Microsoft Should Acquire SAP, Not Yahoo  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/business/24digi.html

<comment><USER2> Microsoft is definitely in trouble - not in the short term but in the long term. Their problem is that they are so accustomed to the packaged sales model that software-as-a-service is very foreign to them. When they try their hand at it it is half-hearted and not very well designed or executed. And they think they can buy themselves out of their predicament by buying another behemoth on a downward slide. They just don't get it...

Instead they should be buying all the startups they can get their hands on - the money they are willing to pay for Yahoo will go a very long way in the acquisition of startups.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the short term yes, Microsoft can win the business market by grabbing SAP. But in the long term Microsoft knows that the web is the next platform and eventually Windows and Office are going to be obsolete by the web, and how long before some well funded web start-up produces a viable alternative to SAP? This is Microsoft's struggle to stay relevent in a time when Windows is just another OS that can open a web browser.

<comment><USER4> "some well funded web start-up produces a viable alternative to SAP"

Patience. I'm working on it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The very suggestion sends shivers down my spine. Seeing SAP and Oracle in action makes it clear that there are no great hacker minds involved. Microsoft is still hanging on to some smart people... but the prospect of working with SAP? I can only imagine that the mere thought would drive them off in droves.

<comment><USER6> SAP is an ops research company, not a software company. They sell optimized business process methods, not high tech. They will candidly tell you so.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. This only thing (still) missing is the marriage of those methods to good software. Somehow, I don't get a good feeling about this when Microsoft is added to the mix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems as if the author is looking at the attempted Yahoo! acquisition as a pure business/user play. BG said it himself-it's the engineers he's after, not the market share.</comment>


Working with Google forms Offline - <AUTHOR> https://www.mydatascope.com <comment><USER2> Nice, it's for free??</comment>


What Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub means for the future of open source - <AUTHOR> https://www.techworld.com/developers/what-microsofts-acquisition-of-github-means-for-future-of-open-source-3680120/ <comment><USER2> open source here, open source there... Well maybe, but I think that the problem is not the source code anymore, the problem is the data...</comment>


A French Baker Is Fined $3,600 for Working Too Hard - <AUTHOR> https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/a-french-baker-is-fined-3-600-for-working-too-hard-1824494?amp=1&akamai-rum=off <comment><USER2> This is an atrocious source. Perhaps [1] or anything else really.

[1] [http://www.france24.com/en/20180314-france-bakery-bread- work...](http://www.france24.com/en/20180314-france-bakery-bread-work-fine- law-tourism-vaivre)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry about that. Was showing in my feed so I just shared it from there. Should have tried to find a better source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > (This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a > syndicated feed.)</comment>


Show HN: Randomly generated metal riffs using Web Audio API and React - <AUTHOR> http://djen.co/ <comment><USER2> Along these lines, someone posted a neat Web Audio driven chord progression arpeggiator yesterday: [http://codepen.io/jakealbaugh/full/qNrZyw/](http://codepen.io/jakealbaugh/full/qNrZyw/)

Comments: [https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/4qmgxo/musical_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/4qmgxo/musical_chord_progression_arpeggiator/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent work ! I saw many random music generators, and this might be the best. I showed it to a coworker playing in a metal band, he's stunned ! It sounds really good.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing job :) I'd love to see it with deephouse or techno sounds. It's so tempting to fork the repo.

Here's my madness: [http://djen.co/#share/opYJd9](http://djen.co/#share/opYJd9)

<comment><USER5> I would be down to work on deep house and techno fork with you !

<comment><USER6> While not quite what you're looking for, "Acid Defender" is a WebAudio game that generates random acid house sequences as part of the game play:

[http://cappel-nord.de/webaudio/acid-defender/](http://cappel- nord.de/webaudio/acid-defender/)

<comment><USER7> That is amazingly addictive!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm impressed. Congrats! I would love to be able to generate a 3 minutes long tune with this

On Android's Chrome the URL shown under "Share this URL:" weirdly glitches the selection sliders.

Love the beginning of [http://djen.co/#share/OkR9gw](http://djen.co/#share/OkR9gw) TUMMM TUMDUM

EDIT : You should add a "Download" option because man do I want that as a ringtone

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you make the settings link more prominent. I left the page before even noticing it. Came back because of the comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does that look now?

<comment><USER9> Better, but in my opinion it should be styled as a button not just text.

It doesn't feel like a part of the tool since it appears outside of the initial box.

I understand you put it outside of the box because it loads more boxes below the entire tool, and now that I know about it it makes "sense." But my initial impression is to ignore anything outside of that box.

I think your best bet for brand spanking new users is to place it as a button inside the box in between the "generate rift" and "play" button to make it stand out.

You're literally hiding 80% of this tool from initial users. I clicked "generate" a few times then bounced at first.

<comment><USER10> Agree with this, Almost said frogboy today, just ditch the toggle, or have it on by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Messing around in the settings feels like telling a talented child what to play - it can technically play anything but isn't sure what to go for! [http://djen.co/#share/gN3Ao9](http://djen.co/#share/gN3Ao9)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is an amazing piece of work! Would love to know a bit more about the implementation.

And I really wasn't expecting the settings to be such a goldmine.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hehe!! I love this. Did you record the samples or did you get them from somewhere? The overall all audio and production quality is actually top-notch, with the exception of clipping the samples on rapid cuts. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER14> This is crazy, man ! Fantastic work !

I generate a riff and continue working, then I go and generate another one ...

Future of music right here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Really interesting project. Can you give a brief description of the algorithm?

Also, would it be possible to export MIDI, or some other format where you could drop in your own samples?

<comment><USER16> It seems to be based around the classic Meshuggah formula.

Basically, pick an unusual time signature and play the guitars and kick drum in that time signature. The kick drum should always be played at the same time as the guitar note. Then play hats/cymbals/snare at 4/4 over that. Other than that, I think it just randomly selects one of the samples you checked-off at a randomly chosen duration.

It's astonishing how good this sounds. It's even more impressive considering how simple it appears to be. I've tried writing music generating algorithms before, and they all sounded terrible. I suppose the genre helps, as djent is expected to make rapid and somewhat jarring changes, so it fits right in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now we need to plug Compressorhead to this.

[https://compressorhead.rocks](https://compressorhead.rocks)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wicked fun and glad to get a chance to test it out. Excellent results with tweaking parameters, at least to my ears. Functional and appealing, well for those into this sort of heavy chug style (djent), which I get a kick out of most of the time. Spiffy!

</comment><comment><USER19> I love it! The instrument selection is good. It generates some brutal riffs with catchy rhythms. As a guitarist, I think this tool is great for finding inspiration and maybe breaking out of a creativity rut.

</comment><comment><USER20> The "safari bug" error message appears for me even though I'm using Google Chrome, not Safari, on my ipad. Is that intentional?

<comment><USER16> Chrome on iOS isn't a from-scratch browser. It's a basic WebView with some Chrome related data syncing. That means Chrome on iOS has more in common with mobile Safari than it does with desktop Chrome.

Any bugs you encounter in mobile Safari are probably present in iOS Chrome as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a electric guitar player myself, and that's amazing.

The source code is MIT ([https://github.com/RossMcMillan92/djent](https://github.com/RossMcMillan92/djent)) but I wonder if the same applies to the audio samples.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very well done. The music was addictively responsive to even the smallest settings change.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have absolute no idea what I'm doing, but damn I feel like a rock star! Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER23> Amazing. Add basic beat and transitions and i could listen to it all day

</comment><comment><USER24> awesome stuff, i love it, also i forked it but cant share the url. google api changed but nothing happens when i hit share riff. where are the files saved? keep up the awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER25> Can we get some european power metal style generators in place? :P

<comment><USER3> Unlimited random-generated Children Of Bodom-like solos :O I would sell my body for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tried three times and like one. Pretty good. Sounds like Helmet

</comment><comment><USER27> This is so good. Why did u get djen.co instead of djent.co?

</comment><comment><USER28> Sounds great. Now somebody needs to train a deep learning network to recognise the good riffs and it's done, heavy metal is cracked.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice! I read a little bit about the Web Audio API but haven't gotten a chance to try anything with it yet, this sounds awesome.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ha, I love this. Love the name too, great job

</comment><comment><USER31> Awesome tool, and great URL to boot :)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is insanely rad. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh how I love this.

</comment><comment><USER34> The first web app that blows my knees out!

Excellent work!

</comment><comment><USER35> This is hilariously good. Great work

</comment><comment><USER36> Amazing!</comment>


When Selling Virtual Products Abroad, Don't Put Prices on Autopilot - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/26/when-selling-virtual-products-abroad-dont-put-prices-on-autopilot/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> > We questioned whether the common practice in the U.S. of setting prices with > endings of 99 cents would resonate internationally. Whatever psychological > advantage comes from this pricing strategy is lost in automated currency > conversions. We moved prices for the app up and down from 99-cent endings to > see what would happen. We saw no correlation between price endings and sales > in other currencies. It's likely that people in other countries have become > accustomed to seeing unusual endings on prices as a result of automated > currency conversions, especially in app stores, thus removing the common > U.S.-based psychological associations with 99 cents.

