No, Fuck Off - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startups-and-tech/8c4523242c85 <comment><USER2> This is making me seriously reconsider my dream of moving to the US for a dev job in SV. Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and good pay?

It sounds like it's either you take part in the life-consuming startup-founder lottery or you go work in BigCo (possibly not even tech) for a good life until you see a worthy opportunity. Or you start doing freelancing/contract jobs till you have a steady stream of income, which is sort of in-between. Anyone have advice?

<comment><USER3> > _"Is it only in the big tech companies that engineers get a decent life and > good pay?"_

No, author's case is severely overstated.

In my experience startup jobs in SF/SV/NYC pay as much as, if not more than most big tech company jobs. The notable exceptions are Google and Facebook, where the compensation and stock is _extremely_ good and generally ahead of the rest of the pack.

Which isn't to say that author's complaints about crappy startup jobs are false, but rather that they're really not unique to startups at all - they're common across _all_ tech jobs, regardless of company size.

In reality there are three classes of tech jobs:

1 - Near-perfection. Great opportunities for advancement, great pay, great benefits, great work/life balance.

2 - Somewhat a pack of lies. You'll either work too much, get paid too little, get to fight management all day, have little room to grow, or some combination thereof.

3 - Complete pack of lies. Deranged management, just complete rubbish.

Most tech companies, even big ones, fall into the second and third categories. I think author is extrapolating a bit from the presence of Google in his seeming belief that most big tech companies are great places to work. They are not.

Case in point:

> _"You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours > while you can have a side project. An open source project, a small app, > something your parents can use, anything that you either enjoy, try to make > it big, or just make the world a better place."_

 _Most big companies aren't like this_. In fact, I can count the number of such companies I know on a single hand and have a finger or two left over. Most startups aren't either, so more accurately _most software jobs aren't like this_.

The blog post seems to be a lament about the shitty quality of startup jobs, but really it's more accurately a lament about the shitty quality of software jobs _in general_.

He wants startups to have good compensation, good environments, and reasonable hours - but most big companies can't pull this off either. Big Corporate software jobs are _infamous_ for low compensation, _infamous_ for being middle-management-infested hellholes, and just as willing to bend hacker culture to its own ends.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the great overview, I really appreciate it. I guess it's all about finding a good company that values its employees. Maybe I'll drop a line to friends at Google after all...

(Thanks also to the other kind commenters who replied - ctide, rayiner, smartician, bkanber, prostoalex, avenger123, and akurilin - your answers are valued!)

<comment><USER4> Google is worth a shot but don't get your hopes up and don't take it personally if you get shat on.

Google has _a lot_ of great engineers, and if you get a good manager for your first project and get to a launch in your first 2 years, you become a Real Googler and it's awesome. If you don't establish credibility early on, you're fucked. It's impossible to transfer to a good project without already having had a good project, so your first manager determines your career.

On the whole, I think Google is in decline and it has an absolutely _shitty_ management structure (probe about "calibration scores") but there is still some genuinely interesting work and there are some _great_ engineers so, by all means, give it a try.

However, there's probably a 60% chance that you'll land on a dogshit project with no career advancement and have to job-hop yet again in a few months. Make it 85% if you're outside of MTV. But if you don't mind taking that risk, then try it out. Google's upside (stable pay _and_ great projects) when you actually land well is too high to write it off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"If you are currently working on one of these startups, you probably are justifying with "but I get to learn/do more than working on a large company, etc. etc.". No you don't really. You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours while you can have a side project. "_

It is important to understand this "learning on the job" thing. It's no use hiding the basic fact: just as with the salary, there is a conflict here between your interest and your employer's. When you are learning, you are not producing and what grows is _your_ market value - the employer might have to pay you more to keep you at the company, so for them the benefits of having a trained employee are at least partially offset by this fact. To put it bluntly - if at all possible, grabbing an employee whose learning cost is already covered by another company looks much better from the profit perspective.

It's not to say that learning on the job never happens - just as with high salaries, there are obvious situations when the employer can afford to pay you more or take the cost of your learning. The less they compete on cost, the better for you.

<comment><USER6> I guess it depends on the employer, employee and culture.

We hire those who want to learn, and we go way out of our way to ensure that those working for the company really do learn and improve.

The benefit to us, the company and founders, is substantial. And the benefit to the employee is obvious.

If we can't offer a killer salary yet, and the equity is toilet paper for a few years, then the biggest thing we can offer is a vibrant environment in which skills are developed and mastered, in which we can understand more of each other's role and how all of the bits fit together.

At the moment I can say that every person in the company is learning every day. Real learning. We drop tools to educate each other, to teach and learn. We really believe doing so is the key to producing good work faster, that works with the output of everyone else.

<comment><USER4> What's the company?

<comment><USER6> Just a small London startup in the community space: <http://microco.sm/>

There's only three of us considered full-time right now, with an additional pool of volunteers and helpers that churn around us.

Our core team have different skills, and so we think it's good to cross- fertilise that knowledge, to teach and learn more of each other's skills as well as to support the mastery of our own skill in sharing it and learning how to communicate it.

We have people - freelancers mostly - who help for a month for free, and then go do something else for a bit before coming back between jobs to help more and learn more. They get to work on something they care about and learn new things at the same time.

We're not kidding ourselves about wanting to pay well, to build a successful business, and to only be bootstrapping this hard while we have to... but this process is really helping build this strong learning and teaching environment and that's been a real benefit to us, so we can all see that staying even after the numbers side adds up more.

The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn.

By helping improve career security for all of our workers, we really feel we're improving security for us as employers and job security for the employees. There's no downside to this.

<comment><USER4> _The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn._

You are awesome. I would really like to throw 99% of "management" out the historical window for good. It's a goddamn anachronism. The _only_ genuine source of credibility is _teaching_. Show me _why_ your idea is awesome, and if you're right and you teach it well, I'll believe you. You could be a 190 IQ genius or a Big Swinging Dick rain-maker, but the only way you add true value is by showing other people the way. "Because I said so" / "I can fire you, shithead" management (i.e. authority _without_ teaching) can go die in a fire. It's 2013, which makes it about damn time for that.

I have no idea what you do, and I'm probably not a candidate for your company (machine learning specialty, plus need to stay in the US for the next 6 months) but I really hope you succeed.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, much appreciated.

And my view of management, is mostly that they're drawn in the wrong place on org charts. They should be below the workers, assisting and helping to support the workers rather than ordering them. Workers themselves are the ones with the knowledge and most qualified to make decisions based on sharing that knowledge.

I can't find the link I meant to, but this one deals with this view pretty well: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html)

<comment><USER4> I don't really like the idea of putting managers "below" workers. The fundamental reason why middle managers behave in such shitty ways is that they're insecure. (Their job is to be leaders, but they often aren't the leaders the group would pick; they're compliant stooges selected by executives who trust them to favor upward interests.) Putting management at a level _below_ workers is just as bad and will probably produce even more incompetent management than the dogshit we already get.

We need to accept _different_ that isn't below or above.

What we need is a radically transparent system that allows for division of labor and investor/worker symbiosis but doesn't turn that into an excuse for parasitic behavior at any level: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _WOW!_

After reading this article, I feel so incredibly happy that I work for "BigCo".

I already like where I am quite a bit, but this article made me appreciate it an extra order of magnitude.

I think I will read this article once a month so I can feel grateful for what I see now as an incredible company and work environment.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Sometimes I wonder how few of us "BigCo" employees there are here on HN.

<comment><USER8> I'm starting to think I'd _like to_ work for BigCo. Not to stay--but because it's very hard to be both _an employee of_ a startup, while also _bootstrapping your own_ startup. BigCo + bootstrapping seems much simpler.

But as far as I'm aware, from most BigCos' perspectives, I'm unemployable; autodidact [no CS degree] + living in Canada. So, I guess it's back to looking for a job at another startup while trying to eek out time on my own...

<comment><USER9> I work at a large corporation that does not particularly care about international borders, and I have no degree. It can be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like the one of the best ways for an engineer to get his worth is to be solo or work with engineers only.

The moment someone else without a programming background comes in, it all goes black. I'm seriously amazed at how people tend to think that all programmers are equal and one guy can't give output equal to three or four.

I'm still in college but I've seen the difference and it is big. In a class of 90, 4/5 people are able to finish one program and when the fifth one finishes, half the class has already given up or is still busy including header files in C!

</comment><comment><USER11> " To me reasonable is less than 50hrs/week or less. 40-45 is ideal" ++1 Not only it's not reasonable, I seriously doubt quality of code can be sustained when coding such long hours. There can be "temporary" bursts, couple of really late nights, or working over the weekend, etc. but in my experience, there is always a price to pay if it becomes the norm.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand the vitriol aimed at the recruiter. Any developer in the Bay Area with a LinkedIn account gets a dozen of these a week.

