My Interview Experience at Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/08/10/my-interview-experience-at-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read. I don't know the author, but it seems he practiced a lot yet fumbled some. Which can be normal, as writing code in a whiteboard is just not natural. To test raw coding skills, it would be a better idea to provide or have candidates come with a latop with their favorite dev enviroment/IDE/editors so they can code in a more realistic situation, the way they do every day.

It is always a good idea to get a good refresh of CS basics, and algorithms, and more advanced stuff as data graphs, but at the end of the day, (if the interviewers are good), your raw skills will show up. Just like math, skills are built in top of each-other and show with time, an you can advance more if you internalize low level abstractions (pointers, linked lists, hashtables, etc). You can't just pick a book and learn these things in few days.

But a 9.5 hrs interview is grueling and a tad exessive, also tells something about the company that you are joining. If they like interviews that long, means that have some huge bureocratic internal processes. Interviews by 3 technical people, and one manager/product manager should be more than enough to spot a good a candidate, within a 4hr time-frame.

Anymore than that, it is just a waste a time.

<comment><USER3> 9.5 hours is actually just thorough. Hiring is the #1 thing any engineering org has to do right. Remember, a false positive will cost you far more in dollars, time, and effort than a false negative.

Microsoft is a huge company. The best thing it can do to improve its odds in the marketplace is to put enough process around hiring such that they can significantly reduce the false positive rate.

I'd argue more people should do full day interviews than less. You wouldn't marry someone after knowing them for only 4 hours, so why should a company hire someone after getting to know them for less than a day? ;-)

<comment><USER4> You wouldn't marry someone after 9.5 hours, either.

The problem is, if you insisted that every first date lasted ten hours, you'd rarely get a second. The ones who did make it though your screen would probably be neurotic and weird.

<comment><USER2> i hope you are not really equaling marriage and a job. The average person stays about 2 years in a job, and they go thru about 10.5 jobs before age of 40.

Most people get married once or twice in their lifes, and expect their marriage to last forever. Nobody expects that from a job.

You might want to equal getting a job with dating and sleeping with a new girl, but not getting married ;)

<comment><USER3> Well, not quite. But who you get married to will determine a huge amount of how happy you are, possibly for the rest of your life if you're so lucky. =)

Similarly, for a startup (or engineering team), each hiring decision is so important that in aggregate it will pretty much determine how happy/productive you are... and possibly in the case of a startup, for the rest of your life as well.

The time scales may be different, but the impact is similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sad but true that landing a job with a great company takes more than charisma alone.

Last 2 interviews I had I was turned down largely due to poor performance on coding challenges.

I feel it was the right choice for each company to make. They had really great teams and I admire them for holding out to hire an equally charismatic individual with truly excellent coding skills.

The hurt you feel getting turned down when you know you've put your best face forward is the blunt end of professionalism. A good indicator that you've got your sight set in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER6> _There is original art everywhere. I liked the boat made from junk._

Sounds vaguely symbolic.

</comment><comment><USER7> "something exhilarating about working for the underdog"

Someone drank the koolaid.

<comment><USER8> In the context of his team (Live Search), they really are the underdogs. Google owns about 59% of the market share in the US as of March '08. Live only owns about 11%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was certainly useful as I'm scheduled to interview with them in a couple weeks. I know some people who have been interviewed there on both the accepted/rejected sides of the coin.

You can be technically savy and still not be a good fit for the team and vice versa. Communication is equally important if not the most important facet. If a team isn't on the right wavelength you'll have more problems than you can count.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd suggest continuous practice is the best way prepare for such interviews (and lifestyles). Write software. Build web apps. Make things. Expose yourself to different languages and diverse challenges. Do things outside software too.

Then write about it, be it a blog, wiki, or your own personal notes.

Adaptability, creativity, insight, and the ability to think quickly and accurately and express ideas clearly and concisely are often greatly enhanced by such activity.

Some people are successful in "cramming" knowledge before an interview (or exam), but the best ones I know are those who live it and absorb deeply the learning. They also hone their art, and if you want a truly great company, these are the people to employ.

</comment><comment><USER11> Makes me think about the recent articles on decision making, which said that people who pondered less about their decisions in general were a lot happier with them. I wonder if the same thing applies for companies (the less they fuss about hiring, the happier they are with their hires)?

Certainly I can not see somebody stellar enduring a 10 hour interview to get a job. No offense to the author of the blog article - he might still be potentially stellar, but not knowing it yet...

Considering the dating analogy: suppose you were on a date with Scarlett Johansson. If it would took you 10 hours to figure out if you really like her, she could be forgiven for thinking that there is something wrong with you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now imagine the pain you would have to go through before acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it would be good to just have an interviewee just sit with the team through a couple of debug sessions, or let them have a crack at a nagging problem in the codebase.

</comment><comment><USER14> The whole process reminded me of the old days of chess competition.

I need to read those books if not simply out of curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER2> One main reason that I would never ever interview for MS is that I will have to use Vista. I can live with XP, but god forbid not with Vista.

Is there any MS employee in this board, can they shed some light on what OS-es do people use to develop with. Maybe it is allowed, but is it frown up to use a non-MS OS?

<comment><USER15> Everyone I know there uses Vista (unless they're using something EVEN NEWER WAHAHA)

But really, Vista-hate? Does Vista _really_ get in the way of you opening MS Visual Studio (which seems to be the IDE of the day there)?

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure a lot of the real engineers don't use visual studio. I've heard VIM is popular.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure most of the engineers at Microsoft use Visual Studio.

And I'm pretty sure they run Windows too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IoT Smartwatch Exposes Kids' Personal, GPS Data - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/iot-smartwatch-childrens-personal-gps-data/150656/ <comment><USER2> This is is a good</comment>


Ask HN: Coffee Cannabis Chocolate - <AUTHOR> I'm starting a subscription service - Loot Crate / Birchbox for speciality coffee, chocolate and cannabis products.
Each month we feature an assortment of products from these categories. It's a tasting menu from great producers.
We have received great interest from the producers but beyond myself (haha) I'm hoping to get some feedback if there is general interest is such a thing existing.
Cost will be ~$65 for aprox: 12oz coffee, two chocolate bars and equivalent of 1/8 of cannabis.
Would love to get any feedback or questions - learn more at www.vibeltd.co <comment><USER2> I'm assuming you will limit this to sale into states where recreational cannabis is legal. Do you feel there is a big enough market for this in the limited number of states that have made it legal? Would you offer a cannabis free version? My gut tells me the cannabis will attract the most interest...

Pricing seems quite good, uh, I've heard, um, read that 1/8 of cannabis in my neighborhood runs between $50 - $60.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your feedback! Yes limited to legal states, starting in CA. I def think the market is big enough, many very successful dispensaries (online and stores) - and this addresses the casual / foodie centric market which is the fastest growing segment. Boxes can be customized 2 of 3 products required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is your plan for credit card processing?

<comment><AUTHOR> have a few good options at this point - def a pain tho.</comment></comment>


Twitter Like Parsing URLs with JavaScript. - <AUTHOR> http://9lessons.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-like-parsing-urls-with.html This tutorial explains about how to Parsing URLs within the posted text like Twitter with Javascript. My last post I had included this Script. I was developing project I found this nice javascript prototype property script in mozilla labs site. <comment><USER2> poor grammar actually gets in the way of understanding some of this, kind of like the lack of code indention. i feel like i was thrust into some lesson half-way. what's he trying to do? why?

that said, the pictures are good. i have a clear idea of what the javascript is supposed to do, just not where it fits in the big picture (greasemonkey? personal site?).</comment>


Ask HN: Training/skills to become a good QA engineer - <AUTHOR>

I've done a search on HN for similar questions before but it seems they get distracted by questions regarding if the op meant standard QA or test automation.
So for background I'm a CS grad who doesn't seem to have a great ability to develop, at least not yet.  I went into finance and worked for two years in support/development and got on very well, unfortunately my application got quite popular and therefore the team was heavily regulated, this meant I went to strictly support and low level so I wasn't happy with the lack of complexity.
As a result I decided to try a different industry and have went back to technology and got a job as a QA engineer.  I am fully aware I cannot rely solely on my employer to provide the skills necessary to become a good QA Engineer.
Therefore I wish to firstly cement soft skills as a good QA tester which I believe I already have. i.e. an eye for detail, enjoy a good puzzle.  What technical skills do people feel are required to be a good 'manual' tester?
Lastly the main reason I took this jump was to get into automated testing as I believe it will allow a jump in complexity and perhaps a side move to development when I'm good enough.  Where do I start in becoming good at automated testing?
The standard advice for a dev is to start developing personal projects?  What about a tester?  Is it the same so then you can test your project thoroughly?  I've often seen it said you should be testing OTHER peoples code mainly.  So how can I get this exposure?
Just for additional info, I've been researching a bit myself and have come across a few products like selenium to play with and reading the google testing blog.  On top of this I've started two udacity classes, one for software testing and one for debugging.  Any further suggestions?  Any decent books to help me feel a little less lost in my current situation?
Thanks for any advice you can provide <comment><USER2> become as good a programmer as you possibly can, and learn to write extremely thorough test plans.

put another way, build quality in from the start. ensure that you don't need to fix/update your code or test plan later. if that's unavoidable, at least make doing so as quick and painless as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> good advice for automation/development I imagine but for QA this surely doesn't apply as I won't be writing the code?</comment></comment>


Runway – Cash planning tool for startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.startuprunway.io/ <comment><USER2> Hey guys, I'm the developer at LTSE that built Runway, a free tool to help you build your runway model. I built it for founders like me, who aren't the biggest fan of spreadsheets, but want to build a sound financial model for my company. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

<comment><USER3> The website looks great. Very eye catching. Congrats.