I don't see any indication in here that they tested whether US customers had a different response to price endings than international customers do.</comment>


The Disadvantages of Single Page Applications (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/ <comment><USER2> As with everything, if you're going to do SPA, you should do it well. So far, one of the best SPA website I've seen is [https://gocardless.com](https://gocardless.com) (disclaimer: I work there).

Once loaded it's probably one of the fastest website I've browsed, and it doesn't have any of the drawbacks you mentioned:

navigating to a new page is quick: ✓

navigating back is quick: ✓

remembering scroll position: ✓

cancelling navigation: ✗ but we won't allow duplicate requests so not an issue

SEO: ✓

Navigation and data loss: ? (no idea how we handle that tbh)

Navigation and loading CSS & JS: ✓ we load everything on the first load (~ 880kB) and that's it. I don't think it will ever be worst than MPA

Analytics: ✓

Automated functional testing: ✓ our unit + e2e test suites run in about 4 minutes (CI)

Our splash pages are open-sourced if you want to have a look at our setup: [https://github.com/gocardless/splash- pages](https://github.com/gocardless/splash-pages)

<comment><USER3> More details about SEO would be helpful, considering that's probably the MOST important aspect of going all SPA or not.

Are you doing some escape fragment/headless browser for googlebots?

<comment><USER4> It's pre-rendered on the server with React:

      <div class="site-wrapper"
           data-reactid=".20hl256vta8"
           data-react-checksum="-1018283815">

[http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/top-level- api.html#reac...](http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/top-level- api.html#react.rendertostring)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally some love for the anti-SPA crowd. Subjective here, but there's something nice about Post Redirect Get and Plain Ol' Hyperlinks from a User Experience. Whenever I interact with a regular web application, I am relieved. Not every "forms over data" or ecommerce experience has to be Gmail. Even in mobile.. SPA just isn't that much nicer. Also, I think maintaining these SPAs is ridiculously more difficult.

I don't think the SPA juice is worth the squeeze.

<comment><USER6> From a development standpoint there are a lot of things I prefer from the old Post Redirect Get workflow. The biggest thing I don't miss is modeling complex data in a form. SPAs let me sidestep this because it's JSON, which is much richer for modeling data than a plain form, going both ways. If form JSON ([https://darobin.github.io/formic/specs/json/](https://darobin.github.io/formic/specs/json/)) was widespread I'd probably drop almost all my SPA usage immediately.

<comment><USER5> That is a good point. The hard part of programming is the modeling. And your point leads to another, easy modeling is why JSON as a format (and its programming interface, JavaScript) is so appealing. I guess it's a trade off: complex modeling and state transfer vs. sometimes inscrutable magic asset loading, client/server programming model, losing the natural behavior of the web, and all the other criticisms in the article and elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> SPA applications frameworks and architecture are so young compared to server side rendering and still evolving.

Why do they exist? User expectations of the web are increasing and waiting for server responses from any action isn't really cutting it anymore.

Of course it's harder to maintain state and develop - the patterns haven't been clearly defined, and SPAs introduce two sources of state (client and server) which is a hard problem. It's the cost of the demanded user experience.

Angular ui router, ember data, react flux architecture are all examples of things that have just started evolving to address these kinds of issues. All of these are very new and being constantly iterated on and updated. Angular ui router does a good job of handling things like the back button and managing the state of your page. Ember data has really powerful client side data state management, and react flux architecture presents a much needed practice of how to control the flow of data between server calls and views. HyperMedia APIs are another evolving technology for maintaining more control between the client and the server.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of my favorite SPAs is Trello. It demonstrates a great use case for a single-page app, a highly-interactive interface based around a single view.

I realize that the "single page" in SPA refers to loading a single HTML page, but I've generally felt like SPAs work best when they're based around a primary view.

Once you start building a SPA that emulates a multi-page website, you're suddenly jumping through hoops that the browser/HTML previously gave you for free (routing, URL history, back button, etc.). If the main thing you'll get in return is faster page transitions, it's probably not worth it.

<comment><USER9> Nailed it! This is one of the first things on my checklist for SPAs.

Is it an application?

Does it revolve around a single view that is not just a header toolbar?

Ok. You are now cleared for any other questions to evaluate SPAs. If the answer to either of those questions is no, just don't use a single page site.

As for answering the question of how much of a primary view makes the SPA worth it. If data needs to be retained within the view while making requests, then yes. Examples - spotify, most multi column apps, ERPs etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I completely disagree with the assessment of this article. I've been building and managing the build of simple to enterprise web applications since the web was born. I'm familiar with the entire spectrum of development platforms from old CGI/Perl, ASP, JSP, Cold Fusion, ASP.NET, MVC-platforms (pick one), and now SPA's using front-end platforms like AngularJS and ReactJS.

The amount of time saved in developing services and front-ends over a server- based system is so significant as to offset any of the complexities mentioned here.

The speed of development, the ability to rapidly change requirements, to adapt to stakeholders wants and needs...all are supported by the service+SPA model.

And tooling is coming in many forms to support this pattern, so it's not going anywhere.

<comment><USER11> Maybe the MVC frameworks you used weren't the best, I can do everything on the backend and still have all the advantages that you described.

It's not about where you execute your UI code, It's about how you structure your application.

I've seen plenty more of SPA's become an unmaintainable spaghetti nightmare and also seen many non-SPA's work splendidly.

<comment><USER12> You can't do on the backend everything what SPA can. You simply can't manipulate views without page reload and if you want to do it by injecting JS into backend templates, it will be just mimicking of SPA on the server side, and it's the most ugliest thing what can exist - from the development point of view.

I support parent comment and I can add: SPA split responsibilities between server side and frontend. It helps us to build services with APIs, reusable with different clients (mobile app can use same API with absolutely different UI), so this split looks like natural evolution. This article is just luddism.

<comment><USER11> I recommend reading my comment again, it's not about what each approach can and cannot accomplish technically, it's about maintainability.

I can give examples of a lot of things that SPA's can't do, that's not the point.

I also don't think, you should either build everything on the backend or everything on the frontend, I consider both approaches to be equally bad.

SPA's do not help split responsibilities, I can easily give the SPA a low level Data API and start implementing data processing functionalities in the frontend.

SPA's don't help build services, good frameworks do.

SPA is a religion, cause it states 'Single Page'. What if I want to have an application with 2 or 3 pages just because it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to cram everything into 1 page? What if I can render a lot of stuff on the backend and be 100x more efficient and provide far superior UX?

I had a colleague once who wanted to do everything on the client side, he said that the SPA is the way to go. He got 6 months to prove his approach is good. He failed. His application was both slow as hell and nobody on the team could maintain it. So after he left it took me roughly 2 months to implement what he had in 1/5th of the code.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but my take on your comments is that you haven't actually been on any SPA projects (yet). Having been on several over the past two years, I have a clear understanding of the trade-offs, benefits, and complexities. I was very skeptical two years ago, but that skepticism has been mostly eradicated.

Sure, if you have bad programmers, no pattern will save you. But if you want speed, agility, and separation of concerns, SPA + services is currently the way to go.

<comment><USER11> I have been on SPA projects and I have made SPA's myself as well.

If you want speed, agility separations of concerns, MVC is the way to go. Most of the things you said are MVC and SRP, it has nothing to do with SPA, this is what I have been trying to explain. SPA stands for "Single Page Application", it doesn't specify anything beyond that, your code could be utter garbage with everything mangled together, and it's still technically a SPA. MVC on the other hand does specify how to organize your code.

I think the problem here is the SPA terminology itself and the way it's being used and marketed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's really good to see an article like this. IMO the pendulum has swung too far towards massive JS "applications" that force you to download MBs of content to render anything at all. Yes, if caching works things can be fast, but then you do things like release a new version of your software and I have to download it all again. I use Asana (and love it), but I hate the fact that it can literally take a minute to download their web application. Once it's loaded it's incredibly fast and one of the best web apps I use, but the performance loading it makes it really, really painful at times. Not to mention that based on their blog posts they've also found it difficult to program.

And it's not just Asana, there are some very popular web applications that have had to make the same decision in order to reduce the time it takes to load things for their users, especially users who aren't on fast links (mobile, rural, and places like South America, Africa and Australia).

</comment><comment><USER14> Nearly all of these complaints about SPAs have to do with navigation. It's true, when you make a SPA, you need to factor in routing. That's part of the design decision. When you use a SPA framework like Angular, the typical go to is to use Angular UI Router ([https://github.com/angular-ui/ui- router](https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router)) to manage your page and state transitions within those pages. By default, you get back button support, it's highly customizable and configurable and it's not difficult to manage at all.

<comment><USER15> does it get forward button support as well, the only SPA I know with reasonable support in both directions is GMAIL and that is recent.

<comment><USER16> Yes, you get forward button support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We need more articles like this.

SPA is a total b*tch to do user activity tracking and quirks and glitches just never end.

SPA rely on browser performance and users with slow connections or weak device - will wait much longer to see anything appearing on the page.

My advice - if you sell anything from your site - stay away from SPA.