The author just isn't interested in working at a start-up, but god forbid he receive a recruiting email from one.

I'd take a different tack: your early twenties is a perfect fucking time to try working a start up. No mortgage, no kids; why not take the risk?

Instead you should what...take a 9-5 so you can have a life outside of work, so you can work on your side project instead of working at a start up.

Also, attending conferences isn't "professional development."

<comment><USER13> > I don't understand the vitriol aimed at the recruiter. Any developer in the > Bay Area with a LinkedIn account gets a dozen of these a week.

Just because you get shit in your inbox several times a day doesn't mean it's not shit.

> Also, attending conferences isn't "professional development."

Having attended several conferences for my employer, they can be valuable in understanding the technology and standards you work with. I had the privilege of meeting customers over dinner with our salesperson. Those dinners were valuable for establishing trust for conference calls I occasionally do.

> Instead you should what...take a 9-5 so you can have a life outside of work, > so you can work on your side project instead of working at a start up.

This is exactly what I'm doing. I'm 26 and working on insurance software. As the most experienced dev on a small team I have a lot of authority in how features are developed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds about right. That's why I ain't moving. I've seen these companies, i've gotten the same mails too and uhm.. i'm not going there :)

</comment><comment><USER15> 50 hours reasonable?

Hell no, not as a sustained habit. 37 is good. 40 is ok. More is too much time in the office.

<comment><USER16> I guess they add their break times to the actual work time?

<comment><USER17> I read about a study done some time ago that said pretty much everyone starts "lying" when they report above 45 hours per week. Like your example, they start scoring things as work that one might not otherwise.

E.g. I found my max "death march" rate of work, which I can sustain for a number of months, is 6 7 hour days. That's 7 hours of real, at the keyboard work, not counting formal meetings, lunch, breaks, etc.

More than once I suffered because bad management measured apparent work effort, e.g. vs. people who put in a lot more hours _including debugging_ for some inexplicable reason vs. useful results.

<comment><USER18> Debugging is work, I don't understand.

<comment><USER17> Should have been clearer; my usage of inexplicable is generally sarcastic, which doesn't always come across in text:

There's a class of programmers who spend a dispropriate amount of time debugging the very buggy code they just wrote.

That's certainly work in some sense, but most of us prefer to write less buggy code to begin with. With me, that means I spend what some view as a dispropriate amount of time thinking problems, where that amount of time is often measured in minutes, but the point is that I'm not typing anything, hence in their eyes I'm not working.

There's a great anecdote about a Bell Labs mathematician who e.g. worked on hard problems that directly applied to building and running Bell's systems and networks. A boss type once complained that he wasn't working because he spent a lot of time sitting and thinking (his real/direct bosses were very happy with that, though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole recruiting ecosystem is just awful. Plus in my personal experience, the best job offers and the best candidates have come through people I know and trust, not through recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER20> I imagine there are startups like the one the OP is describing out there that are awful places to work and the OP is right to be annoyed at rookie recruiters trying to use ego to persuade naive engineers.

But the OP also seems to be a rather angry and bitter individual. That attitude is definitely going to keep any startup with a functional culture from hiring you. There is no way you'd want to take the risk of someone poisoning your culture by ranting about how bad everyone else is.

<comment><USER21> "Pretend everyone is great" smacks to me of the anti-competition fetishism in engineering hiring. The labor market votes with its feet. Articles like this serve the purpose of informing engineers and making them focus more on functional culture. He's not calling out companies specifically, he's speaking in general terms about things you should avoid, and that's valuable in ensuring that better companies have more success in hiring and worse companies are punished.

More generally, engineers are in an enviable and almost certainly temporary situation where they have strong bargaining power in relation to employers. They should use that opportunity to extract as much value from companies while the situation lasts. When the shoe is on the other foot, that's exactly what the employers will be doing. It's only a matter of time before the bubble ends and the management consultants come in and teach companies how to extract the most value from their engineers while paying as little as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "He's on Linkedin, Lemon, he might as well be dead"

I think this post does a good job of calling out low-ball offers from startup founders. In some ways it speaks to just how many developers are really on the market and how much funding is washing around for 'hustler' startup founders.

But, sir, if you don't want to receive recruiter emails, get off Linkedin.

Startup idea: I'll start a company where people set their own price to be contacted. Would you like to join our team?

</comment><comment><USER23> Er, all that comes up on my browser is "No, Fuck Off." Is there an actual article here? I have tried at least three times. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just an obnoxious one-liner.

Edit: It apparently does not scroll on Android. FYI and all that.

<comment><USER7> Same here.

I made the article text appear by switching tabs back and forth. I'm using Boat Browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some good points, BUT. The first employees do not take nearly as much as risk as founders. Yeah you might lose your job if the company fails, but at least you were hired and got a salary from day one, you didn't have to work for a year or more on no salary and not knowing whether you would be able to raise money to even hire that first employee.

Seriously, start a company before stating stuff like this.

<comment><USER25> Most employees are likely taking a lot _more_ risk than founders. In the worst case, a founder has to look for another job (same as the employee), but with experience at being an executive at a company. Lots of founders won't have to look for another job even if their company fails in the worst way.

An employee, on the other hand, puts 100% of their eggs in _your_ basket. If the company fails then they have no income at all, through no fault of their own. What goes on their resume? "I was a grunt at some company you never heard of and never will because it doesn't exist anymore".

Granted, it's possible a founder could be putting up a lot of their own money and end up being broke if it fails, but I think in today's world of seed funding and so on, I'd call such a person an idiot. :)

<comment><USER24> Being an "exec" at a 2 or 3 persons startup is not far off being a grunt. In fact it is the same thing. Putting "CEO" on your resume is not impressive if your company failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Too bad you're going to pass on the opportunity the recruiter was offering. You could have unlocked your "bragging rights" achievement badge.

</comment><comment><USER27> It all comes down to what makes you happy. Startup or big company you could have a bad experience regardless.

Honestly I enjoy the thrill of working in a startup, if I didn't have fun doing this I wouldn't be doing it.

But in all honesty, there are people who worked hard and got pricey non- engineering degrees that are jobless.

If this article speaks to how messed up the startup life is, it also speaks to how spoiled we all are.

<comment><USER25> You have a limited amount of years in your life that you can earn. Allowing yourself to be exploited so certain rich people can get even richer at your expense is not only a bad strategy for you [1], it hurts the market over all because everyone who does this adjusts the market rate downward.

[1] Seriously, people need to shut the fuck up about "fun". Whether you have "fun" or not has fuck all to do with anything. You think Micheal Jordan wasn't having "fun" making a living playing basketball? Of course he was, but he still demanded as high a rate as he could possibly get because he was _worth_ it.

<comment><USER27> What are you talking about? If it's "fun" it's "fun".

Maybe I'm just blind and everyone is jumping into startups for no equity/salary. But in actuality, the startups out there offer realistic deals, if they don't, don't take the job. Simple as that.

One thing is for sure though, you're not going to get as good a deal at a startup as you would at a big company. There is a reason for that, you (should) have a possible big payout.

Now, if people are actually taking low paying jobs with barely any equity while the founders feast, I totally agree that's messed up.

Also, the Michael Jordan example doesn't apply. He would be like a Google employee that demands a higher salary, and because he's worth it, gets it. He was having "fun" playing in the NBA, so he stayed. If he went out to start his own basketball league that would be a different story.

<comment><USER25> >What are you talking about? If it's "fun" it's "fun".

Fine, but that has nothing to do with anything. You should always try to find work you enjoy. But it doesn't affect the rate. Picking up trash probably isn't fun, but it doesn't pay more for being an awful job that no one wants to do. Why should "fun" jobs pay less? They should not.

>But in actuality, the startups out there offer realistic deals, if they don't, don't take the job. Simple as that.

Have you not seen people on this very site saying "well, the pay is bad but I don't mind because it's fun" or "I'd take 50% less if the job was fun" and so on? It happens fairly often.

>Now, if people are actually taking low paying jobs with barely any equity while the founders feast, I totally agree that's messed up.

I think the issue is, they see numbers and think "wow, I'm getting 15% of the company, that's huge!" but in reality their equity has no protections against delusion so by the time they could actually sell their stock it will be worth a few thousand. Nothing remotely compared to the salary hit they took. So they don't _think_ they're getting barely any equity but that's nearly always the case for an employee.

>Also, the Michael Jordan example doesn't apply. He would be like a Google employee that demands a higher salary, and because he's worth it, gets it. He was having "fun" playing in the NBA, so he stayed. If he went out to start his own basketball league that would be a different story.

NBA isn't a company, it's an organization of individual companies. The Chicago Bulls are a separate company with their own staff, payroll and so on. The NBA would be comparable to something like "organic foods retail". It's not all of basketball but it's all of one kind of basketball (NBA pro ball).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Simple solution: untick the "Career opportunities" box in linkedin if you're not interested in receiving job offers.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was half expecting the article to end with 'btw, Spotify is now hiring.' Well done.