Do you have an ebook that explains all the terminology involved? Burnrate, runway, cash out etc.

<comment><USER2> Ooh.. we do have a few articles published. You can find them on the landing page. Let me know if I can point you to more resources beyond that. Happy to help :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, it's a free to use service and the value to LTSE is that if you need a certain amount of financing, they can help you figure out how much / when and promote their services. It's kind of like a Credit Karma or Mint model but I assume it will promote their own products instead.

<comment><USER2> If we were a financing company/bank, that would be a great idea, but we are a tools company that build tools to help founders. Check out Captable.io, too, if you get the chance! But I don't think a tool such as Runway, where we are helping cash-conscious founders save money, should charge money :)

<comment><USER4> Cool, we're in the market for something like this. My next question was obviously "well what about the 409As" and then I saw Fast409A.io.

I'll take a look, thanks!

<comment><USER2> hahaha that's awesome. let me know if I can help :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Played around for a few minutes and really like it. One suggestion - if you are going to prefill data, such as positions, don't pop up a bootstrap modal on every delete. Either just nuke it without confirmation (my preference) or do something quick like change the button to a "Really?" and make them click it twice (Zapier does this and I really like it). Having the whole workflow interrupted with the modal is really difficult, especially as it scrolls the whole page.

It's also quite slow in FF, not sure why.

Great idea. Some minor UX and it could be amazing!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, someone else mentioned this issue as well and we were thinking a simple "no need for template" checkbox would solve it. Thoughts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love "cash planning tool for startups"

But Runway has a huge "spend other people's money" connotation to me.

This may be great for us bootstrappers, but my initial assumption is that it's not made for me.

<comment><USER2> It's easy to jump and take a look around, or you can read our articles to give you a "tour". I'd love to know what your use case is and how we can better fit you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quick feedback:

\- Get rid of the confirmation box for password on creation.

\- Add OAuth signin via Google Apps / GitHub / etc. One click account creation is a must for something like this to take off.

<comment><USER2> Ah, yes, we did what was quickest, but adding OAuth signin is definitely coming up. And ok on the confirmation box, thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice work, this is an awesome tool. As a founder would love to be able to share it with my co-founders--any account sharing on the horizon?

<comment><USER2> we're getting request for collaboration. how do you see account sharing working in your opinion?

<comment><USER9> If projects were shareable then that would be nice, so I could share a report with a cofounder or advisor. Also having edit/view permission for people would be good to control who can edit the budget. And if you're going to do sharable reports, then live edit would also be amazing.

<comment><USER2> ah great ideas! Totally makes sense - added to our todo list :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love something like this for personal finance, especially catering to these two things:

\- Paying off debt (especially student loans)

\- Saving for retirement

<comment><USER2> Totally possible to use it for personal finance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can you tell us a bit about LTSE's vision and business model? Are you planning on aggregating data on your services to get a bird's eye view of early business ecosystem? Maybe learn how to pick potential winners, etc.??

<comment><USER2> While that sounds like a cool idea, that's not why we're building our tools. With our team made up of previous entrepreneurs, we're just happy to build tools that make us think "if I had that in my previous startup, it would have been so helpful!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just a quick point on this, the "new scenario" page came up with an error (I think?) for me:

[https://puu.sh/wylE1/21197650ef.png](https://puu.sh/wylE1/21197650ef.png)

<comment><USER2> No, that's right - you just don't have any Scenarios built yet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Puzzled: don't all the people who care about this do their work in spreadsheets? They're also extremely averse to having their financial data on someone else's computer/network ime.

<comment><USER2> What we found was that it's not true for everyone. Many are not fond of using Excel and prefer to have a tool like this help them jump in and quickly answer questions. We are hearing that founders are able to set up their whole runway plan in less than 2 minutes with Runway.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely not true for me, this tool saves me so much hassle!

<comment><USER2> good to hear! :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh that screenshot is cringeworthy. Comp-wise, you're saying execs > engineers > PMs > designers. At least make the ICs equivalent.

Also kinda sucks that execs get more. They have the most equity and the most pay, seems like a terrible deal for everyone else.

I'm sure you didn't do this intentionally.

<comment><USER15> Or maybe a passive-agressive dig from their designer?

<comment><USER2> hahaha no this was totally unintentional - but great point about the signal we're sending!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice, we built the same thing 20 years ago at brixx.com

<comment><USER2> awesome! nice to meet you and would love any guidance/feedback :D</comment></comment>


OpenGL in 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomdalling.com/blog/modern-opengl/opengl-in-2014/

<comment><USER2> The multiplicity of APIs demonstrates that the problem is hard. The needs of game developers pull the APIs in a specific direction. And these requirements must be addressed, because the games market is huge and pushes the envelope.

But other users may have different needs. OpenGL is used by games, but not just games. For example, at Taodyne, we use OpenGL for real-time 3D rendering of business information on glasses-free 3D screens. I can tell you that my pet peeves with OpenGL have nothing to do with what's being described in any of the articles.

Some of the top issues I face include 3D font rendering (way too many polygons), multi-view videos (e.g. tiled videos, which push texture size limites, or multi-stream videos, that bring a whole bag of threading issues), large numbers of large textures without the ability to manually optimise them (e.g. 12G of textures in one use case).

Heck, even the basic shader that combines 5, 8 or 9 views into one multiscopic layout for a lenticular display makes a laptop run hot for a mere HD display, and requires a rather beefy card if you want to have any bandwidth left for something else while driving a 4K display.

Many of these scenarios have to do with limitations of textures sizes, efficient ways to deal with complex shapes and huge polygon counts that you can't easily reduce, very specific problems with aliasing and smoothing when you deal with individual RGB subpixels, etc.

Of course, multiscopic displays are not exactly core business right now, so nobody cares that targeting them efficiently is next to impossible with current APIs.

<comment><USER3> Sure, the problem is hard. But so are most problems worth solving. That it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible or excuse bad solutions; Direct3D actually does an extremely good job at it, in fact.

If you've not used modern Direct3D, it's hard to concisely explain how much better it solves this problem than OpenGL. It's just a cleaner, more elegant, faster API (of course, I know this wasn't always the case, but we're talking about now).

Many of the "non-game" problems you mention really have nothing to do with the API and should be solved by third party libraries or the OS. Text rendering is not a GPU feature so don't expect a graphics API to treat it as such. The problems game developers find in a 3D API affect everyone, because at its core the 3D API is just our way of talking to the GPU.

The main complaints from "non-game" applications like this are either common to everyone (texture, render target limits), or application specific things that have absolutely nothing to do with the GPU (like text rendering) and have no place in a low level GPU API.

I know it would make your life easier if the API was more like a library with exactly your use cases already implemented, but that's simply not the role of a hardware API.

P.S. You probably shouldn't be using polygons for font rendering. Nobody does it this way in practice (except rare cases perhaps). But this is another discussion; feel free to message me privately and I'd be glad to provide more info on best practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems no one has mentioned the long peaks fiasco yet, which is an important part of understanding OpenGL history and the committee(s) in charge of the standard:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3.0_controversy)

TL;DR: This is not the first time people are pissed at OpenGL. Last time when industry, developers, etc were sick and tired, around 2006-2007, and it was decided to do something about the API, an effort was initiated. Once the work was close to finishing, those who had seen the glimpse of this yet-to-be- released API were excited and were eagerly waiting for the release. Then the OpenGL committee vanished from the scene for a year or so, and when it re- appeared, it released the same old shitty API with a handful of function calls on top of that.

