No Hello (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nohello.com/ <comment><USER3> I used to work in a big company where people would often drop a "hello" and then wait for a response before saying why they were messaging. It was mildly infuriating because I would check the internal chat about once an hour in order to remain productive. So the first time I check I see the hello, then next time I check I see what they actually wanted to say doubling the amount of time until they got a response compared to asking in one go. It doesn't need to be a single IM message but it should be sent pretty swiftly after.

I always wondered if people wanted to wait until the messagee was sat on the other end of the keyboard giving their full attention. If this is the case a phonecall would be more appropriate imo.

<comment><USER4> It's such a weird thing. Most of my coworkers don't do this, but a few will do a "Hi" type message.

It wastes so much time for everyone involved.

I sometimes wonder if these same people think I'm being rude when I write a message like "Hey, xyz, I was wondering if you knew PDQ about ABC?"

Like, are they expecting the convo to go like

        me: "Hi"
        them: "Hello"
        me: "How's your day been?"
        them: "fine"
        me: "Crazy weather"
        them: "yeah"
        me: "Do you have a second to chat about ABC"?
        them: "Just a sec"
        me: "Ok"
        them: "Ok, shoot"
        me: "Do you if PDQ about ABC?"
        them: "Oh yeah, it's 123"

Because I've absolutely had chat conversations like that. It drives me nuts because it's stuff that can be solved in 10 seconds but ends up taking 30 minutes worth of disruptions.

<comment><USER5> A Hello wastes my time, but sometimes I go along with it to see if that's what they really wanted - maybe they didn't have a question after all, and when I have time I'm happy to have a friendly chat:

        them: Hello
        *hour or two passes*
        me: Hey how are you?

But so far every time they say Good and then ask their question :(. A surprising amount of the time when I wait an hour to respond to a Hello they'll tell me they already figured out the answer to their question too (I would never wait that long to respond to actual questions though).

<comment><USER6> > when I wait an hour to respond to a Hello they'll tell me they already > figured out the answer to their question

I used to be part-time sysadmin back in the day, and I fondly remember the benefits of not answering quickly.

Morning: "Hey how do I configure XYC in ABC?"

Afternoon: "I figured it out, it's in .abcconfig"

This was very counter-intuitive for me since I wanted to do a good job and answer quickly, but later I realized it's better for everyone to follow an informal (but well-defined) SLA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A related peeve...

Using chat for support. The first thing it asks is "Please explain why you need assistance"...

I fill it in with _all the pertinent details_...

Then, when the support person finally comes online their first or second message is: _...and how may I help you today?_

<comment><USER8> Or the chat AND phone systems that have you fill out all the info about your account, then they ask "what is your account number"

Why the hell did I just spend the time to type that in to my phone if I know have to type it again for you.....

<comment><USER9> Often used to confirm information accuracy, no mis-entered information, or unauthorised access attempt.

<comment><USER10> How does having to enter the same account information twice in the same session prevent unauthorized access? If an unauthorized person knows my account number, they can easily enter it twice.

And if the account number doesn't exist or doesn't match the name, they know immediately that one or the other was mis-entered.

<comment><USER9> Automated dial/entry, handoff to an operator, especially in high-volume attacks. Verbal repetition requires greater process coordination by the attacker.

Cues such as hesitation, discomfort, etc., may also be present.

The far more prevalent case is likely simply to guard against mis-keyed digits.

Similarly in heathcare, virtually every caregiver handoff involves asking for name and DoB. For the caregiver this helps confirm they are (literally) on the right page (patient record). Patients may see this as tedious.

<comment><USER8> >>Verbal repetition requires greater process coordination by the attacker. Cues such as hesitation, discomfort, etc., may also be present.

Actually no... The most effective Social Engineering attacks are ones with simulated chaos going on in the call, and simulated high emotions by the caller..

There is no evidence or actual theory making a person repeat the same number over and over again does anything about annoy legit callers

This sounds very much like security policy created in the same manner of "everyone must change their passwords every 30 days" which we know now makes things LESS secure not more.

>>The far more prevalent case is likely simply to guard against mis-keyed digits.

Again your data input validation should be taking care of that before you ever reach the agent in the first place

<comment><USER9> Most successful, perhaps. Most common, though?

Other points taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chill out people. Get a little more patient and a little less nitpicky about protocol. You're not that busy or important. None of us are.

This culture of nitpicking text communication styles has been with us for decades and isn't going away soon. Same on IRC and Prestel before that. And it has always been about providing the enforcers with a sense of power and reinforcing tribalism around those who know the rules and those who need to be forcibly educated.

If it's good enough for Lionel Richie, it's good enough for you.

<comment><USER12> I do think the context where these communication issues are the most painful are when there are already other serious problems. But if you have a whole org where a decent fraction of people engage in these patterns, it can turn your day into one substantially driven by pointless interrupts.

Broken habits in an org that can exacerbate this:

\- People don't feel safe saying stuff in a group context so there's a large number of DM conversations at any one time.

\- The chat app is actually used for time-critical issues and sometimes an immediate response is strongly expected. People feel obligated to rely on notifications.

\- There's in general a poor commitment to supporting a "low-interrupt" mode of work for some roles.

<comment><USER11> Rules like the above are what causes a chilling effect on public comms and a rise in DMs. So chill out and create a relaxed space for your colleagues. If you need a low interrupt mode, get off Slack. If you're in a job where you can't, that's a separate issue. If you have a time critical comms channel that's being used for random chatter, it's not a time critical channel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most stressful version of this for me is when someone sidles up to you on chat and asks "is X working?" or "is Y supposed to do Z?"

Like, if you're saying it's not working: say that. If you're saying it's not doing what you expect: say that. It's the QA version of "we have to talk" and I'm instantly anxious until you clarify.

<comment><USER14> We work in an open space and people usually ask to make sure they arent the crazy one. It can go either direction: we had to do that cause x, or yeah thats not how its supposed to work... Followed by... Well its how it works for now cause of this and this... Along with everyone agreeing its wrong. They arent trying to mess with you just confirm intended behavior.

<comment><USER15> In-person I almost universally heard stuff like "is anyone else having problems with X? the site won't load for me" and that second part _is crucial_.

In chat, something like 1/4-1/2 are "is X working?" followed by total silence. Sometimes they _really are_ just asking if it's running, i.e. does X still exist. Sometimes they're having a failed build on a different system because their dependency manager cache is broken and it's blaming random libraries. Sometimes the frontend is busted.

What they're doing _in practice_ is asking for 1:1 dedicated help on _literally anything_ , so the only reasonable choice for a responder is those unicorn devs who know everything somehow. They almost never exist, so those "questions" go unanswered for a long time.

<comment><USER14> Thats usually who I try to be but I have been burned by it cause I didnt mention why I was falling behind at two former jobs. It did cost me a job cause of that plus the fact they were over engineering what would of been a few months into a few years effort just to be bleeding edge.

It sucks how some environments are worse than others. I think the biggest quality for software developers is humility. Without humility you could end up with some nasty devs. I have worked with people who get personallu attached to their code being quality but they dont follow project protocol or write hacky code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Three other things:

\- Use spacing to make your message easy to parse.

\- Have clear questions that are easy to jump back and respond to. Have them separated out by spacing, and preferably numbered.

\- If there's something I need to copy paste, an email address, a specific id, a phone number, then put it on it's own line. Then I can double click and get the whole thing rather then dragging the cursor to do it.

<comment><USER17> To expand on your second point:

The very first thing you should type after your initial greeting should be your question(s). Don't bury the lede.

You can provide all the additional explanation (i.e. what you were doing when it broke, where you've looked, what you've tried, etc) _after_ you ask your questions. By asking up front, you frame the conversation so that the person you are communicating with can read your supporting information with the correct context.

<comment><USER16> I tend to do the reverse, with questions as the very last thing. Sorta introduce what I'm about to be asking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related thought,

But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up?

Into individually

sent

Messages?

Like this?

One

Right after

The other.

Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations when colleagues communicate like this to be a real teeth grinder when you're zeroed in on work (or trying to take a short pomodoro / coffee break and space out for a bit between tasks)?

<comment><USER19> Nope. Not my duty to modulate my communication to YOUR notification preferences.

I say this as someone who has been working remote with various teams for nearly seven years.

Crucial to the success of any remote team is feeling comfortable sharing and communicating via async and text based means.

You can always just turn $SLACKISH off and actually focus. If you're on call or in a situation wherein you need to watch messages and respond immediately - you're not going to reach flow state anyways.

Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings.

I'll leave my bite sized messages for detailed threading, thanks!

<comment><USER18> I'm not asking you or anyone to moderate or change anything about how you communicate, friend (entirely because I know how futile it is). Just idly pondering if others have similar reactions to it.

<comment><USER19> Fair play! I have a tendency to take a hard-line on this relatively minor issue.

<comment><USER18> Why is that, you think?

<comment><USER19> Deep seated psychological issues with control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This raised the question of - why not use email instead, then?

Then answer I came up with is that the asker wants an immediate-ish response.

But in this case, the "hello" makes sense not as a pleasantry, but as a way of finding out, "if I ask you a question right now, will I be able to get an immediate-ish response?"

It doesn't sound like this problem can be easily solved with "nohello", it sounds like a more involved solution might be needed.

