers. In 2020, Apple > News will provide live coverage of key moments in the US presidential > election in partnership with ABC News.

Would really love to know how Apple defines "active users." The screen to the left of the iPhone's home screen pulls in Apple News content by default, and they might be counting people simply swiping over to that screen as "active users."

Also worth pointing out that they seem to be combining the FREE "Apple News" with $9.99 "Apple News+" in this press piece.</comment>


Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private - <AUTHOR> https://protonmail.com/blog/gmail-confidential-mode-security-privacy/ <comment><USER2> The point of confidential mode is for _corporate_ users. When the CEO sends out that confidential mail to the company, it adds a speed bump to users who are about to copy out data that they have been told they should not, so they get a chance to realize they should not do this, and then removes all plausible deniability when they choose to bypass that speed bump.

<comment><USER3> It is almost as if calling it "confidential" may be misleading.

<comment><USER4> It matches the name of an existing Outlook/Exchange feature that people have used for many years. Naming it anything else would have been confusing.

<comment><USER5> In Outlook's docs, they also refer to it as "IRM-protected mail", which seems clearer to me. [https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/mark-your-email- as-...](https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/mark-your-email-as-normal- personal-private-or-confidential-4a76d05b-6c29-4a0d-9096-71784a6b12c1)

Both Google and MS provide a disclaimer that explains Information Rights Management can't prevent "malicious programs" from by bypassing the restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It can still be accessed by Google and potentially exposed to governments or > hackers.

The article makes the classic mistake of assuming everyone has the full security apparatus of a country after them.

This feature is obviously not built as an alternative to Signal or for the Snowdens of this world. These probably know better than using unencrypted email already. For the average user it's an improvement of the current status.

<comment><USER7> So you reference Snowden then pretend dragnet surveillance doesn't exist?

If you are on the internet the NSA _is_ spying on you and everyone else.

This is not an improvement because it makes guarantees that simply aren't true. These compromises are made to further Google's bottom line, not protect users. Don't pretend this is some kind of incremental improvement. It's a marketing gimmick.

<comment><USER4> > If you are on the internet the NSA is spying on you and everyone else.

Citation needed.

> This is not an improvement because it makes guarantees that simply aren't > true.

No, ProtonMail pretended it made guarantees that it doesn't make. Just like the exact same Exchange/Outlook feature that people have used for years, this is to prevent _accidental_ copying of emails and their contents.

<comment><USER8> Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? This is "common knowledge" in information security circles. Go look up the battles the EFF has fought with the NSA about their data collection practices. The NSA is continually building giant data warehouses everywhere... they probably have more data centers than any other organization in existence. They collect all the data.

<comment><USER9> It's pretty common for people to throw out "citation needed" when they don't want to believe or admit something, but can't plausibly deny it. Sort of the same way people use the term "fallacy" these days.

<comment><USER10> IMO "Citation needed" is a quick way to say "do you have a source for me?", and "fallacy" (hardly used without also mentioning the specific fallacy) is a quicker way to say "I recognized logic flaw X in your argument".

You are free to see harm in these statements but telling me they are always meant as harmful as you mentioned is your own negative reflection. Not mine or ours, we are free to have our own interpretation as well.

<comment><USER8> I think citation needed carries a connotation of "I don't believe this is true." It is just a lazy way to converse if you are engaged in a genial conversation in good faith. "This is new to me, can you share some references?" I appreciate we can be technical and to the point, but given the context, I felt my response was appropriate.

<comment><USER10> I do understand you interpret it as "I don't believe this is true" but my explanation "do you have a source for me?" is also a likely explanation. If I then apply the HN rules where the reader must assume good faith and interpret posts in the most positive way, I'm leaning towards assuming "do you have a source for me?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Options for recipients to forward, copy, print, or download this email's contents will be disabled."

I simply don't understand how they think they can get away with this foolishness. I can forward, copy, print, or download ANYTHING that passes over my ethernet cables. Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables in my own home and doing whatever the hell I want with any bits of information that enter my space.

All it does is fool a bunch of less-tech-savvy people into a false sense of security.

<comment><USER12> Consider for a moment: a company or school set up as an Enterprise Mobile Device Management provider, handing everyone out ChromeOS devices, setting up their GSuite domain so that nobody can connect to their GSuite GMail accounts except through the ChromeOS device (or an equivalent MDMed mobile device), and setting up an automatic, un-disable-able VPN on those devices for accessing Google domains.