<comment><USER18> User tracking? Seems easy enough to me: [https://github.com/kendagriff/backbone.analytics/blob/master...](https://github.com/kendagriff/backbone.analytics/blob/master/backbone.analytics.js)

We do mostly SPA's at our agency by now, and they're incredibly stable and easy to maintain. Each to his own, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> After working on a pretty massive SPA for our company dashboard, I've kind of been turned off to the idea. Unless you have a really good reason, like data is live updating all the time with some sort of socket connection, it's probably not worth it. There is so much state you have to keep track of, which is just asking for obscure bugs. It's a relief to work on traditional sites where a page refresh gives you clean slate each time. With the framework we used we also had to duplicate lots of server logic, like model fields and validators. It's a bad pattern. The future is either in something like Meteor, where back and front end can share code, or in traditional multi-page sites.

</comment><comment><USER20> I must say i'm constantly surprised by the negativity towards changes in technology by the technology oriented crowd. More specifically, the pure negativity. So many (here included) constantly shout negativity towards these technology concepts (SPA, in this case), and thankfully also citing what they're negative specifically about.

What i'm surprised to see though, is that so few focus on improving the tech concept (SPA). I see so many complaints, but so few fixes. I don't think SPA is inherently bad, not by a long shot. It's just that, like any young idea it is far from perfect. But, that's technology! It's how advancement goes.

As technology goes, we tend to take two steps forward one step back. But it's often for the sake of _progress_. I have a Moto 360 on my wrist as i type this, but do i consider it amazing? God no, it has some nifty features sure, but it's massive and i can't even see what the time is without turning it on.

Take that in for a second - i have a watch and i have to turn my wrist and bring it up to my face to see the damn time. But do i think that it shouldn't exist? God no. When i got my first "smart" phone it was also awful. If i followed the (seeming) mantra of these negative people, i'd have been shouting for no smartphones phones and no smart watches for years before they had a really solid UX.

I understand a MPA currently offers a more reliable and overall better UX than SPAs tend to. However, can we please focus on improving this technology concept rather than screaming for them to not exist anymore? The HTML5 History API attempts to solve many of the complaints here. It also sounds like we should use data caching (in our SPAs) so that when a user hits back, they get a back-like experience. And as far as scroll position goes, that might be something the History API should provider (if it doesn't already).

Like it or not, JavaScript is here to stay. Usage of it will only increase. Rather than saying how terrible of a UX it has, please try to think in the reverse. Even if you aren't going to work on the solutions, this is the exact type of crowd that will. Cite your concerns and UX improvements - These are the sort of people you should be helping, to help you :)

/rant

<comment><USER21> This isn't an anti-change thing. I have personally experienced the annoyance/pain of having to re-implement navigation in JavaScript. Sure, there are routing libraries that try to make this easier, but on the other hand, routing is kinda built in to the platform.

The author of the post made his point pretty clearly:

> [T]he application handles the browsing instead of the browser. Attempting to > mimic the browser using Javascript is the root cause of the self-induced > issues.

I think you're conflating "single-page applications" with what the author called "rich user interfaces". They're two separate things. A single-page application is defined by the fact it does not let the remote server handle routing. I think you're conflating the two because otherwise your rant doesn't really make sense to me. You asked for fixes, and the blog post comes with one: let the server & the browser handle routing; don't re-invent the wheel (badly).

<comment><USER22> This.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Rely on the browser, not Javascript".

The author of this blog is someone I would befriend. It sounds like his work is probably non-cancerous to the eye.

While I've become rather cynical about web, it's telling that everyone is reading this and posting on a "primitive" and "laughable" site (to many web designers you DON'T want working for you), right now. I'd prefer to keep my 1995, primitive, laughable web in place. Maybe they can keep their blink tags.

</comment><comment> bmir-alum-007 In general, it depends: there are many different use cases where SPA is fine and others where they are not. It's especially good for long-running consoles that don't need much navigation (given using the appropriate JS framework which doesn't leak resources on most browsers). SPA doesn't make much sense (apart from in-web app search live results searching) for static pages that need to be SEO crawlable and can be served up fast from static CDNs. Perhaps the core engineering tradeoff is whether to breaking the stateless RESTful contract by managing state with session cookies and/or JavaScript, and doing so in a way that may or may not be sharable to other users, history-friendly, SEO-friendly, etc.

Ruby's turbolinks is a clever hack and mostly works approach to make nav-based (browser history- and crawler SEO-compatible) almost as responsive as SPA... it replaces assets, title, meta and body on-the-fly and updates the url location with javascript to save a whole page update. It's basically a hybrid of client+server coordinated fragment caching. There are some gotchas and workarounds for onLoad() and other JS hooks, but it mostly works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER24> Other points of note:

The whole history API exists to help the SPA experience (but others too).

The site still needs to be able to render something like:

www.foo.com/customers/10 even if www.foo.com is a SPA and via clicks can go to /customers/10\. This may require more server work, so you're not exactly making life much easier for yourself.

You still need to handle cases where a web crawler comes in without good javascript and has to index your site.

<comment><USER25> Not really - these days even googlebot can and does execute enough javascript to craw #/customers/10\. Screen readers can do javascript and you can use ARIA to make it easy to browse for blind people.

<comment><USER26> > even googlebot

I would assume that's one of the more capable crawlers though; not the average, and surely not the lower bound.

<comment><USER25> It is also the only one that it makes sense to care about, from a business perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems to be aimed at Single Page Websites and not Applications.

The aim isn't to "mimic the browser using Javascript" but to create an immersive application that feels like you're no longer in a browser at all.

<comment><USER28> At which point, the question becomes, "why is this a website?" if you're building an application, usually languages like C#, Objective-C, etc offer far more powerful tools for making an application.

<comment><USER29> Because a web based application doesn't need installation, it's cross platform and accessible by everybody.

<comment><USER30> Then surely all the effort being put into make browsers not browsers would be better directed towards solving those goals, without bastardising the web?

I always thought that the SPA crowd would settle on a custom content-type to handle web apps. That way they aren't hamstrung by the limitations of HTML and web pages and can really do things right by web apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think this article is overly negative, some of the cases are not _always_ a disadvantage.

Take "fast back" as an example. If your app is interactive and updates live, the "back" page can already be up and running with the latest data, instead of first loading a cached version and then having it update with JS later.

Also, personally I'm not so sure users care about things like the "stop" button working. And "fast back" depends on the situation.

Having said that: if these kinds of articles reduce the risk of things like blogger.com being a SPA, keep writing :)

<comment><USER32> Why would users not care about the stop button working? If something in the browser is not loading, I want to hit stop so I can wait a while before trying again.

<comment><USER33> What would a stop button in Word be like? It really depends on the type of webapp and experience you are trying to create.

<comment><USER32> Ah, but see, the stop button, back and forward, scrolling down, etc. are how the web worked. And best practice has always been, "don't break the web". Now... people break things. We went from having a consistent UI experience in the browser to everyone just making stuff up. Not good.

<comment><USER31> If browsers had hooks for "the page has now finished loading" (to display a loading indicator while the page loads with XHR etc) and "callback for stop button click" I'm sure lots of SPAs would put them to good use :)

<comment><USER32> So, it is the browser's fault. Nice.

<comment><USER31> If we can agree that SPAs are useful for some type of apps, it's definitely the browsers lack of APIs fault that the SPA has no way of telling the browser about these sort of things, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This reads like a very good list of things to implement in your SPA.

Having said that, you should also be supporting simply rendering the pages on the first request, and progressively enhance it, rather than a blank thing that then goes and fetches all the JS and render itself. The HTML/CSS should arrive and render as soon as possible. His reference to twitter's 2012 writeup is good.

Having said that, take a look at this:

[http://platform.qbix.com/guide/pages](http://platform.qbix.com/guide/pages)

In our framework, we've always supported the concept of Pages and Tools (components to put on the pages). We handle all the swapping of CSS/JS, loading what you need only on demand, caching (even in the phonegap bundle!), retaining tools you still need while pages get replaced (instead of re- constructing them expensively from scratch every time). And of course removing event listeners for tools and pages which have been unloaded.

Ideally, all your pages should be cacheable to the point of being static, with dynamic content being populated by JS.

Also there is a security implication with CSRF. If you use a nonce in the session to prevent CSRF then this nonce has to be delivered to the client, either with the first page rendering, or -- if the page is cached -- on subsequent requests.

The point is ... it takes a long time to build all the supporting technology. We've done it. But it took us years!

You can check out an SPA here on desktop, tablet or mobile:

[http://qbixstaging.com/Groups](http://qbixstaging.com/Groups)

<comment><USER35> Link doesn't work for me on iOS. I just get a blank page?

<comment><USER34> Try now, it should be working!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> All,

If you want detailed guidance on how to build SPA apps in a right way then you need to check out this guide (called Project Silk) from Microsoft [1]. It contains lot of insights and all the approaches provided are still applicable in 2015.

It comes with complete source code.

[1] - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh396380.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/hh396380.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER37> Senna.js is a blazing-fast single page application engine that provides several low-level APIs that allows you to build modern web-based applications with only ~8KB of JavaScript without any dependency. [http://sennajs.com/](http://sennajs.com/)

Most of the issues reported by this article are not a problem with it thanks to its approach.

Disclaimer: I have contributed to the project.

<comment><USER38> That's nice. The blog example exhibits a lot of the problems identified in OP's article, especially those around history and scroll position.