<comment><USER21> Or you can just send me a brief sentence about what your problem is. So I can decide how much of a context switch it is. At my last company, I could be working on any number of problems from the front end (not likely), to infrastructure, to dealing with documentation for a customer. If you tell me what the issue is, when I do come up for air, I can decide where I place you in the queue. A "hello" goes to the bottom of the queue. I might not even put "respond to bo1234 to see what he wants."

If I am asking a question where your response isn't blocking me, I'll say that...

"No rush, it's not blocking me. I have X,Y I can be working on".

"I'm working a little late tonight. If you're busy, this can be a tomorrow problem."

I personally prefer a wall of text telling me everything they have already tried. If they have already tried my first ideas, I can decide whether I have time or not.

<comment><USER20> So it sounds like you want email, or a ticketing system. Not live chat. am I right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was in an IRC channel a while back that had "Don't ask to ask, ask" in its topic, because it was so common for people to join and write "May I ask a question?".

<comment><USER23> "May I ask a question?"

"You just did."

"May I ask another?"

"You just did."

<comment><USER24> "May I ask two more questions?"

"You are allowed 3 questions and you just used them."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This started going inside Google quite a while back. My feeling then is about the same as now: feel free to say "hello" to me if we happen to be on the same IM system at the same time and you are "opening hailing frequencies", so to speak. I might not be there. I might not have a chance to chat right then. You can find out both without a serious investment in time pre-typing some huge thing which might be a total waste anyway.

It's a good opportunity to get some idea of how quickly things will move, and whether the other end is willing and able to have a solid chat at that time. This applies to being either party in the chat: the asker or the asked!

What's far more annoying is when the [typing] indicator goes on and stays on for a couple of minutes, at which point you are "rewarded" with a wall of text. By then, they have filibustered the chat, and are probably three steps down the wrong road if they got off on the wrong foot, and they need to be backed up and pointed in another direction.

If they start small and evolve it as a natural conversation with back and forths, then a whole lot of needless typing can be avoided.

</comment><comment><USER26> People who just say "Hi" to me often don't get an answer at all.

I don't want to risk someone interrupting my chain of thought with some request that I can't / don't want to act on.

But if I respond to a "Hi" and then decide that I don't want to deal with the actual question, that's perceived as rude.

If you ask the question straight out, then I can decide to respond or not.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I have a co-worker notorious about this. I just quit answering until he writes something amounting to a statement. It's annoying to keep clicking away from a problem for niceties, especially when it's every...single..day.

<comment><USER28> i think it would be reasonable to just guide him to say "hey, you often just start off these online messages with 'hi.' can you just get to the point first?"

<comment><USER27> Oh, I have...but more gently. His reply is that he prefers to engage in conversation than just receive a reply. I do understand that point, but also that it's a bit selfish.

<comment><USER29> Well then. He can wait in the conversation queue, instead of the request queue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Years ago I worked with several people from UK. No subject matter will be broached until pleasantries have been exchanged. After a period of time they will ask to proceed. Then, only after a definitive "yes, go ahead" and a "no, this is not too much trouble", will they finally make their request. I found it both charming and terribly inefficient.

<comment><USER31> It's the same with those ponderous extended variants on "can I just jump in here. Would you mind if I asked a question? Because I'm curious to know..." \- seem to be to be used by people from all over.

<comment><USER32> I've found that one a lot more common than the "Hello" thing, but I'm sure it varies by the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a strong counter-argument though, based on the increase of online meetings and screen sharing scenarios... Not everybody always remembers to silence screen notifications while sharing screens.

Which leads to more-than-once-a-week situations of "Hi - full question or comment notification that probably shouldn't be seen by co-worker/boss/client" popping up during the share.

A simple "hello" \--wait for answer-- protocol makes it a quick way of checking if it's a good time.

</comment><comment><USER34> I totally agree with the sentiment represented here but thinking linking someone to this is a bad way to handle the situation with others. I think it's best handled by asking them after they make one of these requests and they get their answer. Linking to external sites feels passive aggressive to most people who are just trying to be nice.

<comment><USER35> But it's the kind of thing you can put in your Slack status so that the moment someone opens up a DM with you, they might see it, read it, and then know, all before they've typed out their first message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Pinging someone with a "hey" or "hello" isn't really the same as putting a call on hold. As the site points out, chat is asynchronous, so the recipient doesn't have to wait around as they would on hold. Plus it's a status check. With a call you have instant audio feedback to know they're on the line. Not so with chat.

Granted, you don't always need to establish the recipient's immediate availability. But often chat gets used for questions that need answers _almost now_ but don't warrant the time and emotional investment of a phone call.

If you don't do a status check, you risk the recipient not being available to answer your question in time. And if they aren't, you'll waste more time typing your question than you would have with a precautionary hello.

<comment><USER37> Hm. Don't most chat programs offer a status?

Like "Away", "DND", "Available", etc.?

<comment><USER36> Yes...but I've never worked at a place where they were accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> To whomever went to the trouble of writing this up, then giving it a dedicated domain -- thank you, you're making the world a better place.

</comment><comment><USER39> The jist of this is you should still be polite and say Hi or Hello in your message, but include the question in the message.

You'll get a response much faster.

I'll often do something like

Hi <name>, <insert question>

</comment><comment><USER40> I usually go for a combined approach: pre-type my long question in Notepad++, then post a polite "hello" immediately followed by another message with the actual question. So it's both polite and considerate.

It has a bonus point of not losing what you typed in case the chat window bugs out.

<comment><USER41> This is a good approach. More people should do this. I should do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I call this Hi-jacking

<comment><USER43> So good

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Please don't finish with "Ok/good" neither¹.

I have these VVs in my chatbox below each message, one V for delivered and one V for _read_. Please only reply if you have objections and/or questions and/or more time to think. Otherwise,

      silence implies consent (until reply)

Another open-ended question is "when will you show up at <location> / be free?". I don't know. Maybe not today. Maybe not even this week. Because "as a cooperating peer I will either show up and help you ASAP, or negotiate the term, or maybe will delegate and not show up at all, but I can only do that _knowing what the deal is_ ". Don't be afraid of being imperative, just shoot your problem at me, and we'll decide. Even if you just miss my company and want to share a bottle or two. When in doubt, remember the second V rule.

¹ You cannot expect third parties to follow these seemingly non-polite shortcuts of course, but it makes messaging much easier for those who are your most reliable peers. Repeating the same polite handshake/TIME_WAIT routines again and again and again quickly converges to the point where it is not even remotely polite².

² That may sound harsh at the face value, but I seen how good relationships suffered because of exactly these sorts of conversation. A busy person will answer "yes" to "busy?" when all their contact wanted was to meet at the evening. Or "in the city, can't talk" to "where are you?" when they meant "if you're near X, do Y". But all windows close during the day and at the evening it is too late to ask again, because kids, plans, etc. Repeat that few times and both be repulsed.

</comment><comment><USER45>
        A: Hello
        B: Hello
        A: How do I do X?
        B: <instructions>
        B: Does that answer your question?
        A: Yes
        A: Bye
        B: Bye

        A: Acquire attention lock
        B: Attention lock acquired
        A: Information request
        B: Information request reply
        B: Reply satisfaction request
        A: Reply satisfaction response
        A: Release attention lock
        B: Attention lock released

</comment><comment><USER46> Google has a whole list of these (ActionableIM, OnlyHello, ContextPlz); I'm into FastHello

1\. Open the chat window, and type your question with no "hello". Do not press enter. 2\. Instead, press Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-X to cut your question out of the chat window and into your clipboard. 3\. type and send "hello" 4\. Pause 2-5 seconds 5\. Ctrl-P and enter to send your full question.

<comment><USER47> "Hello" <Control Enter> Type your question. Your welcome.

<comment><USER48> You can thank email for people being to scared to do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I grew up in IRC. I almost got fired from my first job for being to direct around sensitive colleagues. My boss coached me to start my emails with "Hello :)". I'm better but I still get into trouble from time to time, especially on a Monday morning when I forget to ask how someone's weekend was!

That's also a fun one because I love breaking the "my weekend was great how about you?" monotony by actually telling the truth. I remember once going for an interview and the interviewer casually asked how my weekend was as we walked through the office. He wasn't expecting me to say that I didn't have a great time because I'd spent it moving out of my ex's place and a family member passed away the same weekend. How was your weekend?

I mostly dislike all these fake interactions we have. Show me something real any day of the week. If you can't service my request because your mind is on something else, I'd take that. Just give me a human, not a half-assed care- less social dressage.

</comment><comment><USER50> Part of the 'hello' problem is to get around the lack of context about what the other person is doing - particularly about who else might see their screen at that time. I still prefer just asking the question but that was the reason some others gave when I asked why they did the 'hello's.

</comment><comment><USER51> While it's a bit annoying I never saw the problem with this.

The article sounds like the author will give their full attention to the chat application after replying "hello" until they receive another message.

You can just switch yourself to nonblocking mode and handle other events and wait until epoll marks this chat readable again, or if you don't have any sort notifications turned on, just check back when you have a second. Worst case, the person at the other end wastes their time, _not_ you. If it takes you an hour, their bad. But chances are they turn to something else in the meantime and don't stare at the chat window for hours on end. Would be kinda bad if you were on vacation and accidentally left your chat client running.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is good advice, for the people who tends to ask to ask, or surround their questions with bunch of fluff.