I think that's the scenario Google had in mind when designing this feature. For enterprise users, where the enterprise controls the hardware, the policy- level controls actually have teeth, because people don't have root over the devices in their possession. For everyone else, it's not "real security", but rather just a gateway drug to get you used to the _workflow_ that "real security" would provide in an enterprise context.

(Context: I used to work at IBM, and they had a very similar setup—company issued laptop, app that enforces MDM profile installation, VPN that checks with the app to ensure MDM is active before connecting, email servers only accessibly _through_ said VPN, and, on top of all that, a policy-enforcing email app [IBM Notes] where you can delete already-sent things out of other enterprise-users' inboxes, send expiring emails, etc.)

<comment><USER13> It's worth mentioning that all these measures can be fairly trivially defeated by the analog loophole[1]. I suppose it's harder to prove authenticity in that case, however.

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

<comment><USER14> Allow me to sell your organisation some VR goggles with iris-reading DRM protection. Your browser won't display on any other screen. And Google Services won't work in any other browser.

<comment><USER15> I can still remember the message (or at least important bits) and can write it down when at home or tell it to other people.

<comment><USER16> Yeah but it is still a helluva lot harder to leak it, and it isn't as good as showing an email exchange.

<comment><USER15> Sure it's harder, and it will not stand up in a court of law probably. But there probably have been and still are a ton of spies, national and industrial, who do exactly this, memorize things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> All of this applies to making a new protonmail account too

Requires SMS verification or an impassable captcha loop if over TOR

And payment with a credit card

The cryptocurrency payment option with non-user identifiable info only being available to existing protonmail accounts where that info was already harvested

So it is ironic to see protonmail calling out those specific things about gmail confidential

<comment><USER9> Protonmail does those thongs to try and prevent bad actors or bots from making encrypted accounts to hide their shady tracks. Not for data collection that they'll sell for a profit. Don't be so glib as to state you can't see the difference.

<comment><USER17> From their home page:

> Secure Your Communications with ProtonMail

> Anonymous Email

> No personal information is required to create your secure email account.

 _requires personal information to create the secure email account_

"Protonmail does those thongs to try and prevent bad actors or bots from making encrypted accounts to hide their shady tracks."

oh okay, pack it up everyone, don't listen to glib ole me coming to a rational conclusion

its IRONIC that I have to trust them as much as I have to trust Gmail confidential's claims about what they may actually do with the data collection. or what they may be coerced to do with the data collection. "Swiss law" doesn't prevent that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, marketing spam from a competitor.

We send confidential docs regularly to users, who need access to those docs for perhaps 1 week at most. No one wants / needs to keep these around, but no one goes through their email carefully to delete these items.

If that users email was hacked -> they have a big problem. If we can mark the items for a 3 week retention and then expire those items for them, that great - and this lets us do that.

The whole I can wireshark my network -> 99.9% of the confidential info we send goes to other folks who ALSO want to keep it confidential. Getting rid of stuff you no longer need to maintain is a key way of helping avoid big document dumps.

The proof is in the pudding. Either this will help google sell to business (it will in our case in a big way). Or folks will say it is a stupid feature and decide idiots like Protonmail who can't seem to understand the point of these features now deserve our business. My confidence in a place like protonmail goes down based on this, and I'd love to get a feel for their security history and overpromises (ie, webmail client has got to easily be able to log and hack encryption etc).

<comment><USER19> These sort of features are really just security theater. If someone really wants to share your "confidential" docs they'll screenshot every page to do it.

<comment><USER18> BOTH parties want to avoid it sticking around in their email forever.

Do folks not work with partners who are sloppy with security? You send over you stuff. No one wants to leak it but someone's email is hacked. Do you want your stuff in their email still 5 years later?

Do folks not work in business? Bob sends sue draft of updated raises, sue edits and adds some notes and sends them back. A final decision is reached. After some time the big list of salary info by position -> folks want that out of their emails. This would keep it out.

This is a REAL security benefit. It goes to show that folks like protonmail and other security experts don't have a good real world understanding of risks to info people face. It's not all state level hacking, it's folks being lazy, not cleaning out their email, then getting hacked.