</comment><comment><USER30> Am I the only one that sees the author as just a _little_ misdirected?

On one hand, he bitches about not wanting to make startup founders rich by working shitty hours in an unstable work environment. I get that, I really do. However, he hasn't indicated he wants to BE said founder (nothing wrong with that).

So go work for Google or Facebook. There's a lot of early employees there who are benefitting in ways that are only possible from being an early employee at a successful startup. Granted, these are rare, and you shouldn't count on them.

I do agree that a lot of startups can have shitty working environments compared to BigCo, but it sometimes it just comes with the territory. That's part of being a startup, always more work than people to do it. That's like getting a job in a coal mine and complaining that your hands are always dirty.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have to wonder how much of this can be mitigated by founders giving up more equity to the employee stock option pool.

It's something I've been seriously thinking about for my own decisions in the future.

</comment><comment><USER32> Come on. Being part of a startup is not about whether you can get a good salary for reasonable hours. It's not about founders trying to take advantage of engineers to enrich themselves.

If you're considering a startup, ask yourself: am I passionate about what this startup is trying to accomplish? If you really are, join the team. Get on the bandwagon. You get equity, which means your successes are shared. If it's just another startup that you don't care about, it's not a good match anyways.

<comment><USER25> If you're not a founder it's not your company. Being passionate about someone _else's_ "dream" (often; get rich quick scheme) isn't noble, it's naive. That "equity" you get is almost certainly worthless (what evidence do you have that it's not? "feelings" are not evidence).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Coincidently I got this same recruiters email today.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm not sure whether writing this post will make this guys situation better or worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries, I am happily employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> grammar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I just came from happy hour and had a couple of drinks. Will edit it. :)

<comment><USER36> Looks like someone's not a happy drunk. ;)

Thanks for the interesting perspective.</comment></comment></comment>


Alibaba partner announces 16 core RISC-V chip - <AUTHOR> https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-07-25/alibaba-chip-subsidiary-launches-first-product-using-open-source-architecture-101443785.html <comment><USER2> Article explaining the relevance of this news: [https://technode.com/2019/07/24/chinas-chipmakers-risc-v- san...](https://technode.com/2019/07/24/chinas-chipmakers-risc-v-sanctions/)

<comment><USER3> Link seems terribly dead =/

<comment><USER4> Just load it via an archive?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190724090600/https://technode....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190724090600/https://technode.com/2019/07/24/chinas- chipmakers-risc-v-sanctions/)

[https://archive.is/I5bgm](https://archive.is/I5bgm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Adapteva's Parallela, which I bought and was really excited about, but was obviously a commercial failure. I work on software that has an above-average (but far less than HPC) need for concurrency, but even our most demanding customers seem to be content with off-the-shelf Intel, either because they don't need THAT many cores, or because they value the more sophisticated instructions (like encryption acceleration, etc.) I'm curious to know what kind of use cases y'all work on that might crave something like this.

<comment><USER6> Modern x64 is very difficult to beat and takes a lot more than just raw core count. The out of order execution, prefetching, multiple execution units, SIMD, cache, cache synchronization etc. are all very strong. I think the space where more weak cores can be utilized but not GPUs is pretty slim. Intel themselves even had that briefly with their high core count out of order atom core chips that didn't take off (or weren't given a chance).

I think software that can take advantage of more than a few cores without just using brute force fork-join parallelism in some of the heavy loops is rare. I don't think it has to be that way, but the problem comes down to software architecture which isn't going to be solved by leaving each application programmer to their own devices. It will take libraries that give them the means to do it without having to reason about low level synchronization.

<comment><USER7> _Modern x64 is very difficult to beat and takes a lot more than just raw core count._

Are there any alternatives on the horizon?

<comment><USER8> AArch64, and RISC-V. POWER is a monoculture, and MIPS never really got out of it's gate count niche.

<comment><USER9> MIPS may enjoy a resurgence, it will be open sourced soon I have read.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't really open sourced. It's open in the sense that if you pay a bunch of money, and sign an NDA, you'll be given access to the source... which has always been the case. Some sales bro bought MIPS and slapped an "open" label on it. IMO, it's current steward has done more to kill it then ARM and RISC-V ever could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are several links available for this announcement, but none of them are that great. Alternatives: [https://kr-asia.com/alibabas-pingtouge-launches- own-processo...](https://kr-asia.com/alibabas-pingtouge-launches-own- processor-aiming-to-be-a-chip-infrastructure-provider-for-ai-and-iot) [https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-07-25/alibaba-chip- subsidi...](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-07-25/alibaba-chip-subsidiary- launches-first-product-using-open-source-architecture-101443785.html)

<comment><USER10> Alibaba doesn't seem to have any press releases written about this, not even in Chinese. All reporting seems to be based on what CTO Zhang Jianfeng said at the currently ongoing Alibaba Cloud Summit ( [https://summit.aliyun.com/](https://summit.aliyun.com/) ). Maybe they'll have more information on the specifics once the summit is over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How long before Android runs properly on RISC-V?

And will they be able to persuade app-makers to rebuild all apps for the platform - x86 Android shows how hard that can be.

<comment><USER12> > _How long before Android runs properly on RISC-V?_

It's mostly up to OpenJDK and V8 porting. When it comes to porting V8, I've found out the hard way that there's more to it than a generic understanding of compilers. Somebody still has to step up to the plate for a real JVM.

> _And will they be able to persuade app-makers to rebuild all apps for the > platform - x86 Android shows how hard that can be._

Real x86 Android devices had libhoudini (DBT), which was pretty decent. If RISC-V starts with low-end devices, or with a high-visibility model that developers are pretty sure will sell well, then the native compilation target will become more popular over time.

If China's bizarre local app market is involved, chances are they'll start supporting the target as soon as it's available.

<comment><USER13> A small correction, Android does not use OpenJDK. It uses the ART runtime ([https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik](https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik)) which will definitly need porting.

Slightly longer answer is that _some parts_ of the OpenJDK are used. Namely, LUNI (implementation of java.lang, java.util, java.net, java.io) run on the device, but those are high-level enough that they will require either none or minimal changes for risc-v.

Compiling applications also uses OpenJDK (or the Jack compiler in platform builds) but that is an intermediate step on the host. The produced JVM bytecode gets converted to Dex bytecode during the build process.

I think the effort for Android will be two-fold:

On the software side, Bionic (android's libc), Dalvik (runtime), LLVM, external dependencies (i.e. boringssl, lib{vpx,hecv,mpeg4,etc},) definitely need work.

On the hardware side it all lies on the practical availability of a SoC. While I have no doubt we'll have something similar to android-x86 running on discrete chips, commercial devices will need a more complete cpu+gpu+dsp+modem package.

<comment><USER12> > _A small correction, Android does not use OpenJDK. It uses the ART runtime_

Oops! I got confused after there was uncertainty in 2015 because of the Oracle lawsuits. I believe it was reported at that time that they would switch to OpenJDK, or something similar enough was reported that that's what I remembered.

> _On the software side, Bionic (android 's libc), Dalvik (runtime), LLVM, > external dependencies (i.e. boringssl, lib{vpx,hecv,mpeg4,etc},) definitely > need work._

Not all of those need to be in software, but yes, it all needs to come together.

> _commercial devices will need a more complete cpu+gpu+dsp+modem package._

Totally, though the non-CPU bits have little to do with RISC-V either way, and the drivers for them tend to be (relatively) portable C code, so that bodes well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being in Arm's position sucks now.

Would they not be so enthusiastic about sanctions, Chinese would've been way more cautious jumping on RISC-V boat.

Now instead of having RISC-V as one off research projects, which would have probably died off silently, now they are all treated as survival essential projects.

<comment><USER15> I agree. I feel like we (USA) are forcing China on a path that will make them more competitive long term.

<comment><USER16> The same thing happened when China wanted to join the ISS[1] - the US Congress blocked this to avoid "tech transfer". Instead of being dejected and sad, China kickstarted its space station program, and are now collaborating with Europe.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_Space_Station#China)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When will RISC-V move to multi-chip modules ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- chip_module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module)) as AMD has done very successfully with Ryzen?

It allows for easy scaling of CPU designs as well as increasing yield by making smaller components that have overall lower defect rates.

hat seems like the logical next move for most CPU chip vendors/designers except for maybe ARM.

<comment><AUTHOR> "RISC-V" isn't an organization that can "move to multi-chip modules". RISC-V is a foundation which essentially publishes a couple of PDF files (the user spec and priv spec) and organizes a bunch of other stuff around reference hardware designs, simulators and the software toolchain.