Look, I'm all in favor of SPAs; I build them myself. But when I trip over something that does infinite scrolling, I groan, because I know that if I should happen, twenty pages in, to slip and left-click a link instead of right-clicking and "Open in New Tab", I'm going to lose my place and have to start over from page 1 and spend five minutes wearing out my scroll wheel to get back to where I was -- either that, or shrug and give up on whatever I was reading.

There are real problems in the space. They need to be either solved or avoided. (If you can't get infinite scroll to work right, then don't use infinite scroll.) Pretending they don't exist and refusing to address them is just foolishness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> In a single page _application_ , I would expect the back button to be entirely nonfunctional, or maybe in some cases functioning as "undo" if this behavior is clearly communicated.

(I'm not sure where back-button-undo would be better than an undo button within the app, but I wouldn't rule it out. Maybe in a graphics editor where it would be convenient to use the mouse's back button.)

<comment><USER40> That might be what you expect - but I think you're in the minority :) Most non-technical users will try to click the back button regardless. Is there even an agreeable definition as to what a web site is versus a web application? Is a discussion forum a web site? What about something like Slack?

I would personally categorize an online discussion forum as a web site but something like Slack as a web app. But I would expect the back button to behave similarly between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The main disadvantages mentioned in this article relate to the fact that many SPA today don't replicate the traditional routing mechanism. Which, in my humble opinion, is the wrong thing to judge it on. You can easily have a single-page-application on a... Single Page. The actual url can just preserve the current state of the app, instead of a location.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, I have seen SPAs that emulate multi-page websites and the traditional routing mechanism. I'm even guilty of creating one, and I very quickly regretted it! It's generally not a good idea.

<comment><USER41> Same here. Today, I tend to make sure these days that my projects absolutely are SPAs beforehand. If someone mentions traditional pages, SPA is out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> How about the fact that in case you use API keys for the back end, the API key has to appear in the client as well. e.g. If there are third party clients using your API server and you want to issue keys for them. (They could just as easily use the one that is used by the main website)

</comment><comment><USER43> ITT: SPAs have few to zero disadvantages.

</comment><comment><USER44> I agree w/ people that say SPA can do SEO and is an improvement and in that and everything else.

</comment><comment><USER45> Some problems with the article.

One you cherry pick SPA attempts, like with Twitter. This is an example of a company trying to refactor for SPA, not doing SPA from the beginning.

Libraries that help with SPA are maturing. It's easy to implement routing with backbone for example. You just have to be a good developer and actually learn.

The part that really matters is being a solid dev. Not if you choose SPA or not.

</comment><comment><USER46> If you want a desktop application, you should build a desktop application.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've always assumed that if you need a back button, your application wasn't really a good candidate for a SPA anyway...

<comment><USER48> Is that so? – As far as I know on Android the back button was or is an integral part of most applications and the whole Android UI as a whole – and I would say a SPA is something that is pretty similar to an Android app.</comment></comment>


GCC 10.1 Is Out - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/changes.html <comment><USER2> Extended characters in identifiers may now be specified directly in the input encoding (UTF-8, by default), in addition to the UCN syntax (\uNNNN or \UNNNNNNNN) that is already supported:

        static const int π = 3;
        int get_naïve_pi() {
            return π;
        }

I see large potential for the IOCCC

</comment><comment><USER3> GCC 10.1 is billed as a major release but apparently GNU hasn't published a release note -- I only see a list of regressions that were fixed in 10.1. Does that mean 10.1 is really a bug fix release with no new features? Just asking.</comment>


Andy Grove: How To Make An American Job Before It's Too Late - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html <comment><USER2> Mr. Grove correctly identifies the problem but avoids the obvious solution, perhaps because it's too painful to articulate. The phenomenally elevated standard of living that we have enjoyed in the U.S. since the end of WWII just isn't sustainable. The Chinese aren't devouring the tech market because they manage their economy. They're doing so because the Chinese worker will work for far, far less than any American worker. Americans currently still monopolize the high paying design & research job market but there's no reason to expect that Asia will indefinitely play second fiddle here.

To put it bluntly - the last decade was the beginning of a painful crash of the American economy back to earth. When we finally do reestablish equilibrium Americans will be back at work at assembly lines. A massive re-investment in hard science education, which seems extremely unlikely, might cushion the blow but there's only so much room for jobs in intellectual capital.

<comment><USER3> Lets also not forget that millions of people in China were starving 30 years ago. The flow of jobs into China pulled 1 billion people out of poverty. This is not insignificant and is not mentioned enough. Americans will go back to work when we get to valuing intelligence and work ethic again. It may take a while.

<comment><USER4> The Chinese (and many other nationalities) have intelligence and work ethic in spades.

Perhaps you didn't mean that the way it sounded. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Andy makes an excellent point: when we outsource the manufacturing and scaling processes to another country, what we lose in addition to jobs are the innovations and experience necessary to maintain a strong defensive econosystem with respect to our economy.

However, I disagree with Andy's recommendation that we should tax offshore labor - we should focus on making labor in the United States less expensive. Neuter the Department of Labor, get rid of labor regulations with heniously expensive and obnoxious unintended consequences like the mandatory 8-hour work day in California, eliminate the concept of wrongful termination, and put a muzzle on the EPA.

Negative incentives aren't the way to go to encourage job creation. Make the climate more hospitable for large businesses within the U.S. instead.

<comment><USER6> Have you actually ever been to an industrialized country that lacks an equivalent of the EPA and OSHA?

Go to Beijing, and enjoy the brown air, which is pretty unbreathable on the bad days, and just moderately smelly on the good ones. Whatever you do, don't drink the tapwater, because it'll make even local residents sick. Don't go for a swim in the river, either.

Be careful near construction sites; there are gaping holes with no signs, and if you fall into one and break your leg, tough. Also, if there's construction only on the higher floors of a building, slag from welding may rain down onto your head. Unless you're well-connected, don't even think about getting the construction firm to pay for your medical bills.

If you're a woman and your boss rapes you, and you're not connected, that's too bad. If you're a man and your boss rapes you, and you're not connected, that's even worse.

Californa's labor practices and tax laws aren't ideal, but I'd much rather work in California than China.

<comment><USER7> > Go to Beijing... brown air... sick... gaping holes with no signs... break > your leg... welding rain down on your head... boss rapes you and you're not > connected, that's too bad...

Dude, I was in Beijing two months ago. It's not like you make it out to be. Actually, it's a hell of a lot nicer than Detroit.

In fact, I was in China five years ago and again two months ago. It's trending upwards quickly - the pollution was near unbearable five years ago and is rapidly improving. Infrastructure is improving. Air and water quality are improving. The country is gradually politically liberalizing... almost everything is improving in China quickly. Scary quickly, actually.

Over the last 10 years, China is trending upwards quickly and the USA and trending downwards slowly... you might prefer living in Washington D.C. to Beijing right now (but would you, really?)... but you almost certainly won't prefer D.C. to Beijing in 10 years unless something changes.

<comment><USER8> _In fact, I was in China five years ago and again two months ago. It's trending upwards quickly - the pollution was near unbearable five years ago and is rapidly improving. Infrastructure is improving. Air and water quality are improving_

All of these things are because of deliberate government policies. I'm sure you know this, but it's worth pointing out. I think you & donw are agreeing with each other here - he's just underestimating how quickly the Chinese government acted to fix what was becoming a problem.

<comment><USER7> > All of these things are because of deliberate government policies. I'm sure > you know this, but it's worth pointing out.

Sort of. If you look at history, every country that's gone through an industrializing process has had an increase in pollution followed by a decrease in pollution. Some of that is attributable to regulation, but it happens in unregulated industries too - almost everyone naturally dislikes pollution, and generally prefer to reduce it.

Saying pollution is down and infrastructure is up because if government policy is almost correct, but slightly misses the mark - pollution is down and infrastructure is up because Chinese people worked to make that happen. But this same process happens similarly in countries with less government regulation as well. Over time, people want lower pollution and waste near them and invest, manage, and produce that result, government or no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He had me up until:

 _Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars -- fight to win.)_

Everybody loses a trade war. And the ensuing impoverishment and desperation can trigger a shooting war.

<comment><USER10> We are currently losing this non-war. The Chinese are playing to win this non- war.

<comment><USER9> The trade is mutually beneficial; it's not a zero-sum game that necessarily has winners and losers.

From the trade, we in the USA get cheaper products and low-cost loans/investment.

We then enact counter-productive feel-good policies that make us less competitive:

\- employment-depressing labor rules (ranging from minimum wages to complex and expensive mandates)

\- corporate welfare (including bailouts)

\- subsidies for politically-popular activities (like home ownership and acquisition of often-superfluous academic credentials)

These choices are not the fault of the Chinese. At worst, because our trade with the Chinese makes us wealthier, we can then afford to make bigger mistakes elsewhere before correcting course. We spend the surpluses from trade on our anti-competitive policy luxuries.

"Winning" won't require getting tough on the Chinese, but getting tough on ourselves.