On the other hand, is you, the question-receiver. The example starts with "CO- WORKER WAITS WHILE YOU PHRASE YOUR QUESTION" but that's not how I usually deal with these types of conversations.

If someone just writes "Hi" to me without something else and I'm busy, I won't reply until there is more messages, and instead continue with my work.

Although, ideally there would be no "Hi" messages. But, not everything goes as we want it to.

</comment><comment><USER31> What interests me about this is often I feel the person may be trying (perhaps poorly) to help you and it's just backfiring.

Most often it feels like an attempt to get initial attention because if they launch straight into something the start may be lost whilst the recipient is switching focus.

Clearly the point against this would be that you'll have the chat history available, but there are apps where the flashing up of the notifications is in the corner and they disappear inconveniently before you've focused. So perhaps I suspect it's an attempt to get that focus moved and _then_ start with the payload.

There is some logic in this, annoying as it can be. People do really badly with focus when switching context, just look at how often someone will call you, you say your name (ie the person they were hoping to speak to usually) and then they ask if they could speak to <your name>, because they've been primed to ask this and didn't update mentally in light of new info fast enough to kill the needless question.

I don't advocate the initial hello, but at times, I've broken text up where I get the key detail follow up ready in advance before the initial gambit is sent. This stops it being a whopping paragraph. I'd only use this sparingly but it helps at times and there's a hint of the focus aware point in it.

</comment><comment><USER53> This concept has to be the new[1] whathaveyoutried.com, the site which became the favourite snarky unhelpful comment on StackOverflow for a while and which the author realised was a bad and unhelpful approach and regretted making.

Just say "Hello" back. You don't have to wait while they are typing. And if you are busy enough that you don't want to be disturbed, put "Do not disturb" on or close the chat client.

[1] newer, anyway. That was 2008 to this 2013. What's the 2018 version?

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm sorry, but are you really losing that much productivity by being a bit more human and replying to that hello, asking how the other person this? in any case, once the question is asked, you will be context switching and trying to find that answer.

I find that saying hello and then waiting is more practical. If the other person is busy, then they won't reply and they'll reply at a more convenient time.

<comment><USER55> There were more arguments than just productivity.

The article supplied an telephone analogy. Put yourself into the situation of the recipient. Would you or would you not mind being put on hold immediately after being called?

> I find that [doing something that does not affect me adversely, but does for > the other party] is more practical.

That kind of reasoning for the benefit of oneself without consideration for the other side causes bad blood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> if you write "hello" and they answer "hello", they are under some social obligation to answer rather promptly, whereas if you write your question first, it may simply get ignored. So I tend to write a short hello first.

possibly some other social factors at play here, but still, my experience.

<comment><USER57> That's exactly the problem, though. You're expecting prompt replies in an async communication medium. Ask your question and then they'll get to it when they have time. If they never reply when you do that then there's a larger issue, but that rarely ever happens. People expecting immediate replies in Slack is a big issue that leads to a lot of unneeded stress at work, and decreases everyone's productivity in the long run.

<comment><USER56> I dont expect an immediate reply, just within reasonable time. I i've made the experience that a question you ask upfront simply gets ignored and then forgotten.

<comment><USER57> When that happens to me, I'll give it a reasonable amount of time based on the importance of the question (which could be a few hours or a few days) and then gently prompt with "hey, sorry to bug you, wondering if you had a chance to look at my question?". That has never not worked out for me.

If it's such an emergency that it can't wait, then I can call them. But most of the things we think are emergencies aren't, and most things can wait longer than we think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> An approach I'm using to deal with "hello"-only messages:

– Jog your memory for any input you might've been awaiting or could use from the "hello" person, and hit them back with a greeting + request or question.

– If they really cannot help you on anything and you are not inclined to chit- chat, just ignore the "hello" message until substance follows.

– If "hello" was too much of a bother at the moment, perhaps you should've been using DnD mode?

– An effective way to use DnD and remain accessible is to set up a periodic alarm to check instant messengers. If you find a lone "hello" when checking messages and you can't think of any input you might want from that person, "hello" back and leave it until next alarm. Your counterparty will learn to get to the point quicker.

</comment><comment><USER59> if I'm in regular communication with someone, I'll skip the hi or inline it. the hello comes in handy when I'm getting in touch with someone I might only talk to once every couple weeks. then I like to just kind of break the ice, make friendly conversation so we both can feel at ease and friendly with each other.

I like to be friends with my co-workers - and there are times where if you are hitting them up for an ask, and ignoring them otherwise, thet might feel like you don't value them as a person ... A greeting, a little gossip or "HR" repartée can make two people trust each other - <USER2> in the end can foster its own kind of efficiency!

</comment><comment><USER60> I had a colleague at a company that would always start his Slack chats with "Hey" and then wait for a reply. My "response" was to not respond until he finally got the message and would continue with what he actually had to say. Worked for me but YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER61> I had a colleague who would do exactly this in order to slack at work -> pinging someone and saying 'hello', then some time passes until the person responds, then the enquirer asks a question, then the person responds and it goes on...

And everytime during the stand-ups the person would be - "Oh, I couldn't communicate the issue on time, I will continue working in the issue today..."

I noticed this once because we spent two hours discussing about some topic.

(we have a milestone-based flexible release model, milestones could be scheduled every couple of months at times, so the person would slack quite a lot)

</comment><comment><USER62> I generally agree with this, but I also think there is a legitimate use case for saying "Hello", namely when you have a request that actually needs a fairly imminent response and if the person you are pinging isn't responding right away, you need to move on to someone else.

If you type the full message to the first person and don't get an immediate response, as you paste the same message to other people, the first person or few people who didn't respond immediately might waste their time duplicating work that someone else you reached is already doing.

</comment><comment><USER63> Gotta love how programmers are so anti-social they'd rather bitch for decades about salutations than elect even a single dev to spend five minutes scripting a pleasant-reply-bot.

</comment><comment><USER47> I always assume its because the person wants to make sure you are there before they bother to type the question. If not they will work it out themselves.

Never respond to hi. :)

</comment><comment> replies-to-fool This might be a little farfetched but is a possible solution to this having chat messages be directly previewed so that the person on the other end can see what you're typing as you do so.

This could bridge the gap between the speed of chatting and talking.

Or are there unintended cinsequences I'm not accounting for (such as accidentaly copy pasting unintended info)?

</comment><comment><USER64> I don't get how someone can get so annoyed at what is just basic politeness. Clearly, computers are making some folks insane

<comment><USER65> I think the point is that basic politeness involves not appearances of being polite, but rather thinking of the other person, their time, and how you would feel if the roles were reversed. I do agree though that going as far as to register a domain for this one social quirk is a bit much.

<comment><USER9> _basic politeness involves not appearances of being polite, but rather thinking of the other person_

THIS!!!

I have the unfortunate experience of somewhat regularly engaging with people who:

1\. Act in a manner / do something they think the other party should appreciate, where

2\. The other party does not in fact appreciate this, and is often burdened, bothered, or inconvenienced.

3\. When informed of this, the first party both accuses the second that they are ungrateful (for not actually being helped) and controlling (for expressing alternate preferences, including often no assistance).

The cycle can reepeat, over precisely the same exchanges, repeatedly and over long periods.

Small children not knowing better is excusable. Adults not so much.

Kindness and consideration are not forcing your preferences down another's throat (exceptions for specific therapeutic expertise and treatment), but in offering to someone _that which they express a preference for or interest in_. So long as this isn't actively acutely harmful, one should oblige, aand graciously.

Keep in mind that "where the roles reversed" _may_ not be a reliable guide. It's not what you would want, but what _they_ prefer.

This lesson seems poorly assimilated by many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> To add more to this I once had coworker who fist wrote 'hi' and then, in addition asked: 'Can I have a question?' (and waited for response) - it was a bit annoying, and made my style of going straight into conversation ('hi, can you _reason of the conversation_ :) a bit weird, unpleasant

</comment><comment><USER67> There are times I have done this if I am not sure if the person at the other end is presenting/sharing screen and the matter is somewhat sensitive.

If that screen sharing software world and messaging/chat software works had some sort of protocol/handshake not to step on each other, many frustrating situations can be avoided.

</comment><comment><USER60> A related annoyance is people who hit return after every statement, so that you end up with multiple alerts for the same message, and worse, the alert you see first is for the last statement that was posted.

</comment><comment><USER68> I've been trying to do this more myself. I have noticed that I'd get someone's attention, then start writing up what I have to say while they waited for me to finish typing.

</comment><comment><USER69> Ought to put (2013) in the title?

Previously discussed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19648415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19648415)

<comment><USER70> Yes; that thread was 2019 and this one was 2017 - with a comment from apparently the original author:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I always push No Hello whenever I start on a new team or at a new company. I should publish my latest revision, which I think is more kind and convincing than this original.

</comment><comment><USER72> What are polite ways to introduce colleagues to this concept?

<comment><USER73> I have www.nohello.com as my status message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> There's a lot of etiquette we can use to improve chat. Another one is phrasing questions in a "search friendly" way, using log names and error strings.

</comment><comment><USER75> My manager used to do this all the time.

Typical scenario:

Manager: hey

<an hour or so may go by>

Me: what's up?

Manager: nvm

</comment><comment><USER76> When someone does this to me I just don't respond.

I generally know who likes to talk with me and who just needs help.