All of this is BSD licensed, so anyone can pick it up and manufacture chips based on the specification or by modifying one of the reference designs. Note that the largest part of designing and building a chip is not the choice of ISA (that's probably well under 10% of it).

What you may want to know is whether any manufacturers are going to make modular RISC-V chips. None of them to my knowledge. But most of them are currently focusing on the ARM space (embedded, IoT, AI, etc.) including this particular design.

<comment><USER18> The nice thing is that software and work on a RISC-V toolchain can now be much more common for vendors that elect to use RISC-V, though it remains to be seen how well the actual manufactured chip variation gets supported like instruction set extensions, peripherals, and configurations for many cores. ARM had some motivation to help ease the customization pain for tooling for their IP licensees, so I'm curious if RISC-V support will be more like ARM or more like early UNIX vendors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The 'muddying the waters, what about the US' comments on these threads always intrigue me.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is both awesome and terrifying. I'll never forget this research([https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor- hi...](https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hides-inside- computer-chip/)) which showed how an attacker can insert a backdoor into a chip during the manufacturing process in a way that is practically impossible to catch. That makes me very concerned about using a chip completely manufactured in China.

But at the same time, RISC-V needs to happen. It's a critical step to move computing forward. It's just a damn shame that this is the way it's going to happen. Hopefully this will push RISC-V manufacturing efforts in the US before the market becomes flooded with cheap open source and most likely backdoored chips manufactured in China.

<comment><USER21> Is there a way to know that the present chips are not backdoored? Or, backdoored by US? Why should the world be concern about Chinese backdoors and not US ones?

<comment><USER22> Let's not pretend the US and China are equally authoritarian please.

<comment><USER23> Let's not pretend how they are governed internally is what concerns the rest of the world.

The US has been in constant wars, invasions, meddling with foreign politics, running protectorates, etc. for over a century, including having bases all around the world. Far more countries have battle and regime change scars by the US than by China. Including it being the only country that ever dropped atomic bombs (and to civilians, none the less).

And it's not just the Orange Baboon in charge that's worrying (though of course there's that too) -- the "Nobel Peace Price" winner Obama had a worse track record.

(Of course for Americans anything that happened over 20 or 40 years ago is ancient history and the world should have forgotten it and totally trust them now -- still there were like 4 wars and one regime change they assisted in the last 20 years, so there's that).

<comment><USER24> Yeah, and China does equally disgusting things _to its own citizens_. Literally right now they are enacting cultural genocide on millions of their own people (see: the uyghurs)

Do you really have faith that China is going to act any differently to outsiders?

<comment><USER25> Americans imprison more people than China. Americans imprison and torture children at the border.

<comment><USER26> >Americans imprison more people than China.

But we have due process and most of these offenses are due to the failed drug war. Whether or not people should be locked up for drug offenses is one thing, but the laws being broken are pretty clear and generally aren't being used as punishment for expressing anti-government sentiment.

>Americans imprison and torture children at the border

This angle is pretty ridiculous. The border facilities are totally overwhelmed by an influx of people who by law are not allowed entry to the U.S. The vast majority are economic migrants, not assylum seekers. Moreover, they made the choice to come here knowing full well the illegality of their actions, and they are not being "imprisoned," they are being detained for a few weeks while the overloaded system processes their claims. Calling it torture is an exaggeration. Also the miserable conditions at the contentious facilities recently in the news are not representative of ICE facilities in general.

<comment><USER23> > _But we have due process_

Only when people are not just executed by cops because they dared look too black or homeless or whatever (so many more cases of police killings that any European country when adjusted for population that it's amazing).

And even then, the due process is full of batshit-crazy aspects, from prosecutorial blackmail deals, to "three-strikes" BS.

And let's not even get into prison conditions, use of solitary confinement, rape as "joke", private prisons and prison labor, and so on...

Or the fact that it's the only (or close) western country to still have the death penalty...

And that's for official prisons. Now let's add the various "sites"...

<comment><USER26> >Only when people are not just executed by cops because they dared look too black or homeless or whatever

These atrocities are an exceedingly tiny minority out of millions of yearly police interactions.

>And even then, the due process is full of batshit-crazy aspects, from prosecutorial blackmail deals, to "three-strikes" BS

The system is not perfect, but the point is that in contrast to authoritarian China, it is generally not abused to suppress political dissent and U.S. citizens have rights to due process and representation in the legal system that do not exist in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I mirrored the PR of RISC-V foundation here:

[http://www.zoobab.com/alibaba-unveils-most-powerful-risc- v-p...](http://www.zoobab.com/alibaba-unveils-most-powerful-risc-v-processor- to-date)

</comment><comment><USER12> Too bad they only quoted the CoreMark, and only compared it to an in-order processor.

I'd love to see a real benchmark, and a comparison to a processor in the same ballpark in terms of power and area.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would really liked to know what extentions they will support. Will the support the Vector extention? How about some of the once that are not quite finished yet, like Bit manipulations.

<comment><USER29> >I would really liked to know what extentions they will support.

Me too.

>Will the support the Vector extention?

The vector (V) extension is not standarized yet. It'll likely take two years, as per updates in recent conferences.

>How about some of the once that are not quite finished yet, like Bit manipulations.

That one (X) isn't ready either, but more likely to be ready soon.

<comment><USER30> Just because standardization isn't finished doesn't mean they won't go ahead an build the closest thing to the current consensus they can manage.

<comment><USER31> Or build something they prefer. If someone is too slow in standardizing there often many concurring "standards" because people needed a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How does this compare to the Intel X86 CPUs in terms of power consumption, price and performance?

Is this CPU a viable alternative for server and desktop computing?

<comment><AUTHOR> This chip exists entirely as a file on a computer, and maybe a few FPGAs, so I doubt even the company announcing this has very much idea. It seems as if they're hoping to get SMIC to manufacture this, so it won't exactly be a competitive node (although China is pouring vast amounts of resources into making their semiconductor manufacturing competitive, so give it a few years).

<comment><USER32> So far is this thing actually from being produced? (In time and cost)

<comment><AUTHOR> Although it sounds radical (16 cores!) it's a rather low end chip. So months to a year, and millions to low 10s of millions of dollars. However the Chinese govt is massively investing in semiconductors at the moment so they will regard that as valuable research and investment rather than a cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's the significance of this announcement? What are the likely markets for this chip?

<comment><USER34> For one, RISC-V is fully open hardware unlike x86, amd64, arm and other architectures. More adoption is always a good thing.

<comment><USER35> RISC-V is an open ISA, but a particular RISC-V chip is not necessarily open hardware. In fact, most probably aren't.

<comment><USER31> What i don't get is how optimizations should work for Risc-V. For e.g. intel chips you can do optimizations for every generation because some things have been optimized in the architecture so you can do different tricks. But with risc-v only the instruction set is the same and every cpu could implement it differently with different performance characteristics. How should someone optimize for this?

<comment><USER36> It's been already happening with ARM. Clang has tune flags for cortex-$generation, thunderx, thunderx2 (vulcan), (not upstream yet) emag…

and regular distributions ship generic just like on amd64 :)

<comment><USER31> Yeah because ARM sells the complete implementation for the ARM core. But with Risc-V there may be hundreds of different implementations, you can't really add optimizations for everyone.

<comment><USER36> Not everyone buys the implementations, I specifically listed multiple non- Cortex ones. Cavium/Marvell ThunderX, ThunderX2 (Broadcom Vulcan), Qualcomm Centriq (press F for Falkor), Ampere eMAG (Skylark), all current Apple stuff, are all very different custom implementations.

TX2 in particular has a fascinating history: [https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/cavium/microarchitectures/vulca...](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/cavium/microarchitectures/vulcan)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> For all my .NET developers, if you want your .NET Core app to target RISC-V ISA, you would need to use Mono AOT and to specify the LLVM target is RISC-V.

</comment><comment><USER38> Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.

<comment><USER39> RISC architectures have existed for about 4 decades.

<comment><USER38> It's a quote from hackers the movie from 1995.</comment></comment></comment>


Optimal Taxation with Rent-Seeking (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/papers/w17035 <comment><USER2> So the argument is: if we lower taxes on ownership of capital that can produce "rents" (i.e. stocks, real estate, etc), the value of that capital flies upwards so high that people are discouraged from buying in due to inflated asset prices. So then we can have a relatively smaller more entrenched group of people who controls all the productive assets.

Sounds wonderful. Long live the king.

<comment><USER3> Can you give an example of capital value flying upwards so high that people are discouraged from buying in due to inflated asset prices?

<comment><USER4> Southern California homes?

<comment><USER3> Are they really disconnected from rents in that area, as well as reasonable expectations of future growth in demand - given low interest rates, which mean you have to consider the performance of the asset far into the future?