<comment><USER11> The benefits are very short-term at the cost of long-term benefits, though. We get cheap products now, at the cost of losing our ability to produce them. There are wide ranges of products now that the U.S. _no longer knows how to manufacture_. Even if we wanted to build factories to produce stuff again, we no longer know how, unless China were willing to lend us experts. And there's an even bigger range of things that would take us 5-10 years to ramp up if we really needed to make them again.

Basically we traded owning our own production for renting production from overseas. Renting often has lower immediate costs but higher long-term costs (and less freedom).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An article worth reading for a lot of astute observations. Andy doesn't shy away from making painful points. One of his more striking quotes:

"But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?"

(Actually, my guess is the over-dependency of faith of individual meritocracy will cause us to miss the deeper structural problems that Grove is pointing to.)

EDIT: (Anedoctal single point of data with limited context), My friend worked in a Battery startup company in the Silicon Valley. After the initial design phase, the VCs and management decided not scale up into manufacturing, they rather lay most people off and sell the design.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the core of the problem is the idea of the 40-hour work week. It is inevitable that more and more jobs will become marginalized and automated. That is a _good thing_ : the goal of technological progress should be increased happiness, of which one component is increased leisure time.

As more and more jobs require less and less work performed by humans, the obvious solution is to work less hours. Instead of family providers working a total of 60-90 hours per week, they should be working closer to 40-50 in the somewhat-near future, with that number continuing to drop over time.

We obviously have 3 possible paths:

      1. We return to the single-provider days of old
      2. We scale back "normal" hours to be 20-30 hours per week per person.
      3. We have high unemployment while many are working 70+ hour weeks.

Currently we are going with (3), and it just doesn't make that much sense. Either (1) or (2) would be acceptable to me, but (2) certainly seems more fair. I would love to get to a situation where families get to spend valuable time together and kids are raised by their parents.

I think an average of 25 hours per week would hit a nice sweet spot. It would allow companies to have 10-hour work days, either alternating 3/2 10-hour days per week, or 5-hour shifts 5 days a week. Jobs like programming could be designed to have 2 8-hour shifts per week (to perform actual development) along with 3 3-hour shifts (to address meetings, squash bugs, perform customer service, etc.). What is keeping us from this?

Instead, we have something like 15-20% of the population overworking themselves while another 15-20% are under- or unemployed. Something's gotta give.

<comment><USER14> Ask the French how reducing the workweek to 35 solved their unemployment problem in the last decade or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm very interested in extrapolating some of these trends out -- America does not have a social system which allows society as a whole to benefit from GDP growth while jobs are destroyed.

My social history tells me that no other countries have been successful at creating such a system either.

Whether or not we have such a system, we may well be moving to a world in which the US can continue to increase GDP significantly while unemployment increases (efficiency increases, in other words). Successfully creating a Chinese middle class, and selling them our branded stuff only hastens that eventuality.

What happens to all these American unemployed people? In an ideal world, they would be artists and poets, inventors and writers, people who add to our cultural capital. The end-game here would (in my dreams) look a lot like Ian Banks' Culture books -- a utopian society which has moved past 'the age of scarcity'. Unfortunately, right now, places like Saudi are the closest we can look to for a society with, frankly, enough money for everyone.

In the interim, we are facing a sort of cultural crisis. America's PDI (Power Distance Index) is middling right now; the PDI describes out comfort with and exposure to, high levels of power differences in society, including wealth. Saudi has one of the highest PDIs in the world, meaning that they as a country haven't solved this problem of building an equitable society based on passive income production; in fact, their society is less equitable than many poorer countries. It is hard to imagine that we are aiming at anything else but a Saudi-ish social system if the GDP growth + unemployment growth trend continues.

I say this partly because Americans think of someone who is 'unemployed' as lazy, uneducated, etc. In fact, there's a significant undercurrent of that perspective in this thread. The reality is that if we are able to keep improving productivity while birth rates decline, there will eventually be less work. There might be more money, but there will be less work.

How do we deal with that? I don't have a good answer, but I still am part of the problem -- I would much rather spend capital on an automated solution for my business than hire someone.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to hear this from Andy Grove. Intel of the 1990s was constantly being called out as an abusive workplace, exploiting H1B and "home grown" engineers, then laying them off when they got too old and sending their work overseas. Although I agree with most of his essay, I'm not sure I would want to be an employee in whatever scheme he is envisioning.

<comment><USER17> You mean the "scheme" of economic survivability?

I didn't read where Grove was proud of how Intel behaved during the '90s. In fact, I got the opposite impression from this article: Grove is writing from the pain and tragedy caused by competing with the Chinese on entirely Chinese terms. Where was the US during those years? Absent. Like a drunk staring into a Vegas slot machine in the wee hours of the morning going through the motions, but not really being there.

<comment><USER16> He doesn't go into Intel's part in the whole thing. He mentions asking investors for money to build a fab, that's about it.

Regarding his scheme, if his economic stimulus plan means to build a bunch of Intels, people will choose to party on and watch the economy go down in flames.

Others in this thread keep talking about "the elephant in the room" but the real elephant in the room is that given other options, almost nobody chooses to work in a factory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a question; does a company _only_ exist to make profits?*

Whenever, someone starts a debate like this, or whenever I see a human being slaving away for a pennies in despicable conditions. I have to ask this question.

If and only if companies are entities that exist to make more and more money (not wealth) then you will inevitably run into such problems. The companies in the USA outsource that labor to China, or India only for earning more money, but are they creating wealth? By destroying the long-term sustainability of human civilization on this planet (I live a few kms from a few of these factories in India. You have to see in order to believe what they get away with)? By ultimately harming the very source of their wealth through such measures?

I have absolutely no idea about the implications of these concepts to make any categorical statement on them, but I think that David Packard and Bill Hewlett may have gotten it right. (see: [http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/the-hp- way...](http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/the-hp-way.html))

*profits are a pre-requisite to its existence. I want to ask if they exist only to do that?

<comment><USER19> The answer is yes. Wealth is the unlocking of human potential through productivity and efficient use of finite resources such as labor and goods. What these companies do is shift costs, not unlocking potential. Luckily for humanity, this is mostly a temporary condition. It only takes a few decades for labor markets to modernize and they will eventually run out of new markets to exploit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Andy Grove is worrying about yesterday's jobs. He shouldn't be. No one was worrying about agricultural jobs disappearing, replaced by manufacturing jobs. As technology advanced, fewer farmers were needed to satisfy the basic needs of the consumer. As their basic needs were satisfied new needs for random widgets, plastic toys and entertainment devices appeared, creating opportunities in manufacturing. Today, service jobs has mostly replaced jobs in manufacturing in developed countries; The amount of service & creative work (e.g giving massages, selling products, and of course inventing the next digital device) output an American worker can produce makes it uneconomical to put the worker in a mundane factory making McDonald's toys instead. As technology advances and robotics replaces even factory workers in developing countries, more labor will be freed up to do other things. As had happened in the past, when the most basic consumer needs are resolved there will always be new needs arising; Where yesterday's consumer demanded shelter, food, clothing and a radio, today's consumer demands cars, houses, artwork, internet, hot water supply and monthly professional haircuts. The circle of increasing supply leading to increased demand and thus increased supply again is a virtuous one.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think our elected representatives need to listen a hell of a lot more to guys like this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Completely disagree: we need technological paradigm shifts and work our buts off... That was the way to our current standard of living, successfully copied by the East, and it will be the successful path to future growth and industrial/scientific advancement. Not that socialist whiny I need more money and less work attitude a la dying Europe.

</comment><comment><USER23> WRT to US startups, how relevant is this anymore?

I.e. with the exception of sports (in the biological sense) like Tesla (also a big political factor there), what new Intel like startups are going to get the serious funding they require in today's political and economic environment.

As far as I can tell, the period of the big VC funded company like DEC or Intel lasted between the late '50s (there's a certain bit of legislation that pushed the concept over the top) to the early '00s, when SarBox was the last straw that ended the game.

Pretty much all of us who are here for the startup game are here for the small capital web/Internet/software type of companies. E.g. I don't see where the next FPGA like think is going to come from (well, in the US).

</comment><comment><USER24> The question is though, is it smarter to use some form of tariffs to create more American jobs, lower the minimum wage, or as a third option accept that Asia can do manufacturing cheaper than anyone else and people will be unemployed, but tax the American companies benefiting most from the outsourcing and redistribute the wealth to the unemployed.

Maybe at this point in time you have to accept a high unemployment rate, the problem you have to be careful with I guess is you still want to provide incentive to the people currently in minimum wage positions.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's sad that after a nice article he ends thinking in taxing, it sounds like a lost case when you need taxes to solve the problem!

My naive point of view sees lowering lifecost (cheaper real state, health insurance, etc) so people needs less money to live in a good way and costs can go down. That can't be done in Silicon Valley or NYC but thanks to the technology and good transportation can be done in other areas of the country with good planning.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just thinking aloud : please humour me. Since technology is getting robotized, and even Chinese labour is at risk of losing jobs...Organ Farming. If and when the technology matures : You take my cells, convert them to stem cells, and workers help grow a perfect heart / liver / other organ, nudging it along it's growth to perfection. It's like working in an iPhone factory, except, it's really life-saving / preserving.