</comment><comment><USER5> OpenGL might well be the "only truly cross-platform option", but it seems to me that, for games or mobile app development, getting stuff drawn on screen is only part of the problem. The rest is about doing so with the minimum use of cycles - either for better frame rates or better battery life. I can easily imagine that this is a classic 80/20 problem, with the 20% that takes 80% of the time being adequate ("butter smooth") performance.

So, given that the capabilities of the graphics hardware can vary a lot, how closely can a single, unified API like glnext approach optimal use of the hardware? And without the kinds of platform-specific code paths which are necessary under current OpenGL?

<comment><USER6> As long as there are multiple different GPUs around, there will always be a need for multiple code paths if you want to get good use of those GPUs, whether you use the same API or not.

<comment><USER7> Having a single, unified, inefficient base code path that you later optimise at hot points is invaluable to validate non-performance (i.e most) parts of your game.

<comment><USER6> I didn't say otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All the whining and complaining makes me wondering how anyone was able to write something with OpenGL at all. This is fascinating because a great amount of people were actually able to write awesome Games and Applications with this API.

Look at the whole lot of mobile devices. I have no numbers to base this statement on but I would be bold enough to claim that OpenGL is thanks to the multiplatform ability by far the most successful graphics API out there. The set of devices that brings some or another form of OpenGL support outnumbers other graphics platforms. This alone is a huge accomplishment. Heck, even Minecraft was able to run on PowerPC systems until they pushed the java version supported[1].

But now I need to look at the link and have to admit that the criticism is still correct. The API is still pretty rough and could see some improvements. I know this myself, I also played around with OpenGL at some point. There is a lot of boilerplate code that needs to be written before you can start yourself with the real game. This was always the case. This is why we always had an engine, a framework to built on.

But to say that it all is a huge pile of shit is a little bit harsh …

[1] [https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/884921-mine...](https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/884921-minecraft- java-5-and-powerpc-support)

<comment><USER9> Well by that logic, IE is a great browser because a lot of people got some amazing applications to run on it despite the fact that it was a nightmare to develop for...

OpenGL is almost like the IE of graphics development. You usually have to support it because it's so ubiquitous, but it constantly makes you want to tear out your hair because it does so many unexpected things and you have to memorize 5000 little caveats.

<comment><USER10> What OpenGL does is hard - to make things worth fast across multiple platforms with backward compatibility. Not like IE which was/is stagnant because of big company sluggishness/exceptionalism, but because its open source trying to do a huge amount with limited resources. There are always higher level platforms if you want something easier to work with, but you sacrifice a little speed.

<comment><USER9> > What OpenGL does is hard

If you think what browsers do is easy... :-)

Here's the thing though: most of what OpenGL screws up is the not-hard stuff. Here are the main things wrong with OpenGL right now:

* Everything operates on and modifies implicit global state, especially with the various "bind" patterns (direct state access will help a lot with this). Even a first year CS student knows global state is bad. It was sort of acceptable-if-ugly back when the fixed function pipeline was the thing, but for almost the last 10 years that's been deprecated, and with how you program a GPU now that global state and bind patterns is ridiculous.

* Error handling is unfriendly and confusing and slow. It's very easy to accidentally send in a bad parameter to a function, have OpenGL silently ignore it, only for something to blow up in your program in a completely different module because that error went silently unchecked. This is just bad. Not only that, but glGetError rarely gives you any useful information. Why can't it at least tell me what function failed, and which parameter/value it was that made it fail? A lot of times you'll see an error in a complex function like glTexImage2d that has a ton of possible parameter combinations for "invalid value". Well, which one is invalid? What inputs would be valid? The driver knows, so why can't it tell me?

> Not like IE which was/is stagnant because of big company > sluggishness/exceptionalism, but because its open source trying to do a huge > amount with limited resources.

Have you looked at the companies that comprise the khronos group? They're not exactly poor. The problem isn't resources, it's bad design by committee.

<comment><USER11> > with the various "bind" patterns

Nvidia have been pushing for bindless graphics.

[http://developer.download.nvidia.com/opengl/tutorials/bindle...](http://developer.download.nvidia.com/opengl/tutorials/bindless_graphics.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now they just have to create ONE single API, instead of forcing everyone to write multiple code paths to target the various flavours, extensions and drivers workarounds.

Specific graphics APIs only matters when graphics middleware is not an option.

Which OpenGL always requires. Since the standard leaves out how image/shader/texture/fonts/GUI/math are handled.

I think the commoditization of engines will be the second coming of the OpenGL 2.0 - 3.0 stagnation, if they don't improve on these areas.

<comment><USER13> OpenGL has support for: image/shader/texture/. The standard is quite clear about how these are handled. Anyway the trend (and demand from games programmers) is away from more features and towards a simplified and lower level API.

<comment><USER12> So in which section are APIs for loading defined?

I am having some problems locating the page.

<comment><USER14> That would be an API for asset management. OpenGL doesn't do that. It does do textures and shaders though.

<comment><USER12> Which was my point, other graphics APIs do offer such support.

<comment><USER15> That's not the job of a graphics API. It's a convenience utility that is not really feasible for OpenGL because it runs on so many platforms. You're asking for platform specific features on a cross platform library.

<comment><USER12> What is platform specific about loading assets?

OpenGL is specified as a C API.

Such asset loading API could be defined just on top of ANSI C IO functions.

What about forcing every single OpenGL developer to write the same set of shader loading/compling/linking code?

<comment><USER16> Compared to what OpenGL has to accomplish, asset loading is orthorgonal. There is a number texture formats that most graphics cards support natively, the OpenGL API already exposes more than those and the Driver converts them on the fly. It is trivial to implement a bmp loader and slightly harder to load something like textures compressed with DXT, there are obviously third party libraries that do that for you. There are simply too many potential texture sources, to integrate that into an api. The same goes for 3d model loading, there are simply too many model formats and how you organize your vertex data is application specific anyways. The reason the shader loading / linking and compile code has to be written by the Developer is also fairly obvious, OpenGL does not want to support cross platform File IO and in real world projects 100s of shaders are actually dynamically linked in different combinations into render pipelines to create desired effects, the effects themselves are often creates in some kind of flow-based programming environment that is translated into shaders behind the scenes. Basic shader loading/compiling/linking on the other hand is trivial to implement.

Finally Window/Context creation is also platform specific and therefore can't really be specified.

<comment><USER12> > OpenGL does not want to support cross platform File IO and in real world > projects 100s of shaders are actually dynamically linked in different > combinations into render pipelines to create desired effects, the effects > themselves are often creates in some kind of flow-based programming > environment that is translated into shaders behind the scenes.

Which other APIs support with effects, scene description files, ....

> Basic shader loading/compiling/linking on the other hand is trivial to > implement.

Hence why every single OpenGL newbie keeps copy-pasting it from somewhere.

> Finally Window/Context creation is also platform specific and therefore > can't really be specified.

So why did they get to the trouble of creating EGL?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We _need_ OpenGL as an alternative. What would Direct3D have been today without competition? But at the same time, GL is such a PITA to use directly that I don't bother without some middleware abstracting it away.

<comment><USER12> At the same level as the game console APIs.

You don't get OpenGL on those.

<comment><USER18> ps3 had opengl available, and the Wii and Wii U use OpenGL. I don't know about the ps4.

Note, the xboxs use a modified version of DirectX which is more like mantle/dx12 (low overhead)

<comment><USER12> > ps3 had opengl available

Again this urban legend.

PS3 had PSGL, which was OpenGL ES 1.0 using Cg as shading language.

This is quite different than OpenGL.

Wii uses GX and the Wii U uses GX2, they are modeled on OpenGL, which is also a bit different than being OpenGL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great article, thank you! Any news as to when we will get a WebGLNext?

<comment><USER20> We're still waiting for WebGL 2.0 to be finished, nevermind widely implemented, and that's based on a GLES version released two years ago rather than one that doesn't exist yet. Don't hold your breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> On Linux you could in principle use the lower level hardware specific command issuing APIs as well. Mesa is not a privileged library.

</comment><comment><USER22> We all got messed up with the transition to OpenGL 4 and now we are gonna have another OpenGL? I don't see OpenGL getting out of this funk until the language you learn today will be useful tommrow. Perhaps, a new API is a step in the right direction but things are gonna hurt bad bad for years to come, especially when OEMs don't support the API.

</comment><comment><USER23> My current approach is to use Go and target WebGL as the lowest common denominator, but with OpenGL (and/or OpenGL ES) backends as well.

That way graphics code written once can run on OS X, Linux, Windows, browser (including iOS).