In other words, if these assets were any cheaper, would they not be underpriced vs their intrinsic value, making it a great investment with someone with enough capital - thus bidding the prices back up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      One might be tempted to expect a similar result to apply to the more general two
      sector model when only rent-seekers are the top earners. In fact, since the top earners
      are all rent-seekers, rent-seeking imposes a negative externality, and the government has
      a desire to redistribute from high-earners to low earners, this seems like a clear case for
      high marginal tax rates on high earners, as discussed in the introduction. As Theorem 4
      demonstrates, however, this intuition is not complete. The key reason is the additional
      sectoral shift effect not present in a one sector economy: By lowering the marginal tax
      rate on the top earning rent-seekers, total equivalent effort E increases and thus wages
      in the rent-seeking sector fall. As a consequence, some agents now find it profitable to
      leave the rent-seeking sector and become traditional workers. Since the traditional sector
      is socially more productive, this shift is always welfare enhancing (S > 0)

This took me a fair while to grok. So I think the point is that a Pigovian tax rate[0] is what you'd expect with a rent seeking sector and a non-rent seeking sector (trying to minimize the negative externalities of rent-seeking).

Now if we have nothing but rent seekers in the top income bracket and try and set their tax rate independently, you'd think that you should set it to the rate which is the value of the negative externalities that that sector produces, right?

The reason for the difference appears to be that in doing so, you make some of the people who would have been rent seekers switch from rent seekers to non- rent seeking behaviours, so to be pareto optimal, it "costs less" in taxes than the pigovian tax, because the logical thing decreases the "attractiveness" of being in the rent seeking sector, and the (logical) agents move to the socially benificial sector, thus producing an outsized effect of net good.

Is this right? can someone confirm whether I'm reading this correctly?

[EDIT] formatting

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

<comment><USER6> The way I understood it (by way of the paper's gold panning illustration) is that with a progressive tax system based on total aggregate income (i.e. you don't distinguish rent income from non-rent income), high marginal tax rates result in a multitude of rent-seekers each collecting a fraction of the total available rents. This is so because as their income for the year accumulates and their marginal tax rate increases, the tax rate overcomes the collection effort required. Once they've maximized their income they rest for the remainder of the year. If they're not collecting rents that means someone else can. The market in rent-seeking supports a larger number of rent-seekers, which diminishes the base of people doing productive work.

By contrast, imagine if _all_ the rents went to a single rent-seeker. In that situation only one individual is doing unproductive work instead of many. Assuming that the rents were going to be collected regardless, then we're better off if there's only one individual pursing that unproductive activity than many.

How do you ensure there's only one rent-seeker? By creating conditions that favor someone monopolizing the rent-seeking market. You can do so by taxing high income earners _less_ than you might otherwise, preserving the incentive for a single rent-seeker to collect all the rents. The lone rent-seeker is taxed less, but that's okay because he's keeping everybody else out of the rent-seeking market. Taxes on other high-income earners is less but that's okay, too, because they're doing productive activity-- _generating_ wealth and thus more taxable surplus--and now there's _more_ of them.

Like the Laffer Curve the devil is in the details.[1] But it's an interesting point.

[1] I don't mean to impugn the paper by comparing it with the Laffer Curve and the toxic political economics surrounding it. I just mean to say that the quantitative values matter.

<comment><USER7> Isn't there a fairly toxic political question buried in this paper as well? Who is going to decide which behaviors are rent-seeking and which are productive?

<comment><USER6> Yes, if pundits and lobbyists abuse this paper by relying on it to expound policies that it can't actually support. (Maybe they already have?) But that's a more general problem with how our political culture permits politicians and pundits to abuse science in their rhetoric.

There's also a problem in academia where intense pressures to publish and to be cited incentivize researchers to make radical claims, exaggerate the practical utility of their findings, gloss over weak points, etc, ripe for political fodder. I won't claim to understand all the technical details in the paper but I didn't sense any of that in the paper. The authors seemed to establish a fair analytical context, and they plainly articulated a limited policy conclusion--"it _does_ _not_ _necessarily_ _imply_ that taxes should be more steeply progressive". (Emphasis added.) Those don't feel like weasel words; just true and straight-forward without inviting misinterpretation.

It's a cool paper that credibly does what it sets out to: explore what can happen (in a formal and fair but, clearly, limited model) when you give rent- seeking a first-class treatment and carefully analyze how it interplays with the rest of the system.

By contrast, Arthur Laffer very actively advertised his research as justifying policies that it simply could not. And he continues to do it--he actively promoted the 2017 tax cut using the same intentionally misleading arguments he always has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've actually thought about this recently. The more equity that a smaller number of elites acquire, the less value they place on their own money, the more willing they are to throw money around and drive up prices for certain items, such as real estate - this warps the market. It's almost as if the top 0.01% become an economic black hole consuming more and more resources to acquire what's left.

<comment><USER9> But notice, it doesn't affect random assets. You don't see people hoarding and speculating on cars to a ridiculous degree, because cars depreciate.

Likewise, with real estate, the actual improvement values depreciate over time. What can appreciate is the value of the land.

But there's other areas that see such influxes of cash desperately seeking a return, like venture capital, ponzi schemes, cryptocurrency, and so on. However, much of that is akin to gambling and the losing bets mainly just harm the losers of the bets.

With land speculation manias, and related natural resource speculation manias, everyone becomes a loser. Cost of living skyrockets, and so does the cost of new production and hiring.

<comment><USER10> Hurry, hurry! Ukrainians want to sell their land quickly (at least that is what our imposed leaders tell us):

[https://voxukraine.org/en/land-prices-and-size-of-the- market...](https://voxukraine.org/en/land-prices-and-size-of-the-market-what- to-expect-for-ukraine-en/)

      Cost of living skyrockets,
      and so does the cost of new production and hiring.

Doesn't automation make wages diminishing? Also, please, read this:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/POLITIC/comments/7hqo7d/to_have_em_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/POLITIC/comments/7hqo7d/to_have_em_all/)

What do you think about the right for secession, if citizens were embezzled of their land by unfair privatization process?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd wish to see an immensely large taxation on non-primary residence properties; something like 15-20%/year. I'm not aware of any examples or good studies on consequences of such action, but I'd expect the affordability of actually owning your home to significantly increase and remove the exorbitant rent cost.</comment>


Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.lunaryorn.com/posts/bye-bye-emojis-emacs-hates-macos.html <comment><USER2> As one of GNU's flagship products, why shouldn't Emacs remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users? GNU has an agenda, just like Apple does. Intel cripples icc for non-Intel CPUs, making it emit pessimised assembler. Apple makes sure that its hardware only works with other Apple products and that macOS can only be legally virtualised on Apple hardware. Everyone has an agenda.

The difference is that GNU is a lot smaller and has a lot less power and resources than Apple and Intel. So much that it is relatively easy and, in fact, explicitly allowed by the GPL, for someone like Yamamoto to come along and decide that, by golly, Emacs will have unique macOS-only features and Apple deserves to have more money to do whatever it wants to its users because its users enjoy Apple's treatment, smelly GNU/Beards be damned. This is a lot easier than fixing icc for AMD CPUs or putting headphone jacks into iPhones 7.

> _We are not welcome, and never will be._

You are welcome. You are very welcome. Apple is not. You should not identify yourself with Apple's operating system.

<comment><USER3> Deliberately crippling your product on Apple platforms does not in any way "remind users that it is not in agreement with Apple's treatment of its users". In fact, it's fairly ironic that, in an attempt to protest someone else's treatment of users, Emacs has decided to treat its users badly. Deliberately crippling Emacs will not make Apple change, and will not get people to switch away from Apple platforms. But what it might do is get people to switch away from Emacs.

<comment><USER4> is removing multicolor font support crippling emacs?

<comment><USER5> I'd say it's a feature, not a bug. There is no place for colorful smileys in my text files.

<comment><USER6> Emojis are characters in the Unicode specification, which have glyphs in the macOS default font, and are rendered by default in native macOS apps that display text. Why should Emacs make the decision that most characters are okay to display in their text editor, but _these specific characters_ are a no-no?

You're sounding like "I'm not using this feature, why does it even exist?". If things worked like that, then everybody would be using Linux on all computers today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And several other Mac features were stopped before they made it into the official release. This is Richard Stallman's policy: "GNU Emacs should never offer people a practical reason to use some other system instead of GNU. Therefore, when someone implements a useful new feature but only for a non-GNU system, we do not accept it that form."

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-12/msg01...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-12/msg01407.html)

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-12/msg01...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-12/msg01572.html)

<comment><USER8> If the goal is to encourage people to use GNU software and potentially even migrate to a full GNU system, I find this policy counterintuitive. It comes off as needless and antagonistic and it pushes me further away from GNU and towards free software that's not so tangled up in rigid philosophies, or worse, proprietary software.

<comment><USER9> > It comes off as needless and antagonistic

That's because that comes directly from the commercial companies rulebook. Apple (for example) will not make an application that runs better on Android or Windows than on one of its OS.