<comment><USER19> I agree there is some benefit. But it also may lull people into a false sense of security thinking that information cannot possibly be copied outside the organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "When we launched ProtonMail nearly five years ago, we pioneered a new kind of email service: one that gives you control of _our_ own data."

This is a very unfortunate typo.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a feature that Outlook already has and corporate users expect. It's for making forwarding sensitive emails or any of their content require intent instead of being accidental.

<comment><USER11> If "accidental" is the true worry, display a confirmation/warning box before forwarding.

There are valid reasons to need to forward even e-mails marked confidential, including lawsuits, harassment cases, or even just asking your own lawyer before signing an agreement, among others.

Deciding when a piece of information should not have been forwarded is the job of the workplace or law, not the e-mail client.

<comment><USER4> > If "accidental" is the true worry, display a confirmation/warning box before > forwarding.

Gmail supports other MUAs using IMAP and POP, so that doesn't work.

The fact that there are valid reasons to forward sensitive emails is why there is an escape hatch. It's only the accidental forwards and copies that this is meant to stop.

<comment><USER11> We can invent a new e-mail header X-Confidential: true, and clients will start to adopt the warning behavior over time. If Gmail supports it off the bat it will already cover a huge fraction of the market.

<comment><USER20> Interesting idea. I'd tweak it just a bit.

When designing APIs I find that bools are often a smell or a missed opportunity. What if, for example, there was an X-Intended-Audience?

That could be integrated with Active Directory, Groups, IAM etc within an organization to make the warning only pop up when a potential violation is occurring which helps avoid seeing the warning so often that it gets ignored (or accidentally send to the wrong confidential party as in medicine or law). It could also inform IT after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of this is clearly explained in the setting to enable the mode for a domain. It's for making forwarding sensitive emails or any of their content require intent instead of being accidental, and people who are used to Exchange/Outlook already understand this feature. Domain administrators still need to keep copies for legal compliance.

</comment><comment><USER21> Modes like this are not intended to provide hard security. They are not designed to deal with malicious recipients. Rather, they're intended to provide a barrier to _accidental_ or _unthinking_ dissemination of confidential content. It is also designed to prevent permanent retention and the ongoing risk that represents. It solves or limits the fallout from the "silly friend" and "new enemy" problems.

There is no way to convey information to a malicious human s.t. that human cannot convey it onwards to unwanted recipients. The best you can do is provide strong disincentives. Some options for doing this: make sure that your recipients generally don't want to hurt you. Make them fear you (even that doesn't always work, see [1]).

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

</comment><comment><USER22> I like posts being out there like this. I expect many non-technical users will get the wrong impression about confidential mode. Impression is different from the stated words and can be filled in by our subconscious thoughts about the space between what is said.

When words are explicitly said it can cause people to think things through.

<comment><USER23> Except that most non-technical users will never read ProtonMail blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Article makes good points. But clearly they are promoting their own product, over Gmail, and compete directly with them.

One thing I find troubling is that they seem to be making their own false claim.

>Because we do not have access to the recipient's private key, we are never able to read the message. We do have access to metadata, like the email addresses, timestamp, and subject line.

I am not sure how proton could send messages to anyone if they didn't know the recipients address!

EDIT: I'm stupid, please disregard this. They clearly state that the DO have access to metadata (for some reason my head read it as DO NOT).

<comment><USER25> I don't see where they claim they don't know the recipient's address.

<comment><USER24> I'm an idiot. I miss read the sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Email in general is not secure or private. It bugs me to see ProtonMail making claims like 'end-to-end encryption' about a webmail service.

</comment><comment><USER27> This 'article' is a Proton Mail spam piece.

</comment><comment><USER28> > This is not an expiring email. It can still be accessed by Google and > potentially exposed to governments or hackers.

This "expiration" could protect the receiver from subpoena/discovery ("Sorry I don't have it anymore") but it sounds like the sender is still liable to produce the original message on demand.

</comment><comment><USER29> Protonmail's Android app still doesn't do threads.

Posting this just to embarrass them into fixing it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I first had this argument (obviously I was on the sane side of the argument) in 1994. Amusing to see it persist for 25 years and to even permeate Google.

</comment><comment><USER31> Jeopardy: An email option that encourages people to add OTHER people's phone numbers to Google's database.