<comment><USER53> Your second sentence implies you respond to the people who like to talk, and don't respond to the people who "just" need your help. Although it seems like it ought to be the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get this kind of "Hello" message all the time. Also popular are "Are you there?" or "$FIRST_NAME ?". It's one of the reasons why I much prefer e-mail to chat. With e-mail, people have to actually formulate a question before hitting "send".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The other thing that gets my goat is the person that sends every line. I guess it's hard not to do in slack since "enter" sends, but I really wish slack would debounce messages notifications from the same person.

<comment><USER57> I feel like at this point anyone using Slack should know to shift-enter to add a newline without sending. I don't understand why people still have a problem with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I see go/nohello has gone external, lovely.

<comment><USER78> Also aka.ms/nohello.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really want to set this as my status message in slack, but don't want people to think I'm rude.

Would you think it was rude if you saw this link as somebody's status message?

<comment><USER18> I tried for a while before giving up because almost nobody in my org reads statuses or heeds them to begin with anyway (as I've learned on multiple PTO days where I would change my status to "On vacation, please contact Mike at ——— for support" and getting P1 messages and calls over slack anyway).

Nowadays I'm just a stochastic replier.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a great point I was on "vacation" last week and got messaged every single day despite my palm tree emoji.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. I'm firmly in camp "slack isn't the problem with workplace communication, it just happens to amplify the problems that were already there".

Most (not all) tech that tries to "fix" communication in the office suffers from this problem though so I'm not blaming Slack alone for this. It just is what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> "Hi, quick question"

</comment><comment><USER28> im in sf and we had a new contractor in india who wanted to ask about my PR comments and started with "hi." yeah...

</comment><comment><USER80> no one is addressing the cultural difference here. In India, people wait in chat after saying hello for a reply.They assume that other person might be busy and also from Indian perspective hi followed by asking for help or question immediately is bad. This is not the case in US where people would expect the intention right after greeting.</comment>


A new way of blogging about ruby - <AUTHOR> http://blog.klipse.tech/ruby/2016/06/20/blog-ruby.html <comment><USER2> This is nice but how is it different from all others "try Ruby in the browser" consoles? I assume it's all about simplicity of usage?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow I love this. Yes we had forgotten, bring on that interactivity!</comment>


Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Programming - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lelouchb/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-programming-1bfef19f032c <comment><USER2> Javascript is single threaded. Async is not parallelism. As far as I know, the only way to run javascript in parallel is to use child_process.fork() or cluster on node.js, server-side. I do not know of any browsers which implement such.

<comment><USER3> In browsers you can use webworkers to get parallel execution.

<comment><USER2> Cool. The author makes no mention of that.</comment></comment></comment>


Patients with Access to Legal Medical Cannabis Are More Likely to Quit Opioids - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187795 <comment><USER2> I am allergic to marijuana, but I fully support the legalization of medical marijuana.

I was on steroids for my condition. Steroids are really hard on the body. My first two attempts to quit landed me back on additional medication. One involved an ER visit and a week in bed. Doctors never told me I needed to taper off, nor provided other support for helping me get off the steroids. Trying to quit was creating potentially life threatening crises for me. Doctors were not proactively helpful to me in escaping this trap that kept me on the steroids because trying to quit was threatening to kill me.

An internet friend told me I needed to taper off, that going cold turkey was too hard on the body. A different internet friend told me to take guaifenesin, the active ingredient in Mucinex. Over time, internet friends helped me sort out that generics were tolerated better by me because they lack the blue dye and the time release stuff. They are also cheaper. One internet friend hand- packed pills for me as a Christmas gift to make sure I could get this drug with zero additives and in a lower dose than you can purchase OTC.

This not only helped me get off the steroids, it helped me get off of multiple other prescription drugs over a period of several years. Addicts are not people who lack self discipline. They are people who need practical help to get free of the prison of their drugs. Our current approach frequently helps to actively make it harder or impossible for them to do that.

Most doctors completely suck at helping patients effectively get off drugs. They are in the business of prescribing drugs and surgeries and can be shockingly oblivious to relatively cheap, simple solutions that can provide a patient with stepped down intervention so trying to quit isn't akin to hurling yourself off a cliff.

And then we blame the addict for failing to get to the other side on their own. We have to stop this.

<comment><USER3> i am curious what your allergy is to mj? have you tried other forms of it like edibles or the higher in CBD tinctures or products? or if edibles weren't an option have you tried vaping or smoking? Not saying you should try it but I am curious how your allergy manifested and what you actually tried before you came to that conclusion.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I would wonder what effect THC distillate with added terps would have. And the allergy - is it a food allergy, to cannabis protein or seed protein, or to pollen?

<comment><USER2> My allergies are not really all that pertinent to the point I am making other than to emphasize that I have no plans to consume marijuana myself, so my position has no ulterior motive wrt me wanting access to marijuana personally. So I have to wonder why on earth that is getting questioned. I have concluded no good will come of me cooperating with answering intrusive personal questions that aren't really even pertinent to the discussion.

<comment><USER4> How is our responding to the first thing you stated in your comment intrusive or not relevant?

<comment><USER2> It is intrusive because people are asking for additional details about me. It isn't relevant because it really has nothing to do with the process of managing drug withdrawal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Portugual is the definitive case-study and justification for decriminalizing all drugs. The War on Drugs prohibition is, and always will be, a failure that just makes prisons, arms suppliers and politicians rich while doing little to reduce drug abuse and also destroys the lives of millions of people and their families.

</comment><comment><USER6> One is "legal", but has to be put into pills in labs. The other is illegal, but you can grow it yourself at home. Guess which is which and why.

Most pharmaceutical companies should be sued/closed for endangering the public, extremely profiting from bogus patents at the expense of the public and so much more.

<comment><USER7> That's just never going to happen; it would take a revolution to make it possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Canabis as a short term harm reduction tool may be good or useful for some people, but there may be danger in the long term, especially wrt overdosing if/when opioid relapse occurs. Also, the sample size of 37 & heavily weighted toward self selected back-pain sufferers is concerning. Also the quality of life survey does not appear to be one that is normed. Overall I would agree with their conclusion. I'm interested in larger studies, especially longer term. Edit: laRger

<comment><USER9> Not sure what you mean about the danger of opioid relapse.

I had esophageal cancer and they prescribed me as much hydrocodone syrup as I wanted. Quarts of it. It was a godsend for the pain, but a huge bitch to quit afterwards.

Had they instead limited the quantity, and supplemented with cannaboids, maybe it would have been easier to taper off.

The current system, at least for me, encourages the patient to make up reasons to keep getting the opiates.

I succeeded eventually by begging benzodiazepines from friends to help me taper off the hydrocodone.

Some kind of pre plan to deal with it would have been so much better. It's as if the doctors have no idea what happens when they cut that supply off.

<comment><USER8> The danger of the relapse is that a person often returns to the same dose as when they last used. Their body is no longer able to handle that high dose and they OD.

<comment><USER10> How is that different than with any other method of quitting opioids? It's not specific to marijuana at all, so it's not a fair criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My mother in law fits this group - long time opioid user due to chronic pain from lupus and various complications. Recently went on medical marijuana and dropped her opioid usage way down. There were other ancillary benefits too, less anxiety being a major one.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kratom has been (somewhat silently to the mainstream) been helping many break free of opioid dependence. It also has helped many who are in chronic pain and can't get access to good lain relievers, or are allergic to them.

Edit: r/kratom can be a good start. It also is in need of support as the FDA is currently trying to regulate it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I spent most of today in the hospital because of a lingering blood clot issue due to a weightlifting injury, exacerbated by some long distance traveling last week that involved long periods of just sitting. I woke up with extreme pain and swelling, and knew I immediately needed to go to the ER and miss my flight :(.

Long story short, the pain was intense enough that I acquiesced and agreed to some hydromorphone. I've never had opioids in my life, and after this experience will likely refuse them from now on. The "high" was immediate (since taken intravenously) and was fairly intense. I can see how people so easily get addicted to this stuff. If medical cannabis is a decent substitute (I know that's not the point of this paper) it seems like a thing we should explore.

</comment><comment><USER14> The main problem here is that weed is classified as a schedule 1 drug, meaning you'd have to declassify it.

No politician wants to be seen as being soft on crime or drugs.

Just like I think that living restriction distances for sex offenders (you can't live within 100 feet of schools) are bad, but nobody will come out in support.

<comment><USER15> I dunno, we have plenty of politicians supporting legalization now. We even have one state where legalization was done via legislature.

Also, interestingly, this is a very easy process, if we can get a president elected who is of that persuasion. The reason being, Congress vested DEA with the executive authority to reschedule drugs. So, in theory, the president could just direct them to do so. Congress can override and reinstate it, of course - but voting to re-criminalize it after it was legalized would also be a politically dangerous move.</comment></comment>


CBC asks for $400M in increased government funding to go ad-free - I-M-S http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cbc-radio-canada-ad-free-proposal-1.3871077 <comment><AUTHOR> I'd be happy to pay my $45.71 per person per year. The BBC makes amazing shows - I don't see that Canada can't do the same. As Canadians, if we believe that we have something to say to the world, we need to fund saying it.

<comment><USER2> It provides close to zero value to me, I don't listen to radio at all.

What's your proposal to me? I'm supposed to pay $45.71 so other people can listen to the radio ad-free? When they can already listen with ads and basically pay for it themselves?