</comment><comment><USER27> He ignores the fundamental problem- the American worker is overpaid. Why would anyone work at the wages of a Chinese laborer when you can make as much money as a Foxconn production line worker ($1.25/hr x 60hr week) in about 10 hours per week at minimum wage here, about 6 hours per week at factory job? We need to find a way to avoid the sticky wage problem, and it will likely involve inflation.

</comment><comment><USER28> I find this line of thinking very disturbing. Mr. Grove follows others in believing a common fallacy, by ignoring secondary effects, and fails to see how issues in macroeconomics affect each other. Where to start...

The American standard of living is higher than China. In order for a worker in the US to continue to enjoy his standard of living and salary, she must contribute to creating something of value equal to what she consumes that is then exchanged at a market price(which determines it's value relative to goods/services created by others). When the US is a leader in technology and innovation, we create things that are very valuable, because rare and productive people make them, and trade them for other, largely commoditized goods, from poorer countries. The reason these commoditized goods are produced in poorer countries is because they can... The ability to produce them is well known so there is more competition, and therefor demand, and the price drops, along with the wages. If you work in a factory cheaply, you do so because replacing your skills in that factory is easy. There are many other people with that set of skills to replace you. The value you produce is cheaper, therefor you are paid less and have less to consume .

Now, back to Mr. Grove's statements. The factory jobs left the United States because wages were higher here than there. It's that simple, but where he goes wrong is say that "managers were happy", which is not quite as harsh, but very close to the usual line, which attributes the offshoring to "greed". Not quite. If an American company has to produce it's goods in a factory where people make 2x the salary of the same good in China, the goods will cost more to buy. If the American company, doesn't outsource, and a Chinese company is able to produce the same or similar good(think commodity again), then they will be undercut in the market and go out of business. Not only will management be un-"happy", but the US as a whole is worse off because the profits now go to a Chinese company instead of an American one. The US has now lost not only the manufacturing jobs, but the high value add jobs as well. Mr. Groves proposes the "solution" that we tax imports and use the proceeds promote American production. This merely shifts the money around. Those imported goods were cheaper than their American counterpart. Assuming current wages remain the same, it now cost more dollars to purchase that good because of the tariff and American's have less stuff because it is more expensive relative to their salary. The other option(without the tariff), is that the American factory worker cannot find other work that will pay him more, so he agrees to accept lower wages for performing that same job here and can therefor buy less stuff. I believe that these, as a whole, offset one another and are probably net a wash.

As for unemployment, I believe that it is caused by many different things, probably many reasons that are poorly understood, but I'll address a few of them that I think are important here. Unemployment can be caused by temporary mismatches between market demands for goods and supply of those goods. Demand changes, prices change, companies don't require as many employees to produce the goods(this can also be caused by changes in the efficiency of production), and people are fired. There may not be a job in their previous line of work. If there is some other skill set which is in demand, that person can learn a new skill and make whatever salary the market demand supports for that skill. It is also possible that the market will not support the workers previous salary. Labor costs go down, but here is where people usually go wrong. When labor costs drop, it becomes affordable to pay people to do things that you might have automated(for a high cost in machinery or software for example). Or, the market might now support the cost of producing a good which _must_ be done with tedious manual labor. Or, if the American worker is more efficient than his Chinese counterpart, then it might be cheaper to start doing manufacturing in the US again. In other words, as wages drop, the unemployment rate will go down, and less will be outsourced. This is just the tradeoff. The fact that jobs are sent to China means that cheaper goods are available here in the US. Mr. Groves states that the trend is towards an economy where there are high value add jobs and high unemployment. This is true only if current wages hold. If wages drop, then outsourcing makes less sense and unemployment picks up. What we really want is lots of high value add jobs here. This comes through innovation, creativity, a highly skilled and motivated workforce and outsourcing production(if it makes sense) to cheaper markets.

<comment><USER8> _In other words, as wages drop, the unemployment rate will go down, and less will be outsourced. This is just the tradeoff._

You make that sound so simple.

You left out the bit about that meaning falling standards of living, and the social dislocation that causes.

<comment><USER29> >falling standards of living

You mean only being able to buy a 27" TV for $1000 instead of a 50" one? Or having to stick with a 3G phone for another year before getting a 4G one?

<comment><USER30> Inability to buy gadgets is unlikely to be the main problem - it's not like gadgets are a huge proportion of the expenditure of poor people right now. The problem that will be created is extremely high wage mismatch between the highly educated, and those that are not able to achieve such a high level of education.

This is a problem for a variety of reasons. The poor are, of course, less able to compete for scarce resources such as housing (particularly in cramped places like the UK), healthcare, high quality education, etc. This uncompetitiveness isn't too bad in places with reasonably limited income inequality, but as the inequality scales up becomes a really serious issue. All of this is a bad recipe for social stability - as being part of society becomes less beneficial for the poor, more and more will choose to live outside it.

Over time, income inequality also leads to poor social mobility, which is a real issue with keeping a country competitive.

<comment><USER31> But the next elephant in the room: suppose with a huge effort, you build a factory that employs all the 100 million (or whatever) uneducated people in your country. Then these people have a steady income and decide to have children. In a couple of years, you suddenly have 400 million uneducated people. Then what? (I don't know a proper answer - simply throwing more money at education seems unlikely to work...).

<comment><USER30> That's not really too much of an elephant. Most western countries have sub- replacement birth rates right now, and this effect seems to occur a short while after countries develop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Although it is naive, at present, to discount (artificial) national borders (and the patriotic sense people might feel), I look forward to a day when countries no longer exist, similarly to how different regions were amalgamated to form countries and their "national identities".

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the 'answer' insomuch as there is one, is not a quick fix, but to educate people in order let them compete for the 'higher level' jobs. 'Making education work better' is a big, long, ugly, hairy and very political topic though.

</comment><comment><USER34> Due to Globalization, America will be saturated and will be inhabited by people who will live on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income>

<comment><USER35> When I read your sentence, right before I got to the very end with the link to Wikipedia, I was thinking you were going to end it with something like "soylent green."

<comment><USER34> I think privatizing profits and socializing losses will result in passive income society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's another proposed solution to this problem in the form of tax reform - The Fair Tax proposal.

IANA Tax Expert, but I like how they've completely rethought the tax system from the ground up, with the objective of making the US a tax haven for all parts of the manufacturing process - harvesting raw materials, milling into useful materials, manufacturing into products, transport, and sales.

In a nutshell, there are 'embedded taxes' at every point in the manufacturing chain. Take a simplified semiconductor for example, made of sand, aluminum, and copper:

1\. Mine the copper and aluminum, collect the sand (payroll + income + other taxes)

2\. Purify it all, mill the copper and aluminum (payroll + income + other taxes)

3\. Deliver to fabrication facilities (tax the transport company)

4\. Convert sand to silicon wafers, etch the microprocessors into the wafers with the copper and aluminum, package into chips. (more taxes)

5\. Transport to OEMs (tax the transport company)

6\. Build computers (more taxes)

7\. FedEx/UPS to purchaser (more taxes).

The consumer ends up paying multiple embedded taxes in the final cost of the product. The Fair Tax folks estimate that these embedded taxes comprise roughly 22% of the cost of the average product manufactured in the US.

The Fair Tax would instead remove all the embedded taxes and add them in one lump sum to the final product:

1\. Mine the copper and aluminum, collect the sand (no tax)

2\. Purify it all, mill the copper and aluminum (no tax)

3\. Deliver to fabrication facilities (no tax)

4\. Convert sand to silicon wafers, etch the microprocessors into the wafers with the copper and aluminum, package into chips. (no tax)

5\. Transport to OEMs (no tax)

6\. Build computers (no tax)

7\. FedEx/UPS to purchaser (no tax).

8\. Consumer pays 23% tax (calculated inclusively, 30% calculated exclusively) on the final product.

The final cost to the US consumer is roughly the same, but the incentives are drastically realigned. It becomes much less expensive to make things in the US, and they are only taxed when sold in the US. Products exported overseas would be tax-free to make and sell (except for taxes in the foreign countries).

The concept potentially solves all sorts of problems, from our trade balance to illegal immigrants not paying taxes. Definitely worth reading more about for anyone interested:

<http://www.fairtax.org/>

[http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal- Boortz/...](http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal- Boortz/dp/0061540463)

[http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Solution-Financial-Justice- Ame...](http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Solution-Financial-Justice- Americans/dp/1595230602/)

<comment><USER28> I really like the fair tax, but it bothers me that it is regressive. I know it is the same % for everyone, and there is the rebate at the poverty line, but the wealthy spend a much smaller percentage of their money at the retail level. Why is buying a car taxed but buying a company isn't? I've heard different answers but I'm not convinced by any of them.

<comment><USER37> Everything is taxed, services as well as investments. What do you think will become of the accumulated wealth, that it will forever remain in bank accounts? What good would it be to have it and not have it moving through the system? It will eventually get taxed, perhaps simple not as fast as you wish.

Its only regressive when you lose perspective on the purpose of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hear hear.

China manipulates its currency, and so does the US: to keep the rich rich. If we were on the gold standard (not that I'm saying we should be) the dollar would already be worthless and US labor would be competitive. But then Wall Street 20yos wouldn't be able to afford a ferrari.