<comment><USER24> How do you target WebGL with Go? Is it possible to cross compile Go to JS?

<comment><USER25> It seems there is a cross compiler for Go [https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs](https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs) There are also bindings for WebGL [https://github.com/gopherjs/webgl](https://github.com/gopherjs/webgl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> WebGL

OpenGL is now available to more people than ever. By an exponential amount.

It is supported by all major browsers. From IE, to Firefox, to Chrome, to Android, to iOS, and more.

<comment><USER12> > ... Android, to iOS ...

On iOS, only starting with iOS 8

On Android, only with Firefox. OEM modified browsers don't do it. Chrome only enables it in specific devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The saying is that total rewrites are always a bad idea. It'll be interesting to see if this one would be an exception to the rule.

<comment><USER28> For an API with 20 years of cruft? Rewriting is the only option.

<comment><USER29> The article gives the age as only argument for why it carries all that cruft, but it can never be the only factor. If it were, the 23 year old Linux kernel project would be rotten by now, especially with the 31 year old GNU toolkit.

Sure I understand that there might be some stuff that should be deprecated (much like with HTML elements, the old stuff can be supported while newer projects use newer and better stuff), but rewriting from the ground up also means that you have to re-educate every developer out there. They might as well go and release for Windows instead since they probably have some experience with DirectX too.

Rewriting something that many people use is a bad idea, especially when there are well-funded competitors trying to get developers onto their own platforms.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, but Linux is not afraid of removing cruft. Computers (and the x86-i386 arch) changed very little over the past 20 years, _even_ with the 64-bit stuff

Graphical cards evolved much more in the last 15 years.

The first Direct3D versions were also bad, but they evolved and removed cruft and broke backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there any ETA for OpenGL-next?

</comment><comment><USER32> So basically, "OpenGL in 2015" will be great!

</comment><comment><USER33> Whoever doesn't force me to use C/C++ or JavaScript.</comment>


How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tristanharris/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3 <comment><USER3> Wow, I'm glad this was posted.

I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s.

Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem.

For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happens to not be be necessary for Facebook to be a successful business.

Go to a developer conference by one of the big tech companies, and speakers generally aren't talking about doing good things for the user. They'll use euphemisms like "increasing engagement". There's concepts like "permission priming", psychological tricks to get the user to do what you want. There's books written about how to maximize app addictiveness. It's stuff that mildly screws over the user, and it guides the product designs that affect the lives of billions of people. It's not good.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad.

After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will find ourselves looking back at these Bernaysian psychological tricks of mass consumerism...and I wonder if we will use the same excuse then as we do today:

"But it was good for GDP!"

<comment><USER4> The lead hypothesis for Roman decline is disputed.

[http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/04/lead-pipes- pollute...](http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/04/lead-pipes-polluted- roman-drinking-water)

The demise of antibiotics is much overwrought. It won't happen, since researchers have basically solved the problem of cost-effectively finding an unlimited supply of new ones.

[https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26701](https://www.edge.org/response- detail/26701)

In general people like seeing doom everywhere. To the extent this motivates some of them to do something about it, this is probably good. But it is very irritating when the doomsayers don't adjust their doomsaying based upon current scientific work.

<comment><USER5> > But it is very irritating when the doomsayers don't adjust their doomsaying > based upon current scientific work.

I love this line. It's like somebody just submitted doomsaying homework, and you are not taking issue with their premise per se, but taking off points for the sources they used.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Heh, yeah. It's like talking to climate "skeptics" \- people who believe climate change is real but disagree on the level of human agency. You can show them graph after graph of greenhouse gas emissions being pumped into the atmosphere at alarming rates and they'll say "I'm not that alarmed, we don't know how much of an impact it will have." Meanwhile, coral reefs are bleaching, Florida is flooding, and we are experiencing record heatwaves AND snowfall. At the very least, it doesn't take much to make clear that we should still DO SOMETHING.

<comment><USER6> But what? The problem with the constant doom is that we get exhausted. At least in the US all we truly care about is war and old people (looking at where the money goes; [http://whatwepayfor.com/](http://whatwepayfor.com/)). The problem with the doom sayers is they have no solutions or actionable items that we can say yes or no to. Its just lions and tigers and bears 24/7.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I'll give you an example. I live in Ithaca, NY, not far from some of the richest shale gas deposits in the United States. This town is also ground zero for fracking hatred. Post something awful about fracking, and people will eat that shit up whether it's true or not. I know, because I was one of them.

Then I started dating a hydrogeologist. As luck would have it, her very MS thesis was on fracking. She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" \- actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewater storage that causes earthquakes; "fracking injects radioactives and other poisons into our groundwater!" \- nope, the fluid itself is relatively benign (except for a single phase of high-concentration HF/HCL) and the radioactives are actually pumped UP from the crust, not the other way around. And as much as we hippies like to believe - the 60s/70s never really ended in Ithaca - <USER2> town is powered by dirty, dirty coal, not magical fairy dust; natural gas would hugely reduce our CO2 emissions.

Point is, it's fair to be scared. Improper fracking CAN cause earthquakes, it CAN poison groundwater, but it is very obvious where and how it happens, and it can be regulated and prevented.

The only real problems arise when people refuse to reconsider their opinions in the face of facts.

<comment><USER7> > Point is, it's fair to be scared. Improper fracking CAN cause earthquakes, > it CAN poison groundwater, but it is very obvious where and how it happens, > and it can be regulated and prevented.

Everywhere I've seen fracking it's been almost completely unregulated. The US MMS (Minerals Management) has been called a "culture of corruption" by whistleblowers: [http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/14/oil.whistleblower/index.htm...](http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/14/oil.whistleblower/index.html)

What makes you think fracking would be regulated in any reasonable manner, given our current bought and paid for government?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Aside from (impoverished) pockets in the Southern Tier, upstate-and-downstate New Yorkers generally approve of Gov. Cuomo's moratorium on fracking, not to mention the fact that some of the best shale gas deposits are underneath NYCs watersheds. There's no chance fracking will get a green light in this state without some pretty hardcore regulation.

Not to mention, the kinds of folks that tend to "buy and pay for" our government live and work in the tri-state area. Don't expect them to risk their health and property values anytime soon.

Equating fracking risk with poor regulation is like assuming moneyed resistance to fracking in NY will work everywhere.

Don't let the boogeyman scare you away from cold, hard, scientific fact: hydraulic fracturing, when done properly, is safe and cost-effective. The regulatory culture surrounding it has a huge effect - nobody's denying that - but the real risks are not scientific or engineering: they're political.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a mildly negative reaction to this article which seems different from most people's reactions here

Yelp example: I get that yelp is limiting my options but what did I do before yelp? Pretty much I just went to the 4 or 5 places I already knew instead of seeing if there was something new nearby. I tried hundreds of new places because of recommendations from Google Maps or Yelp that I likely would not have tried otherwise. Certainly not before I had this thing in my pocket that let me research at the moment of desire instead of having the plan ahead

Similarly I look for meetups and have been to way more activities that I would have gone to in the past.

On the slot machine idea: Before smartphones and apps I'd flip through a magazines and hope there'd be something interesting. Before digital TV back when channel surfing tuned into each channel immediately instead of taking 3-5 seconds I'd flip through channels hoping to discover an interesting program. When I buy a book I'm gambling it's going to catch me. When I go to a new restaurant I'm gambling it's going to be delicious (it often isn't)

I guess I don't really see the difference between that and many of the things listed on that list.

I also do uninstall apps. I've un-followed 90% of my connections to keep it my feed actually relevant to me.

Sure I do spend too much time on (in my own opinion) on the net for various things. hopefully I can keep it under control.

It got more scary for me toward the end where he seemed to be calling for government regulation. A digital "bill of rights". An FDA for Tech. No doubt he's assuming he'll be on the committees to decide what's best for everyone else.

<comment><USER9> There's definitely positive value in the services and apps that you mention, otherwise people wouldn't begin using them initially.

I think the key difference between the services and living life with "Pre- Internet" substitutes is that all of the services have been designed and engineered to elicit a certain usage.

When you use something that was designed, there's a certain set of axioms governing that thing. You've got to buy into someone else's interpretation of value. If you're aware that the other person's interpretation is different from your own, then you'll be much more likely to have the self-control needed to interpret its value for yourself. The danger is that most people don't do that and as a result fall prey to their own assumptions based on what they were told is valuable.

The trickle of pre-internet information doesn't compare to the firehose we have today. There's not one single solution and I agree that a governance of these ethical ideals will be tricky no matter what form it takes.

<comment><USER10> I'd rather have the fire hose with the bad that comes with it than what came before - severely limited information, often old or stale, often requiring travel to find it.