</comment><comment><USER32> _Gmail confidential mode is not secure nor private_

</comment><comment><USER33> Google knows more about you then your mom!

Sorry and personally that's too much for me!

</comment><comment><USER34> Does Gmail give away your data to the Swiss government, though?

<comment><USER35> Yes, and without a warrant too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nor is it email!

</comment><comment><USER37> In other news, water is wet. More at 11

<comment><USER38> most users don't know about this feature and more importantly don't know that Google is lying... so more publicity is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Google and privacy in the same sentence, no one would bet their house on it if they were to choose

<comment><USER26> Google is very good at protecting data from unauthorized access. Many of the people who work there see themselves, with justification, as the guardians of privacy in that narrow sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This makes as much sense as the Outlook recall feature did.

User Bob would like to recall email titled, "that sex party last night"

Riiiight

<comment><USER41> Recalls make a lot of sense if mass announcements are sent with mistakes, so people aren't confused by having the incorrect version in a busy inbox.

<comment><USER40> Yes, exactly.

For benign purposes, some sense is seen.

Otherwise, the whole idea is silly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This makes all the pointy hair bosses out there demanding faxes and hardcopies seem wise. Imagine, getting an email that tried to block forwarding... the nerve.

</comment><comment><USER42> Protonmail is a fantastic service, I switched to an account with them in the last few years and have not logged into my gmail since. Can't say enough good things about their offerings. I'm glad to see them making arguments like these in public to out their competitors practices.

<comment><USER43> You mean creating blog spam that misses the point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm always curious how the Project Managers working on these projects think about posts like these. It's a very public call-out, effectively saying "this product is not what they say it is and is dangerous." Especially when it's obviously true, I'd be curious if anyone here can speak to the mental state of someone on the receiving end.

For example I was publicly put on blast for something that was false about me. So in that case I just blew it off because it was wrong, and no reaction was really necessary. It was still very stressful though personally and for my family. I wonder how these product teams across Google and FB primarily feel in these cases.

<comment><USER45> They probably eye-roll the deliberate misinterpretation of the feature by a competitor. Particular ironic given that that company's marketing schtick is that the first listed security feature is "We are incorporated in Switzerland"

Outlook has had the same feature for 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Gmail has no incentive to create anything secure or private because that would prevent them from going through your email to show ads. [This is wrong]

Update! Gmail changed this behavior a while ago. Went under my radar: [https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads- email...](https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads- emails-1202477321/)

Thanks!

<comment><USER47> "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en)

<comment><USER46> You're absolutely right. Turns out they changed this behavior in 2017. Thanks for making me look into it.

<comment><USER47> You're welcome. I found it fascinating at the time of the change, and still do, that email is sacred, but all other activity is open for manipation-based- advertising.

<comment><USER48> If they don't scrape your email how is this page generated then?

[https://myaccount.google.com/purchases](https://myaccount.google.com/purchases)

<comment><USER49> Nobody said the emails aren't scanned; they're just not used as context for ads. Obviously they're scanned, otherwise spam filtering wouldn't be possible.

<comment><USER48> I think there's a difference between scanning all incoming mail for spam and keeping a details list of my purchase history by scanning my inbox for receipts somehow... If they aren't using this data for context ads it must be being used for something else otherwise why would they do it?

<comment><USER50> The critical words in the statement are not "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages"; they are "to show you ads."

In other words, they reserve the right to scan or read your Gmail _for any purpose other than_ showing you ads. So they can still read your email for things like creating that purchases list, as well as a myriad of other tasks. As long as that task doesn't involve showing you an ad, your Gmail is wide open to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Yes, Google isn't untrustworthy and doesn't care about the users privacy, we knew that, but the general public that isn't as aware (at this point it's hard to be completely unaware) also doesn't read this private company blog, so it doesn't really help much (except advertise the company).

We should be thinking of ways to improve the situation for everyone (not saying I have the solution), but personally (and unfortunately) I don't think this would have any impact.

<comment><USER52> I would trust Google and Gmail way more than protonmail and whatever company behind it for protecting my private data to be honest.