It would not be beside any of the big brand to remove something that was working before just because that remove a tiny bit of interest in their own platform. That makes cruel business sense ... and they are also hated for it when it happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This kind of thing is exactly why I will always support and use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's macOS Emacs port ([https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- mac](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac)), which has been consistently rock solid and committed to implementing nice to haves on macOS that this sort of political bullshit holds back on official development.

Homebrew tap here: [https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew- emacsmacport](https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport)

<comment><USER11> he is the author of the commit [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=934461...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231)

<comment><USER12> And the commit seems to be in emacs-mac too - [https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- mac/commits/9344612d3cd...](https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs- mac/commits/9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231) (Going by the author date, it was in emacs-mac first.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > MacOS users we will always be second-class citizen in Emacs land3.

GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux. Why are you surprised that [other OS] is a second-class citizen for a project which already has a clear OS target.

Besides, the guidelines for GNU packages clearly states that GNU packages _cannot_ emphasise features of proprietary OSes. So it's not really the maintainer's fault, it's one of the rules for GNU packages (you can blame the FSF, but you've got to look at it from their perspective).

GNU packages are different from other projects, because they're actually part of an OS. So they have an obligation to support the OS they're a part of more than other operating systems (especially proprietary operating systems).

<comment><USER14> After using Emacs on Windows for years, including debugging graphics drivers, the only OS with first class support is Linux.

<comment><USER15> You're lucky. I literally have never gotten Emacs to run properly on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's the diff:

        -          /* Don't use a color bitmap font unless its family is
        -             explicitly specified.  */
        -          if ((sym_traits & kCTFontTraitColorGlyphs) && NILP (family))
        +          /* Don't use a color bitmap font until it is supported on
        +	     free platforms.  */
        +          if (sym_traits & kCTFontTraitColorGlyphs)

[https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/commit/9344612d3cd1643...](https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/commit/9344612d3cd164317170b6189ec43175757e4231?diff=unified)

</comment><comment><USER17> As a product developer, maintaining a consistent feature set across OSes makes perfect sense to me. It is a struggle to get consistent behavior across different versions of Windows, let alone entirely different OS types.

<comment><USER8> Some level of consistency is absolutely desirable but I'm not sure that full- on lowest common denominator is the right approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 1) It's perfectly okay (and good) that GNU maintainers do not want to have features that are needlessly exclusive to a given platform.

2) It's perfectly okay (and good) that they want their software to behave consistently across platforms, as otherwise those are not really cross- platform.

3) Coloured typeface are illogical, just use pictures, which is what emoji are. It's fairly easy to insert images into a buffer in Emacs.

<comment><USER19> > It's fairly easy to insert images into a buffer in Emacs.

Sure and how it is represented in the underlying file? Is this platform independent?

Emoji are just a part of Unicode. As far as I care, I wouldn't mind if Emacs would just render it as [GRINNING FACE U+1f600]

<comment><USER20> We're not talking about Emojis, but coloured typeface. Emojis are part of Unicode, coloured typeface are not.

<comment><USER21> Typefaces are not part of Unicode, coloured or not.

<comment><USER18> Unicode is a list of glyphs, typefaces are sets of shapes which represent glyphs. Emoji are pictures. Coloured glyphs in Unicode, which include emoji, require compliant typefaces to include some shapes that have a preset colour, and this is illogical, as colour is not the property of the shapes of a type, but of the rendered text. This must stop before Mona Lisa makes it into the Unicode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 20 years ago the FSF had some very forward-looking ideas. Now we have the ornery opinion of old men - it was good enough for us two decades ago, it's good enough for you now.

The point of free as in speech and not free as in beer is that the choice you make does not need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans. Holding back technology because it's not available on "your" platform is just as monopolistic as any corporate entity they have butted heads with.

<comment><USER23> _The point of free as in speech and not free as in beer is that the choice you make does not need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans._

No, it may be yours, but I'm pretty sure that was never the FSF's point. Not now, and not 20 years ago.

 _Holding back technology because it 's not available on "your" platform is just as monopolistic as any corporate entity they have butted heads with._

\- It's not "their" platform, it's free platforms.

\- The tech is still available, it just won't be included in their official release. Other MacOS ports are free to use it.

<comment><USER22> It's not the FSF's point to have freedom of ideas? Then please explain what it's point is. You disagreed but haven't explained why.

If it's not "their" platform then how is it available elsewhere? If other distributors have access and can make it available then it is very much a GNU political standard and not a side effect the technology.

How are those platforms free if existing features have been removed due to politics? I stand by my point, 20 years ago the FSF was a foundation that wanted to make technology available to all - without having to worry about IP ownership. They have removed a feature that was technically sound due to it's status as a commercial work. How am I free to use this if I can only do so in designated zones?

<comment><USER23> _It 's not the FSF's point to have freedom of ideas?_

Freedom of ideas is supposed to be a given in a free society. The FSF certainly supports it, but they weren't created for the purpose of promoting it.

In any case, your initial statement was that "the choice you make does not need to be right or wrong by the standards of other humans", which is actually the opposite of the FSF's position, which is that some choices (like developing, distributing or even promoting proprietary software) are unethical and should be opposed. That's the definition of making a standard and holding other humans to it.

 _If other distributors have access and can make it available then it is very much a GNU political standard and not a side effect the technology._

I don't disagree. It's still not their platform, it's all platforms they consider ethical.

 _How are those platforms free if existing features have been removed due to politics? I stand by my point, 20 years ago the FSF was a foundation that wanted to make technology available to all - without having to worry about IP ownership. They have removed a feature that was technically sound due to it 's status as a commercial work. How am I free to use this if I can only do so in designated zones?_

I completely disagree with your portrayal of the FSF of 20 years ago. The whole point of the creation of the GPL, instead of using the existing permissive licenses, was to legally enforce the position that the Freedom of the software, not its technical superiority, is the fundamental goal. This is a markedly political position, and one which prevented the creation of many features. Being "technically sound" was never enough to be considered good software by the GNU project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ,,Let's sink this in: The Emacs developers deliberately disabled a feature that was working perfectly fine for MacOS users just because it is not available for free systems1. What a daft decision.''

\- well, right now, it's just bloating Emacs for the rest of the world. If one needs it on MacOS, I'm sure it can be added it to a personal installation.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's easy to see this is but one side to the story from the level of emotion in the blog post. Does anyone have more information regarding the decision itself?

The post also misses the second half of the paragraph, which suggests a method to get emoji working again:

      If some symbols, such as emoji, do not display, we suggest to install
      an appropriate font, such as Symbola; then they will be displayed,
      albeit without the color effects.

<comment><USER26> So instead of using the native font rendering on OS X which they had actually done, they suggest installing a secondary font which doesn't work as well to fix the problem they created by disabling the working font rendering?

Yeah. I'm sure everyone's happy with that answer.

<comment><USER25> You're being just as short-sighted as the blog author, do you know the reasoning why it was removed in the first place?

It's fairly obvious the second part of the paragraph is a workaround, not a fully fledged solution.

<comment><USER26> I understand the reason why they did it. I understand your view of why it should be done.

I'd be A LOT more sympathetic if they hadn't been shipping it working for two years. At that point it's a little late to put the horse back in the barn.

Some of Stallmans list seems insane to me. They withheld accurate scrolling until all the other platforms had it? They are crippling font rendering to the lowest common denominator? They don't want background transparency on OS X because what is ostensibly a console program doesn't have it on other OSs?

This is the kind of stuff that "free software" people do that turns off normal people. I do understand some features. I can see why they wouldn't want to use the system spellchecker if they didn't have a spellchecker on other platforms. Very significant features like that that really could divide the platform makes some sense to me.

But breaking font rendering? Making scrolling work worse? Not having some generic cosmetic effects like background transparency? That seems way too dogmatic.

Worse is that Stallmans email seems to imply that some of the things that they held back on OS X should have been available for a while, but no one was keeping track of when the free platforms caught up to parity. Does that mean it's possible that OS X could have supported something to years ago, doesn't have it today, but Linux has had it for a year? If you're going to impose a rule like that you should be tracking it.

<comment><USER27> I feel like there is some lost perspective here.

> But breaking font rendering?

I would instead see at is making font rendering work equally across platforms.

> Making scrolling work worse?

Again, making scrolling work equally across platforms.

> Not having some generic cosmetic effects like background transparency?

Again, equally.

I am more than a little surprised that this is so surprising to people...it seems rather par for the course for GNU philosophy.

If you truly want to make a platform agnostic piece of software, then you end up limiting yourself to the "lowest common denominator".

People seem to have gotten used to the presumption that if you want to make software, you have to make platform specific versions for the best user experience. Want to write a mobile application? Well the best user experience comes from "native" apps...so you should make one specifically for iOS and then one specifically for Android.