Having the wealth of the world's information LITERALLY at your fingertips is going to come with some bad. But holy moly is it just so much better this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kind of interesting idea about how our tools (generic) present us with limited menus, and effectively restrict our options.

Facebook has expanded (barely) the options for basic responses to posts (no longer just like, but also a handful of emoticons to express laughter, anger, sadness, etc.). Not as full an option as when using the comment box, but for quick responses it allows for greater expressiveness. At least people don't have to "like" the tragic news of their friend's family deaths anymore.

But then look at Allo, announced from Google yesterday, with its @google bot that will help people decide how to make basic, trivial responses to pictures posted to threads. (I'll try to find the link later, but the demo was with a graduation photo, and a few suggested responses like "You look great!" "Congratulations, so happy for you" or something similar).

By pushing the job of coming up with options to tools, like the choice of restaurants and bars to Yelp, we narrow our worlds. We limit our expressiveness and creativity.

I don't know that I have a point, just some thoughts.

<comment><USER12> > _the demo was with a graduation photo, and a few suggested responses like > "You look great!" "Congratulations, so happy for you" or something > similar)._

Don't know why anyone would actually use features like this. It's very impersonal and insincere

<comment><USER11> People already just like photos like that. Or say simply "happy birthday" to everyone when Facebook tells them it's time. It's a small step from this state to a slightly extended set of canned responses to pick from.

<comment><USER13> The "Happy birthday" messages were nice the first time (circa "thefacebook"), but the more I thought about it the more depressing and creepy it became. I hid my birthday, then closed my wall, and then left facebook entirely. Now it's only sincere messages from a close few, which feels like much more.

<comment><USER12> definitely agree, on the other hand it's funny to see people who put fake birthdays on facebook actually getting the "happy birthday!" messages on the fake date

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The bit about choices reminds about the soda cup debacle from when Bloomberg proposed limiting the size of soda containers that some venues could sell.

Everyone griped about how it limited their "freedom of choice", but nobody asked about _why_ those particular sizes were the choices available in the first place. 7-11 and others decided that they could add a $0.05 more soda and charge $0.25 more and make more money. People would buy it because look, you get 50% more for only a quarter!

Meanwhile the choice of buying less was never presented as an option.

<comment><USER15> > Meanwhile the choice of buying less was never presented as an option.

What do you mean here? There were always multiple sizes of soda. Bloomberg was the one who was introducing the restriction, requiring someone who wanted more than a particular size to buy it in two separate cups. I must be parsing this incorrectly.

<comment><USER16> In NYC, most soda drinkers are stopping by their corner bodega/deli and buying a bottle, then walking/taking the subway somewhere. I feel like in this particular case, the goal was to force _soda manufacturers_ to sell 16oz bottles rather than 20oz bottles, thus reducing the amount most people consume in a single purchase.

EDIT: I'm wrong, a reply below clarified the intent and also that bottles were exempt.

Back when I drank soda regularly, I often felt like 20oz was a little bit too much. A 12oz can felt about right, but in NYC it's a lot less convenient because you must finish it immediately upon opening.

<comment><USER15> That makes total sense for bottled soda, but for 7-11 sodas (which were what was mentioned in the comment I replied to), or fast food sodas (which were mentioned often at the time the law was proposed), there were always various sizes. They got cheaper by volume as they got larger, but 1) that's the same as every product, and 2) there's overhead in cup and the labor of filling it that stays fairly flat as the size increases.

Wasn't the Bloomberg law intentionally meant to corral people into drinking less soda by forcing people who wanted to drink more to carry two cups? The law, rather than the opposition to it seems like an explicit, intentional example of the OP.

edit: I don't drink soda, and I'm not a libertarian.

<comment><USER16> I don't have a refutation for your first point regarding fast food, although according to Wikipedia[0], 7-11, being a grocer and thus state-regulated, would be excluded from the sizing law.

> The law, rather than the opposition to it seems like an explicit, > intentional example of the OP.

Indeed. However, we must note that using techniques described in the OP aren't necessarily bad: merely that when the values of these large (not-always-tech) companies do not align with their customers, consumers are manipulated toward actions that ultimately run counter to their (presumed) values, such as their physical, financial, and emotional well-being.

If a government, which ideally represents the values of its constituency, chose to regulate using these same principles, the result could be a net benefit for society.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone else feel the slot machine effect here on HN is the karma displayed on the top-right? After a submission or comment, is that number the first thing you check when you come back to the site?

<comment><USER18> [https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is- fundamental...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is- fundamental-2/)

> If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very > careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do > whatever it takes to make that number go up.

<comment><USER19> Coming from one of the founders of Stack Exchange, no less.

On Reddit, HN, and SE, I'm always checking to see if I have any more points and any replies first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I enjoyed the article.

The most important takeaway for me was " now companies have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design"

I think most of the techniques listed actually cause pain for users, the same way addictions do. I think a lot of people are aware at some level that they are giving up to temptation and it makes them feel worse about themselves.

On the contrary, when an app makes a prediction and nails it, I tend to appreciate it much more, and feel it helped me rather than lured me. My only gripe with predictability is it usually entails giving up a big portion of my privacy.

In my idealist mind somewhere in the future, personal privacy will be a default state of mind for service providers. Total self privacy combined with life analytics (Lifelytics?) which empower streamlining ones routine is a dream I hope I witness come true.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. I have wondered for a while why I find predictive AI services frightening and even disgusting.

I realized that it is through apparent unpredictability of my actions that I perceive my own free will (or at least the illusion of it, depending on one's philosophy). If a computer can acurately predict my actions, it feels like my free will is taken away from me. And free will is one of the few things that truly sets us apart from mere automatons. (At least IMHO.)

<comment><USER22> If your free will can be taken away by a machine predicting what you'll be interested in, you never really had it in the first place

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My 2 cents on this(opinion) and how I am struggling to cope with tech usage in my life.

I noticed that I spend a disproportionately high volume of time "consuming" than "creating". Recently I have been making efforts to create more. writing, drawing, painting. Something, anything so that the brain can spend some time coming up with new things instead of just reading/passively participating.

Technology has empowered a lot of us to create more, but it has also played a huge part in 'consumption', since it is so easy to swipe up and get the next article and the next and the next. Not to forget passive reading where I just skim through without actually paying any kind of attention to detail.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, consumption vs. creation is a great way to sum it up.

By and large I've cut WAY back on my video game playing (like, from several hours a week down to maybe a half hour of mobile gaming in bed at night) and tried to replace it with "healthier" activities like learning guitar and gardening.

Oddly enough, I don't feel like I have any more free time in my life. I'm wondering if I've filled the gap with more consumption via Reddit/HN/reading books enough to make up for the difference.

And that's the rub, because a lot of the stuff I read online or in books isn't garbage. HN has some interesting topics, my Reddit feed is lots of interesting stuff for the most part now, and I'm reading a great book on investing. Ultimately though those are still consumptive activities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is not specific to technology and can essentially be traced back to capitalism for every industry. Businesses have nothing to gain by making product decisions around "will this help the customers well being". If it does not help them sell more, do more, make more it does not matter. All consumer facing companies apps, games, food, travel they are all gamified to grow the business regardless of whether there is a government agency to influence them. I'm all for making product and business decisions around these ideas but these psychological tricks have been applied to consumers for decades long before the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anybody else struck by the irony of the glaring "Don't miss Tristan Harris's next story" dialog at the bottom of the article?

Note the verbiage exploiting Fear of Missing Something Important.

<comment><USER27> Ironic, yes, and sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was really interested in the article until I read: "I spent the last three years as Google's Design Ethicist...". In the article he is focusing at the application level but the issue is at the form factor level.

One simple example: if you give to a child a Simon game app based on the original Simon game [1] he/she will probably end up switching to YouTube and watching stupid videos but if you give him/her the "limited" form factor version of the game the child will have more fun.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_\(game\))

<comment><USER29> Limited how?

<comment><USER11> I had to reread the OP a couple times but I finally got it.

Give a child a _smartphone_ with Simon, even opened to the app, and they'll wander off to YouTube or something else.

Give a child the _game_ Simon which only functions as the game, and they'll be enthralled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sooo... These are the things that I need to do to build a successful app?

<comment><USER31> Yes, but if you don't align well-enough with a genuine human desire/need, your brand will slowly but surely rot away. See Buzzfeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nothing new here. If anyone is interested to learn about these mechanisms in death there is a great book "Hooked" by Nir Eval.

The real problem here are the users. If they keep unconsciously falling for the same tricks over and over again, rather than taking a stand and rejecting manipulative products, there is no incentive for product makers to create product which are _not_ manipulative. You can compare it to eating junk food, rather than choosing healthy options.