<comment><USER53> You'd trust a company thats primary business model is based on the mass collection, analysis, and monetization of user data to protect your private data? Not saying I trust proton mail, but as far as I'm concerned Google is a malicious actor when it comes to my data same as Facebook, and I believe it's in individuals's best interest to limit their exposure

<comment><USER54> I trust the company who is under global regulatory scrutiny 24/7, and watched like hawks by every major news organization in the world for them to slip up.

If Protonmail fucks up, there's not going to be a NYT article about it.

<comment><USER55> Think about the different user bases and sources of revenue.

If google screws up, they might see a small blip in add revenue before recovering.

If Protonmail screws up, then they'll lose paying customers which is their only source (presumably) of revenue.

<comment><USER56> I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that Gmail has many more paying customers than protonmail. This feature exists specifically for those paying (enterprise/gsuite) customers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


India bans 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, ShareIt, UC Browser - <AUTHOR> https://indianexpress.com/article/india/china-apps-banned-in-india-6482079/#:~:text=The%20IT%20ministry%20has%20banned,of%20state%20and%20public%20order.%E2%80%9D&text=The%20list%20of%20apps%20banned%20by%20India <comment><USER2> Modal popover alert!</comment>


I3 – improved tiling wm - <AUTHOR> http://i3wm.org/ <comment><USER2> I use it on a tiny netbook (1 GB RAM) when traveling and on a two-monitor network control center behemoth at work. Perfect for low-resource computing or when gaming or running multiple VMs where one doesn't need or want the physical desktop environment hogging all the attention. Screen real estate left over to rent out. Went back to openbox half for nostalgia and half to try out the desktop/menu config of somebody who'd configured it twice as intuitively as I'd always hoped to have and was disgusted by the overuse of the mouse when I used to believe openbox was keyboardcentric. Brief forays with stumpwm but I keep coming back. I 3 i3wm 3ever

</comment><comment><USER3> I use it, I love it, I've forgotten it's even there.</comment>


Deleted Facebook and MySpace Posts Are Discoverable: Romano v. Steelcase - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/09/deleted_faceboo.htm

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, its difficult to side with plaintiff's here but rulings like these can impact privacy laws later and may force online business to retain data for much longer than users want.</comment>


SpaceX satellite was on "collision course" until ESA satellite was re-routed - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/spacex-satellite-was-on-collision-course-until-esa-satellite-was-re-routed/ <comment><USER2> Talk to anyone who knows their stuff at JPL and they'll be more than happy to explain how much of a scientific and political joke ESA is...

This is not surprising, SpaceX's deployment is more impressive and scientifically rigorous than anything attempted or completed by ESA __in LEO __.</comment>


Ask HN: HTML5 Touchy Survey - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm experimenting or rather gonna be experimenting with some new cool ways to draw things on touch based devices. I wish to conduct a small user experience experiment with iPhone, iPad & iPod touch users. Its a very simple experiment where one is required to draw/trace shapes by dragging their finger. It supports single touch.
The app is currently active at http://toucherry.appspot.com/
Through this I wish to find out how easy do the user find these simple tasks. I'm hoping to build a better curve editor through this experiment.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I just did it from my iPad. It's hard to trace since my finger blocks what I'm looking at.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://toucherry.appspot.com/> (open on device)</comment>


Adobe acquires Typekit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/

<comment><USER2> I have some conflicted feelings.

On one hand, I'm happy for Typekit team, if everything turns out the way they hope. Possible integration with Photoshop / DreamWeaver could help bring better fonts to the web, help them grow, invite more type foundries, and so on.

On the other hand, Adobe quite often ruin things they acquire, and that would be just __terrible __, because Typekit was by far the best service for web fonts. Google fonts are quite crappy, FontDeck doesn't have the best foundries, and Fonts.com is expensive, and their fonts are less optimized for the web.

So here's to the bright future of Typekit, in which the service remains great and inexpensive.

<comment><USER3> Fonts.com has an excellent webfonts offering which includes name-brand fonts like Frutiger, Helvetica Neue, Avenir, and others.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but they are more than 4 times as expensive, and most of their fonts are not optimized for the web (unlike Typekit's).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I liked Typekit. I hope Adobe won't run it into the ground, like the rest of the companies they've acquired.

<comment><USER4> I agree. And hopefully won't require some ugly software in order to use it.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, it will seamlessly work. They're just going to push out a change via the hosted JS that injects flash elements to display the fonts.