<comment><USER3> > I'm supposed to pay $45.71 so other people can listen to the radio ad-free?

Yes. It's part of the basic compact we call a civil society where we don't insist on a direct line between tax dollars paid and personally-felt value gained, because we trust that the larger, more comprehensive value of a strong civil society is worth more than $45.71.

After the number of times I've paid hundreds or thousands in extra property taxes to fund a stadium I'll never visit, where people I'll never befriend enjoy a sport I'll never play, I'm okay with this. More happiness all around benefits me generally.

<comment><USER4> What you're saying is of course completely true, but it also means that "I'd be happy to pay my $45.71 per person per year" is equally invalid as a indicator as to whether some public good or service is worthwhile. I believe your parent comment was calling that out, rather than making an argument that it's worth nothing at all.

As an aside, I think it's reaching quite a lot to say that an ad-free CBC is somehow equivalent to a "strong civil society". I get that you're saying it's an ingredient, but unless you quantify the value then it's an argument you could apply to absolutely everything under the sun. (The government should fund my blog for $0.01 per person, after all a strong civil society is certainly worth a penny each!)

<comment><USER3> The parent was saying that he shouldn't have to pay $45.71/year because there's no direct benefit to him. My response was that a strong civil society requires some latitude in how directly one needs to benefit in order to support taxes for things one doesn't directly enjoy. I agree that a mere willingness to fund something is not, in itself, a measure of some tax-funded good's actual value.

I do think that there's probably a good argument that a strong civil society requires a public broadcaster, but my analogy was more about relative equity-- I'm okay with your sports stadium, if you're okay with my public broadcaster, because our civil society is better when there's public goods for both of us. And that doesn't even get into the direct economic benefits that are the mainstay arguments for sports stadiums and public broadcasters.

<comment><USER2> > The parent was saying that he shouldn't have to pay $45.71/year because > there's no direct benefit to him.

It provides no indirect benefit either. Instead it misguides and misinforms people. The problem is that something like CBC provides no benefit to anyone in society who doesn't share it's biases. A government mouthpiece is absolutely not necessary for civilized society. Nor does it truly provide a benefit to anyone, but a detriment to society at large. I don't believe society should be forced to pay to pander to a specific political niche.

But if you're making this argument, why stop at socialized media? Certainly some people could benefit from socialized food or cars? Why do those things deserve consumer choice, but media doesn't? The market arguably does an even better job with media than those things.

<comment><USER3> First, slippery slope is a fallacy: having a public broadcaster does not lead to socialized cars.

Second, we do have socialized food, it's called welfare, and going forward, that situation will only increase under the name 'guaranteed basic income' because we're automating away all the jobs people might have.

Third, you have media choice in Canada: elsewhere you say CTV and Global are better. Good choice.

> It provides no indirect benefit either.

This is silly. It provides a lot of jobs that pay well or offer good security or both, which benefits the economy generally in a number of ways. It provides funding for the arts, also economically beneficial but also culturally valuable, to some at least. It provides a media outlet directly subject to government controls, which takes some heat off CTV and Global to meet policy goals that the CBC can fulfill, like Canadian Content. It provides a public good for people like me so that when a new levy for a stadium comes around, I'm okay with paying the levy even if I'll get no direct benefit myself.

> Instead it misguides and misinforms people.

Okay, you don't like seeing a viewpoint you find wrong and harmful to be funded with your tax dollars; if the gov't funded a version of Fox News up here, I'd probably feel the same way. Whether or not I actually opposed that public Fox North would depend on my feeling about whether I can tolerate it as part of the broader program of public spending--maybe I'd be fine with it if the CBC was then allowed to drift even further left.

The point remains that we collectively compromise in order to ensure that the public good reaches the broadest number of citizens. If you're unable to tolerate $45.71 a year going to something that your fellow citizens enjoy, suck it up: I'm sure there's lots you're enjoying now that they'd prefer not to fund.

<comment><USER2> > First, slippery slope is a fallacy: having a public broadcaster does not > lead to socialized cars.

I was merely trying to draw a comparison to things we can agree shouldn't be socialized, where consumer choice matters, not that one leads to the other. I believe slippery slope fallacy requires the implication that in this case, publicly funding CBC leads to socialized cars. Which I didn't mean to imply is true if it came off that way. Just to draw a comparison to see how you thought of it differently, because I find them fairly comparable personally.

Even in welfare or the mincome proposals you have consumer choice over where to spend and exactly how much to spend on food. Which you don't in this case with CBC's media. That's the part I have a problem with.

> I'm sure there's lots you're enjoying now that they'd prefer not to fund.

And I'm quite confident there's not. In fact, there are very, very few things I feel that the government should be funding. I'm more than willing to give up just about anything the government provides me if they're willing to do the same.

Why is the opposite proposal of saying we should remove these things rejected outright? How about we all just pay for the stuff we use instead of paying for other people's stuff? If we had a mincome-style system, would you be more okay with this sort of proposal?

I'd be much more open to mincome proposals if we could get rid of cruft like this we're paying for. I think it could generate real economic efficiency in cases like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a 2007 article about the cancellation of a critically acclaimed CBC show, [http://thetyee.ca/Entertainment/2007/12/03/NoIntelligence/](http://thetyee.ca/Entertainment/2007/12/03/NoIntelligence/)

 _" The CBC was born out of similar circumstances many years ago when there was a media monopoly and a feeling amongst people that it was necessary to have an alternate source of information and intelligence for the Canadian people. And now in exactly the same times I think it is really essential. The CBC is a threat because it's able to warn us of things that are going on in Canada that some of the other private corporate interests in Canada wouldn't want to warn us of because they may benefit from them.

"So I think we are really on that train. But I do think that there are a lot of people out there who are passionate about the CBC and curious about what's going on too because there have been so many changes, a lot of them not for the better. And we frankly need to figure out some way to get more funding back into the corporation while at the same time looking who in the CBC is making the big decisions."_

</comment><comment><USER6> On this topic I spotted this tweet with a graph comparing per capita expenditure on public broadcasting. Canada is at the bottom along with the USA.

[https://twitter.com/j_mcelroy/status/803353503225630720](https://twitter.com/j_mcelroy/status/803353503225630720)

<comment><USER6> Additionally this graph explains why I've watched more fan translated Danish shows than Canadian TV. Low funding does not yield good TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm old enough to remember the "it's your 8c/day" slogan for the (AU) ABC. CBC is proposing $46/year, which is only 12c. Pretty good deal!

</comment><comment><USER8> For those of you who are outside of Canada, and even for the many within, please take some time to consider the possibility that the CBC is not a benevolent public broadcaster, and is perhaps not actually putting out high- quality, unique, and novel information that would be inaccessible to Canadians without its public subsidies. Tristin Hopper[0] does a wonderful job of explaining a centrist's argument against funding the CBC/the CBC's modus operandi.

[0] Tristin Hopper: Maybe CBC could use its resources to do something other than steal other people's ideas [http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/full- comment/blog.html?b=ne...](http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/full- comment/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/tristin-hopper-maybe- cbc-could-use-its-resources-to-do-something-other-than-steal-other-peoples- ideas)

</comment><comment><USER9> Note the CBC already has $675 million in funding from the Federal Budget - this is on top of that. [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on- business/liberals-p...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on- business/liberals-pledge-675-million-in-cbc-funding/article29354285/)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but for ad-free Beachcombers, it might be worth it.

<comment><USER11> Bring back Danger Bay and I'm in!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally I think this is great and I think CBC does a pretty good (loved DNTO) job. However, the comments section of that CBC article seem to drastically disagree unfortunately. :(

<comment><USER10> What would you say to the people calling for the dismantling of the CBC?

<comment><USER12> It's hard because I see both sides of the coin, I worry about the same worry that most people point at, bureaucracy, blah blah blah. It's just that without a Canadian voice in the world, I feel we'll lose a lot, much of the original CBC programing (especially radio) talk a lot about what it means to be Canadian, where we came from. My parents and parents parents and I were all born in North Western Ontario and I feel like there was something special about listening to the CBC and understanding the culture.

<comment><USER13> _without a Canadian voice in the world_

Why do people say this? CBC doesn't speak to the world; where are their broadcast towers in Europe or elsewhere? They're a Canadian broadcaster whose habit is to talk _at_ the Canadian public in a voice betraying contempt and impatience. The CBC certainly doesn't speak for me.

<comment><USER12> People immigrate to and travel to Canada buddy. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those who are unaware; the UK TV tax of roughly $15 a month. I never signed up. I'd get a threatening call from the BBC every 6 months trying to shake me down with threats of fines and jail time. I told them that I didn't have TV or the internet at home. Their response was internet on the phone or at work was sufficient to be liable. I told them to b*gger off and they did. For 6 months.

In general; I'm not a fan of states forcing people to pay for things they don't want.

<comment><USER15> I'm positive that my taxes go to things I don't want as well as things I do.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, I now live in a tax haven. It's every bit as awesome as I imagined it to be :)

I wouldn't mind paying some tax but there is a point where you're paying for your own propaganda / chains.

<comment><USER16> Tax haven "nice" or tax haven "we pay for our services by either depleting bountiful natural resources / mental regime / letting others avoid tax and taking a cut" ?