<comment><USER33> As with addictive drugs, the real problem doesn't wholly lie on either side. You can't blame the users entirely for the fact that people choose to supply a harmful product for profit, but neither can you wholly blame the suppliers for being tempted to do so when users lap it up. Regardless of the blame question, it will improve when (if) both sides change their behaviour, or when either side changes unilaterally and forces a change from the other side.

<comment><USER32> Addictive drugs is a good comparison. The supply stills exists because it's profitable and because of suppliers who don't have any moral problems with providing the supply in the first place, for the sake of profit. I remember I watched a documentary on Mexican cartels, and their excuse is simply because they don't know any better.

In the case of technology, it seems a sacrifice has to be made, to refrain from using said manipulative strategies, and thus losing profit.

I still don't quite understand your point about consumers. Assuming that you have free will, it's your own choice to either use those products or not. You can't blame companies manipulating your behavior if you opted in in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is classic game theory.

You lose as a company if you don't build in these addictive features. So everyone does it because as he made clear, attention is the currency of business currently. All of these companies, and new companies would have to agree not to build these behaviors in.

The idea of an FDA or bill of rights for technology is great in the holistic macro sense, but I think unrealistic as it is not aligned with the interests of companies.

It's the same with any externalities, be it pollution or labor exploitation - things that have clear nexus with bad outcomes but struggle to gain traction around limiting because of overwhelming business interests.

<comment><USER35> I agree a FDA for tech addictiveness probably won't happen. Now a Chrome extension to block much of it similar to adblock. That would be doable.

<comment><USER36> Shame beats it. See up-thread. Once people start seeing mindless staring at phones as the public health equivalent of smoking, things will improve.

<comment><USER35> As someone who spends much of the day staring at screens (more macbook than phone) I'm not sure that's going to happen in a hurry. I guess it's hard to distinguish the mindless staring from learning something useful. I can't even figure which category my own time reading the latest Trump craziness falls into though probably more the mindless category. (see also [http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/admit-it-you-people-want- se...](http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/admit-it-you-people-want-see-how-far- goes-dont-you-50895))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hm. Maybe we need a system for mail and messaging which puts most items into a bin to be read later. Once every N hours, it shows you the "later" items.

(One real headache is the demise of third-party messaging clients. You can't write a Twitter client any more, or a Facebook client, or a WhatsApp client, or a Slack client. This is a big problem, because the vendor clients work for the man, not for you. With email, you're still in control, but not with the proprietary systems.)

<comment><USER38> I imagine that this could be done on android by batching notifications for display at specified intervals. Not sure about iOS (without jailbreak) though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is what everyone means when they say "the medium is the message."

</comment><comment><USER40> There are companies that have whole teams of "addiction specialists" that some video game companies hire to give talks to their producers. I know this from personal experience, they are literally trying to make you addicted and have that goal in mind.

<comment><USER36> Name names. Or at least LinkedIn titles!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How can one separate the inherent addictiveness of social approval (which we evolved to cope with) from the added addictiveness due to slot-machine rewards?

(Discrete measures of approval, like a count of Likes, add their own variance in addition to the inherent variability of how much people liked something. That discretization is a property of the digital system, and adds the variance of a binomial distribution.)

So when you say something IRL, you can gauge a lot of fine gradations of approval in the way people react. But online, where you get a small count of upvotes, the quantization adds variance and makes it more addictive.

The added variance is most significant at small sample sizes. People whose submissions get hundreds of votes might find the process less addictive than people whose submissions get a handful of votes.

Would HN be less addictive if the upvote process was more analog, somehow? Say, by adding up the duration people held down the mouse button for?

<comment><USER42> Btw, if we're talking about variance, reddit adds variance on top of the real comment scores, and they say it's to "fight spam". Maybe the real reason is addictiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be > exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our > values, not our impulses, first. People's time is valuable. And we should > protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

I think that the only way we can do this is for out technology to make our values impulsive.

<comment><USER34> The challenge is that there is no one set of "values" that we can agree on as a people.

<comment><USER43> That's not such a big problem. I think we can get good an inferring values from behavior and using values in marketing. Then if you download an app that has positioned itself with certain values, the designer can reasonably assume that you hold those values.

<comment><USER34> Disagree. People are terrible at aligning behaviors with stated "values."

Economists look at this dissonance as "revealed preferences." While it may be the best thing we have to _describe_ behavior, it's not well aligned with self-image - which is really what stated preferences aka "values" are.

As a result, designing systems around revealed preferences might be advantageous in the short term - it conflicts with people's long term self concept.

This ends up being a normative economics (< a rare thing any more) and philosophy question.

Some people in the AI safety community have explored this idea of consolidating values, as the seed goals for artificial general intelligence - but it proved to be impossible.

<comment><USER43> I'm super familiar with the problems of revealed preferences (that's literally chapter 1 of my PhD thesis). But we don't need to naively interpret every action as an expression of 'values.' For example, consider netflix playlists. I shouldn't infer your values from what's in your playlist, but I probably can inver your values from the movies that go in to your playlist but never get watched. You wish you were the kind of person who watched that documentary on the failing school system. That's a value inferred from behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > That's why I spent the last three years as Google's Design Ethicist caring > about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds > from getting hijacked.

Every time I see the doodle, I have the feeling I'm being hijacked. After playing with the doodle I often forget what I came to Google for. Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER45> It saddens me whenever I go out wit my friends and I try to have a conversation, that everyone is glued to their phones and can't have face-face conversation.

<comment><USER46> Find different friends. Not everybody is like that.

<comment><USER47> Exactly. This is one of those things many people assume and it causes them problems. The assumption that people these days always stare into their phones. Some people do that, some do it a lot less, some barely, and some never. Reality offers more choice.

Maybe OP should write a post on intersection of common assumptions with marketing tricks. There were a few embedded in here. Our assumptions get us just as often, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Great post, the whole Yelp part really spoke to me as I have been working on my own side project to help me find better food dishes. I am trying to wrap my mind around this slot machine concept as I really do not want people using my project like this.

Any suggestions on UI would be greatly welcome.

</comment><comment><USER49> First thought: I gotta get off all of these apps. I always knew they were messing with me, and now I know how!

Second thought: Our UX designer needs to read this ASAP... it's basically a "best practices" guide for making a social app that shows "traction".

<comment><USER50> I had the same first thought, but I think it needs to be tempered somewhat. Some apps you can turn off notifications on. For example, Gmail on my phone I have turned off notifications for my work account, but not my personal account. I've also filtered what comes into my "Primary" inbox heavily so I only see emails that have some legitimate urgency on the phone. Everything else disappears into tabs and labels that I check when I want to.

If Gmail didn't make that set of options available to me I would delete it off my phone. I have yet to receive such an important email that it would have had horrendous results to not know or reply immediately. I keep the limited set of emails I do see simply because I enjoy the convenience and politeness of being able to reply to my parents, wife, and friends from my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Similarly resonates with to another great article "The Slow Web" \- [http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web](http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web) .

</comment><comment><USER52> I loved the part about the "friction required to enact choices" bit. Like how it's outstandingly easy to get a bank account, and how as a part of the law regarding privacy, they're required to provide a method for you to opt out of them selling your data, which involves them sending you a paper privacy notice, and to opt out you have to send them a written letter (no form is provided), to an address you have to write out yourself, and at your own cost.

That always infuriated me.

It should be as easy as signing up.

<comment><USER21> I think Germany has some legislation (or a court decision) that requires that customers be able to void their contracts over the same communication channel where the contract was initially created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> One nitpick: maybe it's just the grocery stores near me, but the Pharmacies are almost always located near the front right by where you walk in. Milk is often in the back however.

<comment><USER54> Milk in the back or side makes sense though. The milk and dairy area is usually front-facing doors from the huge walk-in refrigerator.

It wouldn't be smart to put a huge walk-in fridge in the center or front of the store, given the recurring shipments from cold storage trucks to fridge.

... However locally, our Kroger(s) has a small case that holds 15 gallons of milk, and a shelf of common bread up front and center.

<comment><USER55> There was an interesting episode on Planet Money a little while back about why milk is in the back of a supermarket. They had two people give very different explanations: Russ Roberts (an economist) argued that it was just simpler to maintain the cold chain with milk (and meat) in the back of the store since that's where trucks unload, and Michael Pollan (a food writer) argued that it was a behavioral economics trick to make people walk through the whole store.