<comment><USER6> And _requires_ the install of Adobe AIR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the email I just got (I'm a paying customer):

""" If you're one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe's Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we're excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow. """

They're saying all the right things: standalone product, team staying together, etc, sure hope so.

<comment><USER8> > _even easier ways to integrate_

Good, a pure CSS then. Like all other font services these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I, for one, am looking forward to Adobe Air-powered Typekit Installation packages containing native OSX installers that spit out HTML snippets.

</comment><comment><USER10> From a historical perspective, this certainly feels like a logical, organic acquisition for both Typekit and Adobe. But it's disappointing that they didn't exit into the arms of Google. Google Web Fonts could have used the help and passion. They apparently danced, but unfortunately didn't leave the ball together:

[http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.htm...](http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader.html)

<http://blog.typekit.com/2010/05/19/typekit-and-google/>

It's unlikely this will result in the kind of innovation or even disruption that a Google/Typekit union could have provided.

Edit: Removed unnecessarily negative language.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're in the UK (or, heck, outside of the US), start saving up for when the standard Adobe currency conversion rates of $1 = £2 come into action ;-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Price will increase, service will decrease. I'm happy for those at Typekit who cashed out, too bad for the users...

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to see Typekit guys cashing out. I bet the price was pretty solid. I remember, when I first tried their service in 2009, the first impression was _wow, it works!_. Not only in technological aspect. It felt that the Startup worked. The timing and niche instantly became to be "naturally clear". Two years passed and we see here a nice cash out. Meanwhile: let's step up and do something _wow, it works_. Stripe has started doing it in 2011. And probably many more.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love Typekit. I think Adobe knows better than to mess with the product itself. However the pricing model is pretty low by Adobe standards. I hope that doesn't change.

</comment><comment><USER15> Typekit is an excellent service for the price, but the main reason I've remained a committed customer and evangelist is their constant drive to improve. I love that they've worked so hard to improve font rendering on Windows (which I'm sure is a huge pain in the ass) and that they encourage foundries to hint their fonts (which improves rendering for everyone). I hope that this acquisition won't hinder that kind of initiative.

</comment><comment><USER16> Like everyone else, I'm happy for the founders. But as a Typekit customer, I was pretty disappointed to see their email announcement about this today.

They were doing well and were on to something big - why did they have to sell now? I love their product, but they still have such a long way to go and so much they could improve on. It just seems so early and unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe if the chorus rises loud enough, Adobe management will get a clue and not ruin Typekit.

</comment><comment><USER18> TypeKit served a purpose, but cross-browser support for @font-face has largely obsoleted them.

Latest versions of Safari and Firefox and Google Chrome support @font-face and Opera is planning to support it soon.

<comment><USER19> I have tried to use @font-face on a large website where all the users don't have up to date. All was just getting emails about old versions of safari crashing, ipads crashing chrome crashing etc. I agree with you TypeKit wont be useful forever but for now it's the best solution I have found.

<comment><USER20> YMMV but have you tried using this approach:

[http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further-hardening-of-the- bull...](http://www.fontspring.com/blog/further-hardening-of-the-bulletproof- syntax)

We use the above with good results (supports IE6-9, FF, Safari, Android, iOS, Chrome and Opera).

www.airbus.com (a large site) also uses this technique (or at least they did when I last looked).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just got the $49.99/year plan, I've been considering it and I figure if Adobe are going to raise prices they'll hopefully let older customers stick to their original pricing... so maybe I got a good deal.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh no.

<comment><USER22> This was my reaction, and the reaction of three people who walked past my desk and saw the announcement. Good for the Typekit guys, and thanks for the service, but my faith in Adobe not balling things up is shaky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now that Adobe has bought Typekit I anticipate an HTML5 version of Adobe Bridge® bundled with Adobe® Typekit® Master Collection® 6.0…

</comment><comment><USER24> Typekit is a funny concept to me. While I can respect and admire their ability to build a successful company, I think the blog post shows just how rose- tinted are the spectacles worn by these font services:

        Second, we could innovate on the business side as well.
        We could sell fonts as a service, and use a subscription
        model to eliminate Byzantine licensing and usage issues.

I wonder how much money they would have made if they'd sold fonts with a simple, one-term commercial licence fee, just like stock photography, music, icons, etc.