We must either begin enforcing fair trade, and fair employment, or we must face the fact that tens of millions will be unemployed. We cannot support them either. They will not be able to buy the iphones or the xboxes that pay our salaries, and we wont be able to pay our taxes.

And do you imagine that they will just starve to death? Or is LA a testbed for containing the lawless future?

I do not know what is happening to the USA. It seems as if those who should know better are willfully ignoring the consequences of their actions.

</comment><comment><USER39> The real elephant in the room, which Grove and practically everybody else knows very well but refuses to talk about, is that nobody starts a company to employ people. People start a company to _make stuff_. To the extent this can be done with fewer people, this is _always_ a good thing from that company's perspective, with no exceptions I can think of offhand. People suck, and you don't want to deal with them if you can help it. Just as factory farmers would love to be able to grow meat in vats without dealing with the messy parts of animal welfare and husbandry, most managers would love to be able to carry out their missions with fewer people. This is a simple reality of productive life, not a question of social morality or human values.

Why does it make sense for companies like Foxconn to take on more and more of our high-tech manufacturing work? Simply because, in contrast to most of the twentieth century, most consumer products are built pretty much the same these days. There is absolutely nothing about a PS3 that requires different components, production lines, or assembly techniques from a desktop PC. There is nothing about an iPhone that justifies building it in a factory that doesn't also make pocket calculators, handheld game consoles, or, hell, competing phones such as Droids. Massive contraction and consolidation of the manufacturing sector, whether here or elsewhere, is both desirable and inevitable. Right now this is true of high-tech items but soon enough, it will be evident enough across the spectrum of durable goods.

This wasn't the case when producing a new widget required a lot of custom tool and die work, specialized worker training, or the development of advanced processes unique to that widget. For a drop-dead awesome example of what I'm talking about, look at the processes Tektronix had to develop in the 1960s in order to build CRTs for their oscilloscopes: [http://classictek.org/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid...](http://classictek.org/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid=100&task=videodirectlink&id=1) (Flash required)

Grove is basically saying we need to start more companies that "scale up" to require factories where people sit doing stuff like what's seen in that video. He's wrong. Today, if I design a better oscilloscope, I'd be out of my mind if I didn't find a way to use the same generic LCD panels that Chinese factories produce by the tens of millions for sale to everyone from Apple to Boeing. And when my hypothetical design is complete, it will use at most one or two custom ASICs (the fewer the better -- I'll use FPGAs if I can), and Foxconn can start building it as soon as they finish their rush order of iPhone 5G Extremes.

I have a lot of respect for Grove, but as a captain of industry, he's fighting the last war. His subtextual premise is dead-on, though: we need to figure out how to put 200,000,000 underemployed US workers to good use, or things are going to _suck_.

To me, it's obvious what the future of mass production will look like, but it's not at all clear how to stave off a future where 10% of us are shouldering the entire productivity burden for the rest of the country.

<comment><USER40> Why not focus on how to make stuff more efficiently locally, i.e., robotics? At least that could keep _some_ manufacturing jobs local.

<comment><USER39> I think that's a valid point, but it will quickly devolve into an argument as to where the robots should be built. It still won't magically add any objective value to your product just to have the nuts and bolts tightened in your hometown.

<comment><USER19> You're confusing a capital investment (the robots) with cost-of-goods-sold (the widgets). Automated manufacturing systems are complex systems that require highly trained individuals to maintain and operate, while reducing the total labor cost. In addition, if more manufacturing utilized these systems, scales of economy could be reached that would allow them to be more modular and commoditized.

<comment><USER39> _Automated manufacturing systems are complex systems that require highly trained individuals to maintain and operate, while reducing the total labor cost._

For now.

Also, keep in mind that everything I said about it being economically undesirable to employ human labor in production goes out the window when there are a billion workers available who have nowhere to go but up. There is no (natural) law that says that our robots will be any more economical than low- cost Chinese workers, even though they might be more economical than high-cost American workers.

<comment><USER19> It's all "for now." Eventually we will exhaust the Earth's resources and possibly become enslaved by a race of artificial intelligence, but I'm not pretending to even think about solutions to those problems.

It'd also be cheaper to have slaves, but we don't do that either. The ends do not justify the means. In order for capitalism to be effective at increasing standard-of-living across the board and allocate resources and capital efficiently, it must be tempered with rules that set limits on what avenues are pursued for profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of > experience that is so important in technological evolution...

wow ! just amazing.</comment>


Facebook Admits Too Much Facebook Probably Isn't Healthy - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/facebook-addiction/

<comment><USER2> Too much of anything isn't healthy. That's what "too much" means.

<comment><USER3> Relevant Fry and Laurie sketch: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoAe6LanFkg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People who spend the most time on facebook have the least to share.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given two possible FB usage trends [1], (1) high levels of usage leading to a quick burn out and "tuning out" from FB, or (2) moderate usage of FB over a very long timespan (possibly even a lifetime), it's pretty clear that (2) is preferable for a company that has become public and must become sustainable over a timespan of decades to continue its survival. Option (1) would be ideal for a startup looking for a quick flip, but FB is obviously past that stage. Their preference for avoiding user burnout is hardly surprising [2].

Offtopic, but I'm rather dismayed by seeing a meme on a "news" site :(.

[1] Clearly these are not the only two options in the universe, but they're the most illustrative for this purpose.

[2] Though I suppose that a public admission of this fact is somewhat noteworthy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Time to divert my focus to Google+ for a few days.

</comment><comment><USER7> Facebook is definitely a huge time waster and distraction. But it's so addicting...

<comment><USER8> Same can be said about hacker news... :(

<comment><USER9> Facebook doesn't have noprocrast, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Combining and Compressing Disqus' and Google Analytics' JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://mudge.github.com/2011/01/29/combining-and-compressing-disqus-and-google-analytics-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> "Both seem terse enough and are meant for inclusion in at the bottom of your web page."

That isn't true for Google Analytics. It's designed to be placed at the bottom of the head section: [http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTra...](http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html#Installation)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, enomar; I've updated the post to reflect Google's recommended placement of the asynchronous snippet (and your other comment regarding the script type attribute only defaulting in HTML5).

Perhaps instead of appending to document.body, it would be better to use document.documentElement.firstChild to use the head element instead (this is what is present on <http://diveintomark.org>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> "it turns out that the type attribute is optional"

It is optional for HTML5, but not for 4.01: [http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html#adef- type...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html#adef-type-SCRIPT)</comment>


Chrome beats IE market share for one day - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/22/chrome_number_one_for_a_day/

<comment><USER2> Chrome beats IE market share. It showed that over the weekend Chrome is the most used browser, while on a weekday, people go back to work and use IE. This has two implications: 1) Companies are still locked into some solutions like OWA and sharepoint because of which users still use IE at work. 2) Users have started distinguishing between browsers and at home they prefer using Chrome.

For companies with most of their clients using their own personal computers (like for us), we could expect a fair share of Chrome over IE and hence the following: 1) Our QA should have a major focus on testing with these browsers. 2) Architecture needs to focus on this stat. as a guiding principle while deciding future architecture.

Another interesting statistics is the second screenshot with the Mobile Operating systems. 1) The highest share of internet browsers still run a Nokia Symbian phone. Most likely these are traffic from developing countries, where monetizing from these clients is extremely difficult. 2) iPhone and Android are tied and very close.

So focusing only on iPhone could be a mistake. We need to open up to focusing on Android just as much.

<comment><USER3> > Companies are still locked into some solutions like OWA and sharepoint > because of which users still use IE at work.

My hunch is that a lot of companies are locked into legacy internal web applications that were optimized for IE6 and look like crap in a modern browser.

<comment><USER4> Even worse is a handful of web apps we use at work are coded specifically for Firefox. Firefox 3.6. They don't work in IE, Chrome, or newer Firefox versions.

Then we have some other ones that only support IE 6 and 7. My laptop only has 1GB of RAM. Yeah...

<comment><USER5> 1GB of RAM on a work computer? I'd flat out refuse to do anything until they fork out a whopping £30 to quadruple that.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I've edited this post. The original felt like an off topic rant.

Long story short, we're moving to BYOD soon, and until then I'm using a backup laptop from years ago since I'm pretty low on the food chain here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great to see (from the peaks in usage of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera on weekends) that people are choosing more progressive browsers over IE for home use. It'd also be neat to see the breakdown of IE _versions_ in this data too.

Microsoft sure do have their work cut out for them!

<comment><USER7> No, people are choosing _Chrome_ over IE for home use. The trend is clear; Chrome is likely to achieve a crushingly dominant market share in a couple of years, or sooner.

<comment><USER8> __> The trend is clear; Chrome is likely to achieve a crushingly dominant market share in a couple of years __

Assuming the trend will continue until Chrome becomes dominant. Firefox's didn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I like Chrome, the increase in Chrome's share also means more people will be using Google by default.. and their search dominance scares me. Consumer web startups can literally die overnight if Google penalizes them(google "TeachStreet"), or if their Adwords account got banned for some unknown reason.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps, but that's mostly because people prefer Google. When you install Chrome it pops up asking what search engine you would like to use. What should Google do differently? Microsoft hides the default search provider in the initial setup behind a "choose custom settings" button.