That said, I've also noticed that in many larger store they have a small case of frequently bought perishables at the front of the store.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/episode-555-why- is-the-milk-in-the-back-of-the-store)

<comment><USER56> Former merchandiser here. Staples are always furthest from entrance and then separated(ie: bread one back corner, milk opposite) to make most people walk the entire store to get what they need. And that 'convenience' case in the front... take a look at the expiration dates on the products in said case, that product needs to be sold faster than the stock in the back.

Edit: PS: That economist, it's his job to rationalize the action monetarily. I/we/most people realize, if returns could be increeased, hamburger would be in a cooler next to the checkout.

<comment><USER57> Its startling to see how evil insinuates itself into normal people gradually so they don't even notice. The store managers probably think this is a standard practice so its ok. Not a pointless waste of customers' time and energy in the cynical hope to manipulate them into buying what they don't want. I plan on resenting my local mega market in future every time I make the hike to the back of their block-long store for a half-gallon of 1%.

<comment><USER56> Sadly, the store/department managers have no say in the matter. It's all laid out at corporate. Most managers inside the brick & mortar roll with it no matter how nonsensical some edicts are, some were/are bitter. They all know they are ultimately expendable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > Imagine a digital "bill of rights" outlining design standards that forced > the products used by billions of people to support empowering ways for them > to navigate toward their goals.

This scares me

</comment><comment><USER59> The author apparently has his own agenda, after seeing the time well spent link all over the article.

</comment><comment><USER60> The menu options metaphor applies so well to government. Especially given our current predicament.

</comment><comment><USER61> I just finished reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport - great book. The central theme of the book is that you need distraction-free focus to do your best work (especially relevant for programmers I think). Social media goes against this - constantly checking HN, Twitter or FB breaks this focus. He basically recommends to quit altogether. A good start is to try and go a full day with checking any social media - it's harder than it sounds.

<comment><USER62> Same here and I've just started reading "Hooked" by Nir Eyal which is kind if a counter/companion to "Deep Work". Following Newport's logic I am looking at optimising engagmement (for a paid/freemium app/SaaS website) as "help people stay in their flow state, make the interactions smooth and non-demanding, then get out of the way". Part of the book seems suggests that having tools is fine as long as the tool doesn't too much extra baggage or make to process of using it too much about itself (drawing you away from the goal/original focus).

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Apparently google has an Ethicist.

 _Ctrl-F: Ad_

Huh. Zero mentions of the thing that manipulates people by design.

I guess I don't blame him, because even with a blind spot to ads it would seem Google still doesn't give two shits about his input. He explicitly calls out a problem YouTube feature, which he certainly would have voiced internally before externally. And he doesn't work at Google anymore.

Google must want results from ethicists the way tobacco companies of old wanted results from in-house scientists.

<comment><USER64> > Apparently google has an Ethicist.

Well, _had_. From his bio snippet at the bottom: "Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher @ Google"

<comment><USER65> It sounded to me like a euphemism for hanging out on the roof waiting for your non compete agreement term to run out.

<comment><USER66> I don't know that competition is so heavy in the technological ethics industry.

Also, California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> He had me until the end.

"People's time is valuable." True

"And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights." LOLOLOLOL

<comment><USER68> Are you laughing because privacy and other digital rights aren't currently protected as rigorously as they should be?

<comment><USER67> The notion that they're currently protected at all is a joke.

<comment><USER21> There are a lot of people out there protecting digital rights and privacy right now. "Protecting" something is an entirely different thing as it being "protected" already.

<comment><USER69> Depends who he means with "we". Being a Google Design Ethicist, you'd expect he means Google - which isn't exactly well-known for protecting privacy.

<comment><USER70> I think you missed the last bit of the text:

> Ex-Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher @ Google

Ex.

<comment><USER69> Well, that's true. Though we don't know exactly why he quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> It's not "technology" that is hijacking people's minds, it's specific companies who are doing it. You don't blame the magician's hat for fooling you.

The problem, as usual, is that technology is slave to the boring, insipid demands of capital to get us to click on ads and purchase more snow-pants.

</comment><comment><USER72> Tristan Harris, the OP of this medium post, listed a table of comparisons between what's today's engaging/addictive/time sink product characteristics vs. time well spent products he advocates on his main project site[1]. Of all the 11 points, two of them has the most profound sociological impact or inertia:

* Success Metrics: measure success by net positive contributions rather than interactions

* Business Model: use non-engagement based advertising rather than engagement advertising.

I fully applaud Tristan's vision and mission but skeptical of how quickly companies, VCs and society can adopt it.

[1]: [http://timewellspent.io/](http://timewellspent.io/)

</comment><comment><USER73> This is not just a problem at the consumer level. My entire career I have been told that I couldn't do X because it wasn't "industry standard" or "best practice" or some other code word for "not on the menu."

<comment><USER74> As a manager it's an interesting balancing act. There are reasons things are done the way they are done and sometimes they are "because we've always done it that way" but more often it's because we've done it enough to understand something someone new to the company or industry doesn't. It's hard to know where to let go and where to draw the line.

I try to provide an environment where new people can 1. Try an idea and watch them fall on their face because they didn't understand best practices. 2. Then try to encourage understanding of those best practices and how they can be improved and change slowly to minimize impact or unexpected consequences.

<comment><USER73> I applaud your willingness to let people try new things, but the way you describe it seems to assume that all new ideas are bound to fail. They aren't. Different is not necessarily better, but better is necessarily different.

<comment><USER74> My point is that _most_ new ideas do fail. People coming in don't realize that and it creates quite a bit of resentment. But people learn from mistakes and giving them the opportunity to fail is a good thing.

After that they can take the time to learn why best practices are best practices. From that understanding we can talk new ideas.

I've had so many employees come in convinced their idea was the best idea and then be frustrated and resentful that we wouldn't immediately start using it reciting the mantra that we do it "because it was always done that way".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Interesting read, but is the author being serious when they suggest that the FDA should be setting standards for how software UX is designed? I can't even begin to imagine how much of an unmitigated disaster that would be.

<comment><USER76> No need to worry -- FDA people are probably addicted to those software as well, if not worse

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The article does a good job of showing examples, but strangely, it doesn't connect this in any way with the vast related research in psychology and economics. This makes me skeptical of the claims of expertise...

</comment><comment><USER78> > But grocery stores want to maximize how much people buy, so they put the > pharmacy and the milk at the back of the store.

Early competitors of Google thought that accurate search results only served to drive users away from their site and search was therefore an unimportant part of an overall "Internet company". It would be interesting to see a grocery chain with the philosophy of "find what you want really fast" rather than "make it really difficult to find what you want so you spend longer here" \- it could be very successful by the same analogy.

</comment><comment><USER79> I can't see a way for this style of design to be feasible that doesn't rely on a subscription-based business model.

As long as users allow free + advertising generally be the way to for build a dominant tech company then I would assume anyone that tries to compete by not optimising for advertising (eg. reducing friction for users) will lose. Which is a damn shame.

Based on my limited knowledge of the history of news media, theres a cycle between free + advertising and paid + high quality. Intuitively it should apply to other verticals too, and I hope that, in reality, it does.

<comment><USER21> For many kinds of services it can work in parallel. For example, there are ad- supported mail providers like Google, while I consciously chose a subscription-based mail provider (posteo.de) whom I trust to act in my best interest.

The only thing where this would not work so well is social networks, due to the network effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> A note of slight relevant interest: fastmail.com's native client doesn't actually have a manual refresh button. You only get a notification for a new mail if the server pushes one to you.

<comment><USER69> A manual refresh button apparently doesn't help, because now you stumble from the "constant interruptions" trap into the "slot machine" trap...

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I think this is not necessarily right -- the existing technology _limits_ peoples choice and directs them to behave in a certain way sometimes, but it's not like people don't know they are being manipulated or that they are being provided limited choices, but they live with it what's available if what's available is satisfactory enough. But if it doesn't really satisfy them, people do go out of their way to get what they want...mostly. Atleast that's what I see from a data-point of 1.

</comment><comment><USER82> It's called "railroading" and it's been around forever. The only new trick is to add more options that still railroad you in the same general direction.

The problem is human minds are smarter than you think and they tend to disengage when they sense this and they strongly want to get off the rails. The user does this by quitting and/or deleting the service. Over time you realize it's best to give the user all their options and they are more likely to stay using your product.

<comment><USER83> I've certainly been railroaded out of specific retailers, away from specific products, and off of specific Internet / tech sites or concepts on account of this behavior.

I draw attention to the negatives and expressly flag, block, or otherwise mark the antipattern.

HN's increasing practice to deprecate anti-ad-blocking, clickbait, and the like is a positive counter-signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Some of the design anti-patterns he's describing smell a lot like the broken window fallacy [1]. Sure, apps can get big on getting users addicted and "engaged", but there's no _actual_ economic benefit being produced by such design - just tons of opportunity cost to users.