<comment><USER14> The government makes it's money via property and consumption taxes. And there is no military to fund. The economy is also helped by foreign tax avoidance. Interestingly; you'll find that the US is now by far the biggest enabler of foreign tax avoidance in the world. So I'm not sure what moral conclusion you're trying to allude to. At least here the same tax avoidance schemes are available to everyone.

<comment><USER16> > The economy is also helped by foreign tax avoidance

I hate it then. I also hate all the avoidance the UK and US enable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a Canadian I oppose this, and not because I'm worried about money or taxes. I oppose this because the CBC provides news and entertainment in a way that directly competes with Canada's privately owned news and TV networks. As the government owned network grows private sources will lose their audience and voice, and Canadians will only be left with one voice, the government's voice.

Further, unlike the BBC, the CBC answers directly to parliament. This means that the ruling party has direct control over the network and, should they desire, they can make it show only news and programs favorable to them. This makes the CBC a threat to Canadian democracy.

</comment><comment><USER18> Part of me loves the idea of a commercial free CBC, but I wonder whether it will make them just another bloated bureaucracy - less hungry and also much less likely to bite the hand that feeds them.

<comment><USER12> CBC has a pretty good history of pushing back against both itself and the government, I've never felt the CBC was corrupt or a government mouthpiece, I do worry about that last point also though.

<comment><USER19> CBC employees were targeted by their employer for making critical comments about Harper on their personal social media accounts.

<comment><USER12> Link?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ...then another $400M, and another, and another. Never ending story.

</comment><comment><USER21> Assuming that CBC were to get this, how does this not make CBC a literal paid- mouthpiece for whatever the government might ask?

Assume that the CBC is ad-free with this money(grant?) then what stipulations may the government make regarding what they may or may-not run?

I am fine with things being ad-free, it just seems like a request like this would be rife with manipulation/corruption... even if not day-one -- but even within five years - the narrative is then owned.

<comment><USER22> Wouldn't that make every ad funded newspaper and TV channel a paid mouthpiece of its advertisers?

<comment><USER21> Well, technically they tacitly are... meaning that if the advertiser didn't like what they were saying, the advertiser can pull funding... but if the funder (sans ads) is a state/government agent, then its much less desirable.

<comment><USER23> But if the public doesn't like how the government is running a public institution, they can elect different public officials.

To have anything resembling a similar amount of say about how a privately funded media company operates, I have to boycott _all_ of its advertisers, which likely entails long-term lifestyle changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting cover: 'the advertising revenue would go to privates'.

Aside of the obvious (private) joke, that simply sounds like bold-faced wealth redistribution in the wrong direction: get the gov (at the expense of the taxpayer) to sub the movement of money to the private sector.

Not that consumers really benefit financially either way. Still the rich get richer.

<comment><USER25> To me, the question is: Does the public want an information service that isn't beholden to their advertising money, but instead beholden to their chosen representatives, and are they willing to pay for it?

Thats the basis of pretty much all government services, and even government itself. Its not for their direct financial benefit, just as purchasing a cable subscription isn't to one's direct financial benefit. But its moving where the money goes towards something more accountable to the people.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. It's a serious problem in the UK but I don't think the BBC is exempt.

We have private papers like The Telegraph, whose chief political editor resigned due to pressure from advertisers:

[https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter- oborne/why-i-...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i- have-resigned-from-telegraph)

But the BBC is part of the establishment, regularly running property porn shows and glossing over the financial crisis.

I have no solution, I just wanted to point out that national broadcasters are not "for the people" all the time. The BBC basically got beaten down by Blair who made the BBC chase ratings which was the perfect way to dumb it down and neuter it after they opposed the Iraq war. Having a "popular" national broadcaster is truly pointless because if they can compete on ratings they can derive their revenue from adverts. Just another thing in the UK that has been subtly eroded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what it would cost them to broadcast over the air instead? They stopped doing so in the transition from analog to digital, leaving people like me without cable to do without our "public broadcaster". Now pardon me while I select from the other two major (private) broadcasters that somehow managed to transition over.

<comment><USER27> Where are you located? Here in Montréal, you can watch HD TV over the air using a ATSC tuner. The picture quality is excellent, better than HD cable even.

<comment><USER26> Saskatchewan. The only CBC transmitter left in the province is in Regina and I am nowhere near in range. All the rest of the transmitters in the province in the link below were analog and have been decomissioned. At least Global and CTV broadcast digital OTA and the picture quality is indeed excellent.

[http://www.cbc.radio- canada.ca/en/explore/strategies/dtv/cov...](http://www.cbc.radio- canada.ca/en/explore/strategies/dtv/coverage-maps/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why on Earth the taxpayer is subsidizing the CBC to crowd out private media is beyond me. It's not 1930. We don't need a state broadcaster to serve an otherwise unserved nation. To the extent the CBC _does_ have a legitimate function, that function most certainly does _not_ include sports, dramas, comedies, etc. By all means, let them adopt the PBS/NPR model. But get them out of the private market, and put my tax dollars to better use.

<comment><USER29> In Japan we're required to pay for TV for NHK. If you live in apartments that get the premium channels you're required to pay for it, too (about $250/year). The regular broadcast is around $135/year I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The saddest thing is the only good content on CBC radio now is 'From The Archives' where they play old recordings.

Content on CBC just isn't what it used to be. All the local anchors try to hard to be hip and with it.

Gone are the days of Peter Gzowski.

</comment><comment><USER31> oh hey an even more thoroughly government controlled media outlet. their reporting is so biased and so far politically left its embarrassing to listen to. fuck those guys

</comment><comment><USER32> having worked within the CBC, I don't trust the leadership at all! mis- management of funds is a CBC tradition and pastime!

they continue to struggle to understand the digital era, and the executives have gone on record plenty of times in their own town halls expressing their confusion and dismissal of "that thing called the internet".

and while the CBC continues to compare itself to BBC at every turn, that is not a fair comparison, more like a toad contemplating itself a deer.

<comment><USER19> This exactly. My GF works at the CBC which gives me some insight to what's going on behind closed doors and let me tell you that I've never seen such incompetence and mismanagement at the management level. An additional $400M will go up in smoke the minute the cheque clears with very little to show.

<comment><USER33> Having worked at large corporations myself I can assure you that the CBC does not have a monopoly on mismanagement.

Yet somehow despite corporations mismanagement they still are more productive than many a small business.

<comment><USER34> ^ this guy is paid by the tax payers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The price sounds low. My initial question, "doesn't NHL advertising alone come close to this?" seems to be answered already.

Not anymore. [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadas- tv...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadas-tv- broadcasters-see-revenue-shrink-cbc-hit-by-loss-of-nhl- rights/article29860418/)

</comment><comment><USER11> In my view, the CBC is stronger with reporting than it is with the cheesy, low-budget original programming -- and I think they should focus on that.

When it comes to programming, I get that they want to have a 'Canadian voice' \-- but the shows are always so cheesy. I'd rather they air some of the stronger programming from the BBC.

I'm not in-the-know, but they really messed up by losing Hockey Night in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER36> Why don't they just have an optional premium subscription that makes it ad- free.

</comment><comment><USER37> Let's look at the full "Creative Canada" proposal [1]. After reading through the full document, the arguments for moving away from advertising seem to focus on financial stability (page 6) [1]:

"Depoliticize CBC/Radio-Canada funding so that it is predictable and stable, tied to the existing five-year licence cycle, indexed to inflation, and separated from the election and annual government budget cycles. This would be similar to how the BBC now operates. Indexation is critical – without it, inflation of just 1.5% per year would erode the new government funding of $150 million to zero in just six years."

Yet, let's also look at the cultural arguments being made (page 29) [1]:

"Our focus would be more firmly on the needs of citizens, creators and our industry partners without the constant preoccupation of monetizing each of our initiatives.

It would create greater opportunities to find and nurture new talent. It would create more room for distinct Canadian programming, made by Canadians, featuring Canadians and telling the stories Canadian creators want to tell.

We would focus less on commercial return and more on cultural impact, exploring more ways to help Canadian content and creators thrive and grow. We would be able to commission programming that takes risks and has the time to find an audience without being overly driven by the need to deliver immediate success."

Advertising can take many forms. Let's take a closer look at the BBC, whose model is frequently referenced. Does this proposed "ad-free" model include a restriction on the shows themselves to avoid product placement? Does this include an obligation to blur, mute, bleep, or cut brands? The BBC allows product placement [2]. Does this proposed model restrict sponsorships and sponsored messages? The BBC also allows sponsorships, sponsorship credits, and limited messages by sponsors [2].

Now, with broader questions: will there be a ban on home shopping shows (think QVC)? Will there be a ban on infomercials? Will overlay commercials (the small banners that run during shows) be banned?

If other forms of advertising, such as those permitted by BBC, are still allowed, the broadcaster will still have commercial pressures. If shows are allowed to sell product placement and sponsorships, Canadian creators will still be under pressure for short-term monetization. What restrictions does CBC actually propose? I wish I could answer, but there are none. Without closing the earlier mentioned loopholes, CBC will not be ad free and will therefore be unable to fully achieve its cultural goals.

[1]: [http://future.cbc.ca/images/acreativecanada.pdf](http://future.cbc.ca/images/acreativecanada.pdf)

[2]: [http://uk.practicallaw.com/4-504-3931](http://uk.practicallaw.com/4-504-3931)

</comment><comment><USER38> $400,000,000 per year to produce audio content? Seems high. NPR is at $140,000,000.