[http://nyacomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chrome- se...](http://nyacomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chrome-setup- page-1.jpg)

vs

<http://static.arstechnica.com/ie8_search.png>

<comment><USER11> Also, I have the impression that a few microsoft products (MSN, live etc) will automatically change other browser's search engine to Bing. My girlfriend told me her "google changed" after installing MSN.

But maybe it was something else, as she's doesn't exactly knows what she's doing. Can anyone confirm that?

<comment><USER4> This happens with a lot of software, unfortunately. On the side, I do computer repair (and charge for it). I'd say about 30% of my calls are "my Google changed to Ask!" after installing FoxIt or Digsby etc.

I was hoping that charging people money would lead them to finding their own solutions for trivial problems, but instead it has just padded my beer fund. C'est la vie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 12 years ago I suggested that IE would lose its crown to a web browser developed by a web site using an open source cross platform rendering engine developed by Apple.

And everyone said I was nuts.

<comment><USER13> If it's open source, it's not developed by apple......

<comment><USER14> WebKit is open source and is developed by Apple and other companies such as KDE, Google, Nokia, Samsung and others.

<comment><USER15> KDE is not a company and WebKit originated as a fork from KHTML, KDE's HTML rendering engine used in Konqueror. Too much credit is often ascribed to Apple for appropriating the engine on to a popular piece of software (OS X).

<comment><USER16> They did applied polish to it though and also built a new Javascript engine. I don't know who contributed what, but today's WebKit is a lot better than what KHTML was before being forked. I was once a KDE user and the first thing I did after a fresh install was to replace Konqueror.

But yes, truth be told, the KDE developers that worked on KHTML deserve a lot of credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my opinion, successfully marketing a seamlessly up-to-date browser is the 3rd greatest thing Google has done for the world (behind search and gmail)

</comment><comment><USER18> Internet Explorer: the employees browser of duress

<comment><USER19> Do you want the overhead of testing your internal web application on two browsers or one?

<comment><USER20> I'd rather test my web app in a browser with modern development tools (Chrome, Safari, IE 9, Firefox with Firebug).

<comment><USER21> I'm not so sure. If half of the value of the app you are developing is that it will still work 5 years after your consulting gig with no intervention, then it's hard to fault someone for choosing IE.

<comment><USER22> That doesn't make any sense. Forward compatibility is not an issue at all with modern browsers, and you're not obliged to update either.

<comment><USER23> _and you're not obliged to update either._

With chrome (and now firefox?) you kind of are obliged to update... Right? Due to their update scheme I've at least gotten the impression that they won't fix security issues in older versions, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER20> Firefox has a little middle ground where you can use specific versions outside of the fast release cycle and still get security updates. At least that's the plan. [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal) You don't get the 10 years of support that MSFT might provide for (some) versions of IE, but it's not like you have to upgrade every 6 weeks either. Also, because Firefox is open source, they're hoping that someone else will pick up the slack and continue to support older versions.

I haven't heard of any similar program from Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How many people _choose_ Chrome? I bought a Lenovo laptop recently and Google Chrome was pre-installed as the default browser. And although the desktop shortcut icon was the familiar one, it was renamed "Internet Browser."</comment>


Do you think I need a cofounder? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, So I am a 17 year old student who is running my own startup, PassWhiz. You can check it out at passwhiz.com   It's been a crazy ride and I have almost 4,000 users. I am now out of school and want to dedicate some serious time to selling this product. Selling involves a lot of emailing and chatting with high schools and middle schools. While I do enjoy talking to the schools I think have a co founder who has done this before, or just someone to help take some of the workload could be pretty useful. What do you think? Do you have any advice for someone in a position like this? <comment><USER2> I once worked in a particularly good position where the owner (my boss) would repeatedly say something that stuck with me. He was proud of the fact that he had been able to 'hire people who are smarter than me'.

That got me looking at my co-workers in a different light, and indeed, there were several people who worked with me, and they were each better at something than the owner. I realized that by hiring this way, he got to take the credit for a remarkably well-oiled machine that was able to get all sorts of things done exceptionally well. We all did the impossible & it was because of each of our points of expertise worked in synergy- like a puzzle coming together.

So, based on this experience, I would wholeheartedly recommend that you find someone- doesn't have to be a co-founder, could just be an employee, to work on something where your own talents are 'less' (for lack of a better word). Someone full/part-time who's dedicated to business development I would imagine would be a valuable asset.

I learned from my own (failed) startup, that the unexpected is guaranteed to happen. And if you need to allot your time & attention to something else that suddenly comes up, it'll help to have that someone around to help bear the load.

-my 2 cents. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it depends on your goals and needs. Where do you want the biz to be in 6 months, a year, three years? What skill sets do you need? As a developer, I've really benefited from bringing on a really good marketing head as a minor partner. My skills lack in that area, and with two people things get done faster. Just having someone else to work with day to day who is really invested is a huge accelerating force. Advisors aren't the same thing. If you can find someone you know has the skills you want and is go-getter enough to be a partner in a startup, that might be the best way to go. Nice site! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is cool and it's great you are getting into it while you are still in high school! I think bring someone on is a great idea. I have started a few micro/small businesses, and generally it's more fun and good to have someone to bounce ideas off of / help with the ups and downs.

Is the company making money, or is it a free service? Co-founder could be a good idea if you have a friend that you think could be helpful. If not, you could hire someone reliable (maybe on commission?). Or offer a % of company, base on performance. Just a few ideas - for what they are worth - best of luck!</comment>


Running a marathon was never crazier than during the 1904 St Louis Olympics - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-26/the-wildest-olympic-event-in-modern-history/12467362 <comment><USER2> If you've never watched Jon Bois or his Pretty Good series, you're in for a real treat. He has a video on the marathon that's very worth the 21 minutes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4AhABManTw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4AhABManTw)

</comment><comment><USER3> The most perplexing: How is it possible to come to believe water is bad for athletic performance, especially long distance running? Not only water, but seemingly distrusting any tangible amount of any liquid?

<comment><USER4> Exercise-associated hyponatremia is an issue for endurance athletes. If you drink too much water it can throw your electrolyte balance off which inhibits performance. Athletes have been told to hydrate to avoid heat stroke but sometimes they overdo it.

[https://www.outsideonline.com/1900801/tim-noakes-serious- pro...](https://www.outsideonline.com/1900801/tim-noakes-serious-problem- overhydration-endurance-sports)

<comment><USER5> For those who won't read the article... too much liquid intake can dilute the sodium levels in the body and lead to swelling of the brain which itself can cause all kinds of issues, some of which can lead to death.

<comment><USER6> And the worst part is that the symptoms are very similar to dehydration, so it's easy to keep drinking water to try to fix it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stories like this make me wonder about what sorts of pseudoscience people will laugh at us for believing in 100 years.

<comment><USER8> All sorts of nonsense is embedded in nutrition. And medicine of the mind is still very much at primitive levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Dollop has a great comedic re-telling and examination of this event. The show format is that one comedian reads a prepared and lightly researched account of the event, and another comedian reacts and improvises over it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFLjcX163WI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFLjcX163WI)

</comment><comment><USER10> It would appear the rat poison they are referring to is strychnine.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> Haha "The winner, who had to be dragged across the finishing line by his trainers, was doped up and hallucinating on rat poison.

That was only after it was discovered that the first person to cross the line, Fred Lorz, actually hitched a ride in a car for most of the race."

</comment><comment><USER12> Those men barefoot is a sobering image.

<comment><USER4> Abebe Bikila won the marathon in the 1960 Olympics running barefoot. Shoes weren't much of an advantage until fairly recently when materials scientists figured out how to make foam that returned a significant amount of energy.

<comment><USER13> A more recent barefoot example, though at shorter distances, is South African runner Zola Budd. She ran 3000m barefoot in the 1984 Olympics. That race was notable for Budd and American Mary Decker leading the pack, then colliding and Budd's spikes piercing Budd's foot. Decker crashed out and Budd finished 7th.

<comment><USER14> *Decker's spikes pierced Budd's ankle - then Decker fell onto the track rail and was out, Budd ran the whole race but was too shaken up (/slightly injured) to win it as she was expected to.

Both of them were too fast to have much experience competing in a pack of runners. Budd was only 17 and Decker was older, but had been winning international competitions since she was 14, too young to even enter the Olympics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing)

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted because you're technically correct. For a statement to be proven false ("running a marathon was _NEVER_ crazier...") all it takes is one counter example. You've provided that counter example; the statement is false.

<comment><USER16> I'm guessing downvotes because the counter-example comparatively isn't that "crazy". Bear with me here, especially if you don't recall the details. Every participant was affected by conditions in 1904, by dusty roads if nothing else. Whereas in 2013 I had crossed the finish line hours before and was taking a nap when the bomb went off, and the top finishers had already finished well before me. That's not to diminish the damage for those affected in 2013, but there is an argument to be made that the 2013 crazy didn't start until the race was effectively over. I mean, if we're going to argue with the title, _running_ a marathon (as the title says) in the Boston area on the 2nd Monday of April 2013 was fine _for me_ , the crazy started afterward. 1904 sounded crazy from the start.

That, and contrarianism for the sake of it.</comment></comment></comment>