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

<comment><USER85> I'm not sure I follow why the fallacy applies. But for lots of smartphone apps there is an economic benefit. Making your app mildly addictive increases your weekly active users as well as the amount of time they spend in the app. These are two gold star metrics used by lots of VCs.

<comment><USER39> He is implying there is no economic benefit to the users, not for the app in general but for engaging with particular bits of offensive design. If a user actually sat down and consciously decided whether or not to take a particular action, they likely would have gone the other way. See autoplaying videos. You probably didn't want to watch that next video, but if Google/Netflix gets their way you'll do it anyway for any number of psychological reasons. But that next video was not something you wanted, potentially it's value to you is zero or negative because of opportunity cost. That won't stop you from watching it though, if they can manipulate you and distract you from making that decision consciously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very eye-opening read.

few random thoughts:

> _Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. "Respectful" Delivery... By contrast, > Apple more respectfully lets userse toggle "Read Receipts" on or off_

Unfortunately iPhone has a new feature to reply to messages immediately even in the lock screen, looks like everyone is guilty of this

> _"now that you know I've seen the message, I feel even more obligated to > respond."_

always tried to purposefully not respond right away even when it said I read it already, but it does feel weird/rude

<comment><USER86> Replying from the lock screen is good though?? You reply from the lock screen, so you don't unlock the phone, so you don't start doing other things than replying?

<comment><USER12> oh yeah that feature is definitely very useful it just reminded me of what the author mentioned about replying

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Would it be possible to build an app interface which interacts with these apps yet works on behalf of the user? I might be willing to pay for something like this.

</comment><comment><USER88> I love how on one side there is an engineer at google talking about how addictive technology is and then on the same day someone else at google releases an api to make mobile phones be even more clever slot machines... [https://developers.google.com/awareness/?ref=producthunt](https://developers.google.com/awareness/?ref=producthunt)

</comment><comment><USER89> I'd say it's worse, because now that we don't pay for things (ad support ftw?) the service providers have a much stronger incentive to keep you on the site than they do to make you happy. They've slowly but surely developed methods that do exactly that, leaving us all wondering why we spend so much time on sites/in apps that we don't actually enjoy.

This isn't going to change.

</comment><comment><USER90> I wonder what impact this knowledge would have on the public's perception of Silicon Valley (and the tech industry in general) if it got very popular. The current thinking seems to be something akin to: Oil & Gas Industries bad, Tobacco Industry bad, Fast Food Industry Bad, Big Pharma bad. Startups Good! Silicon Valley Good. Tech will fix everything. But it's the same old game.

</comment><comment><USER43> If you're interested in learning more about these power and how to use them for good, consider joining us:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/behaviordesign](https://www.reddit.com/r/behaviordesign)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/habitdesign](https://www.reddit.com/r/habitdesign)

</comment><comment><USER18> A book on a similar theme from before the internet is [Ways of Seeing][1] by John Berger. The typography, set in bold throughout, doesn't do the text any favors, but the writing and information is good.

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

</comment><comment><USER91> Here is Tristan's post "How Technology Hijacks People's Minds" in Russian (translated): [https://wob.su/blog/ekonomika-vnimaniya-vzlom- umov/](https://wob.su/blog/ekonomika-vnimaniya-vzlom-umov/)

</comment><comment><USER92> Much of this content is associated with the field of Behavior Economics. For instance, in Hack #1, the author is speaking of what academia has called "Choice Architecture". For more about that, you can freely access multiple studies published by Thaler and Sunstein.

</comment><comment><USER93> tldr; : don't use social networks on your smartphone or you're going to miss out on real life.

</comment><comment><USER94> > One major reason why is the #1 psychological ingredient in slot machines: > intermittent variable rewards.

I first came across this concept in a Hello Internet podcast, and it's amazing how much you see it in just about everything on the internet once you've heard of it.

</comment><comment><USER95> > What if your email client gave you empowering choices of ways to respond, > instead of "what message do you want to type back?"

Communicating directly via writing or talking is the only thing here that is not driven by limited choices.

It reminds me of the koan about the expressiveness of the command line compared to point and click:

[http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui- programmer.html](http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html)

One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.

"The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward," he scoffed. "Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface."

Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

"I don't understand you!" said the programmer.

Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.

"What are you trying to tell me?" asked the programmer.

Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.

"Why can't you make yourself clear?" demanded the programmer.

Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.

As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.

At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment.

</comment><comment><USER96> I found it funny when the author also uses manipulative tricks:

\- he finishes the article with two links (one direct and one indirect) for the same website;

\- he (or the software) underestimates the time needed to read the article.

</comment><comment><USER97> I spend most of my internet time on HN. It makes me wish HN tracked this and, each time I load the page, prompted me with a "Do you really want to spend the next _n_ minutes here?"

<comment><USER98> Well there's something close: the "noprocrast" [1] option in your profile.

[1] Explained here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=814695)

<comment><USER97> Oh, duh. I always forget those are there. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Technology doesn't hijack our minds, people do. It's an age old practice of blaming the tools.

The logical next step might be to ask well then how do we fix people? (aka, society). Maximum freedom in society means maximum freedom to be manipulated by others.

Perhaps ironically, the closer we get to solving world hunger and eradicating diseases and so on the closer we become to overpopulation and overcrowding our little planet that once seemed so large. Our ineptitude at cooperating with each other and our ability to manipulate each other so easily is probably the only thing stopping highly accelerated human progress, and thus our own demise.

Absurdism looks more appealing every day.

<comment><USER100> Did you read the article? The whole point is that there is a design intended to encourage "people" to act in ways they didn't really intend.

<comment><USER99> I read the article. The first line of my reply was in response to the title, the rest was in response to the rest of the article.

Did you read my post?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> /me furiously redesigning our app to be a slot machine....

</comment><comment><USER101> I could not help but notice the block at the end that asked one to "Read Tristan's next blog" with a button to Follow him.

</comment><comment><USER102> Perhaps we are in need of a cultural shift that emphasizes "doing it right" instead of "making all the money"

</comment><comment><USER103> Related: [http://darkpatterns.org](http://darkpatterns.org)

</comment><comment><USER104> timewellspent.io contains a perfect example of indirectly hijacking our agency: the video play button.

That little triangle has almost become impossible to resist. My two-year-old can spy it from across the room and he runs over and begs me to click it.

What if we stopped using icons that have programmed our brains?

<comment><USER12> isn't it better to use a universal icon for simple actions like this? e.g. pointing to wrist for the time, floppy disk icon for saving a file, etc

<comment><USER104> I agree. It's better for design that compels certain actions.

But its worse for helping users control their impulses.

I personally feel the users should bear the overwhelming majority of responsibility for controlling their own impulses.

But the author's own website contains design objects that encourage certain impulsive behaviors and I was pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> how come this article only got 2 points[1] when someone submitted it here a day ago, but this time it's at the top of everything?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11726766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11726766)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Because life isn't fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Estimated rewarding time is 12 minutes? Who reads that fast!

</comment><comment><USER107> A brilliant article.

</comment><comment> mck- How Hacker News Hijacks your day...

</comment><comment><USER108> Inspiring!

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:

        "what's not on the menu?"
        "why am I being given these options and not others?"
        "do I know the menu provider's goals?"
        "is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?" (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes)

It's so much more about politics (elections of all levels) rather than about technology!

<comment><USER109> It's actually more about philosophy: free-will and the illusion of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> This is another perspective on what Nick Carr noticed in his brilliant "The Shallows", and it is invaluable. I am glad Google is not entirely evil.

</comment><comment><USER111> Nothing "the government" can't solve!!!

</comment><comment><USER112> Likes was 666 wen I went to the page... that hijacks me.

</comment><comment><USER113> Novelty, not technology. The same cognitive behavior is exploited on restaurant menus.

</comment><comment><USER114> Snow Crash

<comment><USER92> L. Bob Rife is behind all of it.</comment></comment>


Linux to the rescue Windows XP support discontinued today - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/business/14/4/windows-xp-expires-install-linux

<comment><USER2> I am not sure this gets at the reason XP computers are still around:

Our lab has a fair amount of equipment that is based on a PC running Windows XP. This is mostly equipment that is old but still working, and will never get driver support for Windows 7 or 8. It will also never get Linux support.

Short of throwing away lab equipment our options are to just ignore the security issues, or do something complicated like disconnect the network except when we need to transmit files.

Linux is a good option for people that just have an XP machine for email and some web browsing, but I personally don't know any examples of that.</comment>