That. Is. A. Huge. Problem. (*at least in the eyes of GNU)

And in principle I agree most of the time. Locked/incentivized eco-systems lead to the dominance of a few "popular" platforms as choosing which platforms to support (as a developer) becomes a function of market coverage. This has been demonstrated time and time again for better and for worse...although usually the latter.

So yes, GNU can be kind of extreme into their adherence to their core philosophies...but, honestly, I don't think this is a "fight" (so-to-speak) that can be made with half measures and exceptions.

<comment><USER19> Isn't it funny how it is the Mac OS people implementing these changes while the Linux people aren't coming up with equivalents?

And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have better scroll, etc

<comment><USER27> As Mac OS has a corporate entity behind it I don't think it is too surprising that Mac OS is in front...sort of.

> And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have > better scroll, etc

Well...sure, but it looks like all they did is remove the usage of Mac specific APIs from mainline:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-01/msg00389.html)

So they aren't so much sabotaging Emacs when it is on Mac, they are just refusing to utilize platform specific APIs and tools. Again...see my first comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > We are not welcome, and never will be.

It's quite silly that the the author of this post thinks non-free support was a top priority for the free software foundation.

<comment><USER29> Especially when the emacs homepage explicitly is anti-nonfree systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You do have the freedom to change Emacs! You can fork it and create "MacEmacs". You probably only have to change a few lines to get it working again.

<comment><USER31> Not even that; such a fork already exists (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish there was a way to force other applications to disable color emjoi.

<comment><USER33> There is a special char to disable colorful emoji but seems no way to deal with the font issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> FSF policy is that GNU software should not have features that will only work on non-free operating systems. The decision to remove multicolor glyph support was made on that basis.

The FSF don't want to make their software better on non-free operating systems which, given their goals, doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to me.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Therefore, when someone implements a useful new feature but only for a non- GNU system, we do not accept it that form."

Users of non-GNU systems that use GNU software: the FSF is actively trying to make your life more difficult.

<comment><USER36> Just as if you don't agree with Apple, you are welcome to use the alternatives. If you don't agree with GNU, you are welcome to use the alternatives.

<comment><USER37> That's exactly how this is going to go down, at least in my case.

<comment><USER18> Well if you'll switch away from Emacs because of coloured typeface, they you're not using Emacs at all anyways, so farewell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Emojify[0] provides all the emoji support I seem to need on both Ubuntu and macOS. It uses non-proprietary emojis though. If that's unacceptable, it can take arbitrary directories for emojis[1].

I must say, Emacs still runs better on macOS than Xcode does on Linux.

[0]: [https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs- emojify](https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify)

[1]: [https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs- emojify/issues/19](https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify/issues/19)

<comment><USER39> Seems to use EmojiOne, which is all the emoji you could need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you want to help adding multicolor fonts to free platforms:

[https://wiki.dequis.org/notes/emoji/](https://wiki.dequis.org/notes/emoji/)

[https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg- devel/2015-August/047175.h...](https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg- devel/2015-August/047175.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> The last time Emacs came up here, there was some discussion about Stallmans obsession with free OS purity and some separately-maintained macOS releases were suggested [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832486)

</comment><comment><USER42> These multicolored fonts can cause problems. E.g. firefox on linux was at one point rendering the unicode char "black right pointing triangle" as light blue for me despite the font and text around it being black! Can be fun for some, but not if you intend it to look like the text font! This character was in unicode since 1993 long before emoji existed and now we can't even insert a simple triangle in text without being certain it won't look ridiculous on some people's screens.

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b6/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b6/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone really need colored emoji in Emacs? It's a programmer's editor.

<comment><USER44> I can imagine having a debugger or repl open in an emacs buffer, which could be printing out arbitrary strings, which could include emoji. Though non coloured glyphs would be fine in that case.

Also, people use emacs for all kinds of crazy stuff, like IM and email and so on ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> A colour emoji font is available for Linux [1][2] so it doesn't really make any sense to disable the feature on macOS.

[1] [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/enable-color-emoji- linux-...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/enable-color-emoji-linux-svg- font)

[2] [https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color- font/releases/](https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/releases/)

<comment><USER39> There are actually a couple now. They currently only render in Gecko apps (though apparently it's possible to get them working in Chromium apps now, too). There's a bug filed in FreeType[0] to support SVG-in-OT fonts like this one, but no implementation yet.

I believe that having this implemented in FreeType would be sufficient to get it to work in GTK3 Emacs; not sure about plain X toolkits.

[0]: [https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?46141](https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?46141)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> And here i can't grok the appeal of emojis outside the tween girls segment...

<comment><USER47> Seems like they are generally popular: [http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising- branding/infographic-...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising- branding/infographic-emojis-are-becoming-preferred-communication-tool-across- demographics-167355)

<comment><USER46> Once more i find myself worried about the "positive" feedback loop found in mass media, marketing, and popular culture...

<comment><USER48> Get off the high horse

Different people like different things. 1337-speak and obscene levels of abbreviation largely came into being as SMS and text in-game chat were popular because, for a lot of people, spelling out words was much slower (or costly). The former mostly faded whereas the latter is still useful for twitter and people who actually still do SMS due to restrictions

Emoji (and emoticons before them) are similar. It is a way to convey an emotion or have a bit of fun in a concise manner. Some people like to type "That is hilarious". Others will type "LMFAO". And others still will put a pacman that is laughing. All convey the same message just in a different way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Forget GNU making a point, maintenance wise having several versions of your program with several different features could easily become hell. As these coloured smilies grow additional features, get bugs, etc - Emacs for OSX begins to fork. You then have divided developer time, with typically one fork eventually dying due to lack of funds.

Apple users: Take the temporary pain to protect your future.

<comment><USER50> I started poking around the emacs mailing list archives looking for drama, and found some messages from this month from RMS getting nervous about the idea of removing support for windows 9x.

<comment><USER49> That's great! Have you got a link?

<comment><USER50> [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-11/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-11/msg00193.html) [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-11/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2016-11/msg00229.html)

<comment><USER49> From what I read, they may look at removing support based on user agent strings which is a terrible idea. Many websites don't support browsers outside of Firefox, MS, Chrome and Safari recent releases, which is why people often hard code their user agent string.

Still, it's great to see them take their user base so seriously!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Feature parity across platforms makes it easier to develop and debug by removing platform-specific corner cases (of which there are already quite enough in Emacs). My init.el makes decisions based on which windowing system (if any) it's running on because some features work and some don't depending on the machine I'm on. I wish it didn't have to.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can you say: "U+1f4a9 U+1f32a"?

Those of you complaining about RMS's curmudgeonly demeanor, perhaps you would rather be using Apple iEmacs™ and "Microsoft Visual Emacs 2013", with about the same freedom as you have with macOS / iOS, Android, TiVo, etc., which would play about as well together as ntfs on mac and hfs+ on linux? (or maybe that alternate universe would be Google Mosaic on FranklinOS?). While you're at it, you should thank the couterpointedly curmudgeonly jwz that Emacs is not tty only, and you have at least one viable non-corporate(-ish) browser choice.

Or you could just run emacs in your iTerm. Or you could get all the big software pimps (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and maybe the W3C) to agree on a good (please not bitmaped) format, then patch Freetype, again. But I really hope it's already being worked on? I'm sure Emacs will work with it then.

</comment><comment><USER52> My immediate reactions after reading this:

1\. Why would you even WANT this?

2\. Find this unacceptable? Then recall what Apple did to Logic and Final Cut Pro users on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wish all emojis just disappeared. They're stupid, don't add any value, waste unicode space and developers' time.

<comment><USER31> > waste unicode space

The desirability of emoji aside, Unicode has plenty of space for this. The bulk of Unicode code points are CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ideographs) characters. Compared to that, a few emoji outside of the BMP don't really amount to much.

In fact, I am under the impression that the popularity of emoji had an unintended benefit. It seems to have contributed to a much better support of non-BMP¹ Unicode characters across the board. Until the extended emoji set came along, most characters outside of the BMP where fairly specialistic or extremely regional, so bugs didn't show up as fast as they do now. It used to be a tiny miracle of you managed to view a PDF containing non-BMP characters properly, nowadays that is just how things work.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)#Basic_Multilin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_\(Unicode\)#Basic_Multilingual_Plane)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It is a strange interpretation of freedom, if you are free to run the software how you want, except if RMS disapproves your OS. I think this way of "defending free software" is rather counterproductive. I say this as a strong supporter of free and open source software and both a Mac and Linux user. I want Linux or any other free operation system to be strong in the market. But this should be reached on features and capabilities, not on limiting software on other operation systems. Fortunately thanks to its open source nature, it should be possible to maintain a branch of Emacs for the Mac which keeps this feature alive. This is where open source is strong.