<comment><USER39> CBC produces at least 4 radio streams (Radio 1/2/3 in english, and at least one in french), and at least three TV channels (CBC TV, CBC News Network, and Radio-Canada)

<comment><USER40> To add to what you already have listed: there is a second radio stream in French (called Espace Musique) as well as a French equivalent to CBC News Network (called RDI for Réseau de l'information). There are also regional broadcast (in both French and English) as well as an international version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Canada just HAS to go and do EVERYTHING right...

</comment><comment><USER42> The whole thing is baffling to me.

First, why wouldn't they just keep the ads _and_ ask for more funding. It would be a smaller ask.

Second, why do they want taxpayers to effectively fund the private media? Maybe the GlobeandMail should ditch their crappy pay wall or maybe the National Post shouldn't auto-play videos.

Third, if CBC had no ads, it'll be a better experience and it would gain customers from the privates. It's a fairer playing field if CBC has to fund itself. The whole problem of govt funded corps is that they have an unfair advantage against privates, but they're saying the opposite?

(I guess it's not as bad as the NDP in Alberta taking $1.3B of taxpayer money and giving it to the electricity producers.)

<comment><USER43> Because then you've got the worst of both worlds - you're still going cap-in- hand looking for money but you're also delivering a product covered in advertising that most people don't want.

 _Second, why do they want taxpayers to effectively fund the private media?_

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is publicly owned. Doing basic research is a great way to avoid looking foolish before commenting on the internet: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation)

<comment><USER42> My question was why do the want to fund _private_ media. If you read the article it says "Critics have said that the CBC is taking ad revenue away from private media that are struggling financially." I wasn't asking why taxpayers were funding the CBC, a public company.

EDIT: regarding "worst of both worlds", CBC gets to fulfill it's mandate at a cheaper cost with ads.

<comment><USER43> But there's no certainty that if CBC goes ad-free the same amount of ad revenue will naturally flow to its competitors. I think you're assuming there's a fixed amount of money in the economy that must go somewhere if CBC stops carrying ads.

Consider the possibility that company X advertises on CBC and 3 other private broadcasters. CBC stops showing ads, but it doesn't follow that company X will now increase its ad spend at the other vendors. Now it's true that the privately owned outlets might raise their ad prices a bit now that there are fewer ad slots available across the media as a whole, or they might increase their ratio of advertising to programming - at least up to the point where consumers get sick of hearing so many ads.

Anyway, private media outlets might make more money out of this...but then again they might not. It's no sure thing and so it's inaccurate to claim that ad spending will automatically shift towards the remaining market participants.

<comment><USER42> We are on the same page I think. The CBC is saying $158mm will go to private media. You say that's inaccurate. I'm saying if it is accurate, taxpayers shouldn't be paying $400mm more for $158mm to go to private media.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Astral – organize your GitHub Stars easely - <AUTHOR> http://astralapp.com/

<comment><USER2> That header effect is super cool. I extracted it here in case anyone else wants to use it: [http://codepen.io/notduncansmith/pen/ogbwEv](http://codepen.io/notduncansmith/pen/ogbwEv)</comment>


A curated list of talks about React Native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mightyCrow/awesome-react-native-talks <comment><USER2> Thanks for this.

Instead of years, the type of content might be a better method of organization. But then again, there aren't many videos so maybe years are the best order.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool suggestion! Maybe when the list has grown a bit I'll restructure it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bit off-topic: Is possible to use React-Native without the whole npm non- sense? Like with normal javascript you get the scripts at that is all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that I know of. You can check out this repo: [https://github.com/npm/how- to-npm](https://github.com/npm/how-to-npm)

Should help you get use to using npm.

<comment><USER3> Use npm is easy, is the huge dependencies that it install and the headache of manage that that I wish to avoid. I'm npm/bower/etc free in my web development, so is possible the same with native?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that I know of =/</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Time for developers to address the chaos of Node.js and NPM - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-its-finally-time-for-developers-to-address-the-chaos-of-node-js-and-npm/ <comment><USER3> An additional element adding to this chaos is the security vulnerability of npm packages. How often do we _actually_ examine the package's code in detail before including it in a project?

Relevant article: [https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers- and...](https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and- passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5)

<comment><USER4> How is it different from maven deps?

<comment><USER5> Usually you don't use maven deps directly. You have a registry in your company that caches maven packages for you and runs vulnerability scans on the binary. So the binaries you end up using are "tested" internally.

Is that how people use NPM?

Also maven central does NOT support unpublishing of binaries. So if you have version 1.2 of something and you have scanned it once for vulnerabilities, it should always be the correct one. Nobody can publish again 1.2 in the central repo

<comment><USER6> In every somewhat serious company I've worked they used a local npm cache like jfrog (usually same one that's used for maven) that can get scanned for security. So yeah, that's how people use npm.

Unpublishing within those companies is usually not allowed, in the official npm registry you can only unpublish within the first 24 hours of publishing, after that you need to request it by email.

<comment><USER5> >In every somewhat serious company I've worked they used a local npm

If that was the case for everybody, then left-pad would not have caused a problem for anybody. People would not notice anything wrong with their builds. The amount of github comments where people say that their production build just broke because of a missing package implies that people are _NOT_ using NPM with a local registry

>in the official npm registry you can only unpublish within the first 24 hours of publishing

I don't believe this to be the case [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16087024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16087024)

<comment><USER7> Just because it's a shitty common practice doesn't mean there isn't a proper way to do it (local repo). For example, there are tons of people who check in their secrets into public and private Github repos (including Uber eng), then they get jacked and complain. If they were smarter than that, "it would not have caused a problem for anybody". Doesn't really prove that what a lot of people do must be automatically good.

<comment><USER5> True, but the fact that NPM seems to be the only repository where packages can be "re-published" further exacerbates the bad practices.

[https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/41zfb8qpvrdj](https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/41zfb8qpvrdj)

The fact that 9 packages could be "published over" _after_ the left-pad fiasco, shows lack of attention.

Tools should try to foster good practices, instead of worsening bad ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: 3m installs in 7 days, of a "module" to check if a number is odd.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/886zji/why_has...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/886zji/why_has_there_been_nearly_3_million_installs_of/)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's troubling that PHP gets so much shit because it has an extensive if clumsy standard library, where node gets a free pass because you can get whatever doesn't exist from NPM, welcoming any number of security vulnerabilities into applications.

I recently cleaned my NPM cache at work after 9 months, it was 6GB. ES6 is a massive improvement, but Node's standard library is still lacking and the sheer amount of tooling needed to be effective and up to date is too much.

<comment><USER10> PHP isn't criticized because it has a big and clumsy library. The criticisms for PHP are very clear: [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

It is badly designed.

<comment><USER9> The fractal blog post will be 6 years old in a couple of weeks. I'm going through it again, and __a lot of it is about the big clumsy library__. Some choice excerpts:

> There's no clear design philosophy. Early PHP was inspired by Perl; the huge > stdlib with "out" params is from C; the OO parts are designed like C++ and > Java

There's even complaints about PHP 5.2, but PHP 5.4 had just been released a month earlier:

> If PHP was compiled with --disable-url-fopen-wrapper, it won't work. [...] > Note that this flag was removed in PHP 5.2.5.

> foo()[0] is a syntax error. (Fixed in PHP 5.4.)

> PHP errors and PHP exceptions are completely different beasts. They don't > seem to interact at all. (Fixed in PHP 7)

> There is no finally construct (Fixed in PHP 5.5)

> Methods cannot be named e.g. "list", because list() is special syntax (Fixed > in PHP 7)

I'm going to stop there. Not saying any of it wasn't valid criticism or that some of it doesn't apply to this day. Just that too many people, yourself included, are happy to throw a 6 year old blog post at a language that has continued to evolve since. It's also strange that you say it isn't criticized for a big and clumsy library, because in the link you provided about half of the page is complaints about the library.

<comment><USER11> > I'm going through it again, and __a lot of it is about the big clumsy > library__.

And even a lot of that isn't fair because PHP has always integrated C libraries directly; which was a huge strength when it was new. A function like mysql_real_escape_string isn't a PHP function, it's a MySQL function ( [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-real-escape- st...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was checking out Serverless Framework I was floored that a single Lambda function (that barely did anything) resulted in 15+Mb of data being uploaded to AWS. I had only installed two NPM modules yet when I looked at the "node_modules" directory there were nearly 300 entries in there. Things like Redux and GraphQL, neither of which I ever intended to use in a simple test of Serverless Framework.

When Node and NPM first came out and I thought, while not perfect, they were a really promising set of technologies. Now, NPM specifically is something I will go out of my way to avoid. And by virtue of the fact that NPM is so closely tied with Node, I tend to avoid Node as well. Which sucks because I have always enjoyed programming in Javascript.

If anyone has come out with a curated alternative to NPM, please let me know.

<comment><USER13> Though I agree with the article, and can appreciate that somebody just "checking out Serverless" (I'm assuming you were also new to Node), it just takes a little bit of awareness when installing packages.

It took a while to learn this lesson, but it pm;u tales a few seconds in the process of deciding if you want to use a package, to check out it's dependencies, I also check out the git page and license. Is it active, is it open-source, does it have far too many dependencies, is it in regular use.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/serverless](https://www.npmjs.com/package/serverless)

That's serverless. I was surprised to see it uses graphql as a default, and looking at graphql, how many dependencies does it have? Just one, which has no more. So that chain ends quite quickly.