I know there's no way I could ever use their services with any of the clients I've had, because you simply can't factor in an ongoing cost that is unrestricted and controlled by a third party when giving a fixed price quote for most clients. However, I've spent significant amounts of my own and various companies' money to buy good quality fonts for other uses, and would surely have done so for web fonts as well if anyone was willing to take my money on that basis.

        Few sites used web fonts when we got started;
        today, new sites seldom launch without them.
        Typekit now serves nearly three billion fonts
        per month on over one million different sites,
        including some of the most recognized brands
        on the web.

Well, good for them, but since Netcraft reckon there are currently over 400 million Web sites and there are only a handful of font services, that suggests to me that perhaps 1% of the Web is actually using these services.

        From the start, our vision has been to make
        the web more beautiful, readable, and fast.

Unfortunately, what they've actually done is cause millions of pages to look terrible, indeed sometimes outright illegible, because most of their screen fonts simply aren't as good at body text sizes as the tried and tested Georgia, Verdana, etc. And there is no way that downloading a font from a third party service, even one with a great CDN, is faster than using a native one that's already installed locally.

Herein lies the fundamental problem with the whole web-font-as-service concept: at body sizes, there is rarely enough difference at typical screen resolutions to justify a change from the old favourites (and such changes are usually ill-advised anyway), while for one-off uses like headings and pull quotes where distinctive fonts can make a worthwhile impact, the web design community was managing just fine already.

As higher resolution screens become the norm, perhaps this will change, just as tiny pixel-drawn icons are giving way to scalable vector-based artwork (but it really shows on smaller or lower-resolution screens where you do still want a 16x16 or 32x32 icon and the vectors haven't been carefully crafted to fit pixel-perfect at that kind of scale). Even then, it's hard to see how you can justify paying a substantial amount of cash every month to use fonts on web sites, when no other on-line stock resources work that way and fonts for other uses don't work that way either.

Still, I wish them well, if only for the benefit of those users who can fit in with their business model and do find it worthwhile. I don't share the pessimism of some here about the Adobe takeover, because one of the few things Adobe has pretty much always done well both technically and in terms of management/legal stuff is fonts.

<comment><USER25> [Disclaimer: My business licenses fonts via Typekit]

Blaming Typekit for bad design is an interesting choice. Might as well blame browsers for giving designers access to millions of terrible color choices via CSS while you're at it. Blame bad designers for not knowing how to use fonts.

The community was _not_ doing a good job with custom fonts for headings, pull quotes, etc. @font-face works pretty well, but foundries clearly weren't willing to sell licenses for it the same way they do for print/commercial use. It's not a difficult thing to explain to clients - it's a recurring fee just like hosting, SSL certificates, and domain registration. It handles all cross- browser issues, saves bandwidth, and gives you, the designer, easy access to a rather large library of fonts at no cost to you. Clients that can't afford the $2-8/month probably can't afford good design to begin with.

If web fonts are too slow for you in all circumstances, how is Typekit any worse than a license from a foundry? Native fonts are great, and should be used extensively, but they really limit your options.

<comment><USER22> Native fonts are only great if you can guarantee that your viewers have them installed. Otherwise, you're left with a wretched subset of garbage.

<comment><USER25> No argument there. You can always count on Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana. Reliable old workhorses. And boring beyond belief.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should I write commit messages - first? - <AUTHOR> http://letac.tumblr.com/post/6142124821/should-i-write-commit-messages-first

<comment><USER2> I usually will create a new branch based on the TODO list item I am working on. Then I will checkout that branch and work on the new feature. When it is done I will merge it back into master and write a commit about what I changed. Then I push it to the master branch on origin. There are only two of us working on our project right now so we don't branch on Github. However, a large team should probably push to a new branch on the origin and then merge it there.</comment>


Ask HN: How does GitHub web interface serve different branches of same repo? - <AUTHOR> How is that I'm able to view a different branch on the github web interface while others are possibly viewing different branches of the same repo (on the )via the web interface? isn't checkout a stateful operation? <comment><USER2> Not that it answers your question directly, but this might be the best shot at finding out: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4892602/how-does-the- gith...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4892602/how-does-the-github- website-work-architecture)

<comment><AUTHOR> Gosh my google skills must suck big time, thanks for the link!!!</comment></comment>