<comment><USER55> Yet RMS disapproval of MAC OS does not make Free software less free. The fundamental rights of free software are still preserved:

"the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software"

<comment><USER54> Yes, those rights are not limited. Still I find it a strange thing, that working features are removed, because they affect only "disapproved" operating systems. I don't like it, if technical questions and political ideas are too strongly mixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Just ask your money back!

</comment><comment><USER57> Emacs-Gud Will never support llvmdb either... sad...

<comment><USER58> Not true. They've repeatedly said they will happily accept patches for lldb. There was a thread on the devel email list just a week or 2 ago. No one has stepped up yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Get off your high horse, Richard: In fighting software that restricts its users and doesn't respect their freedoms, you've become the thing you despise.

Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team: Don't think you're getting away with this, either: it's despicable.

I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.

<comment><USER13> > In fighting software that restricts its users and doesn't respect their > freedoms, you've become the thing you despise.

GNU Emacs is still under the GPL. Feel free to modify it to re-add the feature that was removed. The only reason you have the freedom to do that is because of Richard Stallman's "high horse".

> Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team:

Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later. In addition, it is part of the requirements of GNU packages that they not encourage users to use proprietary operating systems. This includes having features on proprietary operating systems that do not exist on free operating systems.

Surely you see why that's important, right?

> I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.

Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy is so much fun.

<comment><USER59> >Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later.

Yes, but that's terrible. Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset of your users isn't acceptable. If any other group did this, you'd likely be enraged. What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you really be comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you want the features back"?

>Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy is so much fun.

I have no wish to protest GNU as a whole. I do wish to protest the pig- headedness of RMS and others, which keeps us from actually moving Emacs and other packages forward. Not allowing Emacs to touch the GCC AST isn't protecting freedoms: it's needlessly obstructive, and utterly pointless.

It's the same situation here: not patching in functionality until there's cross-platform support? Okay. Actively removing functionality that doesn't work cross-platform (yet)? Not cool.

<comment><USER13> > Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset of your users isn't > acceptable.

Which is why they removed a feature after realising it made GNU/Linux users have a worse experience than on other platforms.

> What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you really be > comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you want the > features back"?

Yes, because I guarantee that someone would fork it. Just like someone already has a fork of Emacs that is macOS-friendly. And it probably already has the patch reverted.

> Actively removing functionality that doesn't work cross-platform (yet)? Not > cool.

It was a mistake for them to merge it, and they're fixing their mistake. That's how I see it. GNU packages have to be "portable to GNU", specifically all of their features have to be portable to GNU. A feature which is not portable to GNU is not a feature that the package should have -- otherwise you're both encouraging people to use proprietary operating systems as well as fragmenting your userbase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Can you just recompile it with that feature enabled?

<comment><USER61> Probably not. I won't be surprised if someone doesn't add a patch though. From NEWS:

       On the OS X Cocoa ("Nextstep") port, multicolor font (such as color
       emoji) display is disabled.  This feature was accidentally added when
       Emacs 24.4 included the new Core Text based font backend code that was
       originally implemented for a non-mainline port.  This will be enabled
       again once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems.
       If some symbols, such as emoji, do not display, we suggest to install
       an appropriate font, such as Symbola; then they will be displayed,
       albeit without the color effects.

IMO: this is the least important thing of this week to me. It certainly doesn't deserve the "Emacs Hate MacOS" subtitle.

<comment><USER26> If you've been shipping a feature for two years it's a little too late to pull it and say "oops we didn't mean to give you that yet".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> For all those who constantly whine against decisions of RMS, you can atleast go start a fork of emacs if you wanted. Unlike macOS which is commercial jail , you have to beg for years for any bug fix/feature you want, and even then it won't be implemented.

Someone has to be ideologically pure, in a world of jailed software.

</comment><comment><USER63> delete (this comment)

<comment><USER61> This is probably a hint that the title can be reworked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> atom probably has emacs emulation

</comment><comment><USER65> Emacs has gone downhill ever since RMS removed this emoji from the ultra-hot screen management package source code.

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and- crossbone...](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and- crossbones.txt)

</comment><comment><USER66> Absolutely sickening.. Stallman needs to leave the crib and join the real world.</comment>


Racer: Synchronised models/data on Node.js and the client - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nateps.com/announcing-racer-experimental-realtime-model

<comment><USER2> How is this different than NowJS (<http://nowjs.com/>)? I don't mean to imply that two similar modules cannot exist; I am just curious if there is some fundamental difference between the two or if Racer is just a project that isn't as far along.

<comment><AUTHOR> NowJS is a framework for building realtime web apps (that doesn't do model synchronisation).

Racer is real-time model synchronisation.

Fundamentally they are completely different. They happen to use similar technology stacks and both contain the word 'realtime' but they are completely different projects. They actually might work quite well as compliments to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I came across this project yesterday. It's obviously very early days for this particular project but I submitted it to HN because I thought client/server data synchronisation might be an interesting topic for discussion.

<comment><USER3> It absolutely is, but "in active development" is to me another word for useless. SproutCore has been in production as MobileMe for three years and it still has difficult bugs. Let's see some source code, or implementation details - something worth talking about. All the page has right now are pretty words and broken demos.

And FWIW an implementation in nodejs isn't useful to most people. It's a cool proof of concept, but since nodejs isn't an everyday environment for web development, popularity will come by way of a clone in ruby or python.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Let's see some source code...

The project is on Github, it's linked in the article: <https://github.com/codeparty/racer>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't publish and subscribe handle sync between multiple objects?

<comment><USER3> Only if there are no write conflicts.

<comment><USER4> The way I've handled that in the past to have a bit map for every attribute so the object owner can indicate which properties have changed, in some cases one side or the other is the owner of that attribute so it is accepted by default, sequence numbers can resolve other conflicts, and then custom merge logic can resolve others. Works perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this is extremely new, but can anyone who've used it care to give some thoughts?</comment>


Ask HN: Here are 40 app DL codes. How can I grow my iPhone app? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to grow my business, I have a lot of product ideas that revolve around AI / human computer interaction and this is the first app I have released that starts to dip into that space. Would people even use this? Yes, some people have payed for it, but I want to take it to the next level. Customers don't seem to comment on it or email me feature requests. What do you think?
Link to SnoozeRobot in appstore: http://bit.ly/heYNgJ
The codes: H9PKXNRALRA9 3X9J3AWFHMLA 7MHF4J6H7NXE 43RRHMW9WPMA 3P7MXJAFNWPK AYMXMHLNTJ9E N6K9E4NRTW6L EXN4JHLMHNXA HFF3JY49ALRJ 7Y3TJJMYLKMY FAF9MLMWY4LP EYLFE4XXW9JH 7PH3W7EWLAKL 9RJE4XML734N XRPYKLRLXHE7 9FKRMXH9JLN3 6ETHEHH3EN7N H3Y4NYK7JEJA 76JMAFALNN34 NTHJWLAL7J96 AYHMRNXK3HAK LM3LF3A9MY33 WE4K4HRAE49Y LTK973MXYPFL 3ANHNFHW9HNA HEFTTTXMLFTA HXPNPAKJYX6K KWA97L64364N LHK4AJAY6EFP FTTLPE63KJYW JK3WFAHKXNTN HYHHXWME6HXL LN7AAE47MJ74 7Y4JEL94NTEA M4Y37M7RY9RX TW3HKMYERLYR LEELFJKE3HAJ YELHKN3XE4LP MR4LYXFT3RP6 6XA7NJPYJTTK <comment><USER2> I think that part of the problem might be that you're trying to change ingrained actions. People are used to hitting snooze. People aren't used to talking to their alarm clocks.

Beyond the ability to speak the snooze function, does it offer $1.99 worth of value over the built-in alarm function of the iPhone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. Thank you for the response!</comment></comment>


Sony Music rejects appeal against Bach content dispute - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist/status/1039172935112638466 <comment><AUTHOR> Now seems to have been resolved, but he had to email the head of Sony classical and Sony PR to get them to remove the content block.</comment>


Famous headlines, rewritten for Facebook's new clickbait policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/famous-headlines-rewritten-to-comply-with-facebooks-new-policy/494603/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Ironically, I prefer many of the joke headlines, like the ISIS one. I'm often irritated by the way 'intellectual' publications will bury the lede in non- breaking stories. Tell me what I'm about to read, damn it!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I was really glad to see "Truman defeats Dewey".</comment>


Ask HN: What is something you can't grasp? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I can't fully grasp the expansion of the universe. It seems intuitive to me that if something expands it must be expanding in something larger. Back when I was going to major in physics one professor told me to imagine a balloon expanding as a way of thinking about the expansion of the universe. It didn't help me. A balloon can only expand since it is in a larger structure with room to expand.

So what is the universe expanding in? If this isn't a valid question then how should I try to understand the universe expanding?</comment>