It doesn't take long looking at the dependencies to see that the same packages get used again and again throughout the community. So you'll find you won't keep going down this path once you are comfortable with the packages.

Having said all of that, it is also good practice to look at the source of a package, and decide if you could do it better and easier yourself. It is amazing how many packages are only a few lines of code, and fairly unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm kind of surprised no one has tried to make a standard library for node - although I guess underscore/lodash come close.

The package situation is a serious problem for distro maintainers, which AFAICT have basically given up packaging any npm packages the traditional way. Luckily Nix[1] and Guix[2] can most likely support automatic importing from npm.

Incidentally, one of the many things I love about typescript is that it has zero non-dev dependencies [3].

[1] [https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix](https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix) [2] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix- devel/2017-03/msg008...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix- devel/2017-03/msg00814.html) [3] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/typescript?activeTab=dependenc...](https://www.npmjs.com/package/typescript?activeTab=dependencies)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this article truncated? The conclusion or end part seems to be missing. Or is this just oddly written?

</comment><comment><USER16> There's two distinct problems I see here, which probably plague most package managers:

1\. Package naming: All the good names will be gone soon, which'll probably lead to big players trying to get package names of little players. Which will then result in broken dependencies a la left-pad. Afaik the latter has been solved in NPM [1]. The former is probably more of a usability problem, we want installation to be simple and able to install deps just by remembering their name.

2\. The power of deps and our reliance on good will: When installing dependencies, we basically grant them the power to wreak any kind of havoc they want. The ways we mitigate the worst: Belief in the magical power of open source, mostly using libs that are popular (hence might've gotten a good read by an IT-sec person) and at enterprise scale some static analysis tools to get an idea of how it interacts with your system. I think we're in need of a technical solution at the package manager level, where a dependency has to explicitly ask for certain capabilities (similar to how Android apps work).

[1] [http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141905368000/changes-to-npms- unpu...](http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141905368000/changes-to-npms-unpublish- policy)

<comment><USER17> 1) seems to plague NPM a lot more than others.

> The former is probably more of a usability problem, we want installation to > be simple and able to install deps just by remembering their name.

There's a point beyond which the desire for simplicity creates dangerous abstractions. A developer should expect to put more effort into installing deps than just remembering a package name.

<comment><USER16> That it plagues NPM more than others might be due to size, NPM has almost 3x as many packages as the next large module repository (Maven) [1].

[1] [http://www.modulecounts.com/](http://www.modulecounts.com/)

<comment><USER17> Size does mean the scope of any issues with NPM is greater, but many of those issues seem unique to NPM's design and the extremely fine-grained nature of Node packages as a whole. One developer had a temper tantrum and unpublished one package and the entire Node universe caught on fire... that kind of catastrophic failure doesn't seem to happen elsewhere, even at a smaller scale.

<comment><USER16> True, that WAS a deficiency, though one that seems to be fixed now.

Given that dependencies are also resolved by name in the Ruby & Python I'd think there's no technical reason for why a similar thing wouldn't happen, is there?

<comment><USER17> >Given that dependencies are also resolved by name in the Ruby & Python I'd think there's no technical reason for why a similar thing wouldn't happen, is there?

I don't know, I'm not familiar enough with those languages, but I would guess that if anything similar did happen, it would probably wind up posted here, although absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

It may also depend on implementation features besides package names - <USER2> worst that should happen if a remote dependency no longer exists is that future updates fail, but a local copy should always exist and the current build should still keep working. To me, vendoring dependencies should be the default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of my least favourite things about the NPM eco-system is that it doesn't have support for name spacing, i.e. package names are global. I think this is one of the things that Composer (PHP's equivalent of NPM) does very well [1].

Personally I'm not to worried about the size of my node_modules since it doesn't reflect what gets transpiled into the target anyway, but yes, if you have a bunch of projects sitting on your hard drive, it can get a bit busy.

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

<comment><USER19> npm has namespacing [https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/scoped- packages](https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/scoped-packages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only NPM causes troubles. Node.js is stable and is improved quickly since the io.js merge.

You don't need to use NPM to run node programs. The binaries provided by node.js website are standalone (no dependencies): [http://www.nodejs.org/dist/](http://www.nodejs.org/dist/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Clickbait. At least propose what it is that you think needs to be done to address this so-called chaos.

Worth noting that ES2017 added String.prototype.padStart and String.prototype.padEnd. The whole left-pad thing is blown out of proportion.

Second, you shouldn't be relying on npm for deployments. You dig your own grave. If package deletion is a concern, then host a mirror with something like Nexus [0], or pay for a service [1] [2] to do it for you. Over the years there have been a few local npm mirror tools [3], but I don't think any of em have really caught much traction. There's also the option of bundling each release. For that you can use a tool such as Webpack [4], or take it one step further and generate a single binary using something like pkg [5].

Developers also have the option of forking their dependency graph and updating references in package.json. Sooner or later you'll start to find bugs in your dependencies and have to fix them. It's your responsibility, you own all that code. Don't be afraid of maintaining your own fork. If you find a critical issue you'll probably need to be able to deploy your update without depending on a third-party anyway. This is fairly common in other ecosystems. Heck, you can also just check in your node_modules folder into version control.

Don't get me wrong, npm certainly has its fair share of problems, and historically they haven't had the best defaults... But there's usually ways to work around the issues, and they're gradually working towards improving things. It's the developer's responsibility to handle their ecosystem's problems, which is also nothing new in the world of software development.

[0] [https://www.sonatype.com/download-oss- sonatype](https://www.sonatype.com/download-oss-sonatype)

[1] [https://jfrog.com/artifactory/](https://jfrog.com/artifactory/)

[2] [https://inedo.com/proget](https://inedo.com/proget)

[3] [https://github.com/rlidwka/sinopia](https://github.com/rlidwka/sinopia)

[4] [https://webpack.js.org/](https://webpack.js.org/)

[5] [https://github.com/zeit/pkg](https://github.com/zeit/pkg)

<comment> FLUX-YOU >It's the developer's responsibility to handle their ecosystem's problems, which is also nothing new in the world of software development.

This is where you have to start questioning the benefits of using node/npm/js on the backend. We're all stuck with it on the front end for the foreseeable future.

I've never had any of the problems in node/npm using NuGet/C# for example.

At some point, I raised my hands and emailed my boss about a new project using node, essentially saying "this is dumb. left-pad is dumb. is-number is dumb. is-odd is dumb. the amount of packages depending on these is dumb. And I won't be arsed to fix it because I value my time, so I'd rather just jump back to an ecosystem that has its shit together because the result is the same simple API pushing json either way we go."

node/npm sucks IMO. Sorry, but the problems I have to fix daily are not interesting, and conquering the mountain and being able to say I fixed all those every-day problems with it is not worth much on the job market.

If the amount of web backends suddenly needs node because they suddenly stop pushing json all day long, because node/npm is the only ecosystem that offers that solution, then you have a compelling reason. But other languages do json APIs just fine right now and have less ecosystem paper cuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's 2018 and still leftpad issue, really?

<comment><USER23> The article says that you can still unpublish packages from NPM at will. If that's still the case, then yes, leftpad should still be brought up in 2018 before someone unpublishes the "is-string-empty" package or whatever the dumb packages that people put on NPM are.

<comment><USER6> you can only within 24 hours of publishing. After that you need to send them an email to request it and they determine if it can be unpublished or not.

<comment><USER5> Not true [https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/41zfb8qpvrdj](https://status.npmjs.org/incidents/41zfb8qpvrdj)

"We have restored all the package-versions for the 9 packages that were published over"

Full context here [https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/255](https://github.com/npm/registry/issues/255)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a npm package to check if the number is even or not, Enough said.

<comment><USER25> Yes, because a developer wrote a joke project, and nowthe whole ecosystem is garbage...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problem relies in the obsession with monolithic design even if it ends up being a complete house of cards. This leads many new developers to sacrifice basic logic and first principles when judging what good software is; often resulting in products that no one uses and that just crash anyway. But hey, you get this great toy-like model to show on your next interview. Security and access rights are sadly not taught as being essential to having a proper monolith because they'd greatly slow down development time. Whereas an engineer or builder has no choice but to confine their creativity within those principles because a product crash for them has much more dire consequences.</comment>


My First Application with the Phoenix Framework – Talktotalk.me - <AUTHOR> https://talktotalk.me/ <comment><USER2> Github Repo [1], from the author himself whom I have had the privilege of speaking over the app itself.

[1] [https://github.com/indatawetrust/chat- app](https://github.com/indatawetrust/chat-app)</comment>


Jim Starkey: Brewer's CAP Conjecture is False - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing/browse_thread/thread/9e7ed2c394f47921/b1a33ed542dd223c?show_docid=b1a33ed542dd223c&pli=1

<comment><USER2> ...if you give "consistent" a different definition than the one used by Brewer (and others).</comment>


Do Facebook pages still have a value for your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed for a while, that in Facebook I do not see any updates of pages I liked anymore. Looks like these days I have to click on "Pages Feed" in the navigation on the left to see them.<p>Does anybody do that? Is there still a reason to have a Facebook page for your product or startup? <comment><USER2> I still get those updates. Aren't you following too many pages?</comment>